elbucho

And even if he hadn't made that abundantly clear, he's obviously in bed with Russia. Like... it's completely mystifying why any Ukrainian (who doesn't hate Ukraine) would want to vote for Trump.

Ukrainians for Trump is even more mystifying than women for Trump, or gays for Trump, or basically any group that isn't white, cis, male, heteronormative, and some combination of stupid and evil for Trump.

Takes all kinds, I guess.

And that alone would be enough, but add to that the fact that they cost about 100 grand a piece, and yet they are essentially held together with bubblegum and shoestring. Bro, you paid a year's worth of salary for the average middle class person to drive around an ugly, falling-apart piece of shit created by a fascist. Yeah. We're gonna point and laugh at your dumb ass.

They're not evil, they're not idiots.

Hard disagree.

But if someone just votes for the other main party to the one I do, who cares?

People who will get hurt by that other party gaining the presidency, or people who care about people getting hurt. Or just people with an ounce of empathy.

None of which seem to apply to you.

Fuck that, and fuck you. They made their bed. Lying in it is the natural consequence.

For me, it's super easy. My "normal" relationship with Trumpers is one of intense scorn and derision because they're terrible people that I want nothing to do with. So nothing's going to change for me.

It's pretty simple: they willingly sacrificed every last ounce of humanity for a grifter / bully. They're not coming back. Chasing after the relationship you used to have with them before they decided to embrace virulent hatred is a losing proposition. Sure, you can mourn that lost relationship, but hoping that they're going to magically see the light and stop being the human equivalent of anal warts is only going to cause you further disappointment and pain.

Calling him a comedian is being overly generous.

No - it has to be postmarked by election day:

The defendents, including Mississippi's secretary of state, countered that although all votes must be cast by Election Day, states were free to take longer to receive and count the votes.

I hate this ruling. If all votes have to arrive by election day, that means that they have to be mailed anywhere from 3 days to a week or more before election day. This allows a few different kinds of ratfucking by people opposed to the idea of absentee ballots: they can delay sending out the ballots in the first place, or they can delay the mail. We've already seen them delay the mail with Trump's appointment of Louis DeJoy to be the Postmaster General, and him immediately ordering the removal of a number of sorting machines from mail facilities.

Allowing votes to be counted so long as they are postmarked by the election day prevents this kind of ratfucking, and it gives the largest number of people the opportunity to have their voices heard. Republicans will spin this kind of shit as an attempt to preserve election integrity, but make no mistake - they are doing it so that they can suppress the vote.

Are you unfamiliar with the concept of humor?

When there were three TV stations, did any of them highlight police brutality? Overincarceration? The military industrial complex?

This is a very fair point. True, having very limited news options didn't allow for a lot of deviation in agreement on observable reality, but to your point, it could also easily paper over a lot of very ugly parts of the actual reality. Chomsky writes quite a lot about this in his book "Manufacturing Consent", which basically is a dive into how media organizations can be used as the propaganda arm of the government. Everything from choosing what you show to choosing how you talk about things goes towards bolstering an underlying narrative that you want to project.

I'm not sure what a solution would look like, if one is even possible. But solution or no, the narrative divergence in this country has primed us to detest each other, which is the first crucial step towards mass violence.

I really don't understand why anybody is demanding anything of him, as if he was some normal candidate who is running for president. He's not.

He is a traitor who is running to stay out of prison, and because he personally appointed a bunch of them to their stations, the agents of the US "Justice System" are allowing this. Demanding Trump provide medical records, as if he were just some normal, legitimate candidate, is in a sense normalizing him. He's not a normal candidate. He's a symptom of the rot at the core of our democracy. We should be treating him as such.