I understand swing states and how they are important to follow in presidential elections, but Montana has had a Democratic senator since 2007 and he only lost his position at this election. So even though Montana is deeply red, in a Senate sense it did swing this election - it changed colour.
Thinking of swing states is a useful shortcut when trying to predict the outcomes of presidential elections. I don't think it should be generalized to Senate elections.
But they all flipped from Democrat to Republican senators, while all the states listed by OP were held by Democrats already and remained in the hands of Democrats?
I mean, sure, somebody gave them the label swing states, but it seems they were not really all that important.
Which raises the question:
HAVE YOU SEEN THIS MAN?
I wouldn't be surprised if a significant portion of the NYPD cares just as little about finding this guy as the rest of us care about them finding him.
"Yes yes, we take it very seriously. Look, he was wearing a hoodie!"
The Republicans gained Ohio, Pennsylvania, West Virginia, and Montana, and with them a majority in the senate.
Maybe I'm missing something, but they don't seem to be struggling all that much to me.
One criticism of many that could be made is on the tag line: "The classic story comes to life"
I feel like anyone given any role in any decision-making for a movie like this should respect the original enough not to claim that it didn't bring the story "to life". It was the first ever feature-length cartoon, it very much brought the story to life.
At the very least this movie seems to bring the story to the uncanny valley. Pausing at 1:42 is... highly regrettable.
It literally goes back to Shakespeare, something all Brits are completely aware of.
In addition, transgender people have always been around, and it seems as if the conservatives have been terrified of them forever. So there's obvious potential for comedic value.
Echibit A: Queen, I Want to Break Free.
Thanks - it's interesting to hear what brings people to different platforms.
It sounds like there's a lot of potential in Hubzilla for front-end developers seeking to make it a friendlier experience - from what everyone here is saying the back-end seems pretty solid.
I interpreted TheLugal as considering the old Facebook vibes as a bad thing - but each to their own!
As you're using Friendica - Is the old school Facebook aesthetic part of what makes Friendica appeal to you? Did you move there directly from Facebook back in the day?
And if you have been around for a while, what has the recent growth of ActivityPub felt like from your corner of the Internet?
Friendica has been around since 2010 - it is very cool to me that the content we post here might reach users of a platform that was created almost a decade before ActivityPub was specified.
Oh, come on, don't misquote him!
"Can't wait for the war footage of the bodies of dead women strewn all over the battlefield."
There you go. Much more normal!
Good thing we have no history of killing women until this point! Never happens!
I guess that's why war is so popular - we just famously never murder any women. Much like ordinary day to day life, really.
Sure is good no women are being murdered.
Just imagine the optics. Surely we would care. Like, a lot.
It's total propaganda, but viewing it now, I see it as a picture of the story Americans tell. Their shitty ideas of progress are highlighted - pollution, cars, use and abuse of the land.
In the shadow of all this, hidden in the dark on the corner of the painting that they're all moving towards, is genocide, murder, killing of buffalos, and the eradication of wildlife.
"American Progress" sounds like a dark joke - like a greasy canteen pizza being labeleld "American vegetable".
Of course, this was not the intention of the painter, and generations of white Americans have looked at this painting and completely ignored the story that is really being told. But it's all there, laid bare, and there's no use pretending they weren't aware of what they were doing.
And for that, at least it has some value. It's like gathering evidence of war crimes from the offenders bragging about their atrocities. Anyone who proudly hung this on their wall you know what they knew, and you know where they stood.
That said, what a shitty piece of work. It's a crime against good taste depicting a crime against humanity.
Would this be a scalable solution to help mitigate climate change and to give room to wildlife?
It's fantastic that they can produce food, and I can see why also for political reasons food aid would be the first priority here. But it seems strange to me that companies never talk about this when they want to greenwash - replacing the Sahara with foreat seems like a potential game changer, and it seems to be something where money can really make an impact.
Seems like the timing is just about right for a final cut.
The last few hours it seems like the fall has declined a little, though the Ruble is still doing incredibly poorly. Fingers crossed it continues to fall again soon enough.
"Go see our movie!"
"No, not like THAT!!"
Ugh.
Having children leave the house is a re-defining moment, just like establishing a family in the first place. It's scary, but it comes with all kinds of possibilities as well.
It sounds like you did a good job on reinventing yourself as a parent, of course trusting your judgment that your kid is indeed wonderful. But the fact that you love him enough that it keeps you going probably counts as further evidence that you're not doing so bad.
You'll manage to reinvent yourself again. And if you can't do it in your marriage, there's no shame in doing it outside it.
Brilliant fucking argument - just make sure mass murderers in charge leave international conventions, and then the rules won't apply to them. Christ.
There's still a bunch of kindness around. There's good food to be eaten and culture to be consumed. There's drinks to be had and friends to be made. Dances to learn and skills to master.
There's a lot of things to be hopeful about, aside from the whole everything going to shit thing. And if you can brighten up people's lives by doing it, you might even contribute to the world going slightly less to shit.
I think it's time to recalibrate and focus more on the closer things. Doesn't mean one should ignore the world, but we're not fixing it by stressing out, doom-scrolling, and posting about it online either. We tried.
This is supported in PieFed by default, in case you're interested in checking out other Lemmy-compatible software.
My filters kept me sane through American election season.
Producers Katz and Wojciech join Katy and Dominic for a very special announcement from The Europeans.
The Europeans Podcast is a fully independent podcast on Europe and the EU, which I've found to be a great source to keep up to date on whatever is going on in the continent (in addition to this wonderful community, obviously).
This week they announced a fundraiser for a new mini-series — Who Does it Best — studying various policy fields across European countries, comparing best (and worst) practices in national solutions to common problems across the continent. They plan to start out with podcasts on housing, childcare, and drugs.
Basically, the question is how these policies are solved nationally across the continent. What are the solutions that work well, what are the solutions that work less well, and how can we learn from each other. So I guess it's something for the policy nerds.
They talk about the mini-series in their latest episode, or in this thread on Mastodon for those who prefer that.
Check it out! :)
---
I take the time to promote their effort because I like what they're doing with their podcast. It's completely independent, being funded almost entirely by their listeners. They've been going like this for seven years now, so they are clearly committed to the gig.
They also seem to have their principles in the right place. This is evident when they speak about tricky subjects — I find they tend to have well-researched an nuanced coverage — but also in their actions: I discovered them through their decision to have an active presence on the fediverse (@europeanspodcast), and they have been speaking favourably about Mastodon several times on their podcast since I started listening. So they're seem to be walking the walk, not only talking the talk, and taking their independence seriously.
Anyone interested in helping can find the fundraiser here. They're currently at just under €5k.
If you're not interested, I nevertheless recommend checking out the podcast! It's usually a great listen.
I hope this doesn't go under rule 2 of the community - it's a small independent undertaking that I think is of some interest to anyone interested in building a pan-European information landscape, so I feel like it doesn't fall under commercial advertising. But if the moderators disagree that's of course their decision - if so, sorry about that!
BEUC and 22 of its member organisations from 17 countries have filed a complaint on 12 September 2024 to the European Commission and the network of consumer protection Authorities (CPC-Network) to denounce several deceptive practices by leading video game companies (Activision Blizzard, Electronic A...
> > > BEUC [the European Consumer Organisation] and 22 of its member organisations from 17 countries have filed a complaint on 12 September 2024 to the European Commission and the network of consumer protection Authorities (CPC-Network) to denounce several deceptive practices by leading video game companies (Activision Blizzard, Electronic Arts, Epic Games, Mojang Studios, Roblox Corporation, Supercell and Ubisoft) marketing popular games (such as Fortnite, EA Sports FC 24, Minecraft, Clash of Clans and others) and affecting millions of European consumers. > >
The Norwegian Consumer Council's @finnmyrstad posted a thread about it on Mastodon:
> > > 2/ 🕹 According to our analysis, these companies are using misleading tactics that do not comply with the EU rules on unfair commercial practices. In particular we identified that: > > > > 🎰 Gamers cannot see the real cost of digital items, leading to overspending. > > > > 💵 Companies’ claims that gamers prefer in-game premium currencies are wrong. > > > > ⚖ Consumers are often denied their rights when using premium in-game currencies. > > > > 🚸 Children are vulnerable to these manipulative tactics. > >
Dear houseplant community,
Like the beginning of any good letter, I should probably have written you sooner.
Anyway, a friend of mine had this beautiful plant that she neglected for months, completely drying it out. At the end there were just a few leaves hanging half a meter from the plant itself, completely dried out.
I cut off a piece, gave it roots, potted it, and it went wild! Explosive growth, every new leaf bigger than the last. It was unlike anything I've ever seen.
A few months later, it had had enough. Leaves started curling up and withering. Growth halted. I thought maybe I had forgotten to give it water, but that wasn't it. Moving it to a sunnier spot didn't help either. Now it's almost completely dead, and I miss what we once had.
So, a couple of questions:
- Does anyone have any idea what went wrong? Did I water it too much? Too little?
- What can I do? Can it be saved? Does it need plant nutrition? A bigger pot? I'm afraid of doing anything, as it seems so fragile one bad move would surely be the end of it.
Thank you so much in advance!
Yours truly, Aa
@plants@a.gup.pe
Ministern för civilt försvar, Carl-Oskar Bohlin, tar inte ner tweet vars innehåll kan ha finansierats av Ryssland.
> > > If a social media account is spreading Russian disinformation - does sharing content from the account give it legitimacy? > > > > No, says Carl-Oskar Bohlin, Minister for Civil Defence. But at the authority the minister is responsible for, the answer sounds different. > > > > — In any case, you spread something that a foreign power might intend to spread to make us worried, says Mikael Östlund, press officer at the authority. > > > > It was a year ago that Carl-Oskar Bohlin shared a tweet from the American influencer Lauren Southern, known for her far-right advocacy. The original video warned of how AI is used in influence operations, something the minister forwarded to his around 45,000 followers. "The ability and height of the impact operations risk increasing avalanche-like with disruptive technology shifts," wrote Carl-Oskar Bohlin on X. > > > > Now, an American indictment against two Russian government employees shows that the production company Tenet media, where Lauren Southern is employed, must have been secretly financed by the Russian news agency RT. A total of just over SEK 100 million is said to have been transferred from the Russian state employees to the American company. In turn, influencers would push specific issues—such as questioning support for Ukraine—to their millions of followers. On YouTube alone, the videos have received more than 16 million views. > > > > In light of the American indictment, Carl-Oskar Bohlin has been criticized for not checking his sources better. But the Minister of Civil Defense lets the tweet stay on X. > > > > "For the simple reason that it is difficult to misunderstand." writes Bohlin to DN. > > > > "One should of course refrain from spreading harmful narratives from foreign powers. However, it is a somewhat strange indictment that my warning about deepfakes and doctored videos would in itself constitute Russian disinformation. With such a threshold, it will be difficult to talk about or warn about the phenomenon at all," continues the minister. > > > > Carl-Oskar Bohlin is responsible for the agency for psychological defence, MPF. Countering misdirection and misinformation, including rumor spreading and propaganda, is one of the agency's main missions. > >
In case you wonder, mr. Bohlin is from the conservative party (Moderaterna).
Makes me feel a bit better about my general political anxiousness.
Listen to the full album: http://bit.ly/392CVEd "Road To Peace" by Tom Waits from the album 'Orphans: Brawlers, Bawlers & Bastards' Lyrics Young Abdel Madi Shabneh was only 18 years old the youngest of 9 children he'd never spent a night away from home and his mother held his photograph up in the ...
Tom Waits is not afraid of going dark places with his song writing, but it hardly gets darker than this.
It's been spinning in my head a lot lately, for obvious reasons.
