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Cake day: July 24th, 2023

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  • Hey, thanks for the long and thorough reply. I’m a bit overwhelmed :)

    I think the reason this sounds reasonable is because a lot of the folks on the GOP campaign are longtime GOP folks, who know - or at least have certain long-held beliefs about - how this conventionally works.

    This is exactly where my doubts come from. The whole piece has the air of “conventional politics“ but at the same time, from an outside perspective, it looks like the whole party has been thoroughly streamlined towards their leader in the past 8 years. And a cult of MAGA would probably not resemble much of traditional politics. It will be interesting to see if they can put a lid on it and return to politics that at the very least appears less crazy and unhinged in case Trump loses the election.

    But this is not really how one wins. You need a broad coalition backing you to win - playing to a smaller base may make them feel good, but it’s not going to bring enough folks backing you to the polls on election day.

    True, but who is Trump going to convince to switch sides a week before the election? You might as well turn up the rhetoric to 11 and say the quiet part out loud, in order to convince your own base to vote for you.
    This is a slippery slope of course, and the outcome could either be losing people with this radicalisation or making sure even more radical people who did not plan to vote show up at the booth. And to deter people from voting for someone else, out of fear. Also, even if it was possible for Trump to extend a hand and suddenly appear reasonable who would believe him after all that happened? I guess he doesn’t have a choice but take the route of last-minute radicalisation. We’ll see how this turns out. Personally I am so sick of seeing the orange conman dominate public discourse worldwide for eight years in a row. It is time to move on and I can only hope the majority of Americans has had enough too.


  • As a non-american, somehow this article rubs me the wrong way. I have a suspicion that all the talk about public relation disasters and staffers worried about their candidate‘s reputation does not accurately portrait what is really going on there. To me it looks like everything that happened including the MSG shitshow was absolutely the way they wanted it to go. It’s a page out of the fascist playbook and it uses the same tactics that have been proven successful since Germany 1933. The explicit goal is to strengthen the collective bonds with voters who already made their decision and to kick it up a notch at the same time. They don’t give a shit about angering Puerto Rican voters or even maintaining a modicum of decency in general. They are trying to provoke a mania in their own base that spirals out of control and so far it works pretty well for them. This is an endgame strategy. The only thing that is not going according to plan is that their candidate is falling apart mentally and it’s a race against time to get him back into office. Or is it, Mr. Vance?

    I could of course be completely wrong on this and I would be more than happy to be proven wrong.






  • “Is a $100 Dunkin’ Donuts gift card for a trash collector wrongful?” wrote Justice Brett Kavanaugh in the court’s opinion. “What about a $200 Nike gift card for a county commissioner who voted to fund new school athletic facilities? Could students take their college professor out to Chipotle for an end-of-term celebration?”

    In my country government employees (including teachers) can’t legally accept gifts above €10 in value. All of these examples would be illegal here. Sounds petty, but anti-corruption laws are pretty strict for a reason.









  • This happened just this morning. Probably not the dumbest thing ever, and I blame Snap for putting things where they don’t belong: I deleted stuff from the /run/user/1000/doc directory. Turns out the files there are in fact hard links to files which actually reside somewhere else. Well, they were, until I deleted them forever.

    Background: Firefox (as an Ubuntu snap package) downloads files in some kind of sandbox mode and references stuff there for some obscure reason. That was my weekly reminder to get rid of snap packages because snap sucks in a myriad of ways.