Lurker > Antifar

Well now I don't know what to believe

I get it, carbonation, but root beer seems to be way worse in this regard than even other sodas

https://twitter.com/Phil_Lewis_/status/1551974609259479041

My man loves considering

Good news: I should be seeing her again this Saturday!

Now, to me, that's bad

Jupiter posted...

Didn't he say this stupid shit before? Why is he repeating it?

He's very stupid

https://twitter.com/cspan/status/1552026848833507328

K181 posted...

Oh no, 0.0125% of the city's population.

Are you familiar with the term "going viral?"

bigblu89 posted...

Not if your intentions is to just entertain the masses and become as popular as possible.

3 hours of people "telling the truth" (whatever that currently means) wouldn't get him 3 million downloads a day.

Nobody else is obligated to think it's okay for him to enrich himself through noxious behavior. We're all familiar with people who got rich by hurting people; it's a common way to the top. But we don't have to be cool with it.

vycebrand2 posted...

The right is a audience he figures it's harder to lose as long as he does stuff they agree with.

A lot of the bad things people do are because it's in their self-interest. But that does not make those things good.

bigblu89 posted...

Is it Rogan's responsibility to make sure his audience isn't dumb enough to believe the garbage his guests are spewing?

Yes! You do actually have a responsibility to push back on people using your platform to spout falsehoods!

To hastily make a metaphor here: if someone is using your wi-fi to download illegal images, that's not necessarily your fault, but you can't just let it happen.

bigblu89 posted...

Keep it going the way it is now, as it's working SO well and pulling the country out of poverty.

The way it is now is *because* of the instinct to means test. Bill Clinton gutted welfare for precisely the reasons you've laid out ITT. It didn't work, if your definition of work is improving people's lives.

Look at this shit
https://twitter.com/actioncookbook/status/1552025188761468929

https://www.vulture.com/article/a-vfx-artist-on-what-its-like-working-for-marvel.html

Its pretty well known and even darkly joked about across all the visual-effects houses that working on Marvel shows is really hard. When I worked on one movie, it was almost six months of overtime every day. I was working seven days a week, averaging 64 hours a week on a good week. Marvel genuinely works you really hard. Ive had co-workers sit next to me, break down, and start crying. Ive had people having anxiety attacks on the phone.

The studio has a lot of power over the effects houses, just because it has so many blockbuster movies coming out one after the other. If you upset Marvel in any way, theres a very high chance youre not going to get those projects in the future. So the effects houses are trying to bend over backward to keep Marvel happy.

To get work, the houses bid on a project; they are all trying to come in right under one anothers bids. With Marvel, the bids will typically come in quite a bit under, and Marvel is happy with that relationship, because it saves it money. But what ends up happening is that all Marvel projects tend to be understaffed. Where I would usually have a team of ten VFX artists on a non-Marvel movie, on one Marvel movie, I got two including myself. So every person is doing more work than they need to.

The other thing with Marvel is its famous for asking for lots of changes throughout the process. So youre already overworked, but then Marvels asking for regular changes way in excess of what any other client does. And some of those changes are really major. Maybe a month or two before a movie comes out, Marvel will have us change the entire third act. It has really tight turnaround times. So yeah, its just not a great situation all around. One visual-effects house could not finish the number of shots and reshoots Marvel was asking for in time, so Marvel had to give my studio the work. Ever since, that house has effectively been blacklisted from getting Marvel work.

Part of the problem comes from the MCU itself just the sheer number of movies it has. It sets dates, and its very inflexible on those dates; yet its quite willing to do reshoots and big changes very close to the dates without shifting them up or down. This is not a new dynamic.

I remember going to a presentation by one of the other VFX houses about an early MCU movie, and people were talking about how they were getting pixel-fucked. Thats a term we use in the industry when the client will nitpick over every little pixel. Even if you never notice it. A client might say, This is not exactly what I want, and you keep working at it. But they have no idea what they want. So theyll be like, Can you just try this? Can you just try that? Theyll want you to change an entire setting, an entire environment, pretty late in a movie.

The main problem is most of Marvels directors arent familiar with working with visual effects. A lot of them have just done little indies at the Sundance Film Festival and have never worked with VFX. They dont know how to visualize something thats not there yet, thats not on set with them. So Marvel often starts asking for what we call final renders. As were working through a movie, well send work-in-progress images that are not pretty but show where were at. Marvel often asks for them to be delivered at a much higher quality very early on, and that takes a lot of time. Marvel does that because its directors dont know how to look at the rough images early on and make judgment calls. But that is the way the industry has to work. You cant show something super pretty when the basics are still being fleshed out.

The other issue is, when were in postproduction, we dont have a director of photography involved. So were coming up with the shots a lot of the time. It causes a lot of incongruity. A good example of what happens in these scenarios is the battle scene at the end of Black Panther. The physics are completely off. Suddenly, the characters are jumping around, doing all these crazy moves like action figures in space. Suddenly, the camera is doing these motions that havent happened in the rest of the movie. It all looks a bit cartoony. It has broken the visual language of the film.

Things need to change on two ends of the spectrum. Marvel needs to train its directors on working with visual effects and have a better vision out of the gate. The studio needs to hold its directors feet to the fire more to commit to what they want. The other thing is unionization. There is a growing movement to do that, because it would help make sure that the VFX houses cant take bids without having to consider what the impacts would be. Because a lot of the time, its like, you get to work on a Marvel show, and youll work on that for cheaper just because its cool.

COVxy was right

tng

https://youtu.be/5H7eT8ACI8k
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LZb_l1mciAw

bigblu89 posted...

As someone who considers themselves a bleeding hear liberal, some liberals are becoming unbearable.

You have to prioritize whether you care more about what people do with the power to govern over others, or what people do on GameFAQs.

Yeah conservative doesn't strike me as the right description for his ideology.

https://twitter.com/BobbyBigWheel/status/1551935283586801666

RISEofCHRISTIAN posted...

It's treason then.

*pats your head*

Lol
https://observer.com/2022/07/head-of-instagram-adam-mosseri-knows-you-hate-video-so-he-made-a-video-about-it/?utm_medium=social&utm_source=t.co

DarthAragorn posted...

Abolish all senates

I mean, you're not wrong

https://prospect.org/politics/abolish-state-senates/

At first glance, California state Sen. Richard Richards might have seemed an exceptionally powerful lawmaker in 1960. The just-completed census revealed that Los Angeles County, home to just over six million people, constituted a whopping 38.4 percent of the entire states population. So Richards, as the countys sole senator, could speak for more than one-third of the states residents.

At second glance, however, Richards was no more than a legislative pip-squeakand, more distressingly, so was Los Angeles. California, like virtually every other state, had shaped its upper house in the image of the U.S. Senate, apportioning its seats not by population but by jurisdiction. Every county was entitled to no more than one senator. As Californias senate had just 40 seats, but the state itself had 58 counties, the smallest counties had to buddy up to get the total down to 40, but that still meant that a senator representing a district with roughly 6,000 residents could, on any given measure, cast the same number of votes (one) as Richards, who represented six million.

That disturbed the U.S. Supreme Court, then under the leadership of Chief Justice Earl Warren and in an uncommonly egalitarian frame of mind. In Baker v. Carr (1962) and Reynolds v. Sims (1964), the Court held that equality under the law meant that state legislatures had to be governed by districts of equal population. No longer could senators from two all-but-unpopulated Sierra Nevada districts outvote the one senator from teeming, gridlocked L.A. In short order, California reshaped its Senate so that roughly one-third of its members came from L.A. County, and all the other states (except Nebraska, which already had a unicameral legislature) did likewise.
The Courts one-person-one-vote doctrine became the law of the land. And in the process, state senates became entirely redundant.

Just how redundant becomes apparent from a survey of the partisan makeup of each of the legislative bodies in the 49 states with both a house and a senate. In 47 of those states, one party controls both houses, often by very similar margins. (In California, for instance, three-fourths of the members of each house are Democrats; one-fourth, accordingly, are Republicans.) In only two statesMinnesota and Virginiadoes one party control one house and the other party control the other, but in both states, the margins are minimal, and could easily move to one-party control at the next election.

Since the 1960s, as the identities of the two parties have grown radically dissimilar, fewer and fewer voters split their tickets. And as the electorate has become more polarized, that polarization has taken on a spatial dimension, with cities becoming more Democratic, rural areas more Republican, and suburbs experiencing more polarized voting as well. As senate districts in some states are overlaid atop assembly districts, the partisan makeup of both are largely the same.

Nor is there an appreciable difference in the job functions of the legislative chambers. For example, the most significant differences between the U.S. House and Senate are that the Senate ratifies treaties with other nations and confirms Supreme Court and other federal judicial nominees. But treaty ratification isnt an option for state senates, and for most of them, neither is judicial confirmation. In most states, judges are elected. Only in Maine and New Jersey does the Senate confirm supreme court selections nominated by the governor, and only New Jersey gives senators sole confirmation powers for other judicial nominees.

Many state senates do confirm cabinet appointments not elected by voters. But in general, both state legislative chambers vote on the same matters and represent the same areas with roughly the same percentages. The nations hyper-partisan legislative landscape today makes state senate redundancy even more obvious than it was when the Court issued its Reynolds decision 58 years ago.

And yet the number of states with two legislative houses is the same as it was in 1964: 49.

This is not at all surprising. Legislators, like most people, are disinclined to vote themselves out of a job. Republicans (and Democrats of a Scrooge-like disposition) may bemoan government profligacy at every turn, but when did you ever hear them call for consolidating legislatures into a single body?

Besides, having two separate houses has proven to be an effective way of shielding the business of lawmaking, or law-derailing, from the publics eye. Key provisions can morph into something quite different or disappear altogether in transit between the houses, or in conference committees where versions are reconciled and where powerful interests can make behind-closed-doors power plays. Such things can and do happen in unicameral legislatures, too, of course, but the gratuitous complexity that comes with having two houses does the cause of transparency no favors.

Not surprisingly, the transformation of Nebraskas legislature to unicameral came at the hands of voters, in the election of 1934. The change would likely never have been made but for the nearly dozen-year campaign for unicameralism waged by the states remarkable U.S. senator, George Norris, whose other notable achievements include federal legislation outlawing court injunctions against strikes (the Norris-LaGuardia Act) and, as a passionate public power advocate, the creation of the Tennessee Valley Authority, which he championed for years before Franklin Roosevelt became president and pushed Congress to enact it.

Norriss case for unicameralism was similarly progressive. Bicameralism, he argued, was an 18th-century transposition to American soil of the British Parliament. Like the House of Lords, the U.S. Senatewhose members were chosen by state legislatures until the popular vote requirement of the 17th Amendment, enacted in 1913was initially devised to enable a quasi-aristocracy to tamp down the popular sentiments of the lower houses hoi polloi.

A body so conceived, Norris contended, ran against the American grain, particularly for state legislatures, whose creation had required no equivalent to the compromise between small and large states that created a bicameral Congress at the Constitutional Convention of 1787. The constitutions of our various states, Norris declared, are built upon the idea that there is but one class. If this be true, there is no sense or reason in having the same thing done twice, especially if it is to be done by two bodies of men elected in the same way and having the same jurisdiction. Which, of course, became even more the case after the Warren Courts rulings.
Continued...

Flockaveli posted...

Same with Twitter. XYZ follows this person, check out this Tweet from them. No. I follow who I follow, and I only want to see who I follow.

On my phone, I use an app called plume, which gets rid of all that stuff. On desktop I think you can click the sparkle button (for lack of a better way to describe it) and get the option to only see most recent tweets first.

As someone whose parents recently had a flight delayed 5 hours and then canceled, I think the Secretary of Transportation has a lot going for him.

https://twitter.com/Politics_Polls/status/1551933518804025346

Now, polling this far out is more or less meaningless, but I would like to say: lol. And furthermore, lmao.

NoxObscuras posted...

Does meeting before exchanging numbers work well for you? Wondering if I should change up my approach

I don't think it needs stressing over; there have been a couple times where we exchanged numbers beforehand to make planning/coordination easier, and times where I haven't. I don't think it's had any real impact on the outcome, but getting a number afterwards does make a nice clear signal to know she's interested in seeing me again.

Just from what I see online, women get a lot of guys on these apps looking to exchange Instagram/Snapchat beforehand for chatting, and tend to look skeptically at that. But age probably plays a part in that.

When COVxy is right, they're right

It turns out that the stuff that happens between elections matters too.

Small =/= bad

SHRlKE posted...

Glad it went well. Do you know why she is in a wheelchair? What's her issue exactly and will it affect your sex life?

Yeah, it came up in our conversation: she was born very premature, resulting in cerebral palsy. As she put it, she can do everything except walk, but I don't quite know how much that "everything" entails, you know?

SHRlKE posted...

Any updates?

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/boards/400-current-events/80106858

Priere posted...

Now that youre dating, you get rock star parking wherever you go.

It's NYC, neither of us drives

ultimate_reaver posted...

why do you have to specify that she uses a wheelchair repeatedly

I considered not specifying with this topic title, but figured someone might see this topic who hadn't seen the previous one and get confused as to the context.

But I take your point. It doesn't define her, but it is a novel situation for me and I imagine most people here are more interested in that than in my standard dating life.

[LFAQs-redacted-quote]

I'd be very surprised if we didn't; the date ended with her giving me her number (we met via Hinge, for those unawares).

We had a good conversation over dinner, then walked/rolled to a nearby park for the views. She's got a fun sense of humor about it all, as I imagine you'd have to develop.

Smackems posted...

Then don't cough.

Buddy do you know how coughing works?

I don't expect people to read that thing, just figured I'd help answer the question.

I had covid a few weeks back, and I'm negative now but every few days my cough will return. It's happening now and I'm super self-conscious about it if it continues onto the date.

Smackems posted...

That's dumb as shit why is it like that

The article:

Its a fundamental conflict, one that plagues communities like New Port Richey all over the country. State transportation departments, Dumbaugh, the urban planning professor, says, designed arterial roads to be high-speed and efficient ways of carrying lots of traffic. Land developers then built up property around the roads. Once that happens, Dumbaugh says, youve put together a few things that are fundamentally incompatible. Add more housing to the mix and youve got a situation where people are walking, Dumbaugh says, in environments that were never designed to accommodate it.
...
Traffic engineers typical response to high congestion is to create more lanes for more traffic, Marohn says, which only makes the problem worse. Studies have shown that more lanes tend to create more traffic, which means that building out stroads usually results in the same amount of gridlock. What happens when engineers widen roads and create clear zones, Marohn says, is that drivers respond to those cues. It tells drivers, weve got your back, and the way that drivers respond to that is by shutting off the active part of their brains, he says.

thronedfire2 posted...

so are the pedestrians jaywalking or getting hit in crosswalks? I feel like that's important info they left out. I'd never try to cross a busy 45-55mph street outside of a crosswalker

The article makes two points on this front:

The crosswalks are so far apart its easy to see why some people decide to make a run for it. After Main Street, we dont see another crosswalk until Grand Boulevard in Port Richey 1.7 miles away. That means someone looking to get across the street between the two might need to walk an extra mile or more to find a safe crossing.
...
That instinct, to attribute a fatal crash to some failure of personal responsibility, distracts us from the bigger picture: that many of our road designs are inherently unsafe. Jessie Singer, author of the book There Are No Accidents, says that the things we think of as accidents are in fact the result of dangerous conditions in our built environments.

We focus on individual blame, Singer says, because that makes it easier for us to believe that it couldnt happen to us. Plus, it prevents us from having to make the hard structural changes necessary to prevent crashes from happening again: to call them accidents makes them seem at once inevitable and impossible to change. This narrative kind of lets the government and corporations off the hook from having to protect us, Singer says.

If accidents are supposed to be random, Singer says, then accidental death would be evenly distributed across the country but its not. Schneiders study showed that pedestrian deaths arent random, either. The places with the most pedestrian deaths tend to look like US-19 in one way or another: high-speed, with multiple lanes, and lots of commercial and residential development around them. Three-quarters of them are bordered by low-income areas, where people may be less likely to have access to a car.

https://www.vox.com/23178764/florida-us19-deadliest-pedestrian-fatality-crisis

Drive along this part of US-19, a stretch of highway in Pasco County that parallels Floridas Gulf Coast, and youd be forgiven for not noticing the danger. It looks like a lot of American roads, especially in the South: flat, straight, and wide. Three lanes move in each direction, and extra turn lanes on the right and left bring the total number of lanes to eight or nine at most intersections. The road runs through several cities and places Hudson, Port Richey, New Port Richey, and Holiday but because of all the sprawl, you never really feel like youve left town.

Along the road is a panoply of American consumerism: Walmart, Publix, tattoo parlors, chain hotels, motels, 7-Elevens, multiple Dunkins, medical equipment stores, condemned buildings, strip clubs, auto body repair shops, oil change places, custom paint job businesses, chain restaurants, deserted property waiting to be redeveloped, and a mini-golf course where you can feed baby alligators, fenced in near the sidewalk.

Walk along this road, and you might begin to notice the danger. The speed limit is 45 to 55 miles per hour, but the cars are often going much faster. The crosswalks are so few and far between that a simple act crossing the street to get to a business a few hundred feet away might mean walking over half a mile to reach the nearest crosswalk. Even with sidewalks set back from the road, its clear that US-19 wasnt built for pedestrians.

Robert Schneider, a professor of urban planning at the University of Wisconsin Milwaukee, has never driven on this part of US-19. But amid a rise in pedestrian deaths across the country, Schneider and three of his colleagues Rebecca Sanders, Frank Proulx, and Hamideh Moayyed decided to look at the data on pedestrian deaths to try to find out where they were happening most frequently. Using information from the governments database of fatal car crashes, the Fatality Analysis Reporting System, Schneider and his colleagues looked at all the pedestrian deaths recorded between 2001 and 2016. The idea was to identify hot spots: 1,000-meter segments of roadway where six or more pedestrians were killed over two eight-year periods. We thought: What can we find out about the places where these fatalities happened? Schneider says. There would likely be similarities, he assumed, which could point to potential safety improvements. One thing we wanted to shed light on is that they truly arent random.

They were expecting to find some overlap. But one road came up so many times that the results, Schneider says, were eye-popping. Out of the 60 hot spots they identified as having a high number of deaths, seven of them were on US-19 in Pasco County alone more than any other road in the United States. When you add the numbers up, thats 137 pedestrian fatalities over the entire Pasco County. Thats an incredibly high number, Schneider says. If an airplane crashed there and 137 people died, people would know about it, he says.

The study looked at deaths through 2016 the most recent year finalized data was available. But a Vox analysis of open-source data from the Florida Department of Transportation showed that pedestrian fatalities have continued to be a problem: 48 people have been killed in car crashes that involved pedestrians on US-19 in Pasco County between 2017 and June 2022.

For every 100 miles on US-19, there have been at least 34 deaths since 2017, making it the deadliest road across the state.

Locals might not have the statistics at their fingertips, but they know that US-19 is dangerous. In 2020, 13 people traveling US-19 by car in Pasco County were killed in crashes. For residents who rely on it, US-19 is both mundane and maddeningly treacherous. Crashes are so ubiquitous that some talk about an old bumper sticker on cars that read: Pray for me, I drive on US-19. Another part of US-19, in neighboring Pinellas County, is sometimes called death valley. But the road is pretty much unavoidable for most people trying to move freely through the area, and the alternatives arent much better. No one is more endangered on the road than those who use it unprotected by a ton of steel and there are a lot of them.

The rest of the article goes on for a long while about America's transportation infrastructure and why it's so uniquely dangerous. Suffice to say: not great!

https://www.vice.com/en/article/93abve/jd-vance-suggests-people-in-violent-marriages-shouldnt-get-divorced

JD Vance said people need to be more willing to stay in unhappy marriages for the sake of their kidsand seemed to suggest that in some cases, even violent marriages should continue.

The Ohio Republican Senate nominee, talking to Pacifica Christian High School in Southern California last September, gave an extended answer that claimed that people now shift spouses like they change their underwear, and that it had done long-term damage to a generation of children.

This is one of the great tricks that I think the sexual revolution pulled on the American populace, which is the idea that like, well, OK, these marriages were fundamentally, you know, they were maybe even violent, but certainly they were unhappy. And so getting rid of them and making it easier for people to shift spouses like they change their underwear, thats going to make people happier in the long term, Vance said.

And maybe it worked out for the moms and dads, though Im skeptical. But it really didnt work out for the kids of those marriages, Vance continued. And thats what I think all of us should be honest about, is weve run this experiment in real time. And what we have is a lot of very, very real family dysfunction thats making our kids unhappy.

Vance was responding to a moderator who referenced his grandparents relationship before asking, What's causing one generation to give up on fatherhood when the other one was so doggedly determined to stick it out, even in tough times?" And those comments came immediately after he brought up his grandparents relationship and how it differed from his parents generation. He described their marriage as violent in his best-selling book Hillbilly Elegy, though theyd reconciled by the time he came along and helped raise him, giving him a sense of safety and stability his mother was unable to provide.

Culturally, something has clearly shifted. I think its easy but also probably true to blame the sexual revolution of the 1960s. My grandparents had an incredibly chaotic marriage in a lot of ways, but they never got divorced, right? They were together to the end, til death do us part. That was a really important thing to my grandmother and my grandfather. That was clearly not true by the 70s or 80s, he said.

And I think that probably, I was personally and a lot of kids in my community, who grew up in my generation, personally suffered from the fact that a lot of moms and dads saw marriage as a basic contract, right? Like any other business deal, once it becomes no longer good for one of the parties or both of the parties, you just dissolve it and go onto a new business relationship. But that recognition that marriage was sacred I think was a really powerful thing that held a lot of families together. And when it disappeared, unfortunately I think a lot of kids suffered, Vance said.

His full comments on divorce, in footage obtained by VICE News, can be viewed below. The comments on violence begin around the 3:10 mark.

https://youtu.be/sUh4ATU_V4A

VICE News asked Vances campaign why he thought it would be better for children if their parents stayed in violent marriages than if they divorced, as well as whether he wanted local or federal law changed to make it harder for couples to divorce.

Vance sent the following statement in response, via a campaign staffer:
I reject the premise of your bogus question. As anyone who studies these issues knows: domestic violence has skyrocketed in recent years, and is much higher among non-married couples. Thats the trick I reference: that domestic violence would somehow go down if progressives got what they want, when in fact modern societys war on families has made our domestic violence situation much worse. Any fair person would recognize I was criticizing the progressive frame on this issue, not embracing it.

But I can see that you are not a fair person, so rather than answer your loaded and baseless question, let me offer the following: Im an actual victim of domestic violence. In my life, I have seen siblings, wives, daughters, and myself abused by men. Its disgusting for you to argue that I was defending those men.

Vances campaign declined to make him available for an interview to clarify his comments. When asked follow-up question of whether he thinks people in violent marriages should generally stay together or get divorced," a Vance spokesperson said they felt Vance's statement already answered this question.

The rate of reported domestic violence in the U.S. has actually significantly declined in recent decades, decreasing from 15.5 per 1,000 women and 2.8 per 1,000 men to 5.4 per 1,000 women and 0.5 per 1,000 men between 1995 through 2015, according to data from the Center for Disease Control and U.S. Department of Justice. Tragically, however, there are indications that domestic violence significantly increased during the COVID-19 pandemic, partly due to stay-at-home orders keeping people stuck with their violent partners. Some academic studies have also found higher domestic violence rates among unmarried partners than married couples.

No, I get it FEH.

https://www.theverge.com/2022/7/25/23277391/hulu-blocks-democratic-ads-abortion-guns-climate-change-january-6-insurrection

Abortion rights, gun control, and climate change have taken center stage for Democrats running in this years midterm elections. But the popular streaming service Hulu has repeatedly rejected Democratic ads focusing on these central campaign issues over the last few weeks, as first reported by The Washington Post on Monday.

On July 15th, a group of Democratic campaign organizations attempted to purchase a joint ad on abortion and gun control on the Disney-backed Hulu platform along with other digital buys on Facebook, YouTube, and Roku and more traditional placements on broadcast and cable channels. The ad ran on every other platform, but Hulu rejected it. Hulu hasnt told the groups if it will run the ad, a Democratic party official told The Verge.

In a joint statementon Hulus rejection on Monday, the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, and Democratic Governors Association said, Hulus censorship of the truth is outrageous, offensive, and another step down a dangerous path for our country.

After the ad went live on the accepted platforms, the groups reached out to Hulu asking for clarification. On July 18th, a Hulu representative said that the ad was rejected due to content related issues. Hulu reps declined a series of other clarifying calls from the committees last week before a rep sent an email saying that the ad was accepted, according to emails viewed by The Verge. But hours after receiving the message, Hulu said it was sent in error.

The Democratic committees still havent received a clear answer as to why the ads were rejected. But their ad is just the latest in a growing list of too sensitive to air ads from Democrats seeking placement on Hulu in the last few weeks alone.

Hulu did not immediately respond to a request for comment from The Verge.
Disney, which owns 66 percent of Hulu, has been subject to intense political pressure from Republicans in recent months. The company, which operates hugely profitable theme parks in Florida, became a GOP target after CEO Bob Chapek condemned the states Dont Say Gay bill. The bill outlawed primary school teachers from engaging students in discussion about sexual orientation and gender identity.

Unlike broadcast television networks, Hulu doesnt have to provide politicians with equal access to airwaves under the Communications Act of 1934. But its decision to block important Democratic issue ads divides it from other online platforms and streaming services, like Facebook, YouTube, and Roku, which accepted the Democratic groups ads and other ads like it in the past.

Earlier this month, Suraj Patel a Democratic congressional candidate in New York accused Hulu of censorship after a company rep instructed his campaign to remove language related to abortion, climate change, and gun reform before an ad could run on the platform. Hulu has blocked a handful of other pro-abortion rights campaign ads without explaining exactly why they were rejected.

Voters have the right to know the facts about MAGA Republicans agenda on issues like abortion and Hulu is doing a huge disservice to the American people by blocking voters from learning the truth about the GOP record or denying these issues from even being discussed, the Democratic groups said in their Monday statement.

Its difficult to say whether Hulus overall ad policy puts Democratic candidates at a disadvantage but for party operatives, the mere possibility is alarming. It is an absolute scandal that a major streaming service like Hulu is censoring Democrats ability to talk about Republican attacks, Matt McDermott, a Democratic pollster and strategist, said in a Monday tweet. Hulu is one of the most impactful platforms for advertising to young voters. By blocking ads on issues like climate change and abortion, Hulu is effectively censoring Democrats from engaging a massive swath of voters on the most critical issues facing our country.

TheGoldenEel posted...

why would they secede when theyre winning at reshaping America into their vision?

Yeah, a lot of people seem fixated on the idea that the next break up is gonna look like the last one. It won't, because the conditions of today are not the conditions of 1860.

http://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/25/us/politics/election-sheriffs-voting-trump.html/

An influential network of conservative activists fixated on the idea that former President Donald J. Trump won the 2020 election is working to recruit county sheriffs to investigate elections based on the false notion that voter fraud is widespread.

The push, which two right-wing sheriffs groups have already endorsed, seeks to lend law enforcement credibility to the false claims and has alarmed voting rights advocates. They warn that it could cause chaos in future elections and further weaken trust in an American voting system already battered by attacks from Mr. Trump and his allies.

One of the conservative sheriffs groups, Protect America Now, lists about 70 members, and the other, the Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association, does not list its membership but says it conducted trainings on various issues for about 300 of the nations roughly 3,000 sheriffs in recent years. It is unclear how many sheriffs will ultimately wade into election matters. Many aligned with the groups are from small, rural counties.

But at least three sheriffs involved in the effort in Michigan, Kansas and Wisconsin have already been carrying out their own investigations, clashing with election officials who warn that they are overstepping their authority and meddling in an area where they have little expertise.

Im absolutely sick of it, said Pam Palmer, the clerk of Barry County, Mich., where the sheriff has carried out an investigation into the 2020 results for more than a year. We didnt do anything wrong, but theyve cast a cloud over our entire county that makes people disbelieve in the accuracy of our ability to run an election.

In recent years, sheriffs have usually taken a limited role in investigations of election crimes, which are typically handled by state agencies with input from local election officials. Republican-led state legislatures, at the same time, have pushed to impose harsher criminal penalties for voting infractions, passing 20 such laws in at least 14 states since the 2020 election.

This is all part and parcel of returning to a world where were using the criminal law in a way to make voting harder, said Sophia Lin Lakin, the interim co-director of the Voting Rights Project at the A.C.L.U. All the things that used to feel more fringy no longer feel so fringy, as were starting to see this very much collective effort.

The sheriff of Racine County in Wisconsin, the states fifth-most-populous county, is trying to charge state election officials with felonies for measures they took to facilitate safe voting in nursing homes during the pandemic.

In Barry County in Michigan, a rural area that voted overwhelmingly for Mr. Trump, the sheriff has been investigating the 2020 election after becoming involved with efforts by people working on Mr. Trumps behalf to try to gain access to voting machines.

And the sheriff of Johnson County in Kansas, which includes suburbs of Kansas City and is the most populous county in the state, has said he is broadly investigating the countys 2020 election. At a recent meeting with election officials, he questioned their procedures and integrity, according to a written account from the countys top lawyer, who sent him a letter expressing concern that he was interfering in election matters.

The Johnson County sheriff, Calvin Hayden, said in an interview that sheriffs faced a learning curve.

We dont know anything about elections, he said. Were cops. We have to educate ourselves on the system, which takes a long, long time.

The three sheriffs gathered with a few hundred others at a forum this month in Las Vegas hosted by the Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association.
Attendees included leaders of True the Vote, a group whose work spreading discredited theories of mass voter fraud inspired the conspiratorial film 2000 Mules; Mike Lindell, the Trump ally and MyPillow chief executive; and other prominent figures in the 2020 election-denial movement.
Speakers urged more sheriffs to open investigations of the 2020 election, which they compared to a rigged sporting event, presenting evidence that rehashed long-disproved theories. One speaker said the way that betting odds had changed on election night constituted proof of a stolen election.

Some of the arguments centered on the premise of 2000 Mules: that an army of left-wing operatives wrongfully flooded drop boxes with absentee ballots in 2020. Many, including William P. Barr, Mr. Trumps former attorney general and Georgia state officials, have pointed to major flaws in the supposed findings and the flimsy evidence presented.

Still, Richard Mack, the founder of the constitutional sheriffs association, said the accusations made in 2000 Mules, which was released in May, were a smoking gun and had persuaded him to make election issues his groups top priority.

Mr. Lindell said in an interview that he and his team had offered the three sheriffs all of our resources, including computer experts and data on voters, but that he had made no financial commitments.

The Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association, which was formally founded about a decade ago by Mr. Mack, is dedicated to the theory that sheriffs are beholden only to the Constitution and serve as the ultimate authority in a county above local, state and federal officials and statutes. The group, whose leaders have promoted Christian ideology in government, has been active in supporting fights against gun control laws, immigration laws and federal land management.
...
Some conservative activists have also floated the idea of increasing the presence of sheriffs wherever ballots are cast, counted and transported, echoing a proposal by Mr. Trump in 2020 that didnt gain steam.

Deputizing volunteers could even be an option, said Sam Bushman, the national operations director for the constitutional sheriffs association.

Jim Marchant, the Republican nominee for secretary of state of Nevada and an attendee in Las Vegas, said that if elected, he would try to bring sheriffs back in to the election process.

The deputies are going to be there at the locations to watch for any anomaly, he said in an interview.

For voting rights groups, the potential presence of law enforcement officers at polling locations evokes a darker period in American democracy, when the police were weaponized to suppress turnout by people of color.

Because of this history, state and federal protections limit what law enforcement can do. In California and Pennsylvania, for example, it is a crime for officers to show up at the polls if they have not been called by an election official. In other states, including Flor ida, North Caro lina, Ohio and Wiscon sin, officers must obey local elec tion offi cials at the polls, according to the Brennan Center for Justice.

This would amount to a climate murder-suicide pact. Letting red states use their fossil fuel reserves as they please with no federal check would result in catastrophic emissions.

ktownslayer16 posted...

did she have any funny mention of it in her bio?

Yeah. One of her prompts is "I'll fall for you if... You push from the wrong angle."