It would be very rare not to do so.

Most poll results give the margins of error of the method(s) used. No idea if this one did or not, but 2% and 3% don’t seem dramatic enough to not be explicable by margin of error issues.

Would put some of that down to people making errors with checkboxes, comprehension issues & trolling.

But yeah, some people just like conviction regardless of their thoughts on a case.

Easy to let despondence & cynicism override reality, but if it were true that voting does nothing, nobody would put such effort into discouraging us from voting; into confusing us so much that we disengage.

Standing in line to tick may feel too tiny to count, but everything counts, from the mysterious interactions of subatomic particles to your most basic civic interaction with the rest of your nation (voting).

The few that might like the idea are too lacking in power to attempt, and in any case are easy for a flight between Israel & the US to avoid. Can’t even see any of them denying access to their airspace.

He’d also unlikely to be travelling via a regular commercial passenger flight, as Navalny was.

It is also a natural thing to think of, and easy for anyone over the age of 7 or 8 to figure out how to do it effectively.

It has always filled me with a kind of dread & nausea when I hear of the internet mob savaging a person, no matter my view of whatever has people riled up into full attack mode.

Determined to follow Bubba’s example of having great love & forgiveness for everyone, even as am a sobbing, mess at this story and yet again devastated at the knowledge of all the dangerous vitriol out in the world. I wish so much that persecutors could glimpse a moment of what it is to love & be relieved of their hatreds.

They’re likely going along with it on the basis that they no longer care about downballot races, or even the main race, intending instead for Trump to seize power & install loyalists by force.

I don’t see their plan working, but there’ll still be considerable chaos & violence during the attempt.

Trying to hope this will galvanise workers in Kentucky into unionising at last, but suspect it won’t, and that Republican strategists are primed to roll out all the usual tactics to discourage it.

CNN is covering it this evening, along with some of his other recent announcements (which amount to rounding up his political enemies & millions more besides), but infuriatingly still downplaying what his vision entails, nor how popular that is with Republican voters.

And security for same.

I’d imagine it is incredibly hard, and that entering with the knowledge the arrangement will only be temporary is unlikely to make handing back a child any easier emotionally, but from the article it seems some foster parents have been using the foster system as a means to circumvent the far more onerous adoption system, rather than merely finding themselves alarmed that a child they took in is being returned somewhere they believe to be unsuitable, and willing to fight such a return.

Have no issue with the latter, even if their beliefs happen to be incorrect (that’s for the courts to sort out), but the former is an intentional manipulation of the lives of vulnerable children from the outset - before a placement has been initiated, before attachments have formed within a foster family, before the foster parents know any details of the lives of the biological parents & before any indications could have arisen that it would be in the best interests of a particular child to remain with their foster parents.

The whole area is a maze of incredibly difficult decisions, and I don’t think there are obvious solutions, other than to remind judges in the family courts to be particularly cautious about the advice of experts & the behavioural theories they invoke.

GOP doesn’t need to, and nor do most of their base.

When one considers that it boils down to key constituencies in swing states, to win you only need relatively small numbers of voters to become sufficiently motivated to get to the polls, or to be insufficiently enthused to bother.

Meantime the same factors impact whether or not people donate to a campaign, financially or otherwise, & how much energy they put into arguing for one course or another with their friends and family.

The arithmetic in a two party federal system is a dreadful flaw, in that it forces a tiny minority to become kingmakers.

Nobody imagines one can get large numbers to totally switch sides, and they seldom need to - working the spectrum of impassioned & disillusioned is everything.

Also crucial to tap the psychology of the justifications voters use to explain their actions to themselves primarily, but also to those around them.

And yet, we know and he knows that a good slice of his base absolutely scrutinise his every move for coded messages & interpret those as instructions.

I don’t know that he necessarily has strong preferences of his own, other than securing his position at the top, coupled with the knowledge that most people do not fall into unquestioning loyalty. He desperately needs intense support backed by the willingness to do violence, and having tried various other options finally found that in the tribalism of the right-wing. He’s unlikely to know much about gun stores, or the details of far-right terror attacks, but it is a trivial matter to direct some lackey to identify a store to promote to embolden those who were already desirous of slaughtering their fellow Americans.

But it is of course disturbing that so many support everything that is going on.

During the protests in the wake of the murder of George Floyd, it emerged that there were similar sites in Chicago & other cities. Those taken to them were lifted off the streets, away from the protests, by people who were not in uniform & who did not identify themselves. Once at these unmarked sites, they were denied access to basics like a lawyer & a phonecall. Seems most were released relatively quickly, but the whole thing sends a stark warning: we can disappear you if we want & you can’t do a damn thing about it.

Mmhmm.

Least bad interpretation: they want younger generations to believe black people had as good a time in the US as any other group & from that to blame black people for current position in the socio-economic class hierarchy.

More likely interpretation: they hope to reinstitute chattel slavery, or at least a massive expansion of less intense forms of slavery, don’t want as many of the younger generation bothering to resist that & need some to actively support it.

Neither educated nor medical, but the first one that was televised looked quite like an absence seizure, only a bit longer.

His staff for that one seemed to handle it fairly smoothly. Couldn’t decide if their reactions indicated familiarity with such episodes happening to him, or just decades of media training to glide through the unexpected.

Seeing him last night on the television, he did look like he’s dropped a bit of weight recently.

Still, there’s no way he has lost 11kg in the past week, that he’s 97kg now, or that he was ever 190cm.

Oh having the “true” leader of the US in exile would be insanely useful to Putin. Base goes crazy, GOP in disarray, propaganda tool within Russia on perils of democracy etc., bump him off if he kicks off & blame NATO (or whoever).

It does sort of make me dream of a federation of ancom communities, but I like to do that anyhow…

Not sure if it still holds now that most people will stumble upon the history of the confederate flag and how it has been flown since in the US, but as an 80s Eurokiddy, back in the day when we were even more clueless than we are now - it just had some vague “rebel” association. Then people started reading stuff, clued the rest of us in about what it actually represents (inadvertently prodding us out of clueless enthusiasm & into some circumspection), but it took time for that message to get heard enough for the flag to vanish from circles who’d never had flown it had they known.

Anyhow, loathe this version for drawing false equivalences, yet find it grossly fascinating for how it obliquely manifests so many truths about our society under Capitalism.

We’re long accustomed to the commodification of causes & the trivialisation of same, but one can look on this and see, endless tidy light grey boxes lit with rows of long lights posed as unflickering mimics of fluorescent tubes, chewing time to unfold tidy folded wraps of glossy paper, encapsulating shine-worn gloss of ticket home (&back) on hard-lit long trains ticking & tilting bright-lit to aching, fretful sweat sotted beds, unfurling blankets… but, for now must choose. By committee.

Or, they laid off 70% of their workers, one of the remainder prompted a chatbot to provide an icon which would “appeal to all Americans” & here we are discussing it, giving them free publicity & putting the pandering fucks at the head of our mind.

Bollocks, have rambled & clean forgotten what I was trying to say. Apologies.

Doctors, of all groups, seem the least likely to harbour unrealistic fantasies about pregnancy, childbirth & the implications of unwanted pregnancies which come to term.

So though it isn’t hard to imagine that providing obstetric care can have joyous aspect which might feel different to helping people who are sick or injured, the statement feels alarmingly divorced from the visceral & emotional realities of human reproduction.

Meantime your words reminded by of an often-quoted comment by a famous US comedian whose name escapes me, to the effect that advocating for the rights of the unborn permits an activist to feel all the passion of fighting for the vulnerable, without ever being confronted by the fruits of their activism whom they dislike as individuals, or whose behaviour they disapprove of, who are ungrateful, who present inconvenient human complexity, who are from groups the anti-abortionist hates, etc… The activist gets to project their own ideal of innocence onto them all.

Though I strongly believe those who are responsible for pushing anti-abortion rhetoric into a major political issue just wish to ensure an increased supply of people who are more vulnerable to exploitation.