Downtown Spokane is a island of blue. Pullman is usually the same. By the time you get to Spokane Valley the people there actively vote for Christian Nationalist Terrorist organizers.

The Spokane City Council is actually very strongly progressive right now. The city’s districts were changed about 10-ish years ago. Since then the votes from downtown actually matter and the city is quickly improving on several fronts. Basically, it’s downtown demanding process with everywhere else demanding we woodchip homeless people and storm schools with ICE to beat up children.

You can say “of course that’s hyperbole!” I say: I canvassed Spokane door knocking for politics and I heard those exact ideas from the people I talked to. They’re fucking crazy. I don’t really know what happened, but the US lost any and all sense of humanity in the rural/suburban areas over the last 40 years.

The classic source for the research is The Authoritarians by Bob Altemeyer. Full text available here from the author: https://theauthoritarians.org/

He studied authoritarian attitudes and other related behaviors for decades. The book came out on the heels of the end of the George W. Bush presidency. He absolutely called the future of the Republican party / Conservative movement we have today as it morphs into a full on fascist administration.

Very highly recommended reading, designed for more laypeople then pure researchers, and is spot on for the situation we’re in.

They were also in on the whole Clipper Chip debacle. They tried to force a hardware level encryption backdoor into all computers back under President Clinton. This stuff isn’t new for them, they’re just less dictatory then the Conservatives who are founded on the restoration of the monarchy.

About 30% of all people, regardless of descent, are Authoritarians. They’ll gladly sign up to hurt others when told to and assume they’ll be rewarded by the dictator for their loyalty. Even when the whole basis of the cruelty is on race, there’s always Quislings lining up to be oppressors assuming they won’t be on the firing line later when the conservatives run out of other outsiders to kill off.

White Fascism is a death cult. Anyone participating is first killing everyone around them, and then themselves. They are not to be trusted.

They’re just rightfully following in the footsteps of their ex leader who only ever did one painting properly.

I was born in a old era swing state, moved to a seriously blue (so, you know center right) state, and now I’ve left the country altogether. Sorry you got dealt an even worse hand.

Not just that, but a lawyer known for representing J6 insurrectionists. This is a stunt to create a supreme court case and otherwise damage civil society.

Samantha’s mother is a lawyer and conservative activist known for representing two Jan 6ers and for fighting COVID-related mandates. She has been in national news before.

Yeah, your evidence is pretty convincing. It may not have been an explicit setup, but it sure feels like it. If nothing else, it’s the perfect storm of factors that would lead it to be a supreme court case in the stew pot simmering away.

Because we’ve seen 30 years of the Web? Because streets used to be (and some sill are) nothing but a place to put up billboards and ads? Because corporations are led by psychopaths and they care absolutely nothing about your well-being or personal health in your home?

OF COURSE if they can put an ad in your kitchen they’ll by all means put an ad in your kitchen. It’s literally the goal of giving out brochures and pamphlets of ads: to make you take the ads into your home. Why are there brand names on everything? It’s advertising all the way down. Giving them an Internet-connecting screen they control in your kitchen is just asking for ads to be displayed in your private space.

Having PERL be a shell style environment was hilariously slow. Entertaining, but slow.

I feel bad that I read that page in Chrome. I’m a failure of a techie.

Tomorrow I must atone by teaching more students terminal commands. Maybe using web API calls with cURL. Or get and some eviloverlord.com quotes?

During the era it wasn’t rare to upgrade components on the motherboard and ISA/PCI bus cards. We’d had some relatively stable CPU socket standards and you’d do things like change out CPU and ram for upgrades.

Was this a stupid marketing gimmick? Oh yeah. Was it unreasonable to talk about upgrading a system at home? Not really. We did do it for a while.

“I tried switching to Hannah Montana Special Arch Edition and it wasn’t easy!” – Is it ever easy? I dunno, but computers are complex things so trying any new approach is expected to take work. Picking a weird, unsupported, and possibly out of date software package isn’t going to help the effort.

People not knowing when to use ‘is’ and ‘are’ in English.

For reals, though? Mostly energy put into conversations, who spends the effort to initiate topics, and whether someone actually has hobbies other than just watching TV.

To the fascist dictator, the enemy is both weak and strong.

In our state, we’ve been getting RCV pushed through at city and county levels. It’s a hill climbing exercise. With every small and local hill we climb it helps us get to a bigger one next.

It completely sucks how long it takes, but that’s how big changes can happen… Eventually.

Hurting children and schools had always been an openly stated goal of conservatives. How hard they fight public education from day 1? Hard. How often do they propose legislation to hurt teachers, reduce the quality of teaching, and force children into the workforce ill educated and early? Often.

Empty classrooms for the poor (the rich just do whatever anyway) IS the goal since an ill educated population is a controllable one. Fascists always come to destroy the schools.

You mean like every year for the last 10 years? That tracks. Why it’s news, though, I’m not sure. This is a “Dog bites man” kind of moment.

My last place basically did it too. They adjusted salaries for post covid corporate profiteering inflation, but only a little. Not enough to even begin to catch up with how much less we were making.

Strangely, many of the younger people there left. They could do the math and the org insulted us with their raise after years of salary stagnation.

Mayor Mamdani should dress like President Zelensky normally does for the meeting. Or just hints of it.