The power to choose, just before dying, to come back to life as a healthy 30 y/o.

But you probably meant only selfless acts allowed, hence the “sacrifice” verbiage. In that case, instantaneous worldwide post-scarcity society. That’d address most of the world’s ills, eventually. Being ultra-rich means nothing in post-scarcity; not needing Middle-East oil and African mineral resources would eliminate most international meddling in those locations. While it wouldn’t immediately address climate change or cure all diseases, it’d mean enough food and energy for everyone, and it’d give us the means to accomplish these.

If so many of us weren’t spending all our time working just to feed, clothe, and house ourselves, we could accomplish much as a species.

The assassination attempt on Reagan also failed, and was bigger news, for far longer. Not JF Kennedy level, but it was more enduring than the attempt on Trump.

The news cycle on the Trump attempt was astonishingly brief.

In Living Color; 1988.

Search for “Kennedy.” Long before Trump was a “thing” in the American zeitgeist.

I think John F. Kennedy qualified; he’s been practically deified since his assassination, and his supporters were MAGA-level enthusiasts. Just the sheer level of conspiracy theory around his assassination, missing from all other assassinations - successful or attempted - is a good indicator. Even the attempted Trump assassination, which generated considerable tin-hat response, is now almost completely forgotten; certainly, nobody’s talking about it in mainstream forums.

In my opinion, Kennedy was an incredible president and great statesman, but yeah, I think you could reasonably claim there was a cult of personality around him.

That’s exactly what I mean. The FediVerse in general can work fine without JavaScript, CSS, or any cruft, but Gemini is even too simple for that to be an enjoyable experience. IMO.

It’s been tried.

Lots of people do use gemini, but I think it’s past the point where, if were ever going to catch on, it would have.

Personally, I think it’s mostly OK, but went too far with simplifying the gmi spec; it’s too simple. And some things that need to be possible for success, aren’t, and never can be. I think it’s too flawed to have ever caught on.

Lately, my wife’s been doing now international travel than I have, and she reports that foreign airport security for flights to the US are far more strict than domestic flights. For example, TSA in the US is pretty loosey-goosey about the liquids rules - not the amounts, but having everything in ziplock bags that can be closed. I haven’t put my liquids in ziplocks for a domestic flight in years, but foreign security enforcing the TSA checks are anal-retentive about stuff like that.

Part may be because we’ve had pre-check since it first came out, so I may just be seeing only the less strict rules of pre-check, but I suspect the US is just more strict with airport security for incoming, non-domestic flights, and foreign airports are just doing what TSA is demanding, to the letter.

Heathrow, Charles de Gaulle, and MUC’s security are way more lax than any US airport. Where they get strict is when you get to the gates for the US flights and have to go through security - TSA, this time - a second time. The only airport I thought had general security as strict as a US airport was Singapore, and their TSA at-gate security is insane. Dubai, too. Only airport I’ve been in where the entire gate for a flight was enclosed in glass, like a snake terrarium. And god forbid you wanted to go back out for food or something, because you had to go through that TSA checkpoint again. I hate flying through Dubai to get home.

If they work for you, great! I’ve never owned one that shaved anywhere nearly as close as a blade, or that I didn’t have to use twice a day if I wanted to be clean-shaven in the evening. Plus, I don’t particularly find them comfortable, or precise; they’re all a little bit like using fine-grain sandpaper.

But everyone is different, and if you like the shave, you’re fortunate.

For years I carried a AA battery powered one in my glove compartment for emergencies, like when I was in a rush and had to shave on the road. It was an absolutely horrible shaver, but better than the alternative. I only used it a couple of times within ten years, so I stopped doing that.

They’re not allowed in carry-on. I’ve gotten through a check point with a blade on once, but I’ve also been pulled out and asked to verify there’s no blade. It’s low risk because all you lose is some time and you might have to toss a blade. But then I’m left with a useless razor until I can find a pharmacy to buy whatever crappy generic blades they have, which I then have to dial in for aggressiveness, and it’s just way more trouble than it’s worth.

When I was heavy business traveling, it was absolutely not worth it, because I didn’t pad my airport arrival and boarding time by many minutes, and getting pulled out for a check meant I’d have to run for the gate. Plus, I’d have to make time during the trip to find a pharmacy, pay for an Uber to go get blades. Not worth it.

On the much more rare occasion that I an checking a bag, like for a longer trip, sure; I’ll pack a safety razor or shavette, but then I worry about light-fingered TSA inspectors. Anything stolen from your luggage, you’re never getting back. I have a couple of cheap-o safety’s I wouldn’t mind losing, but they’re not my favorite shaves either.

All in all, for traveling, I just take cartridge razors. It’s easier.

No. Checked is OK, but most of my trips are entirely carry-on. I almost never check bags, unless I’m going on vacation. I did, however, once lose a nice pocket knife because I forgot to put it in my checked bag before getting on an early AM return flight, and had to give it to the bin, so I still avoid taking things that could get confiscated if I mispack them during the trip.

I don’t know about you, but my outbound packing is pristine; by the time I’m coming home after a couple of weeks, it’s a toss-up where anything is.

Until the TSA lifts restrictions on blades, cartridge razors will continue to be a necessary evil in my kit. However, there are so many better options for your home, as you say. The shown safety razor style is perfectly fine, and so much less expensive, even if you don’t go all in with a solid soap and brush, and just use a normal shave cream like Creamo.

Its inclusion here is absurd. Cartridge shavers are shitty for the environment, and shitty for your wallet; they’re not less manly, they’re just a less smart choice.

I came across a quality cassette tape player while cleaning out my MIL’s house. I’m keeping it for when the cassette tape fad rolls around, with people claiming the sound “just sounds more authentic” or some shit. Then I can sell it on eBay for a grand or something stupid.

I don’t know, but I stopped gaming on console when it became impossible to find games that weren’t mainly multiplayer games. I suppose if you’re saying multiplayer is dying, I should take a look at what’s on offer again.

I got so sick of PvP.

Thank you.

I would love to hear a design, a plan from the progressive left to solve these problems

Many of these things aren’t really “problems.” For example,

• The immigration issue is a red herring, a dog whistle. It’s not a real issue, at least not in the way it’s presented by conservatives.
• You can not satisfy both sides of the abortion issue.
• You can’t satisfy both sides of the genocide in Palestine.

However, if there’s one place Hillary really messed up, it was further alienating blue collar, fly-over country Americans. She mainly appealed to the coasts, and white collar workers. Kamala is going to have to double down on Biden’s efforts to win back the Unions, and really appeal to blue collar. Promising them new, better paying jobs in emerging technology sectors; new training without forcing them into higher-ed white collar office jobs. Not everyone wants to sit an office and work on a computer. But you can still promise to bring construction and manufacturing jobs for things like windmills and solar panels. Promise to put every effort into opening opportunities maybe not in exactly the same industry, but the same type of work. Lots of folks like working with their hands; if Kamala is smart, she’ll campaign on bringing new jobs that pay higher, with high skill overlap to what they’re doing now.

I honestly don’t think people like being coal miners. But they might like that lifestyle: hard, reliable work with consistent, reliable hours, and the ability to live in rural communities where their neighbors are people they work with and know.

Cops like prosecutors. While there are absolutely bad cops, and bad cop culture, when police work in the neighborhoods where they live, they tend to be compassionate and want to resolve issues. Problems start when you bring cops who live in the suburbs and have them police inner city neighborhoods: they don’t know the community, and the community doesn’t know them. When the majority of their interactions with a community are with criminal elements, they start to see everyone in the community as a likely criminal. Plus, there are often race issues, as the suburb and inner city demographics widely differ. She could focus on that, although she really wouldn’t have any direct control over local law enforcement policies, she could campaign to have task forces working on incentivize good policy.

I certainly don’t have all the answers, but I think Harris’s path to success is to try to appeal to as many sectors as possible (as I’ve described in examples above) without sacrificing the core liberal value of tolerance. She can’t win over the intolerant directly, but she might be able to convince some people that they’d rather have economic growth and opportunities than to stick it to some brown people.

Near the end of Biden’s run, the RNC had moved MN to “battleground state.” No Pube has won MN since last century, I think. I don’t know how we stand now that Kamala is in the race, but: Minneapolis has a surprisingly large black population. Surprising for someone from PA, I mean. Now, I know you can’t automatically assume people are going to vote based on race; and Kamala is going to have to be very careful with a “tough on crime” position, because Minneapolis is where George Floyd was murdered by cops.

But, to paraphrase Thunder in Big Trouble in Little China, " Play your cards right, you live to talk about it… as President!"

Oh, god. Someone needs to make a state map color-coded by Gilead-ness.

Like, Texas is 7 Gileads, Louisiana is 8 Gileads, California and Minnesota are 0’s (Minnesota is a Safe State, y’all - if you need one, and can afford to come here, you can get your medical needs met and the State will refuse any information requests).

OK. I’m sorry. That video is over an hour long, and even skipping forward through the toilet humor puppet parts, I found it hard to watch.

But I did watch far enough to grab this screenshot

which is the Forward Party’s planks. I take it you object to some of them? The YouTuber obviously did. I sat through his mocking the idea that the government should make policy on divisive issues based on facts (science) and, failing that, listening to the citizens and letting popular opinion decide policy. I dropped out before hearing his opinion on human-centered capitalism, although I could almost smell the laissez-faire economics through the screen, so I’m guessing he was equally dismissive of that.

If he mocked (and, could he not have?) the “Effective and Modern-Day Government,” well, I can’t blame him, because I don’t know WTF that means, either.

But, oh, if that guy’s a libertarian, and I’ve got a buck that says he is, then I’ll bet UBI really got him worked up. Although, I’d like to hear his solution for when ML eliminates white collar jobs, including his.

“Grace and Tolerance” are just being good people. It’s sad it has too be included as a plank, but considering that one party is objectively and openly opposed to any form of grace or tolerance (except tolerance of intolerance - Nazis deserve to be in government, too!), it’s not absurd that the Forward Party included it. It’s a sort of “Do no evil” company motto that served well, until accountants took over.

I got about a third of the way through before I bailed. Not my kind of humor, and I think from my brief exposure, I think I’d really dislike that guy as a person. He looks like someone I’d end up punching because he’s pushing his girlfriend around outside of a club.

Hey, I’ll admit, that little boy brought up by the fundamentalist father; who once Christmas asked for a leather case for his Bible; who really did read the Bible cover to cover, old and new testaments, multiple times - that little boy is looking at Trump’s base and seeing those warnings about the anti-Christ. It’s not Trump. He’s a foul person, but there are worse. It’s how his base is reacting to him that makes me think of the anti-Christ.

There have been plenty of cults of personality, but this isn’t another Pope, where, yeah, you kiss his ring but it’s God you worship. No, his base worship him. I’m an atheist now, but that Christian child in me is still a little wigged out.

DAN

I’d guess a majority of people are dissatisfied with the status quo, and Trump represents chaos, change. It’s not a rational decision, but whatever your reason for dissatisfaction, Trump is about as far from a conventional establishment candidate as you could find.

I’m not suggesting, at all, that Trump would fix any of these issues; in fact, he’d exacerbate many of them. But Biden, Hillary, and now Harris are the ones who’d continue many of them. And I’m also not saying that all of these are real issues, but his base thinks they are:

• wealth inequality. The rich have provably, measurably, been getting richer, social movement has all but stopped, and many middle class are losing ground
• the loss of traditional jobs, and thereby, ways of life. Midwest small town life, where everyone knows everyone, has been dying as the jobs that support them fade away through automaton and consolidation under corporations. The faces you see in town are often strangers, and worse, strangers who look different from you, are a different color, and often are speaking a language with their buddies that you don’t understand.
• healthcare in this country is abysmal
• all you read about in the news is about people fighting for things you find disgusting: children wanting to be a different gender, people wanting to marry their own gender (which forces you to imagine what the sex is like, and this makes you uncomfortable), even more people who don’t look like you or who talk differently coming into the country - overrunning and irreversibly changing your way of life.
• the climate is changing, and is making things worse, and is noticeable within living memory. This isn’t gramps remembering everything as the glory days; this is you, remembering that there used to be more snow in the winters, or we didn’t used to have to fight with so much drought.
• if you’re gen-z or younger, the future looks bleak. You can’t afford housing, healthcare, or many of the things your parents enjoyed.
• the past 50 years have been a constant slide into a culture you don’t understand. Every few months, you’re told you can’t use words that you did when you were kids. It used to be “cowboys and Indians;” and then you couldn’t call them Indians, it had to be “native Americans;” and then, once you got used to that, you were told you couldn’t call them “native Americans” anymore, and it had to be “indigenous people.” Gays had to be homosexuals, and then LGBT, then LGBTQ, then LGBTQIA or LGBTQ+ or god knows what it is this week. And it’s all you hear about in the news anymore.
• not only are the Blacks still upset about slavery, but now they’re talking about making you pay them for it?
• whenever you see cops on TV, they look more and more like police in some banana republic, with military gear… almost as if they’re paramilitary, and that makes you uncomfortable
• all that stuff crazy Eddy talks about - tinfoil hat stuff - keeps getting confirmed by the news. Your computer is spying on you, tracking you, watching everything you do and reporting it to some corporation, selling it - and the government only has to ask and they can get all of that. There’s no privacy anymore.
• it seems as if there are fewer small businesses and more giant corporations. The local grocer shut down when Walmart put in a store - heck, a lot of mainstreet stores did - leaving mainstreet a hallow shell. I mean, sure, you shop at Walmart, but you aren’t really connecting the dots or take responsibility. It’s easier just to blame The Corporations.
• but there’s also a new generation who does nothing except bitch about how they can’t get any good jobs that pay a living wage or provide healthcare, the greedy little bastards
• women are uppity, and don’t know their place. They’re not making babies, like they should, they’re competing with you for jobs.
• vegans want to take your hamburgers away

The country just isn’t as good as it used to be, and it’s not because of your behaviors - shopping at Walmart, shopping at Amazon, joining Facebook and using GMail and Google search, driving your gas-guzzling hemi pickup (which is actually a work truck because you helped your buddy move his couch once) - it’s because of some indistinct them: immigrants, politicians, corporations, gays, blacks, Millenials, The Media. And here’s a guy who says he’s going to fix all that, and boy did he piss off all those people who represent everything you hate. He turned the Supreme Court around! Things were finally going the way you wanted.

And above all of that are the Christians. They’ve been indoctrinated to believe in hierarchy: woman above child, man above women, and God above man. Having a king just feels right, an earthly authority who, with a wave of a pen, can turn the tide against progressives. I honestly believe that having a dictator - a sympathetic dictator - is a subconscious desire for most people brought up as Christians. They believe in hierarchy; it feels right.