#2020 primaries

[jewish-sideblog]

Young USAmericans will straight up say “Why do we have to pick between two super old dudes! I hate this” and then proceed to vote at half the rate that octogenarians do. Like idk bestie maybe if you had actually showed up to the polls to vote for a candidate you respected during the primaries this wouldn’t be an issue

[socialistexan]

Oh would you look at that, we were sold a bunch of bullshit misinfo about Kamala Harris's prosecution record by a phony news article boosted by known right-wing grifter and darling of both Jimmy Dore and Donald Trump, Tulsi Gabbard!

I agree with the OP, 45 people sent to prison over drug offenses is too many! But it's also not the "thousands" that I keep seeing spread around here to this day.

ACAB, obviously, absolutely, but use your critical thinking and research skills, folks.

[killyridols]

gnostic mass by elijah burgher, 2021, ink on paper, 34 × 24 centimeters

[oh-bother-stickers]

[garadinervi]

N. H. Pritchard, (comp. 1965/July 1971), The Mundus, Edited by Paul Stephens, Primary Information, Brooklyn, NY, 2024

Managing Editor: Sam Korman Designers: Andrew Shurtz & Sebastian Campos at Verytime Copy Editor: Allison Dubinsky

Plus: Charles Bernstein, 'The Mundus' by N. H. Pritchard, «Jacket2», September 27, 2024

[hyunin]

omg as an aside from my tags on the last post. i briefly worked for a company that wrote letters to political reps on behalf of constituents who couldn't/wouldn't write to them themselves for whatever reason and i know for a fact that letters are WAAAAY more effective at influencing government officials than emails are, and sometimes they're even more effective than calls. emails are better than nothing but a lot of times (especially if they all have the same subject line/content) they will just be considered spam and get deleted without making it to the rep at all. letters are way more likely to make it to them for them to read! they Are more effort but that is a big part of why they're more influential too. so if there's an issue you're passionate about i rly encourage u to write a letter/letters to the people who can do something about it 🙏 there are websites out there where you can write the content of a letter to your rep and they will send it for you but i don't have any on hand atm, but otherwise writing and sending a letter yourself is not as intimidating as it might seem and is a great way to make your voice heard

[qqueenofhades]

Thoughts and prayers to all the pundits who really wanted the "Black voters don't like Biden," "Democrats don't like Biden," "the Democrats are divided/won't have their coalition," "Biden is historically unpopular for an incumbent," and all the other narratives to keep going all the way to the election. Oop.

[girderednerve]

Low quality books that appear to be AI generated are making their way into public libraries via their digital catalogs, forcing librarians who are already understaffed to either sort through a functionally infinite number of books to determine what is written by humans and what is generated by AI, or to spend taxpayer dollars to provide patrons with information they don’t realize is AI-generated.

With Hoopla, librarians have to opt into Hoopla’s entire catalog, then pay for whatever their customers choose to borrow from that catalog. The only way librarians can limit what Hoopla books their customers can borrow is by setting a limit on the price of books. For example, a library can use Hoopla but make it so their customers can only borrow books that cost the library $5 per use.

“Investigating these authors, their book covers, their social media, etc takes A LOT OF TIME, especially with the volume of questionable material increasing month to month (and that's not including the sheer amount of legitimate books published each month in adult fiction that I'm looking at),” one librarian who asked to remain anonymous so she could talk openly about her job, told me. “Is it the best use of my time doing this work on top of my other duties when customers may or may not care? And with the rising multitudes of AI generated content, will there come a point where it just ‘is what it is?’”

This type of low quality, AI generated content, is what we at 404 Media and others have come to call AI slop. Librarians, whose job it is in part to curate what books their community can access, have been dealing with similar problems in the publishing industry for years, and have a different name for it: vendor slurry. While the term now encompasses what seems like AI-generated content as well, it predates the rise of generative AI, and also refers to the glut of low quality, often self-published ebooks or book “summaries” that are common on Hoopla. As some librarians told me, the sheer quantity of books in Hoopla’s service makes it seem more valuable because it offers such a large number of books, but in reality that number is misleadingly inflated by this slurry.

Several of the librarians I talked to said that they are worried about discussing [the problems raised by Hoopla's weak, unclear selection policies, including the 2022 inclusion of explicitly white nationalist texts,] because of the growing hostility towards libraries and groups like Moms for Liberty demanding that books about LGBTQ rights, race, and ethnicity be removed from libraries. One the one hand, librarians want to curate their collections and make sure their patrons are getting access to quality information. On the other hand, they don’t want people to think that they are trying to censor what materials patrons can access in way that’s comparable to what organizations like Moms for Liberty want. None of the librarians I talked to suggested the AI-generated content needed to be banned from Hoopla and libraries only because it is AI-generated. It might have its place, but it needs to be clearly labeled, and more importantly, provide borrowers with quality information.

[redgoldblue]

i was tagged by @itwoodbeprefect to post 10 gifs of 10 favourite movies without naming them, and you're right, this was fun.

Following the year-of-release order, although i do not have the snappy one-per-decade collection:

tagging (no pressure) @krysten-knitter @faorism @starfleet-warrior @goldenaltar @strawbfairyy

[niccage]

well maybe next time they’ll let us actually hold primaries for the candidate instead of pulling the most undemocratic shit ever and just telling us who to vote for

[tomorrowusa]

Congrats to Fulton County (Georgia) District Attorney Fani Willis who just won the Democratic primary for her current position by a 7 to 1 margin. Ms. Willis is the prosecutor behind the indictment of Donald Trump and a number of other GOP miscreants in the 2020 election interference case in Georgia.

Fani Willis's Republican opponent in the November election, interestingly, will be a former intern at the Trump White House.

Willis, the Fulton County district attorney, easily defeated Democrat Christian Wise Smith. Willis and Smith, whom she also beat in the 2020 primary, both worked in the district attorney’s office under former District Attorney Paul Howard. [ ... ] Willis is now set to face Republican lawyer Courtney Kramer in November. Kramer, who interned in the Trump White House, ran unopposed Tuesday. Willis is considered the heavy favorite for the general election in Fulton County, which includes Atlanta. Willis brought charges against Trump last year for his role in trying to overturn the 2020 election results, as well as co-conspirators, which include Georgia GOP state legislators and the former head of the state Republican Party.

[dailyautophagy]

someone tell Kamala that she’ll never be unburdened by what has been because sleeping with a married dude twice your age is a scarlet letter you don’t get to take off

[dhaaruni]

America if Democratic electeds/former electeds/the powers that be didn't have a weird antipathy towards Kamala Harris:

[killyridols]

f4a1.2 by richard tinkler, 2023, oil on canvas, 40 × 30 × 1 inches

[plethoraworldatlas]

Current state of Vote Uncommitted

(Linked for data)

Only a few states have yet to hold primaries.

As of now, according to this data, over 794 Thousand primary votes have been uncommitted/uninstructed/none/etc

+794,000

+794k

And this isn't even counting all the people in states that lacked uncommitted options and had to vote write in, or vote for some random other democrat in protest, or left blank, etc. Since so many of those are also protest votes in line with vote uncommitted, I would add another 100-150k to the amount of protest votes Vote uncommitted has gotten so far.

The largest amounts of uncommitted votes are in crucial swing states, by margins that far exceed the tiny amount Biden won by in 2020.

And remember, these numbers are just people who go out to vote in primaries; It takes effort to do that.

Almost 4/5ths of a million Primary voting Democrats have gone out to tell Biden

1) fuck you

2) we are against your genocide

3) our votes for you are dependent on you changing course now and totally

4) We do not have faith in your ability to win while doing this and attacking your own supporters, so stop and change course now

And this is just the vote uncommitted campaign; There are also the many, many, many major dedicated lifelong democrat donors and fundraising organizations that have signed letters and statements telling him to change course because they either can't support this genocide or they know this will cost him the election if he doesn't change course now, as well as those who have cut of funding for the same reasons, and those who did both and more.

here's a fun little quote to keep in mind

When you look at the smallest popular vote shift needed to give Trump a victory, the 2020 election was close. Indeed, it was even closer than 2016. If Trump picked up the right mix of 42,921 votes in Arizona (10,457), Georgia (11,779), and Wisconsin (20,682), the Electoral College would have been tied at 269 all. The House would have then decided the election. Republicans will hold the majority of state delegations in the new Congress, and they undoubtedly would have chosen Trump. If Trump had also picked up the one electoral vote in Nebraska’s Second Congressional District, which he lost to Biden by 22,091 votes, he would have won the Electoral College outright.  -CFR

[garadinervi]

From: N. H. Pritchard, (comp. 1965/July 1971), The Mundus, Edited by Paul Stephens, Primary Information, Brooklyn, NY, 2024