#Ap news

[archaalen]

Breaking News

[tiredofthehumanlife]

The Republican counties get counted first. This isn't indicative of the winner.

The Republican counties get counted first. This isn't indicative of the winner.

The Republican counties get counted first. This isn't indicative of the winner.

The Republican counties get counted first. This isn't indicative of the winner.

The Republican counties get counted first. This isn't indicative of the winner.

[eretzyisrael]

[girlinafairytale]

[mysharona1987]

Once Israel got rid of all the Al Jazeera journalists this was obviously how things were going to go.

The Associated Press said nothing when Israel shut Al Jazeera down.

How did AP think this would end? An honest question. “But we’re nice to them and they will be nice back, right?”

“Then they came for me…”

[diana-andraste]

A skeleton wearing a hat, holding newspapers and running, José Guadalupe Posada, c. 1880-1910

Skeletons in her closet? Nah. A clearly worded debunking by Melissa Goldin at AP News of the false claims against Kamala Harris and her background.

[thegayhimbo]

Sudan: UN warns that Darfur risks starvation and death if aid isn't allowed in | AP News

[an-onyx-void]

UN votes to grant new rights to Palestine and revive membership bid | AP News

"While Friday’s resolution gives Palestine some new rights and privileges, it reaffirms that it remains a non-member observer state without full U.N. membership and the right to vote in the General Assembly or at any of its conferences. And the United States has made clear that it will block Palestinian membership and statehood until direct negotiations with Israel resolve key issues, including security, boundaries and the future of Jerusalem, and lead to a two-state solution."

[archaalen]

@amtrak-official what's your opinion of this?

[smbhax]

A blue lobster is seen in a marine sciences lab at the University of New England, Thursday, Sept. 5, 2024, in Biddeford, Maine. (AP Photo/Robert F. Bukaty)

[colferpics]

The hero of Chris Colfer’s next book series is no ordinary boy.

Little, Brown Books for Young Readers announced Tuesday that the actor and million-selling author is working on “Roswell Johnson Saves the World,” which the publisher calls a space fantasy that “combines the heart-pounding action of ‘Guardians of the Galaxy’” and “thrilling real-world science.” The title character is an 11-year-old named for the city in New Mexico where mysterious debris found in 1947 led to conspiracy theories about alien life, which the boy himself will learn about first-hand.

“Roswell Johnson Saves the World” is scheduled for publication on June 4, 2024.

“I’ve never had so much fun writing a book,” Colfer said in a statement. “These characters had me laughing out loud and I spent hours researching everything from astronomy to entomology. After reading about Roswell’s adventures through space, I hope my young readers are as fascinated by science and our galaxy as I am. To quote the book, ‘Curiosity will fuel your imagination and take you places the fastest spaceship could never reach.’”

Colfer, who became famous for his Golden Globe-winning role as Kurt Hummel in “Glee,” is known to readers for such best-selling series as “The Land of Stories” and “Tale of Magic.”

[nokingsonlyfooles]

“Why you gonna vote and ain’t nobody doing nothing?”

The emotions are running too high, the narrative is too entrenched, and I'm either gonna reap the whirlwind or nothing with this, but I can't let it slide on by with just a shudder:

“To reiterate the sentiments of our Morehouse brother, Sen. Raphael Warnock, a vote is a prayer for the future world you want to see...”

(emphasis mine)

That guy is a young, college-attending religion major, but the guy he's quoting is a respected politician. And, either way, is that where we are? Collectively? In our heads? Voting as an act of faith and worship to an ineffable authority?

That would explain the horrifying takes that drove me out of the Tumblr feed for the time being. That "democracy is a metaphor" and "your issues will never be addressed but vote anyway" or "if you don't vote, the bad guys are gonna come kill you, and I'll laugh because you'll deserve it" type stuff. (Paraphrased, not all direct quotes, but you know the stuff. Maybe you've even said the stuff.)

I am firmly agnostic. If you want to send prayers to the unknown and unknowable on the basis of faith, I'm cool with that. In certain cases, I even admire it, and I see its utility. But your so-called "representative democracy" consists of human beings with a job to do, and they eat and shit and die like the rest of us. They are extremely effable. (And we have certainly been effed.) They can and should be held accountable for what they do to "represent" us.

If you can sit down in front of a human being who doesn't know where their next meal is coming from and can't afford shoes for their child - with no help in sight! - and say, "Of course the government answered your prayer, they just said no!" like some kinda Democracy Apologist, I wish you a speedy return to reality, but until then, maybe you could talk less and donate more money, food and shoes. Democracy is not a religion, is it a process, and it doesn't work if you don't do it right.

Systems work how they are designed to work. If 75 million eligible voters are not voting, and a fair percentage of them are hopelessly enmeshed in the cycle of poverty, and a fair percentage of those are marginalized, and this is consistent, then this is how your "government of the people, by the people and for the people" is supposed to work. If you want it to work in some other way, perhaps in a better way, you need to change it.

But we don't have the vocabulary or even the imagination to express how that might be done - outside of voting more. Somehow, just vote more. Some More News tackled this recently. Brain-bleedingly, they wrapped it up with an anguished plea to vote, even after presenting (and presumably understanding) information about voters who successfully passed legislation to help more people vote... and wound up having their new law neutered into ineffectiveness by politicians. And, of course, electing Democrats doesn't address this. Democrats frequently win elections. Even the Presidency, the House and the Senate, all at once! The inability and lack-of-will to vote remains consistent.

We are taught - and religion is a big part of this, but there are plenty of stories that echo it - that things are bad because human beings suck and need someone with authority to flay them into being better. Surface-level, the voter apathy seems to confirm this. They would get help if they only participated. Why are they so lazy? So faithless? Let's yell at them to vote more, and punish them if they don't. Are their situations wretched and desperate? Well, good, because it's their own fault, and maybe the consequences of their actions will motivate them to do better. They don't do better, not most of them, ever, but that only confirms how fundamentally people suck. Wow, they don't even care about their kids or themselves!

No. No, they need to do a lot of drugs to stop caring even a little, just for a break. Otherwise, they are trying like hell to do whatever they can to fix it - like get jobs, or food, or housing, or secure some kind of assistance in getting those things - and they have correctly assessed that voting does not help. The politicians only talk about them in terms of where and how they ought to be institutionalized, or how to prod them to work harder and be better when they're already dying from the desperate, uncompensated labour of staying alive in a shit situation.

I'm pretty low on the ladder, but I've never been that low on the ladder. Not because I deserve what I have, I just got lucky. If you've been that low and leveraged your way up, you also got lucky. It's possible you are terrified at the prospect of no agency or control and don't want to admit how much of a role luck plays in getting safe and staying safe - I know you worked hard! But plenty of people work just as hard and get nothing but misery and death. If poor people were lazy, they would be having as much fun as the rich fucks who don't need to work for their livelihood. Welfare queens are just another story, no more real than Rumpelstiltskin.

We have enough. I think we have enough on a global scale, but we certainly have enough on a national one, in the lands where representative democracy thrives. We can feed and clothe and house everyone, and put shoes on the children, and then we can all go to the movies. We have enough for that. If we stopped dropping bombs on fucking everyone, the USA would have MORE than enough. We don't do that. In many cases, we punish people for trying to do that, often by calling them all sorts of unflattering things ("Lazy!" "Thief!") and trying to find an excuse to put them in prison (where they can be used as slaves and prevented from voting indefinitely).

If you vote, you need to find some way to do it without becoming an acolyte of a religion. You need to be operating on something other than faith. You need to keep pushing for what's right even if a human being with god-like power over you says "no." Even if they say you'll be punished. Even if you will actually be punished. Wish is a stupid movie, not a blueprint for a society.

If you want other people to vote, don't scream and belittle and browbeat them. And don't lie to them. Much like kids who went through DARE eventually tried a drug and found out it didn't suck, voters in horrible situations will eventually notice voting isn't helping them. Then, not only will they stop voting, they'll stop trusting you, and everything associated with you. Don't piss away trust for political gains that'll evaporate as soon as someone on the other team wins. If we trusted and respected and actually understood each other, we could deal with this food, clothing, and housing situation right now.

A vote is not a prayer. A prayer is a prayer. A vote is not your voice. Your voice is your voice. A vote is, at best, a selection off a purposefully limited menu, and, at worst, a ploy to shut down anything else you might do to improve the situation. Are you prioritizing winning elections over actually banding together and helping each other? Are you gonna vote and do nothing?

Why?

[girlinafairytale]

[generallemarc]

It's really sucked to watch APNews turn into the same partisan, fearmongering click-generator as every other mainstream outlet. I still use them because you can't find anywhere else that'll cover regions as far apart as, say, West Africa and Southeast Asia on the same site, but I'm completely done relying on them for anything related to America. They can no longer be trusted to do anything other than advance the political agenda of their editors and owner(s)

If anyone has any recommendations for any neutral news sites(not conservative/right-wing ones, that's just the same problem in the opposite direction, and if given the choice I'd rather have a bias I disagree with to prevent myself from falling into an echo chamber), or as close to neutral as you can find, I'm all ears.