Assuming this isn’t satire… It really depends on where you’re going. Assuming you’ll be in a big city, I’d say it’s pretty comparable to London. Don’t go walking along vacant streets at night, or during the day if the area gives you bad vibes. Avoid confrontation with anyone looking to start some shit. In big crowds I like to keep my wallet and phone in a front or otherwise harder-to-access pocket.

All that being said, most tourist areas are quite safe.

Maybe it’s because I grew up in Illinois, but Missouri has been giving me whiplash over the last several years. I’d expect the kinda politics coming out of there from Florida, not a Midwestern state.

The new form of city government meant there was a significant number of candidates to parse through. And ranking several instead of picking just one favorite also added time. It took me several days to do my due diligence on all the measures and candidates when before I could usually get it all done in one.

Not complaining, though I could imagine people who don’t take voting seriously easily getting impatient/overwhelmed.

I finished my bottle of Laphroaig 10 on election night :⁠-⁠\

Cries in American

He would never. But Biden could go over Congress and send whatever the fuck he wants. What’s Congress gonna do, impeach him?

Twist: They’re alive. And they’re angry. Choose your weapon.

Sweet potatoes. Something about them made me gag. Every Thanksgiving a heaping pile of them would wind up on my plate and I’d have to power though or else face the wrath of my grandmother.

Nowadays I love them. Dunno when the switch happened.

USB-C has changed the entire game. It’s a completely different game now. It’s like Yahtzee vs Uno. Or like Call of Duty vs Microsoft Flight Simulator. Remember playing freeze tag or dodgeball? Well it’s not like that anymore. Now it’s like playing soccer.

How do you get a full-year’s pay after getting fired?

Keep yelling at those who are so tuned out that they can’t care enough to give a fuck about who’s running the country. Keep making excuses for the Democrats’ decade of mediocre complacency. I’m sure things will change.

#dontputyourdickinthat

What do you expect in this economy? Groceries aren’t the only things being hit by inflation.

Blaming the voting public does nothing other than to help us feel better about ourselves. “It’s not our fault, the people are just stupid and naive. They were always going to vote for Trump, there’s nothing else we could have done”. It’s what we’ve been doing the past three election cycles and it isn’t working.

We can’t make them change. Change only comes from within. We can’t keep telling them they’re better off with us. We need to pass legislation so that the average, uniformed voter can see it for themselves.

Frankly, this take is profoundly arrogant and indicative of why the Democrats lost to Trump (again, arguably again-again).

This implies that the Democrats could not have possibly done any better, or at least submits to the idea that there is nothing meaningful to be learned from this failure. It projects onto the general electorate a deterministic outlook, that they were always going to vote for Trump no matter what as a way to shield the Democrats and ourselves from accountability.

This is a difficult time time for all of us. We are looking down the barrel of another Trump presidency, one that promises to be a significant tragedy in the history of our nation. It hurts to know what’s coming and people are resigning themselves to complacency in order to ease the pain.

But if we want to stand a chance the next time around, we need to understand that the Democrats played a role in their own demise. We need to demand better, not make excuses for them and perpetuate the mediocrity that has been the Democratic platform over the last decade. We can’t just hope for another deadly crisis to get us out of this one.

Most of these accomplishments, while they do benefit the middle class, are largely invisible to the average American who’s not perpetually following politics.

Student loan forgiveness only directly affects people who go to college, an increasingly less popular/accessible career path amongst the working class. It also has restrictions and has been facing legal challenges, both of which limit its effectiveness.

Lower prescription drug costs are only really visible to people who are taking prescription drugs long-term and doesn’t prevent the healthcare system from bankrupting you in countless other ways.

The Affordable Care Act is arguably the single most significant accomplishment for the Democratic party in my millennial lifetime and if it survives to the next election cycle it will be old enough to vote in it.

As for the rest, improving infrastructure moves too slowly for people to notice in the short-term and despite the efforts to slow them we are still facing record increases to the cost of living and job insecurity.

The working class is getting desperate, people are worried about how they’re going to keep up with rising grocery prices or whether they’ll get laid off from their job when they’re living paycheck to paycheck. If you don’t own a home yet you’re likely questioning whether homeownership will ever be within reach while your landlord increases your rent for no apparent reason other than greed.

In a relative sense to the struggles the working class has been facing coming out of the pandemic, the Democrats have thrown them bones, told them the economy is great, in fact it’s the best in the world when you know for a fact you were better off before the pandemic.

Do we know tariffs and mass deportations aren’t going to make anything better? Do we know things are likely to get a lot worse? Are we the average American? The results of the election prove that we aren’t.

I would argue that he most definitely is a champion for radical change and that’s why he won. “Drain the swamp”, “Dictator on day one”, " He says it like it is" are all things that deviate dramatically from the status quo of political etiquette. Trump is willing to break political norms to get what he wants and evidently voters think his interests align with their own.

Obviously, this isn’t the kind of radical change you or I are hoping for but it certainly is radical. Meanwhile, the Dems are playing it safe in an attempt to appeal broadly and not upset too many people. And we’ve seen for the last decade that gets us at best legislation which has been gutted to the point where it does effectively nothing for the majority of Americans.

I certainly do judge any Trump voter as being either terribly naive or a truly bad person. However, broadcasting that message is going to change nothing and only serves as copium for the anti-Trump crowd.

What is going to sway people who have voted for Trump in the past and are not completely lost to the cult of personality is being a champion for radical change that benefits the middle class. The Harris platform evidently did not go far enough to convince enough voters they would see any meaningful change. Nor did the Clinton or Biden platforms, Biden was only lucky enough that his policies were effectively irrelevant in contest with Trump’s disastrous mishandling of the COVID-19 pandemic response.

We can’t hope for another deadly crisis to get us out of this one.

It wasn’t a great plan

You’re entitled to be mad at the voters for forsaking their fellow citizens as well as the citizens of Ukraine and Palestine. But that doesn’t change the fact that, “not a great plan” wasn’t good enough for voters to turn out for the Democrats. Voters are inevitably going to vote for whatever they perceive as being in their own self interests. It’s up to the political parties to align with what the voters want and the Democrats have continuously failed to do that.

The people are tired of the Dems presenting them with weak bullshit solutions to their very real problems and being told to get on board because the alternative is worse. The cost of living in America is drowning the middle class and the Dems keep throwing us water wings.

I don’t agree that Trump’s policies are the answer but I can understand desperate people looking anywhere for some relief.