They didn’t have a Project 2025 game plan going in like they do now.

The Republican Party has the will of the Supreme Court. That means they can rule for, or against constitutional changes unilaterally.

They have already ruled that the President is immune to the law if they are acting in ‘official capacity’, which they have left to themselves to decide if its official or not.

The presidential candidate has said he wants to go after the ‘enemy within’ directly referencing his political opponents.

He can go out and round up anyone with significant pull from the Democratic party, detail them illegally, (but now legal because its in an official capacity)

Anyone else who speaks out against the brutality will summarily be included in that.

How far off is that from where Putin has established himself, where elections are things they say the have, but is really just a form of performance art?

And I’m sure the Germans who “never supported the Nazi’s” were proud of their acts of abstinence after the fact.

Its a terrible system with FPTP for sure, but doing anything that makes it easier for really bad guys to get in power is enablement, full stop.

Will the really bad guys care about a protest vote? No, they’ll thank you.

Will the not so bad guys care about the protest vote if they get elected? Not really, they got elected while ignoring the voice of the people, so why change?

To fix the system you need to get the least worst option elected, and then get out and protest, and cause as much pain for the elected officials as possible to get anything changed. Means protesting at a level that is significantly impacting the economy.

Don’t fuck around with a ‘protest vote’ that’s going to do as much nothing as electing the Meh option.

No, its not like that at all.

It doesn’t matter who Meh and Oh no are for that voter. The results are the same.

If you have a Meh candidate, and Oh No candidate, and a Please Something Else candidate, and you vote for something else, its now easier for Oh No to get elected, because Meh has fewer votes.

Google (used to) scrapes the specific details authorized by robots.txt and uses it to make your content visible.

OpenAI scrapes everything it can technically see, ignoring robots.txt and feeds i to a black box and regurgitates it claiming it’s something new, that it deserves to be paid for.

Quite different actually.

Are there not already words to represent the same thing to anyone old enough to read a message? A different representation of something they are already potentially exposed to isn’t something that technology standards should be censoring.

Especially when the defacto replacement for this is a symbol of something that could very easily give young men a serious sense of inadequacy and insecurity.

edit: (you -> young)