Same, I got laid off recently and 12 years of experience isn't even getting me interviews at in-person jobs.

I was in a community online ~10 years ago with someone who was trans and claimed to be Lebanese and voted for Trump. I asked her why and she said she hated Muslims. I pointed out that Mike Pence was famously homophobic in a homophobic party, and she straight-up told me she hated Muslims more than she wanted rights. I was astounded by that but what you say lines up, I guess. I wonder if she still feels that way.

Here's my general summary of why this is an issue: the US has been denying people the right to vote since day 1. You had to own land to vote in 1788. Half the country seceded and started a civil war that killed more of our citizens than any war since, over the right to own people. The 15th amendment was passed in 1870 to make it so you can't deny Black people the right to vote, but places made it happen anyway. They made it so you had to pass a "literacy test" with intentionally ambiguous instructions, or pay a poll tax, or one of your grandparents had to have the ability to vote (afaik, the origin of the phrase "grandfathered in").

These were all legal until the 1960s. Lots of people here have parents who were alive before legislation was passed to end Jim Crow. Without that, the racists that be turned to the War on Drugs, because lots of places take away your right to vote if you've been convicted of a felony. They started passing voter ID laws and closing down DMVs in areas with lots of black people and reducing their hours. A politician in Wisconsin bragged after the 2016 election that these laws here threw the state to Trump. They've also started banning giving food and water to people in line to vote and throwing out mail-in votes that show up after election day.

This isn't about election security and it never has been; voter fraud has never changed an election in the country's history. The real election fraud is in suppressing people's votes and fucking with voting machines (2004) and having allies in positions of power to throw the election your way (2000). There's more than that too, but it's a tangent.

The current moral panic about queer people is definitely manufactured, but the hatred that it's stirred up is still real. All the religious psychos in power (including Speaker of the House Mike Johnson) really believe that stuff and want to enforce their hierarchy.

I got into White Zombie last year and it's nice because it's a lot like 90s Pantera but without the racism.

MS can pry Windows 10 out of my cold, dead hands. I'll switch to Linux before Win11 and I don't particularly want to do that either.

I'm pretty anti-gun despite being on the left, but I think I've seen ~~this person~~ her at protests before and if anyone's gonna have a gun I'd prefer it be her over anyone else.

ICE told the government two or three weeks ago that they'd need like $26 billion to enforce the Laken Riley act, I think.

Every time I come across forum posts from the 2000s I lose a little bit of nostalgia for that period of time. The casual bigotry was fucking everywhere.

Here are my thoughts:

• Israel has been committing genocide in Gaza since day 1, they just pick up the pace sometimes
• Every US president this century has enabled this
• Biden and Harris were all on board with the current round of fast genocide and they should be remembered for it
• Trump pretends to be anti-war but emboldened this shit by moving the US embassy to Jerusalem in 2018 or 19
• Netanyahu wanted Trump to win, as evidenced by meeting him during the campaign last year
• Any ceasefire supposedly happening right now is entirely to give Trump good press. He's going to give Israel even more support for their imperialist bullshit than Biden did and Harris would have
• Because Trump won, the federal government is going after immigrants, nonwhite people, LGBT people, etc, and is going to further tear the good parts of the government down

I'm pretty disillusioned with the Democrats between the imperialism and almost completely giving in to the fascist takeover, but I wouldn't be looking to get out of the country if Harris had won, so thanks for that if you could have voted and didn't.

edit: I voted Uncommitted in the primary, helped out at my local Gaza camp, and have gone to rallies and distributed books about Palestine, so I'm not just sitting here at my computer saying all this

I wish people knew that TikTok being banned was more about it not suppressing posts about Palestine than national security or whatever else they say. Antony Blinken and Mitt Romney outright said last year it was about stopping people from seeing the truth about Israel committing genocide. If the government actually cared about foreign influence operations they'd regulate data privacy and social media algorithms in some way (idk how, but I'm sure you could) but they obviously won't because US companies manipulating people and stealing their data is totally fine.