Untilted

If your democrat friends start muttering about stolen election conspiracy theories, the time to have a sit down with them and express your concerns is NOW, while you still have a chance to reach them, not 6 months from now when they're fully conspiracy-pilled.

Here's some of the talking points and why they're bullshit:

But just as importantly as the facts: sit down with your friend and talk about the anxiety that's behind their conspiracy leanings. Acknowledge their pain and fear. Help them find ways to feel less powerless and regain their sense of agency. Take them to a mutual aid event, involve them in a fundraising event for a marginalized group, invite them to a local community effort. If they spend more time feeling connection and empowerment and less time doom scrolling online, they're far more likely to stay in reality.

This this this

I worked as an election judge across multiple polling locations and election types in my state from 2018-2023 (presidential primary and general elections, midterms, and special elections like for the school board etc.)

US elections are extremely secure. There are so many safeguards in place. Everything is double and triple counted.

The number of ballots electronically counted by the box are checked against the number of physical ballots at the end of the night, and also the receipt papers that individuals exchange for their ballot. All three of these counts MUST MATCH. Sometimes you're off by 1 number and it means everyone stops and triple counts these papers until you find the error (human error, it's been 16 hours and two pieces of thin receipt paper were stuck together and the second person to recount finds it and everyone cheers because thank fuck, it means no one dropped anything on the floor anywhere.)

There are eyes everywhere and there's a deliberate mix of poll workers across political parties/affiliations. It's simply not possible to alter even 1 ballot at 1 polling place, much less thousands.

Unfortunately, Donald Trump won this election. If there was interference, it was NOT at the voting booth. That's simply not possible. The "interference" (if you can even call it that) comes from right wing propaganda convincing stupid and/or hateful and/or selfish people to vote for him.

As a former election judge from Maryland I can confirm this. I volunteered for years as a student aid and when I turned 18, I volunteered as an election judge for a cycle (primary and general election). The process is exceptionally thorough and incredibly detailed. Everything from the machines, to the checking in process, to the actual votes themselves is carefully constructed to be as exacting as possible. I won't go so far as to say its impossible to submit a fraudulent vote, but swinging a whole election illegally? Thats about as likely as breathing on Mars.

I won't lie to you, I am devastated by this elections outcome and have never been more terrified. There definitely is a part of my brain willing to cling to anything that makes this whole nightmare go away. Unfortunately, if any laws were broken it likely wasn't at the polls or the counting afterwards. Not that that's a source of much comfort, but at least its something to know.

I know this is the Anti Small Talk Website but small talk is one of the most effective social glues out there for getting to know people and forming friendships with them.

When I was just starting out at a job right after college I had a coworker who I thought was the nicest person alive and after a few weeks I realized this was just because she consistently asked other people things like, "How ya doing? Whatcha having for lunch? Got any weekend plans? Seen any good movies lately?" instead of politely ignoring everyone around her.

pro tip for my fellow remedial human behaviour students: you have to wag back. in humans this means, when they say "how was your weekend" and you say "fine" and they say "do anything fun?" and you say "not really" and they say "isn't it cold today?" and you say "I guess", you are not making small talk. you are refusing to make small talk. you are rejecting their friendly overtures. you are supposed to ask them questions in return. give them something to work with, not empty non-responses. "How are you doing?" "I'm good thanks, how are you? Did you see the rain we had this morning?" and now you're both wagging and everyone feels reassured and connected.

okay this reminded me of the strongest human being (I use that label with some reservation) I have ever met and I still think about him like once a week because about 4 years ago on Thanksgiving night my sister, cousin, and I were going to pick up a friend about a 40 minute drive from home, and I got lost and tried to turn around on a little gravel pull-off on the side of the road, but my front tires got stuck in the snow.

we were in the middle of nowhere with no cell reception, and the only sign of life was a single, completely dark house across the road from us.

We all did our best to push the car out, and we’re strong people, but we couldn’t make it budge. Cold and stuck, we climbed back and wondered what to do. A car full of men pulled over beside us and asked if we needed help, but getting out of our locked car on a backroad at night with strange men felt like a bad idea, so we said a tow was coming and waved them along. We did that twice before finally deciding our only option was to accept the next offer for help and just risk it,

when a man came out of the house across the street.

He’d clearly been watching us and figured out why we’d been lying to people, which really surprised me & he said “it’s okay, you can stay in your car and keep the doors locked. Just start backing up when I say so.”

I had the window cracked and told him “it’s too stuck. There’s no way we’re getting out. Could you call a tow?”

And he said “just back up when I say so.”

So he walked around the front of the car, squatted, and said “okay back up,”

and I did, and

he lifted

the front of the car Into The Air. Off its front wheels, and we backed up while he essentially wheel-barrowed us back onto the road.

And we were honest to god yelling. We couldn’t help it. We just yelled until all four wheels were back on the ground and he was waving us off while we thanked him.

And then I looked at my sister and cousin & said “he REALLY told us we can KEEP our doors locked as if THAT WOULD’VE FUCKING STOPPED HIM!!!! As if he couldn’t have just RIPPED EM OFF THE HINGES.”

I later looked up the weight of my car, and it’s 3200 pounds without anything or anyone in it.

This haunts me.

the power of respecting women

this is the only valid response on this post

I just needed to find this post again to reminisce.

monks debating whether vows of silence should still allow you to leave emoji reacts on the monastery groupchat

Inciting incident

i love it when botanists fight in the annotations

guy in 1939, taking his time to line up his typewriter to painstakingly write the family name: its equisetum hyemale!

guy in 1948 scribbling on a slip of paper: no dumbass its equisetum prealtium

guy in 2020 on a sticky note: hey fuckass! its equisetum hyemale, are you smoking crack? are you on fucking crack? update annotation.

love the gradual decrease in formality present here

1939 guy: fully printed, probably using a typewriter, affixed using archival glue

1948 guy: hand written ink on a printed label, appears more worn around the edges than the original label despite being younger (presumably due to materials used)

unknown but presumably recent: scrawled yellow sticky note with pencil

"Why does Gen Z suck shit at horror?" every generation sucks shit at horror. In the 2000's they were sucking shit at found footage, in the 80's they were sucking shit at slasher flicks, in the 60's -- Jesus, in the 60's they sucked so much shit someone went and made a whole TV show where a bunch of guys watched horror movies from the 60's and made fun of how much shit they suck.

sucking shit at horror is a time-honored tradition. back in the 1810’s all of mary shelley’s useless husband’s friends sucked shit at horror so bad she had no choice but to write frankenstein

Apple propaganda notwithstanding, the reason tower PCs are big isn’t because they’re outdated. The reason tower PCs are so bulky is because they’re designed to be user serviceable. The case has lots of open space so your big, meaty hands can easily access all of the components, and everything is secured with friction-fit tabs and standard machine screws to minimise the need for specialised tools. A properly laid out tower PC is fully serviceable with a single Phillips-head screwdriver and no greater manual skill than your average Lego playset – heck, for some of the more modern case layouts you don’t even need the screwdriver, unless you’re performing major surgery like a full motherboard replacement.

Like, think about who benefits from convincing you that a fully modular computing device that can be serviced and repaired with your bare hands and minimal technical skill is unfashionable.

I pray the manufacturers will never take away my ability to KA-KLUNK a new PC part into the massive case, then plugging the thick power strips into each other like I am doctor Frankenstein puling my kreatur to greatness*

*‘greatness’ defined as playing minecraft without frame lag

but the... they were asking... fine

thats the thing thats missing from america-centric discussion of fascism: this shit is global. every country in “the west” is seeing the same rise of fascism in real time, all of it focused on murdering migrants. like giorgia meloni is campaigning to deport people to “migrant camps” in albania. last year the greek coast guard outright drowned a boat of 500 asylum seekers. and as that last post said im not dismissing the suffering of people within the US, i’m just saying its so supremely frustrating that every conversation is about the minutiae of american domestic policy and not the horrifying ultranationalist global trend scapegoating arabs and africans.

my point is you need to be horrified that “border control” is an accepted talking point. you need to be aware of the fact that climate change is currently driving what will become the largest forced movement of people ever as the “third world” becomes uninhabitable. people—specifically people from africa and west asia—are dying in the name of white supremacist “borders” around the world. and whether your european or american when you see this rhetoric manifest in your country you need to push back.

the lesson I'm taking away from this election is not that the Democrats need to become more left wing or more right wing but moreso that they need to find a way to cater their rhetoric towards people who genuinly have no idea what is going on. the target audience for every speech and political appearance should be someone who doesn't know what the three branches of government are because they were drawing a Cool S during high school civics

political scientists have failed to consider the possibility that the silent majority is silent because they didn't understand the question and are trying to play it cool

People who give pets a bit of chocolate when they know it’s their pets last day are a bit of a funny concept. Imagine being old and friends with an alien who will live ten times your lifespan and they’re like “ah shit he’s dying, well since you’re dying anyway haven’t you always wanted to know what uranium tastes like?”

In this scenario have you been asking to share the alien's uranium desserts for your entire friendship?

Well to be fair if I was friends with a heavy metal-eating alien and he LOVED uranium and loved to put it in various forms in his alien desserts or ate it on its own sometimes and his species had a guy who made intrictate edible uranium scuptures that everyone on Krunglr (Saturnian tumblr) lost their shit over then yeah I'd be quite curious too

I love self-referential statements where you just say the name of the thing you wish to express and it counts as having expressed the thing so named. Apologies. Greetings. Fair warning. We should be able to do that with more things, I think.

Witty response.

i do think calling a native american person a yank is a bit weird and speaks to a simplistic view of US imperialism given the colonizers, yknow, still hate us and want us dead. especially if you're from another settler colony like, oh i don't know, picking two at random here, Australia or Canada. not to mention most of the benefits of US imperial hegemony that citizens of the imperial core get dont really get extended to a lot of us but what do i know maybe im just a dumb redsk- i mean yank

LITERALLY!!! like there is active colonial violence being carried out against native americans across the US right now. Did you forget MMIW? Did you forget the pipelines? Did you forget the fucking EXISTENCE OF THE UNITED STATES???? Maybe you should shut up and worry more about how you're actively perpetuating the colonial violence being enacted on the indigenous population of the land you're squatting on.

[ID: Tags that say "#I so feel this way esp when it's white non usAmericans calling natives that #'yanks have never been bombed' they straight up nuked navajo nation." End ID]

I think the most unintentionally pretentious part of me is I genuinely forget that most people do not have a near-encyclopedic knowledge of mythology and folklore. I literally just assume most people know at least the name of every Greek god. My mom and I were watching the Banshees of Inisherin and at the start, she asked "Do you know what a banshee is?" and I was so stunned because it would never occur to me to ask that question because I would never assume the average person doesn't know what a banshee is. The average person knows what a banshee is right. You know what a banshee is right. You know the names of the greek gods right. You know that norse myth where loki fucked the horse right. Right. RIGHT

this post jumpscared me with the reminder that most people don’t know that norse myth where loki fucked the horse (and then gave birth to a horse) (and then Odin rode the horse he gave birth to) (which had eight legs)

Haven't figured out a politic way to word this but before saying someone/thing "makes you uncomfortable" please ask yourself this important question: is it any of your fucking business

At least say "I am uncomfortable with" instead. Own your own shit

"This person is making me uncomfortable" suggests they're actively doing something to or at you. And sometimes people are! But sometimes. You are just uncomfortable with people when they aren't doing anything. And that's on you not them.

"The homeless man on the bus is making me uncomfortable" verses "I am uncomfortable with the homeless man on the bus." You see the difference

i have understood so many things about online leftist culture by the fact that when i said "your local community has people you will morally and politically disagree with but you cannot lock them out of accessing any tangible service you’re organising" one of the tags responding said "this isn’t about proshippers in here you’re not welcome" like. folks. focus with me. some of us are homeless here.

why are some of you reblogging this to add your own exceptions. no, we cannot willfully coerce people with homelessness. even the people you want to argue with me about.