Harris wouldn’t exactly be someone I’d want to vote for myself, but being all the way Over Here™ she wouldn’t have been nearly bad enough for me to start shovign 0.75L of rum into myself after not sleeping a wink at 10am.

Winners’ breakfast

Finland is surprisingly corrupt (it’s just not the sort of corruption where you bribe cops) and Finns are generally stupid and gullible enough to think we’re not corrupt

I can only imagine how bad y’all must feel, because I’m here getting very drunk at 10am and feeling like I don’t even want to see what’s going to happen in the next few years.

One thing I can’t help thinking about is what the hell is Russia going to get up to in the future if they get an effective carte blanche from Trump. I’m Finnish and those fucks are right next door

Wait, they can’t vote if they’re drunk?

You don’t say?

I mean it’s absolutely possible and pretty trivial to do in-house online surveys so that you know whether someone has answered but can’t immediately connect answers to individuals, especially if the survey didn’t use an in-house web service.

Whether I’d trust a corporation that says some survey is anonymous is another matter entirely though, because I absolutely wouldn’t

Oh yeah it’s going to be a temporary reprieve at best, unfortunately fascists don’t disappear even if they lose an election

Yeah I should have said “at least 4.”

What you said is exactly why I needed the rum in reserve

Well I wasn’t but I certainly am now

In my head I feel that those from other countries see our country like a really bad car accident that people drive by, slow down a bit and say oh gosh I hope everybody’s okay when in reality you know damn well none of us are okay.

… you said it, not me 😅 It’s a combination of worry, horror and a sort of sick fascination.

But yeah the stereotypical joke of some Americans not realizing there’s a world beyond their borders does have some truth to it. I guess it’s sort of understandable given just geographical facts alone (let alone hegemonic status): continental US of A only has 2 countries as neighbors and one of them mostly speaks the same language, where in continental Yurop you can probably hit 4 countries with 7 languages on a 6h drive.

“Understandable, I hope you have a better one”

My dear friend that’s a healthy inclination if I ever saw one ❤️ I’ve definitely struggled with various addictions over the years and my drinking is like barely in control right now, so I absolutely get where you’re coming from. Not like this is a healthy mechanism for dealing with shit, right?

I mean sure, that may just be an “innocent” poll and Uihlein might just be genuinely curious about what the percentages are, there is no way I would trust a conservative to not connect those survey answers to people.

Shit, they wouldn’t even have to explicitly note down who answered what in the database where they count answers, since employees have to be logged in they can probably look at server & auth logs to deduce who voted for who

No wonder you feel powerless, what with first-past-the-post voting and… well, everything else 😅

We’ve definitely got our problems here in Yurop too (like literal fucking neofascists being super popular), but at least we get proportional representation – I get to vote for democratic socialists so that it actually means something

Rum can help you with that.

15 years ago I worked at a small gaming startup and after some party or another my boss was hung over for two days, and he said that it’s totally a thing that happens when you get older. Being a dum idjit I didn’t believe him.

I do now.

I can only imagine; this wouldn’t be a one bottle of rum situation if I lived there.

Y’all have my empathy, this shit can’t be easy.

Oh I’m absolutely sure it does, and thank the fucking gods I’ll probably only be indirectly affected

Oh yes no disagreement there, but by all appearances it’s probably still going to be a fairly close shave – much closer to 50/50 ballpark than, say, 40 / 60 or let alone 30 / 70. So out of the people who do bother to vote, around half of them are still probably going to vote from Trump

Oh yes, liberals absolutely are way worse about this, but I do see it even with actual leftists. It feels like with “centrists,” the deal seems to be what you described: a sort of “well, certainly the leopards won’t eat my face, and I don’t like messing with the status quo because it works well enough for me.” However, with some leftists, it seems to be more about an optimistic view of “the human condition” and an assumption that people are, by and large, good and want to do good (even to folks they don’t know).

I’m a degrowth anarchist myself, and since I live in Finland, I get to enjoy proportional representation. I vote for a democratic socialist party that is at least reasonably close to my values and actually has a chance of landing parliament seats and governmental positions. Over the decades, I’ve noted that many “actual” leftist voters and politicians are maybe a bit… well, let’s say a bit too upbeat about what sort of animal Homo sapiens actually is. These are folks who genuinely do care about “woke” stuff like intersectionality and put in the work towards really changing things, but who seem to think that deep down, everybody wants a just, more equal society and not a hierarchical hellhole where the “strong” dominate some “lesser” social classes (foreigners, poor people, whatever)