My outrage is, and has been, very real, but the question is how do we unscramble this egg? Yes, I vote in every election and the primaries. I do my due diligence on candidates and amendments. I regularly write my elected officials with my concerns and strongly held perspectives. I try to engage in local politics just as much as I do national. I go to protests and rallies to show up for my causes. I share political news that angers and frightens me, petitions speaking to those issues, and I try to do it in a way that doesn’t just vent into the void, but encourages consideration in others. I have dialogues with my older or ignorant friends and family that I feel might be reached by constructive conversations. I am exhausted. And I feel completely powerless.
I live in a blue mid sized city in a red state. In the midst of COVID lockdowns, they redistricted us yet again to further disenfranchise me with gerrymandering. SCOTUS is stacked with lifetime appointments. Congress is a circus. Trump is still a free man and may very well run again for president. How do we wake up from this collective nightmare?
Biologist here. The easiest way to unscramble an egg is to feed it to a chicken.
I think one of the main problems we’re confronting is that about a third of the electorate is fine with the violent overthrow of democracy and its replacement by christian nationalist hegemony, while another third wants to treat it as politics as usual. The latter is where we get things like the media talking about the “debate” over J6.
It’s the normalization of (frankly) fascism that makes people think it’s a legitimate political position rather than an existential threat to the US. Gilead has been brought up so often that it feels trite to say it, but I think it’s accurate. Atwood did not explicitly treat the banality of evil, though. If the radicalism of the far-right that is dominating the republican party was called out more, I think they’d be bleeding voters. They already are, but there are still a lot of people who, if things like the DeSantis laws were properly explained in their effects, would quit the party. Their safety from being the targets of the laws leave them open to only evaluating republican messaging, and even news reporting often holds to the “two sides to the question” framing.
There’s the old joke about the weather person announcing that some people are saying it’s raining and some are saying it’s not raining, and then conducting interviews. People who tend to stay inside are often willing to believe that it’s not raining, rather than sticking their heads outside, and that’s due in no small part to the press pretending both sides are the same.
I hear you, whole heartedly, and I wish I knew what more I could do (if anything) to help. It’s so discouraging to see how effective the propaganda has become. I’m so tired of waiting on those prone to fear based rhetoric to die off. We can’t effectively persuade so many people in a timely fashion.
I am with you I see no path that isn’t taking us straight into fascism at this time. And not only is Trump running for president he looks to win the nomination for the Republican party.
And the fact that they holding out on his trail until next FUCKING Year is terrifying and ridiculous.
First trail isn’t until March and the classified document trail isn’t until May. Giving him plenty of time to gain popularity and frankly destroy America.
He should be on trail NOW and no time to campaign. Hell he shouldn’t even be allowed to run.
But I have no way or idea how to fix this with voting.
In an interview Thursday with NBC News, Reddit CEO Steve Huffman praised Musk’s aggressive cost-cutting and layoffs at Twitter, and said he had chatted “a handful of times” with Musk on the subject of running an internet platform.
Huffman said he saw Musk’s handling of Twitter, which he purchased last year, as an example for Reddit to follow
Building your own musical instrument sounds like a daunting project at the beginning but one with very satisfying results. :)
Not knowing much about marimbas or woodworking, I’m super curious about the actual hand-tuning process! Is it carefully trimming the boards down? And how much do the tubes (?) at the bottom affect the tuning vs the wood pieces on top?
So each of the keys is cut to specific dimensions (I just stole these from an existing Marimba) where deeper keys are larger and higher keys shorter, then you cut an arch into the bottom of the key. The arch is where the real tuning comes from, the size of the key just gets you into the general neighborhood.
Each key has 1 primary tone and 2 overtones (actually way more, but these are the 3 that the human ear can actually pick up on), and each of the tones is tuned by specific regions of the arch, so if you trim material from the center for instance, it will affect the primary tone. I tuned my marimba so that the 2 overtones were the fourth harmonic and the tenth harmonic, which is standard for marimbas, and is what gives it it’s unique deep sound.
The tubes are called resonators - they’re sort of natural amplifiers, without them, the whole thing sounds like you’re just smacking wooden blocks (which you are, to be fair), but with them you get a very powerful, room filling sound. Each one is “tuned” to the resonance of the key it sits under!
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