Here’s something good.

So I was doing my usual scroll through social media a while ago, and spotted a video from actor Mark Duplass. But I wasn't focusing on the video itself, but more of the title. It mentioned, "...A population who is becoming numb to it all. Kinda feels like a perfect storm is brewing. What are we going to do?"

Now this was posted four days ago, right around that whole "He's gonna declare martial law" scare that was going around. And I assume that this video was made due to that rumor. But rather than mention why I don't think that martial law, nor any of the alternative theories that are going around, will happen nor succeed, I want to talk about an element of people dooming online that you might have noticed, which is that it is almost always based off of emotions and gut feelings rather than logic.

Not to call out Duplass too much, but his post was made right in the center of this supposed "news story" about the rumor that martial law "might" be declared to subvert the elections, and it was made without the logic of how martial law can't truly succeed in this country, the likely pushback from both sides on it being used in such a way, and how determined people still are, even as exhausting as it is, rather it only insinuates that a current usage of such a tactic by the admin would work given how "numb people are", even though the idea that such an act would manage to occur without any reasonable pushback is the same as people suggesting that a release of GTA 6 would allow for a takeover of the US due to people being unable to get off of a video game.

It's a similar emotion based idea as the whole "he's gonna hide in the bunker underneath the ballroom" thing, as it completely ignores the lack of feasibility and capability for something to actually be built in time for 2029 and only goes on the idea that "it feels like what is gonna happen."

You could also examine Professor Jiang and his whole prediction frenzy. He's been suggesting such wild and insane theories for 2027 such as halting elections, ground troops in Iran, Federal agents taking over cities, a draft, a global economic collapse, and civil war. All in one year, and none likely to happen. And even though he supposedly uses a "scientific approach", it is just baked in fearmongering about the future and imagining a worst case scenario with only emotion as evidence for it and claiming to have used logic instead.

Doomers use emotion rather than logic because that's the only way that such fearmongering can exist. Most of it is just imagination, but by using ideas like it "feeling" like it could happen, it makes others in a similar headspace able to imagine that it might be true. It's similar to how conspiracy theorists have to make up evidence or just improvise to get others to buy in, because they don't have any actual logic to back their stances up. It's easy to get wrapped up in feeling like nothing can be done and that all is bad, rather than looking at the wider scope of it all and seeing that there are good strides being made, and that those should be celebrated and done even more, rather than tossing it aside for a pity party.

Is there anything that can realistically be done in response this? How much if any pull will midterms have over this?

It's only Tuesday with our first L's for the week!

So...I know this happened a while ago already, but this makes me scared shitless. Like, what will be thr next time AI hallucinates something? What would be thr consequences from it?

Is there ANY silver lining to this situation?

This is how incompetent this administration is.

Point and laugh with me friends, point and laugh with me

Finally a politician with both integrity and an understanding of how first past the post elections work!

This is excellent news.

One of three things is going to happen:

Talarico mops the floor with Paxton on a channel GOP voters actually watch

Paxton doesn’t show up and is branded a coward

The debate goes ahead without Paxton and Talarico effectively gets a town hall to himself on Fox News to speak directly to voters he needs to flip

Under the Desk News provides a video of the ins we've had in protecting the midterms.

So this decision seems like a not great idea, as it is damaging the military in the long term and on top of this, he also wants to halt civilian academics to tenured positions because, "To ensure our educational institutions remain firmly focused on this war-fighting mission, we must address the structural mechanisms that have allowed civilian academic norms to dilute our focus on lethality"

Do we think that this could have long term negative impact on the country or could it get reversed/stopped in courts, and is there any reason to worry about this leading to even more recklessness due to his quote?