This is just one industry drinking another industry’s IP milkshake.

Some good reading about the National Endowment for Democracy aka NED https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Endowment_for_Democracy

I credit an intense compassion for animals and resulting veganism to my autism.

Just wanted to put that in this thread without making it a direct response to anyone. Sometimes it can be incredibly alienating and disconcerting to encounter people online who say they can’t be vegan because they’re autistic. It’s a very diverse spectrum with a multitude of manifestations, and I’d like to go on record as proof that it swings toward positive outcomes and not only negative ones.

Parking enforcement used to be seperate from NYPD but was subsumed around the late 80s / early 90s. Some US cities still do it that way though, I live in Portland these days and parking enforcement here falls under the bureau of transportation.

Oh come on now the rest of your country is even more a disaster on this front than the USA is. And don’t you guys have some half hour time zone differences too?

Cheers to Queensland, British Columbia, and a portion of Arizona for being sane on time.

FWIW I believe Queens Boulevard is one of the rare automotive cesspits of NYC that actually wasn’t a Moses project. He did have a plan to make it even worse by turning it into an expressway, but never got around to it.

This is a protest by those car dealerships against that bike lane. The bike lane is less than 10 years old and was hard-fought for by the de Blasio administration against the dealerships in this section of queens. After the lane went in the dealerships started parking their cars on the public sidewalks and encroaching into the bike lane as much as they could just to be assholes. The cops of course cannot be convinced to do jack shit about it.

I’ve lived here my whole 40 years and can verify that while a significant chunk of our voting class (Because it very much is a class thing) are sheltered enough from consequence that they are either still satisfied with status quo or their disaffection leads them only to encourage debasement, the class living a tenuous and effectively disenfranchised existence is much larger. Did you know that despite our last presidential election having the largest turnout in US history, less than half of citizens and barely more than half of eligible voted participated? Whether disenfranchisement or apathy, neither of those reasons generate from nothing.

But my point above was not that it’s incorrect to point the blame squarely at US voted for their government’s decline (Even though I would probably argue, in a separate debate, that it is), my point is that it’s entirely the wrong tree to be barking up when trying to figure out how to put America back on “The right track”. Thinking that we can just yell at Americans until they vote progressive is to deeply misunderstand the nature of power. Asking why Americans are so disaffected, apathetic, or disenfranchised that they don’t participate in politics is perhaps a good first question, instead.

I don’t think you’re really addressing what I wrote. I’m not saying it’s untrue in a strict sense. I’m saying it’s a disingenuous point. A misleading framing. An uncritical, not entirely applicable, and wholly unhelpful approach to our political issues.

Kinda? Most Americans are extremely low-information on politics, and never proactively educated as to how to find that information or sometimes even why it matters. We are the most propagandized population on Earth, our country has little to no standards for factual information in media and several of our major outlets are just pure corporate spin, while all of our major newspapers are owned by oligarchs. Demographic fact is gerrymandered out of our districts, our default voting method creates perverse incentives to elect popularity over platform and locks third parties out of viability. Individual jurisdictions decide how voting is accomplished and more often than not use this power to make it difficult to do so instead of easier. There is almost no enforcement of laws requiring leave from work to vote. There is next to no oversight of our physical voting machines and little trust in tabulation, while parties can and often do purge voter roles between elections without informing those who they nullified. Ultimately most people didn’t vote for this because quite frankly most people don’t or can’t vote for one of the reasons above, something that I missed, or a tragic apathy created by said trainwreck of conditions.

Saying “The people voted for this” sounds logical but the reality on the ground makes the statement wholly disingenuous. At the very least it’s not a statement that can be built off of for a more productive outcome, in fact it functions as a thought-terminating cliche and provides cover for a class of power who continuously work to keep this set of circumstances cemented in place.

What are yall doing with that hydrogen?

She’s a lefty twitch streamer who’s usually on in the mornings, mostly does reacts to current event stuff with some light context discussion, is one of the people Ethan Klein has tried to bully with lawsuits.

Th3Discourse with Majority Report contributor Brandon Sutton is another cozy lefty morning twitch stream, and he usually raids right into the latter when he’s done.

I’ll stop yelling at the cloud when it stops tripling my electric bill!

The only place I hear anything about that guy is on lefty podcasts and streams, I tend to avoid most social media so I’m not exactly tapped in to that shit but it kind of feels like the reactive coverage is his biggest boost. I tune in to chapo and hasan and friedland and denims and seder and holy shit I’m so sick of hearing about this irrelevant fucked up kid on all of their shows.

NYPD all wear cameras, they can present it as evidence if they want to be taken seriously.

So yeah, zero mention of rocks.

And I wouldn’t take the fact that the cops went to the hospital as evidence of anything, that is very by the book whenever NYPD wants to claim assault on an officer.

I remember the first season or two that it was out, it was too stressful for me to watch. At that point I had simply never seen any fiction with that level of consistent, nonstop manic trainwreck quality and it was overwhelming at first. Loved it after I acclimated, of course.

Maybe these bike lockers are the final and most tangential piece of buildout for the new world trade center (2013).

Ownership of a private lot in NYC comes with a legal requirement to keep the public sidewalk in front of it clean and clear, but the city has complete say over any sidewalk fixture installations.

My bad, I did misread. I thought you meant to imply that fines collected is one of the actions that can’t be taken, you did not.

Regarding human involvement, I trust a camera a lot more than a cop. And NYC already has over 40,000 cops, it’s literally like an army. They don’t care.