You don't even need bribery. You can just throw money at something and make things happen.
If you think something is true, you can pay the world to prioritize things as if it were true.
If you think vaccines cause autism and you are rich, you can create massive "education" campaigns and the like to convince people its true. You can buy ads telling people its true. You can amass an enormous following of people who believe you and change policy without bribery.
This assumes that the protesters won't vote for Harris come election time.
Protests are important - especially obnoxious, inconvenient ones. If Harris and the general public can't ignore the protesters, Harris is more likely to act on the protested issue instead of sidestepping it.
In the US, conservative lawmakers have been waging a quiet war against our postal system for a while now.
Highlights: They forced it to be self-sustaining (cut federal funding), then when that didn't kill it they forced it to, in a very short time frame, pre-fund retirement benefits ahead of time for all current and former employees.
The postal system is more or less dependent on the funds it gets from spam mailers.
Edit: To clarify, I'm not insinuating that the bulk/majority of its income is from junk mail, I'm just stating that its not nothing, so they don't really have an incentive to kill that source if revenue.
If Democrats follow that playbook it only legitimizes it, giving a future Republican administration the green light to do it as well.
I 100% agree in spirit. However...
giving a future Republican administration the green light to do it
One of the many problems with American politics is that the Republicans do not need legitimacy or a green light. They'll fucking do it anyway. They'll also cry foul if they catch a whiff of a democrat thinking about doing it. Or they'll just accuse a democrat of doing it and they'll just use that as justification for doing it first.
They know their policies are wildly unpopular and that they won't even be able to maintain power by illegitimate minority rule, which they have been doing for decades now.
It's grab power now or regroup and accept that they've lost the culture war. They are not going to go quietly, as recent events and Project 2025 has made crystal clear.
I am just destroyed by this. I genuinely had a little faith in humanity that people wouldn't fall for this bullshit but I guess I sorely was mistaken.
Laitmer is a conservative, racist piece of shit who is going to take over Manchin's job of fucking things up for progressives. Fucking hell this sucks.
To top it off, Israel just successfully dropped a political nuke on a critic and will likely have everyone running scared in the future.
Honestly, this is what I consider to be the clear danger of generative "AI". We've basically gone several steps backward toward a world where we can't prove something happened because recording technology doesn't exist because it can be faked well enough and easily enough to cast doubt on any recording.
Sure, experts can analyze it and deem it legit or not legit but for the average person its becoming harder and harder to tell. Word spreads fast, and it's been demonstrated that lies spread faster than their corrections by orders of magnitude. All it takes is for something to "go viral" or someone with authority to lazily confirm or deny that something is real/fake and the public at large loses touch with reality.
This plus the insane misinformation campaigns and those that cry "fake news" whenever the news contains information they don't like... I feel like truth and reality are becoming unfashionable.
USA here. They'd likely consider this to be extremely patronizing, but I consider most conservative voters to be unaware of what it is they are actually preaching. It's crazy but the more extreme their views get, the more I'm convinced they're misinformed and misled. Some folks at the top of their pyramid I legitimately hate - I have no doubt they know exactly what they are doing.
So many of conservative beliefs just fly in the face of reality. I hate that they're perpetuating the harm that the beliefs and resulting policies cause, but seeing as how they are mostly based on clear and obvious lies, I have to assume that most of the supporters just don't realize they are being lied to and have invested emotionally in an identity that actively harms their own interests.
City officials said 29% of the 112 people arrested at a protest at Columbia on Tuesday were not affiliated with the school. At the City College protest, 60% of the 170 arrested were not affiliated with the school, according to the city's press release.
"Not students" isn't as informative as "not affiliated with the school".
In that light, the numbers reported are much different between the two colleges and the headline should reflect that.
"Many of us built, whether it's bought homes or whatever, based on this promise of stability," Jesuthasan said. "There was this expectation that the tail was bigger. And we took on liabilities and obligations early on because of that tail. I think this generation has seen that tail dissipate."
In other words, when millennials did what their parents did and assumed if they worked hard they'd get to live a decent life. Then they got fucked by companies whose priorities became getting as much out of their employees as possible while investing in those employees as little as possible.
As a millennial, I hated the idea of debt. As a result, I've had no debt beyond college loans despite being able to afford a lower middle class lifestyle. It took me never living alone (roommates, SOs) but I did it. The education was bullshit and the loans were obscene but I got a piece of paper that helped me keep my job. After working in the public sector for 20+ years I actually had my loans forgiven... and now rent is going through the roof to compensate. Still, I might actually own a home before I'm 50, assuming current and future landlords don't decide to take me for all I'm worth.
When I finally own a home, I'm sure it'll get washed away by the thirteenth "century flood" that year or some other bullshit thanks to climate change. So fucking glad I decided not to have kids. Fuck this world.
I would argue 50% is low-balling the percentage of people they don't give a shit about.
The correction states the average insulin price was lower. However, the point in my mind was that there were companies charging $800+ for insulin when they were allowed to.