This campaign season, some of America’s richest people promoted—and even seemed to believe—ludicrous hoaxes.
> If there’s one salient feature of the 2024 election cycle, it’s that rich people—rich men, particularly, and even more particularly ones who support Donald Trump’s reelection campaign—fell for things at a previously unimaginable rate. Separate from simply supporting Trump or advancing right-wing talking points, they promoted ideas and stories that almost no reasonable person could possibly believe: cartoonish lies, absurd leaps of logic, and clearly fake documents.
here in Seattle: the at-large City Council seat (district 8) between Tanya Woo and Alexis Mercedes-Rinck
Woo ran for a different city council seat a year ago, and lost. in the same election, a sitting city councilmember (Teresa Mosqueda) won an election to the King County Council, so she resigned her city council seat. to fill that vacant seat, the other newly-elected city councilmembers appointed Woo, even though she had just lost.
by the rules of the resignation and temporary appointment, the next regular election (now) elects a permanent replacement.
this leads to an unusual scenario - normally, Seattle (and all of Washington state) holds its municipal elections in odd years. the current mayor was elected in 2021, the most recent city council election was 2023. this leads predictably to much lower turnout for the municipal elections, which leads in turn to conservative business interests having an easier time buying the local elections.
Woo is aligned with the "business-friendly", conservative (by Seattle standards) councilmembers who were elected in 2023. Mercedes-Rinck is significantly more progressive.
based on the primary results and subsequent polls, Woo winning seems pretty unlikely - but the margin of Mercedes-Rinck's victory will still be interesting, because of what it says about Seattle politics in elections with high turnout. voter turnout in the 2023 elections was a dismal 36%. this year is likely to be in the ~80% range.
it's also an opportunity for something very funny to happen - Tanya Woo may set a record that will likely never be broken, becoming the first candidate in city history to lose 2 elections in consecutive 2 years, for a seat that normally gets elected every 4 years.
everyone is focused on the Presidential race, for obvious reasons, and to a lesser extent on control of the House and Senate.
but there's thousands of downballot races across the country. are there any that you're watching / particularly interested in?
Audio obtained from board of elections meetings in Georgia show how a tool called EagleAI was pitched to election officials.
> Nancy Gay, the executive director of Columbia County’s Board of Elections, told 404 Media that the county ultimately did not use EagleAI this year because it ran out of time to get trained on it before the election. But the audio shows how the software was pitched, what voters in the county think about it, and, most importantly, show how some election officials have in some cases begun repeating and spreading ideas that are popular with election deniers.
The Trump campaign and other conservative groups have spent millions on anti-trans ads, setting a dangerous precedent for a potential second Trump term.
Roll 2 the Polls is transforming Election Day accessibility by providing rides to vote for people with physical disabilities.
The Evangelical family’s twisted obsession with corporal punishment.
archive link: https://archive.is/H0FZY
from Talia Lavin, who's high on my list of "anything she writes is worth reading" journalists. an excerpt from her upcoming book Wild Faith: How the Christian Right Is Taking Over America.
hopefully the title made it obvious, but a big ol' content warning for explicit and heartbreaking details about child abuse and endangerment.
hello Cleveland Beehaw! happy to be joining this pleasant little corner of the internet.
good news: I'm in the process of buying a house, after renting my whole life up to now. got lucky that the first home I toured in-person (after viewing probably 100+ homes on Zillow) I liked enough to put in an offer, and had the offer accepted. now I'm just going through inspection and mortgage approval crap.
bad news: I broke my big toe. not broken broken, apparently just a tiny chunk of bone flaked off where the ligament is attached. I put off going to the doctor about it, because I woke up with my toe swollen and painful, Dr. Google suggested that it was probably gout, and I didn't want to bother with a doctor visit if it was just going to be a lecture about eating healthier. so I hobbled around on a broken toe for almost 2 weeks before going in for X-rays and getting told it was broken. now I'm crossing my fingers that it'll heal up on its own in the Fancy Medical Shoe they gave me, and I won't have to have surgery on it. and it's a good reminder that sometimes I need to push past my ADHD and medical anxiety and go to the doctor anyway.
it might be more complicated than you're looking for (requires a self-hosted server instead of just a desktop app), but take a look at the ecosystem surrounding Subsonic
Subsonic did some licensing shenanigans, but there's an actively-maintained GPL3 fork called airsonic-advanced
there's also alternate implementations, Gonic and Navidrome, that maintain compatibility with the original Subsonic API
because they all work with a common API, there's a variety of clients that can work with the backend.
I'm also a big fan of Beets for music organization, it's not tied in to the Subsonic ecosystem so you can use them completely separately if you want. it handles tagging, can fetch lyrics, and can also transcode the library (or an arbitrary subset of it) if you want to send it to a portable device. (not sure if this is what you mean by compatibility)
I currently have Beets organizing everything, run Navidrome on my server pointed at the Beets library directory, then Ultrasonic on my phone, and the Navidrome web interface on my desktop. the combo is especially nice for streaming to my phone - Navidrome will transcode FLAC to Opus on the fly, and Ultrasonic has an option to cache those files locally, and to pre-download them over wifi instead of mobile data. so I have my full collection available on my phone, can stream it from anywhere, and the songs I listen to frequently are already downloaded and I don't have to waste mobile data, or wait for them to load if I have poor cell signal.
A drag protest ballet revolted against military police raiding queer spaces in the 1970s.
