I appreciate it when advocates for a candidate/cause are waving signs at and trying to interact with me right at the boundary for such activities outside polling places.
It’s a reminder of who/what to vote against.
Hitler, Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot will be relieved to hear that they didn’t massacre anybody while in power.
Sure large numbers of people died. And they made the decisions that caused those deaths. But they didn’t personally go out and kill a million people.
There are typically advocates for both candidates in all the interesting local elections right outside the “no politics” line at my polling place. Sometimes i know one of them. Sometimes, i stop and talk to them. Rarely, that’s even enough information to sway my vote for something minor that I’d planned to leave blank.
The issue with Colorado Springs is pretty unique. There is a toxic (IMHO) combination of high military presence (with concurrent tendencies towards conservative thought and high firearm ownership) and a huge amount of … less tolerant?.. megachurches and the like. Note we’ve also had two mass shootings in town.
Combine those factors with the already excessive MAGA hate propaganda, false voting narrative, and it’s not worth it. I vote, my wife votes, we’ve encouraged all like minded associates to do so, but inviting random acts of violence isn’t worth it. NO, I’m not giving into the bullies (again, voting and taking steps to make sure it’s counted) but I’m trying to be rational in evaluating the risks.
And I’m leaving out the not-so subtle undercurrent of antisemitism that’s been on the rise. My given name has very obvious tells, and of course, it’s on all of my property records.
Honestly though, I’m probably being about 80-90% paranoid, but the 10-20% remaining, given the world we live in, is enough right now. It’s kind of like the cultivated color blindness of many non-African American after the Cosby success. We didn’t think, or more accurately, we didn’t SEE the sheer amount of hostile, bigoted, and dangerous treatment that was going on just under the surface, so we assumed it wasn’t there.
MAGA has brought all of that stuff up, front and center, to see. And even when it’s largely restricted to rhetoric, it’s explicitly violent. If I think the nation is going to turn the corner (and it’ll be a long time coming with our current SCOTUS) then, perhaps, I’ll relax.
On the one hand, we have trying to make sense of incomplete science and often contradictory medical advice in the face of a pandemic unprecedented in modern history while weighing competing economic and societal interests. And on the other hand, we have straight up ordering the cold-blooded murder of millions. Yes, yes, exactly the same thing…I’m done arguing with you. See above for my point on the hysteria and flat out bad faith arguments regarding Trump. Despite his many many flaws, Trump did not massacre people during his presidency. You need to understand this, seriously. It’s tough to have a good faith discussion with you otherwise.
I consider myself decently informed about local politics, but it has been very helpful to see local candidate signs on the same property as a candidate that I already know I’m supporting. I’ve even looked people up in the middle of a walk when I saw names I didn’t recognize.
I grew up in a state that mailed sample ballots to us ahead of time. This was very helpful for voter education because it was easy to figure out what was on the ballot ahead of time since you knew exactly what to research.
Texas ballot information can be found online but it is not well organized. You have to click through quite a bit and it usually includes other districts and issues that you won’t be eligible to vote on from neighboring areas.
The other major factor for me is safety. I’m a Black guy in a fairly White city. I absolutely appreciate it when people and businesses choose to fly Pride flags. Even if I don’t get good vibes from an area of town, I always feel safe patronizing a business that’s flying a Pride flag and I’m not even a member of that community.
My neighborhood has a decent mix of everyone, but there are areas I avoid based on how much MAGA/Blue Lives stuff I see flying. It’s weird that folks keep insisting there isn’t a straight line between the Battle Flag for the Army of Northern VA and the more recent regalia proudly displayed by MAGA bigots.
Absolutely! It’s ridiculous that people are still trying to play the same nonsense games from back before 2016. I don’t understand why people keep acting like these folks are safe for minorities and LGBTQ+ people to be around. They aren’t safe at all. At the very least, they support harmful bigoted legislation that promises to limit or entirely remove rights from the rest of us.
Yes, it is. Killing for profit or “the economy” is still killing. And Trump and the Republicans outright ignored the science, spread misinformation, and ignored precautions; they might as well have been employed by COVID.
And that’s why i have a pride flag. Because a trans friend told me it made them feel safer when people fly them. That’s literally virtue signaling. Not so much my own virtue, as the virtue of the neighborhood. I’m saying, “i think it’s safe to identify as supporting queer rights on this street.”
Yeah that ship sailed quite a while ago in America. We have nazis on the streets of our cities and sheriffs telling people to remember the addresses of Democrats.
You cannot possibly be this naive. Literally every governmental regulation, law, or rule at least implicitly balances human welfare vs economic effect. If we really wanted to protect human life at all cost, we would make the maximum speed limit on any road 10 miles an hour. Just think of how many accidents would be prevented and lives saved! Never mind that it would also destroy interstate commerce and the economy and possibly topple the U.S. government. What about regulations concerning the type and amount of pesticides and chemical fertilizers allowed to be used in growing our food? Wouldn’t it be nice to eliminate them entirely and save the lives of those who die or develop illnesses due to their consumption? Of course, that would mean going back to an 1800’s agrarian society where every other person is a farmer, but it would definitely save lives! In fact, let’s immediately get rid of all fossil fuels, since they are polluting our environment and people are dying from that. Of course, that would effectively turn the US into a third world country, but we can’t be making accommodations for the economy can we when it comes to saving lives?
If this is your position (and it really shouldn’t be), then every level of government, throughout the history of the world, has been complicit in the “massacre” of people.
Which isn’t at all the same as outright not caring about human welfare. Or being actively hostile to it.
Well… the last I saw about the Ohio sheriff was that the ACLU had sent him a nasty letter, and that he had closed off social media comments because he was being swamped. I suspect he’ll get swatted down by a court order soon. We’ll see.
And the Neo-nazi article you linked to seems to show more cops monitoring the event than participants, and includes a denunciation from Nashville mayor.
But, yeah, we should just give up. It’s too far gone. (Sarcasm)
I’m feeling pretty good about my neighborhood.
A couple of houses up the street, there’s a guy with a Garvey for Senate sign, and abut 3 American flags in his yard. His nextdoor neighbor has a Harris/Walz sign in his yard.
So far they have not exploded in mutual annihilation.
But we must gaze upon their works, and despair! 
Not sarcasm for me, America is collapsing.
Nonsense. There were no competent professionals offering alternative theories. Trump was surrounded by competent experts who were telling him what needed to be done. But Trump refused to listen.
Why did Trump do this? My personal speculation (and I acknowledge this is just an opinion) is that when Trump was first told about the upcoming crisis, he didn’t understand what he was being told because he’s stupid and he didn’t want to do anything because he’s lazy. So he publicly stated that there wouldn’t be any crisis. And then as the crisis kept getting bigger, Trump kept refusing to admit he had been wrong.
Of course, I could be wrong on this last part. Maybe Putin offered Trump a thousand dollars to kill off a few hundred thousand extra Americans and Trump took the bribe. But I feel my “stupid and lazy” theory is more likely.
Yes, that’s probably the best exit you can hope for at this point.
They seem to be required on farm properties, or at least that’s the case in my area.
My apartment complex does not allow signs, political or otherwise, except for temporary things like a kid’s birthday party.
No, they were in the same district.
So much for that theory –
I just took a road trip through Utah, New Mexico, and Colorado. Oddly, almost all of the signs I saw in UT and NM were Harris/Walz signs. Trump signs outnumbered Harris signs in CO. NM makes sense because it’s been blue of late and I was mostly in Native American and art colony country. But rural Eastern Utah makes no sense, nor does blue Colorado. I wonder if most sign displayers are just contrarians; meaning the fewer signs the greater the candidate’s chances.