It’s scary every time around. This attitude is what got us someone who stalled on even admitting climate change was a thing for almost a decade instead of Al Gore in 2000. Like sure not as fraught as now but imagine being a decade ahead on implementing green policies even if those policies were watered down.

Also, more directly related to your original point, disbanding NATO and withdrawing support from Ukraine get us exactly 0% closer to either of those goals as well. They just show that Stein is an unserious politician with extremely specific opinions on NATO and Ukraine for reasons I’m sure are unrelated to her funding.

Tooth fractured about 90% through at the gum line after I got hit by a car while biking.

It would be ‘fine’ (painful but just really sore like the rest of me) if I bit down on that tooth for a bit to fully seat it, but every time I talked, ate, or otherwise accidentally jostled it it would be like someone jabbed a red hot poker into my face - the crack went across the root and any bit of movement pulled on it.

It was a rough two weeks to get it looked at and a root canal done. I kept getting woken up by searing pain if I moved a bit during the night.

Sure, but the court doesn’t actually have any enforcement mechanism - that’s all held by the executive. Like, a president who orders the military to assassinate a political rival is not gonna wait for multiple months of trial and go ‘oh OK I guess that wasn’t an official act off to jail I go’. They can just intimidate the judges. The Republicans are counting on any Democratic president not doing that, and are probably right.

I definitely share your frustration… That said, there is some progress - see e.g. The price caps on insulin put in place this year, or the ACA reaching a bit further back – and I think it’s worth recognizing (and recognizing how we got it). Still a very long way to go and it’s an uphill battle unfortunately.

Yeah this isn’t even like a complicated idea; I don’t get why people have trouble with it.

As a practical real world example: in the 2000 election, Bush won Florida by 537 votes. (the exact number is questionable because of the recount and the bullshit that was Bush v. Gore. Which we can and should be very angry about but also doesn’t change the conclusion here).

97,488 Floridians voted for Ralph Nader.

Now, I’m gonna assume that people who voted green care about like. The environment. And I’m quite sure that Nader was more progressive on environmental issues than Gore was – Gore would probably have been a boring and relatively centrist democrat. But by voting for Nader over Gore we didn’t get Nader, we got Bush.

If even 1% of the green voters in Florida had held their noses and voted for the candidate who they maybe didn’t align quite as well with but had an actual shot at winning, we could have had a president who actually recognized climate change as a threat almost a fucking decade before we did,instead of a climate change denier. Would it have fixed everything? No! But we’d be a hell of a lot better off than we are now.

Right? “the only sane choice”? The antivaxxer? The “covid is a bioweapon” guy? The “I don’t think we need a ceasefire in Gaza” guy. That guy? What a fucking joke.