Gov Parson pushes to prosecute reporter who found security flaw in state site

But after 2020? There's no plausible deniability left. That the loser of the last election used imagined fraud as a basis to launch a coup attempt, and the subsequent attempted memory-holing and normalization of that event by the Republican party have changed everything. It's clear what they are doing now. Namely:

1) take away independent control of state election processes and install a partisan election process that will "determine" whether any particular election result is "fraudulent". The result of the Arizona audit by the "Cyber Ninjas" reveals the playbook:

- use the audit to kick up a cloud of dust (we are investigating reports of paper ballots from china containing Bamboo!)

- muddy the waters (we are definitely going to find fraud, it's astounding)

- find no fraud (The results show Biden won, but we have a list of concerns we will focus on instead of the actual count)

- declare there was fraud anyway (Trump's statement on the result: "We won on the Arizona forensic audit yesterday at a level that you wouldn’t believe. They had headlines that Biden wins in Arizona when they know it’s not true. He didn’t win in Arizona. He lost in Arizona based on the forensic audit.")

2) Use these fabricated claims of fraud to send your own choice of electors to the Congress to select the next President.

3) The Democrats will object, because of the obvious fraud

4) The process, being contested, will follow the Constitution and eventually a vote will go before the House, where each state delegation has 1 vote

5) Because Republicans control more state houses than Democrats, they can just choose whoever they want as President

6) Any court challenges will end up at a court stacked with Republicans, 3 of whom were appointed by Trump, 5 of whom were appointed to the court by Republican Presidents who lost the popular vote their first term in office.

That's how Democracy ends in America, and Republicans are setting up that exact scenario in 2024. If you wake up in November of that year and the person elected (read: appointed) lost both the popular vote AND the electoral college, well don't be surprised. That's the literal end of elections in America, and it's not hyperbolic at all. That's their stated plan: see the Eastman memo.

If you are voting for Republicans post 2020, you are voting against democracy. I'm sorry, there's no other way to put it. This whole effort is anti-democratic and against the rule of law. I mean, it's fine if you don't believe in democracy and want an American dictator in the style of Putin (complete with the associated corruption of the rule of law and the neutering of elections as a method of self governance), but just be honest about it.

Alienation is exactly the type of thing one should use to combat this. Rationally minded people in the (R) camp SHOULD feel alienated by their intellectual peers when they spew anti-intellectual rhetoric and pass/support anti-intellectual policies or willingly associate, without protest, with people or groups known for doing so. You can't flip the script and say you feel alienated by your intellectual peers (HN) for not jumping with you onto the anti-intellectual band-wagon and/or for calling systemic anti-intellectualism out for what it is. Doing so would be as ridiculous as arguing that you find same-sex couples alienating/offensive/triggering because they tread on your precious sensibilities as an anti-LGBT person. In that scenario, you should feel alienated, because that is the primary societal force that will pressure you into recanting being an anti-LGBT person. Intellectuals are alienating you because they want you to get rid of the rest of your bad opinions, not just the select few you have already shed, before you can take your place at the table.

Even some of the STEM classes were a waste of time, especially the Computer Science classes where the professor would grade people on attendance and random minutia.

I ended up just learning computer science on my own off of Wikipedia after I graduated since I couldn't get a decent hardware design job with my Electrical Engineering degree. It only took a couple of months, BTW, to get from the point where I was just playing around with JavaScript to where I could pass a coding interview laden with data structures and algorithms.

If I could go back in time for a day and talk to my former self, I'd tell him to just buy some used physics, math, and computer science textbooks, then spend six months couch surfing, partying, and studying on his own. Then he could go find a CS job and start making money right away