There aren’t 2 major sides in the US, there are 3.

The 3rd side never does any formal campaigning (though there is some grassroots self-organised spreading of its message), often wins as it did this time and yet never controls any power because of how the electoral system works.

One might call the 3rd side the Not Voting Party.

The entire Democrats campaign was negative campaigning against the Republican Party, something which did nothing to take “votes” from the Not Voting Party and then specifically on Palestine, their actions, whilst if one judges them relative to the Republican Party were neutral, very strongly helped the Not Voting Party whose appeal on this was that a “vote” for Not Voting is a vote that doesn’t support mass murder of children.

So if you look at it as a 3-sided contest, suddently the Democrat result is easilly explainable: they didn’t as much lost to the Republicans as they lost to the Not Voting Party, and in that loss Palestine probably weighed heavilly, both because the Democrats broke some pretty strong principles for a lot of people (there aren’t much strongers principles than being against the mass murder of children) thus convincing them to go “Not Voting” and because they, while raging about how Trump was a Fascist, were activelly supporting ethno-Fascists in Israel (the worst kind of Fascism there is) in the middle of a Genocide, they looked like evil hypocrites and weakened their only message trying to capture votes from Not Voting - the whole “Not voting at all is like voting for a Fascist” thing: calling the other guy evil and dangerous hardly helps convince the unconvinced when the people saying it are active supporters of an extremelly violent ethno-Fascism that has already killed thousands of babies and tens of thousands of children.

I’m truly, totally, completely shocked … that Windows is still being used on the server side.

For avoidance of confusion, I’m talking about New Labour, not traditional Labour.

What would I know, my references are only politics in 4 different countries including being a political party member in two of them, one of which was the UK …

The only “The Onion” rather than “Not The Onion” part of this is the idea that they would announce it.

Or maybe the words do have reasonably fixed global meaning and only British Exceptionalism and their very propaganda-heavy environment makes Britons think their political landscape redefines those words.

Besides, even in Britain you might want to consider the existence of the Corbyn phenomenon (who, if I remember it correctly, got more votes than Starmer did) as well as the Greenparty (whose 1 million vote count went up to 1.4 million in the latest electing) as proof that there is in fact a Left even in England which is not just “What’s in it for me?!” Neoliberals cosplaying as “lefties” by throwing some identity politics slogans and below inflation minimum wage raises once in a while, whilst de facto supporting an ethno-Fascist regime half way around the globe currently working on Holocaust v2.

I would say their support for the Neue Nazis and their pro-Finance politics (which I saw up close and personal having worked in that Industry before, during and after the 2008 Crash) by themselves are more than enough to place them firmly in the full-on Right field, possibly even Hard Right.

People whose guiding principle is “The greatest good for the greatest number” don’t do what the New Labour types have done and continue to do, even the “pragmatic”/“moderate”/“center” ones.

Keir won because the UK, like the US, has First Pass The Post and the Even More Far Right Party - Reform - divided the votes on the Far Right hence the Tories came second in lots of electoral circles were they usually come first.

Also I’ve lived all over Europe including the UK and New Labour is plain Right, not Center-Right - they only seem center by comparison with the Tories who migrated to the Far-Right during the Leave Referendum and subsequent Johnson Government.

Similarly by comparison with most of Europe (not the UK) the US is a country with only a plain Right (maybe even hard) and a Far-Right.

Curiously, both New Labour and the Democrat Party support the ethno-Fascist regime in Israel, something which I feel neatly underlines my point as from what I see elsewhere in Europe (with the notable exception of Germany) no Leftwing party supports them.

The point is that willingness to vote, dislike of Trump, the strenght of ones principle, even political awareness and other similar things are scales, not just absolutes.

Some people will always vote, some never, others can be convinced or convince themselves with different levels of inducement (be it fear or enthusiasm).

Ditto for dislike of Trump - people are all over from love him to hate him and everything in between.

As for principles, well, some people are inflexible no mater what, most are somewhere in the middle being capable of breaking certain principles in certain conditions and other have a Groucho Marx take on them (“These are my principles. If you don’t like them, well, I have others.”)

And ditto for political awareness: just because all you see and hear is the very politically aware types talking about politics because they’re loudly political, doesn’t mean there aren’t a lot people who think, for example, that “it’s all a show and my vote makes no difference so why should I care?”

Just because you, being at a specific point of those various scales, are very politically aware and could easily be cowed by fear of Trump whom (I assume) you detest to vote Democrat even if they were actively going against your principles (assuming one of them is “people shouldn’t be killed due to their race”), doesn’t mean that many others at different points of those scales ended up not voting for Harris when they could otherwise have voted Democrat if it wasn’t for her making choices that went against their strongly held principles or her campaign strategy of fear rather than hope didn’t work on them because they have mixed feelings about Trump so don’t fear him or think their “my vote makes no difference - they’re all bullshitters who don’t do what they say” so don’t see the point in voting for the other guys because Trump is Bad.

Harris’ actions and campaign strategy did capture the votes of people like you even if you had to hold your nose (which they couldn’t care less about) to vote Harris, but those choices of them stopped from voting Harris plenty of people who sit elsewhere in these scales and would otherwise vote Democrat.

Clealy had she chosen differently she would’ve captured the votes of people not quite at your end of those various scales but by all indications the positions she assumed and campaign strategy moved the peak appeal points in those various scales in such away that it dropped a lot more votes (mainly on the Left, Highly Principled and Distrusting of Politics sides) than the ones it gained from appealing to the other side (mainly Rightwing, Party fanatics and unprincipled or even supporting of the Israeli Genocide).

The Democrat loss is not the fault of voters for being who they are, it’s the fault of the Democrats for chosing a strategy of using the fear of Trump to retain votes whilst breaking some pretty strong principles of many people with their support for mass murderers of children, and not fixing certain things during the years they were in power and then last minute announcing measures for it (which is really not going to convince the people more distrusting of politicians to go out and vote).

Mate, every single politician who supports “hands off regulation” and other forms of the State (which is the thing that voters control by electing people to lead and manage it) not interfering in those things controlled by the other Power, Money, would have to be hauled before such courts.

The pro-Oligarchs (commonly known as Neoliberals) are just as much against voters controlling how Society gets managed (i.e. against Democracy) as the Fascists.

It’s just that Neoliberals want Money to be the Prime power, abover a State whose hands are tied but whose leaders are elected (thou often and as seen in the US, the only choices that voters have are a carefully preselect pool of candidates), whilst the Fascists want unelected leaders controlling the State as a Prime power, above even Money, which is indeed quite a different situation for those people with enough Money for it to amount to Power, but it’s not that much of a difference for the plebes like you and me who would are at the bottom of the pile and de facto powerless under both systems.

Ultimatelly “no voting” or “votes only control a secondary power which is not the top power of the land” are both anti-Democratic and the current problem of lack of Democracy (which I believe is the biggest problem in most of the West) predates the recent Trump & The Trumpettes’ version of anti-Democracy by at least 3 decades.

This discussion right here on “whose candidate is best for The Market” at a time when most people have less than $1000 in savings is peak Capitalism.

Yeah, I know that in the US many if not most people have their retirement funds tied to Markets, and having worked in Investment Finance let me tell you that you were and are being swindled (but, hey, your savings for old age really make a LOT of money for a small number of people, not least because of occupying the niche of being the suckers in most markets), but that itself is peak Capitalism.

The Markets mater very little for most people - except for the unfortunates forced by governments to bet their old age prosperity on them - but they’re really important for the largest Asset Owners, or in other words, the Very Rich.

For sandboxing in Lutris you’ll want to have a look at the “Command Prefix” option under “Runner options” - whatever you put there prefixes the command that runs the game, which is exactly how sandboxing with things like firejail works (i.e. you start your stuff from the command line with firejail firejail-args your-stuff your-stuff-args so you literally prefix your command with firejail).

It’s possible to configure it game by game and also as a global default for all games which you can then override for only some games (this later is how I run it).

Lutris also integrates with Steam so you can run Steam games from it.

Same here and for me too it was gaming holding me back, though I mostly buy my games via GoG hence use Lutris and it’ve had a pretty low rate of games that won’t work at all (and, curiously, one of them which won’t work in Steam works fine if I use a pirated version with Lutris), though maybe 1/3 require some tweaking to work properly.

It’s also interesting that by gaming in Linux with Lutris I can make it safer and protect my privacy because Lutris let’s me do things like run the game inside a firejail sandbox which I have set up as default for all games including disabling network access for the game.

Still have the Windows partition around just in case, though the only time I booted it in the last several months was to clean up some of the stuff to free one of the disks to make it a dedicated Linux disk.

There are gamers and there are gamers.

Some gamers prefer not to have the level of noise of a jet engine taking off right next to them to get a couple percent more frames per second on a game.

I would say there are at least two quite different markets amongst PC gamers who have different preferred balances between performance and the downsides of it (noise, heat, power costs), a bit like not all people who enjoy driving want muscle cars.

Lying and misportraying themselves in social media is nothing for a country were most people are fine with murdering tens of thousands of children because of their ethnicity.

This is nothing given the depths of their depravity.

Ah, the good old fallacy of justifying one thing with something completely unrelated.

One can just as easily use the same argumentative structure to claim that a delayed train on the subway is the tip of the iceberg which is the Worldwide Illuminati Conspiracy or that the wood in one’s wardrobe having a darker spot indicates it used to be a gateway to Narnia.

Both of those things are the same: Liberal Politicians are just pro-Oligarchy (i.e. anti-Democracy) types cosplaying as pro-Equality using a highly hypocrite construct (not really Equality, which is equal in all dimensions, but rather one that only defends “equality” for some people or things and not for others, especially not for anything involving Wealth) and hence morally bankrupt.

PS: I wrote “Liberal Politicians” because a lot of normal people who see themselves as Liberals haven’t actually deep dived into analysing the ideology whose superficial slogans they parrot to discover its fundamental contradictions - starting by how it classifies people by characteristics they were born with (hence not of their choise and not reflecting them as people) and then treating them based on the prejudices one holds for or against the one of such classifications those people are deemed to belong to, as well as the whole "NEVER, EVER, EVER talk about Wealth Inequality and the inequality of treatment based on Wealth) - so genuinelly think they are defending a moral and ethical position whilst in fact being the useful idiots of the Neoliberals who just to divide the Left into a neoliberal-style competition were people, driven by Greed, fight against each other but claiming to do it for the “group” rather than for themselves.

Zeleneskyy voiced support to Israel right after 7 October and has been completely silent about the whole thing since.

Sounds a lot like how a lot of Jewish people (and not only Jewish people) reacted to it and subsequent events afterwards - they first saw Israel as a victim and supported it but over time changed their minds seeing what Israel was doing using that attack as an excuse and possibly as additional information about Oct 7 that was not straight out of the Israeli Authprities emerged.

It certainly doesn’t sound at all like a Zionist (for example Biden or most political leaders in Germany) have reacted: those have very vocally continued their “unwavering support” for Israel.

If Zeleneskyy morally supported the actions of Israel even once it became clear they had gone from self-defense to committing a Genocide, he would have kept voicing unwavering support for Israel, yet he has stopped talking about it altogether, and since Ukraine requires the support of the US and Germany, both countries were all main parties support the Israeli Neue Nazis and their Neue Holocaust, saying nothing at all is the smart balance he found between Morally being against the actions of Israel and doing what is best for Ukraine.

Good old German power elites: there has never been a Holocaust they didn’t support…

I lived in the UK back during Brexit and the only people who said that “the BBC is Leftwing” were the English Far-Right - in fact that kind of stuff started (or at least became “mainstream” enough to be noticeable) at around that time and then was picked up by the Far-Right populist side of the Tory Party during the Leave Referendum.

They’re a posh kind of Rightwing, so far more subtle than loudmouths like Farage, Boris Johnson and Trump, but it didn’t take me long after coming to live in the UK (a decade before Brexit) to notice how much to the Right they were (not even Center-Right) from their fawning coverage of the Monarchy, almost invariably positive spin on the “upper” classes and the ultra-wealthy and heavy nationalist take on all foreign affairs (they almost invariably spinned it as “other countries are listening to Britain” when the same news in foreign media barely if at all mentioned Britain).

Certainly the core message from the BBC was always that “the System is good as it is, be proud of it” and “don’t make waves”, in a country which is highly unequal and has pretty low Social Mobility when compared to the rest of Europe.

Also remember how, well before they had any meaningful impact, the likes of Nigel Farage and Boris Johnson got way more airtime in the BBC than, say, the leader of the Greenparty.

Brexit didn’t happen by chance: the fields were Far-Right Nationalism flourished had been long plowed by amongst others the BBC.

But, but, but … the propaganda bot here keeps telling us the BBC is Leftwing.

How could they be Leftwing and have a bias in favour of ethno-Fascists, the farthest Far-Right there is?

Surely the BBC employees are wrong!!!