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The previous Voting thread was being closed by the OP despite us re-opening it so we're moving it here. This is both spillover for US Current Events around Voting, Primaries, Parties, and Political Alignment. As with most new threads post mod feedback, we are going to be very lenient but avoid personal attacks and discuss the issues rather than the poster. This thread will not be closed without a stated reason. CommieGIR fucked around with this message at 18:02 on Dec 2, 2021 |
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Dec 2, 2021 17:58
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| # ? Apr 19, 2024 15:26 |
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It's hard for me to sum up my opinion on the matter. I mean, I lean towards No, it doesn't, but it isn't a hard no. On paper, it's supposed to. But, between Republicans gerrymandering votes against them into obsolescence and Dems gaslighting people into the belief that failing to vote for one of the "Permitted" candidates is literally the same as giving infinity-billion votes to Hitler-But with Two Moustaches, the end result is that I really don't think it does, because again, your vote is either one drop of not-red in a sea of MAGA hats, and/or you vote for someone you don't want because you've been guilted and scolded into voting against your best interests.
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Dec 3, 2021 05:55
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gas
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Dec 3, 2021 07:44
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too harsh imo
Craig K fucked around with this message at 09:08 on Dec 3, 2021 |
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Dec 3, 2021 07:57
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Counterpoint: local elections matter a lot, actually, and often have little to do with either one of Both Sides. For example, I helped in a small way get three current or former students of mine elected to nonpartisan local government this fall. One of them started a commission on climate change mitigation and adaptation and another launched an investigation and strengthened oversight into alleged corruption and misuses of COVID relief funds. I'm not claiming any real credit for either of those but every time similar stuff got brought up in the previous thread it was just ignored in favor of (mostly) national politics.CommieGIR posted:Voting, Primaries, Parties, and Political Alignment. I feel like containment threads for these subjects have been tried before but goonspeed
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Dec 3, 2021 08:22
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Containment threads only work if moderators actually enforce the requirement that conversations be put in them and punish violators. We'll see.
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Dec 3, 2021 08:33
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naw, i trust that unlike every other time it's been tried, this time it totally will not turn into the exact same cliques of the exact same posters relitigating the exact same arguments for the umpeenth time because this subforum is the mass equivalent of that dr. seuss story where two creatures refuse to go around each other and stand there arguing and not giving an inch until the end of time
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Dec 3, 2021 08:44
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Craig K posted:naw, i trust that unlike every other time it's been tried, this time it totally will not turn into the exact same cliques of the exact same posters relitigating the exact same arguments for the umpeenth time because this subforum is the mass equivalent of that dr. seuss story where two creatures refuse to go around each other and stand there arguing and not giving an inch until the end of time Better here than in the main news thread with everyone who doesn't want to deal with it as a captive audience
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Dec 3, 2021 08:49
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Sanguinia posted:Better here than in the main news thread with everyone who doesn't want to deal with it as a captive audience a fair point, actually.
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Dec 3, 2021 08:54
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going to vote extremely hard in the 2022 elections
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Dec 3, 2021 09:02
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Important metachat question: is it a circlejerk if it's just two of them? The left is in a no win bind with American electoralism. The best we can do is try to position ourselves to succeed in local balkanization and defeat the attempted uprising of neofuedal fascist warlords. We can't appeal to the rich, because they are the ones loving us. That leaves everyone else. But if you try to appeal to non rich Republican voters you'll be framed as supporting the most hardcore fascist opinions among them and derided by the rich lib media and lose the well meaning but dumb lib supporters you need to win. If you try to appeal to non voters you might succeed for a while. But ultimately the greater party machinery will ensure you never get to enact your agenda and seek to bully you into various bad votes. The problem is not that it's hard to elect a third party or primary a Dem, it's that it's impossible to do it at the scale needed to do what needs done in the time frame that it MUST be done, or even in the time frame needed to establish political bona fides. And of course wreckers like Sinema will be constantly trying to worm their way in and undermine you for a payout. Harold Fjord fucked around with this message at 16:21 on Dec 3, 2021 |
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Dec 3, 2021 16:19
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Harold Fjord posted:Important metachat question: is it a circlejerk if it's just two of them? Barring a last minute save by Omicron reaping its way through the leadership of both parties... that's probably all that can be said.
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Dec 3, 2021 18:45
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Once Bernie dropped that was it for me at the national level, and even if he had won I figured it would be a coinflip between if enough of the party got behind him to help him win/govern or a Labour style complete destruction of the party and years of purges by New Democrats and their agitprop networks while the Republicans just ran roughshod Locally everything is either comfortably liberal held or so hopelessly gerrymandered that my vote is entirely pointless. I'll turn out for socialists or on the rare occasion that something is contested, otherwise I don't bother. For perspective I'm coming from a purple turned red state in 2012 that is now probably never going to be in contention again for as long as I live and gerrymandering and statehouse intervention in local legislation means every cycle will see my already largely ceremonial vote becoming less and less relevant to anything Losing Virginia sucks but at least it's so close to political and fundraising bases that the party probably isn't gonna entirely give up on it like they've done with so many others. Always like reminding people that they've never once actually been permitted to vote for POTUS regardless of what the ballot said lol
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Dec 3, 2021 20:08
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Gonna continue to vote for the least bad candidate in every election, even though the higher up you go, the less meaningful difference there is between your options. Voting is easy, though I certainly acknowledged that's a privileged position and I'm not currently being targeted with Jim Crow 2.0, and I get it's less easy for a lot of people. I don't think that voting is a ceiling on political activity. If you have the time and energy to do so, it should be a floor. "Just vote" absolutely isn't enough at all and again becomes less effective the less local it gets. As for voting third party, we're about 10 years away from that being anything but a spoiler/wasted vote. The binary choice people have, in practice, is an effect of our current political system and neither party wants that to change. "Break free from what the media tells you and vote your conscience" ignores the structural issues that are designed to enforce the binary and very few people are working on changing them. In terms of "don't reward dems with your vote or they have no incentive to change", that mainly comes down to tactics and what happens after Dems are a permanent minority. Which they may already be given the current redistricting.
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Dec 3, 2021 21:16
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Voting is fine if you're into it but wearing the "I Voted!" sticker is for absolute sickos
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Dec 3, 2021 21:20
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e: wrong forum
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Dec 4, 2021 01:54
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Uncle Boogeyman posted:Voting is fine if you're into it but wearing the "I Voted!" sticker is for absolute sickos It's been discussed to death on various iterations of the r/relationships thread but people who force others, like the general public or their family members at a holiday meal, to participate in their fetish by proximity/observation are bad.
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Dec 5, 2021 15:30
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Uncle Boogeyman posted:Voting is fine if you're into it but wearing the "I Voted!" sticker is for absolute sickos Virginia started putting stickers on the mail-in ballots but I couldn't peel mine off
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Dec 5, 2021 16:29
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At this point, the dems are a toilet that folks flush time, money, mental energy and effort much needed elsewhere down. That's the only thing that can really be said.
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Dec 5, 2021 17:12
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The reason that this thread is so quiet is because contrarians need to post their spicy takes in active threads, and thus giving them their own thread proves to be futile It's the same reason that places like Gab or Parler are ghost towns compared to Twitter, it's because contrarians want to use the ostensibly "normal" spaces that everyone else uses, but they don't want to act in good faith like everyone else is
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Dec 5, 2021 23:08
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Trazz posted:The reason that this thread is so quiet is because contrarians need to post their spicy takes in active threads, and thus giving them their own thread proves to be futile yup. if the point is to loudly proclaim and shame how wrong your posting enemies (both sides of the fight) are, you aren't doing it in the offshoot thread with like 20 posts, you're doing it in the main us politics threads people read
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Dec 5, 2021 23:10
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It comes up there a lot because it has such relevance to all current events. But there's a big group of posters who don't post actual arguments here or post here at all.
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Dec 5, 2021 23:19
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Ytlaya posted:The view that things are improving is a sick and warped perspective born from apathy towards the mass murder and immiseration our nation has participated in and continues to participate in to this day. Never mind how many minorities think we've made progress. California is an interesting argument. All I can say I lived there for years till I moved to DC, and their politics are a special kind of hosed. Single party states are bad, y'all.
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Dec 6, 2021 00:38
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That this is a spillover thread and that the issue of electoralism is so contentious in USPOL, I think, shows how the left in general (to the extent that this forum represents "the left") is feeling. People feel frustrated because they are unheard and underrepresented by the elite politicians who are supposed to "represent" them in Washington. Feeling frustrated and unheard causes lashing out, and since none of the elite politicians are listening and barely know we even exist, that frustration is mistargeted at the people around you. It's a similar process to "they took 'er jerbs". I understand why people feel this way because I've felt especially impotent these days myself. I hated the feeling of having to sit by and watch as my rights - and the rights of people around me - were curtailed by unaccountable elites when Trump was in office, and I hate it even more now with the "good guys" in power but unwilling/unable to upset the apple cart. This is the limits of our "representative" so-called democracy: in theory, a president, a congress and the Supreme Court represent a majority of the people who elected the officials who appointed the judges. In reality, the creation of an elite class of politicians and the requirement to be independently wealthy to run for office creates a separation between the ruling class and us "common folk" they don't understand or care about. It's a big club and none of us are in it. The system is rotten from top to bottom and I'm very skeptical that anything short of revolution will fix it, but that isn't stopping me from trying to work on the local level to feed the hungry and house the homeless. F_Shit_Fitzgerald fucked around with this message at 02:35 on Dec 6, 2021 |
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Dec 6, 2021 02:30
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I don't think this forum represents much at all beyond the views of the 100-200 people who participate here regularly. Most of the views posted here are the kind of stuff you won't really see in the wild outside of maybe some weird twitter rabbit holes. I would particularly caution against seeing sa's politics discussion as broadly or generally representative at all.
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Dec 6, 2021 02:46
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I don't think SA is especially representative, but I do think my theory is probably correct that the neverending arguments over "Dems bad" are - for the most part - because people feel helpless and frustrated. Voting is supposed to be a pressure valve for those feelings, but it's not because voting is suppressed and not representative. Protest doesn't work because murder has been legalized after August 12th and Rittenhouse. You can appeal to politicians directly, but more likely than not they won't care to hear anything you have to say (Bernie and The Squad are notable exceptions).
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Dec 6, 2021 03:23
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The two parties pretty much have a stranglehold on our political system. The economics of these parties are important. The Republican party has an immense problem because the center of the Republican party, it's organizational and its financial core is wealthy people and big companies. And the problem right away is that is a small number of people. Maybe, a million or two million. We have a population of 330 million and whatever that number is very small so they're not going to be able to control politics or to be a political force if only what they rely on us is themselves. There's not enough of them not even close. So in order for the Republican party to function, to be a political force, to do what it does in this culture it has to find a way to get other people aligned with it. There is a famous Italian Marxist, Antonio Gramsci, who had a whole theory about how the people in charge have to take over, control things, in his language achieve hegemony, a control of the whole society by building a hegemonic block he called it. He was analyzing Italian society but he understood it applied everywhere. So the rich in the United States corporations and wealthy people who are the core of the Republican party who finance and make it possible they have to build a block. They have to get large groups of people to see themselves as aligned with them. First they have been building and they have been very successful for at least half an century in building an alliance with the military. That's very, very important. We have two or three million people who directly or indirectly relate to the military sometimes more in periods of warfare. That's a lot of votes. Millions of voters. They can work out a deal. We as a party, the Republicans, we will be generous to a fault. We'll fund anything. You have a new aircraft carrier? We'll take six. You put us in political office and we will make the military happy. You want a new aircraft? We'll get you one. You want to have bases all over we'll get you those we'll do it. We ask only for two things in return. One: you vote for us. The majority of the military votes for Republicans and has for decades but the second thing is we would like you to take the money we so generously give to you and pay us way higher prices for what we sell to you then you could ever have to pay if you ever bought anywhere else. That's an unending scandal. We will fund you and you overpay us and we'll take the over payment you give us and fund you with it. Scratching each others back. That has worked really well. There are a large number of Americans for whom it is extremely important that as they drive into town in their pickup truck on a little rack in the back window behind them there are guns lots of them. And the republicans say this is wonderful. You should have these guns. You should have all kinds of guns. You should have them on your body when you go to the store because then the large horde seeking to separate you from your money will think twice because you may shoot them. So the Republicans celebrate the gun carriers. The Republicans announce that they love churches. Oh boy do they love Churches. Because have ambivalent feelings about churches. This is an important constituency for the Republicans. Another group is, for a lack of a better term  Libertarians . People who have decided that the real evil in the world is the government. Oh boy do they hate the government. If we could just get the government out wow would we be happy. The government is terrible. They are not so good at explaining why the government is so terrible. It's self evident. Why? Because that's what governments are. It's obvious.So the Republicans have built powerful alliances with religious folks of all kinds, with gun advocates, with the military, and racists of all kinds, and another group for whom immigration is the great evil in the world. There is lots of them. They have to build these alliances. Because they got a lot problems the Republicans, this group of big businesses and the rich. Little business of which there are many more than big ones. Big ones are the big powerful but for every big one there is five thousand little ones and little ones are constantly discovering that the big ones are their enemy. The big ones control the prices that the little ones have to pay if they're going to survive. The big ones can decide at a certain moment to go into a business wiping out the little ones who try to survive. So there is lots of tension. So the republicans realize we need all these little businesses. We will denounce government for making life hard for little businesses and we'll denounce unions because they threaten little business and that'll show the little businesses that we are their buddy even though they know we are often their enemy. This is a tension. And the religious people are a little tense too because the religious people listen to those leaders talk about the importance of religion and then look at how they live and realize they are not practicing what they preach. In fact they are doing everything that is denounced in the church and more then everybody else and they seem to playing us religious folks for fools. Oh, that can hurt. There is a constant tension. And then there are the gun tooters, and the racists who also kind of know somewhere and suspect that the reason the government is such a hateful thing for them is because they don't control the government which leads to the thought who does and that can take you right back to the big business and the rich. Which means the very people the big business and the rich have to hold in are always edgy and not so sure. So it is a very difficult thing for the Republicans to hold on to the mass of people to keep these alliances with subsections of them from dissolving on them. The core of the Democratic party is the same thing: big business and wealthy people. Different groups of them but basically big businesses and wealthy people. If you are ever in doubt go look up any of the internet sources of the funding of the two big parties and you'll see very quickly how dependent they are, both of them, on a relatively very small part of our population that funds them and provides them with all of their basic needs of function. The Democrats therefor have the same problem: how do you get a mass of people? The Democrats however go to a different group of folks. First of all the Democrats work very hard to convince poor people at least the poor people that vote that they are somehow their friend . We are the friend of the poor people. We are the friend of union members. We are the friend of the unions. We are the friend of minorities, ethnic minorities, racial minorities. We're the friend of women, particularly the Democrats are focusing on single women, most women being single these days. That's a big voting block and they did very well. No way that Biden would have won without the vote of single women it was wildly lopsided in their favor.Academics, big support among academics, school teachers at all levels who of course let that leak in the class room making young people tilt. LGBTQ+ people. Ecologically minded folks. The Democrats go after all of them. But they also have terrible trouble because the very people they claim to be for look at them and say "Ugh, what are you doing for me?" If you are a union member for example when Obama ran, and I don't want to pick on Obama because he's no different from all the other presidents but that's the point he isn't any different. When Obama came in the unions said we want one thing from you we want the dues check off business to be adjusted so that it'll be a little easier for us to gather the signatures for a majority of the workers at a place we want to organize and if we sign these cards then we can get an election for a union. Card check that was what is was called. That's what they wanted and Obama promised it to them when he was running for office in 2008. He gets into office in 2008. He gets re-elected in 2012. It's as if it never happened. He didn't get that the bill, it was never put through *poof* it's gone. So the unions keep supporting the Democratic party because they are convinced that the Republicans would be worse for them. Probably true. But they don't get anything and that leads to a lot of bitterness, resentment, and that sits there and that makes that alliance weaker and weaker. Poor people, it's not good to be poor in case you hadn't noticed. We kind of know that. The Democratic party promise all kinds of things to poor people but the delivery is lets call it spotty . That makes poor people think voting is a waste of time. Minorities the same thing, immigrants the same thing, academics the same thing, women the same thing.The Democratic party sometimes have an easier time because they can always point to the Republicans and that so terrifies large numbers of people they need an alliance with that they can hold them but it's not because people are enthusiastic about the Democratic party it's this endless lesser of two evils game that they play and that's not a very secure way. Beneath the veneer of two big powerful parties is a very fragile, very insecure, very wobbly structure. They are not the big power houses they would have us all believe. They are very shaky. Here is where the shakiness could get interesting suppose the mass of people that the Republicans have drawn in to a shaky alliance and the mass of the Democratic party that those leaders have drawn in suppose they all more or less at the same time began to say "Wait a minute. There is another option. We don't have to be patsies for the Republicans or for the Democrats. Suppose we all got together and supported another party.". Not only would that party be very powerful but the Republicans and Democrats would be no match for it at all. They would be reduced to what they are: the rich and the corporate leaders. Don't think that is some kind of a pie in the sky. Don't think that that is impossible. Why not? Jon Pod Van Damm fucked around with this message at 03:52 on Dec 20, 2021 |
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Dec 6, 2021 06:38
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Not sure why people are posting about the Dems in the US News and Current Events thread rather than here, in the proper silo.
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Dec 16, 2021 08:47
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Corky Romanovsky posted:Not sure why people are posting about the Dems in the US News and Current Events thread rather than here, in the proper silo. Because the Dems are terrible wherever you go
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Dec 16, 2021 14:51
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Corky Romanovsky posted:Not sure why people are posting about the Dems in the US News and Current Events thread rather than here, in the proper silo. Because contrarians need to post their spicy takes in active threads instead of spillover threads that no one reads
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Dec 17, 2021 02:12
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| # ? Apr 19, 2024 15:26 |
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I think the underlying issue that the US Party system has is that it presumes coalitions instead of allowing coalitions to naturally build. In other countries, you often end up with multiple parties that build coalitions in given elections. So, you get some actual compromise. In the US though, Liberals, Leftists, and Progressives just default to being in party together. The Liberal Party would still probably be more successful and prominent than a Progressive or Leftist Party and you might end up with Biden-type being leader regardless, but actual concessions would need to be made to get everyone to build a coalition and the minority parties within the coalition would hold leverage. I think what I don't like about the rhetoric here is you get into these fantasies of basically killing the Democratic Party and making a new party, but I think that's a pretty farfetched fantasy where we have the exact same hosed up system except Liberals are the marginalized group within the party. I empathize with it because the system is incredibly hosed up and the reality is that the rest of the world has actually refined representative government while the US is stuck with a first draft built on a bunch of institutions that literally only exist to appease slave owners. And there is just not a clear way to actually fix things. We're a country that needs a new Constitution but a country that would probably make a horrific new Constitution.
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Dec 17, 2021 18:36
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