Mamdani is a clean-cut conventionally attractive man (with a conventionally attractive wife) who looks good in a suit. Trump loves "central casting" looking people, and Mamdani has that look. He also craves the admiration and approval of the NYC elite.

I'm actually quite sympathetic to direct realism, and I agree that it tends to be dismissed much too hastily by professional philosophy. That said, I'm struggling to see a tension between that position and the standard (what you're calling "Chalmerite") account of consciousness. The standard view doesn't dismiss stuff like intelligence or cognition, but rather just (very plausibly) separates those capacities from the experiential aspect of consciousness (qualia). While I don't think tht whole p-zombie line of argument is especially convincing, I do think it is useful to be able to distinguish between things like intentionality and qualitative experience. Of course, in minds like ours all of this comes as part of a package, but I see no reason to think that minds like ours occupy the whole of the space of all possible minds, and I don't see any reason to think that (say) intelligence or goal-directed agency must always come with the kind of subjective experience we have. That's all the definition is supposed to do.

None of that seems to me to be in tension with direct realism. I can talk about qualia and the what-it-is-likeness of my experience of the world while also admitting that that experience directly reflects the world as it truly is. We need not believe in something like the Cartesian theater to think that what it is like for me to see a chair is a distinct physical process from the chair itself. I'm extremely sympathetic to your picture of sense organs as measurement devices (and also tend to think, as I suspect you do, that the "explanatory gap" is overblown), but I'd like to hear more about the tension you see here.

Picard was of the best, healthiest, and most non-toxic masculine role models in popular culture--a great depiction of how a man can be strong without being a bully and kind without being a pushover. TNG (and Picard in particular) was enormously influential on me growing up, and Patrick Stewart himself seemed like a really good guy off-stage as well. I don't tend to give a shit about celebrity deaths, but this one sucks.

problems with buses transporting voters to polling stations

That's a fun way to say "fascists kept shutting down busses."

No sooner had we had our first dinner at the White House, which is a very seductive and beautiful place

Young Man. Cheesecake Factory Astounds.

I say Young Man! Cheesecake Factories Abound!

I just learned that this guy is not Ezra Klein.

Archimedean death ray technical

"What the hell? They just updated my job description to include "viciously bullying dorky oligarchs" as a responsibility?"

Yes, this is a major contributor. I teach a scientific writing class, and we spend the first several weeks work shopping a single piece of theirs from 750 words down to (eventually) 250 words. They have to unlearn the habit of saying everything in the longest, fluffiest, emptiest way possible. They developed that habit because most of their English assignments have heavily penalized them for only having 8 pages of stuff to say for a 10 page assignment. It's second nature by this point, and it makes for very bad writing. They're shocked to have to deal with maximum word counts instead of minimum, as well as by how much better (and shorter) their writing gets when you remove all the "of course, under some circumstances, it may well be true that..." style constructions.

I think the results are skewed because they're so often phrased as "your country." My answers would be very different if I lived in a nation that was actually benevolent instead of

I got anarcho-syndicalist though so not too far off I guess.