So he's fine if we remove all toilet paper from bathrooms. How he wipes his ass is his parent's responsibility right?
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I've seen a fair number of people on here who deny the spoiler effect is a thing... I for one am glad that idiot RFK didn't catch on until AFTER he signed the paperwork.
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More than a little frustrating
Not really. The Democrats are aware of the effect but if they lose they basically just go back to the drawing board. They actively benefit from a lack of knowledge of the FPTP drawbacks so they don't bring it up unless things get dire enough to tip their hand. They have been squirrelly about letting that understanding flourish so they have been putting forward a sacrificial lamb in the form of the Electoral College to keep people's eye off the prize.
But unless you get a once in a lifetime knife edge minority government third parties tend to be unstable voting blocks who don't have the ability to influence schedules which is where the real power lies. They might vote their hearts but it doesn't matter if they can't even propose time on the floor for their issues.
From the standpoint of the beneficiaries of the spoiler effect you are a sacrifice that is useful because if we are having this conversation then we aren't talking about more threatening things lile election reform.
I mean... We here in Vancouver BC just had a Provincial election that is so fiercely fought they are still tallying votes a week after the fact and the winner still has not been officially declared and we have no idea if we have a minority or majority government because some districts (ridings) are like 20 votes apart.
Our election is on fire... Just not literally.
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More than a little frustrating
It's not about the player, it's about the game. Two party first past the post systems are subject to the weakness of the "Spoiler effect" which is a legitimate problem with the design of the system.
As a Canadian this is a well known and well worn principle of our election landscape as "strategic voting" has been byword in elections for about 20 years. The Electoral College creates additional complexity that is more or less something that can be pointed to as the source of the problem but the issues are much deeper.
I know it's really hard to actually come up against these principles and lose one's innocent belief that the system rewards your type of participation... But you need to look beyond the gloss and realize how cracked the system is otherwise you will be played.
What the hell are you talking about? Basically the American establishment has been Pro Israel since it's inception. You have a two party system that treats this as the air America breathes effectively speaking you aren't and never were going to be voting about the stance of Israel in this election. If you want that you need to organize and fight like hell and you should but there is nothing anyone can say or do to change the election promises on the table right now. If they could, they already would have.
But that means that you are still voting for something. You are voting for everything else on the table. In your country's case, your chance to actually have elections in another four years.
You have noble concerns but you are letting them blind you to the reality here. This election is important. Republicans have spend decades rigging the game so they need less voters to win and their candidates have started spewing outright Nazi rhetoric. While your veiw is in the distance the wolf is in the grass in front of you. You need to deal with this first if you want your country not to not remove your personal power to influence it further... And I'm not inferring elections, I mean other forms of resistance.
I mean seeing how he has probably pissed off just about every theater kid living by now it's just deserts. Nobody is racing down from the booth with a lav for this guy.
Can you blame the left? The dance of interfacing with Conservative rhetoric means constantly having to change up tactics under the assumption that the person doesn't understand because the alternatives to that are that they either refuse to understand because they are selfish and want to be comfortable at the expense of other people's safety... or because they do understand but they are creating scapegoats and targets for the deliberate harm of others because doing so gives them kickbacks or because they think those people are deserving of harm.
Believing they are being tricked or haven't actually thought things through at least gives one the comfortable idea that one's fellow man is not evil or indifferent to evil as long as they benefit. Right wingers think leftists are elitist and leftists hope that right wingers are dumb because being dumb is still better than being actually cruel.
A lot of the distinction of sex and gender gets muddied because as scientific evidence mounted about how blurry the lines between the sexes actually were "gender" ( not as we understand it in a modern queer context) started out as a construct that played fast and loose with phenotype and form to create a scientific construct of sex. It's in part why gender is sometimes a synonym for sex because it was aiming to preserve a biological binary which was really falling apart.
However philosophy looked at that construct and elaborated on what they were seeing and realizing that we draw arbitrary cultural lines around these things so "gender performativity" theory tends to group gender as something you do.
However gender performativity theory doesn't really cover what trans people experience. Basically, a lot of gender dysphoria is actually closer to the original use of gender. It involves people reacting to their physical bodies sex characteristics not falling in line with a sort of internal compulsion...so for a severely compressed example if I feel like everytime I am reminded through language that I do not conform to the physical features typical of the male phenotype I feel depressed, anxious and like essentially life has denied me something essential to me then I can backwards engineer that series of reactions to "I am a man / male"... Man might be a cultural category but the lack of the cultural category isn't what is upsetting, it's the social construct of woman drawing attention to the real problem of existing in my own body.
So where this gets culturally sticky is if someone insisting I am "female" it really is no different then misgendering. What's often culturally happening is they are just trying to do it in a pseudo scientific way which is why people will call you out on it.... Here's where it gets complicated. Trans people are a group of people who are lay masters with personal experience of the malleable nature of physical sex and the science of sex. Since the people often trying to categorize us as "male and female" alone are not actually giving any kind of scientific specificity it's not actually correct in a scientific biology based context so when we say you are wrong we usually don't mean it on a strictly metaphysical axis. We mean, * that's not how science uses those words*.
If I have been on testosterone a while and a couple of surgeries / or if I never went through a feminizing puberty at all I am going to fit more aspects of the male phenotype than female. I might have female chromasomal make up... but chromasomal makeup is only one facet of sex. If you wanted to be actually scientifically correct in regard to the "biological sex" of a trans person then you are going to have to take us on as individuals and that answer is going to be a lot more complicated than just rendering it down to "male" or "female". From a strictly taxonomic perspective a lot of us have become intersex. We biologically fit a category that is beyond the male/ female binary... We just did so as a matter of using technology to achieve that end.
That is calculated I think... Having been stuck in forced proximity to Conservatives for awhile the party line is that Russia isn't as bad as people make it out to be, Putin is a good guy, the left is constructing Russia as a boogey man when they do "so much right".
Kamala I think is pretty adept at code switching. When dealing with Conservative audiences you pick your battles because if you trip too hard on one of their landmines where you have to go on a long fight to up end one of their propaganda efforts then chances are they stop listening to everything.
To be honest no... Because I think I violently expunged it from my memory and mind as my brain probably interpreted it as some kind of threat to my cells.
I read a bunch of those books because my roommate was in love with them. It established an idea of a writing flaw in my mind that I called "The Heirachy of Cool". Basically the guy practically has an established character list of who is the coolest. Whichever character in any given scene is at the top of the hierarchy is mythically awesome. They have their shit together, they are functionally correct in their reasoning, they lead armies, they pull off grand maneuvers, they escape danger whatever...
But anyone below them in the Heirachy turn into complete morons who serve as foils to make the people above them seem more awesome whenever they share page time together. These characters seem to have accute amnesia about stuff that canonically happened very recently (in previous books) so they can complicate things for the hierarchy above, they usually make poor decisions due to crisises of faith in people above them in the hierarchy... But because that hierarchy is infallible it's predictable. Less cool never is proven right over more cool.
... Until that same character is suddenly alone and they go from being mid of the hierarchy to the top and all of a sudden they have iron wills and super competence...
Once I caught onto that pattern it became intolerable to continue.
"The Cat Who Walked through Walls" by Robert Heinlein...
Now Heinlein is usually kind of obnoxiously sexist so having a book that opens with what appears to be an actual female character with not just more personality than a playboy magazine centerfold, but what seems like big dick energy action heroesque swagger felt FRESH. Strong start as you get this hyper competent husband and wife team quiping their way through adventures in the backwoods hillbilly country of Earth's moon with their pet bonsai tree to stop a nefarious plot with some promised dimensional McGuffin.
Book stalls out in the middle as they end up in like... A swinger commune. They introduce a huge number of characters all at once alongside this whole poly romantic political dynamic and start mulling over the planning stage of what seems like a complicated heist plot. Feels a lot like a sex party version of the Council of Elrond with each of these characters having complex individual dramas they are in the middle of resolving...
Aaaand smash cut. None of those characters mattered. We are with the protagonist, the heist plan failed spectacularly off stage and we are now in his final dying moments where we realized that cool wife / super spy set him up to fail like a chump at this very moment for... reasons? I dunno, Bitches amirite?
First time I ever finished a book and threw it angrily into the nearest wall.
Do I detect a little Barbara Laslett and Johanna Brenner in there? Love the post, chef's kiss!
Honestly don't know about the specifics to verify or checked the sources but on first blush it feels pretty correct.
My mental situation is such that I have a very strong memory recall and approach learning pretty voraciously. Around topics I enjoy I build a sort of mental map to compare and recall things creating a sort of landscape of understanding over a wide range of topics. I pick up a lot of fabrication based tasks quickly in part because I've realized that my imagination renders things in full three dimensions allowing me to imagine builds in stages and troubleshoot at the concept stage... which as I have come to understand it isn't ubiquitous for most people and is tied into the form of dyslexia I have.
All in all though it's a pretty isolating experience being this way. I chose a career that is non academic and a lot of people at some point or another imply that it's a "waste" of my mind. Some people react to me as a threat, as though I am judging them or showing off or lying about my interests or must be exaggerating the things I demonstrate some small mastery over. Listening to those who have known me over a long period of time describe me to other people is often sobering. While it's often flattering the impression is that I am sort of a sort of wonderous jack of all trades eccentric who operates on a different scale of time than other people.
To experience it from my perspective though, I have a sense generally of the line where most people are likely to absorb or remember things and know from people's reactions exactly how much of a weirdo I come across as when I step past that boundry. Neurodivergance is a neutral term, it just boils down to "a different brain". The more different one is generally the harder it is for other people to intuit your needs. My experience with teachers in school is that I could understand as a child that the system of reporting progress required me to do things that I found intolerable so that essentially the system could report metrics back to measure things in a systemic way. But that system wasn't serving me what would have been personally tolerable by actually challenging me and also didn't particularly care about me as a person. I figured out that most of that scorecard was meaningless while I was beholden to the system. A number of teachers realized I was imbibing the lessons I just wasn't playing the game and their reactions to that were often pretty sympathetic.
Alberta adopted this model and saw an increase in public health wait times and a sharp increase in the required government spending required to run the public system.
Creating a two tiered system means that it bleeds doctors, nurses and admin into the private sector which is fundamentally at odds with the philosophy that everyone deserves the right to life sustaining care. If the rich want to dodge the cue then they can quite frankly afford the plane ticket. If the system is being undermined by politicians - oust the politicians. Let them know that that system is of the highest priority and should be first to see reinvestment.
But we should all be aware that Canada is one of the most challenging landscapes for delivery of any kind of health care. We are diffuse over a large landmass and the commitment to the system means that if you live in a remote place 2 hours away from the nearest surgery then the government is on the hook to spend an outsized amount of budget to uphold the commitment of care for you. The temptation to cut corners is always there and each Provincial trust is its own battleground. That we have the level of service we do is a credit to the efficacy of public health systems... Which means upping the costs to create competitive private sector development hurts us all.
It may be a step up for Americans to have any system at all as a right to health safety net but it's a sharp step down for anywhere running a full public system.
On the next episode of "historical figures who were gay as fuck"... Leonardo Da Vinci.
That is actually one of the major issues at play. One of the kind of predatory things about right wing politics is it plays into a fallacy that the truth is simple, easily recognizable and can be rendered down into axioms a child can understand. Anything that doesn't fall under these parameters cannot be the truth.
But science moved away from big axiomatic stuff like 50 years ago. It became the study of variation and nuance.
The left attempts to have a aspects of this simple explanation stuff in sections by adopting almost slogan-like things - take "Trans women are women" as an example. That easily digestible slogan sits on top of a whole bunch of consequentialist based philosophy, psychological research with a focus on harm reduction, a history of uphill public advocacy to just put trans issues on the radar and being trans itself isn't easy to explain. It is simple and quippy - but not axiomatic. So a lot of people on the right tear into it as a target because the optics of defending a short quippy but nuance laden argument in slogan form while keeping it short and easily digestible is basically impossible.
This issue is throughout progressive political thought. Any short form word we use to describe practically anything has a whole swack of addendums, hidden complications, edge cases and multiple historical definitions. If you use very technical language you can be more specific but then you can easily talk over the heads of your audience.
Well... Short answer talking about "the left" and "the right" is effectively doing something called "constructing a public". These are are not just political constructs, they are political constructs that do certain things. Neither of these constructs have hard boundaries and throughout time they shift.
But there is a distinct difference. When you look at the right, while the presentation changes they have a fairly straightforward citable group of guiding philosophy traceable through a small handful of writing. If you read Thomas Malthus and Edmond Burke they will sound like slightly more archaic versions of modern pundits on the right. When you listen to the modern pundits you will notice that they are very repetitive and what differentiates one from another is more or less just presentation style. That repetition of talking points changes it's arguements but never it's foundation. Since it's mostly in service of protecting a status quo where hereditary privilege is upheld it doesn't have to get complicated. It just has to justify the world as it has been and that humans are sneaky, fundamentally flawed and morally defunct but that by structuring society as a winnowing process where playing the game the rightful and just few will rise to the top.
But when you look at "the left" it's not an easy gradient, it's a loose scattering of little clusters of very different ideologies and guiding philosophies. Since it largely works of a guiding concept of dissolution of established aggregated personal fortunes and radical anti-supremacist framework of various forms it's not uniform. There's anti-colonialism, anti-racism, anti-monopolist, anti-capitalist, anti-discriminatory, pro-neurodiversity, expanded personal rights, pro public service, pro democratic and anti democratic groups, pro freedom of movement, anarchists, and acedemic political theorists each with individual theories about how to bring about a state of all these things when none of this has in living memory existed. It's not generally trying to defend a status quo but trying to feild test different ways of doing things... So basically everybody and their dog has a slightly different opinion of what is a good idea.
It's kind of hard to see " bad faith actors" as it were because any two leftists might have almost no ideological overlap as far as praxis. They might not see each other as being part of the same tribe even if outsiders looking in would classify them as "left" and they might all claim to be "left" themselves... It's not that it's contradictory, it's that the branching paths of divergent evolving philosophies have rambled off in a whole bunch of different directions and effectively become whole other creatures entirely.
Well I dunno if he is an anti-christ. There never is a specification that there is a singular anti christ and they are often pluralized. There's a pretty low bar to be an anti christ and they aren't particularly a big deal. Basically according to script anybody who denies Jesus as being the son of God is an anti-christ and that's pretty common. Any given day you'll encounter a half dozen anti-christs. "The Antichrist" as in the one big one though isn't super specified in character and there's a bunch of options of not goodos who could fill the role
There is a separate nasty called the “the man of sin” and “son of perdition.” supposedly he will come at a time of a general apostasy, deceive people with signs and wonders, sit in the temple of God, and claim to be God himself. And a "Little Horn" (which I am not unconvinced just is a reference to a tiny dick) setting himself in the wing of a temple acting as though he is a divine authority and causing devistation of the Holy land... Which could fit?