Well yes… Because liberalism if very forward in enabling a lot of personal property rights and is generally in tension with socialism. We’ve had an awfully long period of treating liberalism as the air we breathe.

But whenever we talk about liberalism it is important to remember it’s a whole package deal of a host of distinct concepts that were basically come up with by the handful of people who claimed the school of thought. It encompasses such vastly differing sources as the spirit of the French Revolutionaries declaring the Rights of Men AND the class obsessed, monarchy friendly, property rights forward English intelligencia. Liberalism holds within it a multitude of characters and we are seeing some of the design flaws now but in it’s day it was a radical dissolution of power of the state from an authoritarian norm that is alien to our modern sensibilities.

Liberalism has become a dirty word by virtue of it basically being compatible with a variable degree of capitalism and we are in an age of unchecked capitalism. Personally I think a balance of heavy socialism and very moderated liberalism to keep power from tipping too much towards state consolidation is actually pretty stable. But I think people like the emotional fire of the Communists writers because it’s evocative and because throwing everything in the trash and starting over speaks to the anger of feeling disenfranchised.

This is not correct. Rights are a construct of human law that can be traced to a series of foundational legal documents and structures of government processes. It evolved out of the privileges given by royalty to variable degrees of their subjects into the ideas foundational to liberalism and other political philosophies of humanitarian ethics which established an idea of aspects of human life and choices that were sacrosanct from government interference or entitlements citizens have in their systems. You have probably heard of the phrase “God given rights” but that is more or less just a saying that came from the concept of rights becoming such a social norm that one considers them the air we breathe.

Religious individuals, from personal experience, tend to have an issue grocking the idea that ethics are not dependent on the idea of a God outright telling you what is good or bad - secular ethics isn’t about what gets you punished or not by an authority. It determines what is correct based off of different rubrics based on the individual school of ethics one applies. More often ethical systems, including modern law systems, are based out of some idea of empathy towards harm and struggles in life divorced entirely from the idea of punishment by a divine being.

Rights are also place dependent because they are built into the law system of whatever country you are in. If you are in China for instance you do not have a right to free speech, the Government can censor you or exact retribution for trying to publish or communicate certain things. Like any law though just cuz it’s on the books doesn’t mean it’s in play. Russia technically has a right to free speech but their courts basically ignore infringement on it when it suits them to do so.

There is an idea of an international code of human rights… But really it is still considered a lower priority than the idea of individual nation sovereignty so protection of those rights is toothless and it is effectively more like gold star guidelines put forward by committee than actual rules.

Honestly… You were voting for a Hitler that would destroy protections and target vulnerable people on your home soil as scapegoats or a group who can be counted on at least to uphold the freedoms you and vulnerable groups have as a citizen on paper. Those were the only two choices you had. You can rail about how sub par your choice was but in the end you had two… and you didn’t fear the one you needed to enough in my opinion.

You can continue to beat your fists about how shit the Democrats were but if you wanted more options then that was not your moment to demand them. As one who is LGBTQIA+ in Canada with a lot of American friends I know so many people who are now scared for their lives and livelyhoods who are abandoning marriage plans in favour of courthouse weddings and are scrambling to try and get visas. I know the realities of them finding long term safety here is a shit shoot and I am trying to do what I can. I am seeing the cost of people I know upending their lives because they no longer feel safe. I was here for months beforehand listening to so many people looking at this two choice system and treating the election like a game of chicken. I am so personally angry because so many of you might as well have said “Well that’s a rainbow colored sacrifice I’m willing to make.”

I might not be the one to try and justify how Democrats were not good enough for you because that wasn’t the question you were being asked.

I mean, I am Canadian and have been writing my MPs for literally years now and doing what rabble rousing I can but it really is a ridiculously hard system to crack. It was everybody’s election promise 10 years ago back when Trudeau was first elected and I am a part of a group of people whose rage has been simmering like the surface of the sun for decades.

Getting people to actually UNDERSTAND first past the post as a systemic weakness it is and to buy into electoral reform is grassroots hell. One thing you have going for you is that essentially the entire system is breaking down and is cause for immediate genuine alarm which if you do this right should light a fire under your asses to actually march and DEMAND change.

They didn’t vote for Trump - they misunderstood the system that was in place.

Republican citizen groups have been going over the rolls in key states and removing by challenge registered Democrats who had any small errors on their registration sowing confusion and making otherwise eligible people ineligible.

Republican resources were used to amplify third party candidates who never had a hope of success due to the nature of construction of the system to create spoiler effects. If you thought Jill Stein was a real electable option you can look back at prior elections.

The concept of moral abstention from this election removed people who otherwise would have voted Democrat as the lesser of two possible evils from the system.

Basically since First past the post is a winner take all system Even if 70 percent of the public hates the Republican platform all they have to do is win a majority voting share, that doesn’t mean they have to win your vote. They just have to mean that they have to remove your vote from supporting their main competition. They can do that via sowing apathy or divison or by changing the structure of the voting process through gerrymandering and other tactics that any dedicated volunteer can do if they are willing to slog under the assumption that what they are doing is ethically sound “payback”. The fact is that these voting systems do not support the will of a majority and both established parties have benefited from that historically… But Republicans stopped playing by the rules awhile ago and they are marketing masters.

Since Republicans have basically outlined their goals to destroy the checks and balances of the system of government basically all they needed was to keep up the ruse that the system somehow rewards people who act outside of the two party choice the system was designed to deliver. Democrats, hoping to play the long game couldn’t out the system they have benefitted from as being a rigged game if they wanted it to continue … So anything but a vote for a Democratic candidate was basically automatically an increase in share to the Republicans by virtue of subtraction hence why a lot of us are unhappy…particularly those of us who tried to explain this shit beforehand and were told we were scum for supporting genocidal regimes. I don’t like Democrats but they at least support the Laissez-faire systems that allow leftists to utilize their power as private citizens to support foreign intervention. I don’t give a snowball’s chance in hell that the support people have managed to give Palestinian interests thusfar will be able to continue at all under the Republicans.

It’s not just that.

One thing that the Republicans got real good at was piping the idea of election fraud into their base. Part of what they’ve been doing is getting devoted citizens to target individuals they suspect to be democrat friendly and pouring over their registration paperwork. If they find anything amiss they report it which has made it nessisary to show up and defend one’s right to vote to the administrative bodies on a schedule.

https://youtu.be/CkK3W0lOKcc?si=OT4mOCnlZosTGbld

It’s meant that relatively small wildcat groups of citizens have managed to target literal tens of thousands of voters in swing states to cause confusion and delegitimize voters based on minute errors.

They find new ways to rig the game because they believe that they are owed this.

So he’s fine if we remove all toilet paper from bathrooms. How he wipes his ass is his parent’s responsibility right?

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.

You need to call your relatives. If one of my second cousins whom I never met gives me a call saying that they are in your position and don’t know where to turn I am driving out 4 hours to pick them up at the drop of a hat.

It is going to be be hard but there are means to get free. Explore your options once you are safe but right now job one is get safe.

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.

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.

That the tech has evolved to be better actually is an assumption. The novel data problem hasn’t been meaningfully addressed really at all so mostly we assume that progress has been made… but it’s not meaningful progress. The promises being made for future capability is mostly pretty stale hype that hasn’t changed year to year with a lot of the targets remaining unchanged. We are getting more data on where specifically and how it’s failing, which is something, but overall it appears to be a plateau of non-linear progress with different updates being sometimes less safe than newer ones.

That actually safe self driving cars might be decades away however is antithetical to the hype run marketing campaigns that are working overtime to put up smoke and mirrors around the issue.

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.

Huh. So I imagined the ball on the table immediately as a colorless glass sphere on a white table. Before I even read the prompt to push the ball in my imagination I had already placed my index finger on the ball and was rolling it around it place like a fidgit so I just tapped the ball to push it with my index finger so the person who pushed the ball was me (non-binary) for reasons that I was already interacting with the ball anyway. I imagined this in the first person so I didn’t really see myself in full. The ball itself was baseball sized and rolled a short distance, stopped and wobbled after being pushed.

I didn’t think about what the table was made of but the ball itself was glass that was smooth and cold to the touch. The table was square, waist height and dining room table sized. The room these objects were in was featureless and visualization was instant upon reading.

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.

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!