Thanks! I knew what kind of replies I’d get, and did. Essentially, doubling-down on the electoral calculus argument, and not considering that other people have different motivations.
Thanks! I knew what kind of replies I’d get, and did. Essentially, doubling-down on the electoral calculus argument, and not considering that other people have different motivations.
For what it’s worth, I’m comparing what’s actually happening (genocide and the Middle East spiraling into war) with Democrats in office (tsk-tsking but providing material support to Netanyahu) to what history shows would likely happen with the other guy in office (hot air and bombast, but almost certainly not any greater material support).
Let’s break down this bullshit: A vote for Jill Stein is a vote for Jill Stein. The election clerks count ballots marked for Stein and report the vote totals that Stein received. A vote for Jill Stein is literally a vote for Jill Stein.
The statement that a vote for Stein is a vote for Trump is, of course, metaphorical. It’s asserting that a vote for Stein is morally equivalent to a vote for Trump by the speaker’s moral reckoning. It’s a rhetorical shortcut. This shortcut rests on the notion that either the voter would have voted for Harris, or that it is a moral imperative to stop Trump above all else.
That’s a moral judgement call. Other people may judge differently. Flatly stating that a vote for Stein is a vote for Trump so vehemently and absolutely elides any possibility of discourse and clearly tells the Stein voter that the speaker will not listen to or consider any of their views, or reasons to vote for Stein.
Fine, you believe that, but when has telling people more or less directly that you do not have any intention of considering their political beliefs won them over to your side? How is that a good tactic? If it worked, then why not employ it on Trump supporters? Go ahead, tell them that the party you support will ignore what they think and want, and demand they vote for your candidate.
If it doesn’t work on them, why should it work on Stein voters?
Which is which? Like, seriously. Put the recent headlines about Israel’s actions against the other guy’s vague, contradictory statements and demonstrated lack of deep interest in foreign affairs. It’s not clear at all.
This is how Wisconsin’s law is so fucked up: The three men he shot were not working together, were not coordinated, did not know each other. So, on the one hand, Rittenhouse may have subjectively felt under coordinated attack, he was not, but the subjective feeling is what matters for the law.
From Huber:s POV, he was trying to disarm a murderer. Maybe he felt threatened, too? But the law is so fucked, his POV doesn’t matter because he’s dead. In Grosskreutz’s POV, he was approaching an active shooter who’d just killed two men and trying to defuse the situation. When Rittenhouse pointed his gun, Grosskreutz would have been justified under the same law in blowing him away.
In short, the law incentivizes shooting first.
Okay, but I’m not on board yet. We start with the biggest crooks of all, the wage thieves, right?
Sometimes I write just for the fun of it, not trying to convince anybody. In this case, I was just matching the tone of the meme text.
Love it!
Gotta point out that, though, that most primates don’t eat a lot of bananas. The species that really seems to love bananas is homo sapiens. I worked at a grocery store for several years, and saw the sales numbers. Bananas are the biggest seller, and it’s not even close. They outsell whole categories of other products.
The boat in the old photo (from 1928, apparently) is casting a pretty good wake, and the man aboard is holding a tiller attached to a rudder. It’s impossible to tell for certain with the low-res image, but entirely likely that one of those shapes in the boat ahead of him is an inboard engine.
Seriously, tho!
Madison, WI just launched Bus Rapid Transit only on one route so far. But that route goes right past the stadium and arenas where the UW Badgers play their games, the city and university performing arts centers, the state Capitol, many popular music venues, and the State Street pedestrian mall. It has free park-and-ride lots at each end of the route. Lots of people say that they will ride in for events at these venues, so BRT hasn’t solved all our issues, but it’s lessening congestion and helping even drivers get around more quickly.
Oh, dear child, you have already succumbed, you’re part of the machine, and you don’t even know it. 😔 “This form of the Internet” == you are a consumer, passively ingesting the content created by the few, big players who gatekeep the marketplace of ideas. This is the Internet the capitalists want; you’re just grousing about the details of paying for it.
The old promise of revolutionary change on the Internet was the idea that it would be an all-to-all media, that the users would create the content, and shape the message. So if you want to fight what the Internet is becoming, stop fighting the capitalists on their own turf. They don’t care if some people pirate their stuff, as long as the money rolls in from the masses.
The best the can possibly happen if you teach everybody to pirate is to destroy the funding for content creation. Then all that will be left is the propaganda, the political ads, the messages pushed by somebody for ulterior motives. Unless…
Unless we teach the children to break that paradigm altogether. A person can live a happy life without any Hulu shows, or YouTube algorithms, or AAA games. Really. Become the creators. Leave the corporate walled gardens for the open, peer-to-peer Internet.
Or don’t. It’s hard, I know. Just don’t pretend that your Jellyfin server means you’ve broken free of the system.
People talk about black ice in near-mystical terms, like some sort of malevolent spirit that waits to ambush its prey. But, really, while it is every bit as slippery as they say, it’s also not hard to avoid. I’ve had great results by simply treating any pavement that looks “wet” as slippery black ice. It’s not hard to see; the pavement color changes. It’s not always black ice, but it’s the same principle at treating every gun as if it is loaded.
To jump in here with a clarification: Wisconsin does indeed have a bar exam. However, the Wisconsin courts offer diploma privilege to graduates of the Marquette and University of Wisconsin law schools. You do not need to sit for the bar exam if you graduate from those schools, but everybody else must pass the exam to gain admission.
Good news, though: Milwaukee and Madison are very blue cities.
He’ll be a martyr in prison, too. He needs to have a massive, disabling stroke so his followers can see him look irredeemably weak.
The first thing that comes to mind is that bacteria are prokaryotes, while plants are eukaryotes. They have internal membranes, called thylakoids, in which they do photosynthesis, but chloroplasts in plants are fully-developed organelles with their own DNA. If I recall correctly, the current thinking is that chloroplasts developed from endosymbiotic cyanobacteria.
Agreed, nothing inherently wrong with expensive toys for adults. For instance, I have a sailboat. I just don’t insist that everybody structure their lives and build their world around it.
And yet people get so bent out of shape when I point out that most cars are nothing more than expensive toys for adults.
Break the powers of the president into multiple different offices.
As long as we’re talking esoteric political ideas, the big one here is to split head of state from head of government. It might not affect the function of government much, because the head of state is largely ceremonial in modern systems, but it’s I think it’s super-important psychologically.
A lot of (most?) people have trouble thinking about the office of the President as an abstract concept separately from the person of the President. Therefore, the President becomes an avatar of the United States, taken to be the living embodiment of our identity as a nation. That’s why so many people freak out about “the destruction of America” when a member of the other party, with values they don’t share, becomes the President, and it makes elections feel like a polarizing, existential referendum.
By contrast, King Charles is the head of state in the UK, while the head of government (the prime minister) comes and goes, and a stable avatar of the nation, largely above politics. They have their share of major problems over there, to be sure, but at least the nation has a shared identity to rally around when needed.
More directly relevant, many members of Netanyahu’s government have also called for the extermination of all Palestinians, and they have the U.S. government providing political cover while they do it.