Drivebyhaiku @ Drivebyhaiku @lemmy.world

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2 yr. ago

Doesn't look feverish...

So this doesn't work as a simple math equation because you have to understand a lot of key concepts first. This has basically nothing to do with the electoral college system so we will put that aside and start with the "first past the post" system of determining elections.

On it's face the First Past the Post (FPP) seems fair. Highest percentage of votes for a candidate wins. But imagine a system where we have a lot of parties. Say there are five- The red, blue, yellow, green and purple parties. So you have an election and maybe the spread looks like this :

• RED 20%
• PURPLE 25%
• BLUE 15%
• YELLOW 10%
• GREEN 30%

So Green takes the election... However this doesn't actually represent the will of a majority as only 30% actually voted for green. So in our little Rainbow country, as generally happens the encumbant party makes mistakes or compromises and becomes less popular. So next time the election comes around you get some party consolidation. Blue maybe has enough ideological cross over with purple to merge into a new party. Yellow is say kind of an extreme outlier and Red and Green are close on the political spectrum but they really believe they got this. Let's say maybe some of the compromises in the new Blue/Purple merger turns off some of their base and Red snags some of their vote share this time.

The new spread looks like this

• RED 25%
• BLUE/PURPLE 32%
• YELLOW 15%
• GREEN 28%

So the problem remains. Only around 1/3 of voters actually chose the "majority" who takes all.

So next election let's say Green, seeking to snag votes does the same thing Blue and Purple did. They change their platform to be more like Red to court the votes of Red party people. The problem being is they are too similar. The next election happens and they end up tying with red because the two parties split the votes but that razor thin line of preference between the parties splits the share. This is called a spoiler. If RED and GREEN are decently acceptable policy wise to the voting pools of both voters then you have a group of 52% that represents what a majority desires policy wise...but that 32% Purple/Blue party is still in control.

So over time Red and Green merge. They win an election. Blue/Purple changes their policies and the two start trading back and forth. Yellow eventually dissolves from never winning and you end up with a two party system. Almost all FFP systems devolve into two party systems through histories that look like this.

Now say we end up in the situation we are in now. The two parties over time sort of naturally drift further and further apart as a branding initiative deepens.

Now imagine one has sown incredible brand loyalty. They are marketing experts, they have been hammering everyone's fear buttons for so long that they could run the literal devil and the party would still vote for them because to do otherwise is heresy.

On the other side you have what could be best described as the lesser of two evils. They don't have to be paragons, their entire strategy has been to be good enough while maintaining a status quo that benefits people like them but they treading water. They aren't fixing anything just adding time to the clock. Not great but probably also not going to sink the ship.

The two go head to head.

Under normal circumstances the voting share between them is pretty evenly split. But it will be a frozen day in hell before those carefully indoctrinated into the marketing strategy of the Right wing will vote differently. If they did they would have to admit they were wrong and well... Everything that's been piped to them for years has painted the other side as decadent, subhumans who are "UnAmerican".

The lesser evil has basically just run on being the lesser evil. Nobody was excited about voting them in last time...

So the votes happen.

• 38% Democrat
• 40 % Republican And the remaining 22% split between a series of independants.

If 3% of that 22% those people thought Trump was the greater evil but didn't vote for the lesser evil then their abstention to participate in voting for a lesser evil , or even just not voting at all basically enables the Republican win. It's not a vote for vote pledge to support Trump, it's a more complicated series of value judgements. A FFP system over times demands gaming of the system. That's why many places have ditched FFP and has these more complicated multiple voting systems to make governance more representive of the actual will of the people to stop this from happening.

America is stuck until that kind of reform happens.

Oh no... She doesn't like any of us. The transphobia she levies at FtM is just different. Rowling is notorious for Championing the works of Abagail Shrier who is famous for her work trumpeting the very discredited but viral "social contagion" theory that frames trans men and non binary trans masc people as being misguided lesbians and women fleeing from misogyny who spread transness to their friends who need to be protected from making terrible decisions and undermining the worth of femininity.

Transphobia is best described as framing trans people as a problem for other people. Naturally the problem framed is different for the two groups. In this instance trans men are still framed as being dangerous but rather dangerous by association...

"If we let them exist then they will tempt our perfectly healthy daughters into pursuing surgeries to make themselves into sterile parodies of men! We must stop them! Save the children! " Clutch pearls, repeat.

You are correct in some instances. The construct of gender is for a lot of us just used as a tool. Some of the time it's to alert people to how we wish to be treated... Which is the passable but non-ideal win. It's not the fault of people's brains encoding us to a binary standard that is keyed to read our characteristics as vital information. At some level we are animals and our brains treat info about sex as important. I have friends I know are trying their damnedest to respect my mental health by using language and means of cultural inclusion which don't hurt but a lot of them slip because their brain isn't naturally processing me into the correct category. They are looking out for me and trying ... but the switch obviously hasn't flipped.

When the switch does flip and you are properly read people legitimately treat you differently. It feels so bloody natural and fast like you are used to dealing with lag and all of a sudden you are on a fast newly formatted machine not bogged down by bloatware. Moreover a lot of things stop feeling artificial and like someone trying to calculate how they are supposed treat you. Getting that switch to flip is aided by social constructs - gender expression which the brain learns to read as just more markers of sex. It's the extra power to get us over that hurdle.

It's imperfect though. To use gender constraints as a tool can get you what you need but sometimes at the cost of what you want. The number of transfemmes out there envying the cis girl wearing the low effort androgynous shlumpy t-shirt and jeans and still effortlessly getting correctly gendered when they go out to do stupid bullshit errands... Is like the trans Cinderella wish.... Most of the trans femmes I know are one " Oh fairy godsmother I wish I could go to the 7-11 without eyeliner and not have the cashier call me "sir"." away from selling their souls to the fae.

On the flip side Try being a pre-T flamboyantly gay transmasc with not uber straight masculine vibes... You can perform like a puppet on a string to a rather stupid and arbitrary social convention of rigid gender performance or you can have people hammer on your feel like lukewarm invisible crap button all day making every social interaction you have feel like an exercise of utter pain as your dopamine rapidly flees your body and leaves you an empty husk.

Most of the time you kind of have to pick one. We are slaves to the construct cage of gender more than most. What is underneath it all is something we do not wholly control. What I experience daily makes no logical sense from the idea of gender always being a choice. I can learn how I work but not change it... Furthermore if it were something I could change I don't think I would. It would be far greater violation of selfhood to change something that has colored every relationship with myself and every human being I have ever known just so I could be comfortable in a body I don't like.

They want the free market but that's about the only freedom they care about. The freedom to allow exorbitant amounts of money to buy whatever they want. Laws and policies, people, rights to resources we all rely on to survive, the ability to bypass other freedoms...Everything on the table for a price.

Technically the situation with trans people is already a genocide in the US - but such things do exist by degrees. You can't call the two comparable in severity.

A genocide counts when victims are targeted because of their real or perceived membership of a group, not randomly and involve :

• killing members of the group
• causing them serious bodily or mental harm
• imposing living conditions intended to destroy the group
• preventing births, and forcibly transferring children out of the group.

Right now that particular snowball is small but you already have families with trans kids fleeing states because Child protective services can target affirming parents as child abuse removing vulnerable children into the foster system. People unable to go out in public for more than a couple hours at a time because they can't use bathrooms without hassle or because they fear assault and trans adults are getting stranded in pain between surgical procedures or facing hormonal imbalances as their HRT and health care is forcibly stopped.

Too often we treat words as automatically hyperbolic... But the reality is fuzzier. Genocides exist on a sliding scale. Gaza is a very hardcore textbook extermination the sort which dominates our understanding of the word genocide. The trans genocide is a much smaller largely beaurcratic one ... People are dying due to it yes, but the actual cost is still well obscured.

Sweet rock!

Well... No. It's more complicated than that. The Irish potato famine happened because the lack of genetic diversity in the crop and a wet humid year caused a massive viral collapse ( scientific name for the blight :Phytophthora infestans) which caused the crop to turn to sludge in the ground. The effect wasn't limited to Ireland, big chunks of England, Wales and Scotland also had the crop collapse... The fact it was so deadly though and why we call it the "Irish Potato famine" and not the British / Irish /Welsh and Scottish Potato Famine ", that was mostly capitalist bullshitery. There was a lesser known " Highland Potato Famine " but Scotland got away mostly unscathed by comparison by basically holding landlords highly to account for famine relief early and received greater charitable relief due to better solidarity between Scotland and England.

The flashpoint was all caused by the fact potatoes grow in much poorer soil than other crops the population which had seen an overall increase due to the caloric production increase. Basically the population rose because of production of the crop and then saw massive hardship because the crop when it failed could not be easily replaced by sowing other alternative crops. The viral collapse of the potato crop lasted practically a decade. If it was simply the matter of one bad year the supply and storage of other food stuffs would have softened the impact and they would have recovered over the next couple of years while they sowed other crops like they were used to doing when other crops failed... but the land literally couldn't support other crops because the soil was way too poor. It was potatoes or bust and the potatoes were damn near impossible to propagate unless you were lucky and your tiny potato patch was properly isolated... Which most people's weren't.

Other crops like cereal grains (including some of the less popular ones like millet and corn) were bought up in bulk and imported by the British back to England but they basically diverted everything they could from Ireland early and once they had secured a sustained cereal grain supply to England from the colonies they never distributed anything back to Ireland despite the ongoing humanitarian crisis. The British were bastards who actively and "passively" contributed to the famine deaths via tremendous greed... But the potato crop failure was real and there were more than a few extra steps in the plot that was more about grain import/exports to make up for the shortfall than moving potatoes around... Because the potatoes were basically just rotted slime.

Well I mean... Not exactly limited to girls. Who doesn't like a nice shiny rock? Nobody, that's who. Show me one person who claims to not have at least one good rock somewhere in their house. Can't do it can yeh? Didn't think so.

How much damage suburbs strodes and massive footprint drive up box stores actually do. The amount of materials and ecological flattening needed so that everyone can have their own yard with a patch of shit grass. All the concrete reflecting heat into the atmosphere and causing temperature instability, the damage to the water and carbon locking systems we all need to survive because so many people can't stand being around people outside their own isolated family units or need to find a place to park their car. We need affordable city and high density village housing and flip the script on housing costs heavily incentivizing moving out of suburban areas.

We need more trains and buses but more than that we need design where our land use is treated as an actual resource that requires harm reduction policies instead of just "unused" land because "unused" land is what is keeping the planet alive and if we don't start reclaiming it we are gunna be in massive trouble.

It's more complicated than that I think.

Like "being nice to people" is transactional. It doesn't really look at emotional needs. The so called neckbeards think they are being nice... But the issue is that nice is superficial. Nice will get you promotions at your customer service job but it ignores emotional need.

The fact so a contingent is so poisoned by so called "benevolent" sexism is a feature not a bug.

I mean the premise is flawed. The "neckbeards" are not intrinsically unlovable but they are getting duped into being annoying and problematic to people.

When you treat the attention of any kind of people as a status symbol or a commodity to use for bragging rights or prestige for others it's not exactly fair to the people whom you are essentially using. You see the same principle with famous people. Being in any kind of relationship with someone, even friends, soley because you like what their association does for your image is a jerk thing to do

The people who do the mocking are every bit at fault for being assholes. Only when the person being mocked accepts the assholes premise as true and care about their acceptance do they also become an asshole in turn.

Had an older co-worker who kept saying that Andrew Tate had some real gems and that he was just telling young men to give up videogames and hit the gym if they wanted some self worth.

So one day I looked him dead in the eye and gave him my best impersonation of a 1950's radio voice and said. " Young ladies if you don't work on refining and improving your womanly figure with clean living and labourous exercise and not stop wasting your time reading novels then how will you ever expect to catch a husband?!"

I would like to say that I scored a point but he just sputtered and went on being horrible.

It is more of a rich trendy thing. I have seen it particularly in mansions and high end apartments and things that I have been given access to via my work but I don't think I have ever seen anybody who is strictly working class pull it off.

Hoarding is more common but with hoarding there's more of a psychological element where they are anxious about removing objects from their places. Sometimes it's from a place of having experienced traumatic scarcity but it seems to me more often it's more about believing there is a larger connection between memory and stuff than actually exists. Like "I can't throw out this half melted kettle or I might forget the day it boiled dry on the stove and everybody laughed about it! " - there is a lack of trust that they will remember it without the item or that all memories are worth clinging to to the extent of impacting their physical space. The Archive of memory hoarder is also the worst to try and help because after the fact if they ever feel the need to revisit something they let go for any reason they will blame the people who tried to help them with their total consent to cut down on their stuff and some of them never get over that resentment.

You're thinking of the more nebulous "decluttered lifestyle". Minimalism is an aesthetic design choice. Think of those houses where like there's no shelves, no storage tucked out of the way.

Minimalism primary is an aesthetic not simply a "decluttered lifestyle". It's a fashion. There isn't a bunch of stuff tucked carefully in boxes perfectly Marie Kondoed out of the way. With minimalism if you end up with spares of anything you get rid of the spares because the idea is that you are removing psychological noise for a clean look. Things that are infrequently used are looked at as the enemy of the aesthetic.

What you are thinking of is not the aesthetic movement it is the idea of having slightly less stuff. Low or Zero-waste lifestyles are a very optional part of minimalism and arguably more of a separate sustainable eco movement ...but it is really hard to do those lifestyles in isolation because while you might not bring new single use things it does mean finding them elsewhere which requires someone else to have stuff or outside resources.

I realize it's a joke but actually one of issues with aggressive minimalism is that it's actually very nessisary to be decently wealthy to pull off. If you can not afford to treat tools and materials as effectively single use items that are frequently expunged from your spaces then it can actually be fairly wasteful and expensive. Extensive lending resources like tool libraries in cities being available makes it more tenable but otherwise yeah... Minimalism is kind of for the rich.

I doubt capitalism is quite so dramatically responsible for the specific developments mentioned. While it does create incentives to develop certain technologies faster there were other structures that were developing things like medicines, sciences and so on before capitalism really took off and things like clean drinking water wasn't really attached to capitalism except for supplying water company data that showed different companies having different death tolls to the people they serviced.

It's important to put capitalism into context. There are a lot of ills but it's a beast of different degrees. Someone running a business where they own the factory and equipment and pay employees for labor can be an efficient practice that can exist harmoniously in a fairly stable system and variations of capitalism are actually very old as it doesn't strictly apply to all privately held property - just off of how labor and investment is structured in some instances. Unchecked it can be a beast that creates abuses.

False dichotomies are currently rampant with things like the philosophy of socialism being seen as anti-capitalist. It's more accurate to say that socialism is a spectrum of interfacing with capitalism that offers a mixed system. It very rarely and only at it's farthest end seeks to stamp out every single instance of private business ownership or investment banking. A lot of thought written aince it's inception shows it's more dynamic in the variable ways it puts checks on what can be considered privately owned resources. Things like offering protections of varying degrees for labour and managing resources to create public wealth are very much throughlines but total dissolution of private property isn't really a given of the philosophy. The capitalism/libralism and socialism are often veiwed as diametrically opposed but its more useful to think of them as demi-linked on a scale that can tip from a fairly medium degree of regulated private ownership and capitalist tolerance to very public property and social ownership based structures. But basically it all still looks at resources through the lens of money and statehood existing.

Communism is more strictly anti-capitalist as it veiws all aspects of private property rights, businesses ownership, investment banking and even currency as things to move beyond. Things capitalism requires to function.

Individual property rights aren't strictly capitalism based. A lot of our modern issues are bases around free market ideas but that is more traceable to the ideas of high individual property focused libralism... Which also isn't historically all bad. At one point libralism was key to creating a more secular society based less off of privileges of patrelinieal titles... But left unchecked it creates a very misanthropic society that keeps claiming things as personal property which were once collective resources, pushing colonialism and creating new power structures just based off different metrics.

It's important I think to retain a good solid idea of where the boundaries of different ideological sources and their historical precedents actually are and not nessisarily be too quick to state one or the other is all bad. The tendency has become that to be considered that ideology every example must be stretched to it's utter extremes to be considered that ideology. There are shallow ends and deep ends of individual systems.

The history of capitalism in a more general sense is often more responsible for creating incentive to hurrying people to an early grave in the history of predatory patent medicine than it strictly is saving people. A lot of the history of scientific and technological development wasn't and still isn't driven strictly by capitalism from a funding and motive standpoint. Public money actually underlies a lot more of the significant developments... But capitalism does have a habit of driving underlying resource chains and more or less the profit driven arm of distribution - which while efficient generally causes a lot of social problems and damages.

Religion also is also not really connected directly with capitalism any more than anything else is. You can very easily have a theocratic capitalist society and generally speaking that was the norm for the early history of capitalism.

Not the op but a medieval history nerd all the same.

Monasteries actually were kind of technological powerhouses in their day. Cistercians for instance transmitted technologies, forging techniques, farming and cultivation advances and medical knowledge across Europe because basically you had a sort of "franchise" where every church they made was built and run to a regimented standard. They had the study of latin and a sort of sign language that meant travelling monks could all understand each other and since travel was fairly dangerous and rare it facilitated the transmission of scientific and philosophical thought.

It was fairly common for monasteries to provide state of the art medical care for their time which was actually fairly sophisticated in basic exchange for experimentation, the honing and propagating the research. You see the lingering effect of this in our languages. Clock comes from the word for "bells" because the mechanisms were developed originally to automatically ring the tower bells at the monestaries. Gutenberg likely got his early education in the hopes of pursuing a religious career and yhe printing press was originally to copy bibles. Latin is so entangled with modern science because those systems have their origins in monastic studies that veiwed the study of "natural philosophy" as a sort of religious observance of God's creation.

Similar situations were actually happening in parallel in other places. Religions of various sorts held a very "glue of logistical and technological ties" role in the past. Like the Muslim faith was very key in the developments of maths. Astronomy, medicine, metalworking, farming, the skills required to produce art..you track these developments in the religious temple structures of the Aztecs, Buddhists , Taoists, the Babaloynians, Greek and Romans, Egyptians and so on. Secularism taking over that role is actually all told a very new development in the grand scheme.