Schadrach @ Schadrach @lemmy.sdf.org

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2 yr. ago

Did you literally wake up from a coma the day Biden's cancer diagnosis was announced or something? Or are you the rare person who isn't part of Trump's cult but also only watches right wing news sources?

"President Trump shits on Constitution in novel way!" could paraphrase a headline from literally any week this year after 1/20. And only after 1/20 because before then he was merely President-Elect Trump.

Beyond that, the news cycle is pretty short - for example, unless we have revelations about Trump sexually assaulting a woman we didn't already know about or some movement in an existing court case, it's not going to continue to be litigated in the news media because there's nothing new to say.

No different than European tourists "traveling the US" visiting a couple of big cities and maybe the Grand Canyon on a stop in between.

That’s why I never believed in the rhetoric of “it’s too late to consider 3rd party!” before the elections. Here it is just 6 months later and “we don’t have time for that”. Is it disingenuous then to just say there will never be time for that, like it is being implied here?

It takes years to get a new party off the ground and in a meaningful position to take federal offices at any significant rate. During that time, you are mostly helping your farthest opposition of the main parties win by splitting the vote.

This is literally why the Tea Party operated by internal change of the GOP and not by starting a third party. And love them or hate them, they were effective at shifting the GOP.

It usually requires a competent and well-known politician storming out of their party for ideological differences, but being locally popular enough to win their seat as an independent or new party.

It also usually causes the party they broke off from to lose higher offices a few times because the two sides of the schism don't have enough power individually to win the bigger contests. Until one of them swallows the other.

The right avoided this by doing their "reform" from within, aka the Tea Party.

Prior to 1974, it was legal for banks to require a man’s signature for a woman to open a credit card, and many banks chose to require this.

The requirement for women to provide a male co-sign for lines of credit was one of the last vestiges of coverture (the notion of the household as the primary legal unit, with the husband/father as the one ultimately responsible for the household owning all the assets but also holding all the debts and in some cases responsible for crimes done by family members) to go. Because under coverture, the only women who owned their own assets and were responsible for their own debts were femme sole (single women who are not under their father's household, typically orphans, widows or spinsters) which meant loaning money to a woman who was or might feasibly become married within the terms of the loan created a scenario where the debt had to be collected from someone who was not a party to the debt being created which made things more difficult for the lender. The whole point of requiring a male co-sign was that way they had someone they could more easily enforce collection against than the debtors potential future husband who wasn't himself a party to the loan. Once we tossed coverture, it took a bit for policy at private institutions to catch up unless/until they actually needed to.

I agree that the facts are very frequently misrepresented.

There's a dichotomy to it you see in descriptions of other things, where unless all women could do the thing nationwide without exception then women couldn't do the thing but if any men could do the thing, then men could do the thing. For example, some women in the US could vote since the founding, because voting rights were determined at the state level and not all of them restricted it by sex. At the same time, most men couldn't vote either in most states until the mid-19th century with the push for so-called Jacksonian Democracy (ironically, women actually lost the right to vote in New Jersey when voting rights were expanded - the previous wealth requirement was not restricted by sex).

Women who had "hysteria" is also why vibrators were invented, because the 19th century treatment for hysteria was hysterical paroxysm through manual stimulation - aka giving her an orgasm by playing with her bits. The vibrator was originally a labor-saving device for doctors.

Yeah, the thing a lot of people seem to miss is just how major of a geographic barrier the Sahara is. As a consequence, northern Africans weren't generally very black for most of history.

hey want to drag the nation back about a century. Women without a vote, black people again as slaves,

Neither of those was the case a century ago. Literally closer to two centuries than one for black folks since slavery (160 years since the 13th Amendment to be more exact) and women's suffrage is also over a century old if you count it starting at the 19th Amendment as opposed to any period where it was up to the states.

Hey, you figured out a way to get MAGA types to support abortion - just find a way for tech bros to monetize aborted fetuses for shiny tech thing. Starte= referring to them as "extruded excess biomass" or something.

You may have nothing to fear right now, but you never know who’s going to be in office soon.

The way I always explain it to people - take any additional government power or access to information you either don't care about or actively support. Now imagine whoever you oppose/hate the most taking office and trying to use that against your interests. Are you still OK with them having that power? Same principle applies regardless of what power or who's pushing for it.

It's like due process - you don't want any category of alleged violation not to be subject to due process, and if you don't understand why then it's time to wrongfully accuse you of doing that so you understand the problem.

Fuck it, align='center'. That'll center it horizontally relative to some context and if that's not good enough then you should have been more precise in your request.

This was not personal interest, though it is an incredibly interesting text. It was fascinating to discover he devoted ~2.5 chapters to the importance of the same kind of simple, yet powerful finger-pointing rhetoric used by right-wing ideologists to this day. I joking say it’s one of the earliest texts on meme theory, and it’s only half a joke.

I still find it funny that just a few years ago a feminist social work journal called Affilia published an article that was essentially a rewrite of a section of Mein Kampf in terms of sex and with some "fashionable buzzwords" included under the title “Our Struggle Is My Struggle: Solidarity Feminism as an Intersectional Reply to Neoliberal and Choice Feminism.” Especially since the bit is spelled out right in the title (for anyone who doesn't know, "Mein Kampf" literally translates as "My Struggle"). It was part of the grievance studies affair.

I think I have a mutation in a taste bud or something, but Sucralose is really a prominent and nasty taste to me in anything it’s in.

The only artificial sweetener I get a nasty aftertaste from is saccharine. But I get a really absurdly foul aftertaste from saccharine, I can't even compare it to anything because it's easily the worst thing I have ever tasted in my life and I can't think of anything even sort of similar. Glad basically nothing uses it any more, but it was more of an issue as a type I diabetic kid decades ago. Sucralose doesn't give me an aftertaste at all though, neither does aspartame or acesulfame potassium.

My preferred sweetener though is stevia (I used to go to the local new age shop and buy just dried stevia leaves for my tea and such during the time it was legal to sell in any amount for any purpose as an herbal supplement so long as you didn't mention it had a flavor which turned it into an unsafe food additive because fuck NutraSweet corp). It took such a ridiculous time to get approved because of NutraSweet, when stevia really should have fallen under GRAS status for the same reason things like tomatoes did - New World plant used in food forever by the natives, but wholly new to Europeans when they came to the Americas.

If a theory and every attempt at real world application of a theory yield wildly different results, shouldn't that suggest something in the theory is deeply flawed?

Really it’s actually capitalism that supposes people are too dumb to make their own choices or know how a business is run, and thus shouldn’t have say over company choices.

Really it's actually that businesses with that structure tend to perform better in a market economy, because no one forces businesses to be started as "dictatorships run by bosses that effectively have unilateral control over all choices of the company" other than the people starting that business themselves. You can literally start a business organized as a co-op (which by your definitions is fundamentally a socialist or communist entity) - there's nothing preventing that from being the organizing structure. The complaint instead tends to be that no one is forcing existing successful businesses to change their structure and that a new co-op has to compete in a market where non-co-op businesses also operate.

If co-ops were a generally more effective model, you'd expect them to be more numerous and more influential. And they do alright for themselves in some spaces. For example in the US many of the biggest co-ops are agricultural.

Yeah, wasn't trolling. They literally start a court case against the property to determine if that property was used in or purchased through the proceeds of a crime, and the standard is a preponderance of the evidence. Hiring a lawyer to defend your property against the allegation it was bought with drug money or w/e often costs more than replacing it would. Which is the point.

The term used for it in law enforcement is "civil asset forfeiture". For her to get it back, her property is going to have to get a lawyer to defend that it is probably not used in a crime or purchased with funds obtained through criminal activity. Doing that is not cheap.

I understand at a nuanced and historically informed level what’s happening at a political and geopolitical level here, and all of my bleakest predictions keep coming true

Let's test this: Make some specific predictions for various points over, say, the next 5 years (start near future and work your way out). Put them somewhere where they can remain generally fixed but available (say on a pastebin or lemmy post or something). Then come back to look at them after those times have past and see how accurate you are. This would let you see your actual rate of accuracy as opposed to just the ones that stand out because they ended up true), which would ideally lessen your panic or alternatively if you really are getting it right in a consistent fashion we can start calling you gravitas_deficiency the Bleak Prognosticator.

For example just glancing at your profile one you seem to be doubling down on a lot recently is that there will be either no US presidential election in 2028 or no peaceful transfer of power in January 2029. That is easily verifiable in four years time. How do you imagine this will happen? Is it enough to satisfy this if the election happens and the GOP wins with a non-Trump candidate? Do you think opposition to the GOP will simply be made illegal? Do you think they will push an amendment to let Trump run again? Do you think Trump will just run again regardless and argue that the Constitution doesn't apply to him because seemingly no other law does?

They got a majority of votes. Unless you live in a deep blue area it's likely to get you more customers than it costs, at least for now. Most customers won't care either way, they're at your business to buy your goods/services, not as a political statement.

Those signs will go down fast except for the very political and deep red areas once we're in a post-Trump world.

You're not wrong. There's nothing that requires the two parties be Dems and GOP. But you're not going to overturn one or the other in a single election, and that means losing to the farthest big party from you, likely a few in a row, while that gets resolved. Especially if you try to do it top down instead of building support from local/county offices up.

Basically, if you could get enough third party support, you could either supplant one of the existing parties or force them to shift to stay competitive. The argument is that trying to do so with the office of president when doing so promotes a fast track to outright fascism is a painfully bad tactic.