Drivebyhaiku

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.

Fucked up?

I am in Vancouver Canada and the whole week has been a knife edge dance of a provincial election between a party that is basically Republican-lite and two Progressive parties where either could make a majority government... And given the projection is of a Conservative win in the Federal elections having two levels of trans hostile groups in charge of one of the most trans friendly places in the world feels a bit like the one place I feel safe is under fire.

I know I am more durable than most. Because I basically chose my partner's sexual phenotype preferences over transition I live under general permanent assumption that I am cis and straight passing. It sucks literally all the time for the dysphoria and feeling of living inside this illusion created by my body that people think treating me as cis is okay... but I don't have to worry about a lot of medical continuity of service vulnerabilities. I have so many friends not in my situation who are down to the bricks clinging by their fingernails already that I worry.

My partner has stepped up the cuddles to keep my spirits up. Things have been getting better as things are being forcast but it's been a rough ride.

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.

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.

You got it backwards friend. In the grand scheme here Trump isn't comparitively rich, he has an empire that constantly hemorrhages money but value wise he is sitting around 3. 6 billion.

Musk's currently valued at around 269. 8 billion. He spends a ridiculous amount of money on super PACs and uses his purchase of different platforms to kill news stories that show Democrats in a positive light and bankrolls a lot of Republican stuff. Musk isn't being bought, Trump is.

Simple - one must strive not simply to be A shit but to be THE shit - The plutonic ideal of shit, the perfect shit from which all other shits are derivitive. Anything less is a failure. So following this logic.

"You ain't shit" = You are invalid from the rubric, so below par as not to be mentionable.

"You are shit" = Acknowledgement that you are shit of average or middling status but with the implications that vast improvement is nessisary because you are still a failure.

"You are not the shit" = More directed pointed reminder that you are far below the goal of being THE shit and maybe are overestimating yourself.

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.

My Grandmother always called this sort of thing being a "red letter Christian". Basically like you take a highlighter to everything Jesus specifically did or said and discard the rest.

My Mom's family all followed this principle since like the 70's thus saving my trans ass from any hint of intergenerationally inflicted religious trauma so I am a fan. My 92 year old great uncle went to bat to fight for non-binary gender accommodations in his seniors home because one of his nurses is an enby who was getting a raw deal from a number of their paitents. Honestly, though I don't think the Christian God is what he says he is, his kid seems weird but as a rules for life kinda thing the results seem good. .

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.