Schadrach

this is starting to look like a conspiracy to make your largest city not the capital, lol

Usually this is because the capital doesn’t generally change over time while the relative size of cities often does, especially on the scale of a century or more.

You say that like 3rd parties being created and taking federal offices happens all the time.

They aren’t, and that’s kinda the point. People grossly underestimate how hard it is to do this (pretending it’s some great unknown and not something that’s been tried and failed literally dozens of times), and what game theory regarding FPTP elections means for the rise of one.

We haven’t had a serious 3rd party, let alone one that takes federal office, for well over 100 years.

We had a few elected to Congress in the last hundred years, even if you don’t count ones who changed party at some point. Mostly Farmer-Labor Party between the late 20s and end of WW2. We also had a Conservative Party of New York candidate in Congress in the 70s. And a Libertarian if you do count people who convert while in office. Hell, Trump once tried to run for POTUS as a third party candidate in 2000 for the Reform Party, but failed miserably and didn’t win a single state during the primaries.

Don’t pretend you know what it takes, because we haven’t even fucking tried. It’s uncharted water!

How many parties do you think we have that are large enough they operate in multiple states and have ballot access right now? The answer is a dozen. All of which have hopes of eventually getting someone in federal office, you know aside from the Dems and GOP who already do that. Of those twelve, 9 ran a presidential candidate in 2024. You’ve probably only even heard of 4 of those at most (Harris, Trump, Stein and maybe Chase Oliver [Libertarian]).

What it takes at a minimum is getting a majority of a state or House district on board with you and willing to vote for you rather than a major party, knowing that if enough other people don’t buy in it’s going to let the candidate farthest from them win instead. If you’re pushing for POTUS, then it means getting about 78M people on board in the same way, distributed across most of the country.

Third parties running for federal office isn’t untested water, it’s just extremely difficult to succeed at. Again, that’s why the Tea Party operated as a reform movement within the GOP rather than being an actual third party - it let them hijack the political machinery of the party from within, instead of having to fight against it in a battle that would at most likely cause both to lose if it did anything at all. Literally, had the Tea Party been an actual third party then instead of gaining massive influence they would have at their most powerful caused Democrats to win by splitting the GOP vote.

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.

Choose people by being popular and saying the right things and you get salesmen types rather than experts.

I have a saying: “You can never trust salesmen or politicians, and to be fair politicians are just salesmen selling that they should be in charge.”

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.

This case really isn’t. This is due to terrible Georgia state law, not a Trump EO. Every Republican in Georgia voted for precisely this to happen. Trump had no say.

They don’t campaign for child marriage in secret,

Wait, who is actively campaigning for child marriage? I mean, “child marriage” is already legal in a bunch of states (as in a large majority of them) so long as you understand we’re generally talking about 16 or 17 year olds marrying with consent of their parents, a court or both (depending on the state). The term tends to evoke imagery of kids much younger than that, which is why I’m clarifying. Why would they need to campaign for something that’s already legal in most of the country?

It does seem weird to blame Republicans for this one though, since the states with the broadest child marriage laws have been solidly blue states (Massachusetts eliminated under-18 marriage entirely in 2022, but prior to that had no hard minimum age of marriage with parental and judicial consent, and California still to date has no hard minimum marriage age but requires judicial consent for under-18s). I don’t think anyone is going to claim that California is a state controlled by Republicans.

It’s not like for example fucking animals where it’s only legal in one state, and that one state is a red state. Specifically: Fucking animals isn’t illegal in WV because WV repealed their “crimes against nature”-style law in 1976 for LGBT related reasons (and it wasn’t really enforced much anyways, 4 prosecutions in 46 years on the books, 3 of those overturned on appeal), and WV has just never passed a replacement ban on fucking animals. It typically gets proposed in the legislature every year, and typically never goes any farther than being proposed because the legislature usually has more important things to do than pass an embarrassing bill to legislate against a vanishingly small number of perverts who on the whole aren’t really hurting anyone (and if they were could be prosecuted under regular animal abuse laws).

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.

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.

Chris-chan is a person who got targeted literal decades ago and has been persistently doxed and harassed ever since. The constant doxing, harassment and scrutiny has really messed them up, overall and they weren’t in a great mental place to start with.

Just imagine the single most elaborate doxing and cyber bullying campaign ever devised, enacted over years going back to at least 2009 and ongoing to this day. Every detail of the poor person documented because they became kind of an obsession for some folks.

The notorious KiwiFarms doxing and harassment forum was literally born from Chris-chans stalkers expanding their target roster.

EDIT: Fucking autocorrect turning doxing into dozing on my phone, but not even consistently.

It’s an internet forum that picks targets they think it would be funny to harass (dubbed “lolcows”) and then doxes, tracks and harasses them.

It started life as people following, doxing and harassing Chris-chan (as a consequence Chris-chan is probably the single most documented human in history because of internet weirdos). Chris-chan did eventually come out as trans, but that didn’t happen until they’d already been obsessively watching them for over a decade so they clearly didn’t start targeting them because of trans status.

It usually gets painted as being a primarily anti-trans site, but they don’t limit themselves to trans people, though they do have a board for trans targets. They have an entire board dedicated to furries, another dedicated fat activists, etc. If you’re internet-famous and kinda weird or controversial, they’ve probably started a thread to at least start obsessively gooning over you if not worse than that. Their thread on Musk has the blurb “Tesla, SpaceX and Twitter owner + ex-paypal CEO. Manchild, sexual deviant, spergy autist with access to space travel .”

The site most recently made news headlines when CloudFlare decided to cut them off, being the first time that CF has ever behaved in the fashion of a content moderator. This took them down for a couple of days until they found an alternate anti-DDOS solution.

For clarity, I am going to use man/woman in reference to gender and male/female in reference to sex.

Always said this is exactly the way to protest those laws. Get the burliest, most masculine trans men you can find and engage in malicious compliance.

The conservatives and the TERFs are totally aligned on this one - and their thinking boils down to a few points:

1. You cannot change your sex.
2. Male persons are evil, dangerous predators.
3. Predators will do whatever they need to to get better access to prey.
4. Sex-segregated spaces are segregated by sex, not gender and exist in order to protect female persons from predators by limiting access to them by male persons while in a vulnerable position.

…and that’s really it. You might notice that trans men are totally irrelevant to all of that, since they only really care about women’s spaces. To them a trans man using the men’s room is only putting themself at risk and doing so by their own choice, while a trans woman is endangering the cis women in the space against their will by existing.

Shit even my in laws say they are centrist, they don’t hold a single view that’s centrist. They vote down ticket republican their whole lives. This is a thing republicans do.

I voted a mixed ticket until 2016. Then straight blue until 2024, and only one exception in 2024 and she was was a city seat that I knew and could knock on her door and yell at in person if she did something I didn’t like.

Or to pick more immediately pertinent examples, RFK is a an idiot, but he supports banning some food additives that are already banned elsewhere for good reasons, Trump is an idiot, but he wants to end daylight savings time. Both are good ideas, despite support from terrible people and being supported by those terrible people doesn’t make them suddenly terrible ideas.

That’s what they said. You get given a choice between “drag things farther to the right” and “do nothing”, with a system designed to always collapse into two functional parties, knowing you’re too terrified of “drag things farther to the right” to meaningfully challenge “do nothing.”

It’s like a political ratchet.

It’s just the End of Days… https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4RKRO_VssJQ

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.

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.