It’s not just that.

One thing that the Republicans got real good at was piping the idea of election fraud into their base. Part of what they’ve been doing is getting devoted citizens to target individuals they suspect to be democrat friendly and pouring over their registration paperwork. If they find anything amiss they report it which has made it nessisary to show up and defend one’s right to vote to the administrative bodies on a schedule.

https://youtu.be/CkK3W0lOKcc?si=OT4mOCnlZosTGbld

It’s meant that relatively small wildcat groups of citizens have managed to target literal tens of thousands of voters in swing states to cause confusion and delegitimize voters based on minute errors.

They find new ways to rig the game because they believe that they are owed this.

Yes I do. Because The situation in Gaza was not an election issue for Biden. There was a fantastic amount of campaigning, a lot of it bought and paid for, that turned that genocide into a single issue vote with tis holier than thou reaction of withdrawal from the entire system toted as the answer. It is political suicide to run a mainstream Pro-Palistine presidential campaign in the US. A candidate of one of the two main parties need unilateral support from their donation streams and encumbant systems and the Republicans knew that. They know that’s the devil’s bargain every DNC candidate has to sign to even get a shot.

Republican money supported Jill Stein to serve as a spoiler candidate to engage those with a naive veiw of the system but still wanted to vote and then they helped pipe that message through all manner of socials that if enough people withold their vote then Kamala would have shift her position… Because they knew how enticing that is. The idea that you don’t have to compromise your integrity and that that will be rewarded. They turned this into a single issue campaign for so many people knowing that they didn’t need to shift their position even a little. They could let their Red capped demogogues talk about literally beheading people and those high on this intoxication of absolute righteousness would ONLY care about an issue that Republicans can flaunt their support in favor of.

It was misplaced moral superiority in part that got us here because if you were lulled into not voting or voting third party because one candidate wasn’t “leftist enough” when the alternative is someone popular with an entrenched imobile base of support who wants to make sure leftistism dies dead then you failed to get the assignment.

It wasn’t ‘voter apathy’ it was a misplaced sense of voter moral superiority. It’s the thing leftist rhetoric has been weak to for a very long time. That love of withholding support except for perfection. The idea that compromise or chosing a lesser evil from two bad options dirties you. It doesn’t matter what you lost if you personally took “the high ground”.

This cutting of our noses to spite our face was exploited all to shit this election. They lulled people by appealing to the same zeal of righteousness that they know divides us fundamentally knowing that when push comes to shove people will turn up their noses on principle of not being personally catered to and forget that their ability to help at all is contingent on the freedoms that one party was explicitly putting on the chopping block.

It will be a while before people can admit that they were duped and there’s a lot of fault to go around, particularly in those funded astroturf campaigns designed to bait the hook… The right have been watching us for the past decade they knew how to divide us and it is on US that so many of us fell for it.

Oh, it’s worse than that for Canada. Trump during his last term tanked entire sectors of our economy with executive orders he spat out like tweets. Those “deals” were all taken apart in International court filings but the damage was already done.

Remember we are a very big landmass staffed by only a sliver more people than exist in the state of California. If the US goes under we will be ripped apart as no more than collateral damage.

Neither Zeus nor Odin is canonically all seeing or all knowing. Zeus was tricked by Prometheus by accepting bones wrapped in fat as his sacrifice leaving what he really wanted, the nice juicy meat, as the human’s share. He had to get word of Persephone’s last known location from Apollo and has routinely been tricked by other clever Gods and mortals in his myth.

Odin was not able to discover the plot behind the murder of Baldur until the confession of Loki nor did he know the location of Thor’s hammer when it was stolen (they had to ask Heimdal). He may have sacrificed his eye to trade one form of perception for another… But we aren’t really let on to what that perception actually is. In Norse myth only Mimir is functionally all seeing and Odin takes his council from his severed head, he has to ask for information he doesn’t implicitly know himself.

There is a difference between simply very knowledgeable or powerful and actual omniscience or omnipotence it is not a matter of scale based on perspective, it’s a boolean function - one is either all powerful/all knowing or they are not. If ever a god or other character needs to ask someone for information, is tricked by something obscured or fails to know something they are automatically proven to not be omniscient… In storytelling omniscience tends to make for very boring characters because it means that most conflicts are automatically resolved and the cleverness or stupidity of a God is undercut when they simply know everything. Odin’s stories are ones where he goes and scouts, learns, adapts, formulates a plan and then gets away with murder because we are supposed to admire the process.

We assume omnipotence from Gods but it’s not wholly true. Most gods out in the world of myth are limited in their reach and ability. If they are in a pantheon then often that implies that they have no direct power over each other and thus they are not all powerful.

Interestingly omnicence or omnipresence is not something claimed even by the monotheistic religions. No God is actually all seeing. Plenty of times in script things have been hidden from God or something has to be told to God to bring it to his attention.

This has nothing to do with his dick persay… Just the assumption of omnipotence. If the Christian God exists he coulda just be lying about what he’s capable of and what human is gunna be able to check the math? Guy seems like the kind of dick who would pull that shit.

Shelters often share resources and many are more flexible than you would expect. They might not take you personally but dollars to donuts they can point you in the direction of other specialized resources.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Huh. So I imagined the ball on the table immediately as a colorless glass sphere on a white table. Before I even read the prompt to push the ball in my imagination I had already placed my index finger on the ball and was rolling it around it place like a fidgit so I just tapped the ball to push it with my index finger so the person who pushed the ball was me (non-binary) for reasons that I was already interacting with the ball anyway. I imagined this in the first person so I didn’t really see myself in full. The ball itself was baseball sized and rolled a short distance, stopped and wobbled after being pushed.

I didn’t think about what the table was made of but the ball itself was glass that was smooth and cold to the touch. The table was square, waist height and dining room table sized. The room these objects were in was featureless and visualization was instant upon reading.

To be honest no… Because I think I violently expunged it from my memory and mind as my brain probably interpreted it as some kind of threat to my cells.

I read a bunch of those books because my roommate was in love with them. It established an idea of a writing flaw in my mind that I called “The Heirachy of Cool”. Basically the guy practically has an established character list of who is the coolest. Whichever character in any given scene is at the top of the hierarchy is mythically awesome. They have their shit together, they are functionally correct in their reasoning, they lead armies, they pull off grand maneuvers, they escape danger whatever…

But anyone below them in the Heirachy turn into complete morons who serve as foils to make the people above them seem more awesome whenever they share page time together. These characters seem to have accute amnesia about stuff that canonically happened very recently (in previous books) so they can complicate things for the hierarchy above, they usually make poor decisions due to crisises of faith in people above them in the hierarchy… But because that hierarchy is infallible it’s predictable. Less cool never is proven right over more cool.

… Until that same character is suddenly alone and they go from being mid of the hierarchy to the top and all of a sudden they have iron wills and super competence…

Once I caught onto that pattern it became intolerable to continue.

“The Cat Who Walked through Walls” by Robert Heinlein…

Now Heinlein is usually kind of obnoxiously sexist so having a book that opens with what appears to be an actual female character with not just more personality than a playboy magazine centerfold, but what seems like big dick energy action heroesque swagger felt FRESH. Strong start as you get this hyper competent husband and wife team quiping their way through adventures in the backwoods hillbilly country of Earth’s moon with their pet bonsai tree to stop a nefarious plot with some promised dimensional McGuffin.

Book stalls out in the middle as they end up in like… A swinger commune. They introduce a huge number of characters all at once alongside this whole poly romantic political dynamic and start mulling over the planning stage of what seems like a complicated heist plot. Feels a lot like a sex party version of the Council of Elrond with each of these characters having complex individual dramas they are in the middle of resolving…

Aaaand smash cut. None of those characters mattered. We are with the protagonist, the heist plan failed spectacularly off stage and we are now in his final dying moments where we realized that cool wife / super spy set him up to fail like a chump at this very moment for… reasons? I dunno, Bitches amirite?

First time I ever finished a book and threw it angrily into the nearest wall.

Do I detect a little Barbara Laslett and Johanna Brenner in there? Love the post, chef’s kiss!

Honestly don’t know about the specifics to verify or checked the sources but on first blush it feels pretty correct.

My mental situation is such that I have a very strong memory recall and approach learning pretty voraciously. Around topics I enjoy I build a sort of mental map to compare and recall things creating a sort of landscape of understanding over a wide range of topics. I pick up a lot of fabrication based tasks quickly in part because I’ve realized that my imagination renders things in full three dimensions allowing me to imagine builds in stages and troubleshoot at the concept stage… which as I have come to understand it isn’t ubiquitous for most people and is tied into the form of dyslexia I have.

All in all though it’s a pretty isolating experience being this way. I chose a career that is non academic and a lot of people at some point or another imply that it’s a “waste” of my mind. Some people react to me as a threat, as though I am judging them or showing off or lying about my interests or must be exaggerating the things I demonstrate some small mastery over. Listening to those who have known me over a long period of time describe me to other people is often sobering. While it’s often flattering the impression is that I am sort of a sort of wonderous jack of all trades eccentric who operates on a different scale of time than other people.

To experience it from my perspective though, I have a sense generally of the line where most people are likely to absorb or remember things and know from people’s reactions exactly how much of a weirdo I come across as when I step past that boundry. Neurodivergance is a neutral term, it just boils down to “a different brain”. The more different one is generally the harder it is for other people to intuit your needs. My experience with teachers in school is that I could understand as a child that the system of reporting progress required me to do things that I found intolerable so that essentially the system could report metrics back to measure things in a systemic way. But that system wasn’t serving me what would have been personally tolerable by actually challenging me and also didn’t particularly care about me as a person. I figured out that most of that scorecard was meaningless while I was beholden to the system. A number of teachers realized I was imbibing the lessons I just wasn’t playing the game and their reactions to that were often pretty sympathetic.