Canadian here, we don’t do that either. Primaries is one of the many additional structural barriers to representive voting being adopted in the US and a step away from having more than two parties in their system. It also increases the campaign costs for candidates and exacerbates the issues with first past the post voting meaning running people becomes an exclusive exercise for the wealthy or people with wealthy patrons who make handshake agreements.

As I understand it, Instead of having parties internally figure out who they are running on the docket as party head like sane people they open it up to basically a second first past the post election of internal candidates. You register as a member of those parties when you register to vote to participate (or not) in the election before the actual election. Personally to one outside that system that just seems like an additional bundle of problems to deal with by doubling down an already outdated voting system that creates further issues of populism but some Americans are very fond of archaic systems. You know something something founders of our nation blah blah can’t change anything our fathers who art in 6ft of dirt didn’t personally come up with blah.

Forgive my glibness. Being a neighbour is hard sometimes.

Social democracy is a subsection inside the umbrella of Socialism. So she’s both.

Gunna take this as Liberal/Conservative as party brand names rather than strict social ideology and you’re talking about “the left” more generally.

I think the short answer is empathy. When you dig down to the bottom a lot of the discussion on the left talks about different forms of human needs. A need to feel accepted and loved, desires to exist publicly without fear… It is a radical form of empathy that asks you to put yourself in multiple pairs of shoes and see the world through perspectives you aren’t naturally born into. The ultimate aim is to achieve a picture of humanity which is inclusive of the widest possible range of understanding.

In that way “Conservatives” are also people. It is not impossible to empathize with their issues. It takes a lot cognitively to internalize this new data and a lot of the rejection from the right comes not from outright cruelty but a desire for things to be and remain simple and easy. They don’t want to stretch themselves and are scared of a world where that is something they are forced to do. The issue is a lot of the people selling the pitchforks on that side are doing it because it benefits them. That desire to understand encompasses the motives of individual Conservatives and splits them apart. A lot of the issues Conservatives have is that the left is “preachy” that we act like we’re better than them and that does come from somewhere. Some leftists do just want to be the smartest most correct person in the room but others are just waiting for the Conservatives they know to be more understanding of other people who they learned about so they stop being mean. The person who pitties the school bully is often their target because that empathy seems to the bully like condescension.

Uh… Was this in response to the right post? I am not vegan nor do I wish to be and I never mentioned anything about rice and beans…

Half my social circle has gone vegan at this point and I think a lot of the anti-vegan sentiments is people don’t like modifying their behaviour to give up their own comfort even when they know something is distressing to someone else. Since a lot of vegans see a very real cruelty that they are generally powerless to stop and other people do not understand their reactions to seeing other people participate in cruelty is often to feel very sad. Since so much of human culture surrounds shared meals having a vegan takes a lot of options off the table entirely and alters other people’s options even when they don’t intend to.

Like it’s not a matter of “well we’ll go to your vegetarian restaurant this time and next time we go to a place I’m excited to go” for those of us who care about our friends being upset we basically rarely pick our first choices and more often sacrifice things we are excited for in the name of someone else’s comfort. It can be a love language to find restaurants and eat the things on the menu that don’t exactly thrill you but other times you just want to have that selfish Birthday dinner where you don’t feel compelled to pick a restaurant for someone else.

I think a lot of people reject veganism more forcefully because they don’t want to have to participate in that sort of friction. All it takes is one ethical vegan to completly change a friend groups food culture. Even when they bring their own food and try not to make a big deal and mask it not bothering them when they see meat being consumed people are generally compelled to care for people they know and ignoring someone’s distress isn’t showing care. When people ratchet up the social cost of veganism they are more often than not trying to engineer a social sphere where they do not feel callous, don’t have to give up what they like and don’t have to do any additional research work or social calculations .

There is no true answer to the Tao of hair. I gave up and went around to hair dressers and said "Do whatever you like " until I found the one who made me look good. Now my hair looks amazing like 95% of the time and the remaining 5% is the occasional “just trying a thing” that becomes a temporary conversion piece.

I realized I do not actually know what I want. To believe such was mearly ego. I am going to people who have better trained aesthetic sensibilities, why should I, someone who has no sensibility direct them? I am but a canvas, a scruffy Tabula Rasa.

The DIY though is undoubtedly more cost effective…

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.

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.

I recommend it. Experiencing that kind of temporality made me realize how much the mass adoption of clocks impacts our experiences. I never expected the degree to which I would pay more attention to the people around me.

It very much was! There were construction projects, games tournaments, arts… You’d think that the absence of clocks meant that people would be habitually miss things but I don’t think people did more than usual.

Yup, the ancients loved stars. It was strangely common for multiple cultures to create these weird observatories that were mostly for observation of a single star associated with different seasons.

Mechanical options were usually used by people trying for some form of efficiency either social or to mark distance. Marking time on ships was very important for accurate mapping for instance.

As for most of society meeting up at a given time just took longer as everything was more of a rough estimate. Some of the accounts have been guessed at as people didn’t write details about how they approached time down. It’s been hazarded that the day marked your doing productive stuff period and you set out your routine for days in advance so people knew where to find you if not exactly when you’d be doing it. Evening was your social planning time where you’d meet up and share details of your to do list with the people who needed to know.

I once spent a week with a whole bunch of people camping on a big property for a Medieval recreation event where we had volunteer work to do on the property and agreed to attempt to explore time as our ancestors knew it. We all ditched our watches for two weeks. It was actually generally fairly relaxing? Everything moved a little slower but not by that much. There wasn’t any way to have much anxiety about not being precise so you just got used to people showing up during a wider span. If there was somewhere people needed to be around a specific time the person hosting the event just dispatched some runners to the places you knew people were going to be and people became more conversational as they passed along info. Actually very basic conversation had a lot more interest because passing along knowledge of what you knew was happening elsewhere became an actual topic of combined mutual interest instead of very boring comparisons of time tables.

Mysogyny is the belief that women and the passtimes associated with cultural womanhood are less valuable, capable, worthy of resources and/or should have culturally different expectations or additional restrictions than men. Anything that places phenotypic female bodies or cultural “woman related stuff” on a heirachy beneath what is afforded to men is basic misogyny.

In practice a lot of mysogyny doesn’t look like active hatred. It can be internalized by women themselves who don’t on their face hate being female but still see womanly passtimes as being lesser. If are a woman who hates the women who wear pink, wear makeup and enjoy flirting with boys because you think their choice of expression of femininity is silly and purile… You are buying in to a heirachy based on cultural gendered lines that places the more feminine centric expressions as being lesser.

The targets aren’t always women. Misogyny for instance can be seen when a gay or non-gender conforming person is riddiculed for being lesser for wanting to express the feminine as the underlying assumption is that the trappings of femininity is not a choice between two equally vaild options but choosing an option which is lower than what they should want. Meanwhile women emulating the masculine is not usually commented on because when the masculine is aspirational and the feminine is silly, trite garbage for inferior people it makes logical sense to ditch it.

Misogyny exists in our use of language. Examine for instance the word “pussy” which equates the female genetalia with cowardly behavior and “unmannly” inferiority. You are acting as a woman which is supposed to be insulting because women are not just categorically different but equal… They are implied to be an inferior state of being.

Furthermore some misogyny can be “benevolent” - CRITICALLY this does not mean it is good. Benevolent misogyny is harmful - but it means that the misogyny comes from a place of misplaced pity and assumption of inferiority. Treating a person as weaker, more delicate, in need of help and unable to make their own decisions or utilize their own capacity for handling things is also misogyny. Being treated as though you are a child who will never grow up will drive people to bite through solid steel levels of frustration and madness or worse injure their self worth, sense of independence and empower learned helplessness.

The companion peice to misogyny is misandry. The idea that men are all to some degree inherently violent, sex motivated and unsafe for women and children to be around and the idea that any choice of a man to express the feminine is abhorant limiting the options of men to participate in society in ways not outlined by traditional masculine expectations.

Unlearning misogyny is not an easy thing. It is a process of dismantling behavior based out of something you may not have given much consideration. Our society is generally kind of misogynist by default so reaching in and recognizing misogyny and choosing to leave it behind takes a lot of effort and willingness to honestly self critique.

I regularly fear for the Americans I have connected to since the days of covid stretched my group of friends more into online spaces.

One got beaten to shit by a bad boss when he tried to retrieve his tips. All at once he had injuries that kept him out of work, mental trauma and legitimate fear for his safety that meant he couldn’t return to his job but also because work and insurance are tied down there he was in an immediate precarity. He couldn’t return to work, the cops showed active disinterest in helping him press charges and his hospital bills blew through his savings… And because he had technically quit there was no EI safety net either.

I was struck so hard by the dystopian nature of it all. There is so much under the Canadian system which is just never a factor. I didn’t realize how free I actually was because I had never tied my considerations of my health to what job I chose or whether I was unemployed. I was used to my medical services bill just being this tiny expense I had set to autopay that was so small I didn’t even have to think about. They don’t even charge that any more.

All I ever had to do to get help was ask and it was freely given. I had no cause to ever question exactly how much of a blessing… How much of a privilege… that actually was.

Peter 2:13-17

Be subject for the Lord’s sake to every human institution, whether it be to the emperor as supreme, or to governors as sent by him to punish those who do evil and to praise those who do good. For this is the will of God, that by doing good you should put to silence the ignorance of foolish people. Live as people who are free, not using your freedom as a cover-up for evil, but living as servants of God. Honor everyone. Love the brotherhood. Fear God. Honor the emperor.

Sooo yeah “God is a higher authority you need not heed” is more like government is the official middle management. Obey the management.

Word. Vancouverite here. Nudity law in Canada is fairly lax. As long as the windows of the bars are tinted and the owners like it, full nudity is a go. We got folk doing fully nude pole dances in the shower over at the Pumpjack.

If folk gunna be a delicate homophobic snowflake… just stay out of the steam.

They don’t think about it.

Getting attacked or forcibly ejected from women’s bathrooms where they already feel desperately exposed make a lot of trans guys so gun shy from amalgamated bad experiences that they develop bladder and intestinal problems from refusing to go and tend to retreat from public entirely due to general anxiety. Some of pro move one can adopt to combat this is basically never going out without a female chaperone who can vouch for you…

But it’s still a severe restriction of your general comfort going out of your house for more than a couple of hours at a time.

End result is you basically rarely see trans men in public bathrooms so the bigots basically never are inconvenienced with considerations that they exist much less need consider the welfare of them.

This feels like it’s intended to be a positive message… I think? I have certainly never knocked on anybody’s door and asked them to be trans. I think a lot of people assume that we are trying to force people to use our pronouns and be nice to us… But if it’s on my own time why would I hang around people that call me things that make me feel like crap?

It’s crazy though how upset people will get when you tell them you don’t like them very much. Bigots want to be “respected” but most of the time it just seems to mean “above judgement for behaviour.”

Lol, devastating! I like the cut of your jib!

That’s a rounding up by a pretty big margin. I am in one of the most trans friendly cities on the planet and we’re sitting at 0.4% of our population being trans.

A lot of the rhetoric tends to fall on the “we shouldn’t have to change our behaviour because it’s such a small number!” but then we are also supposed to be this society wide menace that is “socially contagious”…

We are prime scapegoats because you require extra empathy to understand the basics of what being trans is actually like compared to being cis and conservatives generally rate pretty low on empathy. They don’t care that they are condemning us to permanent misery, they can’t conceptualize that misery anyway.

It was all the unsolicited dick pics that did it wasn’t it? If randos kept sending me their junk mail I could see wanting to curse them to a terrible fate and never touching one again as the natural response.