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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: August 4th, 2023

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  • I feel like we’ve said this to OP already too, but:

    …it came off that he was so popular…

    However it may have come off, not enough people voted for him to win him the primary. He wasn’t that popular. For reasons mentioned elsewhere.

    It’s possible some people who favored Sanders over Hillary voted for Hillary in the primary anyway fearing that she was more likely to win the primary and not wanting to chance unintentionally boosting the chances of someone other than Hillary or Sanders getting the nomination. I don’t know of any polls or anything that might have indicated that was or wasn’t the case. But that still means people didn’t vote enough for Bernie.




  • No president has tried it before. Whether he can get away with pardoning himself has yet to be seen. For him not to get away with it would require someone to bring some sort of court case challenging it. And to bring a case, they have to have “standing.” (That is to say, they have to have some credible justification why the self-pardoning action the president took wronged the petitioner in some way.) Which would probably require some legal argument that has never been made before.

    I’m guessing Trump probably could get away with it, but given that no president has tried this, we’ll just have to see for sure.




  • Are you expecting someone to provide you with all the answers?

    Only to explain the answers that they’re already bringing up.

    And, honestly, your answer and OP’s answer are exactly the sort of answers I needed. Thank you.

    I guess the short restatement is something like “work with others to create an alternative to depending on the capitalist/fascist system for crumbs and then protect that alternative system on a self-defense basis with firearms. (And be ready to before you actually have to.)”



  • Seems like you’re advocating:

    • “Get organized/involved” - What’s that mean in more practical terms? Start attending social gatherings put on/hosted by radical leftist organizations? And maybe start ones if they don’t exist in your area?
    • “Get armed” - So, acquire firearms. To use in some particular way? (You mentioned you’re not advocating for “acts of violence or an insurrection like January 6th”, so not that, apparently.) Or just to have for when “something” happens? If so, what specifically?
    • “Don’t wait until troops are rolling down the street to stage a resistance” - 'K. Not really helpful until I understand more specifically what you’re advocating for people to do.
    • “Start organizing” - Same as that first bullet?
    • “Get involved in mutual aid” - Yeah, ok. I’ve read Eisenstein. I know his book Sacred Economics has some tips for how to get involved with existing mutual aid organizations. I definitely need to re-read that bit and read other sources about that. But at least I have an idea where to start with some of that, I guess. I’d still like more specifics on what in particular you mean by this, though.
    • “Get involved with resistance” - So, let’s say you’re a respected voice in a mutual aid radical anarchist collective with guns and enthusiasm. What do you suggest they do?
    • “Stand, fight, and maybe even die” - How? Not January 6th, but… how then?
    • “Don’t do nothing”/“Don’t lay down and accept our fate” - Not really helpful on its own if we don’t know what you’re suggesting we do instead of “doing nothing” or “laying down and accepting our fate.”

    I don’t really know if this is a “I can’t really say what I’m advocating for because I’ll be banned, so I’m dancing around the issue and hoping you’ll stochastically pick up on what I’m not saying” thing either.

    Without knowing more concretely what you suggest we do, I don’t really have a take on whether I agree or not.



  • I think if someone referred to “the Travises shared given name” without adding the extra “es”, my brain would get stuck on that for a bit. I don’t know that that would be the case for most people or not. But if someone were talking to me about the name shared by multiple people named “Travis”, my brain would churn less, get " stuck" for a shorter time, and be less likely to have to catch back up to the conversation if the extra “es” was included.

    Without the extra “es”, it feels like it could get a little “garden-path-y.” Like:

    • “The Travis…”
    • “The Travis” sounds like a pretty pretentious way to be referred to.
    • “…es”
    • Possessive. 'k. What does he have?
    • “shared given name…”
    • Oh, so “The Travis” was magnanimous enough to offer his name for consideration when it came time to decide the name of… maybe one of his relatives’ newborns…?

    Right? Not to say I wouldn’t expect to catch on in a couple more words there. And also more realistically, my brain wouldn’t be stuck on this interpretation in the conversation, but more “suspending judgement” and holding both possibilities for interpretations in mind until something resolved the question. But speaking just for myself, I think my brain would have to go through all those machinations if the extra “es” wasn’t there. And that requires more wetware cycles than if the extra “es” wad there. If it was, it’d be unambiguous immediately after the second “es” that “Travis” was both plural and possessive.

    (To be fair, after the second “es” another possibility would be that we were talking about multiple groups of people named “Travis”. Chapters of a club only open to people named “Travis” for instance. Kindof like the word “peoples” which is similarly “double-pluralized”. But it seems to me unlikely my brain would jump to that possibility the way it might jump to a possessive form of the title “The Travis.”)

    Also, it’s very possible my brain works differently than most. I think I have a pretty “stilted” manner of speech. People occasionally poke gentle fun at me about it. (All in good fun, mind you.) And it’s possible my brain doesn’t process speech quite like most people’s do.


  • There’s a linguistics professor at MIT who I once heard say in a class (an Open Courseware class… I didn’t attend MIT or anything):

    “We’ll speak no more of prescriptive linguistics except to mock it.”

    However you want to say it, say it. Your particular style of speech is unique and beautiful and you should keep speaking that way.

    I personally would pronounce it like “Travises”. As if pluralizing it. (“There are multiple Travises in the phone book.”) Makes it fairly clear. I guess that brings up the question what to do if there are multiple Travises who co-own something. “The Travises’ shared given name.” I think off the top of my head, I’d probably pronounce it like “Traviseses.” Cool!





  • First off, MS Gothic is a monospace font. (Meaning all characters have the same width and move the cursor by the same horizontal distance. Ok, that’s a slight oversimplification. Especially when you’re dealing with asian characters, there’s a possibility of “double-width” characters which are twice the width of “single-width” characters and move the cursor twice as far.) In sites like Lemmy, there are usually ways to tell Lemmy to switch into “monospace” like you did with the first cat art you posted in the body of your post. And that ensures consistency in the output. With non-monospace fonts, it’s more of a crapshoot. Arial’s “m” might be a different width than Comic Sans’, for instance. Typically, sites like Lemmy (or 4chan or Reddit or Facebook or whathaveyou) won’t have ways to specify a particular font (different Lemmy clients are also free to use different fonts), so if you composed ASCII art with a non-monospace font and pasted it into a Lemmy post/comment, even if it looks right to you in Lemmy, it may not look right to other viewers of your post. And that’s why monospace is popular for these things.

    How to make these? I honestly don’t know if there are specialized tools for that. Probably just a standard text editor. The examples you posted have some asian characters in them, so a way to input such characters. I’m on a Linux machine and have fcitx set up for Japanese text input. If you’re on another OS, I’d expect the way to set up input for asian characters would be different. Alternatively, there are probably unicode character explorers/apps that can be used and don’t require quite the learning curve.

    As for how to manage these, no idea. I can think roughly about how I might go about writing a program that migth manage these, but I’m not sure if any exist out there currently.



  • I once had an interesting conversation with a nurse at my GP’s office. I was scheduling an appointment with my GP. The nurse asked what I wanted to see him about. I mentioned light headedness, dizziness, globus, chest pain, palpi-

    She stopped me at “chest pain” and said “I’m going to write down chest pressure, because otherwise, they’ll send you to the ER.”

    At the time, I was scheduled for all the heart tests you can think of and a few neurological tests and had been having chest pain daily for months during which I’d had plenty of heart tests already. And the nurse was familiar with my case. Had she not been, she definitely would have just sent me to the ER.

    She made the right call. All the heart and brain tests came back fine. Nobody ever saw fit to give me a diagnosis beyond “your nervous system is too sensitive.” (I asked if he was talking about “dysautonomia” and he agreed to that. Not a “diagnosis” per se, but better than nothing.)