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Cake day: June 19th, 2023

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  • I personally already know the connotation of “female/s” in English and avoid using it, so that’s not an issue for me.

    It was more of a reminder (to some native speakers, yeah, I shouldn’t have generalized) not to assume the worst of people saying it, because they might not know. In the whole thread there was just this one comment reminding people that ESL people exist, and it was pretty downvoted so I wanted to add on that.

    Plus, as you said, most of those Tate-types have a dozen other red flags attached to them, so imo there’s not really any point in attacking people just for misusing a word (especially online where you can’t rely on vocal inflection or accent). It just drives non-native speakers away from conversations.

    (Also, ironically, as far as I know “cunt” is pretty much a greeting in Australia so even from that alone you can’t really assume anything. Context is always important, unless you know 100% you’re speaking with someone who grew up in the same country)




  • Because they don’t win due to neoliberalism, they win due to their opponent being the literal antichrist. The point is to force Republicans to change their (supposedly) losing strategy, and have Dems react to that.

    You can see how, for example, after the three consecutive Republican terms of ‘80-‘92, Democratic candidates have shifted more towards the right on average, in order to recapture more “average” voters.

    I don’t have the competence to lay down accurately the process or know the best examples for it, but it’s pretty much basic game theory. If you keep losing consensus you have to adjust your strategy to be more similar to whoever is winning.




  • I know there’s alternatives, my point was just that voting Dem doesn’t preclude, or slow down, any of them.

    My argument here was that voting for Dems does not move them left, so I’m not sure how protest is relevant.

    It eventually has to. But they have to win a lot for that to happen. In the past 80 years, the US never had three consecutive Dem terms, which means the needle is very much in between of the two parties (if not leaning right since Republicans actually had them once). So both can continue with their current policies and hope to be elected.

    In the end that’s what matters to politicians, more than upholding any values they might champion: getting elected. Therefore the only way to shift the window in a FPTP system (barring violent protests, which are viable but a different matter), is to keep electing one party and send the message to the other that, unless they calm the fuck down, they’re not getting the seat ever again.

    There’s no way that after three or four consecutive Dem terms Republicans will still keep campaigning on killing abortion and LGBT rights. They want that seat, and, like every political party in a similar system, they’ll compromise to get it. At that point, when their opponent isn’t a cartoon villain anymore, Dems will lose their main selling point and will be forced to prop up actual leftist policies to retain votes.





  • Democrats have won more elections than Republicans, yet they have moved to the right. So what will it take to move them left?

    They haven’t won enough. If people like Bernie are still losing primaries because “commies won’t win general elections” and Dems still have to go for the “middle-of-the-road” candidate while Republicans can prop up the literal antichrist, that means they still haven’t won enough to cause a shift.

    Once they get enough wins (possibly in a row) that Republicans are the ones forced to go for a “middle-of-the-road” candidate, that’s when Dems will actually have to act as a left wing party to get votes.

    EDIT: also, unless I miscounted, Dems actually have less wins than Republicans post-FDR.



  • This is why Steam reviews should be taken much more seriously. This was impossible to avoid due to the enormous amount of bad press and devs themselves jumping on the hate train, but I’m betting that a lot of review bombing attempts have been quietly offset by the company just paying people for fake reviews. It’s especially obvious when the game has relatively low reviews for months and months, then suddenly bad stuff happens and along with the justified dump of negative reviews, positive ones also skyrocket (99% of which composed of “good game”, random memes or ascii art).








  • That’s reassuring, but then I’m confused by this:

    In 79 of those deaths, ProPublica confirmed that body-worn camera video exists. But more than a year later, authorities or victims’ families had released the footage of only 33 incidents.

    ProPublica’s review shows that withholding body-worn camera footage from the public has become so entrenched in some cities that even pleas from victims’ families don’t serve to shake the video loose.

    If getting the footage is relatively easy, why can’t those videos be released even if the families want it? Am I misreading it and is the situation more “families have the video, but not the clearance to show it to the public”?