I love the way you weave in the cultural context, including the culture war parts of modern political and policy debates, the business/corporate trends in entertainment, in your telling of this history. It’s clear you know your stuff, and you’ve helped me understand something new (the influences these slasher films drew from, from Agatha Christie), grounded in stuff I might have already known (the actual movies themselves and the cultural context they were released into, including how people looked at boobs before the internet).

So thank you. This comment is awesome, and you make this place better.

This is a counter to the Democratic party supporters you see everywhere who always get irrationally upset at third party voters, not about Republicans.

Plenty of us Democrats are very much in support of a ranked choice voting schemes, or similar structural rules like non-partisan blanket primaries (aka jungle primaries). The most solidly Democratic state, California, has implemented top-2 primaries that give independents and third parties a solid shot for anyone who can get close to a plurality of votes as the top choice.

Alaska’s top four primary, with RCV deciding between those four on election day, is probably the best system we can realistically achieve in a relatively short amount of time.

Plenty of states have ballot initiatives that bypass elected officials, so people should be putting energy into those campaigns.

But by the time it comes down to a plurality-take-all election between a Republican who won the primary, a Democrat who won the primary, and various third party or independents who have no chance of winning, the responsible thing to make your views represented is to vote for the person who represents the best option among people who can win.

Partisan affiliation is open. If a person really wants to run on their own platform, they can go and try to win a primary for a major party, and change it from within.

TL;DR: I’ll fight for structural changes to make it easier for third parties and independents to win. But under the current rules, voting for a spoiler is throwing the election and owning the results.

Racists would pay quite a bit of money to be able to target certain ethnic groups.

Dog lord isn’t exactly high frequency, but it’s higher than I would’ve guessed.

Why do you care if the person you voted for wins?

Because it’s an election with consequences, not an online fandom.

She absolutely is a trash person. I agree. I’m not defending her to be clear.

People who let their dogs off leash in public are assholes and deserved to be confronted and shamed. She was a piece of shit well before their conversation started.

to the downvote brigade I highly recommend go watch the full video and decide for yourself

Yeah it’s obvious she’s weaponizing the police against a guy who she doesn’t like, by knowingly playing directly into the “police will overreact against a black guy” card, and faking panic in her voice. This is violent escalation to a non-violent situation. The faked panic is straight up sociopathic.

People who don’t leash their dogs are assholes, and his response to that was relatively tame.

I don’t see how you can watch this and respond the way you have, unless you’re also the type of asshole who feels entitled to walk dogs without leashes, or generally dislike black people, or are completely oblivious to the social context in which police in New York interact with black people.

“Feminism” is like philosophy in that over time it makes certain wins, and the discussion around that topic gradually sheds the label.

In the same way that ancient philosophers were establishing the disciplines we now call mathematics, geometry, and physics, or early modern philosophers were establishing what we now call economics and political science, and mid-century/postwar philosophers were establishing what is now called computer science and information theory, the history of feminism is notching wins and making them normal:

• In Anglo American law, women were able to own their own property beginning in the early 19th century, starting in the American South (somewhat ironically driven by southern concerns about preserving the institution of slavery).
• Women were allowed to be considered for credit and banking services, equal to men, beginning in the 1970’s.
• Women earned the legal right to equal pay for equal work in the 70’s, even as cultural attitudes in many circles still considered that to be government overreach (even today).
• Marital rape and other forms of domestic violence were outlawed pretty recently. The last state to criminalize marital rape did so in 1993, the same year that Jurassic Park came out in theaters.
• Liberalized divorce rules throughout the 80’s allowed women to leave abusive husbands more easily.
• Most gender segregation in official government institutions were dismantled in the 1980’s and the 1990’s, including the abolition of male-only universities, and laws imposing different legal drinking ages between men and women.

Today, many of us who were alive when these rules were in effect think of them as totally backwards. Nobody is seriously advocating for a return to denying women the right to have their own bank accounts, or giving husbands the right to rape their wives without consequences.

But the cultural understanding of the meaning of feminism rarely considers preserving past wins, even recent wins. People only think of it as fighting for something in the future.

Most men have experienced the stifling gender norms that force them into a box: they’re not allowed to cry or show any feeling other than anger, there’s no such thing as non-sexual touch or romance, women don’t like sex so trying to get close to them is inherently rapey and goes against their desires.

Feminism fights against that trap, that men are only men if they check certain boxes. That’s what’s toxic: telling men they’re not allowed to be certain ways.

So yeah, feminism does have a lot to offer men. Toxic societal expectations are bad for everyone.

I read it in Larry David’s voice.

John Oliver sometimes runs random out of context clips of MILF Manor and I’m not sure actually watching them in context would make them any less ridiculous.

No, no, the bigots hate people who speak French too

SNL had a fun sketch about this 12 years ago.

Oh you can remember which one is which by remembering that they have a university named USC.

Haiti’s gonna hate hate hate

why wouldn’t I use my platform to share those beliefs?

I think it’s perfectly valid to say “the system that gave me this platform is unfair and I shouldn’t have benefited from it to the degree that I have, but I have the platform now so I’m going to use it for good.”

I’m saying that you can reduce birthrates a lot and it won’t make much of a difference, because you can’t go below zero and the rich/high consumption countries are already low.

If your goal is to reduce net consumption, then reduce consumption (or replenish consumed resources through increased production or restoration/replenishment of what is consumed). Preventing births itself won’t meaningfully move the needle.

I’d rather focus on raising up the lowest into a tier of stability

What you’re describing, then, has nothing to do with birth rates. That’s what I’m saying in this thread: reduced birth rates won’t fix the problem of runaway consumption and emerging scarcity.

You’re talking about the bottom 90% of the world and I’m saying that they don’t consume as much as the top 10%, so I’m focusing mainly on the top 10%. If we’re going to discuss resource consumption, the people we talk about should be weighted by the resources they consume. And by that metric, the global rich consume much more, and have fewer children, than the global poor. Therefore, it’s easy to point out that reducing birth rates won’t actually do much to reduce consumption, because the people who have kids aren’t doing much of the consuming.

The jet fuel is just an example of that general correlation, and one of several mechanisms why the childless tend to consume much more. You can argue “oh but all else being equal more mouths equals more resources” but I’m saying that all else isn’t even close to equal, so you should engage with the patterns as they actually exist in the world rather than a hypothetical where everyone is equal.

Who the fuck can afford that?

The fact that you struggle to imagine that these people exist in large quantities tells me that you haven’t actually fully understood the power distribution of who is consuming how much.

On CO2 emissions, the top 10% emit about 48% of the CO2. The top 10% of Americans (where the cutoff is about $135k) produce about 55 tonnes of CO2 per capita per year, and they have low birth rates.

people with kids travel by plane too

Yes, but paradoxically having more children makes households consume fewer passenger miles at any given budget, because traveling with children is slow and less enjoyable, and their tickets are just as expensive. So the DINK couple with the $200k budget can fly for vacations and even weekend getaways once every few months (4-8 times per year), but after having kids might only fly on one trip per year. Even with two kids, doubling the number of people in their household, they might be looking at half the passenger miles by taking 1/4 as many trips.

And if eating all the meat in the world and throwing food in the trash and using disposable diapers doesn’t compare at all to the consumption involved in traveling out of town by plane, then adding up all the day-to-day stuff the family is doing with kids won’t compare to the jet setting couple with the same budget.

Throw in the fact that the people who have the $200k+ budgets are less likely to have kids, and you have the correlation where consumption is negatively correlated with fertility/household size.