Good comment, but this bugs me:

*Reagan

Regan was Reagan’s chief of staff for his last couple of years in office.

I like the metaphor of a shipwrecked sailor clinging to a piece of flotsam in the cold water a mile from shore. He’s losing body heat, and eventually hypothermia will set in and he will drown. But if he lets go and starts to swim for shore, he’ll lose body heat even faster, use up his energy, and he probably won’t make it. The “harm reduction” argument says that he should reduce his heat loss, and stay clinging to the flotsam. He’s safe right now, while attempting to get to shore is difficult and dangerous.

Of course, by the time that the fallacy of that strategy becomes apparent (*gestures at current events*), he’s too cold and weak to even attempt the swim.

In my city, we have a barely-there progressive, third party with a presence in the city and county government. It’s all that remains of an attempt to in the 1990’s to launch a Midwestern political party based on an electoral reform called “fusion voting,” which would allow a candidate to get the endorsement of multiple parties, and appear on the ballot multiple times as a candidate under each of those party banners. That way, the candidate would know where their support came from, without the “spoiler effect.” I learned from the Wikipedia page that it was an important tactic in the movement to abolish slavery.

But, in this case, the Democratic Party (technically, the Democratic Farm Labor Party) went to court to shoot down that idea, arguing that it was too confusing to voters. The American left isn’t just sitting here waiting for someone to start a revolution, it has two major political parties actively suppressing it.

Amusingly, one tidbit of information that I just now learned from that Wikipedia article, presented without further comment:

In Milwaukee, Wisconsin, during the heyday of the sewer socialists, the Republican and Democratic parties would agree not to run candidates against each other in some districts, concentrating instead on defeating the socialists. These candidates were usually called non-partisan, but sometimes were termed fusion candidates instead.

Voters do have a say.

That’s why I vote third party.

Not at all. Making families buy life-saving medicine, at whatever price, is in fact the opposite of left-wing policy. Universal, single-payer health care is just centrist policy in many countries.

Same deal, you’re not wrong. At the same time, it has to be done. Voting Democrat to hold off the fascists was, at best, a holding action rather than a viable, long-term strategy. A slow track to fascism, as it were, as they were going to win an election eventually. Democrats weren’t going to fix the problem. For example, we voted for Biden in 2020 to hold off the fascist threat, they attacked the Capitol because they lost, and Biden did next to nothing about it. Hence, the depiction of the party as the pawl in the ratchet mechanism.

Let me say again, the FPTP voting system leads to two dominant parties, but nowhere in mathematics or law does it say the those two have to be Democrats and Republicans. We’ve always had the choice of a different two parties. That the Blue and Red duopoly would lead to fascism via the ratchet effect been clear for nearly 30 years.

I wouldn’t claim that Democrats don’t see the people of Palestine as human, exactly. They may just put it out of mind. Denial is a very potent force.

Leon Musk, for example.

Next, you’re going to tell me that a snail doing cocaine isn’t realistic?

No, no, shh, I want to believe.

Yeah, but to be fair, the threads linked here from r/BHJ are Chernobyl-level toxic, and they seem to think they’re the victims.

comparing it to the best comics

Indeed, it’s not The Family Circus nor The Lockhorns…

In case anybody was actually wondering, the difference is sudsing agent. The manufacturers originally put a chemical in laundry detergent to make more suds. That doesn’t make them clean clothes any better, it’s just for psychological effect. Customers feel like it’s working better when they can see suds.

But too much sudsing in front-loading machines can cause leaking from around the door seals. (Same as putting dish detergent in the dishwasher.) So the HE detergents are the same thing, but without the sudsing agent. They work just fine in top-loading machines, too.

But does anybody remember those TV ads for Biz detergent which pitted a woman using it against man using “Hiz” detergent? Hooray for casual sexism!

Reminds me of a meeting my co-worker and I had with the IT staff of a company that is a customer using research instruments in our facility. The meeting was to ask us to enable data synchronization through SharePoint. (We’re a Linux shop.) We asked what the issue was with getting their data files with SFTP. They said, “It’s open source.”

Then, a few beats of silence as it sinks in for us that there is no next step in the chain of logic. That is the totality of their objection.

Only if you have installed the correct license file.

That’s amusing to me. Back around 2010, I used a lot of state legal forms that they only released as PDF files, but not fillable. It was annoying to print them and fill them by hand, and terribly fiddly to use the PDF annotation tool on the computer.

So I just used OpenOffice.org to create almost-pixel-perfect versions of the forms, with fillable text boxes, then exported them as PDF. Word couldn’t do it at the time.

Now, at work, I use Microsoft365 because that’s what everyone uses because of the site license. I wish we’d switch to something else, because Outlook fails so hard at basic email stuff.

Interestingly, those main squares were all built before zoning. If they were destroyed in a disaster, they could not be rebuilt.

FWIW, I used to take my car to an auto shop located in the middle of a residential neighborhood, next door to an ice cream and bait shop. It did not affect the neighbors in any way that I could see, and didn’t affect the property values.

The court thing is not universally true. I worked in a family law firm for several years, and the practice in the courts here is to start from a baseline of equal custody and placement, and I’ve heard the same about other states. The men who lost out were the ones who wouldn’t fight, because they were convinced that the courts were biased. But hell, in one case, we got full custody and placement for a guy whose son wasn’t even biologically his! (His wife cheated, and he didn’t find out until well after they’d emotionally bonded.)

We talking about 19th century land grabs? There’s a really interesting (to me) law called the Guano Islands Act of 1856. The United States needed fixed nitrogen, and therefore could just take it?

The history of the US—the real history—is wild.

Honestly, this argument comes across to me as a horrible mangling of different pop-sci concepts to construct a victimology. There’s good evidence of the mechanism by which stress and trauma induce epigenetic changes in organisms. (Selective methylization regulating expression of genes.) There’s some evidence of epigenetic changes due to physiological trauma passed down through germ cells. But it’s a huge leap to ascribe mtDNA damage to psychological experiences.

The mitochondria have a degenerate genome, a tiny amount of DNA with (looking it up) 37 genes to support the processing of energy into ATP to power the cell. It is susceptible to epigenetic changes, which leads pretty directly to a number of metabolic disorders, but I can’t find any evidence that those changes result from life experiences of an animal. The idea that mtDNA has accumulated generations of damage from sexist trauma beggars logic, too, because there’s just not a lot of room to collect damage, and that damage leads to health problems fairly directly. If one got every cell of life from one’s mother, in turn, she got it from her mother, and so on all the way back to the first eukaryotic life. All of those generations of trauma, how are we even still living?

Furthermore, the assertion that “men created the patriarchy” ignores actual history and context. One simply cannot ascribe a singular intent to a class comprising billions of individuals across time and space. At best, one could describe patriarchy as an emergent phenomena of societies and cultures. About half of the individuals in those societies and cultures were women, so you’d have to conclude that women helped create patriarchy, unless you deny their agency or intelligence.