In an election with stakes like this one though, doesnt maximizing their chances for a win also serve that? Like, being rich offers you some protection from the law, especially in a corrupt regime, but when the other side is an actual authoritarian, half-assing it so that they win while also being publicly against them is dangerous to one’s personal safety. Even rich people dont tend to get away with being against authoritarians, when they are in charge. If all you care about is power and influence, and you dont actually have any values beyond that, and one side is an authoritarian, then being on their side serves your interest, and being put in power to stop them serves your interest, but publicly failing to stop them puts a target on your back and gives you no power and influence by which to ward it off.

I mean, we’ve seen plenty of authoritarianism and facism before plastic was invented, so that seems like a dubious notion

Couldn’t you still study populations with more or less plastic, even if “zero plastic” cant be found? Or is the amount of it more or less even across groups?

I mean, I feel like it is quite fair to blame the people who voted for Trump for Harris’s loss tbh. I don’t really buy the "the dems would win if they didn’t just refuse to try to win over conservatives and instead promised to go all-in on progressive policy that I’ve seen lately. I wish we got more progressive policy too, but it’s not like they don’t have any idea what people want, they have whole teams of people whose job it is to figure out that kind of thing. If promising some more progressive policy was a clear winner, why wouldn’t they do it? The answer I generally see implied or stated is that the dem establishment doesn’t want that policy, but that isn’t really an adequate explanation, because politicians are perfectly familiar with dishonesty. If supporting some progressive policy they didn’t like would win them power, they’d just promise it and then just not do that thing upon getting elected. It’s happened for state and congressional races before, so it’s not like that’s never been thought of.

I don’t think Harris’s loss is down to refusing to say the right words to inspire her base or anything like that, it’s down to the fact that, somehow, Trump is very good at inspiring his. She gave it a decent shot, but it’s very hard to win an election against a massive cult of personality. He, and the people that support him, are the problem here.

While I do agree, I also find that even though I find VR a lot more intense and enjoyable than any flat screen game I’ve played, I also only rarely use mine even still. There’s something about it that seems to make it a hassle to use casually somehow, between actually getting the headset straps feeling comfortable, getting the passthrough cables plugged, launching driver programs on both the pc and the headset just to get to steamvr. It’s not a problem at all if I’m feeling specifically like doing VR stuff for a couple hours as it doesn’t take that long, but if I’m recently home from work and want to just chill for a bit without really knowing what, even that inconvenience means that the VR stuff basically never gets used for me.

My current VR headset feels a lot more polished than my previous, older one, or previous experience with earlier devices owned by people I was visiting, and admittedly I bet it’s probably a bit smoother on standalone than on pc passthrough like I go for, but I feel like to really take off, putting it on is going to need to not feel like setting up a printer whilst wearing a box on your head.

The issue is that people will use votes for if they like the thing or not instead of if it’s in good faith, even if you tell them not to, both on purpose to harm opposing views, and unintentionally because they’re more likely to notice a bad faith tactic coming from someone disagreeing than from someone agreeing with them.

“hey Google, download Firefox for me please.”

-“Im sorry Dave, I cant let you do that…”

There is quite a lot Trump could do to speed things up. He could, for one thing, send American troops to assist Israel on the ground; I have concern that he might do such, because Israel has increasingly been dragging other countries in the region into this, notably Iran, and Trump pursued a policy towards that country during his term in office that very well could have led to war had things gone slightly worse. Given his support for Netanyahu, whose government has itself been tempting fate of late by engaging in back and forth missile strikes, and his disregard for the consequences of attacks against Iran, I have serious fears that he might give Israel a green light to pursue a full scale war with that country, by promising to commit US forces in the event of such a thing.

At a lesser degree, he also could simply increase US military aid to Israel beyond the current level, and end what efforts (insufficient by a country mile but still better than their absence would be) have been made by the US to convince Israel to limit its actions, such as the recent threats to cut some of its military aid if Israel does not allow more food aid across Gaza. He appears to actively dislike Muslim populations, as seen by his efforts as president to ban travelers from Muslim majority countries, so it strikes me as rather unlikely that he would do anything, even something basic like that, to assist a Muslim majority country like Palestine against the wishes of one of his allies.

Also for the record, I do not think that I am simply protecting “my outgroup” in opposing him. I am of the view that he, (or more importantly, the fascistic movement that he has grown around him, of which Trump himself is the leader, but which may persist even after he is gone), presents an existential threat not just to myself and those whom I know, but to you, to everyone in the country, to everyone in the numerous countries who he seems actively hostile to (including but not limited to Palestine as I have said, and Iran, as I was saying earlier, and Ukraine), and to a lesser extent, to the future of every single person on this planet. That may sound a bit extreme, but we are talking about making a narcissistic old man showing signs of mental decline and known for lashing out at things that anger him the commander in chief of a nuclear armed state, we are talking about putting someone who does not seem to believe in climate change at the head of the world’s largest economy at a time when getting carbon emissions down is critical to keeping the planet livable in the future, and we are talking about putting the country with the world’s largest military budget in the hands of a person who idealizes fascists, has attempted to maintain power despite a previous election loss, and has a following composed to a large degree of racists and religious zealots.

I am not saying that I worry about what Trump will do as hyperbole, or to justify what the current dem administration has done in arming Israel while it bombs and shoots civilians, I am saying that I worry about what he will do, because thinking about it quite literally keeps me up at night and has quite literally given me actual panic attacks within recent weeks upon seeing the prevalence of his support in polls and among my coworkers.

I do not think the democrats are actually “willing to throw out trans people” the way you seem to suggest at the end there. I dont even think that they are happy with what their “ally” in Israel is doing. I think they are a fragile “everything that isn’t the R’s” alliance of much of the right and what passes for the left here that includes both LGBT people and their allies, and conservative types who never wanted them in their party in the first place but arent quite extreme enough for the republicans, who are sort of mashed together in a broad coalition that as a result has no real collectively agreed upon ideology and doesn’t have the guts to rock the boat by withholding military aid to a country traditionally seen as an ally, even though that country really deserves to have that aid cut right now. Their vague compromises of positions do not really align with mine on many if not most things, especially economic and foreign policy, and I resent that they stay just barely to the left of the republicans to get the support of the left while offering it little but scraps. I do not like them, except maybe a few on the leftmost edge. But we (or at least I, I guess I’ve just assumed you were probably also American if youre invested in our election but I guess with our international influence that doesnt actually mean much) live under a system that guarantees that if they dont win, Trump will, and when he and his cult look so startlingly similar to the fascists of history, just before they succeed in subverting the systems that constrained them, not voting for them is a luxury that I do not think that I or any of us in this country really have.

Something I saw from the link someone provided to the thread, that seemed like a good point to bring up, is that any student using a screen reader, like someone visually impaired, might get caught up in that as well. Or for that matter, any student that happens to highlight the instructions, sees the hidden text, and doesnt realize why they are hidden and just thinks its some kind of mistake or something. Though I guess those students might appear slightly different if this person has no relevant papers to actually cite, and they go to the professor asking about it.

I am not simping for anything. I firmly believe Trump would be far worse for genocide (he has literally said that he thinks Israel should “finish the job” with regards to the war in Palestine, and when he was president, he was incredibly supportive of Netanyahu, and proposed a “peace plan” that was actually just carving up Palestine into a bunch of little pieces that could never constitute a viable state and giving Israel control of the paths between, effectively wishing to formalize Israeli control of the entire region) The only reason anyone can suggest he wouldnt be without getting laughed out of the room is that he happened to get lucky enough to not have the current escalation of Israel’s genocide happen during the time when he was president. From my point of view, any action that brings him closer to getting back in power is asking to throw gasoline on a genocidal fire, and saying that one’s motive for doing so is being against genocide is sickening in the kind of way that it would be if you saw someone suggest that Hitler should have won ww2 because of all the evil stuff that Winston Churchill was responsible for. Consider for a second what people making your argument look like, from that lens.

There isn’t a constitutional mandate that there only be two choices, it’s instead a consequence of poor design. The US, with the exception of a few state and local governments that have tried different things, uses something called first past the post voting: each person votes for one candidate, whoever gets the most votes wins the job. Then, we just hold an election in each of a number of geographic districts for each seat. That’s intuitive, but actually not a good way to design a democracy, because it forces a two party system. If you have multiple parties that have similar ideas, there’s no mechanism for them to form a “coalition” like you might get in other countries. If you win 30% of the votes in a state, split evenly such that you get 30% of the votes for each district, and someone else gets the rest, you don’t get 30% of the seats or 30% of the power, you get zero, because you were the loser for each of those seats, and it’s winner take all. Thus, any time you have two parties with similar ideas, it is in their interest to combine to form one party to get a higher chance of winning the most votes in a given district, and this process continues until every party of note has consolidated into one of two camps. Those two camps don’t consolidate with eachother because they represent views too different to tolerate, and anyone else must join the closest one in order to have a shot of actually winning (unless the election is local enough that personal connections can get you a majority in spite of this, which is why third parties tend to do better at local elections than national ones).

Now, there are going to be some parties left out of this, either those that idealize having more parties to the point of retaining independence at the cost of any chance to actually win at most levels, or those so different from the major ones that they just can’t fit with either. The fact that the two party system isn’t really originally intended means they still are allowed on the ballot and everything. But since most people voting care about their choice having a hope of winning, it makes pragmatic sense to not vote for them unless the election is very local in scale and you can organize enough people. Thus, only two effective choices even if more are technically on the list.

In some sense, you can say the two major parties basically are like the coalition governments you get in other countries, it’s just they’re stuck together despite not really liking it, they don’t have independent enough identities that they could easily split up and recombine into new ones, at best they could leave and watch their voters stay behind with the old party, becoming irrelevant, and at worst they could sabotage the side closest to them and ensure they get even less power than otherwise. This is why the democrats have such a wide difference in ideals between more conservative and progressive candidates, and the republicans have both “small government” people and “ban everything I don’t like” authoritarian types in one party, they’re both basically political coalitions stuck together with super glue that have to just go along with whatever most voters in their bloc do or else lose.

I can say the same about you. Putting “no there aren’t” in all caps and adding profanity and personal insults doesn’t make it more true, but it does make people remember that a block button exists for the kind of person that uses things as disgusting as a genocide as an opportunity to troll. I do not think that anyone who both has paid any attention to the past 8 years and is arguing in good faith can possibly support that conclusion.

The difference is that there are real, material differences between the actions the candidates take. It’s not a fair choice, but it isn’t false either, and choosing not to go along won’t give you a better outcome

I am repeating myself because the notion that the least evil option available is the best one, that the lesser evil if you will is preferable to the more evil one, is axiomatic, that is, it’s a basis one takes when constructing a moral framework, not a consequence of one that can be reasoned through. If you do not agree with someone’s moral axioms, then there is simply nothing to debate, you and they are simply operating under mutually incompatible definitions for what is and is not the right thing to do. Restating that in a slightly different way is a way of testing if the axioms we are operating under are truly different, in which case further argument is pointless, or if we merely misunderstood eachother the first time around.

If you reject the lesser evil, and all options possible to you are evil, then you by inaction support the greater evil, which, by definition, makes you evil. “Working against both”, when evil is inherit in all means by which you might do that work, is a fantasy you tell yourself to justify sabotaging efforts to limit the damage by practicing and encouraging what effective amounts to surrendering one of the few levers of power that you have any limited ability to pull.

What message would we be sending if our replacement for them is a guy that wants Isreal to “finish the job” with it? Killing fewer people matters more than accountability

And who, of those who aren’t mathematically precluded by the flawed system we are currently stuck with from having a chance at winning, can you vote for that isn’t about to help Isreal with their genocide? Trump is even more favorable towards that policy than Biden is, and while Harris isn’t Biden, it seems hard to imagine she’d be much worse than current administration on that issue. One of the reasons to vote for Harris is because, despite all her administration would likely do there, having her in office would almost certainly result in fewer Palestinian deaths than Trump would.

Suppose you have two buttons. If you press one, it kills someone. If you press the second, it kills two people. If you don’t press the first button, someone else is eagerly waiting who will press the second. Whoever has placed the buttons here, has enough power that neither the buttons nor the other person are within your personal ability to harm at the moment, and you have neither the time nor the popularity to amass enough people to change this before the other guy pushes the “kill two people” button. Your only options are to press one or press neither and allow the second be pressed. If your answer to this scenario is “I press neither button, because pressing the first kills someone, don’t you care about people’s lives!?”, then you are not choosing morality, you are choosing selfishness, because you care more about the notion that your hands will be clean than about the net life saved if you press the button that kills fewer people. In fact, the blood is as much on your hands by inaction if you decide to reject your choice, as it would be had you killed the additional victim yourself.

Is there a reason that you use some character (I’m afraid I don’t know the name of it) wherever you would otherwise use “th”? I can’t guess if it’s some kind of technical issue with federated text, something from a different language you’re incorporating, or one of those “I think we should add x symbol to the language so I’ll use it to draw attention to the effort” deals, like with the people that use the combined !? symbols whenever both are relevant at once.

I mean, it’s a kitchen appliance that makes bread? Throw the ingredients in and turn it on, and you have bread, in like, 4 hours. I have a slightly nice one, because I found someone selling it used for 20 bucks when that model new is like 200, but I think the more basic ones can get a bit less than $100, so while I wouldn’t call them cheap, they’re not exactly unaffordable luxury for most people lucky enough to live in a developed country. They’re just not really worth it unless you plan on using it regularly (and eating a lot of bread, because homemade bread lacks the preservatives of store bought food I’ve found I get maybe 5 days with a loaf from it before there’s a risk of the bread going moldy)

anecdotally, Ive gotten this with store bought basic sliced bread. I used to love it and snack on just bread as a kid, but Ive been making my bread with a bread machine for a few years, and now the store bread just tastes and feels like weak, dry, slightly sweetened insulation foam.