Social democracy is a subsection inside the umbrella of Socialism. So she’s both.

Autism and ADHD definitely fits that bill. A lot of my friends are on the spectrum. I am a Non-binary trans person so a lot of the people I know IRL who also identify as Non-binary trans are autistic but I ended up with just ADHD. Still it makes me angry to hear my friends talked about as though they are a problem that was caused by somebody’s lack of oversight. They are incredible, funny, loving, worthwhile people to know. They struggle and it’s not always okay but that doesn’t make them a “problem”.

I get a dose of the same nonsense when I tell people that I am non-binary on here. People’s immediate assumption is I am very young. That I will “change my mind”. That all non-binary people are flighty star chidren who want to live in a land of make believe, feel special or be lavished with attention and it’s so frustrating. I am 38. I knew I was trans since I was 21…I think barring an extreme brain injury I’m pretty set in my ways. I am told that I am at times infuriatingly practical. I worked in crews with fairly conservative people for three and a half years straight being rehired for the gig when they had plenty of opportunities to ditch me. None of whom have any idea I’m enby. If they suspect anything with the name change they never said. I think being non-binary is functionally one of the least interesting things about me. It says very little about my personality and interests. When conservative people do talk to me on platforms a lot of them cannot reconcile me with their assumptions of trans people. They might label me “one of the good ones” … which believe me really doesn’t feel great to hear them say… but that’s how they rationalize the disconnect. Their pride demands not that that they review whether their skeptism is misplaced but instead I must be the exception that proves the rule. Ignoring that I know a fair number of other trans people my age and I am more similar to them than not.

That’s something I wish more people would actually give some thought to. As someone from a group who gets discussed ad nauseum in the media it really is the case that a lot of the skeptical people that become our problem really don’t have a personal data point for us. So many assumptions are made with things we theorize about but do not personally know. For us it can become plain very quickly when someone has never really interacted directly with us and are just operating on assumptions. I think the world is generally a better place when one is willing to be humble about what they choose to be skeptical about. Admitting to yourself and others that something is at present and maybe forever beyond your ken isn’t a weakness. It’s a strength.

Plea deals are basically you just accepting whatever comes your way regardless of your actual culpability. They aren’t concerned with actual fault so much as being a steam release valve on the system to concerve the effort police need to prove actual fault. As far as civil case law is concerned I think they have value in terms of conserving the limited resources of court time as well as personal hastle and the resources needed for regular disputes to gain resolution… But I personally think that plea deals pushed by persecution in criminal case law should be flat out illegal. If you want actual justice then relying on a system that exploits power imbalances between the individual and the State we need to see a commitment to actually giving people a full shake of presumption of innocence by the system and maybe consequences for cops who waste court time with poorly evidenced charges.

There are way too many people who take plea deals basically because they are poor.

English is dumb. We got the term “seasoned” to mean like a veteran fighter, something aging properly and using salt and spice from the French “assaisoner” which means “to ripen / to improve with time” which we expanded upon by being like “when things become tastier” which is how we started applying it to using spices and salt…

In this case it means sort of speed running getting the oil sheen a cast iron cooking implement used to naturally get by just using it over and over when cooking over wood or peat hence “ripening” the pan. Way back in the day in England and France they didn’t really use soap for dishes. You washed them with water and left them outside in UV light to sterilize them so all iron cooking things tended to naturally develop that nice carbon coat. Time and use made them better hence “seasoned”.

So this doesn’t work as a simple math equation because you have to understand a lot of key concepts first. This has basically nothing to do with the electoral college system so we will put that aside and start with the “first past the post” system of determining elections.

On it’s face the First Past the Post (FPP) seems fair. Highest percentage of votes for a candidate wins. But imagine a system where we have a lot of parties. Say there are five- The red, blue, yellow, green and purple parties. So you have an election and maybe the spread looks like this :

• RED 20%
• PURPLE 25%
• BLUE 15%
• YELLOW 10%
• GREEN 30%

So Green takes the election… However this doesn’t actually represent the will of a majority as only 30% actually voted for green. So in our little Rainbow country, as generally happens the encumbant party makes mistakes or compromises and becomes less popular. So next time the election comes around you get some party consolidation. Blue maybe has enough ideological cross over with purple to merge into a new party. Yellow is say kind of an extreme outlier and Red and Green are close on the political spectrum but they really believe they got this. Let’s say maybe some of the compromises in the new Blue/Purple merger turns off some of their base and Red snags some of their vote share this time.

The new spread looks like this

• RED 25%
• BLUE/PURPLE 32%
• YELLOW 15%
• GREEN 28%

So the problem remains. Only around 1/3 of voters actually chose the “majority” who takes all.

So next election let’s say Green, seeking to snag votes does the same thing Blue and Purple did. They change their platform to be more like Red to court the votes of Red party people. The problem being is they are too similar. The next election happens and they end up tying with red because the two parties split the votes but that razor thin line of preference between the parties splits the share. This is called a spoiler. If RED and GREEN are decently acceptable policy wise to the voting pools of both voters then you have a group of 52% that represents what a majority desires policy wise…but that 32% Purple/Blue party is still in control.

So over time Red and Green merge. They win an election. Blue/Purple changes their policies and the two start trading back and forth. Yellow eventually dissolves from never winning and you end up with a two party system. Almost all FFP systems devolve into two party systems through histories that look like this.

Now say we end up in the situation we are in now. The two parties over time sort of naturally drift further and further apart as a branding initiative deepens.

Now imagine one has sown incredible brand loyalty. They are marketing experts, they have been hammering everyone’s fear buttons for so long that they could run the literal devil and the party would still vote for them because to do otherwise is heresy.

On the other side you have what could be best described as the lesser of two evils. They don’t have to be paragons, their entire strategy has been to be good enough while maintaining a status quo that benefits people like them but they treading water. They aren’t fixing anything just adding time to the clock. Not great but probably also not going to sink the ship.

The two go head to head.

Under normal circumstances the voting share between them is pretty evenly split. But it will be a frozen day in hell before those carefully indoctrinated into the marketing strategy of the Right wing will vote differently. If they did they would have to admit they were wrong and well… Everything that’s been piped to them for years has painted the other side as decadent, subhumans who are “UnAmerican”.

The lesser evil has basically just run on being the lesser evil. Nobody was excited about voting them in last time…

So the votes happen.

• 38% Democrat
• 40 % Republican And the remaining 22% split between a series of independants.

If 3% of that 22% those people thought Trump was the greater evil but didn’t vote for the lesser evil then their abstention to participate in voting for a lesser evil , or even just not voting at all basically enables the Republican win. It’s not a vote for vote pledge to support Trump, it’s a more complicated series of value judgements. A FFP system over times demands gaming of the system. That’s why many places have ditched FFP and has these more complicated multiple voting systems to make governance more representive of the actual will of the people to stop this from happening.

America is stuck until that kind of reform happens.

The difference between liberal and left is not fully capitalism dependant. It has more to do with lateral vs horizontal power structures. Liberal rhetoric tends to focus very much on personal property rights which means it basically is a machine to enable unchecked capitalism because it resists anything that would enable seizure or social checks on acquisition or regulation. It reinforces heirachy by legitimizing and protecting wealth and ensuring it snowballs creating greater inequity over time. Any check on what is considered personal property is anti-liberal to some extent.

There are actually liberal and social attitudes towards capitalism. Anti-trust measures, stock restrictions, union organization, reabsorbing privately held services and property into public trusts and services. These things exist as social counter measures to unchecked capitalism but not an attempt to explicitly remove the basic idea of investment capital existing in some form or another. The focus on decentralization of wealth agrigation and empowering labor still makes it nominally left of center.

You are over-reacting a little here. This book is not a great candidate for something actually sexy. The characters try something sexual and find it really doesn’t suit them and they stop. The POV character has massive dysphoria around being touched directly down below and so it’s hardly glammorizing sex acts. Rather the entire thing is framed as a complete disappointment.

A lot of the focus on “well not MY child” is being used to perpetuate this book ban nonsense in public libraries and other spaces where general collections are for all ages. Just as you struggled with the mental health issues around being a sexual assault victim at 14 and likely there wasn’t a lot of materials on offer to help guide you trans kids most often start feeling body based dysphoria at the ages of 11-14. Those kids are left often with a fairly nebulous view of the future where they might not have access to healthy adults who can help understand what they are going through and give insight into what their lives might look like when they grow up. Their fears about ever being able to feel comfortable in their sexuallity is valid when they might be having severe reactions to their own sexual development.

What I find particularly interesting about all this is this book is essentially one where a person with fairly intense dysphoria depicts what a fully complete non-surgical transition looks like where a purely mental coping strategy is employed. I would have thought this book, in a discussion that regularly centers around prevention of surgical transition would highlight this character who finds ways to carry on outside of a medical model… But it doesn’t. Because trans people’s problems and solutions are always treated as taboo and perverse regardless. The answer we overwhelmingly get is just "Well, you are just supposed to be permanently unhappy. " which isn’t exactly a beacon of hope.

Your kid might not need this book but I was desperate for something - anything like this when I was that age… I grew up in the 80’s and 90’s where I had no bloody clue what was happening to me and why everyone else seemed fine while I was having routine anxiety attacks about puberty that made me think I had heart problems and my issues would likely be solved for me by me dying before I ever grew up. Sex ed leaves a lot of pressing trans issues at a critical age unaddressed and while 11-14 may seem young it IS a crucial turning point in puberty which doesn’t exactly go well for a lot of us. Basically by the window of time girls get their first period there’s also young trans kids in complete crisis.

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Basically. People just get used to the nebulous mental calculations of how much tax one can expect. It encourages a culture of routine overspending and should be illegal.

People expect to budget roughly tax and tip, they are basically mad because this is not a cultural norm and they got stung by surprise.

Not even with a rented dick my friend. It would freeze solid in seconds.

Info dumping is a love language.

I mean for a lot of people it’s pretty easy to understand once it’s someone they care about.

If a random salesperson calling your friend ma’am makes her whole damn week why wouldn’t you do that for someone you care about?

I feel like half the issue with a lot of advocacy is we go a little too far into the intellectual stuff? I mean it definitely helps to know that the ethical underpinnings of the movement are epicurean but like… You go over someone’s head you rarely get em in the heart.

Rings pretty true in the face of trans advocacy. In our case it’s really hard to fight a very simple take on something that seems like an easy “fact” because to do so depends on an understanding of a pretty specific psychological condition that dovetails into some complex social and philosophical principles and a history of how we got medically to the place we are in regarding treatment that really weren’t mainstream knowledge… And still kind of aren’t because people are more easily sold 90’s mad scientist logic over the structures that exist.

Like trans folls and their loved ones often become versed in psychology, phillosophy, history and sometimes endocrinology as a matter of survival. It’s way more efficient for most people who don’t need to constantly defend their quality of life to just shut it all down and repeat the thought terminating cliches, feel like they are the arbiters of truth while leaving damn near everything on the table untouched.

I relate very hard to it being like fighting the gravity of low mental resource allocation. It can feel like being crushed.