Dems win big! The Incels subreddit is banned! Celebrate in this open thread

@shadowplay

But in general, vote who you support – it’s simple as that.

I’d say have, “in general vote tactically, and only vote for who you want if you don’t need to vote tactically”. A fair few of my brit friends, despairing over cameron’s conservative government and feeling like the liberal democrats had failed them decided that they were finally going to give up on all this tactical voting bullshit and vote for who they actually wanted. Result? the liberals were practically obliterated overnight, and the conservatives came back stronger than ever and ultimately fired off the whole brexit thing.

Not a Trudeau fan – he’s too slick. Reminds me of Blair in the first couple years of his power ?

It is easy to remember blair only as a lying, warmongering neoliberal crusader (cos, y’know, he was), but he did a fair few good things too. This stands in stark contrast to the governments of the uk since his time, who have only managed the lying warmongering neoliberal bit.

@shadowplay

So by voting tactically most of the time – you’re killing the very party you agree with.

If you don’t have to vote tactically, eg. voting for who you want will either a) get them in or b) make no difference to another candidate getting in, then vote for who you want. If by voting for who you want you are assisting an unwanted candidate getting in, you are probably making life worse for yourself. I did give an example; former tactical voters decided they’d finally vote for the independent and green candidates they eally wanted, and as a result the conservatives got in with a landslide, and now they have the slow-motion catastrophe that is brexit.

It sucks that voting tactically is often the only option in many voting systems, but until there’s a lot more proportional representation or alternative vote systems in place, it will remain the choice for minimizing how shit everything is.

If anything, singles have more time and energy to devote to caring about big-picture issues that affect everybody. Having kids doesn’t make you myopic, exactly, but boy does it ever sap your energy and force you to pick your battles.

Just consider this: Finnish president Sauli Niinistö is becoming a father at age 69, just in time for this winter’s re-election. He’s gonna have a busy second term (if he indeed gets re-elected, as is likely) and retirement.

(I vaguely recall that his first wife and existing children died in an accident in the 90s. By the time of his election in 2012, he was married to the current wife, now in her 40s with no previous children.)

@Pie

Got to scoot for a few hours but before I do:

It sucks that voting tactically is often the only option in many voting systems, but until there’s a lot more proportional representation or alternative vote systems in place, it will remain the choice for minimizing how shit everything is.

How will you get other parties to critical mass (or even to start) if you never vote for them? The large party in power (of any slant) is not going to give up some of their power out of the goodness of their hearts.

@Arctic Ape

Pretty sure Trump said about releasing the UFO stuff even before he was sworn in. Might or might not have been before the election itself, can’t remember right now.

It makes me feel kinda paranoid – are all the “decent” men I know really decent? What kind of skeletons do they have in their closets? Who can I actually trust?

I know, right? 🙁

For me, it depends on what exactly is meant by trust. Do I assume that people aren’t creeps with skeletons like that in their closets when I meet them or interact with them? Barring information to the contrary or a really bad gut feeling, yes.

Would I bet on that, a.k.a. ever put myself in a vulnerable position again, even with people I otherwise think are decent? Very likely not (although I’m working on that). The more vulnerable I’d be the more that answer would tend to be no. On the other hand, I’m a cynical person with trust issues when it comes to these things, so…

I guess what I mean is, it’s difficult to definitely answer a question like that in the sense that nobody is or can be absolutely sure about the people they meet or are dealing with in their lives. In a practical sense, I’d say go with your instincts in each separate case and situation. Like “can I trust this man with this thing now”. That’s how I try to do it, anyway.

@ kupo

What if its like that bit in independence day!?

“They’re like locusts. They move from planet to planet, destroying everything until it’s just a husk….Scott Pruitt, you’re fired, I’ve found someone else.”

@Shadowplay

How will you get other parties to critical mass (or even to start) if you never vote for them? The large party in power (of any slant) is not going to give up some of their power out of the goodness of their hearts.

To repeat: this is about tactical voting, where the choice is perhaps between party A who you really don’t like, party B who you may or may not like very much but is at least the lesser of two evils and party C who you do actually like.

If the A and B share most of the vote, but the difference between their shares is low, voting for C risks A getting in and has a vanishingly low chance of C getting in. The end result is stuff like cameron’s second term, or the bernie-or-bust people benefitting trump.

Some of the smaller parties understand this and are willing to make sacrifices and compromises. The Greens in the UK, for example, deliberately stepped down some of their candidates in places where they were extremely unlikely to win, in order to shore up labour or liberal democrat candidates because preventing a conservative government, or at least a conservative majority, was more important.

You don’t have to take my word for it. The vote numbers for the various parties and candidates in the last UK general election aren’t secret, and so you see a really depressing number of places where the electorate leans left, but their vote was split between multiple left-leaning candidates and so a right wing candidate got in because there was a largely unified right.

Scolar Visari:

Mind you, there was also one U.S. president that remained a lifelong bachelor: James Buchanan, otherwise best known for palming off the American Civil War to his successor.

There were rumours that Buchanan was gay, of course. That seems to be the fate of any unmarried man in high political office. Britain has had, if I remember correctly, four prime ministers who never married, and at least three of those had similar innuendo written about them. Perhaps due to the declining stigma attached to homosexuality, the rumours about the last such PM, Edward Heath, have changed, with allegations emerging that he was an active pedophile. I don’t know how credible that is, but I suspect that any bachelor PM would face similar rumours. A lot of people are suspicious of an absence of visible sexuality.

I’d forgotten Cherie Blair’s pussy-grabbing.

To my knowledge, Trump has never had a pet mentioned…I have never even heard of him having a family pet while growing up.

Shadowplay, yes, Billy Carter was quite the character. He had a beer, “Billy Beer”, named after him, for a while. I remember my father buying some and saying “back to Budweiser. This stuff was a waste of money.”

I can’t wait to see Cernovich’s eyes bleed as he defends Al Franken.

@Shadowplay, PeeVee:
I seem to recall that Mad Magazine once had a back cover while Jimmy Carter was president that had Jimmy standing there, trying to smile while weighed down, with an obviously drunk Billy still holding up a beer riding piggyback (pick-a-back?) on him.

The caption was ‘He ain’t heavy, he’s my brother!’.

@Who?

Yeah, his sons seem to quite enjoy slaughtering endangered animals. What a disgusting bunch.