last night I had a dream that I met Bill and Ted, and I complimented Bills crop top and said something about how I would wear crop tops if my body was less bogus and he put a hand on my shoulder and said “what’s truly bogus is the way you think about yourself” and Ted nodded solemnly and then I woke up

That was the real bill and ted

Little fucking guy alert!!

The far right justices in question are Clarence Thomas (75) and Samuel Alito (73). The likelihood that both will be able to remain on the bench until 2029, at the earliest, is small, especially with the growing ethics concerns around Thomas’ financial improprieties and his wife’s association with January 6 that may push his retirement even though he is currently (very) resistant. Thomas and Alito are the oldest members of the Court.

Re-electing Biden substantially increases the chances of the loaded 6-3 court shifting to 5-4, moving control away from the far right bloc, by 2029.

But it also has to be considered that Sonia Sotomayor, even though she is only 68, may not be able to remain on the bench through the next presidential term due to health concerns.

The first Trump presidency and Mitch McConnell’s scheming loaded the court with three right wing ideologues who barely qualify to teach law at Regent University, let alone have lifetime appointments to our highest court.

It is crucial to remember that the impact of a presidency on the courts outlasts any other presidential legacy and can change the entire course of American life for decades.

Voting for Democrats is the "leaving the house, getting some exercise, and drinking more water is good for your mental health" of societal change. Everyone keeps telling you to do it, worst of all your mom keeps telling you to do it, and it's not a magical cure-all, but it actually works and rotting in your room shitposting does not help in either scenario.

Also like mental health, voting doesn't solve the whole problem! But if you aren't doing this bare minimum thing, the other tools you have aren't going to work as well as they should either. If you get medicine and continue rotting in your room shitposting, you will probably still be miserable. If you get a union at work but don't vote for politicians who support unions, the union won't be able to advocate for its members as effectively and work will still be miserable.

Voting is maintenance. It's like doing the dishes or cleaning the leaves out of the gutters. You're never going to get to a point where you are Done and Never Have To Do It Again (alas,) because time will continue to pass and you will continue to eat meals and the trees will continue to drop leaves into your gutters and right wingers will continue to submit bad bills to every session of congress.

You'll never be done with maintenance. But if you don't do that maintenance, your situation can and definitely will get Worse

You know I used to think "tumblr's absolute refusal to actually engage with the Trolley Problem in favor of insisting that there must be a third, morally pure option that doesn't require them to make a hard decision and anyone who asks them to make a binary choice is just a short-sighted idiot is really fucking annoying, but I guess it's not actually doing any harm".

Anyway that was before we asked tumblr at large to decide between "guy aiding a genocide but making progress elsewhere" and "guy who would actively and enthusiastically participate in a genocide and would also make everything else much, much worse for everyone elsewhere" and the response was that there must be a third, morally pure option that doesn't require them to make a hard decision and that anyone who asks them to make a binary choice is a short-sighted idiot.

Oh, god, I hate that this is correct.

"Engaging with the lever in any way makes me culpable for the death that occurs" seems to be the rationale behind most of the voting naysayers, so, and I am quoting wikipedia here, their rational is quite literally one of the positions of the trolley problem;

'...since moral wrongs are already in place in the situation, moving to another track constitutes a participation in the moral wrong, making one partially responsible...'

Their refusal to engage with the trolley problem has made them ignorant not only of how their position IS one of the sides they refuse to take, but also that the other option recognises their desire for moral purity at the expense of obligation, for what it is;

'Under some interpretations of moral obligation, simply being present in this situation and being able to influence its outcome constitutes an obligation to participate. If this is the case, then doing nothing would be considered an immoral act.'

People who refuse to vote because "they're both bad" may be taking the high ground, but there are still people on the tracks.

This post is stupid because there IS a third option. The party doesn't have to run biden again! The party can have anyone as a candidate! They're choosing to.

Don't run genocidal candidates if you want my vote. It's that easy. Surely you can find one Democrat willing to run for president who isn't also genocidal, right? Surely it can't be that hard?

You are still missing the point of the trolley problem, just like OP was saying people do.

The trolley problem is not "why couldn't they have given us a better track"

It's not even "should we take steps to prevent the kinds of people who would tie people to train tracks from having access to those train tracks"

The trolley problem is about reacting to the situation AS IT IS.

The trolley problem is; does taking steps to mitigate harm mean you are therefore responsible for the harm that has occurred as a result of your choices? Do you allow more suffering to happen because you are scared to be tainted by your association with *some* suffering? Or, if you make the choice to abstain from participation, are you then responsible for the harm that occurs because of your choice not to act?

We'd all love some morally pure option. But when voting day comes, there might not be one. So you will have to choose between getting your hands dirty in the hopes of some progress, or clean hands and letting the trolley rampage out of control.

actually you know what that's exactly it i would rather someone add 5 parantheticals after every sentence than use tone indicators it's 1. accomplishing SO much more in terms of clarity 2. extremely funny to look at depending on how they're used

observe:

"is this real? /gen" — i thought /gen meant "general" for ages. i would not be able to understand this on first sight a few years ago and is thus ineffective

"is this real? (genuine question)" — i fully understand this without issue

"is this real? (genuine question) (can't tell) (very realistic) (looks real) (scary) (photoshop?)" — is not only incredibly clear it's also very funny to read all of these thoughts stapled together while also in their own parentheses. it's also the most useful because now i can actually address all parts of what they are asking me with as much specificity as BOTH of us need

parentheses my beloved (they are for bonus thoughts) (and questions) ( and sidetracks) (like a 2nd conversation on top of the first)

My biggest frustration with the left has always been the inability/unwillingness to work on making progress inside of the system while advocating for greater change.

I remember the first time I came to this realization.

I was nineteen, pregnant. We couldn’t afford to heat the house because we couldn’t afford the deposit to turn the gas on. It was miserably cold. The duplex we were renting was old and rickety and drafty. The window frames were messed up and there were cracks you could stick your finger through that were open to the elements.

Just, like, to give you an idea where we were financially. And this was better than we’d been doing before!

Anyway, I had recently started going to DSA meetings. And that month, they were talking about how a moderate democrat had successfully gotten a small increase in WIC benefits monthly. It came out to, like, $10 a month.

The members talking—mostly male, almost all doing decent—were scornful. The democrat should have pushed harder and gotten more, refused to accept anything until everyone else caved to their demands. I remember sitting there, quietly drinking the latte in the smallest size they had that I had bought with scrounged quarters, listening. Wishing it wasn’t held in an indie coffee shop because it was a luxury I really couldn’t afford, but it would be rude not to. Enjoying the coffee anyway.

I was one of the lucky ones who was getting that additional $10 a month through WIC. Even more exciting, we were now getting a voucher for the farmers’ market. I casually mentioned that WIC recipients would now be getting farmers’ market vouchers, too.

The guy who organized the meetings was a hard worker, passionate guy. Did something in tech.

He was like, “That’s the thing! These people don’t want farmers market vouchers. They want—” and he went on to describe a bunch of pie in the sky desires. That, yeah, sounded good.

But one. I was one of those people! A lot if the tamiles were super excited about it, myself included.

I had never been to a farmers’ market before. I tried arugula for the first time, a piece pulled from a bunch by the grower as he explained the flavor difference. I hadn’t known before then that different lettuce greens had different flavors, that it was more than just the texture and shape. I tried pesto, which delighted me. Goat cheese. I got three full pounds of strawberries for two dollars, since they were closing soon and the old man selling the berries got a kick out of me.

Anyway. It was like, you have a decent life. Not great but decent! The things that are life changing for me, for us… you already have.

The ten dollars at the grocery store made the difference between a meal of broken-noodles-with-some-half-horrible-pantry-scraps and a meal. It kept me full and healthy! And the additional farmers’ market voucher was world changing for me.

The democrat who worked for those things barely got them through. And it was means tested to hell and back. They weren’t able to get everything they wanted. But what they got made such a huge difference for me, for people like me.

truly the end goal is not "my close friends aren't annoyed by me and it's all in my head, they're my friends and they love me", it's "sometimes I do annoy my close friends, just as the people I love most will also annoy me sometimes, because this is normal, and we will continue to stay friends, and they're not going to want to immediately cut me out of their life if I do something annoying once in a while"

gotta admit I talk a big game about avoiding The TikTok Algorithm and all that garbage but probably another big reason is just. with every single one. This Could Have Been A Text Post. I'm sorry, you want me to take the worst part of social interaction (listening to other people talk very slowly) and just... do that? that's a deliberate part of the experience? you people do this... for fun? instead of reading text like God intended??

It's the "this could have been an email" of social media

if we send this up on one of our spacecraft the aliens are gonna be so fuckin confused

goddamn her voice is gorgeous

I am slowly losing my mind over the shift towards video as the default media format.

I do not find this to be an efficient way to absorb information. I am bored and distracted by the time the largely unnecessary introduction is over. I can't use ctrl+f to find the specific information I'm looking for. If there are instructions to follow, I don't want to have to constantly pause and back up to the part I need.

At least give me a fucking transcript.

“you don’t like the proliferation of terms like Unalive outside of TikTok because you realize that you’re aging out of youth culture and it makes you uncomfortable!”

no I don’t like it because there’s something INCREDIBLY dystopian about being forced to soften terms for basic parts of the human experience like death and sex (and even more so terms for oppressed minorities- call me a “le-dollar sign-bian” and I will bite you) purely because advertisers and corporations demand it

The idea that young people are getting used to not being able to speak in public about sex, queerness etc without talking around censors, and see this as normal and not a problem, scares me tbh.

The fact that people are so comfortable with being censored that they Voluntarily censor themselves on words and topics that aren’t even being limited is a terrifying sign

I hate to be like the “THIS IS JUST LIKE 1984” guy but. there was literally a thing in that book where you had to say “double plus ungood” instead of “bad” because you weren’t supposed to talk about bad things. if you told me ten years ago that “unalive” was a word that George Orwell had coined for Newspeak I would have believed you.

that comment about how you should not borrow grief from the future has saved me multiple times from spiraling into an inescapable state of anxiety. like every time i find myself thinking about how something in the future could go wrong i remember that comment and i think to myself: well i never know, it might get better. it might not even happen the way i think it will and if it does happen and it is sad and bad ill be sad about it then, when it happens. and it’s somehow soo freeing

He learned his lesson

Nah you guys don’t get it. For all that Gandalf complained about Pippin, he better than anyone else knew that Pippin was absolutely crucial. Pippin accomplishes a very impressive feat: not only does he manage to see something in the palantír (most hobbits would perceive nothing, as these stones were designed for use by high elves), but he manages to close his mind against Sauron. That is a seriously impressive feat of ósanwë given Pippin’s youth and almost total inexperience. The only clue Sauron manages to glean from the meeting with Pippin is that he is in Meduseld: which Pippin probably did not even directly give to him. Pippin did not tell Sauron his name, so Sauron is led to believe that Pippin is Frodo. I remind you, in the books, the Good Guys manage to trick Sauron, by making him believe that Aragorn has claimed the One Ring. They can only do that because of Pippin’s ridiculous feat of ósanwë. Far from sabotaging the mission, he is the one who allows it to succeed (albeit, not on purpose). This is why Sauron doesn’t think anything is fishy when Aragorn wins the Battle of the Pelennor Fields by controlling ghosts: that would be consistent with the idea that he is using the One Ring. Which Sauron believes that Pippin brought to him. This is why Sauron pulls out his old “play nice and weak” card from his Númenor days. He first of all believes that Aragorn is a lot more powerful than he actually is, and secondly thinks that the Ring is beginning to affect him.

He should perhaps have remembered that Aragorn is named for Fingolfin. Fingolfin’s mother-name, Arakáno, would properly be translated to Sindarin as “Aragorn”. Most people would not show up to an enemy fortress with an army they knew was far too small, and start a battle they knew they would lose. But Fingolfin famously did exactly that.

When you read the line “fool of a Took!” It is important to understand that in the context of Gandalf calling himself a fool on several occasions. Galadriel too sees beyond the veneer of foolish naivety in Pippin. She gives him and Merry belts that almost definitely were once her brothers’. A golden flower on a gift from Galadriel can only be a golden lily, the sigil of the House of Finarfin. Galadriel, while all hell was breaking loose in Tirion, raided her brothers’ rooms and took their belts from when they were little kiddos, hauled them across the Helcaraxë, and then held onto them for three Ages before giving them to two hobbits she just met. Merry, of course, is comparable to Angrod and Aegnor: his great deed is done in a moment of beserk rage, and it is a feat of strength. This then implies that she is comparing Pippin to Finrod. That’s one hell of a complement coming from Galadriel: but as I just pointed out, entirely warranted. Pippin manages to reproduce Finrod’s feat of radio silence, in the face of torture by Sauron. Which again, is extremely impressive given that Pippin is far younger and less experienced than Finrod was.

You see me <3

I'm 50 and still need tips and reminders on Adulting.

I'm gonna keep it real with you, chief, just about every one of those things can move down a slide or two except the "throw out old food in the fridge."

Some of this is shit I've never done in my fifty years on this planet, and you shouldn't feel bad if you never get around to them.

Folks are out there cleaning their vaccum cleaner? For real?

I had to laugh at laundry being in the daily slot, because boy is that ever presupposing in-unit machines in a separate laundry room.

I actually invested in a little hand-cranked washer and a drying rack so that I can do laundry in my apartment, and the drying rack and a bunch of buckets take over my whole kitchen and living room. It's more efficient to only bring out the setup once a week, crank through five small loads, and clear the space the rest of the time.

And before that I was using the laundromat...no one is doing that every day.

You're right, and you should say it.

Unless your household contains several small children or incontinent critters... what are you doing to generate so much laundry? Like... okay, you go to the gym, and that generates a t-shirt/shorts/undergarments/socks combo, and if you spill something or get sweaty in your non-gym clothes, that's part of a second outfit.... is everyone out there using countertop laundry machines?

Unless you need something washed immediately, wait until you have a full load. It's easier on you, and it's easier on the water.

(I am way more familiar with DIY laundry solutions than most folks honestly need to be, having worked at a laundromat and done laundry roon coin collection for a condo complex; having my own washer and dryer to use when I need them is honestly one of the unspoken wins of home ownership.... he says, while stripping another set of laundry because cats.)

I'm 50 and still need tips and reminders on Adulting.

@emma-as-an-adult I would argue that dusting should be done monthly, but ymmv. I feel like I want to print this out and put it above my computer.

I don’t even want to reblog this because people will see this list and immediately start feeling guilty, but the SECOND I saw “laundry” under “daily” I was out.

Are you kidding me. In what world, ever.

Time and effort aside, it’s bad for the environment, too.

Why are pole dancers usually mostly naked (and why am I usually not)?

I get this question from both directions, depending on how familiar people are with pole. In truth, I prefer the chrome for dancing, but silicone is better for videos.

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