Throwing a toddler tantrum and handing the country back to a senile, deranged, fascist, revenge-riddled, theocratic Trump HELPS. NOBODY.

louder for the morons in the back who are still whining about both parties being the same

Not voting for the left because they're not Left Enough also does not make the party go more left. It makes them go more right. Because that's where the votes are.

Reblogging because for the love of Christ, I wish the “I’m not going to vote for Biden because he’s not pure/ far left/ whatever enough for me” crowd would remember what, EXACTLY, it would mean for there to be a second Trump presidency.

Assuming that any checks currently in place would stop someone who’s mindset is “I’m perfect and DESERVE to be president” from turning our country into the closest approximation of Russia he can get, is not only naive, it’s dangerously, determinedly ignorant.

I said this in 2016 and I said it in 2020 and I'll say it again:

If you don't like the fact that the leftmost candidate of the two major parties isn't left enough, the solution is neither to refuse to vote, nor to "send a message" by voting third party. Both result in an advantage to the rightmost candidate.

The solution is, vote for the guy that's not quite good enough, and then lean on him hard.

Biden has moved farther to the left than any president since Roosevelt. Yes. He's gotten more of our agenda done than Clinton or Obama. And there's many things he's tried to do that the right wingers in Congress or in the Supreme Court have stopped him from doing. He's also moved farther to the left than any president I know of when you look at his whole career; at one point he was Liberal Lite, "moderate", pro-corporation, etc... and it seems he learned from it. He changed. So we're dealing with a guy who is capable of moving left, has done so, and could be asked to go farther.

The other candidate literally wants to become a dictator, eliminate freedom of the press, and spend our tax dollars persecuting his "enemies."

Do I like the fact that Biden is supporting Israel militarily when they have caused such an enormous and horrible death toll in Gaza? No. But we have treaties with Israel and we can't easily break them. Meanwhile we have actually seen him call Netanyahu out. Including saying basically "You keep this up and no one will be your friend", implying that he is threatening to withdraw support. Trump, meanwhile, is cheerfully Islamophobic and would happily murder every single Palestinian. You care about Palestine, there is only one legitimate choice. I'm sorry, I know you want to believe there are multiple moral options you can take, but there is really only one. In the US's winner-take-all first-past-the-post no ranked choice system, the guy who gets 51% of the vote and the guy who gets 90% of the vote are exactly the same.

Look, we can win this. The right's abortion bans are wildly unpopular; many people will be voting to try to restore the right to control our own bodies. Republican support skews older, but in four years millennials didn't magically reach a point of comfortable status quo where they're likely to start voting Republican; instead Republicans have doubled down on the crazy. Anti-maskers and ant-vaxxers, who are likely Republicans, are much more likely to have died of COVID than the reality-based community on the left, since Biden won by 7 million votes 4 years ago.

But Trump will do everything in his power to cheat. We can't just win by 51%. We have to trounce him and as many Republicans at the ballot box as we can, because they have lost the plot. Even the best ones refuse to do anything to stop the spread of this evil-for-its-own-sake movement that wants queers, Jews, and Muslims dead, POC subservient, and women of all races securely under the thumb of men. We have to stop this movement by sending a message to politicians, "these are not winning ideologies. Embrace these ideologies because of the fanatic fringe, and you will lose." Most of them aren't true believers; they're pandering. The only way to stop the Republicans being pointlessly destructive is to make so many of them lose, the rest realize, shit, the grownups are back, we better start acting like politicians and not demagogues again.

And one of the best ways to do that is to make sure Biden wins by such a large margin even Trump can't cheat his way to victory. Because he's ready. He's promised, there will be violence if he loses. (There will also be violence if he wins, but it will be state violence against us. If he loses, there will be rioting white thugs in red states, but the federal government will still have both the power and the will to try to stop that.) He's going to pull every dirty trick in the book to win. The only way to stop him is to win overwhelmingly. Then we get four more years of relative safety, where if Clarence Thomas dies or gets arrested we get a young liberal judge in his place, and in that time, we can push the Democratic party farther to the left, because they'll know why they won. They'll know who voted for them, and why, and they'll move in that direction because they want to keep winning.

You cannot save Gaza by making sure Biden loses. That is actually the worst possible thing that could happen, in terms of anything any American could do. Netanyahu wants Trump to win because Trump will back him up no matter what he does to the Palestinians.

Voting is not about proving how moral you are and selecting the perfect candidate. Voting is about getting the best possible candidate out of what is usually a lackluster selection. But this time, the choice is, an old guy who's not as charismatic and shiny as we'd like and hasn't done as much as we want, vs, literally, a wanna be dictator with an agenda that's pure evil.

I feel like people really underestimate the impact that your mode of transportation has on how you see and think about and interact with your city. Like, driving makes your city feel like a few islands, pockets of space where you regularly go and new ones you discover only when brought there for a purpose, but all amidst an ocean of just, filler. Taking public transit makes your city feel like a network of corridoors, a glowing grid along which you may discover new things, but whose alternate winding paths you only take when given to by circumstance. Cycling makes your city feel more human in its scale, and while you can only go so far, the spaces through which you travel are far more often built for people, not machines, and that difference is tangible, while your freedom of movement gives you more opportunities for exploration. Walking can only take you so far, but you see everything meant for you along those places, and every street feels like it carries potential, with no barriers to stopping and partaking of whatever piques your interest. I think, among these, driving is the one that by far most isolates you from the place you live, while the others are, in decreasing order, most utilitarian, and in increasing order, most personally connective to your shared space.

Also shout-out to the Swedes for just borrowing the French "adieu" into their vocabulary and just spelling it "adjö"

German has borrowed the italian "Ciau", spelling it "Tschau" and only using it as a goodby instead of also a greeting.

I had completely forgotten about this, this is fantastic.

If you enjoyed "ciao" becoming "tschau", you'll definitely want to hear where "tschüss" (German, also meaning "goodbye") comes from!

We can't let the French keep getting away with this

I mean the french very much aren't getting away with it. Everyone else is taking their language and running off with it cackling with glee. We're all getting away with fucking up french words on purpose

#English loves french so much it steals the same fucking word a few centuries apart so it gets two words that have the same meaning#But different spellings -#Like guarantee/warranty#(aside: There was a w/g shift so you can see if the word showed up with the normans or got nicked later#Which is why for e.g. the english call it wales and the french call it pays de galls)#Catch/chase#Gender/genre

official linguistics post

#jesus.#orpheus and eurydice#as a poem#using a poll#this is probably the greatest exploitation of mediums i have ever seen op#every reader has the chance to become part of the text by voting#not the subtext#the TEXT#and i love me some ephemeral works in concept#you had to be here for this one week#and then the text is locked#(barring any edits to the original post of course)#and i just think that's so beautiful#beauty springs from the simplest things viewed askew#and all you need is a poll that accepts long enough strings (via couchcrusader)

and then THE FINAL RESULT. where “look behind” came so so so close to winning, but “i trust that she is there” came out ahead by 0.1%. so maybe, maybe, we did it right this time. maybe this time we were able to save her.

previous years: 2022, 2021 / list of worst sf/f/horror

the bangers were BANGING this year, I kept mentally readjusting my top 5 list every time I read something good so the honorable mentions are extremely honorable this year. I hope you read anything that sounds good from this list and tell me about it!

top 5:

honorable mentions:

Beholders  - Mia Bergeron , 2024.

American, b. 1979   - 

Oil on canvas , 24 x 24 cm.

Jason Anderson

'S T R I A'

Oil on 60 x 60cm linen

the idea that restrooms, locker rooms, etc need to be single-sex spaces in order for women to be safe is patriarchy's way of signalling to men & boys that society doesn't expect them to behave themselves around women. it is directly antifeminist. it would be antifeminist even if trans people did not exist. a feminist society would demand that women should be safe in all spaces even when there are men there.

btw this is maybe the single most key distinguishing feature of the terfy strains of radical feminism, the seed all the rest of it springs out of: they have absolutely no faith in the ability of feminism to actually destroy patriarchy. they do not think feminism can truly build a better world. they cannot really even imagine that possibility. they think patriarchy is an inevitable natural consequence of unchangeable biological facts, and therefore the goal of feminism can only be to mitigate the worst effects of patriarchy, not to get rid of it.

they can imagine a society where women get some designated safe spaces without men around. they cannot imagine a society where the presence of men is not inherently a danger to women.

So I've been learning French for a while and 'faire' is actually an incredible word. Like what a fucking breakthrough in economy of language.

Faire is a verb that is usually translated into English as "to do/to make," but it covers way more actions than that, which is very confusing for new speakers. because (I have realized) that's not really what faire means.

Faire is actually a word that just gestures vaguely in the direction of the object of the sentence and goes "you know." "Je fais du velo." "Je fais du courses." "Je fais mes valises." I'm biking. I go grocery shopping. I'm packing my bags. You're just sort of pointing at a bike and going "you know, the obvious thing you'd do with it."

English: "You mean RIDE it??"

French: "Sure whatever."

Like idk I just really enjoy the concept of a catch-all verb that you can just slap onto almost anything because who fucking gives a shit, you get the idea. There's a bike. what do you think I'm going to do with it.

I feel like the closest English equivalent might be "Get"? Or maybe "Got"?

"I get a present. I need to get going. I get to drive. I get what you mean. I need to get over there. I'll get it done."

"I've got this. I got you a present. I've got to go. I just got here. "

Or maybe that's too close to "Avoir?"

OH WAIT

NO

IS IT "FUCK"?

"I fucked your mom. I fucked up. This shit is fucked. Stop fucking around. Something's fucky. You're fucked up. My car is fucked. Fuck shit up. Fuck yeah."

SOMEONE MORE FLUENT THAN ME PLEASE ADVISE

I believe you got (apprehended) the idea right away, Teaboot.

'Get' most commonly makes sense when substituting 'comprehend' or 'manipulate'. It works in the sphere of receivership. Heidegger's Dasein philosophy applies here. This is closer to 'faire' than the english language use of 'fuck', because the breadth of 'fuck's use is greater, and covers pronouns, (Grab that fucker, will ya'?) verbs, (I fuck cars, monster fucking, it'll all be fucked by 2030,) and prepositions, interjections, and abstract nouns besides, and this is not a premeditated exhaustive list.

Oooooooooh ty

This actually has to do with what linguists call "open class" vs. "closed class" words! Certain parts of speech in different languages may be more "open" or "closed" than others. Open class parts of speech readily accept new words. Closed classes do not. Generally, open classes are more content-oriented and closed classes are more grammatically oriented.

Take conjunctions for example (and, but, or, etc.) and try to think about inventing and introducing a brand new conjunction to the English language. Doesn't sound likely, right? But we add new nouns all the time, like "deepfake" or "rizz."

English also adds verbs easily, which is how we easily get verbs like "googling" or "doomscrolling," but verbs are a less open class languages like French or Spanish. This makes sense when you consider the grammatical complexity of verb conjugation in those languages compared to a language like English. Turning "bike" into a verb is pretty simple in English and only generates four verb forms of the word: bike, bikes, biking and biked. In Spanish, for example, verbing 'bicicleta' would generate dozens of new forms of the word through 16 tense and mood variations multiplied by five or six different forms (first, second, third person + plurality), depending on dialect.

That's where words like "faire" (French) and "hacer" (Spanish) come in. Instead of generating a new verb and all of the conjugations that come with it, those languages are more likely to use the preexisting verbs faire and hacer as verbifying auxiliaries. As a result, you can stick them in front of any non-verb to make a verb version.

So actually the best English equivalent to "Je fais mes valises," would be "I'm suitcasing."

Chen Chen

Anastasia Trusova, “Lace over the river” Acrylic on canvas, 2022

Optical Illusion Paintings by Rob Gonsalves

There are only two ways to wake up early 1)Go to bed early 2) Not enough sleep Why do you keep thinking there’s a third way there is no third way it’s a Two option system it’s a span of time you can shift it backwards or you can shorten it you can’t do anything else. Just shift it backward all you have to do is shift it backward you aren’t Losijf your day because you went to bed early you Get More Tomorrow it’s math baby it’s just counting don’t fall for the long open hours of the night baby they aren’t good to you like the sunrise is listen to me girl

outtake already??

Wow I like those words ashgfkjvmgk

Would you mind if I used them?

(have been using bdsm(canonical) and bdsm(material) instead as in this narrative acknowledges bdsm as something happening in the story vs this is not bdsm in universe but it is bdsm related and just like, stuff to feed your fantasies, rules and morals do not apply because nobody is trying to portray real situations, these narratives are shallow as they are merely tools.) But I guess both the descriptions have slight differences.

oh yeah go nuts lol, it's just the best way I could come up with to phrase it, I don't own the words or anything

Watsonian BDSM vs Doylist BDSM

Couldn't see his name anywhere but he is Ronn Lucas!