Alternative perspective, for what it’s worth:

50/50 is actually comparatively huge. Considering everything else has been 90/10.

The first departure from your god-king is always the hardest. I expect for many, this is the first break, and will make any subsequent break mentally easier.

Also keep in mind that people who identify/lean Republican has taken a little more than a 10% haircut since January 2025. Any “republicans say” is an increasingly smaller subset of the total voting population… getting more concentratedly nuts as they boil off the more rational ones. Even with this more concentrated version of Republicans, it’s STILL not popular.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s not GREAT… but there is a trend line. It’s not moving as fast as it should, but it IS moving.

On the flip side, imo there are some brilliant people with good ideas, and thier persuasiveness is hamstrung because they just can’t stick to a word count that appeals to thier audience.

If you know that your audience has a 6th grade reading level… avoid a long form essay.

“When did neighborhoods become full of strangers?! We gotta get off our phones and get to know each other in our communities. We should be able to borrow a cup of sugar!”

Check it out, you can pitch socialism in a way that’ll amp people up in like 3 simple sentences.

If you can’t or won’t do it yourself, by all means ask AI to help you lower your barrier for entry.

Basically all left (or even neoliberal) discourse happens in such an echo chamber people have forgotten how to talk irl.

It’s incredibly one dimensional to say that people wanting to shop in a place where patrons extend basic human decency to one another would be only be popular because people want to … crush the poor.

If your only cognitive tool is a hammer, ever idea is going to sound like a nail.

I feel like you think I’m not understanding your position. I am. I hear it ad nauseum.

I’m challenging you to consider if your approach is so narrow that you can’t even comprehend the premise. “I don’t want to get mashed up by a cart” necessarily translating to “I want to suppress the poor” should be setting off warning alarms that you’re not engaging in the idea or discussion with a full toolset.

I could get behind you on this if the post was saying that all grocery stores must have that limitation. In the subway example, it’d be like saying that the only labour that exists is being a subway driver. The calculus changes when, like you said, it’s mandatory.

Oh my god I’m still stewing over that exact same post. It’s been like a week.

Fine. The person operating the subway train. Should they be drunk? Should they have needed to demonstrate competency in operating a subway?

That’s entirely true.

But that’s still a double-edged sword we’re playing with.

If you want to run towards a an “inevitable conclusion” in the one direction (resegregation… undesirable… are you even alluding to genocide?)

I think it’s fair to do the same in the opposite direction too. Is there no lower bound for human interaction and behavior? Is it wrong to set boundaries for how people treat you?

I like how hyper aware people are for things that could be turned into an avenue for bad things. I think that’s actually more than half the battle. Doesn’t always mean you toss the idea outright, you just know that you gotta watch out.

I, for one, am in favor of a minimal demonstrated set of awareness and capacity to operate a motor vehicle. I also am in favor of not letting people drive drunk. Someone might say this will inevitably turn into a tool of racism. And guess what, THEY’D BE RIGHT! But, the solution probably isn’t to ban cars, or to let anyone drive with no rules of the road and drive drunk.

That’s an interesting take. I’ll guess we’ll see.

I’m curious as to what circumstances could unfold in which Canada would be asking to join the USA in the next 100 years, let alone in “a few” years.

You’re right. I edited my post to make the words more accurately capture my intention. Thanks for the vibe check. I was out of line.

If you don’t feel like you need to move your feet when you accidentally drop it (to avoid a toe smack) , it’s too small.

The fact that 3.5" floppies were self-sealing to make handling irrelevant (put your greasy fingers on any surface you fucking want) is another obvious advantage.

There are more. Before putting something on blast, really run it through forwards and backwards. You might be surprised at how many pros/cons fall out of a genuine consideration.

Sorry for the wording of my original post… it WAS needlessly adversarial.

I mean, there was that one guy where the mob cut off his entire body

That’s an interesting thought, I hadn’t ever considered that it might become this “wandering” point in space based on context. Maybe having a “fixed” conception at all is just a byproduct of mostly relying on eyes and ears which are pretty fixed. If you’re relying on touch, which is available over a much larger and flexible area, your brain maybe just abandons any notion of you existing at a fixed point in your own body.

We gotta find a deaf and blind person.

I haven’t had the chance to ask someone blind from birth (or blind at all), but I strongly suspect you’re right. I’d guess it’d be right between the ears.

In my bizarre life, I was basically blind in one eye for about a year when I was in my mid 20s. There was a perceptible and jarring difference in my perception of self, towards (but not directly to) my good eye. It didn’t happen right away, happened about a week in. This makes me wonder if even someone blind after birth would actually maintain the same sense of center vs someone blind at birth.

Blind and deaf at birth for me is the real head scratcher. Part of wonders if it would be somewhere on thier dominant hand, or maybe closer to thier center of mass?

I could be wrong, but I don’t think awareness that the brain being “where memories are stored” is innate. I think that’s something we are told. If I’m recalling correctly, a surprising amount of what we perceive as cognition is offloaded to other distributed parts of our nervous system, so it’s maybe not even quite as true as we think it is.

And even if it were, through informal polling over the years, when pressed, almost everyone I’ve ever talked to conceptualizes the exact center of thier “self” to be around the bridge of thier nose. Nobody I’ve talked to described the pinpoint location as being the position of thier frontal lobe.

I’m the fucking furthest thing from an authority, though. If you had to pinpoint the exact “point” of your consciousness, where would you describe it to be? I’m curious how far offset it is from your center of vision.

Not exactly related, but I think the typical conception of self being centered around the head at all is maybe just because that’s where our eyes and ears are. Curious how deaf and blind people conceptualize the physical location of thier consciousness

In university my entire dorm floor was in on insisting to my ex that it wasn’t “Big Bird”, but instead “Big Bert” (as opposed to regular sized bert)

It came up for the 100th time at a party, and I was like “go ahead, look it up” and was able to get in an edit JUST before the page load. “Big Bird (Or “Big Burt” for Canadian rebroadcast)”

It lasted for maybe 20 seconds, but it was all we needed.

You probably didn’t expect that comment to make me feel so old.

I thought it required energy to process wood into charcoal?