Back in 2016 the voters actually weren’t super excited about Biden either.

Biden did pretty badly in the first 3 primaries

Feb 3rd in Iowa he came in 4th place behind Sanders, Buttigieg, and Warren.

Feb 11th in New Hampshire he came in 5th place behind Sanders, Buttigieg, Klobuchar, and Warren.

Feb 22nd in Nevada he came in 3rd place behind Sander and Warren.

After these pretty awful results there was a brief period when Sanders was considered the front runner and the DNC shit a brick. You might recall Chris Matthews on MSNBC speculating wildly about a Sanders presidency meaning “executions in Central Park” that was February 8th.

Biden was thrown a life line though by Jim Clyborn who strongly supported him and gave him his first victory in South Carolina on February 29th. A state that would go on to vote trump on Election Day.

This strong showing though was enough for the DNC to see a way to have a moderate candidate win the primary. If they could get the moderate candidates, Klobuchar, Buttigieg, and Biden to stop splitting that voting block they could stop a more progressive candidate like Sanders or Warren from taking the nomination. Internally the DNC feared that a more progressive candidate would win the primary and lose in the general and wanted a safer option.

The day before Super Tuesday when 15 states would hold their primaries, the more moderate candidates reached an agreement. Buttigieg and Klobuchar announced they would drop out of the race and throw their support behind Biden. In the days before these announcement polling showed Sanders likely to win a plurality of the Super Tuesday delegates. After the moderate candidates lined up behind Biden he won 10 of the 15 contests, losing California, Colorado, Utah, and Vermont to Sanders and American Samoa to Bloomberg.

Buttigieg would be rewarded with his current position as Secretary of Transportation and Klobuchar would end up Chair of the Senate Rules Committee (although it’s less clear how much that was because of her dropping out).

With a victorious Super Tuesday the media rallied around Biden’s amazing reversal of fortune and the Chris Matthews of the world finally had a light at the end of the tunnel for the horrors of a Sanders presidency, line up behind Joe.

An interesting foot note is that of the states holding primaries on Super Tuesday, of the 10 that went for Biden, 6 (7 if you count Maine but I wouldn’t) would go on to vote for trump on Election Day, Alabama, Arkansas, 1 of 4 of Maine’s votes, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Tennessee, and Texas. All the states carried by Sanders, except Utah, reliably voted for Biden in the general.

So the DNC, worried about losing the general election, rallied their moderate candidates around Biden, who was losing fairly badly. His overperformance in states that would ultimately vote Republican ended up changing the narrative enough that he became presumptive nominee status on the eyes of the media. This status became generally accepted on April 8th when Sanders pulled out of the race, but you can find the media pushing this in March

I’ll engage with you in case you are acting in good faith.

“Helps” here is an interesting take, but not an uncommon one. There have been and continue to be a lot of people that when they see someone who has adhd or autism or some other neurodivergence think “let’s help them act ‘normal’”

If you are a neurotypical person you might even genuinely be thinking this is a good thing and in some ways it can be. Providing accommodations and life skills that are compatible with neurodivergence can make a world of difference.

The problem is that there is a long history of “help” being neither accommodations nor life skills, but discipline and shame. Here’s a thought experiment if you are neurotypical that might help.

Imagine that the world was majority autistic, since autistic individuals are the majority they consider their way of thinking to be neurotypical and you are neurodivergent. You want to do things that make sense to your brain, you’d like to make small talk and you find it very hard to stay focused during your school days 4-hour special interest hyper focus time.

Society “helps” you by telling you you are lazy and unfocused and all the normal people are able to spend 4 hours in a row completely consumed by their special interest but you keep wanting to talk or have variety and it’s very disruptive. They teach you “how to hyper focus” but nothing they say works for you, your brain isn’t wired to do this. They scold you when you don’t. They finally decide the best path would be to label you divergent and give you powerful stimulants so that you can remain hyper focused like a normal person. They “help” you.

And then one day you learn about how your brain is simply different, that you shouldn’t have felt bad all those years for being unable to do something your brain just isn’t wired to do. You realize that you don’t even really know the person that you are because your whole life you’ve been faking it, running scripts that they taught you so people won’t be upset at you, and taking chemicals to force your brain into an unnatural configuration.

Then someone comments on your post “So what you are saying is a good upbringing helps.” How would you feel?

It’s currently 110 degrees with a high wildfire risk where I live. So yes

I find it interesting that it’s always the “adults in the room” aka “the people in power” and their allies that run to the favorite news outlet and let you know “oh it’s far far too late to put anyone else in power.”

Really? I mean maybe, but also let’s not pretend like the DNC and Biden campaign and all their operatives are just neutral observers opining about the objective logistics.

In any other election year you wouldn’t have a candidate before the convention, so somehow it’s not too late in all those elections. And what exactly do we need all the time for? No one ever seems to say why it’s too late, just take it on faith that it’s too late.

If they replaced Biden it’s not like they would have to start from scratch. They have raised funds and they have staffers and campaign offices, as long as you don’t actively dismantle that election infrastructure I’m sure some enterprising intern can find the call script and strike through “Biden” and write in the new candidates name.

It’s not like they would pick a candidate with 0 name recognition, the person would have to be someone in the party they think could win. So it’s not like you need some massive lead time so people can get to know the candidate.

You toss that infrastructure to a younger candidate and what’s the actual thing they won’t be able to wrangle in time?

Not really perfectionism just grammar

I think the fact that using a neuter pronoun is so charged that we can’t even speak or write our language correctly is insane.

I’ve written thousands of technical documents, if you are referring to a generic operator / user / whatever the correct term to use is “they.” That’s how you say “the person that I’m referring to that I don’t know anything about”

There was a brief madness in the 90s when fucking morons used “he/she” for absolutely no reason.

I have some bad news for you if you think the ruling class gives one wet fart whether or not people vote.

“Not voting” doesn’t matter to a corrupt politician, they don’t care if you stay home. There will never be a voter turnout so low that the ruling class will go “oh shucks, they all stopped voting I guess we have to give up our wealth and power now.”

Voting is not the solution to the problems that plague our society, but just like how putting out a wildfire doesn’t solve climate change, you still put the fire out before it burns a bunch of shit down.

While I believe in common sense gun control I think that one thing people might miss when comparing America to Finland or Sweden is just how brutal America can be.

America is an interesting country, if you can stay on the gainful employment ladder you can have a lot of creature comforts and for a few people they get to go up the ladder and have a really nice life.

That ladder though is dangling over the mouth of a volcano and there are more ways to fall off then anyone wants to admit. There’s also a ton of people just barely hanging on.

Easy access to guns is a problem, but the fact that so many Americans are so crushed by the system we live under that violence and deadly violence are things people routinely turn to is also a massive problem. For a lot of working poor the system can feel a lot like running on a perpetual treadmill stuck at full speed. We retooled our economy towards service and knowledge jobs, a lot of people in that service industry make just enough money to scrape by.

There is not a single state in the nation where minimum wage affords a 2 bedroom apartment

So you have a large number of people that spend the vast majority of their time working difficult jobs rife with customer abuse. They earn just enough money to afford a place to stay and food (and a cellphone so people can sneer at them and say, oh you have a cellphone so you can’t be struggling). Mix that with a big pile of guns and violence is bound to happen.

We can take away the guns but I suspect Americans have the ingenuity to find other ways to do violence against each other.

We have all just accepted the term “Human Resources” as something that I guess we aren’t going to revolt against

I’ve heard it’s a generational divide thing between “you’re welcome” and “no problem.” I’m an older millennial and tend to use “you’re welcome” in more formal settings and “no problem” in more casual settings.

I use “no worries” if someone is apologizing but sometimes I suppose if someone is thanking me for some slight inconvenience I’ll also use “no worries.”

I read an article that older generations think “no problem” is a rude replacement for “you’re welcome” which is funny because they mean the same thing. The thing you are telling the person they are welcome to is your help and time because it was not a problem.

Don’t worry, he seems hard at work making sure all that Tesla stock he got will also be worth less everyday.

In case you are wanting the history. IBM actually coined the term PC with their IBM Personal Computers

At the time most computing platforms were incompatible. Software written for a commodore computer wouldn’t work with an apple computer wouldn’t work with an IBM PC.

The IBM PC was popular enough though that people started building “pc compatible” machines. A very popular configuration for this was intel chips with Microsoft DOS. While these machines started out as “pc compatible” after a while the IBM PC wasn’t a big deal anymore so saying “we are compatible with a machine released in 1981” just slowly morphed into “it’s a PC” as shorthand for “intel chipset with Microsoft OS”

Now why didn’t apple get the pc moniker? At the time when the IBM PC launched apple was actively building and selling their own computers and weren’t interested in making them IBM PC clones so they never went out and marketed themselves as “pc compatible” because for the most part they were not.

Thanks for attending my Ted talk

The maquis end up, in my opinion, as supremely unlikeable. Of course our exposure to them is through the federation lens, but in the abstract it is hard to understand how they can be the good guys.

From what we understand, the federation is a post scarcity society due to replicators. The maquis origins, as I understand it, is that to broker peace between the federation and cardassians some planets swapped ownership. The maquis are the displaced people from planets that shifted to cardassian control.

Ok, losing your planet sucks. Now whether or not these figures are sympathetic hinges on the federations accommodations to them. The federation offered to relocate them to other planets. They are federation citizens so they can go to any developed world in the federation or start a new colony, replicating whatever they need.

How did they respond? By going “no this patch of land is super duper important for some reason that no one will ever be able to explain” and refuse to leave. Then they begin terrorizing the cardassians for trying to settle the planets that were agreed to. Threatening the peace and stability of a space utopia society because they want to hold their breathe and stamp their feet and not sit in a shuttle craft for a day and go to some other of the vast countless planets in the universe they have access to.

Billions upon billions of federation and cardassian lives at risk so some jackass can keep farming a plot of land indistinguishable from the replacement plot of land he’s being offered for free. Oh and also he doesn’t fucking need to farm anything at all this is like a hobby or some shit because they have replicators.

Sisko was right to launch the tricobalt devices at their colonies and the federation should enlisted him to go Sherman on those traitors.

I realized the other day about how much I’ve internalized the violence of capitalism. I was driving down the road and there was a man with a sign that said he was hungry and needed help and my first reflexive feeling was annoyance.

That’s insane, that’s monstrous, that made me stop.

Here is a human being, standing there just holding a sign and I’m annoyed, even angry at them. The system is set up so that there will be people that can’t be exploited by capital and that’s their lot, to stand on the side of the road begging for scraps.

You see it so frequently in capitalism that your choices are to be sad for them, be angry at them, or ignore them entirely.

Maybe I wasn’t annoyed or angry at that man, but at myself for hardening my heart to his plight, and at the system we are stuck in that put him there.

I think even a young child could understand “we don’t talk like that” I don’t really see the alternative as particularly more gentle.

If a young child is figuring out what “self” is, I think it would be even better to provide them guidance that could help them answer that question. “Please use kind language” is just a request / order, I imagine someone might think it’s more gentle because it contains the word “please” but I’m not really sure

I think either phrase could be delivered in a gentle or aggressive manner. I would support telling a child “we speak kindly to others” as a sort of middle ground. Even better would be to explain the importance of this value to them “we speak kindly to others. It’s important that we treat each other with kindness” and then to follow up any questions about why, to provide space for the child to understand the value you want to communicate instead of just the instruction.

I do think raising up a child with kindness is good, but our children will not always have an adult nearby to tell them to be nice. Our goal should be to give them the values that guide their conduct in our absence and help them navigate the world.

There’s a weird feel from this comic for me. I’m glad that these two people could have an amicable divorce. I think the thing that feels off is how casual the decision feels in the comic. I suspect this might be why some people are having a negative reaction as well.

Even if you think marriage isn’t forever, it’s still a promise to love and care about someone, to cherish them and share your life with them. I think if you’ve been in a marriage and seen your loved one through hard times together, this comic just feels capricious. A discussion about ending such an important component of your life happening in the span of two panels in a car ride just feels abrupt and unserious.

I imagine in real life the conversation was more serious and the impact of changing you relationship from one of romantic love to friendship weighed on both parties more than the comic has space to show.

If you’ve loved and supported your spouse through difficult and unexpected change or been the recipient of that love and support, this comic can feel dismissive. If you’ve gone through the heartache of losing your special person, even if they are still a part of your life, the celebratory tone sounds wrong.

I am happy that they can separate and still care about each other, but I also understand why people feel like something is wrong about the comic.

I always tip my hair cutting person 100%. I wanted a hair cut, the hair cut cost $x, that person literally does the entire thing often with their own equipment that they paid for. The place will charge me $x because that’s what the haircut is worth to me but I know the person that actually physically cut my hair with their skills and labor won’t get $x and I think that’s bullshit.

In many other kinds of transactions someone can go “oh well the business deserves a cut of the profits because they provided the ingredients, or they stocked the inventory, or yadda yadda yadda”. But the hair cut is the one place where with my own eyes I witness the full body of labor occur and see who does it. That person deserves the value that their labor produced, not some owner sitting off in their beach house doing plenty I’m sure but one thing I’m damn sure they aren’t doing is cutting my fucking hair.

People act in accordance with their notion of identity. There was a study about voting that showed that getting people to identify themselves as a voter resulted in statistically significant increase in them actually voting than asking them if they would vote or having them pledge to vote.

For this reason I take issue with replacing “we don’t talk like that” with “please use kind words”

The former helps form the child’s identity as a person with values, one of which, is not using mean words. The latter is a plea to abide by the parent’s values.

It is not cruel to raise your child to have values and to instill those values. I would argue it is cruel to deprive a child of those core values and replace it with some sort of obedience to authority which is what the updated phrase instills.

TIL updated my post to reflect that

“Dear America: You are waking up, as Germany once did, to the awareness that 1/3 of your people would kill another 1/3 while 1/3 watches.”—Incorrectly attributed to Werner Herzog but just some random person on the internet it seems.

Still the quote makes sense even without the appeal to authority

Thanks, TheReturnOfPEB for correcting me

Thou shalt have no other gods before me.