Peter Drake, he/him, LFHCfS 🔥 @peterdrake@social.cleverlibre.org

@SecondJon Not at all. We're glad he's gone, but expect Trump to put in someone even worse.

@SecondJon What's more diverse than literally including the entire population?

Curiously, suburbanites outnumber urban and rural populations combined. Catering to only urban voters is not a winning strategy.

I've never understood the "republic not a democracy" thing. I'm also not a historian, but aren't we a democratic republic? Yes, we're a representative democracy, not a direct democracy. I'm fine with that -- I don't have the time or expertise to deal with every legislative, executive, or judicial question, but I want my fair say in choosing the people who do make those decisions.

What protects us from a tyranny of the majority is not the existence of representatives but the Bill of Rights and the judicial system.

All those problems you're seeing with 5-hour lines and whatnot? Oregon's wonderful vote-by-mail system neatly avoids them.

Welp, looks like I'm about to cancel my subscription to @pingg@twitter.com. Their server has been down for two days.

Interesting -- on Mastodon, if you don't enlarge this, you don't see the caption at the bottom: Big damn heroes, sir.

@SecondJon Diversity is something to strive for, but on these specific cases (all-male committees legislating on women's issues) the complaint is that the people making the decision don't have to bear the consequences, or, in some cases, know what they're talking about:

https://www.usnews.com/opinion/blogs/susan-milligan/2015/02/24/idaho-lawmaker-asks-about-swallowing-cameras-to-get-pregnancy-pictures

Yes, race and gender are not the only factors in diversity. Others include geography, socioeconomic class, and (as you note) age and ideology. That said, if there's a group that is consistently underrepresented, that's a problem.

As for the Electoral College, the President can't be diverse because there's only one (at a time); diversity has to come from Congress and the Supreme Court. (Man, a lot of capitalized terms in that sentence!)

Are you arguing that the EC is valid because it provides extra votes for rural people? I don't buy it. If we're all going to choose one person, every vote should count equally. That's the core of democracy.

Drawing districts to ensure fair representation in a multi-representative body is a more complicated question.

We voted AND got our flu shots. What does that make us?

@SecondJon Let's look at the second idea first. I'm not an expert on gender theory, but I'm familiar with the line, "sex is between your legs, gender is between your ears". The vast majority of people (but not everyone, even at birth) fit into one of two sex categories. There's a lot more going on with gender, including homosexuality, transgendered people, those who identify as nonbinary, and those who simply don't conform to norms about how people of their sex should dress, behave, etc.

If someone who was born with a vagina identifies as male, I've found that it's VERY important to them and costs me nothing to, e.g., use their preferred pronouns. I also know that there is an enormous amount of hatred, legislation, and murderous physical violence directed against the LGBT community.

The right seems to have the idea that people change their gender identity on a whim. My sense is that people do this only after a very long and agonizing decision process, weighing their need to be honest about who they are with the very real possibility that they may lose their careers or be cast out or even killed by their own families.

(Perhaps a #gender theorist or #LGBT person on here can weigh in.)

Looking at the first idea, there are two reasons to object to decisions (especially decisions about other groups) being made entirely by straight, cisgendered men. The first is that diversity is good -- having people with different backgrounds, life histories, and areas of expertise makes for better decisions. (I think it is very likely that men and women tend to think differently for cultural reasons, not immutable biological ones.) The second is that the nondiverse committee tends to consist of members of the group that has traditionally held power and oppressed others.

Here's my take on the Shaolin "fire staff" form. As far as I know, this is the first time it has been performed with literal fire.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2_0kGkdQZyM

@SecondJon If we threw out everything that was decided by only men, we'd have to start from scratch. At the very least we should stop doing it.

I would not want such decisions to be made by a group composed entirely of progressive men either.

The 600-page textbook I just read would have been less tedious with serifs.

@SecondJon I also thank you for your courtesy. It's also nice that, although we're each seeing or emphasizing different subsets of the facts, those facts are at least drawn from the same universe.

There is certainly something to the notion that the left (especially the far left) can go too far with its "zero tolerance for intolerance". ("Vegetarian but not vegan? You animal-abusing $%^#!") It's been said that the left's version of a firing squad is a circle.

There is also the difficulty of balancing the need for free speech against the need to protect people from actual harm. I believe direct death threats are generally illegal (which didn't stop the alt right from using them to drive the Sandy Hook families from heir homes). Inciting violence can also be a crime. Creating a hostile work environment (as Demore did) can, I think, be at least grounds for firing or a civil lawsuit.

Back to the parties, I think comparing the 2016 presidential hopefuls is ... a misrepresentative sample. Looking at voter demographics, Republicans are vastly whiter (Pew says 83% vs 59%). In Congress, the Democrats have three times as many women and nearly six times as many nonwhites. The left finds it particularly galling when a committee deciding on women's health issues consists entirely of old, white men.

@SecondJon Typo correction: support POLICIES that help their demographic.