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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 10th, 2023

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  • Do you have any idea how long it took to make any kind of healthcare reform happen when we finally got the ACA? If we just remove it, that’s not going to make everyone “work that much harder to get Medicare for All”, it will set us back arguing over even the things that the ACA got us. Suddenly, denying coverage for pre-existing conditions is back on the table.

    And what the hell would Democrats say to the tens of millions of people who lose their health coverage when they vote to repeal the ACA? “Don’t worry, this is going to make things so desperate that we’ll all feel really determined to pass universal healthcare!”

    It makes absolutely no sense what you’re saying!


  • What I’m saying is that the problem is systemic. It’s not stuck because the big parties are just better at blocking other parties than they are in Europe. It’s a consequence of a system that punishes similar candidates. It’s just not possible for everyone to simply decide to vote for more parties in this system, because whichever side has more parties will just lose, lose, lose as the similar candidates cannibalize each other.







  • It makes perfect sense why we only have two parties while many countries in Europe have lots of parties. It’s not magic and it’s not because our parties are just so good at stopping third parties.

    The reason we are like this is because our voting system punishes similar candidates who run against each other. This results in parties that are more like coalitions, each made up of various factions that would be separate parties in a better system, who run a primary to pick one candidate to send forth, so that they don’t cannibalize each other in the general election.

    The bad part is that even the primaries generally have the same flawed first-past-the-post voting scheme, so similar candidates often have to strategically drop out or not run at all.

    This voting system desperately needs to be fixed. But you can’t fix it by simply acting like we just have to decide to have more parties, nor can you fix it by voting third party and screwing over one of the parties. I think this idea of voting third party in this election is appealing to some because it makes you feel like you’re doing something to fix it. You’re not.

    In my view the best hope of fixing this is pushing for election reform locally and winning over communities to the idea. There are some parts of the country with better voting systems in place. We should build on that.






  • So, if you study a map of a building, noticing that it has a kitchen at a certain place, then in go inside the building (without the map), and someone says “go to the kitchen,” how do you know where the kitchen is? How do you imagine the paths, rooms, hallways to follow?

    I know this isn’t true of everybody with alphantasia, but what I do in this situation is I get lost. I can’t visualize walking through the space while I study the map, and I can’t bring the map to mind when I’m actually there. Some people with aphantasia have no trouble finding their way around, so I think in my case it must be that I’m missing some innate sense of direction as well that visualization might have helped me to compensate for, if only I could.

    If I told you “a pink and brown dog,” you can’t “see” that dog in your mind at all?

    Correct. I’m not 100% on the aphantasia spectrum, so if I think about it then I might get the briefest flash of some dog, like an afterimage at best, and I can’t hold it in my mind, or manipulate it, or see any details or color. It’s not even really a complete outline or anything either that flashes for that quarter-second.

    When I read a book, I don’t know what the characters or places look like. But I have always been able to draw really well. So it’s really a mystery how this all works.