I feel like we’ve said this to OP already too, but:

…it came off that he was so popular…

However it may have come off, not enough people voted for him to win him the primary. He wasn’t that popular. For reasons mentioned elsewhere.

It’s possible some people who favored Sanders over Hillary voted for Hillary in the primary anyway fearing that she was more likely to win the primary and not wanting to chance unintentionally boosting the chances of someone other than Hillary or Sanders getting the nomination. I don’t know of any polls or anything that might have indicated that was or wasn’t the case. But that still means people didn’t vote enough for Bernie.

…because fewer people voted for him than for Hillary?

Not quite sure what kind of answer you’re fishing for here.

He just wasn’t “as popular as you believe he was.”

Yes, but how do you think candidates get “popular?” With Hillary’s and the DNC’s thumb on the scales, Hillary’s campaign had an unfair and underhanded influence on the public.

I’m not sure if anything Hillary’s campaign did was “illegal”, but it definitely broke things like the DNC’s own bylaws.

No president has tried it before. Whether he can get away with pardoning himself has yet to be seen. For him not to get away with it would require someone to bring some sort of court case challenging it. And to bring a case, they have to have “standing.” (That is to say, they have to have some credible justification why the self-pardoning action the president took wronged the petitioner in some way.) Which would probably require some legal argument that has never been made before.

I’m guessing Trump probably could get away with it, but given that no president has tried this, we’ll just have to see for sure.

deleted by creator

I doubt the term “time tangled in knots” is sufficiently well-defined for any reasonable answer. At least in terms of real-world physics.

If you’re talking about scifi technobabble time tied in knots, my answer is “Looper.”

Yeah, good answers. Thank you.

Are you expecting someone to provide you with all the answers?

Only to explain the answers that they’re already bringing up.

And, honestly, your answer and OP’s answer are exactly the sort of answers I needed. Thank you.

I guess the short restatement is something like “work with others to create an alternative to depending on the capitalist/fascist system for crumbs and then protect that alternative system on a self-defense basis with firearms. (And be ready to before you actually have to.)”

Seems like you’re advocating:

• “Get organized/involved” - What’s that mean in more practical terms? Start attending social gatherings put on/hosted by radical leftist organizations? And maybe start ones if they don’t exist in your area?
• “Get armed” - So, acquire firearms. To use in some particular way? (You mentioned you’re not advocating for “acts of violence or an insurrection like January 6th”, so not that, apparently.) Or just to have for when “something” happens? If so, what specifically?
• “Don’t wait until troops are rolling down the street to stage a resistance” - 'K. Not really helpful until I understand more specifically what you’re advocating for people to do.
• “Start organizing” - Same as that first bullet?
• “Get involved in mutual aid” - Yeah, ok. I’ve read Eisenstein. I know his book Sacred Economics has some tips for how to get involved with existing mutual aid organizations. I definitely need to re-read that bit and read other sources about that. But at least I have an idea where to start with some of that, I guess. I’d still like more specifics on what in particular you mean by this, though.
• “Get involved with resistance” - So, let’s say you’re a respected voice in a mutual aid radical anarchist collective with guns and enthusiasm. What do you suggest they do?
• “Stand, fight, and maybe even die” - How? Not January 6th, but… how then?
• “Don’t do nothing”/“Don’t lay down and accept our fate” - Not really helpful on its own if we don’t know what you’re suggesting we do instead of “doing nothing” or “laying down and accepting our fate.”

I don’t really know if this is a “I can’t really say what I’m advocating for because I’ll be banned, so I’m dancing around the issue and hoping you’ll stochastically pick up on what I’m not saying” thing either.

Without knowing more concretely what you suggest we do, I don’t really have a take on whether I agree or not.

He dropped out? Waaaaaat?!

(Kidding. Kidding.)

I don’t think it would phase me that much.

In 2016 it was so out of left field. So completely unexpected.

If he wins tonight (surely he won’t, but if he does…) I’ll be kinda pissed and scared. I don’t think I’ll be moving to another country or anything. It would feel a little “been there, done that.”

Don’t get me wrong. I voted. I voted for Kamala. And I hope the final figures show her winning in a landslide. And I would love to see a blue majority in congress along with her victory. But I’m not expecting good things. And I’m not investing too much in the result emotionally.

If Trump won, I’d probably plan to be a little more shut-in and keep to myself more.

Cybertruck not actually a truck. Musk directs Tesla to rename flagship vehicle “Cyber-not-a-truck.” News at 9:00.

This makes me think of the commandment “thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a human mind” from the Dune series.

Seriously, though, I suspect a lot of technologies we currently experience in society only in the context of oppression of average people and widening of the income gap might be able to be put to better use. Not even necessarily because we have rules in place so much as because people won’t be baking their selfish asshole agendas into the tech they build.

That all kindof assumes that humanoid robots would be “tools” for humans to “use”. If of course they (or at least some of them) are more like sentient creatures with hopes and dreams and emotions, that might make for a much different conversation. And that feels like the kind of conversation that’d be hard to even comment on today.

What’s worse is when that asshole tickles my sinus nerves just a little, never actually letting me sneeze, but still being an annoying piece of shit.

Right?!

I’ve dabbled in learning Japanese enough to know that learning a second language as an adult has a way of driving home to you how little I really understand about my own native language. And learning what little I have of a second language definitely has taught me more about English.

Well, the whole saga is longer. We got a bathroom redone and the sink never worked right. It dripped. I took the faucet apart several times trying to fix the drip, but eventually concluded the faucet itself was just cheap crap and couldn’t be repaired.

So I bought a nicer one and replaced the faucet entirely. I was a bit intimidated by the prospect of replacing it ahead of time. Usually the drain and faucet “match”. (As in, the finish of them matches and if the finish on the drain is a different style/color/etc than the faucet, it’ll stand out.) And so they come as a set. But in this case, the drain that was part of the old/cheap faucet a) worked fine and b) was so similar in color/finish/style that you couldn’t tell it didn’t come with the new faucet. So I didn’t end up having to replace the drain, which made the whole process considerably easier.

Oh, I did need to slightly modify the drain closure plunger to fit the old faucet’s drain… lever… thing. Heh…

There was definitely a moment once I’d assembled the whole thing and was turning on the valves under the sink that I was a little worried it’d all explode and soak the whole bathroom. Lol. But everything’s been fine for months now!

As for how long it took, probably three sessions of a couple of hours each to finally convince myself the old faucet was too defective to try to salvage. And then another thirty minutes to find a new faucet on Amazon and another three or so hours to replace faucet. And about the only roadblocks were the time I spent trying to fix the old faucet and the time I spent procrastinating before undertaking the actual replacement. Heh.

Coming out the other side of that experience, I do feel like I understand the sentiment better now that “if you want it done right, you have to do it yourself.” And I think it largely applies even if you don’t have any particular amount of expertise. Someone who doesn’t have to live with the results may not really care about something like a dripping faucet. If they can check the “replaced the faucet” box, they can say “job’s done”, charge the customer, and be on their merry way. (And I’m not saying I blame them, really.)

(Of course, that only goes so far. I wouldn’t think you ought to DIY things that might be dangerous, for instance.)

I think if someone referred to “the Travises shared given name” without adding the extra “es”, my brain would get stuck on that for a bit. I don’t know that that would be the case for most people or not. But if someone were talking to me about the name shared by multiple people named “Travis”, my brain would churn less, get " stuck" for a shorter time, and be less likely to have to catch back up to the conversation if the extra “es” was included.

Without the extra “es”, it feels like it could get a little “garden-path-y.” Like:

• “The Travis…”
• “The Travis” sounds like a pretty pretentious way to be referred to.
• “…es”
• Possessive. 'k. What does he have?
• “shared given name…”
• Oh, so “The Travis” was magnanimous enough to offer his name for consideration when it came time to decide the name of… maybe one of his relatives’ newborns…?

Right? Not to say I wouldn’t expect to catch on in a couple more words there. And also more realistically, my brain wouldn’t be stuck on this interpretation in the conversation, but more “suspending judgement” and holding both possibilities for interpretations in mind until something resolved the question. But speaking just for myself, I think my brain would have to go through all those machinations if the extra “es” wasn’t there. And that requires more wetware cycles than if the extra “es” wad there. If it was, it’d be unambiguous immediately after the second “es” that “Travis” was both plural and possessive.

(To be fair, after the second “es” another possibility would be that we were talking about multiple groups of people named “Travis”. Chapters of a club only open to people named “Travis” for instance. Kindof like the word “peoples” which is similarly “double-pluralized”. But it seems to me unlikely my brain would jump to that possibility the way it might jump to a possessive form of the title “The Travis.”)

Also, it’s very possible my brain works differently than most. I think I have a pretty “stilted” manner of speech. People occasionally poke gentle fun at me about it. (All in good fun, mind you.) And it’s possible my brain doesn’t process speech quite like most people’s do.

Probably rudimentary plumbing repair? (More specifically, replacing a bathroom sink faucet.) Via Youtube.

There’s a linguistics professor at MIT who I once heard say in a class (an Open Courseware class… I didn’t attend MIT or anything):

“We’ll speak no more of prescriptive linguistics except to mock it.”

However you want to say it, say it. Your particular style of speech is unique and beautiful and you should keep speaking that way.

I personally would pronounce it like “Travises”. As if pluralizing it. (“There are multiple Travises in the phone book.”) Makes it fairly clear. I guess that brings up the question what to do if there are multiple Travises who co-own something. “The Travises’ shared given name.” I think off the top of my head, I’d probably pronounce it like “Traviseses.” Cool!

Brag about being an Arch user (BTW.)