boyd-t-theophillo

[boyd-t-theophillo]

Please no weeks other than seven days please. It already sucks to have to take days off work for Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur and Passover and so on because the secular calendar doesn't accommodate the holidays; if Shabbat just drifted through the secular work week and I had to take a different day off work every week for it I don't know what I'd do.

[boyd-t-theophillo]

This is a good post, but "Iowa has historically been red" is just not true. Iowa has recently been red; but looking back to, say, 1988, Iowa's electoral votes have gone to Democrats twice as often as Republicans. Trump won Iowa in 2016 and 2020, and Bush squeaked out a win in Iowa in 2004, but Dukakis, Bill Clinton (twice), Gore, and Obama (twice) all won Iowa as well.

Reports are coming out that Harris is leading in Iowa.

So what does this mean for Iowa voters?

Iowa was red in 2020 and has historically been red. As someone who lives in AZ, a red state that is now a swing state, it is entirely possible to flip a state or at least make the Republican Party sweat. So if you are in Iowa and were considering not voting because “your vote won’t count in a red state anyways”, please get out and vote.

Obviously polls can be inaccurate, but how great would it be if we could flip a state that republicans considered an easy victory?

Iowa also allows same day in person registration!!! So if you are over 18 and a U.S. citizen who resides in Iowa it is not too late! Click here for info on voting in Iowa: https://voterready.iowa.gov/registertovote/

Link to article: https://www.desmoinesregister.com/story/news/politics/iowa-poll/2024/11/02/iowa-poll-kamala-harris-leads-donald-trump-2024-presidential-race/75354033007/

[boyd-t-theophillo]

The sentiment behind this post is laudable, but the claim in the first sentence is just nonsense. The main thing that decides whether a state is "red" or "blue" is what party tends to get the plurally of the vote there in presidential elections. That's the primary meaning of the terms "red state" and "blue state". Presidential elections are not affected by gerrymandering (or, if they are, it's a pretty remote third-order effect).

Gerrymandering is ultimately what decides whether a state is Red or Blue, not the beliefs of all of the people who actually live there.

If you're ok with any state getting obliterated by a disaster because of the color it turns on the electoral map, then you do not care about the people you claim to be protecting at all.

[boyd-t-theophillo]

@balioc, do you think it's unlikely that some number of the present-day people who go to ballroom dance parties (either because they're the rich people who go to rich-people parties, or because they go to the open balls that @jadagul mentions) find serious romantic partners there? A lot of people date people they meet at social events and in their hobbies!

[boyd-t-theophillo]

Republicans don't currently have a majority in the Senate, but other than that this is correct (and having a majority in the Senate is not much help for legislation if you don't have a majority in the House!).

Still can’t get over people blaming RBG for not predicting the time of her death instead of voters who screamed at Hillary Clinton for telling them the Court was on the ballot in 2016.

[boyd-t-theophillo]

@quasi-normalcy, culture can include both surface-level things and deeper things! If I said "American culture includes celebrating Halloween and Thanksgiving, believing that freedom of speech is valuable, and believing that democracy is the best way to select leaders," that wouldn't be "conflating" surface-level things with deeper things; that would just be a list of some things that are part of American culture, some of which are surface-level and some of which are deeper. The same is true of Christian culture.

Every discussion of "Cultural Christianity" makes the mistake of grouping a bunch of factors that are bad but aren't unique to either Christianity or ex-Christians or cultures in majority-Christians areas, and then explains that these things are from Christianity.

[boyd-t-theophillo]

Wikipedia factcheck:

Looking as far back as 2019 in the page history, I can't find any point in the recent history of the Wikipedia article on Marsha P. Johnson where they/them pronouns are systematically used. There are a couple of sporadic uses of they/them which have popped up at various points, but not an overall pattern in the article.

The actual overall pattern in the article is to avoid using pronouns for Johnson when possible. I'm not claiming that this is an innocuous or appropriate choice, but it's a different choice than the one OP states above. The edit to the article that switched it from primarily using she/her to avoiding pronouns was carried out on May 12, 2020 after a long discussion on the talk page—about four years ago, though OP seems to imply that what xe's talking about ("now they're coming for the queers") was a recent change.

The editor who made that change does seem, as OP suggests, to have been someone who had a track record of terfy edits, rather than an isolated change; someone once said on that editor's own talk page "your edit history seems like you have a particular interest in minimising allegations of transphobia." However, that username hasn't made any edits to Wikipedia since 2020 (though of course there's no way to know if the same person hasn't been using a different username since then).

I know an awful lot of propals have me blocked, so I’m going to ask that while this post should be reblogged, if you know you have significant inroads in goyische Tumblr, copy/pasting or screenshotting this would be great, because we need all hands on fucking deck.

So for those who don’t know: we’ll start with “a whole bunch of articles on Jewish history and identity on Wikipedia have been vandalized, including but not limited to removing mentions of individuals being Jewish and referring to Jewish holidays as Palestinian holidays, and making Jewish holiday pages deliberately vague with such things as ‘it may mean’ or ‘it could represent’ as though real actual living Jews couldn’t tell you what it does or doesn’t mean.”

Next: the same thing started happening to articles about North American indigenous and First Nations people. When I say “the same thing,” I mean I actually contacted the person who brought this to my attention to be like “could these be linked? Because some of this verbiage sounds IDENTICAL.” And little surprise there, because guess what, at least two of the editors involved have been found across both sets of edits.

So at first I assumed this must be a group with some weird hate-on for indigenous groups.

BUT GUESS WHAT I FUCKING FOUND YESTERDAY.

I was on Marsha P. Johnson’s article doing some research for a Pride event, and someone has gone through the entire page replacing her pronouns with they/them.

Marsha used she/her pronouns. The Marsha P. Johnson Institute refers to her with she/her pronouns. Someone has decided that because she was gender nonconforming and called herself “a boy and a queen,” her pronouns should be what they feel are correct—not the ones she actually picked for herself.

They came for the Jews, they came for the North American indigenous groups, now they’re coming for the queers, WE NEED TO FUCKING TAKE WIKIPEDIA BACK.

I cannot encourage you strongly enough to become an editor. You don’t have to write entire articles (although you can). You can do cleanup, you can re-insert appropriate references, you can add sources. There are editing guides to help you and if you’re going “there are SO MANY ARTICLES, I don’t know where to start,” just hit the random article button and start fact-checking.

We cannot allow a group of five or six people to monopolize our identities and manipulate them as they see fit.

FIGHT BACK.

[boyd-t-theophillo]

The article history for Tina Louise illustrates that it is not the case that "before 10/7, there were at least 3 to 5 references to her Jewishness at any given time on her Wikipedia page." Here's the version of the page from September 13, 2023, the last version before October 7; it makes no mention of Louise being Jewish. The implication that reference to her Jewishness was removed from the article post-10/7 is simply untrue.

By browsing the article history, it's possible to find when reference to Louise being Jewish was removed. Here's the edit: it was removed on June 1, 2022, by an editor who said they were removing it because it wasn't supported by cited sources. This is correct; information on Wikipedia is supposed to be backed up by reliable third-party sources, and the source that was cited in the sentence in question—the 2002 book Film Fatales: Women in Espionage Films and Television, 1962–1973—whose article about Tina Louise does not say that she is Jewish. So it at least appears that the information was not removed for antisemitic reasons, but rather because there was no clear evidence, at the time, that it was true. In any event, it was definitely not removed in the aftermath of the October 7 Hamas attacks.

When the information that Louise is Jewish was first added to the article, by an anonymous editor on July 16, 2019, two sources were cited. One was to a 2007 article in the Baltimore Jewish Times that was already cited elsewhere in the Wikipedia article; however, according to archive.org, the URL for that article was already producing a 404 error long before 2019. The other cited source was this post from the blog Neatorama. The two references were removed in January 2021, the former because it was a dead link with no evidence that it was a real source, and the latter because Neatorama is a blog that ostensibly doesn't meet Wikipedia's standard for reliability; the editor who removed the references also removed the claim that Louise is Jewish, leaving a note on the article's Talk page saying "I could find no evidence she was Jewish." The claim was added back into the article by another anonymous editor on February 2, 2021, but with no sources supporting it, and stayed there until it was removed again on June 1, 2022 for being unsourced.

The editor who removed the unsourced claim in 2022 also claimed that the claim was actually added for antisemitic reasons ("These tricky edits were done by a persistent antisemetic witch hunter"). I don't find that claim very credible, and no evidence is given to support it. In my opinion, it's very likely that the originally cited Baltimore Jewish Times article actually existed and said that Louise is Jewish, though of course I can't verify it. The information was restored to the article on May 21, 2024 (after the OP above), citing as a source the 1979 book Encyclopedia Yiddishanica, which includes Tina Louise on a list of Jewish celebrities.

In sum, I don't think it's very likely that antisemitism was a primary factor in the the removal from the Wikipedia article on Tina Louise of the information that she is Jewish—it was removed because the information was added in the first place without reliable evidence that it was actually true. Of course I'm not denying that antisemitism exists on Wikipedia! There is definitely systemic antisemitism that must be fought, including that discussed in some of the links matan4il provides, involving both structural bias in general and intentional bad actors. It may even be the case that structural antisemitism played a secondary role in the Tina Louise case—for example, it could be the case that editors might delete questionably-sourced claims that a person is Jewish, while tolerating (or making more of an effort to find sources for) other questionably-sourced claims. But I don't think there's evidence that the Tina Louise case is an example of a trend of people going through Wikipedia erasing Jewishness by removing information about Jewish identity.

Another Jew on here commented that people were going onto Wikipedia and removing references to certain people's Jewishness, and I just saw for myself that this is true. As a Jew and a fan of old movies and history, I was looking up a list of Jewish actors on Wikipedia. I saw Tina Louise (you know, from Gilligan's Island) pop up. So I popped over to her actual page on Wikipedia. And there were zero references to her being Jewish. So I hopped on over to the Wayback Machine (bless you, Internet Archive) and put in the URL for her Wikipedia page. And wouldn't ya know it: before 10/7, there were at least 3 to 5 references to her Jewishness at any given time on her Wikipedia page. Wtf is happening.

[boyd-t-theophillo]

U.S. Senators can't be gerrymandered since they're elected based on state borders, which don't change. State senators and representatives, and U.S. representatives, have the gerrymandering problem though.

I don't think term limits are desirable for legislatures, though, because legislating is A Skill, which people can get better at with practice. If you have term limits in your legislature, in practice what you get is a bunch of legislators who don't actually know what they're doing, leaving them much more dependent on lobbyists, who can stick around and learn the ropes for as long as they want but have agendas that may be at odds with those of the electorate.

honestly you can argue about the us constitution forever but

the obvious worst amendment the us had was the 22nd. they had probably one of the best presidents ever, who guided them through the great depression and then WW2 and then... added an amendment so they could never have that again?

[boyd-t-theophillo]

The part that you’re missing here, i think, @transgenderer​ and @cromulentenough​, is that Judaism is targeted in a very different and more specific way than just “religions disagree with each other”. Supersessionism is the belief that Christianity is the fulfillment of Judaism—it’s fundamentally claiming that Christianity follows from the principles of Jewish theology. So it’s not just a matter of Christians thinking Judaism is incorrect and Jews thinking Christianity is incorrect; it’s a matter of Christians thinking that Judaism implies that Christianity is correct. So the complaints about supersessionism specifically are not about “how dare your theology be different from ours,” but “how dare you tell us what our theology is.”

I don't really understand complaints about supersessionism. Like. I guess specific stuff about gods chosen people or whatever. But surely the idea that Christianity was a correction to judaism is just like...what it means to be Christian? If you didn't believe that, surely you would be jewish? Or like. Some other religion entirely. It seems like the complaint is "you believe your religion is correct". I mean I'm sure its inspired violence but like. Yeah duh religions do that sometimes

[boyd-t-theophillo]

@dagny-hashtaggart The Unraveling by Benjamin Rosenbaum takes place in a far-future weirdtopia with a strict gender binary that has nothing to do with what parts you have or who you have sex with; you might find it interesting.

new kinds of homophobia/transphobia to add to your worldbuilding:

if you want your fictional society is to be less just world, but in new ways.

Sexist society that believes men are better; thus, views transmen as extremely valid, as unlike women, they have seen the light.

Gay men are honored, as with polygamy there is a continual shortage of women, and gay men means more women to go around. Lesbianism is seen as just something wives do sometimes. Transwomen are controversial because, on one hand, more women, but, on the other, some people suspect it is a scheme by fathers to have more daughters to get a bride price for.

Lesbians are controversial but only because they are seen as appropriating Amazonian culture. If you are over 6ft tall and strong, then it is okay.

Gay men are seen as too manly. That they are somehow stealing the manliness from the straight men. If woman are around them, they will somehow turn into men.

Society that "solved sexism" by dividing the world into short people and tall people and then assigning the short people to the former women's roles, and the tall people, to the men's. Now people are homophobic about two short people getting married.

people are afraid of people born in the same country as them. i.e. the opposite of xenophobia. This is homophobia. (this is what I thought homophobia was when I first saw the word)

people assume that men are gay because they have never seen a women before. People react very sympathetically to a gay man coming out because they assume it means they were locked away from society as a child.

sexist society loves trans-women because it means one less man vying political power.

[boyd-t-theophillo]

“Culturally Christian” refers to someone who, even if they’re an atheist, still has Christian-specific elements as part of their culture. For instance, an atheist who thinks it’s important to have December 25th off from work so they can spend it with their family may be culturally Christian, even if no one in their family is religiously Christian.

As far as I can tell, "culturally Christian" means "shut up, atheist."

[boyd-t-theophillo]

@slatestarscratchpad, “anymore” presupposes that something has changed. Saying “nobody wants to work anymore” carries the implication that back in 1981, 1940, 1894, back then people wanted to work, and it’s these kids now who are the problem. What the post you’re responding to said was that anti-worker rhetoric has not changed, which is amply illustrated by these screenshots.

Of course, it’s always been true that ~nobody wants to work; that’s why it’s called work.

[boyd-t-theophillo]

And indeed, it's also worth noting that even if you accept Hamilton's thesis that the role of the electoral college is to prevent the people from electing someone incompetent, corrupt, or compromised by allegiance to a foreign power, in 2016 it manifestly failed at that purpose! Even mainstream Republicans at that time recognized that Trump was incompetent and corrupt, and some considered him compromised; then if ever would be the time for electors "likely to have the information and discernment" to exercise their judgment and not elect someone "not endowed with the requisite qualifications." But they didn't! So the electoral college, in addition to all of the problems it has, doesn't even have the benefit it was ostensibly designed to have.

Ok, since some folks are still struggling with this: No, having a national popular vote for president wouldn't mean that "just 2 or 3 states would pick the president."

First of all, that's *basically* what's already happening with the Electoral College. Because the states are winner-take-all, it doesn't matter if you lead in a state by 3% or 30%, you get 100% of the vote. So the only states worth campaigning in/listening to are a few swing states, where you need to eek out a 1% lead to win 100% of the points.

We see this in the actual campaign event data. Two thirds of the presidential and vice-presidential post-convention campaign events were conducted in just four states in 2012 (Ohio, Florida, Virginia, and Iowa). The electoral college doesn't empower rural voters or small states. It just allows campaigns to hyper-focus on the undecided voters of swing states. So if you're a centrist in Ohio, I guess the EC was tailor made for you? But no one else benefits here.

But, would this still happen in a national popular vote, you ask? NO. Of course not.

I don't blame folks for not realizing this intrinsically. They are big numbers, and this "big states blah blah" rhetoric is pervasive. (Notice how often it's "California and New York" though, and never Texas. Ask yourself why.)

Let's assume, for fun, that 100% of the population of the country can and does vote. For rounding purposes, that's 330 million people.

Even if you could get California, Texas, Florida, New York, and Pennsylvania to vote 100% unanimously for the same person, you'd fall woefully short of of 50%, and that's getting EVERY SINGLE PERSON in these states to agree. You need the 9 most populated states to vote 100% turn out in unison to hit 50% of the population.

California (Population: 39,613,493)

Texas (Population: 29,730,311)

Florida (Population: 21,944,577)

New York (Population: 19,299,981)

Pennsylvania (Population: 12,804,123)

Illinois (Population: 12,569,321)

Ohio (Population: 11,714,618)

Georgia (Population: 10,830,007)

North Carolina (Population: 10,701,022)

But, as I've said many many times, states are not political monoliths. Despite what those red v blue electoral maps train you to think, these states aren't hiveminds.

Both of these maps represent the 2016 election. Personally, I like the first one more, since the intensity of the color mirrors the amount of votes, but the second one really drives home how *blended* our communities are politically.

In 2020- 155,508,985 votes were cast. That's 77,754,493 for 51%. How many states, at a minimum, would it take to reach that number based on how they actually voted? Well, let's go from most populated down until we hit 51%.

CA- 11,110,250 for Biden

TX- 5,259,126 for Biden

FL- 5,297,045 for Biden

NY- 5,244,886 for Biden

PN- 3,459,923 for Biden

IL- 3,471,915 for Biden

OH- 2,679,165 for Biden

GA- 2,473,633 for Biden

NC-2,684,292

MI-2,804,040

NJ-2,608,400

VI-2,413,568

WA-2,369,612

AR-1,672,143

TN-1,143,711 (we aren't done yet)

IN 1,242,498

MASS 2,382,202

MI 1,253,014

MA 1,985,023

CO-1,804,352

WIS-1,630,866

MIN- 1,717,077

SC-1,091,541

AL- 849,624 (We're still only at 68 million, by the way)

LA- 856,034

KN- 772,474

OR-1,340,383

OK-503,890

CN-1,080,831

UT-560,282

NV-703,486 (We're getting close now, I promise)

Iowa-759,061

AR-423,932 (I'm so tired of adding these numbers up)

MIS-539,398

KA- 570,323

NM- 501,614 (SO CLOSE I really thought this would do it.)

Nebraska- 374,583 (DAMMIT NEBRASKA! We're still short!)

Idaho- 287,021

And that does it! That puts us above 77,754,493 and it only took every Biden vote from the 38 most populated states.

Hardly the "Californians and New Yorkers making all our decisions for us!" reality that people decry (Never Texas. Even though we had more Biden voters than New York. But Texas isn't the standard boogeyman for a racially, ethnically, religiously diverse, queer coastal city. Even though Texas has 4 of the 10 largest cities in the country, more than California- Houston, San Antonio, Dallas, and Austin)

YES, a lot of people live in California. Yes, a lot of people live in Texas. Yes, it's super weird to me that the city of San Antonio, Texas has almost 3x the number of people in the entire state of Wyoming. (I'm sorry if you think that Wyoming's 73,491 votes for Biden should make or break the election.)

But please remember that individual states and districts still get their representation in Congress. (Which...I have some opinions about how much this actually impacts federal politics that are their own thing.) State governments and local governments still exist.

And this idea that a popular vote system, which we use for senators and governors and mayors and school boards is suddenly ~oppressive~ and ~tyrannical~ when we apply it to the presidency isn't logical. (If 70% of your town lives in apartments, you don't give folks in single family homes an extra vote to balance out their vote for mayor.)

Frankly, going to the popular vote should be a logical first step. Ranked choice ballots (for president and senate), and party proportional voting (for the house) would go a long way towards making people feel like their votes had real power again, increase voter turn out, and I think motivate the parties to better reflect the wishes of their constituents, reduce our political tribalism, and encourage third party participation.

[boyd-t-theophillo]

Nope! I’ll grant that “shitsville, population 3″ is condescending and responding to “california and new york shouldn’t dictate what the rest of the us should do” with “Actually they should” is oversimplified, but fundamentally the point at issue is “should the candidate who gets the most votes win the election” and what OP and others in the thread were arguing at the time, and what you were disagreeing with, was that yes, the candidate with more votes should win the election. 

hey @boyd-t-theophillo

“the electoral college is a bad way to ensure the rights of the rural minority and there’s better ways to do that that don’t fuck up federal elections” is a coherent and respectable position I agree with

it’s not the same thing as “fuck those backwards hicks we should actually dictate their lives because there’s more of us and we’re smarter than them”

that second one was what OP and the others in the threat at that time were arguing, not the first one. (OP also blocked me for disagreeing with them, so that was fun, love how Tumblr mobile doesn’t tell you you’ve been blocked and just acts like there was a network error)

I didn’t move the goalposts, you just wanted me to move them for you.

[boyd-t-theophillo]

It's also worth noting @brazenautomaton's blatant (brazen?) goalpost-shifting here, which I haven't seen anyone comment on yet. Should we have "special legal protections that ensure" that people who don't live in big cities "don't get fucked over by the will of the majority"?

Yes, certainly! What should these special protections look like? They might look like legal guarantees that people may choose to live outside of cities are not forced to remain in cities against their will; or that public services such as education, healthcare, and transportation must be made accessible in rural areas (and an urban majority can't vote to defund them just because 'nobody lives there'). There are plenty of ways to guarantee protections for a minority group that don't involve simply overcounting their votes.

The argument that systems like the electoral college are beneficial because they help protect the rights of a minority group (i.e., non-urban people) are always, always insincere. You can tell because people who defend it never advocate for applying it to minorities other than "people who live in low-population states (should trans people, as 0.4% of the population, be guaranteed two U.S. Senators for the same reason that residents of Maine, as 0.4% of the population, are?). This is because people who defend systems like the electoral college don't actually believe in protecting the rights of minority groups, and have observed the (contingent!) fact that over-valuing the votes of people in low-population states happens to lead to less protection for the rights of minority groups than a direct popular vote would, and support it for that reason.

[boyd-t-theophillo]

OP... what in the sam hill are you talking about?

Yes, of course many observant Jews believe that Jewish law requires abortion to be an available option. Moreover, even more Jews believe (correctly) that the motivation for banning abortion is to enforce the strictures of certain religions (e.g., Catholicism and conservative evangelical Christianities) on people who are not members of those religions.

And your Kim Davis analogy is a total non sequitur.

tbh did anyone ever find the "abortion bans are against jewish women's religious liberties" thing particularly persuasive or a solid way of interpreting religious freedom or did someone in the left liberal sphere say it and then everyone credulously started repeating it