Cairo Practical Effects

Dumber people than I have been pointing out for years that anti-trans campaigns do not tend to win competitive races even in conservative leaning electorates. It's pretty obvious the centrist types just want their own prejudices to be popular even though they're not.

I feel like one of the biggest "blindspots" among centrists are trans issues. Voters, for better and very much for worse, do not care. This has been proven in virtually every election where a candidate decides to go mega TERF.

I put it in quotes because we all know they're smuggling in their views.

Is it just me or is this uncomfortably erotic?

Does the public good pay his bills? Last I checked we don't live in a society where many people can do their job for free. Are you willing to do your job for no pay?

My name is Ozymandias. By looking at my works you agree to despair, and you agree to resolve any disputes arising from or relating to this agreement through binding arbitration

Newsmax isn't about to pivot to "actually there are more than two genders, so long as we can strictly police them" because the notion of conservative policing of gender is definitionally incompatible with anything other than "it's Adam and Eve"

I think you're basically correct that a lot of conservative hangups are rooted in aversion to complexity, but whether that can be weaponized against them comes down to what their media diet is willing to feed them. You can't win those people as long as Fox and Newsmax exist

It's been 15 years and nobody's leaked a single bit of this plan, my man

Don't let him know, they'll get discharged next week for not shaving white enough

I think we should abolish SNAP and a lot of other welfare programs, they're clumsy and poorly targeted and demand too much paperwork. It should mostly be replaced by "if you don't have enough money, the government gives you money."

The idea is simple, that doesn't make the implementation easy. It's certainly no harder than taxing food waste

If we can't get laws passed to just give people money, we can't get laws passed to tax food waste. The mitigation right now looks like SNAP. I'm not pretending there's a lot of hope for government solutions at this point in time, speaking as a government employee who hasn't been paid in weeks

"We can feed some people by setting up a system that encourages businesses to make food more expensive" is not a solution, especially because it will remove the food waste that's meant to feed a handful of people

The solution to "some people don't have enough money" is very straightforwardly "give them money."

The reason they do that is to discourage employees from deliberately creating food waste to take home. Again, this is an issue better solved by removing the incentive of employees to do this by relieving their need to do so. By giving them money.

Is there a man alive who better embodies "An Evening with Tim Heidecker?"

Groceries operate on extremely thin margins, taxing wasted food won't cause them to donate to food banks. They'll cut stock and raise prices, making food insecurity even worse. The solution to poverty is to give people money, that's what the government needs to do

Respectfully, this is a problem better addressed upstream of the point of food distribution. We shouldn't be trying to address hunger at the point of "this food is about to hit the dumpster" because food waste isn't the problem, poverty is. Reducing food waste won't do anything for the poor

Bomber with pride flag, BLM, and Yes We Can markings labeled with text "Bill Kristol"

Tweet from Bill Kristol, March 4 2025, posting a link from The Bulwark, an outlet he writes for (he did not write the piece). "Stand with trans Americans. You don't have to understand everything about the transgender experience to know that Trump's acts of humiliation and dehumanization are unjust and dangerous."

Nah, there actually are conservatives who believe in democracy. They are vanishingly rare, but Kristol is one of them. It doesn't absolve him, but he's doing a better job of not throwing trans people under the bus than a lot of Democrats so I'm not gonna question his support right now.

I think it's important to identify this kind of thing explicitly as evil. It's not dumb, it's not hypocritical, it's not ignorant, it's not cynical. It's evil. These are evil people trying to achieve evil ends. It's literally Biblical evil. There's no complex antihero here, it's just evil.

It seems about as legally sound as sovereign citizen stuff, the difference is as you said: it flatters those in power.

I think the consensus a while back was "even when they have a decent starting premise, they get too mad partway through and just end up incoherently ranting"

There were definitely some high schoolers who did this when I was 16 almost two decades ago (I was too embarrassed to be one of them)

I do physics and orbit stuff. I knew who the author was before I clicked the link. This proposal is "3rd day of a VC coke binge" absurd, and Ars would be a much better mag if it ditched this credulous lickspittle

Not that a random forum post is deep political theory, but he definitely struck something real

Binds but does not protect, protects but does not bind, etc

This is maybe half-baked but I feel like Obama is the Michael Jordan of campaigning. Phenomenally talented, without any contemporary equal, effortlessly outplays everyone else on the court, but ultimately weirdly selfish and not a great team player

He's gonna get milkshake ducked when it comes out it was imported Italian wine