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Cake day: September 6th, 2024

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  • The percentage of people who were left handed magically rose from less than 1% to around 10% after we stopped persecuting people for being left handed. The same dynamic is at play here.

    The thing about trans people is we’re often an invisible minority. If you met me on the street or even were my coworker for years, you wouldn’t know I’m trans. I’m a trans woman in my mid 30s. I simply don’t bring it up with people who aren’t really close to me. That’s both for my own protection and because frankly, most of the time I just want people to see me as a woman, not as a trans woman. And just in case you’re one of those people who thinks you can magically identify all the trans people around you, well confirmation bias is a thing. You only see the trans people you see. Some of us are out and proud gender-fucking pink haired gender studies majors, but most of us are just pretty regular boring people. We have jobs and lives like everyone else. I live with my husband in a 3 bed 2.5 bath house in a regular suburban neighborhood. You could be my neighbor or coworker and not know it.






  • I would straight up call it “the New Democratic Party” or similar. I wouldn’t even necessarily try to make a massive shift towards the progressive direction. Instead, design it so that it would be very easy for existing Democratic politicians to jump ship to the new party. Make it an equally large tent, and just serve as a one-to-one replacement of the existing party. Once the Old Democratic Party is dead and buried, then debates can be had about what direction to move the party politically. Instead, the main change would be structural reforms, reforms that would serve to allow the party to move in new ideological directions in the future.

    I would make the New Democratic Party like the old one, except with a few key structural reforms that will prevent the dysfunction of the Old Democratic Party. Some possible reforms I can think of:

    1. No politician may run under the New Democratic Party banner while accepting corporate campaign dollars.

    2. Every nominee must have a full and competitive primary every single cycle, regardless of incumbency.

    3. Any party leader that holds a leadership role during a losing election will be ineligible to serve in party leadership for the next ten years. (True electoral accountability among leadership.)

    4. No system of committee appointments or positions within the party may be assigned based on seniority. Every position from top to bottom must be competitive. This is the DEMOCRATIC party. We don’t do inherited royalty here.

    5. Various reforms to greatly diminish the power of political consultants.

    6. A vice president is ineligible to be the party’s presidential nominee for at least 8 years after the end of their VP term. (Kill off the “it’s their turn” idea once and for all.)

    In other words, in software terms, this would be a hard fork of the Democratic Party. It wouldn’t be an entirely new party that has to build a completely new base and tradition from scratch. It would simply be a new version of the existing party built with a few crucial reforms that will prevent the kind of sicknesses that currently plague the existing Old Democratic Party. The actual formal legal structure of the party would be entirely new, but it would be designed so that any existing Democratic politician could easily jump ship to the new version as long as they’re willing to agree with these few crucial structural reforms. It would essentially be stealing the party right out from under the existing DNC.






  • Realistically we wouldn’t just do this overnight. You would take a couple of years to work all the details out. Peaceful dissolution of nations has happened many times before. You don’t just shut down the old empire like turning off a light switch. But there would be existing institutions to build off of. The existing state national guards could be expanded to serve as full military units.

    As far as doing this Constitutionally, the process is a bit dubious. But really, it doesn’t matter. If you’re at the point of the population being willing to voluntarily dissolve the country, you simply ignore the old constitution entirely. If a president and Congress were elected with a mandate of dissolving the US entirely, they could simply do it and there wouldn’t be anyone to stop them. Hell, you could probably do this just by electing a president on a platform of dissolving the country. Yes, it really wouldn’t be constitutionally valid, but in these kind of situations, that’s not really relevant anymore.






  • Democrats are a party divided, Republicans are a party united. That is why they win. The Republican base and Republican donors support big corporations and corporate graft. The Democratic base wants a party that will truly take on corporate power, but the gerontocracy that runs the party is firmly in bed with corporate ghouls through their donations. The Republican base is united with its donors, while the Democratic base is at odds with its donors. The progressive wing of the party, in rejecting corporate influence, offers the party a way forward. But as we’ve seen in the recent House committee fights, vampires like Pelosi refuse to give up power and will die in office. The leaders of the Democratic party would rather lose to a Republicans than win with an anti-corporate progressive message, as those corporate dollars enrich them personally.

    The existing Democratic Party likely needs to be burned down to ashes. It needs to go the way of the Whigs. Only then will room exist for a less corrupt party to form on the left. Democrats are losers, and they are going to continue to lose, as they simply do not want to win. Only win the Democratic party is left in the ash heap of history will progress finally be possible.

    These people are beyond redemption.