SwingingTheLamp

joined 2 years ago
[–] [email protected] 1 points 18 hours ago (1 children)

Getting trapped in a building with a mass shooter is something very, very unlikely. On the other hand, I face the danger of death by automobile at least twice a day, on my ride to work, and my ride home. More, if I go other places. It may seem not that bad because it's so normalized. Dying in or under the wheels of a car is something that happens to people every single day, and it barely rates a mention in the local news. Sometimes the victim doesn't get even get a name. By contrast, the stochastic nature of mass shootings makes them scary, like plane crashes or terrorist attacks, the natural order of things is upended. Death is death, though, and I wouldn't be less dead if it were a texting driver rather than a gunman.

And the texting driver is a whole hell a of a lot more likely. So, yes, it's entirely logical that I'm afraid of that. Not being able to understand and denying that fear is exactly the kind of car-induced sociopathy that I'm talking about.

Throwing insults is not a discussion, by the way.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 20 hours ago

You're surprised that something that's not good enough is... not good enough?

[–] [email protected] 0 points 20 hours ago (3 children)

You don't understand what fear is like?

[–] [email protected] 14 points 23 hours ago* (last edited 23 hours ago)

Are we still pretending he's not experiencing severe cognitive decline, likely dementia? We are? Got it. Just checking.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 23 hours ago (5 children)

They're not the same. This is privilege speaking, I know, but gun violence mostly occurs between people who know each other. I'm not in those circles or neighborhoods, so only the occasional mass shooting might affect me.

But cars? They're omnipresent. There's a steady stream of them in front of my home, so I can't avoid the danger. My life is threatened by cars every damn day, and my quality of life degraded by them. And you can't tell me that driving a car around a city is anything but sociopathic disregard for the well-being of others, because that's what it amounts to.

Cars as bad as guns? No, they're worse.

[–] [email protected] -1 points 1 day ago

An automobile, at the end of the day, is a luxury item. A toy. Humanity existed for most of its history without cars, and even today, you can get to work or the grocery store without one. (Granted, often not easily, but that's only because we've made it difficult to get there any other way. But making it difficult was a deliberate policy choice designed to exclude poor people.) One could argue that the automobile is an anti-tool, as its use is making our lives materially worse (traffic violence, health impacts, pollution, ecosystem destruction, climate change, the burden on government and personal budgets), but that ignores a car's major function as a cultural identity marker, and for wealth signaling. We humans value that a lot. Consider, as but one common example, the enormous pickup truck used as a commuter vehicle, known as a pavement princess, bro-dozer, or gender-affirming vehicle.

In that way, they're exactly the same as firearms, which are most often today used as a cultural identity marker. (Often by the same people who drive a pavement princess, and in support of the same cultural identity.) Firearms are also also luxury toys in that people enjoy going to the firing range and blasting away hundreds of dollars for the enjoyment of it. But beyond that, the gun people have a pretty legit argument, too, that their firearms are tools used for hunting and self-defense. They are undeniably useful in certain contexts, and no substitute will do. One certainly wouldn't send mounted cavalry with sabers into war today.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 day ago

I'm having trouble believing that this is a good-faith comment, as the strawman bears so little resemblance to what I wrote. The vein of thinking is that reduced-harm is still harm—maybe Harm Lite—and that we can only sustain any level of harm for so long before it's fatal. Without the metaphor: The harm-reduction argument of "vote blue no matter who" is utterly stupid, because it only works if "blue" wins every election forevermore. That's highly unrealistic. The fascists were never just going to go away; they took over one of the only two viable political parties and were going to win an election sooner or later because U.S. elections routinely swing back and forth between the only two viable political parties.

Furthermore, the accelerationist concept is to shock the people into action with the contrast of how bad things got so quickly, while the harm-reduction concept seems to entail letting some people non-figuratively die along the way, as Sen. Ernst applauds, as long as it's fewer people than it could have been. (No, I don't think that the harm-reduction proponents want that, I'm just observing what appears to be the real-world implementation.) Personally, I have hoped against hope that we could change course, and fix the only-two-viable-political-parties problem before things got bad, before any metaphorical or non-figurative dying.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 days ago (2 children)

All of those are center-right policies, tinkering with the mechanics of a fundamentally neo-liberal system, when that system is slowly crushing us (57% of Americans living hand-to-mouth). Imagine why voters aren't fired up to come out and support a boost to, say, semiconductor research spending to strengthen U.S. supply chain resilience.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 days ago (2 children)

That's not even remotely the same vein of thinking, even though both Ernst and I used the word "die."

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 days ago (13 children)

Biden did very, very few "left" things. His policies were center-right. (For example, when the railroad workers threatened the economy with a strike, the left-wing response would be to temporarily nationalize the rails; the right-wing response would be to protect the railroad companies and remove the workers' ability to strike.) Progressives showed up to vote for Harris, anyway, as the numbers show. The mythical "centrists" did not.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 days ago (5 children)

If "harm" and "less harm" are the only two options, then the only question is how quickly you die. There's the argument that we have to do "harm reduction" in order to buy time to organize for something better, but we've been procrastinating for decades apparently. Since all of history informs us that humans act only when inaction is no longer tenable (and sometimes not even then), really the only material difference between "harm reduction" and accelerationism is, again, the timeline.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 days ago (15 children)

The Harris campaign tried to appeal to the centrists, and look how that turned out.

 

No, I wasn't stoned. This thought was inspired by the post the other day about how trees evolved independently (e: multiple times) from different plants, the product of convergent evolution.

 

A little background information, as I've recounted a few times on Lemmy: Back in the '90s, UW-Madison professor Joel Rogers co-founded an aspirational new political party—creatively named the New Party—that tried to revive fusion voting. They endorsed a Democratic candidate for the Minnesota House in 1994, and the Minnesota DFL objected. They took the case to the Supreme Court, which upheld the ban on fusion voting. The New Party lost momentum and fell apart soon afterwards. Progressive Dane, based in Madison, is the only remaining New Party affiliate.

It's not surprising to see the Wisconsin Republican Party objecting to the practice; it will be interesting to see what the Wisconsin Democratic Party thinks. (I recently learned from the Wikipedia page on fusion voting that the Republicans and Democrats used to run fusion candidates to defeat socialists in Milwaukee.)

I wish United Wisconsin all the luck.

 

I'm very glad to hear that this wasn't a targeted attack, it was just another instance of routine traffic violence that kills hundreds of people daily. That means that I don't have to care about the victims. I don't have to learn their names, or their stories, or see their faces splashed across the news as tragic, sainted victims of a destructive ideology. They're just more roadkill to be tossed anonymously on the heap of bodies. Thank goodness! There's a lot going on in the world lately, and the last thing I need is more terrorism victims to wring my hands about. I just don't have the time or the energy.

(/satire, I hope obviously)

 

The partial veto that the Wisconsin governor can do is ridiculous. But it was ridiculous back when Tommy Thompson was doing it, too. If Republicans can use it, so can Democrats.

 

In a sliver of good news for today, Michael Gableman faces consequences.

 

I guess that every election now will have a referendum to amend the state constitution for funsies. Let's add Chapter 1 of the statutes—Sovereignty and Jurisdiction of the State—since that seems pretty important. Maybe the state symbols? I mean, nothing's more patriotic than the American Robin. Let's get the lyrics to "On, Wisconsin!" in there, too. That, and the 2025 Green Bay Packers schedule definitely should be in the constitution, and we can add 2026 next year.

Now that it's an open ledger, what other random crap should we put into our foundational document?

 

This was peak Internet back in the day.

 

The 2024 State Street Pedestrian Mall project was popular and led to increased activity on that stretch of State Street during the summer months, according to a report on the experiment(opens in a new window) adopted by the Common Council during its March 25, 2025, meeting. The first year of this experiment is leading City staff to evaluate a longer-term program while keeping or bringing back some of the elements of last year’s experiment.

 

We have several city alder elections, as well as the state supreme court race.

1
4THOT (midwest.social)
 

This past week, I saw a car near the stadium with a vanity plate with this on it, and I can't stop wondering about the backstory. I guess it could be a sports player or fan referring to the 4th OT in a game. If it's supposed to read "forethought," the owner probably could have used some. Anyway, I guess the censors at WisDOT aren't clued into, or don't care about, Millennial slang.

 

I can hear the vexillologists weep.

 

This is why the April 1st election for Supreme Court is so critical. We need to have fair district maps to have a hope of getting a Legislature that will share the state surplus with cities instead of sitting on it. It's a Republican strategy to deliberately withhold shared revenue from Madison in order to force their agenda down our throats, like they did in Milwaukee, that led to the recent referendum to increase property taxes. (They've also withheld payments for municipal services that Madison has already provided to state buildings.) If Congress removes this tax exemption, too, we'll be doubly-squeezed.

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