I have a suspicion that a candidate chosen in a RCV primary would have a mathematical advantage in a general election against one from another party not chosen by RCV, but I’d need someone with better math and electoral analysis skills than me to address the question.

I’m convinced there are two appropriate ways of using the internet:

1. Interacting with people that you personally know and have spent time with in real space. This is just keeping in touch, and might even be used to visit with them in real space in the future.

2. Interacting with strangers, but only under the assumption that they are not given permission to meaningfully impact your emotional or mental state. If they say something stupid or hurtful, it must be allowed to roll off of you, because they might be a troll actively trying to harm you, or they might be an AI programmed to harm you. Neither is worth allowing to get under one’s skin, or to even inflate one’s sense of self, either. One wouldn’t get meaningfully pissed at a video game NPC for being mean, or proud of oneself for them liking you.

Online relationships may supplement ones that are based in the real world, but allowing them to act as if they are real relationships is like giving bees aspartame and wondering why the hive is all fucked up.

If Trump really liked a well-kept beard, he’d treat Melania better.

🤡 🔫 🤡

And the guy in the middle is arguably the most powerful SCP in the room. Whenever he is killed, he regenerates a new body to replace the old one, and he also might be host to some even more appalling eldritch abomination.

Hmm.

Since Trump hit the scene, I’ve come to believe that everything that can happen has had a 50/50 chance of being either normal or absolutely batshit insane. And, really, that’s much too high a ratio of insane. If the insane thing happened one time out of a hundred or a thousand or so, that would be the right amount of insane outcomes. But fifty fifty is completely intolerable.

We need a constitutional amendment forbidding members of one’s immediate family from running for office once one is above a certain level of success. President is right out. Include the VP, of course. I’d say that Speaker of the House is well within the power tier at which your family should no longer be able to maintain a multi-generational grip on power.

An Andrew Cuomo-era nursing home.

“Empty”?

What are the mimics disguised as? Floorboards? Lint?

“No, no, no! Do not come to Texas! Texas is full!”

Meanwhile, Texas:

It’d be worse than that. We don’t share a border with North Korea. We will not like what happens if we initiate endless blood feuds with our next door neighbors.

See that little stream — we could walk to it in two minutes. It took the British a month to walk to it — a whole empire walking very slowly, dying in front and pushing forward behind. And another empire walked very slowly backward a few inches a day, leaving the dead like a million bloody rugs. No Europeans will ever do that again in this generation.”

“Why, they’ve only just quit over in Turkey,” said Abe. “And in Morocco —”

“That’s different. This western-front business couldn’t be done again, not for a long time. The young men think they could do it but they couldn’t. They could fight the first Marne again but not this. This took religion and years of plenty and tremendous sureties and the exact relation that existed between the classes. The Russians and Italians weren’t any good on this front. You had to have a whole-souled sentimental equipment going back further than you could remember. You had to remember Christmas, and postcards of the Crown Prince and his fiancée, and little cafés in Valence and beer gardens in Unter den Linden and weddings at the mairie, and going to the Derby, and your grandfather’s whiskers.”

“General Grant invented this kind of battle at Petersburg in sixty- five.”

“No, he didn’t — he just invented mass butchery. This kind of battle was invented by Lewis Carroll and Jules Verne and whoever wrote Undine, and country deacons bowling and marraines in Marseilles and girls seduced in the back lanes of Wurtemburg and Westphalia. Why, this was a love battle — there was a century of middle-class love spent here. This was the last love battle.

–F. Scott Fitzgerald, Tender is the Night

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I feel like Scroll of Immolation could cause an exploding plague that would plausibly wipe out the entire population of anything more than a moderately large city where the population density was high enough.

Ask John Bolton how that worked out.

Destroying National Landmarks for Fun and Profit