Spoken like a person who isn’t forced to use JIRA

Yelling at voters doesn’t help, neither does educating them.

These things only affect individuals, and there’s hundred of millions of voters out there, in a constantly shifting cohort.

You may as well try to bail out the rising tide with a teacup. You can expend unlimited resources on the task, and you’ll achieve precisely dick.

It doesn’t matter how wrong people are, how stupid people are, or how fucked-up their reactions to things are. You cannot effectively change that at scale, except via constant, persistent social engineering over years or even decades.

If the opposition is offering free pizza, then it doesn’t matter how much healthier and better your free salad really is. Don’t waste your time on trying to convince people, don’t waste your energy on it, don’t waste your emotions on it. People are going to choose the pizza, and you damn well know it.

If you want them to take your offering instead, you need to come up with something that hundreds of millions of people will think is tastier than pizza.

Now sure, you can try and sell people the idea that the pizza guy doesn’t wash his hands after taking a shit. You can put up giant posters of the cockroaches crawling all over the stall, and sure you might make a dent.

But when the alternative looks like a bunch of dry bitter rabbit food to them, no matter how tasty it actually is, you’re fucked.

You need to address the actual concerns of the voters (no matter how stupid), and you need to show them that you’re addressing them, in a way they’ll actually notice and appreciate.

Not ‘ought to’. Will.

What it needs is some angry people who will get up on their hind legs and fight for the working classes. It needs people who are loudly and visibly sick of the status quo, tired of the bullshit and ready to rip the face off anyone who gets in their way.

Not the fucking charity-auction Moira Schitt ghouls schmoozing up to $LARGE_CORPORATION while laughing about the dirty poors, or smirking about how bombing Palestinian children is the only moral choice.

(Seriously, Trump ought to hire Matt Miller and Vedant Patel - they did more to undermine the Dem campaign than anyone else. The optics were an unmitigated disaster.)

“Am I out of touch? No, it’s the voters who are wrong”

I mean he did kill Hitler, that’s got to count for something.

As a fellow Australian, I don’t understand why you’re surprised.

“Hold your nose and vote for the lesser evil” may be pragmatic, but it doesn’t get people emotionally engaged. It doesn’t get you infectious enthusiasm and passion. It gets you reluctant, dejected compliance, and that simply does not catch fire.

On the other side you have nothing but emotional engagement; god knows it’s not a rational or pragmatic choice there. Trump does nothing but pander to hatred and cruelty and fear and the power fantasies of gullible idiots, and it fucking works. Cheap shallow emotional satisfaction, no matter how stupid an idea it is. You know, like junk food and binge drinking and cigarettes and pokies; things that people know full well are ruining their lives, but they continue to seek them out regardless.

If the dems ever want to win, they will have to make the progressives fall in love with them, and you don’t get that by backing genocide unconditionally, you just don’t.

They didn’t get the oh-god-yes, just a not-no, and that does not equal consent.

Well, Democrats can rest easy knowing that Palestinian children will continue being murdered.

I hope it was worth it.

I don’t understand why the entire region hasn’t wiped Israel off the map. They’re clearly expansionist, and are clearly going to keep bombing their neighbours a little bit at a time; why just sit around and wait?

Even when it’s the “most important election ever”, they don’t just pull out all the stops to ensure it’s a shoe-in - they try to finesse it down to a hair, and get away with 99% of the bastardry of the other guy.

Exactly the same thing here in Australia, every single fucking time. And 90% of the time, they lose.

it’s an effective meta for rich people.

Because the conditions required for fascism to take root have been incubating for decades.

Massive wealth inequality, insecure employment, non-existent labor laws and worker’s rights, hollowed-out education, healthcare and social services, large corporations getting to write their own laws verbatim, political parties sucking dick for their donors, endless war ensuring unlimited money for the military-industrial complex, demonization of brown-people-of-the-week, fetishization of ‘the troops’ and ongoing acceptance of brutality.

People are poor, desperate, ignorant, exploited and forgotten, they’re shown every day that killing the shit out of outsiders is the solution to all the country’s problems, anyone pushing actual progressive ideals is shut down and demonized as a threat to the profits of the 0.1%, giving people a choice between rightwing bastardry and neoliberal bastardry as their only lens through which to see the world.

Give that the opportunity to flare up and of course it’s fucking going to. The republicans want it, the dems do nothing to prevent it.

It’s like watching a party get the wrong kind of rowdy all night, you keep supplying drinks regardless, then you wonder why it turns into a fight, oh no how could this ever happen?

Sucks to your ass-mar

I mean for god’s sake, you had a spell in each hand but they didn’t do spell combos.

cmon man

oh no, not implications.

That was one shipment, in June.

“And while you’re at it, drop these bombs on them.”

Who says you need punishment at all?

The vast majority of misbehaviour is down to poorly-developed coping skills. Which kids have, because, y’know, they’re kids.

We all do stupid shit we know we shouldn’t, even when we know it will lead to bad outcomes for us, because fuck it.

Work is stressful, fuck it entire pizza for lunch. I’m sad and lonely, fuck it I’m calling my ex. I have a shitty headache, fuck it imma chew this stupid customer out. Omg I need to know what happens, fuck it I’m binging the rest of this series at 1am on a work night. Partyyyyyyyy fuck it lets finish the entire bottle. And so on, and so forth.

Emotion management and impulse control is a learned skill, especially when you have to integrate it with all the social stuff. People have decades of experience, and they still fuck up.

What the flying fuck do you expect from a little kid? They’re hilariously incompetent at literally everything; why do you imagine that they’d be automatically perfect at probably the most difficult complex and nuanced skillset there is? They need strategies for dealing, they need experience recognising that they need to deal, and they need time to develop enough emotional resources to take the strain.

And since when did anyone get better at learning any skill when every slipup leads to some asshole deliberately inflicting pain and/or misery on them?

That’s not how you draw a dog, Emily. :thud: You made me do that.

You missed the ball, Billy. Now you don’t get fed.

No, Kate, 5 x 8 is not 42, now I’m going to throw out all your toys.

It doesn’t work like that. People need to learn from their mistakes just as much as from their successes - which means a safe environment with support and feedback, not anxiety, fear, pain and shame.

When my kid was about 6, he had the worst time with video games. He would get frustrated when he lost, frustration would make him worse at the game, he’d start losing more and more, get even more frustrated and he’d spiral into a meltdown and storm off in rage and floods of tears and be absolutely miserable for ages.

Getting angry and melting down because you lost at a video game is entirely unacceptable behaviour, but just heaping more misery on him for doing it would have been not only highly counterproductive but a complete dick move as well.

So instead of doing that, I taught him how to manage the emotion - how to recognise the feeling of frustration, how to recognise when it was building up past his ability to handle, and then to step back and take a break until he was out of the red zone before getting back to it. It took trial and error and a whole bunch of practice, but by god it worked.

Once he got the hang of managing it, not only did the meltdowns stop, but the breaks got shorter and rarer as he smoothed out the curve and got to practice increasing his tolerance without catastrophic failure blowing the whole thing up. Before long he was actively seeking out the most ridiculous rage-games like Super Meat Boy and VVVVVV just to revel in it (and beating the shit out of me at them too, little tyke).

And this principle generalises across the board. Teach them to manage the gigantic emotions and impulses that assail them from all sides. Give them a strategy for dealing with them - and when something gets past them, acknowledge the failure, make restitution if necessary, then postmortem what went wrong and how to handle it better next time. They may not like the process, but that’s worlds away from deliberately inflicting shit on them for the sake of it.

They absolutely do need the feedback, you can’t just give blanket approval to everything and expect results - you just keep it constructive. It’s that simple. Unconditional love and they need to do better than that what the fuck little dude.

And when they’re too little to reason about stuff, that’s what the Parent Voice and judicious use of Death Glare is for. You don’t need to yell, you just go full Mufasa on them as necessary. There’s a couple of cheap tricks you can use to de-escalate threenager tantrums, mostly by interrupting the self-talk loop.

And it works. My kid got all the way through the school system without ever getting in any kind of trouble; I don’t think I needed to even tell him off about anything past the age of 10 or so. We have a great relationship, I never had to be a dickhole to my kid, and I never relied on intimidation to maintain authority through his childhood, it just naturally tapered off into mutual cooperation as he got older.

P1: I cannot cope with the idea that my mind is a mundane physical process

P2: God is… wait, fuck we aren’t doing god any more

C: It must be quantum

Fuck off.

Protesting near a hospital: bad and evil.

Shelling a hospital: Quick, hand those people another billion dollars!