Because voting is specifically a popularity contest, and most people aren’t very politically engaged.

Blue is marginally better than red, in terms of trying to secure conditions where actual action can be effective. Summarizing another commenter, you’re not voting for good vs evil, you’re determining which mainstream option is going to be more difficult to fight against and trying to ensure they don’t win.

I don’t think you can erase the acknowledgement of “no child should be killed” from the masses. The people who already believe that aren’t going to stop, and the ones who don’t aren’t going to start.

But we celebrate saving one child because, again, it’s a popularity contest.

The red voters are pretty stalwart supporters. Their voting habits don’t vary much no matter what their party does. They’ll celebrate killing 3 children because their party tells them that they were the bad kind of children.

The blue voters are much more variable. They like to think of themselves as decent, principled, thinking people. When you inundate them with the child killing, they’re more likely to stay home. And since blue is marginally better for us, that works against our purposes. Ironically, loudly condemning the killing of 2 children makes it more likely that it will be 3 children after the next election.

You’re absolutely right that they’re ghouls who don’t deserve to be celebrated. But we don’t celebrate them because they deserve it, we celebrate them to reduce the chances of getting the worse alternative.

Once the worse alternative is eliminated, and there are better alternatives that stand a chance to win by calling out the lesser evil for still being evil, we should absolutely 100% do that. But until then, I don’t want to demoralize the voters who can help stave off the greater evil until we have a viable alternative, be it an actual leftist candidate with broad appeal or a sufficiently organized revolutionary force.

Certainly possible. In that case I would have expected a good faith attempt to understand that those resources and conditions separate them from a large number of people having a more difficult time, but who knows.

Uh, that seems like a legitimate reason to be stressed. You might just be particularly stress-tolerant.

You can rotisserie things besides chicken. Could be a rhino.

I’m busy, but that’s because I cram a lot of extra things in my life for fulfillment. I’m also fairly lucky in that I make over the median income working 30-35 hours a week. I assume you are also financially comfortable, but our experience is very different from someone who has to work 2 jobs to make ends meet.

I half-joke that my childhood was so stressful that the stress/anxiety circuit in my brain burned out years ago. It’s probably more accurate to say that I have a solution-oriented mindset: when there’s someone wrong in the world, instead of getting anxious I start brainstorming solutions and how to implement them; if I have no solution, stressing still isn’t going to fix anything so I just focus on problems I can find solutions for.

I’d wager most people feel more helpless than that, they see big problems in their life as immutable facts instead of temporary conditions. That certainly plays a role in how stressed/anxious they feel.

*deep tissues

Whereas the study of thyme would fall under horticulture

Yeah, it does. Pretty sure buttons were less common pre-industrialization, limited mostly to more elaborate, fancy clothes. By the time adding buttons was cheap enough for the bulk of the population, design principles were already established.

I interpreted it completely differently, when you “duck”, you crouch down

You have now, officially, crossed the line.

I wore a bandana pirate-style

But my hair was only shoulder length. I’d probably combine that with a bun.

It lessens it, but that’s because I’m tasting liberally while I cook.

That’s why Primer is my favorite depiction of time travel. Machine turns on at your destination time, you get in at your departure time, and it spits you out in the past. This sacrifices freedom of travel (you can’t go back to before you first turned the machine on) to solve the point-of-reference problem (the machine moves normally with the Earth).

I think typically a Rachel also substitutes coleslaw for sauerkraut.

Ironically, I’ve found that in many cases, frequently I find perfectly correct grammar to be more a hindrance to communication than a boon. In certain cases, grammatically wrong leads to fewer misunderstandings.

Who told you God is omnipotent and above humans? Who told you he or she has emotions, or smites or becomes upset or wrathful?

Any God worth naming as such is so beyond such concepts as to be entirely inscrutable. It’s people that ascribe such characteristics, usually to influence other people. In any case, it comes from an inclination to anthropomorphize the unknown, to rationalize non-human phenomena through a familiar human lens. The conflict isn’t in God, it’s in God’s self-appointed biographers.

Did you misinterpret Starship Troopers to be straight endorsement of militant fascism?

yes!

There’s your problem. Just because an author writes a book with a world building premise does not mean they fully endorse the world created. In Stranger in a Strange Land, which came out less than two years later, the main character creates a free love hippie movement. The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, a few years later, is about a revolution against authoritarian oppression.

If a person names as his three favorites of my books Stranger, Harsh Mistress, and Starship Troopers … then I believe that he has grokked what I meant. But if he likes one—but not the other two—I am certain that he has misunderstood me, he has picked out points—and misunderstood what he picked. If he picks 2 of 3, then there is hope, 1 of 3—no hope. All three books are on one subject: Freedom and Self-Responsibility.

Heinlein wrote thought experiments. He wrote about the relationship between people and the society they live in. To that end, he wrote about a number of different kinds of society, and how people related to them. Insofar as you could ascribe any particular political ideology to him based on his writings, he was broadly anti-authoritarian. Nothing remotely close to a Nazi.

Uh, curious where you got that from, especially since I don’t see how you can be both a Nazi and a libertarian. Did you misinterpret Starship Troopers to be straight endorsement of militant fascism?

You should read Job: A Comedy of Justice by Robert Heinlein. This is basically the main theme

“Magic” has many definitions. There’s fantasy magic, stage magic, Hollywood magic.

Magick has had a consistent definition of “the science and art of causing change to occur in conformity with will” for a century. The “mysticism” is a very potent system of exploiting the associative nature of the mind to focus one’s will, and train the subconscious.