the extreme complexity and chance required to manipulate the process makes this sound quite resilient to me. i think the risk is low, but i wonder about the prevalence of gerrymandering at Level Two.

two questions:

• do additional endorsements past the minimum nomination requirement count for anything? if they don’t, i imagine that incentivises people to save their endorsements for ‘underendorsed’ candidates, which keeps the pool large.
• how are the kinless treated? how does chosen family work in your setting? i have a deep, negative emotional reaction to family-based governance, as someone who has been systematically denied family. i struggle to form any coherent words on the subject, but i imagine i would be ‘kinless’ in any life or world, so this piqued my interest.

i love these posts and i look forward to reading more!

:3c

And it probably would have been better for my mental health growing up if I hadn’t thought “wow if all these adults believe this thing then it must be true and I must just be an idiot” […] Basically the entirety of your hometown, and most of your family members are just delusional. You’re not wrong and they don’t just not believe you because you’re a kid, they just don’t believe in evidence, and there’s no evidence one can use to convince people who don’t believe in evidence.

for me, the thought was: ‘wow, these are the people who get to have power over me? and they use that power to actively limit my potential and freedom of association? these are the people who keep clawing me away from independence, because they think they know better what’s good for me?’

it made ageist remarks — particularly the sexist ones — go from irritating to infuriating. disappointment, anger and deep depression, that these people are allowed to have any responsibility at all.

when you have an AuDHD student who skips lunch every day to read and work in the library, and all the teachers are conspiracy-thinking fundamentalist yokels who: haven’t studied anything in over two decades; only became teachers so they could have power over children; regurgitate superstitions, fakelore and urban legends; and have no concept of information/media literacy — then it’s very possible to be smarter than your teachers and get regularly put in detention for pointing it out.

their diplomas would’ve been better used as toiletpaper.

a workplace problem that has persistently followed me thru my entire life: at school, at home, and at every job i’ve had, across multiple continents.

i have a ‘non-native’ name which isn’t hard to pronounce but which my coworkers refused to learn, so they started calling me something akin to ‘Jane Doe’ in $language.

when they were told by HR they can’t do that: they took to the funny ‘joke’ of calling me “the bot” and sometimes referring to me as ‘it’. ‘hey, where’s the documentation on this system?’ ‘idk, ask the bot’ my manager even got on my case about how i shouldn’t ‘use ChatGPT to respond to work messages’ — because i wasn’t using ‘enough emoji’.

but i’m the immature one for thinking all the NTs i’ve had in my life are insufferable. ok.

i believe they’re @ing you because they’re posting from Mastadon.

i’ve been seeing them in German, but i believe the dbzer0 host is also in France.

All the time spent thinking how to solve a problem is also work.

try telling that to every manager i’ve ever had.

tell you that violence is a terrible thing that can never be excused or condoned.

aha! but they say violence has no place in the so-called United States (if you ignore wage slavery, prison labour, the police, and the entire capitalist system). violence overseas always serves their interests, until it doesn’t.

checkmate tankie /s

i think it would be more symbolic to extend the rainbow peace flag over it.

I’m not disagreeing, but it seems to me I’ve known of white supremacist groups that do want other races to exist, but as subjugated classes.

not OP, but at least in Europe the raceless racist trope is more common, particularly among liberals. in one breath they’ll say that the concept of race is pseudoscience (true), but then conclude that this means racialisation doesn’t happen (uhhh). then in that same breath they’ll say that people from Muslim countries are destructive radicals who are ‘incompatible’ with European culture, which is almost neo-racist, until you realise that they don’t know what a ‘Muslim’ ‘looks’ like, and that in practise it’s ‘anyone with dark hair and/or a von Luschan index higher than 20’.

it’s not that they want to subjugate brown people: it’s that they wish they had never existed, and that they could never see them again. but the people they vote for to accomplish this do want to subjugate brown people.

before you know it: the group of ‘incompatibles’ has grown to encompass 2/3 of the world’s population by hair colour and skin index alone, and antisemitism is back on the table. but they believe in nonviolent democracy and the ‘rule of law’ and eat organic so it’s ok.

sidenote: this is why a lot of far-right supremacist groups in Europe tend(ed) to be more about (national) ethnicity than race. historically, even people from neighbouring countries were parasitic ‘others’ to be corralled and expelled.

Did you look for a nest or another bird in the original shrub?

i didn’t see anything in the bush at first glance. i tried to see if it was leading me somewhere, but it didn’t seem like it. i didn’t want to stress them out by approaching them too quickly or digging thru the bush.

they did seem very small, so it’s possible they don’t know how to feed themself. it’s not too far, so i can try checking on them sometime soon. i don’t want to invade their home, tho.

my guess is it was trying to get you to help one of its friends or something.

that was my first guess, but it didn’t seem like it was leading me anywhere.

i’m a little worried now.

I’d have had a good search around the area befriending crows can actually bring you some benifit like shiny gifts

when i was homeless, i shared my food with a crow. i got them to bring me coins by feeding them double portions when they brought monies.

or in some cases crow bodyguards as they actually recognise individuals as friends etc.

that’s my current relationship to the corvids in town. a long time ago i rescued a magpie from two seagulls, and since then all the corvids no longer fly away when i come near them. the magpies even defended me from a seagull one day!

but they otherwise don’t approach me, and we don’t ‘communicate’.

that was my first guess, but after i tried getting back on the path they only kept putting grass on my feet. i tried holding still, backing away, moving toward them, moving back into the grass, making noises, and checked in the bush — it just kept putting grass on me. i didn’t immediately see anything. i was afraid of scaring or upsetting them, so i left.

someone else suggested they’re a juvenile that doesn’t know how to feed themself.

la oficiala lingvo de la Eŭropa Parlamento estas ‘neresponda’

yeah.

that’s all i’ve got to say, but i have a strong urge to say it.

i was phone

if i had a penny for every time a neocon accused me of being ‘uncivil’ right before and after casually dropping a slur…

i already have a pet theory:

• the sick children are sick because they’re subjected to secret medical trials.
• rescuing the children means rescuing the research which means secret new booster.
• bonus: the children will die either way.

now, the booster doesn’t need to be good. it would just be really funny if the immaterial benefit of saving the children turns out to be materially beneficial in an almost eviler way than forsaking the children for the antitank mines. (pls give fire resistance)

now, if the booster is bad, that would be thrice as funny: antitank mines forsook and children sacrificed, for shitty research that amounted to nothing really helpful.

this all could also explain how they’ve managed to survive so long.