"I'm excited to vote for a woman!" isn't "I'm voting for this person because she's a woman."
"I'm voting for the woman!" isn't "I'm voting for this person because she's a woman."
"It's time for a woman to be president." isn't that, either.
The myth of "vagina voters" that circulated in response to HONEST GRASSROOTS ENTHUSIASM for Hillary Clinton in 2016 was demeaning, sexist, and based on... nothing. Literally nothing.
But people were so quick to believe it...
...that if you pointed out no one was saying they were voting for her because she was a woman, you'd be mobbed by people insisting "lots of people say it all the time" and they'd link you to quotes... saying different things.
Exactly.
And I swear John McCain honestly thought it worked that way. He was so smug the day before he introduced her.
You're asking "why not vote for a woman just for being a woman, as long as there's not other reasons not to vote for her and she's good on issues that you care about" and
Honestly, "just" is rapidly becoming my least favorite four letter word.
And I know Mooseplainer didn't say "just" but
I'm not telling people not to care about the gender of politicians, that it doesn't affect lived experience or that lived experience doesn't affect policy decisions.
My whole point here is: statistically no one votes for a female candidate just because she's female.
It's a myth, it's a destructive myth that is used to dismiss support for female candidates (effectively demanding we DON'T vote for them), and it's a myth that should be easy to disprove, except that believing is seeing.
Even someone who has resolved to never vote for another male candidate again, or to never do so when there's another choice, isn't doing this. Unless they're picking at random among the remaining candidates, they've got other criteria than gender.
I'm not even getting into how "vagina voters" is both cissexist and dehumanizing, because statistically no one who believes anyone voted for Clinton "just because" she's a woman, or supports Warren or anybody else for the same reason, is ready to have those conversations.
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"How can one person be a they? It doesn't make sense."
Same way one person can be a he or she.
"Those words are singular."
No. Those words, like all words, are shapes and sounds. Words don't make any sense. Words don't do anything.
We make words, and we make sense of them.
There's all kinds of other arguments that favor the validity of singular they, including the fact that even people who claim it's a contradiction use it reflexively when the *only* thing they know about the unknown antecedent is that it's one singular person.
There's the argument about established use, where "they" has been used as a singular pronoun for longer than "you" was standardized as the second person singular; "you" is still grammatically plural, as in "She is one person. He is one person. You ARE one person."
Here's a reason I'm a pro-mockery of the OceanGate fiasco: that whole "regulations stifle innovation" thing that crops up in their PR to present the whole "untested and unlicensed" thing as a feature rather than a bug: people who want us eating heavy metals for breakfast say that
The idea that safety regulations and oversight are anti-business, anti-competition, anti-future, and anti-human survival (because the geniuses who would save us have their hands tied)... that's a huge and consequential part of right-wing/libertarian mythology.
And no, I'm not saying that libertarian and right-wing are the exact same thing. That's why I said both of them. Because they aren't exactly the same thing.
But there's a lot of areas where their goals and methods overlap perfectly, even if their professed beliefs do not.
Don't disagree with Representative Raskin here about the principle, but we all need to be ready for the fact that the GOP attacks on Joe Biden via Hunter aren't likely to stop or even change no matter what he does or does not do.
And counting on the people - even those who aren't specifically part of the right-wing echo chamber - to notice the disconnect and the hypocrisy... well, I mean, a lot counts on the media not blandly reporting/repeating the attacks like they're normal and well-founded.
The idea that is prevalent in so much of the media that the proper thing to do is amplify both sides and if one of them is absurd or dangerous, "the American people will see and decide that for themselves".
But to the extent they trust the news, they trust the news.
...and how much more it felt like I was getting something done and communicating ideas clearly in the thread vs. when I try to write even a "gallop draft" or Pratchettian 0th draft of actual mechanics.
So I'm going to give my brain a break by threading about the ideas more.
Two things I mentioned in that thread, about things a Paladin can mostly *just do*, the idea of a Paladin's vow having a supernatural ring of truth that is *just believed* here, and sensing the presence of deceit, are both part of two important aspects.
The sentence "At some point, safety is just pure waste." is such a perfect distillation of something I've tried to articulate over the years about *gestures vaguely around at everything*.
Whatever happened to the sub now, it was cheaper at the time to assume it just wouldn't.
This logic goes into oil tankers and pipelines: sure a spill will be catastrophic and expensive, but what's the alternative... spend "extra" money forever to try to head off something that just might not happen?
And of course, the pandemic. All of the missed opportunities and half-measures... the long-term cost of not investing in safety is a problem for a future version of us who might not even exist. Cheaper to assume it won't.