I've talked about how naive I still was in November, 2000, when I was twenty years old and thought Al Gore looked kind of petulant and if he'd just concede we'd get another one term Bush and how bad could it be?

Let me tell you about teenage me and gay marriage.
The first time gay marriage even got on my radar as an actual possibility was the first time it got on a lot of people's radar who were of about my generation in the US: the Baehr case in the state of Hawaii.

As a deeply closeted tween/young teen, I was excited.
I imagined that we were seeing the first movement of a sweeping pendulum of history, that momentum was going to be on the side of gay rights, and that legal rights would lead to normalization and acceptance and gay relationships and people would just be relationships and people.
It was big news! It made like the little scholastic newspaper thing that our school got handed every so often in social studies. Teachers talked about it. The news talked about it.
And it ran for years. 1991-1999. Basically paralleling my entire tween/teen decade.
At one time I knew the whole thing chapter and verse because it had been a source of so much hope and joy for me. Now it's a dim and distant memory but I remember how it ordered: the straight majority voters of the state of Hawaii voted to amend the constitution to block it.
The course of justice which had seemed so swift and sure and certain and true to me was stopped, the inexorable pendulum swing halted mid-air, because they asked the kind of people who used "gay" as a catch-all synonym for "bad" what they thought about human rights for gays.
We talk a lot on here about what radicalized us and I think that was a big first step.

But you know what kills me? I found that even years later, most of my straight peers thought the whole thing had been settled. Gays could get married in Hawaii.
Years later... like, well into the 21st century, any time the subject of same-sex marriage in any state came up, someone around me would say, "What's the big deal? Just move to Hawaii."
When the state of Hawaii finally passed a law approving civil unions (2009!)... "They already got marriage. Now they want special rights?"
Bush v. Gore happened not super long after the state of Hawaii passed Constitutional Amendment 2 to specifically block same-sex marriage and it preceded a bunch of legislative defeats for even civil unions in that state, and happened amidst "Defense of Marriage Acts" nationwide.
So high school age me could think: "Sure, things suck right now but I can see them getting better. I know they're getting better. I'm going to grow up to be an adult in a world where things are better."

Twenty-something me? Oof.

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More from @AlexandraErin

Jan 25
"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."
Read 5 tweets
Jun 21, 2023
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.
Read 13 tweets
Jun 21, 2023
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.
Read 6 tweets
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Writing this thread yesterday was a huge aid in further clarifying and refining What I'm Doing Here with this TTRPG project.

Today I'm finding that weighing against me a bit, as I remember how much writing the thread felt exciting and like I was doing something...
...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.

Read 36 tweets
Jun 20, 2023
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.
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Jun 20, 2023
This is something Todd from Bojack would make as step one of filming Todd Chavez's James Cameron's Titanic.
This is something you would see on a show about doomsday preppers with tiny houses.
Read 5 tweets

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