ROTSHARP, mirror-ape ogre

There are a lot of countries that have completely fair elections that aren't rigged at all and even ones that have pretty reasonable vote systems besides first past the post—and yet just the same single party still wins >60% of the vote in >85% of elections.

Why? Because when only one party has really substantially ruled your country for as long as anyone alive can remember, then nobody else can really say they have substantial experience with running a government. If you look at a place like Singapore, their pseudo-fascist party doesn't need to rig the vote because nobody else has ever won in the entire history of the country's existence. So the majority of people associate every single aspect of living in a modern country with the perceived competency of that party and so how could anyone ever run again them? It's just impossible for your resume to be more impressive.

In America, it's a similar situation but with two parties. Even if an individual politician here and there is an "outsider" they're still governing as part of the same two parties we've been living under for 166 years! And the Democrats have been governing for 186 years! Everyone seems to hate both parties but they at least trust them to serve more of the same and maintain vaguely the rule of law.

Stories of Greens and Libertarians winning local offices that you hear, whether true or not, is that these are kooky weirdos with no experience running a government and no idea what they're doing, so even if their stated principals are nice they don't know how to get anything done and often end up corrupt or making crazy mistakes that the big two parties don't make (by accident) because they have senior government people guiding them.

Is this all true? Probably not but it's the reputation and the mentality everyone has in this country. The Democrat and Republican binary represents all political possibilities. To be more left wing is to be more Democrat and vice versa and anyone else is a quack. The two parties have captured the American imagination so strongly that even if we had major election reforms nationwide to make it easier for third parties to win, I bet that most people would still only vote for the main two parties, at least for the first thirty years of a new system.

Americans don't even have very good impressions of multiparty systems. Everything you see in the news about countries with multiparty systems is always about Israel holding its fifth election in a year or Germany failing six times to form a coalition government and ending up with insane cabinets where the most opposed parties are sharing the government. Multiparty systems are confusing unstable chaos to American media trained eyes. The two party system is stable. It represents "the eternal peaceful transition of power" that is romanticized in the American mythos even when it is not true.

Every single criticism of the two party system is 100% correct. It's a bad system. And Americans definitely aren't going to be turning to a third party. Unfortunately.

It'd suck. EVEN IF IT WON!

The system isn't just bad because of the two-party part. Any party taking offices within the framework of the USA federal government would engage with the roles of those offices. A socialist president would become a war criminal at most 48 hours after entering office with the decisions they'd be required to make on the military's behalf, and it'd be a fait accompli where any decision they make would kill somebody and to avoid being removed from office for failure to do the duties of the office, they'd have to make whatever decision prioritized the soldiers in the situation, and by the logic that put them there, the entrenched interests of capital which guide the use of the USA's military might.

We can't reform our way out of the cesspit of capitalism and neoliberal politics. The level of fundamental change required to actually fix the problems that got us here? They can't happen under a system of laws built on the concept of private property derived from Roman law. They can't happen in a system which accords any legitimacy to the power and authority of private capital ownership. We can't, within the system as it is, undo the misogyny and racism and ablism and ageism and all the hate-inducing structures built into the superstructure of this country, let alone the productivist and thus anti-environment and anti-human-relationship infrastructure of the international system that supports this country, let alone the world political economy which acts as a human-driven misery-generating machine in the name of numbers-go-up (all hail the growth god, the great bull of the market) - none of that can be dismantled without addressing the root causes. That's what radical means - addressing the root.

The organizing required to get a "third party" or especially a socialist party in any significant amount of power in the US or any capitalist state is equal to that required for revolution, and it's a dead end anyway, so organize for revolution and skip the bullshit.

At least, not until you have 5 billionaires bankrolling you. Napkin math, I wouldn't know.

(this applies to places as large as the US, but probably elsewhere too)

When people talk about building third parties, all I ask of them anymore is to do the math. DSA at it's most politically acceptable got 120k members, and it was shooting straight for the middle in terms of appeal.

Can you do ten times better than that with a media that won't cover you, no donors, and no presidential candidate mentioning your org?

Or is the labor better spent doing the political equivalent of insurgency, taking territory the parties don't touch, finding spots under the armor to stab while the gods are fighting the titans?

You don't need an electoral party -- you haven't for decades. They're not the way things are organized anymore. Look at the recent explosion of the trans movement, at occupy, the yellow vests (yes, we still must study them), the 2020 protests. It has an agility the parties lack, because it doesn't obey a chain of command, just goals and the somewhat self-policing gestalt. You can influence it with polemic and propaganda, but it's hard to co-opt, and hard to be taken over.

The revolution's already pretty bloody, from blm marchers gassed and shot with rubber bullets to trans teens (and older) committing suicide in despair. Organizing to give each other hope and places of safety and food and resources and so on is in service of reducing the casualty count. As is, in cases such as the unicorn ranch, arming against the fascists coming to murder us. Insurgency isn't like a pitched battle, except when it suddenly is (battle of Blair Mountain, national guard advancing on the Seattle CHAZ, etc).

Revolutions only win when the soldiers refuse to fire on the revolutionaries.

apparently it is my sworn duty to Post here but once every month or so, with new silliness. i thought i saw this on a tshirt a while ago but it turns out i just can't read very well

comment I just made in a chat, regarding coworkers making no effort to keep email threads readable:

It's wild how Coworkers are always oblivious. Invariably, everyone you ever speak to as a direct acquaintance will be the only person that they work with who pays any attention to their environment or surroundings, or actually looks at the effect of what they're doing, or thinks about taking actions that would make their job easier or their work cleaner. There's only ever one person, and that's the person you know, and somehow every other employee at that entire company is just utterly oblivious.

it's been that way everywhere I've worked. anyone else I talk to about i.e. "hey maybe we should stop using our full signatures on every single message, so email threads are more readable" looks at me like a Martian; I gave up years ago. They hate the way emails look, I can watch them on a screenshare struggling to find a simple piece of information in an email because 95% of the space is taken up by the same signature over and over and over, and the actual data is relegated to hard-to-parse lines of text tucked in between these huge, useless boilerplates. They obviously don't like how this is working, but they seem incapable of recognizing that it frustrates them.

The email thing is just an example, there are hundreds of problems at every job I've worked at that that would be simple to fix if people would just think for a second about what irritates them or slows down their work, but they won't even acknowledge that the problem exists even if it's right in front of them, and I just don't understand how I could be the only person who can see this, or how My immediate friends can be the only people at each of their employers that can see problems like this. The probabilities just don't make sense.

in my experience, the majority of people in the world do not look at systems, only the immediate happenstance. even people whose job descriptions are “build and maintain this large, complicated system” are usually unwilling or unable to look at a system as a whole, but must instead look at each individual part as if it was a discrete thing, leading to the kinds of technology and organizational failures we’re all so familiar with. you can show them things like “How Complex Systems Fail” and it will have absolutely no effect because they simply cannot model a system in their minds

this doesn’t appear to have anything to do with being neurodivergent vs being neurotypical, being from a technical background, etc. it’s a specific kind of intelligence that isn’t even necessarily tied to memory, but is closed related to problem-solving. it feels like it should be related to spatial awareness but it isn’t; I’ve known a number of people who are terrible at directions and are completely lost trying to interpret maps, but who are otherwise quite capable of modeling (for example) a complicated social structure in their heads. it’s entirely disconnected from math, too

as our world becomes more reliant on huge, interconnected, complicated systems, more and more people are just going to end up completely lost because they are either incapable of modeling a system, have never been taught how to do so, or find it in their best economic interest to simply ignore everything outside of their immediate perceptions

as to why it seems like it’s just your friends and close acquaintances who can see the flaws in the machinery, I think there’s two possibilities:

1. queer folks tend to be able to break out of simplistic, “this is how things are” viewpoints, for obvious reasons. clearly there are exceptions, and being very wealthy means you can simply buy yourself the world you want instead of figuring out how it works, but being able to realize that you are not what your label says you are requires a bare minimum capability to understand that the map is not the territory

2. the kinds of people you (and I) like to talk to and hang out with are people who are not dumb as a box of hair, so there’s some selection for minimal comprehension going on here as well. after a certain age, you’ve filtered out all the dumbasses you used to hang out with just because you shared hobbies

the downside of being able to model complicated systems is that the world is even more terrible due to it being understandable. “horrors beyond your comprehension” are mild compared to the horrors you can understand but cannot fix. being able to look at the food you eat and understand what had to happen for it to arrive on your table is not a blessing in the world we live in

this was longer than intended

I want to third this as well in a very strange and not-fun way but also this would be very fitting for it to be my first actual Copoast on Cohost. Apologies and I hope you folks can keep up with my 'I should probably be sleeping' rambling.

I work for a sewer utility in a large Western US city. Operation and maintenance of complex systems that humans both rely on and are extremely hecking clueless about, either willingly or not, is my bread and butter. It's what gets me up in the morning, it's what rattles around in my brain some nights when I'm trying to sleep if I'm not in the field trying to resolve an issue of some sort so that I can crawl back into bed an hour or so later.

"As our world becomes more reliant on huge, interconnected, complicated systems, more and more people are just going to end up completely lost because they are either incapable of modeling a system, have never been taught how to do so, or find it in their best economic interest to simply ignore everything outside of their immediate perceptions"

Is actually a pretty good quote (And one I absolutely agree with, @apocryphalmess!) I'd like to add a fourth statement: "Or simply find the system too gross to think about until they're forced to confront the reality of their situation, often at inopportune times"

It should be known by most, if not all of us, that when you think of 'infrastructure,' particularly public infrastructure: where our poo goes isn't exactly at the top of the list for a lot of folks. Some of my sewerage textbooks even mention this exact issue! Elected officials, the vast majority of the voting public, and much to my dismay, quite a few radicals who seek the demolition of the Current State Of Things, many of whom I may or may not share political alignment with, express little interest in where the drain goes.

While "The sewer" is a good preliminary answer to "Where does the poop go?" I'd argue it shouldn't be left, ever, as a complete answer on its own. In that state, it's about equivalent in terms of complete understanding as JK Terfling's "The wizards simply magicked their piss away." "The sewer" as a 'complete' answer on its own becomes a reason to discharge any sense of object permanence, it becomes "Away," the same place our solid waste disappears to, a place where we don't have to think about things anymore (but that's another subject all on its own.) The problem is, "Away" isn't really "Away." It's another massively complex system beneath our feet that requires a dedicated, experienced, and trained set of individuals and teams to operate so that we can maintain the illusion that 'Away' is a thing that actually does exist.

The flushable wipe that Average Joe sends down the toilet one night may seem to disappear forever, but to me, it's something I may very well have to confront. It could be the final part of a ball of other similar things tens, or hundreds of Average Joes have sent 'away' that coalesces in a pump intake and blocks it up, reducing its capacity by 50% or more. It on its own could wedge itself in the less-than-a-half-a-millimeter-wide space between pump impeller and wear ring that causes a hundred-horsepower motor to throw its hands up and trip out on overamperage. It could be one of the things I have to shovel out of a hopper because a grinder got rocks from a poorly-maintained part of the system caught in it again. And even if it does make it through all those steps, it probably ends up getting raked out at a bar screen and fills a dumpster at the treatment plant. Or, in the case of a grinder situation, contributes to the growing issue of untreatable microplastics in our oceans, some of which may be Posted About by Average Joe, clueless as to where these microplastics could possibly be coming from.

... But I thought mommy or daddy really did disappear behind their hands!

Another absolutely banger quote: "The downside of being able to model complicated systems is that the world is even more terrible due to it being understandable. “horrors beyond your comprehension” are mild compared to the horrors you can understand but cannot fix. being able to look at the food you eat and understand what had to happen for it to arrive on your table is not a blessing in the world we live in"

Damn. I wish I could forget the horrors I understand but can't fix. I wish I could look away when I see a king tide completely filling up an outfall line used as a "Overflow here as a Last Resort if the combined stormwater/sanitary sewer system fills up due to rainfall" point, followed up by looking at the weather forecast and being thankful to the weather deities that we don't have a rain squall roaring toward us. When I look at pump stations with all their pumps running but only barely able to keep up with rainfall and what's leaving homes, shops, and industries, I ponder: Do people know?

Or is it something they'll only care to think about when I'm out there hammering a sign into the beach or along a trail saying "SEWAGE OVERFLOW, DO NOT SWIM." When they're forced to confront that "Away" is really just a carefully maintained illusion, keeping the odor from their noses and the sewage-caused algal blooms from dissuading them from their swimming or fishing holes?

I live in a perpetual state of varying levels of horror, but I do so, so that most folks don't have to think about what happens after the tap turns off or the flush lever is tugged. Oddly enough, I kinda like it. But in the end, when things go wrong and the complex system gets screwed and misbehaves, I'd like a bit more thought behind the outrage than the thinly veiled "But my parent revealed themselves! They were there the entire time during this game of peek-a-boo!" that we usually see from most folks who don't have to think about these systems every day.

Much thanks to the two Chosters above me for inspiring this little late-night chostrant. You two keep being awesome!

I'm still looking for work in Canada I'm a Chilean trans woman and developer with over 6 years of experience in several fields (Java desktop applications, PHP and python web dev, most recently systems programming and microelectronics). I've worked both in startups and large companies, and I'm able to adapt quickly to what my environment requires.

I'm planning on moving to Canada with my wife (who is a Canadian citizen) and in order to do so I need a work permit. I've been keeping an eye on the job bank news and have sent several applications so far, to no avail. While we would prefer an opening located at the greater Toronto area (since that's where my wife was born and raised), we're willing to relocate to most other provinces.

If you know of any opening I should look into, or if you happen to need someone, lemme know.