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WONDER BAR (1934) | dir. Lloyd Bacon

“The other [scene that stands out above the rest] involved a handsome man, asking a dancing couple if he could cut in. The female partner, expecting his attention, agrees, only to see him dance with her male partner. Jolson then flaps his wrist and says, “Boys will be boys. Woo!”. This scene almost caused the Production Code to reject the film, and was featured in the opening scenes of the documentary film The Celluloid Closet (1996).”

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[fandomsandfeminism]

the ways different languages translate the “Biggus Dickus” scene from The Life of Brian is quite good

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Discworld is so delightful because you get lines like "When banks fail, it is seldom bankers who starve" except it's spoken by a 7 foot tall sentient clay statue named Pump 19 and directed to a man whose name is Moist von Lipwig

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It's even funnier because Data doesn't consistently win.

Which either means Riker is the god of Poker....or Data is letting his friends win because the point isn't to win money (they don't have money) but to socialize and have fun. He's learning his social skills.

People are always like "why do they let Data play poker with them, his brain is a computer, he has an unfair advantage," and the answer is simply because it's for fun!! He's their friend! Like can you imagine if they told Data he can't play, he'd be like "I understand, that's a logical decision, and as an android I am unable to feel left out," but then any time the poker game came up he'd be looking at Riker across the bridge like

[fandomsandfeminism]

tired: mermaids are all women

wired: much like elves, merfolk are mistaken by sailors for being all women because they have long hair and are very pretty

[fandomsandfeminism]

no one's doing it like lady ramkin.

[fandomsandfeminism]

[fandomsandfeminism]

A reminder that first past the post, winner take all, red/blue electoral college maps promote political tribalism and encourage gross stereotyping. It turns the political process into a game to be won or lost, a sport with teams where the goal is the beat the other side. It erodes nuance, destroys bipartisanship, and crushes third party thought.

More Trump voters live in California than Texas. More Biden voters live in Texas than New York. No political candidate ever carries a state with even 70% of the vote.

Election maps like these move us closer to the truth.

Remember that the loudest, most extreme voices may make the best TV and the most viral videos- but they aren't the reality of your neighbors. Or of mine.

[fandomsandfeminism]

Ok, since some folks are still struggling with this: No, having a national popular vote for president wouldn't mean that "just 2 or 3 states would pick the president."

First of all, that's *basically* what's already happening with the Electoral College. Because the states are winner-take-all, it doesn't matter if you lead in a state by 3% or 30%, you get 100% of the vote. So the only states worth campaigning in/listening to are a few swing states, where you need to eek out a 1% lead to win 100% of the points.

We see this in the actual campaign event data. Two thirds of the presidential and vice-presidential post-convention campaign events were conducted in just four states in 2012 (Ohio, Florida, Virginia, and Iowa). The electoral college doesn't empower rural voters or small states. It just allows campaigns to hyper-focus on the undecided voters of swing states. So if you're a centrist in Ohio, I guess the EC was tailor made for you? But no one else benefits here.

But, would this still happen in a national popular vote, you ask? NO. Of course not.

I don't blame folks for not realizing this intrinsically. They are big numbers, and this "big states blah blah" rhetoric is pervasive. (Notice how often it's "California and New York" though, and never Texas. Ask yourself why.)

Let's assume, for fun, that 100% of the population of the country can and does vote. For rounding purposes, that's 330 million people.

Even if you could get California, Texas, Florida, New York, and Pennsylvania to vote 100% unanimously for the same person, you'd fall woefully short of of 50%, and that's getting EVERY SINGLE PERSON in these states to agree. You need the 9 most populated states to vote 100% turn out in unison to hit 50% of the population.

California (Population: 39,613,493)

Texas (Population: 29,730,311)

Florida (Population: 21,944,577)

New York (Population: 19,299,981)

Pennsylvania (Population: 12,804,123)

Illinois (Population: 12,569,321)

Ohio (Population: 11,714,618)

Georgia (Population: 10,830,007)

North Carolina (Population: 10,701,022)

But, as I've said many many times, states are not political monoliths. Despite what those red v blue electoral maps train you to think, these states aren't hiveminds.

Both of these maps represent the 2016 election. Personally, I like the first one more, since the intensity of the color mirrors the amount of votes, but the second one really drives home how *blended* our communities are politically.

In 2020- 155,508,985 votes were cast. That's 77,754,493 for 51%. How many states, at a minimum, would it take to reach that number based on how they actually voted? Well, let's go from most populated down until we hit 51%.

CA- 11,110,250 for Biden

TX- 5,259,126 for Biden

FL- 5,297,045 for Biden

NY- 5,244,886 for Biden

PN- 3,459,923 for Biden

IL- 3,471,915 for Biden

OH- 2,679,165 for Biden

GA- 2,473,633 for Biden

NC-2,684,292

MI-2,804,040

NJ-2,608,400

VI-2,413,568

WA-2,369,612

AR-1,672,143

TN-1,143,711 (we aren't done yet)

IN 1,242,498

MASS 2,382,202

MI 1,253,014

MA 1,985,023

CO-1,804,352

WIS-1,630,866

MIN- 1,717,077

SC-1,091,541

AL- 849,624 (We're still only at 68 million, by the way)

LA- 856,034

KN- 772,474

OR-1,340,383

OK-503,890

CN-1,080,831

UT-560,282

NV-703,486 (We're getting close now, I promise)

Iowa-759,061

AR-423,932 (I'm so tired of adding these numbers up)

MIS-539,398

KA- 570,323

NM- 501,614 (SO CLOSE I really thought this would do it.)

Nebraska- 374,583 (DAMMIT NEBRASKA! We're still short!)

Idaho- 287,021

And that does it! That puts us above 77,754,493 and it only took every Biden vote from the 38 most populated states.

Hardly the "Californians and New Yorkers making all our decisions for us!" reality that people decry (Never Texas. Even though we had more Biden voters than New York. But Texas isn't the standard boogeyman for a racially, ethnically, religiously diverse, queer coastal city. Even though Texas has 4 of the 10 largest cities in the country, more than California- Houston, San Antonio, Dallas, and Austin)

YES, a lot of people live in California. Yes, a lot of people live in Texas. Yes, it's super weird to me that the city of San Antonio, Texas has almost 3x the number of people in the entire state of Wyoming. (I'm sorry if you think that Wyoming's 73,491 votes for Biden should make or break the election.)

But please remember that individual states and districts still get their representation in Congress. (Which...I have some opinions about how much this actually impacts federal politics that are their own thing.) State governments and local governments still exist.

And this idea that a popular vote system, which we use for senators and governors and mayors and school boards is suddenly ~oppressive~ and ~tyrannical~ when we apply it to the presidency isn't logical. (If 70% of your town lives in apartments, you don't give folks in single family homes an extra vote to balance out their vote for mayor.)

Frankly, going to the popular vote should be a logical first step. Ranked choice ballots (for president and senate), and party proportional voting (for the house) would go a long way towards making people feel like their votes had real power again, increase voter turn out, and I think motivate the parties to better reflect the wishes of their constituents, reduce our political tribalism, and encourage third party participation.

[fandomsandfeminism]

good analogy 🤣🤣🤣

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Yuuuuup

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Here's a fun map on Google trends today

[fandomsandfeminism]

I just think its really fucking cool that we get to live on maybe the only planet that has total solar eclipses, and that we live here during the cosmic window of time when solar eclipses look the coolest (and happen at all.)

They are not inevitable, they are not forever. They are a weird, beautiful, temporary coincidence and we are so fucking lucky that we get to experience them.

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I'll spare yall the terrible grainy eclipse photos. Incredible. We had an overcast, muggy morning. Gloomy and doomy.

But then. The clouds broke up just enough for Totality where I am.

There's nothing like it.

It felt like the first time I saw the Grand Canyon in person. Pictures and video don't prepare you for the scale and the depth and all the sensory input of the world around you.

Watching it with a field full of middle schoolers was honestly pretty great too. There's something special watching something actually impress them. Lolol.

[fandomsandfeminism]

that post thats like this is the reading order for discworld is WRONG first you read the first one you find in a second-hand shop or local library. then you read going postal. after that youre on your own

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But it isn't *only* that tiny percentage of rapists going to prison now- its also over *one million* Americans, hundreds of thousands of which are there for drug charges, immigration charges, property crimes.

And having *all those people* incarcerated within a violent system is not a nuetral situation. It is active state violence.

So we are weighing the good of ending/preventing the active state violence against over a million people vs the "bad" of the incredibly small population of offenders who might "deserve it" being dealt with by an alternative system (such as house arrest, counseling, or other intervention programs that would be funded instead of the BILLIONS that is currently spent running prisons each uear.)