The economic angle has been tried to death

It really, really hasn’t lol.

Price of eggs.

I’d love to make good on that guarantee, but we would’ve needed somebody with a national media platform to phrase it that way, not some nobody on Lemmy like me. The past is the past, but the time to figure out how to frame the issues with the next fascist in line is now.

It’s not just slightly different phrasing, it’s phrasing that packs an emotional/visceral punch. The economic angle has been tried to death, and a constant refrain I hear is, “how can people vote against their own self-interests?!” It’s because the other side speaks to the animal brain, not the frontal lobes. The murder of a pretty, young nursing student activates strong emotions and has a lot more cognitive stickiness than economic arguments about who gets paid how much to pick our strawberries. Guarantee that if voters picture his grubby, little fingers sliding into a vagina in a department store dressing room, they’ll remember it.

The media gets high on sensationalism. If a Democratic politician came out and said that the President was “deep-throating Putin’s cock,” oh believe me, that’d get coverage right quick!

Saying he’s a “sexual predator” and that he “finger-raped a woman” are far from the same thing. One is dry and intellectual, the other conjures up memorable mental imagery. It’s the same way that “damp” and “moist” can be synonyms, but only one of them squicks a lot of people.

Same thing I’ve wished Democrats would do for years and years: Learn from psychology and neuroscience that language and how you use it matters, then learn how to use language to improve their messaging.

And then do it.

Politics in a big country like this is like an arena show, and Democrats treat it like a university lecture hall. Play to the cheap seats! For example, compare how I read that Harris would “address health care disparities which disproportionately affect Black men” versus “death tax.” Which one is more likely to reach Joe Six-Pack? Which one has more visceral impact? Which one is more, as they say, cognitively sticky?

To add to the other comment, saying “always-late wife” would convey the correct meaning to most English speakers.

If she’s dead, I don’t think it matters what you say.

Since this is about punctuation, what’s with the double dashes? Trailing off is usually written with an ellipsis, though an em dash can be used, since this is more of a break in speech. And yes, double dashes are sometimes used as a substitute on a keyboard or with a typeface that doesn’t have an em dash.

But this is hand-lettered text— just draw the em dash!

Hillary Clinton won the popular vote.

I dunno, man, it just feels like the ol’ fascist/totalitarian tactic of flooding the zone with shit until people get exhausted from fighting it has worked, people are exhausted, and there’s this energy of elated resignation, like, we can’t swim upstream anymore, so fuck it, riding the current is kind of fun (and the inevitable waterfall is out of sight and out of mind for the moment).

That’ll be next week in the U.S.

they were literally the first company to make a home computer that didn’t require soldering experience or a kit

I’ve never heard that claim before. How is that the case, considering that the Apple I was just a motherboard, and the Apple ][ hit the market six months after the Commodore PET?

I have to push back here and say that I think that the “emotions are feminine” explanation doesn’t give the whole picture. There’s also instrumentalization of men.

We’re all familiar with objectification, the tendency of (some) men to ignore women’s agency, and treat them as objects for their own use. On the flip side, in my experience, (some) women instrumentalize men. That is, treat men as agents to be used as tools to achieve their own goals. As a result, I think that (some) women use men as a bulwark against the stresses and existential terror of human existence, or sometimes even literally, like a bodyguard, or the one who has to deal with the spider in the house.

You want your vacuum cleaner to suck up dirt when you pull it out of the closet, and then disappear quietly back in there once the job is done. You don’t want to have to change the bag, and clean the motor, and replace the belt every time. More metaphorically, you don’t want to find out that your emotional ramparts against a scary world are built on sand, and that’s what kind of happens when (some) women find out that their partner has fears and weaknesses, too.

I’ve heard the same story many, many times from men whose partners begged them to open up emotionally, only to flee once they found out that those emotions included fears and self-doubt. It doesn’t make sense that they’d do the first part, if emotions were unattractive, per se.

(Edit: Missing word.)

This is the guy who set a woman on fire in a subway car.