I would like a train please.

With a bulbous bow?

I thought that was ships.

I'm moderately hopeful. Thanks for asking.

Also he's bringing back Dana Carvey since he seems to be the only person capable of doing a Biden impression (Jim Carrey's sucked.)

Yeah, me too. He's turned out better than I thought he would.

I watched a video of LBJ shortly before he died talking about why he did civil rights as legislation and not by Executive order. He said it was because he oknew that legislation was harder to undo, but he also knew that a lot of Civil Rights leaders were suspicious of a Texan and a Southrner as President.

I kind of feel sometimes like Biden is our LBJ to Obama's Kennedy, only substitute Progressives for Civil Rights leaders. Kennedy looked cooler, suaver etc., but domestically LBJ's presidency was more tranformative.

Except for the whole thing in southeast Asia, he did great.

Domestically he's been doing better than I thought, and I find it heartening that he's taken FDR as his lodestar. Foreign policy wise not so great. He's really fucking up the JCPOA agreement in the worst possible way*, after the upcoming elections in Iran where the hardliners are expected to win it will likely be irretrievable.

*Basically by playing off of Trump's stupid posturing and using the US reentering the JCPOA as an opportunity to enter into new non-nuclear related negotiations with Iran. It's just not going to happen. He needed to reenter it immediately and at least call off some of the sanctions as a gesture of good will.

He's fucking up North Korea too in a way that is comically amateurish and not something I expected from his administration (follow Jeffrey Lewis aka Arms Control Wonk on twitter for deets.)

Yeah, foreign policy has been not very good with regard to Iran and North Korea in particular.

The US just continues to be a basket case with regard to Iran. One good (and improbable) development, JCPOA, and we couldn't tolerate it.

Overall, I think it has been pretty decent, but I think he will ultimately be ground down and we will continue our march to quasi-democratic minority rule.

And boy could I not hate the press more. And Fox news lurched further nutward. Not a good sign.

And you know what doesn't go better with Coke? Voting in Georgia. Sometimes regarded as the #1 brand name in the world and closely linked to Georgia. Be a shame if something happened to it.*

The voting access stuff (and line refreshments) are the most visible but I think can be countered. What is more worrying in the bill is the back-end exploits that would allow legislature to more easily circumvent county and state election officials. If it was in place for 2020 I think at least a 50% chance Trump is certified in Georgia.

Unfortunately I do not think the relevant parts of HR1 will get through. Maybe a few provisions at best. I think it will be Biden's "stimulus."

*I am not in general in favor of boycotts, but I would not mind the brand getting linked worldwide with voter suppression.

7: I left off my line about not starting another Vietnam, but I don't know enough about how much of that was Kennedy's fault.

(and line refreshments)

This was the thing I was going to post about!! Then when I sat down, it slipped out of mind and I couldn't recall.

It's just so utterly nuts on every dimension. How is this not deliberately provoking the Democrats to smush the filibuster and pass SB1? Like, is this scripted by Democrats? You can't provide water to people standing in line to vote?!

I would be down with boycotting Coke as long as I can still drink Diet Coke.

I would add Saudi Arabia to the areas in which I am not happy with Biden's foreign policy, but domestically he's doing a good job.

My fear of Biden as a candidate was be that he would be constantly bending over backwards to please Republicans, which is certainly the impression he gave on the campaign trail. He seems to not be doing that, although I think that's mostly due to him having been dead wrong about the level of Republican cooperation that could be expected.

At some point he seems to have recognized that "unity" wasn't going to happen, and its to his credit that he's chosen the other path, which entails getting actual policy wins.

13: Totally. Did you see the video of the Black Georgia State Rep who was arrested for knocking on Governor Kemp's door? Straight out of Jim Crow.

I do expect sometime in the next 4 years for the Supremes to further cement the supremacy of state legislatures to do whatever fucked up shit they want with regard to elections. Three-legged stool for US voting going forward--court-crippled Voting Right legislation, gerrymandering not subject to judicial review, and state legislature rule forever especially on elections. Dave Wasserman has been showing how almost every swing/Rep state has potential even more extreme gerrymanders. They do run the risk of cutting it too close (I think Tom Delay fell foul of that eventually

I just do not think enough Rs or Manchin see it in their interest to do anything real on election-related stuff. And I don't think Biden has any sway on that. (Although apparently he did just appoint Manchin's wife to some Appalachian regional board of some kind.) And I think anything real is at risk of the Supremes. Fucking black voters seems to be John Robert's one passion in life (also their healthcare re: Sebelius ... oh and also protecting the rights of capital).

Is there any chance that the Supreme Court doesn't toss what is basically a new Voting Rights Act?

I do expect sometime in the next 4 years for the Supremes to further cement the supremacy of state legislatures to do whatever fucked up shit they want with regard to elections

It seems like they will have trouble navigating Article 1 Section 4, which says "The Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections for Senators and Representatives, shall be prescribed in each State by the Legislature thereof; but the Congress may at any time by Law make or alter such Regulations"

I mean, that seems pretty explicit to me that Congress is empowered to do what it needs to do here. Not to say the Sam Alito won't have some novel theory about why that's not the case...

15: Also signed under a picture of a plantation. Have just been reading Ty Seidule's Robert E. Lee and Me-- A Southerner's Reckoning with the Myth of the Lost Cause. He refers to them as "enslaved labor farms" which he credits to Edward Baptist, a historian at Cornell.

16: Just like as women enter a profession, it'll somehow mysteriously lose prestige and earning power, as non-Republicans demonstrate their ability to win votes, the powers that they can get will be removed and handed over to systems the Republicans can gerrymander. It's clear that there's a Supreme Court majority to declare independent redistricting boards unconstitutional on the same nonsensical (but very attractive to Republicans) grounds as the bullshit non-delegation doctrine that Thomas and Alito want to blow up federal regulatory apparatus with.

I mean, look what's happening with Medicaid expansion in Missouri, where despite winning a referendum (with 53% of the vote!) and having it written into the state constitution, the GOP is simply going to ignore the law because rural whites don't like it and the majority of the state doesn't have the power to force them to do anything.

Quasi-pwned by 18, but you're going to see a SC ruling within the next couple years that says that state-level election rules may only be set by state legislatures, not by independent boards and possibly (I'm less sure that they'll go this far, but they've already shown willingness to meddle with state courts' interpretation of state constitutions) not subject to judicial review by the state courts.

I don't see any solution to America's problem that doesn't involve taking control of at least a few state legislatures in purple states.

I am so pleased about Deb Haaland at Interior. That is really something.

Why hasn't Trump been arrested already? Surely the cases against him could have been ready to file the instant his presidential protection ended? What is New York waiting for?

I do recommend the Seidule book*; he was a US military historian at West Point who has gotten some notice on Twitter for his unstinting views.

His chapter titles pretty much lay it out.

"My Childhood: Raised on a White Southern Myth"
"My Hometown: A Hidden History of Slavery, Jim Crow, and Integration" -- Alexandria VA.
"My Adopted Hometowns: A Hidden History as 'Lynchtown'" -- mostly in Monroe GA--halfway between Atlanta and Athens, but still 74% Trump in 2020. Some in Mobile AL.
"My College: The Shrine of the Lost Cause"--Washington and Lee
"My Military Career: Glorifying Confederates in the US Army"
"My Academic Career: Glorifying Robert E. Lee at West Point"
"My Verdict: Robert E. Lee Committed Treason to Preserve Slavery"

*Attention conservation notice: I also recommended Caste.

Our state legislature has been taken over by a hoard of barbarians. Their first act was to get their own Speaker to die of covid after a mask-free caucus event. As their next trick they are going to gerrymander the shit out of our state Senate.

I honestly think HR1 is something of a distraction. Yes, it's good and compelling and should become law, but what happens if it passes and contravenes Georgia's new John Roberts restrictions? There's no way that conflict doesn't land in the Supreme Court, and with its current composition, we're fucked.

The only way out is to kill/reform the filibuster and fix the court, and we can't even get Manchin/Sinema on board with the former. There will be negative appetite for the latter. We're fucked.

Sure, we can hope for another backlash of epic proportions where we manage to keep the Senate by winning by the newly rigged rules and it sticks, but hope, as they say, is not a plan.

The Biden administration seems to be doing fine in exactly the way I would have predicted, maybe even a little bit better. The deck chairs have been turned back right-side up and arranged nicely and many of us should have nice places to sit as we sink below the waterline.

President Manchin is doing much better than I expected, and Joe is doing just fine, too. Nothing fundamental about the future has necessarily shifted, but we've got two years to imagine that the tide might turn. I'll take it.

I am more optimistic than either of you two.

I still can't get over the awful turn that RGB's legacy took, though.

The hidden downside of death. Still, it's possible Trump would have won if she were alive.

foreign policy has been not very good

American foreign policy has been a goddamned disaster for my entire life, regardless of who is in charge. I expect nothing else on that front.

I have agreed with apo on this point once before and I'm going to cosign it again. Someday we should have a knockdown 1,000-comment thread about what it would actually take to align incentives such that U.S. foreign policy could improve. I really am all ears. Whom do we need to kill? What institutions should we burn down? More importantly, what voices and perspectives should be promoted? Oh I know, it's easy to say "kill everyone and burn everything," but then what?

If Obama couldn't really do anything about US foreign policy, I'm pretty skeptical that any progress will ever be made. It really seems like the president has weirdly little control over it.

I am not hopeful about our foreign policy improving much in my lifetime. Step 1 would be cutting the military budget *at least* in half. Maintaining the capability to project massive force globally just incentivizes using it.

Killing everyone and burning everything is not a good plan.

I do recommend the Seidule book

Agreed. It is a good memoir of how he was educated as a child and a man in the myths and facts. It's an easy read too.

31,32: I think a much smaller defense industry and military budget. Some decades in the future, I think the US can expect China to offer an exchange, Chinese influence in the Caribbean and central America offered in exchange for US influence and weapons exported to Taiwan. A continued decline in oil prices will in principle also help US foreign policy improve.

Most immediately, steps to improve rather than harm Guatemala and El Salvador would help. Basically every elected government in Guatemala has taken steps to weaken the now-definct CICIG. Thelma Aldana was banned from running in the last election there. No idea what can be effectively done in El Salvador. Also no idea what's realizable that would help Mexico. It's a country that's hurt by US gun laws almost as much as the US is.

I think we should pay defense contractors to fuck off and not actually make weapons. Can't cut off the money spigot because of their influence but at least they won't make things that can kill people. I guess that's sort of what the F-35 program does.

Jonathan Freedland at The Guardian says Biden's putting on a master class.

What makes us think Obama had the foreign policy sensibilities of your average left-of-center blogger?

I think the US can expect China to offer an exchange, Chinese influence in the Caribbean and central America offered in exchange for US influence and weapons exported to Taiwan.

America would be set up to blow away China at the influence game in the Caribbean and Central America if we wanted to.

My impression of the Chinese-funded development projects down there is that they tend to be poorly constructed, embroiled in scandal, and not even built with local labor.

We should be able to offer better.

Poorly constructed and built with local labor.

My uninformed thoughts along with 37 -- if we needed fossil fuel less, and if we decriminalized drugs, would that pull enough money out of oil and crime to stabilize the nations we currently destabilize?

This depends on our not wanting to destabilize nations just because, though. But it seems so much nicer for most of the US as well as most of the rest of the world.

Laydeez!

37.1 Absolutely not. I hope I never see the US abandon Taiwan to the CCP. That would be a tragedy and a horrible failure.

NMM to Beverly Cleary, you sick fucks.

I hereby reserve "No more wet dreams" for when Judy Bloom dies.

My uninformed thoughts along with 37 -- if we needed fossil fuel less, and if we decriminalized drugs, would that pull enough money out of oil and crime to stabilize the nations we currently destabilize?

We've been a net exporter of oil for several years now, so any effect on our foreign policy should be apparent. And maybe there has been some? We're definitely less focused on the Middle East than we were for a long time, but there are lots of factors contributing to that.

In general I agree on the foreign policy comments, but am curious if within that context do folks not think the JCPOA was a relative bright spot?

My favorite part was not waking up in the morning and feeling the need to check if anything was horribly and needlessly fucked up while I was sleeoping.

46, 47: I haven't even been able to bring myself to masturbate ever since Olivia de Havilland gave up the ghost.

I mean, what's even the point?

To get the neighbors to leave?

53: Or to get to know them a whole lot better.

18: It seems like they will have trouble navigating Article 1 Section 4, which says "The Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections for Senators and Representatives, shall be prescribed in each State by the Legislature thereof; but the Congress may at any time by Law make or alter such Regulations"

Well they warmed up for that by navigating Amendment 15 Section 2 in Shelby County.

The Congress shall have the power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.

Ah but maybe because Article 1 Section 4 isn't conditioned by "appropriate" it will be harder ...

Has anyone on Fox News referred to that as "an obscure provision of the Constitution" yet?

34 is fighting the last war; that is, the war you chose 20 years in the past, not the war someone else will choose 20 years in the future. You are facing the most formidable adversary you have since 1815, in the most lethal environment in the history of war; you aren't spending even close to enough on defense.*
Maintaining the capability to project massive force globally just incentivizes using it.
Yes; but changing the force structure wouldn't constrain decisions the way you hope. You ended conscription (in part) because you thought the volunteer force would be too small to do anything without mobilizing reserves, so the political leadership wouldn't casually intervene in places. Whoops. The Army deliberately forgot everything it learned in Vietnam, so the political leadership wouldn't throw it into another insurgency. Whoops. Shrinking the force would not protect you from your own stupidity, but would increase the risk of major war.
*Which is not at all to endorse your current MIC or habitual foreign policy. Procurement is a disaster, senior leadership intellectually bankrupt, policy far too militarized. You need to cut heads and rebuild. Nor is this to say you shouldn't spend all you want to domestically; you're rich enough to do both, so long as you raise taxes.

Maybe we really should have been fucking for virginity instead, this whole time.

The best kind of fucking there is.

Shrinking the force would not protect you from your own stupidity...

Yea, we're going to marinate in that no matter what.

You know damn well you were supposed to make a cock joke there.

I'm not as cheerful as I was last night.

Okay, this might get to 100 at least.

- 1815 = Waterloo? Just checking.
- J, Robot should weigh in, and I know ajay is busy saving the UK but someone should kidnap him and make him post. X.trapnel, any thoughts?
- I assume lw didn't mean the US should actually accept the offer in 37.
- One big question is how to effect changes given realistic projections of ongoing partisan divides in Congress and all the other facts on the ground. It's not exactly the case that you have to change Democrats in one way and Republicans in another... but it is a little like that. It's also important that they can maintain symbolic disagreements to preserve their all-important oppositional identities.

When Ajay's lot burned your capital, but didn't finish the job because they were tired of paying income tax.
Oppositional identities will take care of themselves. Especially when you're doing New Cold War civil rights.

They couldn't have 'finished the job' and were wise to get out when they did.

We didn't intervene militarily re Tibet, and would never have cared about Taiwan not being a part of China from 1949 on if we hadn't been all worked up about communism. On the other hand, we did go to war to defend the state system when Iraq conquered Kuwait. ISTM that the problem with 37.1 isn't so much that we'd be destroyed by a peaceful reunion of China and Taiwan, but that the consideration on offer would be dubious. What is it that China would actually be offering? Influence acquired because some countries are hoping for alternatives to US dominance isn't exactly transferrable.

65.1: Really? With the full Wellsian war machine in gear and all the powers allied or prostrate? I see you losing everything west of the Mississippi, if you're lucky.

Really?

From time outside Biden seems indistinguishable so far from every Dem president I've been aware of, starting with Kennedy.

I think this might be my stupidest 'nym yet, although "Rod Scatlock" was also pretty fucking transparent. But fuck it, let's GOOOO! I was kinda contemplating a farewell post where I thanked everyone here for helping me to grow as a person, but I will not countenance a world where goddamned gswift is a regular commenter on Unfogged and I am not.

Biden's doing pretty well, speaking to the topic of the post. And I don't think that comes at the expense of Obama, who did what he *had* to do in his time, otherwise the "Obama was a tyrant" narrative would have fully taken hold and efforts to disenfranchise Black voters would be even worse than they are.

It turns out that personal growth is really hard. Good to hear from you.

(Point of fact, the reason that Biden is as good as he currently is, speaks most to me of tutelage by Obama. As does the fact that he has a Black female VP.)

Hey! Good to see you, Moby.

Doc! Good to see you!

I've lost my youngest child to the blandishments of your damnably attractive country -- he's talking about not coming back to the US after he graduates from University of Toronto.

Toronto kind of scared me because it had eight million mid-rise condos and $10 mixed drinks at nice restaurants without bottom-shelf liquor. It's probably a trap.

I'm still planning to put up that post, by the way. Or cajole Liz into putting it up, if I can. B/c Unfogged-land has no idea, I think, how much I truly do love it and love [almost] all of you.

(But in the meantime, yes, personal growth is... complicated. I shouldn't care a whit about where gswift is a regular commenter, right? But here's some personal growth Fo Yo Ass: I acknowledge that I do. My imperfections, also, are a part of me. GROWTH!)

"I've lost my youngest child to the blandishments of your damnably attractive country -- he's talking about not coming back to the US after he graduates from University of Toronto."

Toronto is a shithole. Recover him with all haste! I am terrified for you!

(/jks Toronto is great except for the part where it contains people who actually voted for Rob Ford)

And on Biden, I kind of think he's completely unprincipled but in a good way -- if he's surrounded by people with decent politics, and he gets along with them, they can nudge him almost anywhere. Another politician with a history as centrist as his might have stayed more to the right out of committed belief in his positions, but Biden is willing to be talked into things very very far away from where he started out.

And of course any guest post you send me will go up.

77:: Alternate explanation (hear me out... and is fucking mcmanus still here BTW?): Biden's time in the Obama Administration actually made him more moral, not less, and that's why every unexpectedly progressive he makes has happened.

78: Aw, many thanks.

I would buy that too. I don't mean by unprincipled to say that he has no morals, but that he's a very persuadable person -- there's not a central core of positions he can't be swayed from. I would buy that being a part of the Obama admin persuaded him in a good direction.

Hey, Lacks, good to see you.

I won't be surprised if historians figure out that Biden's grandchildren had a big impact on him.

He was always going to embody pretty much wherever the center of the party is, and I think that's more or less still true right now. I've always thought that he wouldn't be, or want to be, a force that changes the speed or direction of the movement of that center, or that he has ambitions to be out in front of the movement. He's not a dead hand of the past, though, and that's better than many expected.

I think his foreign policy isn't catching up to where the center is, but that might be because I'm too far out of touch with the center to understand the pull. I get that he's not looking to make trouble with Israel, for example, but think he's not taking the right line on Iran. I think he should be moving more forcefully on Yemen, and that he's lagging the center on that.

I say that with the grandchildren because he seems like the kind of person who would listen to them, be empathetic to their concerns, and learn a lot about what values are important in thinking about the future. While I am sure that the former president can tell you the names of his grandchildren, he really doesn't strike me at all as the kind of person who would have given a single thought to what they think or care about.

To 79: oh wow, I hadn't been around long enough to perceive a pattern, but I'm now going to assume your real name is Tacos L. Dorck; and no, mcmanus was expelled shortly before Trump took office, which I feel was probably in his (i.e. bob's) best interest.

84: LOL! Thanks for the update, good to see you.

I see you losing everything west of the Mississippi, if you're lucky.

I don't, at least as long as the Pacific Ocean exists.

I didn't have an opinion about Secretary of State Blinken before, but he's tweeting in support of the jailed the leaders of the right-wing coup in Bolivia, so fuck that guy.

Good to see you as well, Charley, apologies for the omission.

Trump has, I think, changed things not only by convincing assholes to go full asshole, but also it has pushed much of the center to the left by making problems too obvious to ignore.

The thing with rejecting staff who were honest about past marijuana experience is an indicator, to me, that a lot of his instincts are bad and his change is mostly because he reflects back the force exerted by the party/movement.

This is kind of an offensive comparison as they're nothing alike personally (he does have brains and some kind of morals) but his role in this moment is not unlike GWB's - he puts a staid and inspiring gloss on the party platform.

90 Right, he doesn't intuitively know where the center of gravity of the party is on every single issue, and when no one has thought to tell him, he has to find it by trial and error. I don't know anything about Wayne Gretzky's politics, but it might be useful if someone got Biden all hip to the whole 'where the puck is going to be' thing.

Maybe historians will work out that the reason Biden is lagging on defense/fp is that those are fields where the premium on maintaining the status quo is so high, as a prerequisite for advancement in the field, that there's just no one in the admin who understands that things have moved. In 2002-2005, maybe later too, I used to say that the problem was that people my age couldn't get a foothold in security/fp unless they believed (between 1975 and whenever the hiring decision had to be made, all the way to 1987) in the ridiculous assertion that the likelihood of a Russian military invasion of then West Germany was genuinely high. If you sort for credulous types, what do you know -- you end up with a bunch of people too credulous to make a decent analysis of reality.

There was a decent run-down of Biden's FP fuck ups by Fred Kaplan in Slate https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2021/03/biden-foreign-policy-china-iran-korea-afghanistan.html

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FErYyPMbllI

Good to see the Canadian Dr!

I think Biden is better than I expected, but I'm not yet at the point where I expect him to be good.

91: Some Canadians would like a word with you.

95: the Wikipedia entry on Gretzky's records (linked from that article) is impressively thorough: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_career_achievements_by_Wayne_Gretzky#Records_update

95 I think that article demonstrates the absolute propriety of someone talking to Biden using the phrase.

For folks who didn't click through on 93, it's the 1984 Reagan bear ad. Can anyone watch it without shouting 'jfc, there's no fucking bear!'?

Someone who actually lived in MN during the relevant time might have a more informed take on this, but my hope for the Biden administration was always that he'd be like Mark Dayton was as governor. I've met Dayton, and he did not strike me as being a particularly bright fellow at the time. AFAIK, though, he ended up being a much better governor than his Senate record would suggest, and it seemed to me at the time that it had a lot to do with him being willing to appoint and listen to the right people.

||What is up with the UK? Apparently there's now a whole new party for people who support an independent Scotland, but also hate trans people?|>

||

Charley's sen: "Bring back local manufacturing!"

|>

99. I have no idea what is going on in Scotland apart from two large predatory fish knocking lumps off each other. As far as I can see they have both behaved very badly and probably set the cause of Scottish independence back a generation. But ajay is probably your go to commenter on this one.

re: 99

I don't know what the fuck is going on with the trans thing. It seems to have been a current in various Scottish nationalist circles over the past two or three years or so, judging by what I see from some people I follow on twitter. Spawned from TERF circles, as far as I can tell. It's not coming from right wing reactionary politics, but from, well I don't know what you call TERF politics? Left wing reactionary politics? Fuck knows.

Salmond versus Sturgeon, I really don't know. There's decades of political rivalry and cooperation there. Although Salmond was found not guilty of harassment, I'd be very surprised if there's not something there.* The SNP are in the very unusual situation of being a quasi-fringe party that managed to transform itself to become a massive mainstream success and govern a country. Salmond and Sturgeon are more or less personally responsible for that, through a combination of political nous and sheer force of will along with a load of risk taking, e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/79_Group

* pure prejudice on my part, maybe, and I've not followed the details of the allegations at all, but he seems the type.

Right, what's weird is that the UK TERF politics thing seems to be so singular to the UK, and yet it's also a UK-wide phenomenon. There aren't so many ways in which England and Scotland group together within the anglosphere in terms of politics. Canada has 3 left-of-center parties and it's not that one is for anti-trans lefties.

To some extent it makes sense that if you already have right, center, and left unionist parties in Scotland, then there should also be right, center, and left nationalist parties (though there's a shift here where all three nationalist parties are to the left of the corresponding unionist party). But the centrality of TERF-iness as the salient issue is just so bizarre from a non-UK perspective.

Mostly this has crossed my twitter in terms of Alba pronunciation discourse.

That is really strange. Moreover, it had not penetrated my information bubble in the tiniest way until these comments.

I hadn't heard either, unless it is about Hogworts.

Weirdly it is about Hogwarts. (Or rather, about JK Rowling.)

It is in Scotland.

102. ttaM, sorry, I didn't realise you were still around. Do you have any idea what Alba's programme is likely to be, and how they could hope to take votes off anybody except the SNP?

re: 108

I don't really know, as I'm not a "nat" or an insider in any way. From the outside, it feels like a Farage or Galloway style vanity project/grift. I can't imagine there's space for 2 independence parties in any form other than cannibalising each other.

109: There were already 2 indy parties, because of the Scottish Greens.

The cannibalization thing is weird because of the very strange method of apportioning seats for regional parliaments, you vote for a person for FPTP, and then for a party list for proportional representation. The party list seats are assigned in a somewhat strange way, but the key point is that if you win the FPTP seats it gets much much harder to win the party list seats. SNP wins the overwhelming share of FPTP seats (the latest poll I saw had them winning all but 3), which means they almost can't get list seats. This is why Alba and the Greens are both "list-only." The idea is that you vote for the SNP candidate for the FPTP seat, and then Alba (if you hate trans people or think sexual assault is good) or the Greens (if you're to the left of SNP) and that ends up taking seats away from unionist parties without hurting SNP. But it's all a bit unpredictable, if say the Tories have a good night in the northeast and win several FPTP parties there then it does hurt to split the list vote.

But the point is that if you're in a region which already votes in SNP for nearly every FPTP seat (which includes the entire central belt, and last election really everywhere but South Scotland), then voting for SNP for constituency plus Green or Alba for list really does take seats away from the unionist parties but not the SNP.

(As a side point, I'd guess there's a non-trivial number of older Tory/Alba cross-pressured voters, especially in Northeast Scotland.)

Yeah, sorry, no idea either. I have spent the last four months entirely focused on the home counties to the point where I instinctively think of Warwickshire as "up north and foreign".

re: 110

Aye, I guess I meant parties whose USP is independence, which doesn't apply to the Greens, but I take your point.

Re: the TERF thing in the UK, I sometimes wonder if it has its root in Germaine Greer and her influence here which is larger than elsewhere.

It's basically the Alex Salmond Party so I'd think it hates women rather than anything as specific as taking sides on who's the wrong kind of feminist

100 A whole lot of fun was had dragging him for that. Not that he cares what anyone thinks.

This is an intriguing take, although not Scotland-specific, on the UK TERFs question, whose author freely admits that almost no one really agrees with her. I've heard "it's the skeptics" before, but nothing within the wider context of British left-wing thought. This may just be a matter of, you know, family resemblances.

Closer to home, the Arkansas Senate passed its ban, so I am thinking of delagar and her (adult, I think) kid and every trans kid in Arkansas, and feeling wary/dispirited about the judiciary.

(Moby: Twitter links from Unfogged are kosher for Lent.)

Yes. That's my rule too.