"...To use such enormous powers against the eunuchs would bring victory as easily as lighting up a furnace to burn a hair. You only need to act promptly: Use your powers and smite at once, and all the empire will be with you. But to summon forces to the capital, to gather many bold warlords into one spot, each with different schemes, is to turn our weapons against our own person, to place ourselves in the power of another. Nothing but failure can come of it, and havoc will ensue."

"The view of a mere book-worm," said He Jin with a smile.

• Romance of the Three Kingdoms

On Saturday, Oct. 24, Josh Turek, the Democratic candidate for U.S. Senate in Iowa, released a new ad targeting transgender people—perhaps the worst anti-transgender ad of the entire election cycle to come from a Democrat. The ad begins with Turek talking about his disability and the importance of not discriminating, before immediately turning to adopt discriminatory policies toward transgender people. One such policy is a sports ban, a position sadly becoming increasingly common among high-profile Democrats in competitive races, and one that alone would have made this yet another newsworthy anti-trans ad. But Turek then goes further, advocating for a new policy: a proposal to ban federally funded gender-affirming care in the United States, one that would impact a substantial number of transgender people and make their care difficult to impossible to receive.

The last two posts talking about Iowa senate candidate Josh Turek's hard-right shift in betrayal of trans people were removed on technicalities. This one's a Reuters link, with the exact title of the article, which doesn't even mention his name, so we'll see if it stays up.

In Iowa, Democratic gubernatorial candidate Rob Sand, Senate candidate Josh Turek and congressional candidates Lindsay James and Sarah Trone Garriott have all distanced themselves from progressive positions on transgender issues.

“I ⁠oppose letting men in women's locker rooms and voted to let parents, not politicians, make decisions for their kids,” Trone Garriott said in a recent ad.

LGBTQ advocates have criticized such language, saying misgendering transgender women as men represents a betrayal of the party's LGBTQ supporters at a uniquely vulnerable moment.

The article unfortunately makes no mention of the fact that Turek has gone even further, and voiced support for banning federally funded gender affirming care, which would affect many trans people including veterans and government employees. Unfortunately, I couldn't find a mainstream corporate article that discussed that part of his ad.

The number of false rape accusations is absolutely dwarfed by the number of rapists who get off scot free. While false accusations do happen, to set the standard at only believing women when the perpetrator is convicted in a court of law (which you can find people doing all over lib instances right now) excuses more than 96% of all rapes. There is literally a 4% difference between that, and just straight up excusing rape altogether.

In the particular case of Platner, there was already an accuser who didn't tank his campaign, because people were justifiably skeptical of her political affiliations. The second accuser, however, presented credible evidence, including records of conversations from long before Platner had entered politics. It was only at this point that many different progressive figures who had endorsed him withdrew their support and called on him to drop out. So any attempts to shift the goalposts and pretend that people turning on him will just automatically believe anything and everything any woman says with zero skepticism, are obviously complete bullshit.

"Why did she keep quiet until now?" The vast majority of rape victims never take the case to the courts, ever, because they know that the chances of anything actually coming from it are incredibly low. And when the perpetrator goes free, they will now be in the position of looking like a false accuser, with the social stigma that comes with it.

Here's a little challenge, a way to conceptualize this. Roll a D20. On anything but a 1, a rapist just went free. If you do get a 1, roll it again. On a 17 or higher, the rapist still goes free. Keep rolling that die until you convict a single rapist, and post a comment telling me how many rapists got off before that.

Also, just a reminder: Platner is already out. The justification of, "We need to defend him because he's the only shot against a worse evil" no longer applies. At this point, anyone defending him is just in it for the love of the game. Frankly, if you were excusing his red flags before, you should be reconsidering whether your way of thinking was flawed. But if you're still defending him even now, I don't even know what to say. If no part of "rapist killer-for-hire with a Nazi tattoo" is a deal-breaker for you, then you are not a progressive by any stretch of the imagination.

Now, I try not to talk shit without having the receipts. So here's a little selection of what I'm talking about:

:::spoiler Misogyny

Notes:

The map I used didn't include Turkey (US ally) or Gaza as part of Palestine. Palestine and Lebanon are the only countries that have only been attacked by Israel and not the US directly. Pakistan is technically a US ally and Lebanon has security agreements with the US, but neither host US troops.

For every single country in the oil-rich Middle East, the options are to let the US troops come voluntarily, or to fight them off when they attack.

I did another version for China btw:

https://bsky.app/profile/starlightnoelle.bsky.social/post/3lmxtf6op4c2q

Newcomb's problem is a thought experiment where you're presented with two boxes, and the option to take one or both. One box is transparent and always contains $1000. The second is a mystery box.

Before making the choice, a supercomputer (or team of psychologists, etc) predicted whether you would take one box or both. If it predicted you would take both, the mystery box is empty. If it predicted you'd take just the mystery box, then it contains $1,000,000. The predictor rarely makes mistakes.

This problem tends to split people 50-50 with each side thinking the answer is obvious.

An argument for two-boxing is that, once the prediction has been made, your choice no longer influences the outcome. The mystery box already has whatever it has, so there's no reason to leave the $1000 sitting there.

An argument for one-boxing is that, statistically, one-boxers tend to walk away with more money than two-boxers. It's unlikely that the computer guessed wrong, so rather than hoping that you can be the rare case where it did, you should assume that whatever you choose is what it predicted.