Counterpoint: Brexit

I’m sure many people can handle their crack better than me

Way to tell on yourself ;)

for best results, sexual activities, love and commitment should go hand in hand

This is fine, I agree with it as written, but I dispute that “commitment” has very much to do with sexuality, except sort of tangentially, in that people are often bad at managing their feelings around it, or simply have extremely strong feelings which are hard to manage. It’s true that if something affects you emotionally to the degree that it has negative impacts on your partner, you shouldn’t do that thing, but that would apply to any stressful job where you took your stress out on your loved ones.

you shouldn’t make money out of something so intimate and important as if it were nothing

This on the other hand is the kind of thing that religious people say when they don’t want to admit that they see women (and let’s be real, it’s always women we’re talking about) as property.

Of course you can date or not date anyone for whatever reason, nobody can make you. So indeed, the world is big enough for that.

admitting it is too much so you have to fight strawmen

This is exactly what you are doing with the second statement. If you were to honestly dissect why you think that “making money out of it” would mean that “it were nothing” you would be able to see that too. It implies that someone doing OF somehow lessens the commitment to their partner. Robbing him of something you see as rightfully his. It is this deeply engrained patriarchal mentality which is in the end responsible for most of the emotional issues.

And sure, if you can’t handle it, that’s ok, many people can’t. We all have things that are hard for us. But it’s better not to lie to yourself about where those feelings come from.

It’s because they are secretly proud of their past

Yeah? What would be reasonable about it? Of course, it’s very common, but that doesn’t mean it’s reasonable. I think if you break it down, all those objections reduce to “my partner is my property”.

It’s almost like there’s a spectrum

207 as opposed to 230-250 for the oils people typically recommend (rice bran, peanut, refined sunflower, ghee…) and 270 for avocado. Sounds lower to me.

Edit: oh you were talking specifically about canola. Well, since they put mustard oil (basically the same thing) at 240 later, I’m not sure about that number, but yeah maybe specifically canola is also not great.

The chart at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smoke_point would disagree

Ok, so what would the equivalent be?

How come it’s in the quote in your own comment then?

No, it really is the most transformative NYC transit project in the world

Only if it actually can do their job, which is… Doubtful

Not only did I not mean to imply that, I didn’t imply that. If you read that into my comment it’s 100% you.

No worries, it happens.

Yeah, I basically agree with your first paragraph, but the point I was trying to make is that I do see people doing much else. I do know people who reject voting but spend a lot of time and energy doing organising and activism. Whether or not that applies to the other poster on this thread, I feel it’s better not to overly shame people for not having voted. Life sucks and people rationalise the dumb stuff they do in all sorts of crazy ways. I’d prefer to talk about something more positive.

Mamdani seems cool. It’s nice to see someone win on a straight affordability campaign without openly throwing marginalised people under the bus. Of course, it’s NY. But it shows it’s something we could unite around.

I’m not that person, check the usernames.

My only point is I think there’s actually better stuff to focus on than whether people voted or not. I think it’s probably on the whole better to vote for the democrats than not vote. But I think there are good faith arguments against it and what really matters is more active ways of fighting fascism.

What those criteria are matters

That’s not what I said, why bother replying if you didn’t read my comment?

in the context of the US, if you (generally) chose not to vote in the 2024 election then you are guilty of doing nothing to prevent the atrocities committed by the Trump administration

This is really a false dichotomy. There are so many other ways to fight against the atrocities. Given how enthusiastically the democrats are cooperating with the fascist agenda, if you didn’t vote but you uploaded some info to one of those ice watch apps, or went and protested in LA, or shuffled papers to slow down their progress in your federal job, you probably already did more tangible good than someone who did the other way around.

Just for the sake of discussion, I think there’s a real argument to be made that reversing 25% is actually worse than doing nothing, because it makes people complacent. “Controlled opposition”, if you will.

I’m not saying that’s necessarily always the case, there are obviously tangible benefits to reducing some of the damage. But if it comes with allowing even more damage to be done later, because the changes are superficial and don’t address the ways in which the right extremists can manipulate the political system, then people might be fooled into thinking the system still works and the long run consequences would be even more severe than if they realised it doesn’t.

And if you fully realise that the political system doesn’t work then I don’t think it entirely makes sense to get on someone’s case about voting or not. Not that they shouldn’t, but there are much bigger issues.