That’s one pair of philosophies that creep me out both ways. Both the anti natalists and pro natalists.

Deciding for yourself is one thing, imposing your choice on others is maddening.

I don’t know if the comment quite raises to the level of anti natalist though. Maybe it’s grading on a curve of reading some more hard core anti natalists, but that comment felt tame and felt like they wouldn’t necessarily object to a couple having one child or even two, being somewhat below the replacement level…

If a protest of a billion people happens, then it cannot be ignored by the media.

I know, it was hyperbole, but the point is that if 12 million people are on the street, it’s not that the 12 million people need to get people’s attention, they are indicative that the people already have that perspective and are showing it in the streets.

A small protest has a goal of getting attention on a problem that people may lack awareness. A multi-million person protest isn’t about a need to raise awareness anymore, it’s about showing the awareness and commitment that is already there. For whatever volume of people actively protest, you can be sure there’s a singnificant multiple of that number of people who agree with the protestors but didn’t take it to the streets for one reason or another.

Well I meant the more rhetorical “pushing”, but yes, some of the activity of the claimed non-violence seems a bit violent.

I would say that I doubt you can have millions of people protest and manage to be completely non-violent. Some folks will take it to violence in the name of the cause, some will opportunisticly do it under the cover of the movement, and finally some might “false flag” to try to discredit the movement.

On the one hand, most of those incidents cited were in the face of a regime that also didn’t want to care. Just hard to ignore circumstances if 3.5% of your people are out on the streets and likely most of the people off the streets agree with them.

On the other hand, they base this on very few instances, so it’s hardly a statistical slam dunk, it’s vaguely supportive of some concepts, but anyone taking note of specific numbers is really overextending the research beyond what it can possibly say.

I think it’s not “3.5% of people want an outcome” but “protests of significant magnitude to have 3.5% actively on the streets pushing” correlate with a very very large population that agrees, but not enough to be out on the streets.

So even if 40 million people want single payer, there are not 12 million in the streets.

But again, this is based on a scant handful of “movements”, so it’s pretty useless on specifics. Most I can see as a takeaway is perhaps that a violent movement may be too high stakes for people and a largely non-violent movement can attract more people and more people usually matter more than more violence.

Based on the article “no non-violent movement that has involved more than 3.5% of a population has ever failed” has the caveat of “we only look at 3 of them, and those 3 worked”.

So their overall sample size is small, and the 3.5% sample size is just 3. Further, those 3 had no idea someone in the vague future would retroactively measure their participation to declare it a rock solid threshold.

I think the broader takeaway is that number of people seems to matter more than degree of violence, and violence seems to alienate people that might have otherwise participated.

While that’s true, even Trump will throw a few hollow words in support of other Republicans and declare himself a Republican and knows the result is his life is easier with Republicans victories.

In a hypothetical cheating scenario, it’s not like Trump directly did the cheating, some broad conspiracy across multiple states would require a number of players, coordinated since the “evidence” is similar dropoff across many states. Any such conspiracy would doubtless recognize the strategic value of allies also winning, even if they didn’t care about the allies directly. Such a conspiracy would be keyed into the same sentiment that wants to do everything they can to install conservative loyalists across the executive and judicial branches as quickly as they can. There’s no way such a conspiracy would neglect legislators and state governments if they had given themselves that opportunity.

The drop offs could be explained much more simply that MAGA is only about Trump and not about Republicans. If Trump only cares about Trump, the same can be said if his followers. Most of them will vote R as long as they are filling out a ballot anyway, but they barely even show up for Trump loyalists in the midterms. So it’s quite reasonable to expect a bunch of Trump people to just go in for the one thing they care about and ignore the rest.

The governor is easy to explain, the Republican candidate was never well liked, and then it came out that he specifically called himself a black Nazi and the Republican party threw him under the bus.

The lieutenant governor and attorney general remain odd, but that’s NC for you. They sometimes just vote Democrat for statewide State races and then vote republican federal.

I suppose the counter question would be if they were manipulating the votes directly, why not also rig the down ballot election?

The number of fatal incidents is probably more informative for most conclusions. We rarely have a passenger airliner incident and this year we had one. That really moves number of deaths statistics despite not having a particularly informative different cause than other aviation accidents.

The point is there is certainly some intent for visualizing and sharing the data, and a nuanced understanding of the circumstances make it obvious that, as yet, the number of fatalities while tragic, is not indicative of any trend yet. If you went by “number of fatal incidents” the graph would look less anomalous. We’ve had many years without any passenger liner incidents, and this year we have had one.

So it’s a graph that wants to be suggestive of something but ultimately shouldn’t be considered suggestive of any comparative significance. It’s data that is precisely what it purports to be, but there are intended inferences that have to be answered.

I don’t see why any level, even knowing “furry” would find these particular designs “objectionable” and worthy of rejecting. They aren’t even vaguely fetishized.

There’s some self selecting bias there, going to a ‘furry convention’ is a rather steeper level of engagement than just, say, looking at a webcomic featuring art like this mascot here.

Those more hard core sexual furries scare off casual furries as well as folks a bit timid about being associated with the most… Forthcoming portion of the fandom.

It’s rough on some as they want to engage without sexual interest in the aesthetic, but as a result get grouped in with those with a sexual interest. They want to identify as something, and furry is closest, but they aren’t into the sexual facet and struggle with that broad association.

I know someone who is into the general aesthetic of SFW “furry” stuff but is a bit weird about it because one of two things happens if she shares some content she likes:

• People turn away because they think she’s into that stuff sexually
• People get way too into engaging with her because they think she’s into that stuff sexually.

Feels like there needs to be some better nuance between “I like furry style SFW art” and “I’m all into furry in the the way people guess”. Not that there’s anything wrong with the latter, but it’s certainly something you should have to explicitly opt into rather than an assumption based on liking or doing a drawing or like wearing an animal ear headband or non-plug tail or something similarly innocuous.