Past Imperfect

You are very wrong about Maine. Mills is an unpopular governor - there's a reason she did so poorly in the primary. If she was a good candidate, she would have won. Platner in the primary received more votes than any Democratic candidate ever (and more than combined total of all Republic gubernatorial candidates). He did it with the support of labor unions (which refused to support Mills) and hosting frequent town halls the past year talking/connecting with voters. He is aggressive in his critiques of Republicans and has a progressive platform. Collins in 2026 after two years of Trump wrecking the country and after Dobbs - it is a fundamentally different race than ever before. I understand and agree with the candidate quality critiques, but at this point the Senate majority is what matters.

This is also a false dilemma.

“The LEGO Movie was my favorite movie of 2014, but it strikes me that the main character was male, because I feel like in our current culture, he HAD to be. The whole point of Emmett is that he’s the most boring average person in the world. It’s impossible to imagine a female character playing that role, because according to our pop culture, if she’s female she’s already SOMEthing, because she’s not male. The baseline is male. The average person is male. You can see this all over but it’s weirdly prevalent in children’s entertainment. Why are almost all of the muppets dudes, except for Miss Piggy, who’s a parody of femininity? Why do all of the Despicable Me minions, genderless blobs, have boy names? I love the story (which I read on Wikipedia) that when the director of The Brave Little Toaster cast a woman to play the toaster, one of the guys on the crew was so mad he stormed out of the room. Because he thought the toaster was a man. A TOASTER. The character is a toaster. I try to think about that when writing new characters— is there anything inherently gendered about what this character is doing? Or is it a toaster?”

"Your body knows whether it has this organ or not" okay so

the 'you can do whatever you want forever' queer theorist blogger when what a lesbian/trans woman wants is to be a lesbian and a woman forever:

the beauty of early 2000s shows is that they just... stuck to the bit. You watch this show to see a neurodiverent man solve crime with his best friend, you will get that for 8 seasons. We said this show would be about an ex-spy and his employer who built an AI and the people they save. They will do it even when they admit in the show it makes no sense because that's what you signed up for. Leverage commited so much that they got a modern version that still does the same thing instead of being 6 episode seasons about one big con.