This was a fun post and makes a good point with your comment in the other thread. There are games where you will only win if you do your homework.

I do suspect there is a difference in the nature of the murders. It's not that men are "supposed" to engage in risky behavior, it's that many in fact do. This seems to be strongly related to economic class and access to education and employment.

First note that the killers are overwhelmingly male. Second, how many male victims are themselves in gangs or engaged in the drug trade? How many cases is the murder part of a "beef" between two men (or between two gangs) that leads to a homicide, followed by revenge killings, etcetera?

Is this "victim blaming"? I dunno. I'd love to see drug legalization, combined with much better social support for poor communities. I'd like to see better education opportunities, and somehow (perhaps magic) we could offer hope instead of despair.

Anyway, it's complicated.

For women and LGBT people, it is indeed a very different situation. The murders of women and LGBT people are very often a case of one violent brutal man killing a victim who had no violent tendencies themselves. It's often about domination. The murders of women are often from either intimate partners or men the women rejected. The murders of LGBT people are pure hate.

The point is, if you're a middle class man, your chances of being gunned down is pretty darn close to zero. Who targets middle class dudes minding their own business?

It's very different for women and LGBT people.

I suspect that none of the men on this forum are likely to be murdered in a drug deal gone bad, nor in a gangland revenge killing. The women on this forum must be aware of intimate partner violence. It's part of our lives. I must be aware of transphobic hate. There is a big difference.

People underestimate how much it's this that is the real concern. What if there's no food at the store? What if your boss shutters your office for a few weeks or months? How will people live?

I mean, I seriously doubt many people are going to be wanting to make a baby the next few months, and March-May are usually my best months. This will likely entail a huge pay cut for me even though I can still work from home.

Shout out to my sister in law, who for the past few years has bought us big packs of emergency food for Christmas.

IDK if you've ever tried the milk replacers (rice milk, soy milk) but they have some shelf stable ones that are tolerable. I'm lactose intolerant but sometimes have an urge for a PBJ and have the rice milk with that, and it's not terrible.

The paymasters do a lot to limit it as the movement's priorities become that of its financiers. I'm probably about as sympathetic to libertarianism as planet blue gets, primarily because I think journalists like Radley Balko, or coming from the other direction, Glenn Greenwald, and similar folks serve an important purpose that the progressive press and broader left in the US just plain suck at. There's so much reflexive statism and naive sympathy towards the establishment. At the very least its a valuable gut check we ignore at our peril.

But in terms of a mass movement in a 2 party system? I agree with you that its limitations are built in.

Oh lordy. Frame marriage as a type of contract and all of sudden some people don't believe in contracts or know how they work.

Marriage is, among other things, a contract.

Strikes me the more interesting story is the downward slope among Women *away* from Democrats starting from a peak just after Trump is elected, sloping down through 2018, and continuing through 2020.

Those are not 2020 "wave" slopes... not for Democrats, anyway.

Re: Saturday night D&D session...We're running "Against the Slave Lords," which was a series of tournament modules for GenCon XIII in 1980. Since this was a tournament adventure, there was really no need to tie the four (now five) separate adventures together outside of a basic "now you're fighting the next set of slavers..." Because I like narrative, I was trying to come up with a hook to get the party from Darkshelf across Woolly Bay and into Highport (World of Greyhawk >>>>>> Forgotten Realms...fight me). The hook came to me yesterday at work and I rushed home after the climbing gym to commit it all to paper before my goldfish brain forgot it all.

The hook also conveniently solves a bit of a problem my players didn't even know they had, so that's nice, too. I just hope my plan survives first contact with the enemy...er...with the players.

Clue comes with human figurines now? My set just had those little pieces that looked like a cross between a Hershey's Kiss and a bowling pin.

Both hypotheses checked out. The data here are from 2015, but the female homicide rates correspond roughly to the numbers given in the linked New Humanitarian article, so it doesn't seem to have changed much. According to NH, El Salvador had a "femicide" rate of 13.49 per 100,000 women in 2018; according to WHO, the "femicide" rate in 2015 was 15.0, and the "androcide" rate was 117.5. In Honduras it was 46 vs. 125. In Mexico it was 3.9 vs. 34.3.

A few years ago, Mike Huckabee noted that since 94% of people killed by police officers are men whereas about 25% are black, maybe "Male Lives Matter" would be a more appropriate slogan. Internet feminists responded in a manner every bit as thoughtful and mature as you might expect, but he kind of had a point. Activists and the media are constantly pushing the message that women's lives just matter more than men's, and "Male Lives Matter" is a message that they could stand to hear and take to heart.

To be fair, a lot of the male-on-male violence is reciprocal, so even if the men don't, strictly speaking, "deserve" to die, they are at least kind of bringing it on themselves by getting involved in a lifestyle that involves getting in lots of gun and knife fights with other men. Maybe this explains the whole gender gap in homicide victimization, and women are actually more likely to be victimized through absolutely no fault of their own. Again, though, the activists and media pushing these "femicide" narratives don't seem the least bit interested in investigating issues that could call the narrative into question.

I go through this every year living in Hurricane Country. We generally keep about two weeks of canned good around and have water containers to fill. tablespoon of bleach in 5 gallons and you are set from a water treatment perspective.

Democrats like themselves a lot of gun control, and Republicans love outlawing abortion.

Everybody has planks in the platform that are shitty, why are Libertarians held to a different standard?

The messaging is the most important thing of them all. For in the messaging lies the re-election campaign and owning the libs. Those are the most important things in the world. God, we are so fished.

This feels like the opening scenes from Chernobyl, as the experts are silenced and the political aparatchiks and hacks are trying desperately to maintain control.

Not control of the emergency, but control of the messaging.

Looks like this what happens when 60 million people and an antidemocratic and archiac voting system decide the best thing to do is elect a barely literate, bankrupt, corrupt, fraudster suffering from neurological decline because the previous President was a black man who wore a tan suit once:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/trump-says-he-can-bring-in-coronavirus-experts-quickly-the-experts-say-it-is-not-that-simple/2020/02/27/6ce214a6-5983-11ea-8753-73d96000faae_story.html

But hey, those blah people are going to be put in their place so who cares about the economy.

This weekend is going to be My Birthday (observed) because like most unfortunate adults, I had to work on my actual birthday (and it was my longest day of teaching, at that, coupled with a faculty meeting over the 45 minutes in which I would normally sit in my office to recoup and eat lunch).

Plans right now are to go to the yarn shop about an hour from me, I have a $20 "loyalty card" because I spent a chunk of money there LAST time. And probably get lunch out*.

And I think, make a swing by the Target for more jumbo packs of loo roll and laundry detergent and other things that I'd rather not deal with having delivered to my door, and which might get harder to get IF the worst happens and the viral outbreak gets worse** and supply chains get disrupted here or I don't want to go to the local Mart of Wal.

Sunday afternoon I think I will work on the ongoing quilt top; it is a 26 b 26 square grid so I have 676 squares to sew together. I think I currently have 364 of them together.... (This is an oddball quilt that came from a weird idea I had after reading a book on codebreaking; it is based on the Tabula recta idea, and each of the 26 different fabrics - a through z - is a different typographic patterned fabric. The hardest part was finding 26 different fabrics that had a typographical pattern*** and in the end I accepted ones with things like stamps or typography-in-a-non-English language to fill out the total.)

* Because maybe in a few weeks this will not be a wise idea depending on the spread of COVID-19. Currently there is no sign of it anywhere near me, but....I don't trust the "we have it contained" claims.

** Someone somewhere else said their Costco seemed dangerously low on TP and hand sanitizer and I wonder if the panic buying's begun. I usually buy the giant packs of loo roll so I only have to do so once a year, and it's getting close to the year being up.

*** Without resorting to using Spoonflower to custom-print one for me, but now I think that might have been an excellent idea; get a .pdf of one of my published papers converted to yardage and cut it up and put it in a quilt... but yeah, it did take me 2 or 2 1/2 years of haunting quilt shops and mail-order sites to find 26 different typographical fabrics.