(Admittedly, me liking 1883 more than Yellowstone probably comes from me liking Sam Elliot and Tim McGraw as actors more than Kevin Costner)

wasn't "hole up in a trailer, write 250 pages in a day and get his assistants to hammer them into functional shape".

IMO, his historical stuff tends to be better than his modern-day stuff, if only because the research needed slows him down and forces him to think through it properly.

also pro-Native", and you get stuff like how in Landman, he just kind of...assumes full green energy isn't possible, which results in anti-green right wing people thinking he agrees with them and since he does very little to dissuade them.

He'd probably be more successful if his writing method

Sheridan is a very confusing person in a lot of ways. He's clearly got a lot of very conservative leanings but also seems to have enough empathy to get how horrendous the right-wing is...and it almost never actually gets through to the audience. A lot of his stuff reads as "right-wing but

He sucks, but he sucks in a really localized way that makes it difficult for other people to sucker him in to being a patsy for their plans because he likes it when people like him...but he's really only gunning for certain specific groups in Toronto to like him and doesn't much care otherwise.

comes up, he basically beats his party into not doing anything. He's also been consistently very unhelpful for the Alberta and Quebec conservatives, and I think it's because them accomplishing their goals would obviously go badly for Ontario and he doesn't want to deal with that.

The way I generally put it is that Ford (and his deceased brother) are very, very specifically *Toronto* conservatives and they tend/ed to behave like low-key mobsters. Doug is bad for Ontario, but he also doesn't like other people muscling in on his turf and when something he doesn't care about

I don't like him much, but I'll give him the slight credit that he's not dumb enough to try and cozy up to Trump.

I get the impression that one thing that really grinds their gears is that Doug Ford is really not playing along with the GOP the way they want. He's been really hardcore on "Ontario will not be selling US alcohol" and is on his own wavelength enough that they can't really use him as a puppet.

In a morbid kind of way, I love how this explanation makes even *less* sense than just "Trump really exaggerates numbers all the time". No, it has to be this new definition of percentages that's literally impossible to make work.

For me, it's that, but also that none of the people pushing AI like that seem to actually care about any of the output.

"It's so exciting, it's so amazing!"

"Okay, what's your favourite bit of output?"

"I don't understand the question, why would that matter?"

Meanwhile, J. Edgar Hoover was notorious for almost never taking any time off at all.

I was referring more to how Fetterman has really, really poor judgement about how to vote and what his own constituents actually want. He frequently goes with his gut in situations where he really shouldn't and has no meaningful reason to and Platner talks like he does that too and...not great.

But at the very least, it is my right to point out that these problems exist and that people should take them seriously. Platner has this *giant problem* that he's not taking seriously, and to me, that means we're running the risk of him being another Sinema or Fetterman.

On top of that, him wiping the floor with someone who has spent the entire campaign so far constantly reaffirming her support for unpopular things isn't really an endorsement of *him*, it's more an indictment of *her*. A bad candidate does not mean that worse candidate does not exist.

I am not denying that he's doing well in the primary, *but* from how bad his judgement has been about several things in the past, I think he's a bad candidate because I do not trust that he can do the job correctly and nothing he's said has changed my mind.

Either he was fine having a Nazi tattoo, or he was so dumb as to not bother listening to anyone who told him that it was a problem until the news started talking about it.

Do either of these sound like someone who can be trusted to make good decisions with proper forethought?

Hey, hey, sit down for a second and think. Maybe, *just maybe*, I am referring to how a guy with a Nazi tattoo who either knew what it was the whole time and didn't think it was an issue or who never bothered checking what it was despite being told several times doesn't have good judgement.

There are a lot of very loud people who seem under the impression that pointing out that Platner and Newsom are really obviously bad candidates for some very good reasons will collapse the party completely.

Hell, Schumer has that thing where he runs everything past that made up couple in his head and they don't even vote for him. He's trying to appease a pair of people that he made up and even in his own head he can't make them vote for him.

The party leadership is in objectively bad shape.

A lot of the problems have gotten only more obvious in hindsight and stuff like Schumer very, *very* obviously voting for Cuomo and not even being willing to admit it makes it clear that a lot of the party leadership don't understand the moment and don't know how to rise to it.

IMO, a lot of the problem now though is that a lot of the "Vote Blue No Matter Who" crowd is trying to rush obviously bad candidates through. Newsom is a bad candidate for a bunch of reasons, and the only defense for Platner is trying to make him seem stupid and incurious beyond belief.

bsky.app/profile/zend...

What's really telling is the people who combine it with "YOU HAVE TO VOTE FOR THE TRANSPHOBE LESSER EVIL LESSER EVIL" and they're doing it so early that there's going to be several better options available, they just really don't want people taking them.

If you think the Cass Report makes some of his points valid, you should probably ask yourself why he’s going out of his way to try and prevent the few actual recommendations it made from being followed up on.

The Cass Report and the Finnish study aren’t really showing anything and I cannot overstate how little the Cass Report had to say and how out of step the reaction to it has been with what it actually said.

The Finnish 30 year study is riddled with stuff like this, where they‘re counting things they’re forcing participants to do as evidence of harm. It’s like claiming that getting blood tests is evidence of decreasing health, but your database is all people getting blood tests as part of treatment.

except that the Finnish system heavily encourages trans patients to get psychiatric help and those visits were included in the database. If you run a clinic that mandates your patients see a psychiatrist, you don’t get to claim that psychiatrist visits are proof of worsening mental health.

The Finnish study is also kind of iffy and the premise it’s based on is pretty flawed. Like, it makes sense that just giving puberty blockers won’t solve all underlying mental health issues. The study also counted visits to a psychiatrist as evident of ”mental deterioration”…

Gonna be direct: the Cass report didn’t really have any meaningful conclusions. It was very cherry-picky about who it talked to and the result was “we have no evidence that it *doesn’t* cause harm” because they couldn’t find the evidence of mass harm people insisted existed.