Allow Ranked Choice Voting in PA (HB 123)

 

A bill has been introduced in the Pennsylvania House of Representatives to permit the use of ranked choice voting in local elections. The bill is appropriately numbered 123,  since RCV is based on ranking candidates (1-2-3) in order of preference, so that the best doesn't become the enemy of the good (or just less bad) and every vote truly counts.

March on Harrisburg has made it easy for PA voters to write their representatives in support of this measure. Here's the text of my letter:

The disaffection and alienation of so many eligible voters is due in significant part to the partisan polarization promoted by first-past-the-post elections. These result in tribal thinking and mutual demonization by citizens of differing political inclinations instead of open-minded exploration of each other's ideas. It also frequently results in the election of candidates who don't actually reflect the preference of a majority of voters.

An alternative to this is Ranked Choice Voting, which is used by 63 U.S. jurisdictions, including 59 cities, 2 counties, 2 states, and over 13 million voters. Data show that it results in less toxic campaigning, more voter engagement, higher turnout, and fairer representation. Most of all, everywhere it’s used, voters like it!

I urge you to support Ranked Choice Voting in Pennsylvania by 1) becoming a co-sponsor of HB 123, which would allow jurisdictions to adopt Ranked Choice Voting for their local elections, and 2) asking the State Government Committee for hearings and movement forward on Ranked Choice Voting.

You can send your own letter by going to https://actionnetwork.org/letters/ask-your-representative-if-they-support-rankedchoicevoting-in-pennsylvania and editing the suggested text to personalize your message. 

Another Spirited No Kings Day in Philadelphia

 

This is reported to have been nationally the biggest demonstration ever. The banner centered above says, "Go Birds! F*ck ICE. Free Palestine." I arrived too late to take part in canvassing with If Not Now and other groups in the pro-Palestine/anti-genocide contingent, but I carried this sign in solidarity:

  

A couple others that got my attention:

 

(My childhood hero.)

 

In case you have trouble making it out, this one says, "Veterans against ICE."

Omegakitten Turns 15 Today!

 

 

Omegakitten Hydra, who now records music with her little cousin as Omega Idol and Medusa Idol, turns fifteen today. You can listen to their latest album here. You can follow the progress of her movie, Omegakitten and the Mythicals, here.

A Major Study on Gender Dysphoria Outcomes Has Been Launched

It's called AYAGDOS and its stated objective is "closing the research gap on adolescents and young adults living with gender dysphoria." The home page says, The Adolescent and Young Adult Gender Dysphoria Outcomes Study (AYAGDOS) is a research study of gender dysphoria that occurs during adolescence or young adulthood. Currently, we are enrolling gender dysphoric youth ages 13-25, as well as the parents of gender dysphoric youth of those ages, for the initial research phase."

Although it appears to have been launched in 2024, I just learned about this study today from an article by trans blogger s. baum posted to Erin Reed's Substack. From the tone of the article, I get the impression that the reason he may have waited so long to write about it was that he was afraid of giving it publicity. And the reason for this may be that he seems to adhere to the ideological dogma holding that mental health professionals whose patients present with gender dysphoria -- unlike any other physical or mental health condition -- are obligated to simply rubber-stamp their self-diagnosis rather than perform an independent, comprehensive evaluation.

baum tries to cast doubt on the bona fides of investigators J. Michael Bailey, Lisa Littman, and Kenneth Zucker, but the sources he uses to do so are themselves highly suspect. For instance, he repeatedly seeks to discredit people and organizations on the basis of their being designated as "hate groups" by the Southern Poverty Law Center, a group that Media Bias/Fact Check says has "mischaracterized some groups and individuals," giving them a "left bias" rating of -5.8 (and which has been begging for funds from supporters by claiming an "emergency" despite apparently sitting on mountains of cash already). He also seeks to discredit the researchers by saying that some of the ideas they've given consideration to have been condemned by professional organizations such as the American Academy of Pediatrics, which has itself been shown by sexologist James Cantor to have based its gender-affirming care guidelines on a thoroughly fraudulent scientific paper.

If you're interested in participating in AYAGDOS you can contact them at https://www.ayagdos.org/. 

Tony Dastra is the Green Party Candidate for Pennsylvania Governor

 

 

If you're a PA voter and have been thinking you'd have no better option in the governor's race than Josh Shapiro, take heart. There's now a Green Party nominee. And if you were thinking you have to vote Democratic to keep someone even worse from getting in, Break the Duopoly's website is now up and running, making it easy to get matched with a right-leaning PA voter to withdraw your votes from both capitalist parties at the same time, leaving the margin unaltered. Here's the announcement of Tony Dastra's candidacy: 

Tony Dastra of Lancaster is the Green Party Candidate for Pennsylvania Governor of Pennsylvania. On March 8, the 35 elected delegates to the GPPA State Committee endorsed Dastra’s campaign.

 

In requesting the endorsement, Tony Dastra told the delegates from 12 counties, “Today, with your support, I am planting myself. I am committing to be on this ride, to help get the blood flowing and to grow unorganized areas of our Commonwealth into organized ones. I will seed new Green Party organized counties by recruiting more delegates to fill our rolls.”

 

Dastra now says, “I am committed to growing my local Green Party of Lancaster County. I am committing to the Green Party’s Four Pillars and Ten Key Values. In fact, as it relates to our values, I am particularly upset recently because Scouting America is flat out REMOVING their Citizenship in Society Merit Badge. The more I think about my upbringing being an Eagle Scout, I had a lot of American history poured into me. The Green Party often reminds me of the newly formed Republican Party of 1858. Back then, abolitionists, like U.S. Representative Thaddeus Stevens (Republican of Lancaster County) who drafted the 14th Amendment, were called radical. I have hope in the Green Party in this moment of history for that reason. Though I do not have a crystal ball, I am putting all my chips on Green.”

 

Tony Dastra was the Green Party candidate for Mayor of Lancaster City in 2025. He is a vigorous campaigner and plans to visit the 10 largest cities in PA and a rural community in all 11 PennDOT Districts. Dastra says that his campaign will not accept donations from corporations or corporate PACs. Interested individuals should get involved with the Green Party of Pennsylvania and follow listed social media for campaign updates.

 

For more information, please contact:
Email,  dastraforpa@gmail.com

Instagram, https://www.instagram.com/dastraforpa/

Facebook, facebook.com/DastraforPA
Website, https://www.dastraforpa.org/ 

 

 

To register at Break the duopoly go to https://www.breaktheduopoly.com/. To learn more about the Vote Pact concept go to https://votepact.org/.

TDIH: Rachel Corrie

 

I, too, volunteered with the International Solidarity Movement eight months earlier, being part of the first affinity group to go into Gaza rather than the West Bank. Corrie was the first ISMer to be killed, but not the last.

https://www.instagram.com/p/DV9Ck2FgZaJ/ 

Leftism vs. Liberalism. Also Liberalism vs. Liberalism.

 

There's an important difference between political liberalism on the one hand, and what Helen Pluckrose calls "liberalism as a higher-order value," which doesn't necessarily entail capitalism even if she thinks it does. It really just means the humanist values of the bourgeois revolution, which are negated by the contradiction of capitalism and necessitate going beyond it. Also, working within the system can mean different things. Working exclusively within institutions won't bring about social revolution. But such work can be a useful, even essential complement to disruptive tactics, as Rosa Luxemburg argued in Reform or Revolution.

 

https://www.instagram.com/reel/DVnIPkBjAYd/ 

The Insidious Censorship of Valence Issues

 

 

Yesterday UpTrust posted the Open Question "Free Speech, but who draws the lines?" preparatory to a conversation today with FIRE's Greg Lukianoff. I offered these comments:

The most insidious threat to free speech comes from cultic processes operating in society at large, obscuring people's ability to perceive threats to freedom of thought with pseudoscientific phantasms of existential threat. In much the same way that fundamentalists may see themselves not as imposing cultic milieu control on their children but instead protecting them from "slavery to Satan," we see major publishers and platforms suppressing people's opinions, lived experiences, and scientific findings in the name of preventing "harm to children" that has never been shown to be real by methodologically sound research. The best known example is Congress' shameful censure of the Psychological Bulletin for publishing the 1998 Rind et al. meta-analysis even though it was -- in the words of Emil Kirkegaard, a Research Associate at Ulster Institute for Social Research -- "Politically Incorrect, Scientifically Correct."

I experienced the same kind of thing a couple years ago when my Meetup account was deleted for having simply suggested, for a discussion of "When can we trust the experts?" for which preparatory readings hadn't yet been selected, Paul Okami's (psychologist with Ph.D. from UCLA) paper "Sociopolitical Biases in the Contemporary Scientific Literature on Adult Human Sexual Behavior with Children and Adolescents." That was published in 1990, but as Rind observed in his contribution to the 2023 volume Ideological and Political Bias in Psychology, there's been hardly any improvement in this field, which Okami described as being marked by "seriously flawed research methods and discursive practices similar to those found in works of political propaganda."

It should be noted that this kind of censorship around a "valence issue" transcends the usual political divisions, resulting in what Rind terms "left/right bias."