Reclaiming slurs

Kevin Drum stirred up a hornet’s nest in his comments in a post asking what exactly the term ‘queer’ meant these days when applied to issues of gender and sexuality. He thought that it had become an umbrella term for anyone who is not cisgender and heterosexual. It is simpler than listing all the categories like LGBTQIA+. Using queer as an umbrella term for those categories risks circularity since Q in the list stands for queer or questioning. But that can be dismissed as a quibble that will only worry language pedants and also by reserving Q only for ‘questioning’.

That seems to be a common understanding of the term. Unfortunately, Drum phrased it in a way that, while attempting to be amusing, was seized upon by some of his commenters to take offense and the conversation veered off in an acrimonious direction. We know that when it comes to comments on the internet, that is inevitable so we should not be surprised that it happened.
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Can a passenger stop a self-driving car?

The above question was prompted by a strange dream I had last night. I was in the front passenger seat of a car that supposedly had self-driving capabilities. The owner of the car was in the driver’s seat and at one point got out to do something or other. The car started off without him and proceeded to go somewhere unknown to me. In the dream, I was wondering how to bring the car to a halt but had no idea what to do. In my dream, I looked for the steering wheel and brake pedal and other standard control features of ordinary cars but since I have never been in a self-driving vehicle, my dream did not have that specific information.
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Which bathrooms will Sarah McBride use?

In the previous post, I wrote about how Sarah McBride has been elected as the first transgender person in the US House of Representatives, a piece of good news in an otherwise dismal election.

But something occurred to me later and that is there is going to be an issue when she starts her tenure on January 3rd. Trump and the GOP have made much of the bathroom issue as a way to wage the culture war by attacking the transgender community, saying that people should only be allowed use bathrooms that correspond to the gender assigned to them at birth.

So will they demand that she use the men’s bathroom in every building that makes up the US Congress? What about when she visits the White House? What about the places she goes to as part of her official duties? Which members of Congress will support her right to use the women’s bathroom everywhere?

While using divisive and incendiary rhetoric is easy when you do not have to personally deal with the consequences, this is one issue that is going be very close to home.

A small piece of good news

The results of the election were overwhelmingly bad but in the debris there was one piece of good news and that was the election of the first transgender person to the House of Representatives.

Sarah McBride, a Delaware state senator, has made history as the first out transgender person elected to the US House of Representatives.
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McBride, 34, won Delaware’s at-large House seat in Tuesday’s general election against the Republican candidate John Whalen III, a former Delaware state police officer and businessman. The House seat, Delaware’s only one, has been Democratic since 2010, the New York Times reported.
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In 2011, at the age of 21, McBride came out as a trans woman in her university’s student paper and in a viral Facebook post.

Since then, McBride has worked on LGBTQ+ issues within and beyond her state. She worked on anti-discrimination legislation in Delaware that provided protection to trans people. She later served as the national press secretary for the Human Rights Campaign, an LGBTQ+ advocacy group. McBride also taught public policy at the University of Delaware and wrote a 2018 memoir entitled Tomorrow Will Be Different, as her state senate biography notes.

The LGBTQ community, especially the transgender part of it, is going to face a difficult future given the overt hostility that has been expressed against them in this ugly campaign by those who will now have much more power than they did before. Now more than ever, we need to rally round and support them.

The role of gender in the election

There are going to be plenty of postmortems of the last election, trying to understand how Trump managed to win. These analyses will look at exit poll data to see what they can learn about who people voted for and why, and break it down by demographic categories. There will of course be analyses of many factors such as campaign messages, strategy, and tactics.

I looked at data on the number of votes going back to the 2008 election and have made the chart below. Each vote total is in millions, as is the US population at that time. We see that the percentage of the US population that voted this year was roughly the same as past election years, except for the sharp increase in 2020.

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America reveals itself. And it is not pretty

The people have spoken and what they say is that they want a corrupt, amoral, hateful narcissist as their president.

Donald Trump has always been this way. One might find excuses for how he won his first term in 2016 by saying that he was largely unknown then, a novelty act that a large part of the country was willing to take a chance on. But in the period since then, he has revealed himself very clearly, and surrounded himself with awful people who espouse the same misogynistic, racist, xenophobic, anti-LGBTQ views. And people said, “Yeah, I’m fine with that”.

There will be innumerable postmortems as to how and why this came about. It seems to me that Kamala Harris was a good candidate and ran a good campaign. One can disagree with this or that policy (For example, I strongly disagreed with the way she and Joe Biden addressed the war in Gaza and the Israel-Palestine issue generally) but I doubt that any one of those was a decisive factor in her loss. The voters wanted Trump.

He has also been given control of the Senate and (likely) the House of Representatives and the chance to appoint more right wing US Supreme Court justices and federal judges. Basically, he now has a much freer hand than he had in his first term to wreak havoc and leave lasting damage.

It is said that a country gets the leaders it deserves. It is hard to imagine that any country deserves leadership like this.

But here we are.

We are at the meaningless ‘vox pop’ state of election reporting

Today is election day and until the polls close and vote totals start coming in, there is really nothing to report. So the media is filling time and space with responses from voters as they exit the polling stations, asking them whom they voted for and why.

While well-designed and organized exit polls can use this information to obtain trends and do important post-election analyses, these ad-hoc interviews are useless.

Getting quotes from random people about something or other is a standard reporting trope but such quotes are usually selected to support the narrative that the reporter has already decided upon and hence are cherry picked.

But we get them anyway.

What will happen on election day and when to expect results

The final day of voting for the US elections is Tuesday. As with everything else involving elections in the US, the process is complicated by the fact that all 50 states and the District of Columbia have their own voting times and procedures. Also, each state has its own rules about how and when early and mailed ballots are processed and counted. As a service to those readers of this blog who live in other countries and may be bewildered by the complexity of the process, I thought that I would write an explainer so that those interested (and patient enough!) can follow the results as they slowly emerge on election day and the days following.

Note that while I emphasize the presidential race in this post, there are also a slew of important congressional and gubernatorial elections, as well as ballot initiatives such as ten abortion-related ones in Arizona, Florida, Missouri, Montana, Nevada, and Nebraska and four other states . See here for a compilation of all the things that are up for votes and which ones are worth paying close attention to.

To start, this map tells you when polls close in each state (Note that the times are Pacific times. You can get similar maps for other time zones by going here.)

People outside the US are often bemused by the fact that media outlets are the ones who project winners because in many other countries it is a centralized governmental body that handles the vote counting and declares who is the winner only after all the votes are counted. As I mentioned in an earlier post, the large number of votes cast in each election by each person for a whole slew of races (I had to vote in 23 separate categories in my county in California) makes the vote tallying more complicated and as a result, at least for the major races, media outlets have stepped in to project results more quickly, using exit polls and early vote count totals.
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