"With the result of the 2024 election, my wife and her family are directing their understandable fury at my mother."

"My wife’s sister said, 'If she voted for Trump again, I’m completely done with her.' I expect that the next time they interact it will not be pretty. But my mother is a member of our family, and an invaluable caregiver to our children. She’s pleasant and kind in daily life and moved far from her home primarily for us and her grandkids. And she is my mother, after all. I’m torn...."

From a letter to the NYT Ethicist, in "My Mom Voted for Trump. Can We Let It Go? The magazine’s Ethicist columnist on how a family might proceed in the wake of a momentous presidential election."

"Torn"... presumably because Mother is so useful as a childcare provider. And what, if anything, are you doing for her?

"If I try to protect my mother from vitriol, would I be betraying myself, or my wife and her family, in order to preserve harmony and child care?"

"Harmony and child care"... what an absolute loser!

From the Old Parish Church in Cathcart.

A beautiful rendition of "O Holy Night":

Playing very old music, Spotify snuck in something that only sounded old and tricked us.

Now, we keep listening, amused by how this fooled us... and how much we like it.

ADDED: Here's a Village Voice article from 2016: "Down Under Blues: Australia’s C.W. Stoneking Is a Roots Music Disciple":

"CBS News poll finds Trump starts on positive note as most approve of transition handling."

Link to CBS News.

You'll find material like this:

On TikTok, by contrast, you will find material like this:

Bill Maher asks about the "fact" that 84% of "gays" "stuck with the Democrats," and Andrew Sullivan doesn't agree with the assertion of fact.

Sullivan: "We don't really know how gays vote.... That's how GLBTQIA+ people vote.... The vast majority — 40% of that — are bisexual women, many of whom are in relationships with straight guys. So we don't know. I'm sure it was a big majority. I'm not sure including a big bunch of of of young women in that will distort it somewhat. I wish we could have polling of gay men and lesbians. Why can't we? Why are we now forced into this bleh?"

I'm using the letters b-l-e-h to represent a Sullivan vocalization that seemed to express the opinion that the GLBTQIA+ grouping is annoyingly large and indistinct. He seems to think gay men and lesbians should be polled as a distinct group and that their opinion is more meaningful than the amorphous grouping that sweeps in the many young woman who call themselves bisexual and may very well be living the most privileged sort of life. Of course these women tend to vote Democratic, but did gay men continue to vote Democratic? Sullivan groups gay men and lesbians together, but why not demand separate polling there too. There is an important difference in the voting of men and women, and why wouldn't that difference also show up among gay people?

ADDED: Tim Dillon says that trans people ought to identify as Republicans:

"Much like the 'videotape format wars' Betamax and VHS fought in the 1970s and '80s, in the new millennium..."

"... automakers have vied for dominance over ways to charge EVs. Tesla created a proprietary, compact plug design; most other automakers used a shared design for a larger plug.... Tesla won. Within the last 18 months, every other EV maker in the U.S. has agreed to switch to Tesla's technology...."

From "Tesla won the plug war. Enter the age of the EV charging adapter" (NPR).

BUT: It seems to me that Tesla's technology was in the Betamax position — limited to one brand. Betamax was Sony. So looking at that analogy, the companies other than Tesla might well have thought their technology would win, even if it wasn't as good. That's what happened with VHS.