Yeah, that scans for me. It breaks up “getting ready…for a night out”, but I think it works.

I think honestly it’s just a reality that, if brevity is the soul of wit, then a punchy sentence needs to be compact and that means you need to get a bit funky with the grammar, so maybe the audience has to do a little work.

Maybe also “at which” is fine too, and I was just overthinking it.

One thing I won’t bend on is that “to be starting to get ready” is objectively worse in every respect and is the main thing that throws people about the sentence.

This is a slightly wacky sentence. It’s not wrong - it does make sense and communicates the idea, it just forces you to do a bit of work to straighten it out in your head.

I think the biggest issue is the way they unnecessarily used present continuous tense with “be starting to get”.

It’s convoluted and adds syllables. You could eliminate the “be” and “to” entirely and change it to “start getting”. That starts with an active verb which feels stronger and more natural.

So then it would be:

“This can’t possibly be the same 9pm I used to start getting ready for a night out at”.

That preserves the flow & punch of the delivery but shortens & simplifies it a lot without losing anything imo.

Also ending a sentence with a preposition can be awkward. You read “at” and you need to refer it back to 9pm near the start of the sentence. Plus it comes after another preposition, which itself is not acting as a preposition but as part of the nouned phrase “night out”, so you end up with “out at”. Again, not wrong, but it can be awkward. I think using “at which” can move it closer to the noun it’s referring to but it’s not necessarily better that way.

Make that change and it’s, “This can’t possibly be the same 9pm at which I used to start getting ready for a night out”.

It’s a little easier to parse, but honestly I think it loses something, because it doesn’t have a casual delivery. “At which” is evidence that the sentence was very deliberately constructed. It adds a syllable and loses some punch. I’d stick with just the first change personally.

Maxwell immediately adopting an unexplained and unflappable admiration for Wealwell is such a Murph thing to do and I love it.

“Samwell, Blanewell, Roywell, Hatwell, Wealwell, Johnwell”

https://youtu.be/Odo3F1WqO4A

Also my mum brought me some costco hotdogs the other day. It’s hard to get good American food in grocery stores here in Australia but those delicious smokey dogs have me considering a membership. So good.

This has a similar energy to, “Lend me a dollar, but give me fifty cents. Then I’ll owe you fifty cents, and you’ll owe me fifty cents, and we’ll be even.”

Do you have a sauce for that claim?

You live in a different universe where talk matters more than actions and individual voters have more power than the systems and people that consistently screw them over.

That’s not a gap I can bridge.

If all of the people who stayed home would have been kamala voters then it sounds like she failed to inspire them to vote. It sounds like she lost an election.

Yes, if an unprecedented, impossible turnout occurred then dems might’ve won, but that’s not actually a strategy, that’s fantasy. Assuming there isn’t some level of divine intervention, then people are right that their vote doesn’t matter, because this is the real world where we already know a plurality of people don’t vote.

It’s almost like voter disenfranchisement works.

I don’t know why liberals can’t get this basic concept: if electoralism is meaningful at all, then the electorate cannot be wrong.

If the electorate voted “wrong” then your democracy doesn’t do what it claims to, it does not represent the people. <- this is actually the correct answer btw

Blaming the electorate achieves nothing.

The electorate didn’t fail the dems, the dems failed the electorate.

It’s hard to blame the people who stayed home when disenfranchisement is an intended feature of your electoral system. The vast majority of people know for a fact that their vote mathematically does not matter and a huge number cannot get time off on the weekday it is scheduled for.

If a full third of people stayed home, that’s a systemic problem, not an individual responsibility problem. Your electoral system is completely captured by capital and you are stuck blaming the electorate.

Folks please: US corruption is not a cultural or personal issue, it is systemic. Power corrupts, not just people, but systems. The US has been at the head of the global hegemon for most of the last century, they have most of the billionaires, of course they are corrupt. That’s where capitalists focus their efforts to get the most returns. It’s not an accident that the guy doing DOGE just happened to be the richest man on the planet.

Maybe focus your energy there instead of on the people who have literally no power.

Iran getting nuclear weapons would be an immense boon to peace and stability in the Middle East.

I think you just put your finger on exactly why the US doesn’t want that to ever happen.

That was me, actually, and I didn’t run out, it is still valid. You are denying that we should criticise the dems for their genocide, and you haven’t gone back on that. That is a kind of genocide denial.

Your entire point in calling me a pedophile was that you literally could not substantiate it. You were talking out of your ass. You were done with any sort of argument.

It’s amazing that you don’t see what that says about you, just like you don’t seem to see what an absolute repudiation of the democrats it is to say that it is useless to accuse them of genocide because the choices in your “democracy” cannot exclude genocide.

And you wonder why so many people stayed home.

It was already turbo genocide, and the idea that what’s happening now is somehow worse is just your fantasy.

I just want to point out that you’ve given up trying to make an argument and are now simply calling the other person a pedophile. That’s about the biggest admission you can make that you have nothing to say.

At least you didn’t spend that comment on genocide denial, so let’s call it an improvement.

That’s weak, doesn’t explain anything, and I think I’m done giving oxygen to a genocide denier.

I think you think the electorate likes genocide, or at least you said so, so I don’t understand why you think accusing Joe of genocide would have lost an election.

If the American people really didn’t want genocide they would elect candidates in primaries that were anti genocide (they didn’t) or they would vote for the candidate who wanted to just maintain the genocide as it is instead of accelerating it (they didn’t).

people complaining about dems support of genocide while being silent about gop support (including “genocide Joe” chanters, 3rd party voters and non-voters), helped trump win and are responsible for the next 4 years of turbo genocide

This isn’t hard to figure out, but I guess my brain isn’t broken by genocide apologia so I maybe I can’t understand.

But every time we said the dems were doing a genocide we were supposed to say that Trump would somehow be worse, but when you complain about us talking about the dems’ complicity in genocide, somehow you don’t have to mention that it’s a genocide? Because you didn’t do that.

And despite the fact that you acknowledge the dems are complicit in genocide, you have no criticism of that becuase… something about democracy?

Also if the electorate wants genocide that badly, then why is it bad if we put the genocide at their feet? Aren’t we helping them in that case? What are you upset about then?

If the American people really didn’t want genocide they would elect candidates in primaries that were anti genocide (they didn’t) or they would vote for the candidate who wanted to just maintain the genocide as it is instead of accelerating it (they didn’t).

You should say, “Yes, that’s my favourite genocider! A vote for Joe is a vote for genocide!” waves tiny plastic flag

Your genocide apologia is breaking your brain.

You could also learn the most basic facts about the US electoral system and understand that it is not democratic in the slightest, and people do not have a meaningful chance to vote for what they want.

So are you mad at the dems for making the genocide even worse by doing a genocide which helped them lose an election thus making the genocide worse?

Why is it leftsts’ fault for telling the truth and not dems’ fault for making it true?

Why do we have to be fair to the dems to agree that Trump’s genocide would be worse when the dems worked so hard to make “worse” virtually unimaginable?

Why do we have to be fair to you by always saying Trump is worse but you don’t have to be fair to us by acknowledging that there is an actual genocide?

Just because you have some mental gymnastics to explain why the dems’ genocide is somehow something we shouldn’t talk about doesn’t mean you’re not denying it.

If mentioning a genocide helped elect Trump, then doing the genocide helped Trump far more, so I don’t know why you’re not attacking the dems for that.

The genocide charge wouldn’t carry any weight if it wasn’t true.

Why is this genocide more important to you as a political football than as, you know, a genocide?

You’re a genocide denier. You’re not denying it’s happening, you’re just denying it’s worth talking about, which is maybe worse.

Also apparently leftists have to temper our criticism of a genocide by mentioning that Trump is always somehow worse despite there being no evidence that it is materially any worse under him - that’s literally a counterfactual - but somehow this person gets to criticise us for mentioning a genocide without acknowledging that it is actually a genocide.

It’s genocide denial, but they’re not denying it’s happening, they’re just denying that it’s worth talking about, which is maybe worse?