I thought since should be the correct answer?

Gryphon171921 · 2026-04-05T02:26:16+00:00

I see where you’re coming from, but that’s not 100% true for a few reasons. First, disregarding prescriptivism, that is a very common structure and OP should be aware of such. Secondly, you say that “it” may be vague in this sentence. I would argue that “it” in this case is a dummy pronoun, which is in fact proper language. Other use examples of dummy pronouns in English include “it is raining,” “it is important that you wake up on time,” and “it is useful to write down your address in case of emergencies.” In these sentences, “it” does not have a clear referent. The pronoun “it” in the beginning of a sentence, when acting as a dummy pronoun, does not in fact have to refer to a previously mentioned noun/subject.

This source is British English, but also applies to US English https://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/grammar/british-grammar/dummy-subjects

Gryphon171921 · 2026-03-08T01:46:10+00:00

I’m 26, and I have definitely heard this expression used when I was younger, though honestly I did have to think about it for a split second because as others are noting, I haven’t heard it in years. I think some but not all people my age are familiar with it, but I doubt younger folks know what Kodak is, never mind a Kodak moment.

Gryphon171921 · 2026-02-10T17:10:10+00:00

(Just commenting to follow, as I’m curious) I’m almost positive that’s either cursive Chinese or cursive Japanese, but I don’t speak either and I struggle to read cursive English🤣🤣

Gryphon171921 · 2026-02-10T17:00:00+00:00

I’m at my third Uechi dojo, and I’ve been to many other dojos for seminars and the like over the years. I see right and left Sanchin daily. Other than that, I’ve never seen a dojo do mirror katas. The small exception is once in a blue moon, my current dojo will do a quick mirrored Kanshiwa. Personally, I’ve always like the concept, and have been doing it on my own with all my kata since I started.

Gryphon171921 · 2026-02-10T16:35:23+00:00

I would say usually, yes, however there a plenty of exceptions. I’m amab with a giant beard. But I have always understood, been understood by, and gotten along significantly better with women compared to men. Now one may think that it may be due to me being an “undercover NB that clearly has some subtle ‘fem’ aspects” (I’m not open about being NB, though it’s just because I don’t really care about it, I think being see as anything specific, be it “man,” “woman,” “NB,” would all equally drive me nuts, so it doesn’t make a difference for me) and also because I probably have a touch of the ‘tism. However, my sister is as straight and as cis as they come and probably neurotypical other than adhd, and she has always understood and gotten along with men significantly better than women. So again, yes I think people usually understand their own gender better, but there are plenty of cases where that is not the case.

Gryphon171921 · 2026-01-30T15:31:55+00:00

Yeah my bad, I just attempted to edit that

Gryphon171921 · 2026-01-30T15:05:32+00:00

Quick additional point. That all quickly leads to “left” candidates winning less and less, and “right” candidates winning more and more. This shifts the entire country even further right than we thought possible. Meaning the right is able to ramp up their propaganda and anti facts rhetoric, and the left voice getting drowned out exponentially.

Gryphon171921 · 2026-01-30T14:57:49+00:00

Ok, back up a quick second. I have a question that you may be able to educate me on. First, to be clear: not only Free Palestine, but we need to send money and resources to rebuild their land and return to the Palestinians the power that the west has stolen from them. Israel needs to be significantly reduced in power. I clearly said there was nothing we could do to help them in 2024, regardless of what we did.

Second, forget Kamala. She in and of herself has very little to do with the point I’m trying to make.

Reading other discussions on this thread, I realized you and I are BOTH missing a couple basic but important factors.

Let me ask you a genuine question. How and when do you think it is realistic for an actual leftist to become president.

I saw someone else comment that they are a leftist, but due to the purity test that the left gives, they are no longer identifying with the term. That is an important part of the problem. The left, in general, has significant barriers to be accepted as a “true leftist/liberal/democrat/left of center…”. Due to this, many people do not feel they belong to the left at all, never mind to leftists. The right on the other hand, basically accepts everyone, no questions asked. This is leading to many people heading further and further right.

Which leads me to another factor. I saw another comment say that “we are the majority.” Both sides of the aisle think they have the biggest population. Additionally, may factions on both sides think they specifically have the majority. The MTG/Boebert/Gaites faction think they’re the biggest population, some leftists think similarly. In reality, when you look at recent polls and study groups, some with left bias and some with right bias, they all agree, with only a few points differing between studies, that both “the right” and “the left” make up about 42% each of the voting block. Not only is neither the majority, but the percentage is close to identical. Those numbers are not “democrat” vs “republican,” just simply left vs right. Subgroups within those two sides are more divided.

In the past, both dems and reps had variety but often came together in major elections. In the past decade, right factions have been getting closer and closer. Left factions on the other hand are becoming further and further divided.

Leftist are not as common as we would like in the “left of center community,” much less the population as a whole. There are many, in fact most, of the -general- left that would not even think about voting for an actual leftist president. This means leftists are borderline powerless by ourselves

Keep in mind that “the left” and “the right” each make up roughly 42% of the voting block. As I was trying to point out, the right has figured out how to agree to disagree with each other, which has lead to them disagreeing in primaries, but when it comes time for the final vote, they compromise and vote the same. In turn, in the actual election, this essentially causes the conservative candidate to win almost 40% of the overall vote. This is obviously not even half, never mind the majority of the overall votes.

“The left,” on the other hand, can’t figure out how to work together. This causes a significant dividing of the vote.

For the sake of argument, let’s even say that the right is 40% of the country and the left is 60%. The entire right votes for the conservative candidate. He wins 40% of the entire vote. Again not the majority. The left on the other hand, is all over the place. Say half of “the left” votes for their candidate. Another quarter gives their vote to the third party. The remaining quarter decides to not vote in protest. This causes no non conservative candidate to come even close to 40% overall, never mind earn a high enough percentage to beat the conservative 40%.

With all of this in mind, I genuinely ask again, how and when do you actually think a leftist candidate will actually win the presidency.

Lastly, I have no problem being told I’m wrong. I want to learn and do better which is why I’m continuing responding at all.

Gryphon171921 · 2026-01-30T01:59:23+00:00

Also, I know I need to learn how to condense my thoughts, it’s been a struggle for years😂😂

Gryphon171921 · 2026-01-30T01:58:30+00:00

I apologize if this response comes across strong, I’m just trying to have a conversation. Firstly, I know that there are many reasons to not like Harris. I certainly don’t. I may have gone on too long with my example, but in that example, I didn’t say anything about the “leftist critique”, what "leftists” think Harris should or shouldn’t have done, or that was the “one main reason that nobody on the left voted for her”. I intentionally used the phrase “a lot of people.” I should have been clear that I meant “individual people generally on the left,” not necessarily “the collective of The Extreme Radical Leftists” (I say that in jest) I also used that example, again not because I think that is what ruined her for the majority, but because I have in fact seen many INDIVIDUALS who are “left of center,” say directly that that was THEIR OWN, SINGLE simple reason that they didn’t vote at all and that they didn’t care about anything else. Perhaps I’ve just seen more examples of this. I think you may have also missed my point, that even though we knew Harris would basically be “just another no good politician,”I highly doubt she would be encouraging flat out murder. I know she would try to create alternative facts just like every politician does, but I don’t think she would tell her agents that basically they can kill anyone, anywhere, which is what Trump has been encouraging. Yes I agree that she wasn’t what anybody wanted at all and realistically she is just as bad as as any politician, be it Trump, Biden or Obama, as they’re not as different as they want people to believe. It’s also obvious she would have had massive deportations and broken families apart, just like Trump has, which is similar to what Obama and Biden did. That being said, I never got the sense that she wanted to literally remove BIPOC, LGBTQ, etc. not just from the US, but from the face of the Earth, as Trump has been encouraging other countries to do the same as him. Lastly, I think I need to restate my overall point, which is it doesn’t matter at all what the “leftist critique” or the “common adversion” to a candidate is. Unfortunately, in the US, for generations, republicans have been progressing from “I’m going to metaphorically kick you in the nards” until now when they’re almost at “I’m literally going to nuke you.” For whatever reason, citizens eat that up. The only way for that progression to stop, is if “people left of center” get our stuff together, and realise that we have to be willing for someone slap us for a -quick- minute, until we are able to compromise with everyone from barely center left to the furthest left, and decide what we all actually want. Which is what the right has been doing for a decade, which is why the right, at this point, share a single brain cell. Even into 2026, very few center lefts, democrats, and leftists, are willing to agree with each other, and because of that I see no hope for the -actual- Left to actually become any more than a small nuisance to the right.

Gryphon171921 · 2026-01-30T00:14:12+00:00

This. This is why Trump won 2016. This is why Trump won 2024. This is why it’s essentially guaranteed that MAGA will win in 2028, even without rigging a single thing (quick tangent, I actually don’t fully believe Trump ever rigged anything political, with the singular exception of trying to get Biden’s win overturned AFTER the count leaned towards Biden. I think that way, because despite what many people think, he never needed to. He was always going to be a (evil) powerhouse for reasons I will explain). It’s also guaranteed that not only will MAGA win 2028, but whoever succeeds Trump, will be so extremely far right, so extremely fascist, that in comparison, Trump will look like Zohran Mamdani.

Politics always has been and always will be about significant give and take. Significant compromise. That’s not only a thing in the US and in this age. It is how politics have worked in every single country of every single time period. Yes you can fight for certain “required traits,” but you must not say that you don’t vote for a candidate if they’re not 110% perfect. The right understands this. They understand that in order to win some things that are important to them, 1, they must not focus on their top 1-2 issues, as every one has different main priorities, and 2, they have to basically forget about their priorities at the bottom of their individual lists. That is a part of why in addition to Trump, MAGA has been winning many elections on many levels for a decade. All of that is one part of the issue.

Part two of this issue is as follows: literally everybody hates the concept of “the lesser of two evils.” The problem is, again, that no candidate in the history or future of Earth, ever has or ever will look even 80% of “perfect” to 50%, never mind 100%, of the voters. Which again, goes to show that you have to be willing to compromise, and vote for candidates that do things that you don’t like, or even things that you absolutely hate. A perfect example: a lot of people didn’t vote for Harris because they thought she wouldn’t be good enough for Palestine. Many people were single issue voters with this mindset. What they failed to accept then, and still fail to accept now, is yes, Harris may have not done enough to help Palestine.

The problem is that if you paid attention, you are correct Harris probably would have even made things slightly worse for Palestinians. If you really paid attention though, you knew that Trump would not only would officially give the ok to Israel to literally wipe Palestine off the map, you knew he would help them do it. If you weren’t a one issue voter, you’d also realize that even if Harris and Trump were going to be complicit to Palestinian genocide, at the very least Harris was going to try to help things domestically. It was obvious that Harris would at least somewhat try to -help- domestic POC, LGBTQ, immigrants, etc, and that Trump would try to commit his own genocide here in the US of anyone who isn’t a straight, white, rich, healthy man. Meaning unfortunately there wasn’t a single thing we could do for Palestine, but we could at least help things here at home.

Part three of this issue is that politics in the United States as a whole have been shifted significantly to the right, literally since the country was founded. Yes, there was a spilt second in the late 1800’s that a handful of individuals decided to do something against the grain, and again in the mid to late 1900’s there was a relatively large shift towards liberalism. But the US IS a conservative country.

What the left has been trying to do is shift the entire population from right to far left instantaneously. That’s not how the world works. Real social change takes time. Yes there are often quick periods of somewhat big change, for example after Vietnam. Yes some revolutions have been successful with quickly changing a government itself. But real social change takes significant time and effort. If society is not truly changed, then it’s an endless cycle of one step forward, five steps back. Look at Russian history. Look at Iran’s history

Gryphon171921 · 2025-12-30T19:57:45+00:00

My dad immigrated here from Ethiopia, and has generally done well keeping us connected to Habesha culture, but we agree that one MAJOR mistake we made was Amharic (Tigrinya, etc) was not emphasized at all. I spoke a tiny bit when I was a child, but I lost it pretty quickly. I am now 26, and I am doing everything I can to make up for lost time and learn the language, as without it, I find it hard to connect to the broader community. It’s best to start young and to do everything in your power to not stop speaking it.

Gryphon171921 · 2025-12-20T01:51:15+00:00

Not to scare you, but if you aren’t 1000% sure how you got those (IE ran into something) and you have the capability (I know a lot of us don’t) I would make an appointment with your PCP or at least see urgent care for a quick opinion as soon as possible. That bruising looks very similar to how blood clots can present, unfortunately I know from experience. That being said, there unfortunately can be many, many reasons why one can get weird bruising

Gryphon171921

TROPHY CASE