A vote for a third party candidate isn’t always a vote for Trump

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Lots of people are yelling about how if you don’t vote for Clinton you may as well be voting for the Trump monster. Because of the wonders of the electoral college, that’s not true in many states.

2008 competitive states

2008 competitive states

If you’re a lefty who lives in a solid red state where Clinton can’t win, vote for whoever you want. Vote for Jill Stein! There’s no chance Clinton can win in your state and getting strong support for your third party candidate will push the Democratic party left, feed money to that party (and their platform), and feel damn good.

If you live in a solid blue state, it’s also probably totally safe to vote for Jill Stein without helping to turn things for Trump.

BUT if you live in a contested/swing state and the thought of Trump for President fills you with unspeakable horror, hold your nose and vote for Clinton.

Strategic voting feels shitty, so make sure you actually need to vote strategically.

This kind of thing doesn’t just apply to the presidential election. Is the Democrat in your district winning by a huge margin, but you think they’re Republican-lite? I bet there’s someone on the ticket closer to your views. Vote for them and tell that incumbent Democrat why they lost your vote.

This isn’t the most effective way to influence political change, but if you’re going to go to the ballot box, why not?

Priorities

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I’ve read more papers on my illness than I have on my PhD topic.

I’m never going to graduate, am I?

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Headache medicine’s problems with legitimacy persist despite the “discovery” of a neurobiological mechanism underlying migraine. For while the emphasis on the brain does somewhat mitigate migraine’s association with psychosomatic, feminized personalities, locating migraine in the brain also managed to inscribe gendered cultural assumptions about the personalities of headache patients into the physical structure of their bodies. The newly biomedicalized migraine has not eliminated characterizations of a migraine patient as a particular kind of person, but instead has transformed the moral character of the migraine patient into a new, still highly gendered biomedical configuration.

Joanna Kempner in Not Tonight

expose/pose

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Psychological explanations of migraine remain an extraordinarily popular trope in self-help books for migraine care. Take, for example, the most popular self-help book on this topic, Heal Your Headache: The 1.2.3 Program, by David Buchholz, a neurologist from Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. Buchholz recommends a strict treatment protocol for migraine prevention, which includes the immediate removal of all abortive drugs (i.e., the drugs that one takes to interrupt a migraine); a strict diet; and, if all else fails, preventive medications. The treatment plan is difficult to follow—he suggests that people quit taking their pain medications “cold turkey” without help from a physician, lest “you and your doctor … become entangled in a sticky web of victimization, dependence, blame and guilt …quick fixes … [that] undermine your determination to do what you can to prevent migraine.” If his methods do not work, Buchholz observes, “sometimes it’s hard to let go.” He confides that he is pessimistic about patients who are “entrenched in or seeking disability status, or pursuing a lawsuit, based on headaches.” Illness behavior, he explains, can help motivate migraine, as “when we’re sick, others give us their attention, concern, affection, sympathy, help, forgiveness, and permission to be excused from work and other responsibilities … our subconscious may have some other hidden agenda that interferes with response to treatment.”

Buchholz relies most heavily on psychological explanations of migraine when his recommendations fail to work for the patient. For him, the next obvious explanation is that the fault lies in the psyche of the person who refuses to get better. But it’s also important to remember that Buchholz isn’t talking about just any kind of person. He’s implicitly describing a feminized patient, one who could easily become involved in “victimization, dependence, blame and guilt.” Buchholz’s use of the psyche as a last-ditch explanatory model for the difficult patient underscores one remaining way that biomedicine manages the balance between mind and body in migraine: when patients— especially female patients—become “difficult,” the psyche remains a convenient explanation for treatment failure.

Joanna Kempner in Not Tonight

As Sara Ahmed says, “When you expose a problem you pose a problem.”