Growing Number Of Anti-Jim Jordan Republicans Are Reporting 'Credible Death Threats’
BeautifulMind ♾️ @ BeautifulMind @lemmy.world Posts 24Comments 449Joined 2 yr. ago
BeautifulMind ♾️ @ BeautifulMind @lemmy.world
Posts
24
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449
Joined
2 yr. ago
It's as if there's organized crime here
Once they’re in, their main concern is their legacy
Apparently the legacy some of them are gunning for is 'we owned the libs and put women back in their place' tho
Well since the USA has brought back debtor prisons anyhow, I know someone that ought to be in one
In what way does addition to a third sum dilute the first two sums?
It's not addition, it's division . If you divide a finite pool of votes among more candidates, the effect is that candidates similar to each other will draw from the same pool of voters, while not drawing votes from the candidate most-ideologically opposed to them. Imagine, if you will, the scenario with a green and blue candidates B and C, where a third (let's call him "A", and place him close to the greens) gets in to the race.
- A is third-party, center-green
- B is green
- C is blue
In this scenario, there are two candidates dividing the pool of green/center-voters between them. A and B probably aren't appealing to any of C's supporters. Let's say that A and B got 25% and 35% respectively, you've got a green-blue split of 60-40 that awards the blue candidate victory because it got the remaining 40% and A and B split a green-majority's votes enough to lose. A entering this race divided (or diluted) the greens' available votes.
Because splitting up a majority of votes can hand victory to an undivided minority party, there is very much an incentive for voters that don't want their side to lose to coordinate voting to vote on the one that "can win". This involves betting on how other voters will vote, in order to avoid splitting their majority. That in turn transforms voting from an exercise in selecting your preference into an exercise in voting where you think other voters on your side of the spectrum will vote.
A ranked-choice voting system (which allows the voter to signal their choices in ranked order) does not require them to vote in the way they imagine most of their ideological allies will vote- it allows them to send their preferences as discrete signals instead.
If you don't understand this, you don't understand it, and you would do well not to finger-wag about basic math
expecting party insiders to change the way things are done is foolish
Fair enough, but there's no law saying it has to be done from within the parties. Alaska now uses RCV in its elections- a thing the Alaska GOP does not like- largely because Alaskans voted for an initiative to do so and it stuck.
The result of its implementation? After 2 eliminations rounds of ranked-choice voting, the running was down to Mary Peltola (D) and Sarah Palin (MAGA), but enough first-and-second-round supporters of Chris Bye and Nick Begich (R) preferred Peltola to Palin. With their first-pick candidates eliminated from the running, Peltola had a majority and that ended the process.
In the same election, they re-elected Lisa Murkowski (R) to the Senate and Dunleavy (R) to the Governor's mansion. The result: it looks a lot like RCV reduces the leverage of MAGA money within the GOP, and it will be fascinating to see what effect it might have on the Dems.
expecting party insiders to change the way things are done is foolish
Eventually, things will have to change in a party that's still mostly being run by people that came of age in the Watergate era. Your Pelosis and Clintons and Bidens and Feinsteins won't hang on forever, and eventually the guard is going to change. But again, this doesn't have to be initiated from within the parties.
You just agreed with my point.
No, I just argued that voting 3rd party in an FPTP system is bad for the voter doing it, bad for the public interest as well.
I agree on the point that RCV is needed, but I call bullshit if you're claiming I just supported Forward party (a third party, in a FPTP election) because I don't. Sure, in your opinion, I should, but I'll thank you not to put words in my mouth, it's very off-putting.
It's nice that they're promising to support RCV, but I don't believe promises like that any more than I believe promises the Democrats might make about enacting election reform like RCV. IMHO, for so long as they're running as a 3rd party in a FPTP system, they're a threat to split the left and hand an election to actual fascists.
Right now, I think the place to press for RCV is in the primaries of the major parties, and at the State and local level, not by getting people to gamble on splitting the electorate and throwing the result of a federal general election to the the party that doesn't govern and can only seem to agree that the purpose of government is punishing people that aren't like them
Who do they harm?
In a FPTP voting system, a vote for a third party will dilute the vote of the party closest-aligned to the preferences of the voter casting it- an effect that implicitly aids the party farthest-away from the voter's preference. This means the winner doesn't need a majority, they just need divided opponents.
In a ranked-choice system, by contrast, the voter can signal their top preference without creating the spoiler-effect described above.
The existence of this spoiler effect in FPTP requires voters to vote based on how they bet other voters will vote, instead of signaling their actual preferences, in order to avoid dividing their support and throwing the election to the opposing side. This prevents the parties from knowing what voters really want, while giving donors and insiders massive leverage by way of giving them the ability to influence which candidates voters will bet 'can win'. It's harmful to democracy, to the voters, and to the public interest, but it's fantastic for party insiders and donors that want things the public doesn't want.
fucking Gorilla Arms
Flash forward to the 2A people demanding their right to Bear Arms
So apparently she, member of the board of Red Deer Catholic Regional Schools in Alberta, Canada, posted a meme comparing pride activism to nazi activism, like they're "both brainwashing". The board stripped her of her committee duties and she's now lawyered up in response to sue other Christians about it with the claim that she's the real victim here, that this infringes on her right to express her faith like every other normal Christian.
Oh honey, when you use your faith as a shield for your politics and your politics equivocate oppressors with those you want to see oppressed, you've just told the world that God is, in your image, a fascist. 🍿 🤡
If he pulls enough from Biden to cause the contingent election scenario (in which case, the incoming congress decides the winner not by voting seats, but with each state delegation able to cast 1 vote) it might not matter to the GOP if RFK pulls more from Trump than from Biden.
If you game out the probabilities- It's very unlikely that Trump beats Biden It's also unlikely that RFK gets enough votes to deny Biden an outright win, but is it less so? It's very likely that the GOP will control more state delegations than the Democrats will, by virtue of their state-level gerrymanders.
The contingent election moonshot might be the GOP's best shot at winning control of the White House in 2024
Yeah just saw an ad for the Ray-Ban surveillance Wayfarer glasses. Ray-Ban has been dead to me ever since it was sold to Luxotica (the near-monopoly that explains why $40 glasses cost $180). It's kind of perfect now to see overpriced-for-no-good-reason branding being zombied yet further
it’s pretty unambiguously a warcrime
Also noteworthy: US law requires countries receiving US military aid to not have a consistent pattern of violating human rights, etc. And yet, the US doesn't even follow US law on that
Fuuuuck Philip Morris. Tax them heavily and use the proceeds to pay their customers' medical expenses
At face value, I understand why this can be perceived as racist and divisive
I appreciate that you're not working to promote the talking point where if a profoundly disadvantaged racial group is given representation it's "racist against white people", but I live in a country where white people routinely argue that any amount of civil rights protections is "racist against white people" and it gives me a headache processing that level of stupid.
Yep, in my country it's regular fare to hear GOP politicians bleat "you're being divisive!" (as if our failure to submit to their rule is a fault)- it takes two to be on opposing sides of a divide, and it's morally dishonest to pretend that only the other side of a disagreement is at fault for honest disagreement. Don't let them work the 'you're being divisive' angle, you'll never hear the end of it.
TIL that the spoiler thing was a feature
There was a time in which Twitter was an incredible resource, just by being the sort of place that subject-matter experts like law profs and history profs would weigh in on relevant political claims, in nearly-real-time. Sure, you had to wade through a nightmare farm of trolls and porn to get there, but once I figured out how to curate my feed well enough it was a quick way to get the benefit of actual expert takes.
TBH I suspect destroying that was among the reasons for taking over twitter
It's a fedi client in the same way that Mastodon is, but as an app it's better in a lot of ways.
Most Mastodon instances limit you to 500 characters in a post, on firefish the default seems to be 10k chars. I like the support for threaded viewing of replies, the authoring tools are just a bit richer, and a lot of things that don't need to be done in a whole-separate page are instead done in a modal dialog. All in all, it's a thoughtfully-derived app that (imo) improves on Mastodon in a lot of ways.
AI is a tool to
assistplagiarize the work of creators
Fixed it
LOL OK it's a super-powerful technology that will one day generate tons of labor very quickly, but none of that changes that in order to train it to be able to do that, you have to feed it the work of actual creators- and for any of that to be cost-feasible, the creators can't be paid for their inputs.
The whole thing is predicated on unpaid labor, stolen property.
Living in the North, my grandparents never discussed beating the shit out of civil rights protesters. Nor did they spout overtly racist things.
TBH when I hear someone say that about their parents (they didn't say racist shit out loud) I take that to mean: they didn't say that sort of stuff out loud.
I just think about that as a sort of Schrodinger's Racism- there's an unknown distribution of super-shitty racists out there in Yankeedom too, but they're neither racist nor non-racist until they open their mouths about it in un-coded ways. That it's more covert there than it is in other places doesn't really tell us if it's more or less prevalent, it could just be telling us that in Yankeedom the racists feel ever-so-slightly more inhibited about being out loud about it.
"the bed that I shat in has shit in it"