Makeitstop @ Makeitstop @lemmy.world

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5

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661

Joined

2 yr. ago

Oh he knew the spoiler effect was a thing. He just didn't think it was Trump that he'd be hurting.

Mastodon and Threads also exist. I don't use them or Bluesky, and I'm not endorsing any of them, just pointing out that there's several would be Twitter replacements out there.

Well, I generally agree that party leaders have way too much power, but that seems to be an issue across many different systems. Your example is from a FPTP system. Is there some reason to think it would be worse if we had proportional voting?

It's not that it would be worse, it's that it would be the norm. The party would always be the one with the final decision on who actually represents you.

I mean I can see how party leaders might have more power in some ways. But on the other hand it’s much easier to abandon them for another ideologically similar party if they abuse it. Yes it means abandoning AOC or whoever your favorite is but they can also jump ship if need be. I think we need a different solution to overly powerful party leaders.

Which makes it an all or nothing proposal. You can have the entire party or none of it. You can't vote out a particular shithead, you can only take the nuclear option and abandon the whole party. That makes it a lot harder to hold each individual representative accountable to the people they are supposed to be representing.

To bring this back to real world examples, the only reason Kari Lake and Mark Robinson are not likely to win their elections is because the voters get to vote on a specific candidate. Both would easily have the support of their party's leadership, and the party's supporters would certainly vote for their party, but a large number of those who support the party don't want those candidates. That ability to say "no, not you" is not something we should give up when trying to reform the system.

But the thing is, there are so many things I would want to change about the Democratic Party, but I can’t abandon them because my only alternative is far worse. If we had a diversity of somewhat similar parties then it would be much much easier to pressure them into doing what voters want.

Not suggesting we keep the status quo, Just suggesting that any reform should keep representatives directly accountable to voters.

Ranked choice would do this to some extent as well, so I broadly support both. However, I have concerns about election security with ranked choice. Unless the election authorities share their ballot data, it’s very very difficult to determine who the true winner should be from exit polling or similar. There was a major fiasco in Alameda co California where the wrong candidate was seated by accident and no one even noticed until a later audit was done by a non-profit group.

Transparency absolutely needs to be the rule. If we move to RCV, we need to have the full dataset released with each election. Results should be published showing the percentage each candidate got for 1st, 2nd, 3rd, etc. and the order in which they are eliminated. It would take a while for everyone to get used to it, but the data should be straightforward and it isn't hard to figure out how to fit into a simple enough graphic for people to understand.

The issue isn't just one of partisan extremes. Just look at the near miss in the Democratic primaries this year. Biden was the choice of the party leadership and it took his public humiliation and a massive pressure campaign to get a replacement. The people calling the shots at the party level do not necessarily have same interests as the voters, even when they are politically aligned.

Sure, you can jump ship and go to a new party, but that only works when enough voters care to make them jump ship, and when there is a worthwhile alternative. That also means abandoning anyone you support in the party, because they are all lumped together and there's no separating the people you want to vote for from the people you oppose. Building a new party from the ground up is a much more extreme reaction than just voting for a different person.

I wouldn't have the same objection if we had a system where we were had proportional representation spread across specific candidates voted into office. I would have some questions about how it would work, but it would address the issue I'm bringing up.

My concern with proportional representation is that it typically means you are voting for a party, not a specific person. Imagine voting for the Dems and not knowing if you're getting AOC or Joe Manchin.

With Ranked choice, you can know exactly who you are voting into (or out of) office. I'd rather let the voters be the ones who choose candidates directly and not have the party do it for us.

That just leaves the other 999,993 reasons to cover.

It also assumes that people are fully aware of how much celebrity endorsements affect their opinion. People generally aren't that self aware, especially when looking back through a haze of memory at past decisions.

You might not say to yourself "Jack Black approves, and that's good enough for me" as you do a 180 on an issue, but that doesn't mean it didn't have some effect. The fact that it's a celebrity saying it might be the thing that gets the message to you in the first place. It might be that the bandwagon effect shifts your thinking without you realizing it. And it might be one of many things that all contribute to a gradual change.

Why are we doing this? Because we believe America’s future is decided locally – one race at a time,” Antón continued. “And with more than 200 publications across the nation, our public service is to provide readers with the facts that matter and the trusted information they need to make informed decisions.”

Local elections are important, but I'm pretty sure that the one race that's going to have the biggest impact on America's future is the presidential race. You'd think think they'd have something to say on the topic if it was America's future they were thinking about rather than just their own.

In general, people are more likely to vote when they perceive their side as being in the lead or more popular. It's why there's a long history of partisan polling, and why campaigns are eager to be seen as having momentum. It's much better for them to say they are cautiously optimistic than it would be to say nothing and leave their supporters feeling demoralized by all the people saying the opposite.

Best case scenario, there is an injunction now, a civil suit that brings evidence out into the open during discovery, and criminal charges at both the state and federal level once they have an overwhelming case built up that can eviscerate any defense his army of lawyers might put forward.

I wish they could just slap cuffs on him now and toss him in jail, but unfortunately the richest man in the world is not going to be easy to prosecute.

Trump doesn't apologize, admit mistakes, or accept anything resembling accountability. It's worked in the past because there haven't been lasting consequences and the more he gets away with shit the lower expectations get.

The problem for him here is that short term consequences now could become long term consequences after election day. If there's enough outrage to shift a small portion of the vote in a single swing state, that could cost him the election.

Will it actually make a difference? Who knows, but it sure as hell isn't going to help. While I'd rather he lost by such an unexpectedly large margin that it can't be blamed on this, I would still laugh if it all comes down to a sudden shift in the Puerto Rican vote in PA.

Puerto Rico has no electors. But there are a lot of Puerto Ricans living in the states, and as US citizens they can vote in the election.

Duckman, though that was not for kids.

Ren and Stimpy and Rocko's Modern Life both had stuff that was bizarre and only allowed in a kid's show because it was over their heads.

Batman TAS and Gargoyles both had some heavy shit. The latter also had a guy die by having fire erupt from behind his eyeballs, and a scene where a surgeon explains a gunshot wound in visceral detail. God I love that show.

The Lion King is an experiment being run by the aliens from Close Encounters of the Third Kind. The music is diegetic and is used to modify behavior.

We know they can implant images and subconscious commands, and that this is perceived through music. That's why they can coordinate musical numbers on the spot, and why sudden changes in behavior and attitude are accompanied by music.

In particular, the most critical character change comes when Simba wanders off to be alone, sees a vision in the sky, and the soundtrack kicks in with an extended version of the alien music from Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Suddenly he's doing a 180 and running back towards his assigned role in the story.

For a lot of them, I don't think it goes any farther than: "Yeah he says things I don't necessarily agree with, but groceries are more expensive than ever and I just want things to be different."

More like the whimpering twenties.

Downside of being an ageless immortal: oldies stations all play that new crap and no one plays your favorite hits from the roaring twenties anymore. NPR's still good though.

Selling democracy and the rule of law for empty promises of a slightly better economy.

I don't care how out of touch with reality these people are, they remember January 6th, they know what Trump is all about. Supporting the fascists now because of the economy is no different than supporting them then because at least the trains run on time.

Well, that's not entirely fair. The fascists then weren't running on a platform that was guaranteed to derail the trains.

Technically there's a non-zero chance of the margin being within three votes for any population of voters.

He's incentivizing voter registration by making cash payments and a lottery contingent on being a registered voter. Adding a trivial requirement of signing a petition (a petition which doesn't function as a petition since they aren't publicly sharing the signatures) doesn't change the fact that it's illegally incentivizing registration. If I promise to pay anyone that votes for my candidate of choice and also sings I'm a little teapot for me, I haven't sidestepped the law. Musk is doing the same thing, he's just putting the petition requirement front and center in the hope that framing it that way will make people think it's legal.

If it was a nonbinding pledge to vote or to register to vote, that would be different. There'd still be all the rules that govern lotteries which could cause legal issues, but it wouldn't actually cross the line into paying people for being registered voters.