limer @ limer @lemmy.dbzer0.com

Long term computer programmer, making my own library. American based. Far l

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8 mo. ago

@aihorde@lemmy.dbzer0.com draw for me Mickey Mouse stealing art

Every horrible bill has an optimistic happy sounding name that goes well with baby talk. The happier baby talk it is, the worst it will be.

One will know the end is near when they pass “funsies time” . Seriously, I’m headed for the hills if I hear that

I think people are confused which court case this is; there are too many things happening this week, and I suspect the above was referring to the national guard one

Everyone knows that Israel cannot attack Iran without USA logistical support, permission and foreknowledge.

This is being labeled a multi-day attack

I’m cynical, but isn’t this just going to the Supreme Court to be decided by those 5 assholes based on their reasons?

And chances are those reasons will be batshit?

So what we are really watching here the required preliminaries for a ruling that will cripple the country

That is a great question, and one I spent hundreds of hours thinking about. I still don’t really know about the answer.

I have some fragments.

I think it is a deep rooted cultural thing we are talking about here. One that is generations old and will continue for generations more. Also America is a huge country and for each thing I mention here , there is some areas not doing that .

Most Americans who vote, trust the counting of their votes, and the more obscure the vote counting is, the more they trust it. In other words if they are completely baffled by how it works, they will believe in it. And they are told by a father or mother figure that it’s accurate, then they will go along with it, without questions.

Americans are like Russians in that large segments of their cultural elite don’t understand democracy. But it’s the American flavor. They understand voting, but there it stops. There is no instinct with most voters that participation is only half of democracy , the other part is counting. They distrust simple counting like mail in ballots but fully participate in the most convoluted vote counting with childlike faith and hope.

Many fundamentally do not understand that counting can be simple and done to the satisfaction of all participants, even if they do not like the results.

So when one suggests paper ballots counted in front of people, allowing recounts for any reason. It’s challenging faith itself.

I’ve been trying to get people to think about using the British or French ways of counting ballots.

But I was confused why I made so little progress in the USA.

I finally decided it was cultural. There was something about Americans I did not understand. After a few more years I realized it was people who were politically active , and the journalists who reported on politics, who had this filter, or taboo about addressing any of this.

For example, if you talk to disenfranchised blacks in rural east Texas, they readily understand and agree. But if you talk to black progressive activists in Texas, they have the filter. Same for poor white fundamentalists in my area and their conservative representatives.

So, I think it’s more the price of admission to politics now, than anything else. And those who cannot ignore don’t participate at all

American protests tend to die down after a few weeks unless there is constant new irritation applied.

Continuous mass roundups of people with indefinite detentions, in harsh conditions will probably help keep this protesting active.

But I don’t see how it can get much worse. The police and federal agencies are pretty much at maximum limits for being evil for them. New people will have to be recruited to do worse.

And while there will be mass beatings and the occasional death, and tens of thousands of kidnappings. it’s not enough to tip things over to the next stage unless people in the administration try very hard to achieve that. And I think they are too incompetent to succeed making things worse.

Something unexpected would have to happen first?

Bush the elder laid the groundwork for the current systems while president in the 1990s. People he knew got the first contacts soon after, . And then when they were used in Texas in 1995 the state started to switch from democratic to republican and his son won the governorship. Many southern states switched the first year they were used.

What distinguishes the American voting experience from other democracies is

that these systems are closed source and protected by intellectual secrets legally. There is no public knowledge of administers with access keys or any other of the hundreds of details that are addressed in the Baltic states

there is no curiosity about the above by most politically active people. There used to be loud tech community responses about all this, even conventions. But by ten years ago these were effectively ignored.

when the republicans claim cheating by this, they only stay in conspiracy mode and never try to use technical help in explaining why these are bad to have.

the democrats react to the above and fully embrace the voting machines despite having no clue how they work or are monitored, and a new type of bogus technical experts have become accepted to explain how this is all very safe. Again with no talk to most of the hardware or software community

there is an effort to use paper ballots and were having some success but this was sidelined by the 2020 election denial fallout

I used to tell that joke but I forgot, and was surprised at the answer. Now the shoe is on the other foot

Probably because the USA is helping Israel attack Iran soon

Lots of Palestinian flags and symbols in the different rallies.

But it is; nobody is shooting except the cops with less than lethals. Compared to serving in Iraq, this is nothing

There are a huge number of lemmy users who are genocide deniers and hate many other things , including lemmy.ml and the developers

He likes making people sick and die. A compulsion. It’s that simple.

What is complex is how this is being allowed

Apologies, no offense meant.

Yes, but will it be judged legal later by the courts? That is not an academic question and disobeying illegal orders require them to be judged illegal.

The average reservist is not a legal expert but knows things are wacky. They not going to forfeit too much by guessing wrong. Especially when things are mild like this.

I don’t think this will happen soon in the USA.

This is because the USA is a complex web of non democratic institutions posing as the real deal, and most people seem fine with that.

Secondly, Americans as a group do not know how to recognize or understand when there is massive cheating by political parties, and seem incapable of applying standard checks or common sense. Whoever wins at the state or federal levels are incapable of changing the systems . Some states are actually real democracies but this is lost on the majority of people. As a group and culture this is set in stone and cannot change but slowly.

Thirdly, Americans went through two generations of mass migrations and job changes, local politics and grassroots are broken because of this. And will take years to recover. Political parties must be done at the local level.

I agree with you on your points except I do not see how it works. Americans lost the ability to form new parties or organizations at the local level . It will be a long hard road to learn it again. And I’m sure they will.. eventually decades from now

I agree, which is why I think the one working solution has critical issues and will not work.

The Democratic Party would have to be reformed from the ground up, which requires things and behaviors which are not possible in the USA right now