This is almost certainly a Russian talking point. It's completely unstrategic, it's spreading largely through broadcast media, and it's easy to regurgitate with zero thought. Literally 10 articles per day about this, and none of them seem aware that the primary even existed.
That's not unusual at all. What's unusual is for a small publisher like 404 to demand an email address before letting you view their articles. Personally, it means I don't read them.
Do we want free articles on the internet? Like we've had for the past 30 years until some publications decided in the last 5 years to start paywalling everything?
Yes. Yes I do want free articles on the internet. And once upon a time, publishers actually wanted my eyeballs on their free articles.
Privateers tended to obey a sovereign government and do all the pirate things, but directed it against the enemies of the country they were under the flag of rather than just at whoever. Privateers would sometimes become pirates, though. Basically, they'd just keep doing the same job, but for themselves.
The distinction is largely one of who gets to make the rules and do the finger pointing.
Why would you want people to stop talking about disenfranchisement? States deciding to take the vote away from their citizens after they've been convicted is something we should absolutely be highlighting. You'll even notice there's a significant correlation between which states are consistently redder and which have greater rates of voter disenfranchisement.
Maybe what we need is clarification about what disenfranchisement is, because it's not just people deciding not to vote. It's people having their ability to vote taken away.
Its failure to what, though, exactly? Go by the popular vote?
There are definitely problems with our democracy, but I don't think an electoral college automatically disqualifies it. I'd love to see it gone, because I don't think it's representative, but the argument behind it is one of broader representation rather than narrow representation.
The idea is that life in the population centers of the US and life in rural areas is very different. We've got a fair chunk of our population living in the middle of nowhere, but they're dwarfed by the population of our cities. By dividing votes by state, it keeps the most populous states from constantly determining the course of the less populous states on a federal level.
The alleged intent is to give those less populous states an opportunity to be involved in the discussion of our federal government. As you've probably noticed, laws vary wildly from state to state in the US. Instead of one consensus on law in general, we have 50 mini-consensuses. There are states that literally will refuse to enforce certain federal laws, or that will refuse to honor the laws of other states.
So our presidential electoral process looks very similar. It's not one consensus, it's 50 mini-consensuses. Because the votes happen at the state level, you can win a popular vote and still lose the state-by-state vote. That's not it being broken, that's it functioning as intended.
This model of state and federal government honestly works pretty well for us in a lot of cases. It allows states like Massachusetts, California, or Washington to go ahead and try some new stuff that other states are hesitant about. It's why we've got things like ACA, marriage equality and other protections for queer folks in some states, and it's why marijuana has been legalized in a lot of places. Unfortunately it's also why Texas and Florida are dystopian hellscapes, but it does insulate the people in these more progressive states from a bit of their nonsense.
Unfortunately we also have a lot of gerrymandering and voter disenfranchisement going on that makes the situation worse. But even in a really bad situation, you're going to have states that protect people from some of the worst of it.
It's democracy, it's just not direct democracy at a federal level. It's representative democracy that focuses on an alliance of 50 states rather than running it like one big thing.
If we want to challenge the legitimacy of American democracy, voter disenfranchisement and the ongoing persistence of legal slavery are probably a better place to start.
I'm not sure that the electoral college precludes qualifying as a democracy. Voter disenfranchisement certainly seems to put a wrench in the idea though.
Probably not. But I also live in Massachusetts, which hasn't voted Republican since Ronald Reagan.
I typically vote in every election. I think I might have missed a mid-term or two in the past couple decades. Maybe more than that, but I haven't missed a presidential election and I've always voted Democrat.
If we had ranked choice I'd probably be more into some leftist third-party, but it is what it is.
I'm pretty sure everybody I know is voting for Biden even though like half of them at least don't approve of his policies. Specifically, every leftist I talk to is against his continuing to give arms to Israel, but recognizes that Trump would make things much, much worse.
I think he's going to win by a pretty wide margin. Political polling is fundamentally flawed and self-biasing other than at exit polls. The media is trying to make Biden look like a confused old man, but he's got enough on the ball to listen to the people he's put in charge and to get a good read on the situation. He doesn't have to micromanage everything, he needs to know how to delegate, which he clearly does.
That's part of the problem with the current ways of looking at politicians in the US, especially the office of the president. We look at this one figure head and just see like, their personality. As if they're going to wake up in the morning and just wing it based on their gut instinct. I'm sure Trump does that, but most presidents have advisors that they actually listen to and that actually have qualifications.
Biden is a decent president because his VP and his cabinet are decent. He could literally die in office and we'd probably have nearly the same policies.
Again, political polling is notoriously meaningless outside of exit polling.
This election the media is doing the same thing they do to make our bullshit exploitative economy seem like it's healthy. They focus on measures that mean fuck all as if they were representative of something significant.
It's smoke and mirrors.
Want to make sure we don't get a fascist? Get poor people to vote. If the poor turn out to the polls, we can literally flip every single state.
Trying to talk the DNC into an absolutely bonkers gamble will not win the election. Mobilizing voters will
Planescape: Torment is extremely replayable. I've been playing it every few years since I got a copy in I think like the early 2000s. It may be that this has something to do with having gotten to play it a little bit in the 90s but not having gotten to play the whole thing. There was a lot of anticipation there.
But I don't think it's just that. It's incredibly responsive to choice, and it's one of the first games I can recall with things like faction reputations and alignments. There's a lot there to dig through, and even once you have, it's always cool to wander around Sigil. It feels very alive.
The other one I end up replaying over and over is Shadowrun for SNES. That's not so much infinitely repayable though as just a really great game that I'm happy to run through.
If you read the article, they're raising the concern that we might have the technology to destroy a potential Martian ecosystem before we have the technology to detect it. The question isn't what we currently are aware of, it's whether we might be losing a one-of-a-kind resource that we're completely unaware of.
If there's life on Mars of any kind, that's extremely profound. It would give us a chance to study life on another planet and compare it to our own. It may be that there's no ecosystem on Mars, but it's probably worth it to make absolutely sure that that's the case before we go destroying what might be there.
It may be that we won't have the opportunity to screw Mars up for decades, or centuries. But it'd probably be a good thing if we'd give it some serious thought as a species first.
This is almost certainly a Russian talking point. It's completely unstrategic, it's spreading largely through broadcast media, and it's easy to regurgitate with zero thought. Literally 10 articles per day about this, and none of them seem aware that the primary even existed.
Bullshit. Propagandistic bullshit.