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Cake day: January 4th, 2024

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  • Trump has basically openly admitted that if he had his way, this would be our last election.

    JD Vance is a weird corpo-monarchist. He’s written about it a bit, but his corpo-daddy Peter Thiel has openly spoken about it.

    Then there’s Project 2025, a literal blueprint for Trump to follow to turn the country into a christo-fascist dictatorship. Vance wrote the forward to the book form, but the author is holding it back until after the election. Not out of shame, but because they know that being so open with their plan has hurt them in the polls.










  • Edge cases like you describe are a key part of Ordinal voting systems, Cardinal voting systems are immune to that sort of thing.

    Also, Cardinal voting systems can be super easy. Take Approval.

    Simply take a list of names, and mark next to each candidate you approve of. If you feel like you need to have a moral conundrum over what you feel like approval means, then go ahead, but just mark the next to any or all of the names on the list that you like.

    After that, the counting is simple as well. You add up the approval of each candidate, independent of what any other candidate gets, and then the winner is the one with the most approval.

    It is literally impossible to elect an unpopular candidate via Approval, unless only unpopular candidates run.

    STAR is slightly more complex, in that you rate each candidate on a scale of 0-5. Again, no one actually cares about your personal journey in rating someone a 4 or whatnot, just do it and move on.

    Then when counting, you again add up the numbers, take the highest two, and see where they rate on each individual ballot. If one is rated higher than the other, they get the vote from that ballot.



  • That’s some blatant Russian propaganda there. Blame NATO twice for Russian imperialism.

    The “Russia had to invade a sovereign nation because they were talking about joining NATO to prevent Russia from invading them” logic has some holes to it.

    The fact that Russia has invaded their neighbors 14 times since the end of the cold war tells you why one of their neighbors would want to join NATO.

    Also, remember that time that Russia shot down a commercial airliner? The Ukrainians sure as hell do. That was the true beginning of the invasion, which is why Ukraine was in talks to join NATO.


    And yes, people have the right to defend themselves. But the Israeli government has locked down the anti-terror propaganda, because Hamas is pretty vile as far as organizations go. It’s why Israel let Hamas grow and become powerful, and why the Israelis paid to keep Hamas in power for the last decade or so.

    As long as Israel can point at Hamas, they have just enough of an excuse to claim their ethnic cleansing is actually just an anti-terror campaign.

    Hamas is a full on terrorist organization, not that all terrorist organizations are bad. Or rather, there are some causes where a terrorist organization is the appropriate response. John Brown tried it. So did Nelson Mandela. But Hamas is a religious extremist terrorist organization. One that has distasteful views, and was sort of put in place by Israel for those views.

    You see what I’m getting at here? Hamas is fucking evil, and Israel has mostly succeeded in making Hamas the face of Palestinian resistance against Israel.

    I doubt many of the original leaders of Hamas are still alive, but that doesn’t matter either when Israel can just lie and say that whoever they kill is Hamas. It’s a bit maddening, and I doubt there’s an answer to it all except for the other Palestinian resistance groups to step up their social media game.



  • Everyone knows Putin invaded Ukraine because he’s a dumbass dictator who started to believe his own propaganda. It’s the dictator trap. Putin surrounded himself with backstabbing yes men by literally killing anyone who wasn’t.

    As to Palestinian resistance. I don’t think Hamas is a good resistance movement. For a whole host of reasons. Which is why the Israeli government has been propping them up since the 80s.

    An unsympathetic resistance movement can do more to damage a cause than not having a movement at all.

    From now until the ethnic cleansing is complete, Israel will call any resistance movement Hamas, regardless of their actual name or beliefs. I’m not sure how to fight that… I don’t think anyone really knows beyond screaming the truth everywhere we can.

    It didn’t work in the 1920s in Europe. But maybe with the Internet… Likely not though.




  • As anyone who has lived in a Rocky Mountain town can say, Distant bullies are pretty bad too.

    But that’s a sort of unique situation. Or it was until Reagan. See, the entire Rocky Mountain range is treated as a sort of internal colony.

    Resources are extracted, but the people who own the companies doing the extraction all pretty much live on one of the coasts.

    And then every store is also owned by someone who lives on one of the coasts.

    This means that any real wealth produced in those states, quickly leaves those states.

    A lot of towns in the area never really had a “down town” in the first place, and with the creation of Walmart and such, no one else gets a downtown either.

    The answer of course is a bigger government. But it has to be free of corporate influence.

    Which might just take a very big government. Like expanding the House and Supreme Court big.

    Both are desperately needed.


  • Some of them have the power of of a million mass shooters. Some of them have the power of a very long neck. Seriously, there an X-man with the codename Longneck because he has a very long neck. He’s never once helped the team in the field, because he’s completely powerless unless he wants to look over toilet stall walls while pooping.

    He does have longer arms to match his neck, but that’s it. I guess he can easily get stuff off a high shelf…

    And pointedly he cannot blend in as a normal human, so his introduction to the team was them saving him from a lynch mob.


  • I’ll add in, Ranked Choice is a bad choice. The “edge cases” mentioned in the post can happen in any and every election using the system.

    If Ranked Choice were the only option besides what we have, it would be a slight improvement, but there are far better options.

    STAR is simple, and does everything that RCV claims to do, but actually fails to do.

    Something to keep in mind for the push to reform voting laws after this election.