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Cake day: July 22nd, 2023

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  • force@lemmy.worldtoMemes@lemmy.mlAverage US presidential debate
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    2 days ago

    Shoot them

    We’re allowed to kill Abe Lincoln and JFK, why aren’t we allowed to kill these guys? Why does Reagan get plot armor out of all the presidents? Who wrote this shit?

    To be fair JFK getting shot was pretty epic though. He almost caused nuclear holocaust (although a more rabidly anti-communist president may have definitely caused nuclear holocaust), war crimed the South Vietnamese a ton, and stabilized Israel. RFK getting assassinated was less epic because that gave us Nixon




  • Pushing for voting for other parties in most of the US gets you nowhere because of the way our elections work in the first place. At least, outside of elections where parties (and policy in general) barely matter at all, like very small municipalities; but generally unless you get the entire city council and judicial system in that town/county progressive it’s pretty hard for small-town politicians to make much meaningful change anyways. Although it’s not impossible – recently an “independent” (I think Republican but idk) city council member I directly voiced my concerns to right before the election about the lack of investment in sidewalks, public transport, and other non-car infrastructure in our small extremely conservative town actually got some sidewalks built which was great.

    With the state level, though, it’s not coming unless you live in a state with some sort of multiple answer voting like RCV (like Instant-Runoff Voting / IRV), approval voting, cardinal/rated voting (like STAR voting or score/range voting, etc… Or if you live an extremely progressive state where candidates that advocate for that kind of system are able to get voted into office, almost always a Democrat or sometimes an Independent aligned with Democrats.

    IMO the ideal voting system would be Condorcet Single Transferable Vote / CPO-STV (same exact thing as STV to the voter, but implementing a variation of the Condorcet Method under the hood, which would be the most proportional system in both multi-winner and single-winner elections) but I don’t think that’s actually used anywhere, and a system with such computationally heavy internals would be a hard sell to people who already see IRV as “controversial”. As long as we get anything other than FPTP, we can make it better later, the specifics don’t matter too much.

    For the curious, STV (Single Transferable Vote) is essentially the same as IRV (Instant-Runoff Voting, known simply as ranked-choice in the US although there are other ranked-choice systems) except it’s multi-winner instead of single-winner, where you can “rank” multiple candidates, and if your first choice candidate is eleminated or if they have surplus votes, your vote is instead “transferred” to your second candidate. The Condorcet system is basically a voting system that takes into account every possible candidate match-up, and makes the winner whoever has the most votes in each individual match-up – it’s very computationally heavy since, especially in elections with many candidates and in multi-winner variations, you can have extremely large amounts of matchups. You can combine STV with the Condorcet method and get CPO-STV, which would theoretically be the system which would be the hardest game/“tactically” vote in (a.k.a. people wouldn’t have any incentive to vote against a candidate they like in order to make a different candidate more likely to win, thereby increasing the chance of a candidate they don’t prefer winning) and achieve the most proportional/happiest-choice voting.






  • force@lemmy.worldtoLemmy Shitpost@lemmy.worldLater, losers
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    2 months ago

    Not gonna be active on Discord tonight. I’m meeting a girl (a real one) in half an hour (wouldn’t expect a lot of you to understand anyway) so please don’t DM me asking me where I am (im with the girl, ok) you’ll most likely get aired because ill be with the girl (again I don’t expect you to understand) shes actually really interested in me and its not a situation i can pass up for some meaningless Discord degenerates (because ill be meeting a girl, not that you really are going to understand) this is my life now. Meeting women and not wasting my precious time online, I have to move on from such simple things and branch out (you wouldnt understand) @everyone




  • Idk man conservatives in recent history have a pretty consistent track record of assassinations and assassination attemps on liberal and leftist politicians in the US based on their politics. Tommy Burks was outright killed by his Republican opponent less than a month before the election (Burks was one of the most conservative Democrats at the time, but he was certainly killed by a lot more conservative Republican), Clementa Pinckney (targetted in a white supremacist shooting at a primarily black church that he was the pastor of), Gabby Giffords (shot in the head by an anti-government right-wing conspiracy theory consumer).

    When Republican politicians are killed now, it’s pretty much only by personal enemies/drama that is unrelated to liberal or leftist politics, or by schizophrenic/criminally insane people who also weren’t doing it over politics. Like Linda Collins (her friend killed her after being confronted for stealing money), Mike McLelland (he was killed by a former lawyer who’s theft case he prosecuted). Hell, even Ronald Reagan was shot over an actress, not over the guy’s personal political views. Ironically, Republican John Roll was killed by the right-wing terrorist targetting Gabby Giffords, he was caught in the cross-fire. I don’t think there’s even an in-office conservative Republican politician that was assassinated by a Democratic rival this century, or even a single instance of a conservative Republican being assassinated by a liberal over politics recently.

    I want you to think of how frequently you hear of terrorist attacks which were committed in the name of white supremacy, christian nationalism, dicrimination against LGBT, or some other far-right bullshit, and then think of how frequently you hear of terrorist attacks committed in the name of progressive beliefs like, oh idk universal healthcare and better public transport. it’s gotta be at least like a 20 to 1 ratio, and that’s me being conservative with the amount of conservative attacks.


  • So I take it you’re against the government subsidizing science research in general? “The government shouldn’t fund new technology” is a stupid and destructive position. We’d be living in the 1800s if it were up to solely the capitalistic market. I mean, the first broadly effective antibiotics that are responsible for saving probably hundreds of millions of lives at least only exist because of people working in government-funded labs, under government-funded universities, for the government. Why should the environment be treated like it doesn’t matter to our civilization?


  • “There is no future without electrification. But just electrification will not get us there,”

    Daniel Posen is an associate professor in U of T’s department of civil and mineral engineering, and the Canada Research Chair in system-scale environmental impacts of energy and transport technologies. He agrees electrification is vital. But relying solely on electric vehicles to reduce carbon emissions from transportation may not be enough, especially if we want to do it in time to stop a catastrophic two-degree rise in global temperatures.

    The article you link contradicts you, it clearly suggests that adoption of EVs reduce carbon emissions, but we still need to do more (e.g. ACTUALLY HAVE PUBLIC TRANSIT INFRASTRUCTURE) to prevent a climate catastrophe.






  • No, just compared to the developed world and the democratic world. There are developed countries outside of Europe, you know like Australia, Canada, NZ. There are very few developed countries it doesn’t apply to – like previously mentioned Japan and SK and some in Europe. A majority of democratic countries also have left-wing parties – ones far more left than the democrats – like, again, many in South America (Chile, Argentina, etc.) and even India as you mentioned. Even most democratic Middle Eastern & African countries have at least one leftist party that is undeniably more left than the Democrats, as well as ones which aren’t fully democratic but still have competing parties or factions (like Jordan, Syria, and Palestine).

    Authoritarian/fascist countries are irrelevant to the conversation, I’m not sure why you thought to bring something like Saudia Arabia or Russia in.


  • No, not at all. You can easily view the edit history of all Wiktionary pages – 2 years ago, someone put the definitions in the order they are now for a specific reason. This person thinks it should be the other way around, so if they want to change it it’d be best to make a discussion about it. That’s the best way to get a community consensus on it. Wiktionary is a collaborative effort, people have different opinions on the specifics of a page, that’s why discussions exist and are the go-to for settling differences in views.