Loosely, it’s rape any time you have sex with someone who doesn’t currently want to be having sex with you. That’s pretty much the broadest possible terms.
At one point, she alleged that he penetrated her despite her objecting because she was in the midst of a urinary tract infection; the incident left her “screaming” in pain. Gaiman denied K’s allegations and told Tortoise he was “disturbed” by the accusations.
I fucking love being American. I hold American ideals in high regard.
I hate that people who hate freedom and equality claim to love America and freedom in general. I live in a red state, so I see traitorous flags everywhere I go. But American values hold true.
Pride month in general fills me with a lot of American pride. Regardless of how many antagonistic people there are, those who continue the fight for rights show the true American spirit.
I remember when gay marriage was illegal, which always felt like it was unconstitutional and anti-American. So seeing people celebrate those rights and continue to fight for rights that are withheld, that is America to me.
Calling the values that are supposedly held by Americans “American values” would be accurate even if they were the exact same values held by the people of Belgium. They would also be “Belgian values” if that were the case.
I doubt anyone here would suggest that “American values” were exclusively American.
"Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness” are specifically listed an unalienable rights in America’s Declaration of Independence and could be seen as the origin for many other “American values”.
The phrase itself is quite similar to John Locke’s "life, liberty, and estate” from Two Treatises of Government written nearly a century earlier. You can look to Voltaire, Hume, or really any other Enlightenment period philosopher or writer of the time to see that the founding fathers were a product of that time, and that the ideas of the century or so leading up to American independence are enshrined as values or rights in Declaration of Independence, Constitution, and Bill of Rights.
Go read the preamble to the constitution. It’s quite different from what the “We the people…” 1776 people think it says. It’s basically what the right would call socialism, taking care of one another when possible.
The first amendment protects the separation of church and state, freedom of the press, freedom of speech, freedom of assembly.
The second amendment protects your right to form a militia if none exist. Which always reminds me of the Black Panthers protecting black voters while armed.
There’s a lot of technical amendments too. But what really gives me American pride is all of those who have continued to push for those rights to be upheld.
That’s your modern interpretation of those “rights” and document. The people who wrote that were mostly slave owners, who believed only land owning men should have any democratic rights. Black people were not even considered humans. Indigenous people were treated as pests. I mean…
That is true. While the proclaimed rights and values held true, America has failed to uphold those values from the very beginning.
However, there have also been people from the very beginning who have fought for those values. Columbus was seen as savage by his fellows, slavery has never had unanimously accepted, indigenous people weren’t seen as pests to all.
Even the land owning part was contentious, which is why they left it up to the states to determine.
I too would think that, had I just woken up from a coma and not known about the four press secretaries under Trump.
Edit: oh wait, the felonious traitor had five:
The Mooch, Spicer, Sarah “FuckTheCountry” Sanders, Stephanie “Never gave one press conference” Grisham and Kayleigh “My cross necklace proves how KKKhristian I am” McEnany.
The Mooch was easily my fav press secretary from that shit show.
FYI , if you haven’t seen it yet, he’s one of the whales on “Killer Whales”, that crypto Shark Tank knock off. The show is wild, everyone talking shit about the products, but still saying they’d support it. And the prize isn’t actually any sort of money for the schemes, just a mentorship with the whales. It’s absolutely great to watch with a bag of popcorn.
It’s not even a new idea. It’s just the same weathered and worn “a minority couldn’t possibly have the proper education to do this job,” from uneducated idiots who… *checks notes… definitely don’t have the education to do the same job and spend all their time trying to reduce access to education to minorities.
It’s still the slaveowners attitude of purposefully keeping them uneducated and then judging them for their… lack of education. It’s what stupid selfish controlling people have done to others for centuries, kick them down, and then berate them for having been kicked down. They don’t like smart people who can talk back to them so they try to make sure they are the smartest person in the room by purposefully keeping everyone else dumb.
When everyone in a political party is vying to be the smartest person in the room by controlling information and making everyone else dumber, you end up with a joke shitshow like the US Republican party, which stands for nothing other than bullying and willful ignorance.
That’s what it always has meant. It threatens the heteronormative Christian patriarchal power structure to have anyone but a white man in charge of anything. And it doesn’t matter that a woman is saying it because it’s a woman who doesn’t understand that the leopards will eat her face too.
Glad Project 2025 is becoming public knowledge, it’s not hyperbole, people really are going to die if Trump is re-elected. That’s not a threat, that’s an acknowledgement of what the GOP plans to do.
I remember when “Race war now?” was just an edgy 4chan meme… Better days, used to on the internet when someone was being racist it was a comedy routine mocking the absurdity of racism, nowadays… people actually mean that shit.
Sadly I remember the “Bugaloo” movement, because everything has to be a joke now, even repeating the Civil War…
Not sure what article you're reading, but this one didn't seem to imply the reason for ceasing donations was being against oligarchy. So I'm not sure what point you're making?
Isn't the push behind Biden "making the best of a bad system"? Which seems to be exactly the same sentiment behind "I don't like the oligarchs but it's useful that they agree with me."
You think the US’s implementation of democracy that forces you to pick the least bad between two candidates you don’t like is
Democracy, yes. It will always be the ‘least bad’ choice in a democracy, unless you have some miracle roll of the dice where a candidate 100% agrees with you, or a cultlike devotion to them.
A good system
What parts of the system that make it bad are anti-democratic elements - which are not particularly relevant in whether my choice should be Biden or Trump.
The only implementation of a democracy
This may come as a shock, but if the majority of people in any democratic system prefer candidates that I think are shit, those are what my effective choices are going to be narrowed down to. That’s kind of the point of a democracy.
What parts of the system that make it bad are anti-democratic elements - which are not particularly relevant in whether my choice should be Biden or Trump.
Or in other words, the system you're in is flawed but you're working within the constraints of those flaws to get the best outcome you can find.
Making the best of a bad system
The US is only in this predicament because the system it has currently allowed a candidate who lost the popular vote in 2016 to get into an office that had enough power to meaningfully damage the country.
However it's clear from your repeated and deliberate attempts to reframe criticism of that system as an attack on the very concept of democracy itself that you aren't arguing in good faith here.
Or in other words, the system you’re in is flawed but you’re working within the constraints of those flaws to get the best outcome you can find.
Making the best of a bad system
Except that the issue you’re discussing, the choice being narrowed between Biden and Trump in this election, is not related to the anti-democratic flaws of that system.
However it’s clear from your repeated and deliberate attempts to reframe criticism of that system as an attack on the very concept of democracy itself that you aren’t arguing in good faith here.
Sorry that you find democracy such an offensive concept.
If you ignore the fact that trump wouldn't be running if he hadn't lost the popular vote in 2016 and still won, sure.
This started as you deriding the US's system as an oligarchy, but now when pressed it's your ideal democracy? What are you doing, friend? Are you okay?
If you ignore the fact that trump wouldn’t be running if he hadn’t lost the popular vote in 2016 and still won, sure.
How is that relevant to my choices being narrowed down to Trump and Biden by the opinions of the electorate?
This started as you deriding the US’s system as an oligarchy, but now when pressed it’s your ideal democracy? What are you doing, friend? Are you okay?
Sorry that the idea that the candidates with near-majority support being the only choices is a symptom of democracy is so foreign to you, and the idea that an ultrawealthy megadonor attempting to change one of the candidates without democratic support being a symptom of oligarchy is, likewise, apparently incomprehensible to your worldview.
being the only choices is a symptom of democracy is so foreign to you
Given that the overarching question here is "is biden really the best candidate?", and that ranked choice voting would immediately fix that issue while retaining democracy, yes i feel fairly confident that the current situation is one brought on by an imperfect implementation of democracy.
But again, this is just more bad faith whining so goodbye.
Given that the overarching question here is “is biden really the best candidate?”,
Yes, he is the best candidate currently running.
and that ranked choice voting would immediately fix that issue
No, ranked choice would give us an option to express a stronger preference for other candidates. It would not fix the fact that Biden and Trump hold near-majority support in this election cycle and one of them will be the winner of the election, making every voter with any sense pick one of them to support over the other.
while retaining democracy, yes i feel fairly confident that the current situation is one brought on by an imperfect implementation of democracy.
Okay, cool, if ranked choice voting was implemented, who would have the support of the electorate who isn’t Biden or Trump?
On what basis are you making the claim that Biden has near-majority support here? Because if it’s simply the fact he’s the candidate that was produced by our shit system, it seems like you’re just begging the question.
Polls taken before Thursday all largely deliver the same answer: any Biden alternative — Vice President Kamala Harris, Govs. Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan, Gavin Newsom of California, Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania, Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg — performed about the same, or worse, than Biden against Trump when voters were asked how they’d vote in head-to-head matchups.
In averages of national polls fielded between February 2023 and January of this year, for example, Harris underperformed Biden by about 2.3 percentage points, per tracking by the former Democratic pollster Adam Carlson.
Buttigieg, Newsom, and Sanders did worse than Biden against Trump (Newsom, for example, trailed Biden’s margin against Trump in every poll in which he was included, by about 3 percentage points on average). Whitmer did roughly the same as Biden, but that’s also based on only two polls.
Yes, that one. The difference between all the candidates falls in a range of about 3 percentage points, meaning that everyone has near majority support.
Lmao, those polls are asking how people would vote in hypothetical head-to-heads - as in:
the current situation is one brought on by an imperfect implementation of democracy.
But I guess since this says each hypothetical polled resulted in near the same chances, that means all of the alternatives have ‘near-majority support’, right?
No, ranked choice would give us an option to express a stronger preference for other candidates. It would not fix the fact that Biden and Trump hold near-majority support in this election cycle and one of them will be the winner of the election, making every voter with any sense pick one of them to support over the other.
idk what to tell you, the article you linked shows alt candidates having similar support as biden in head-to-heads. I’m not sure in what world that means Biden has majority support. They can’t all have near-majority support
if 75% of the democratic electorate would prefer a different candidate, then in a ranked-choice election 75% of democratic voters would likely be putting him as second or third choice, not their first.
This is the third or fourth time I’ve seen you hide behind “the opinions of the electorate” as a defense of status-quo positions, except this time it’s pretty clearly not the opinion of the electorate that Biden is the preferred candidate to go up against trump.
You know there are other forms of democracy right? This isn’t the only way to select an executive, and many of those systems aren’t about choosing the least bad option.
Parliamentary systems. Ranked choice or approval voting. These two candidates don’t actually hold majority support, they’re just the end result of filtering and internal politics in a FPTP system that needs to have two parties.
So then I don’t get a choice as to who becomes the executive at all. Wonderful.
Ranked choice or approval voting.
Ranked choice still results in one of two candidates if those two candidates have near-majority support. They simply allow voters to pick one of those two candidates whilst expressing support for less-popular candidates. It creates MORE scenarios in which there are more than two candidates with a chance to win, but it neither eliminates the existing problem nor prevents it in all cases.
Ranked choice is better than FPTP. But it’s not a silver bullet to the issue being discussed.
Ranked choice’s end results are not the issue. It solves the problem because it allows multiple similar candidates to compete, which means the left wouldn’t have needed to winnow down to a single candidate. If Biden becomes incapable that’s fine, people have another candidate already available who wasn’t spoiling him by existing. And if we don’t all agree that Biden is incapable? Biden-stans can vote him first and the other candidate second, and vice versa, and one of them will garner the full vote of the left.
Again, I appreciate the advantages of ranked choice and support the implementation of ranked choice as a massive improvement over FPTP - but it’s not an answer to the question of “What system offers more than two choices, practically speaking, when two candidates have near-majority support”, which is the question under discussion.
What kind of nonsense question is that? These candidates both don’t have near majority support (polls of head to heads are not measuring that) and there’s no reason to have a different system if two hypothetical candidates actually did. Most people did not want this rematch in the first place.
If you have a situation where say there appeared to be two likely dominant candidates, but one crashes and burns spectacularly, other voting systems wouldn’t cause a default decision for their single opponent. And the people who thought Joe Biden was too old from the very beginning could already be supporting their replacement. Hell, we could just have all these potential replacements already competing and work it out in voting.
Despite insisting otherwise, PugJesus is a through-and-through centrist who prefers the convenience FPTP offers to those who don’t want things to fundamentally change.
It is the only reason he would be insisting on the head-to-head interpretation of “near-majority support” and only agrees to popular progressive positions when there is a systemic hurdle that prevents that position from coming to fruition.
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