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.
Horrible events like January 6, or 9/11, each get a name.
I wonder what Monday’s SCOTUS ruling will end up being called.
Bc that seems to me to have been the turning point - not the beginning, obviously (you could point much further back to e.g. Citizens United) but when it really allowed/encouraged things to ratchet up.
Even its wiki page says it was not unique, was not for common folk, and also it was repealed even though portions of it were re-issued. If you mean that this could be used as a name, I was thinking more along the lines of like “Madness Monday”, except you know… something actually good:-).
How does it need to be AI? It’s a vending machine. Are you suppose to describe what you plan to shoot and it suggest a specific ammo? Oh it’s looks like you plan to highjack a plane, I recommend Hollow point .22 short to insure it will stay in the body and not breaching the pressurized hull.
I believe it is the part where it scans the person’s face to see if it matches the ID that is being called AI. I don’t know if that meets the technical definition or not, but that’s what they marketing is calling AI here.
LPT: Actual AI still does not exist, when you see something described as AI, it’s bullshit. The closest thing we have to AI is machine learning, but that’s more glorified text prediction than it is actual general artificial intelligence. A lot of things advertised as being “AI” aren’t even really that.
Agreed, but in my experience people in their early twenties can be surprisingly experienced and conscious kinksters, able to voice consent and negotiate intense situations. While people in their fourties can be incredibly insecure, unable to communicate their needs and insecurities, while still wanting to play.
It’s a matter of experience, self-awareness and skills, and those don’t come with age, but with work on yourself and education. We need so much more sex education and communication about these things.
The woman in question doesn’t seem to be an experienced kinkster though, and she should totally be heard in any case. But the age argument distracts from the real issues, I believe.
Oh, I’m sorry that was unclear. The age/maturity dynamic is as important here as the employer/employee one. I didn’t mean the two parties are on equal footing.
Yes, absolutely. That’s what I was trying to say. Also, because of another reply in this thread: I didn’t mean him, or him being insecure, in my example of the fourty year old… I meant a 40 year old at the bottom of the power dynamics. As compared to a 20 year old.
I think under 25 is still not a full adult. There’s research that the brain isn’t fully developed. And personality is still in flux as well. I couldn’t care less about huge age differences, but only when older than 25-30.
No they still need to be a part of our society and this should have the right to control it. I’m just talking about consent. People under 25 generally are more easily manipulated due to both physiological and sociological characteristics. And there’s not a specific age, everyone is different of course, but as a general rule I find it unethical for someone over 40 to date someone under 25. But I wouldn’t find it unethical for someone over 60 to date someone in their 30s or 40s for example.
There is a distinct imbalance between someone in their 60’s and someone in their early 20’s. I’m not saying it can’t be carefully and respectfully navigated, but it has to be acknowledged and accounted for.
It doesn’t sound like that happened here.
Then we have the power dynamic of a celebrity who is also your employer. Add in a healthy dose of fictive kinship due to the live-in nature of a nanny and you’re in a situation rife with the potential for abuse.
IIRC, that study didn’t conclude it stopped at 25, it expected it to stop at 18, but it kept going, and they ran out of funding at 25. A likely conclusion is that it never really stops, it’s just that what was measured wasn’t really development, but “change”.
Okay, source it if you’ve got it, because the idea that a single study ran out of funding at 25 and that’s where the number comes from is such an odd suggestion, as though no one else has studied the brain’s development and neuroscientists everywhere just shrugged and thought, “if only the funding were there.”
Here’s a well-sourced article that concludes the brain continues to develop well into the mid-20’s.
While the brain will always continue to develop and grow, due to neuroplasticity, the concern is whether or not the prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain responsible for long-term decision making, is properly developed. This development continues into the mid-20’s and is well-documented.
Here’s a 2022 study where they looked at over 100,000 brain scans from people 110 days old to over 100 years old used to draw and affirm similar conclusions.
While 25 isn’t magic number, as everyone’s brains develop on different timelines, it is a rational and reasonable landmark that can be reliably used for broad discussions.
Not sure how exactly your sources are measuring “development”, but at the age of 41 I know for a fact I still have prefrontal neurogenesis happening. I still have neuroplasticity, etc. My brain’s not going to stop developing until I’m dead.
Biden dropping out right now would all but guarantee that Trump won the Presidency. Anyone calling for him to drop out knows this, and is doing it likely as someone who is horribly misguided, or intentionally to try and sway our elections by a foreign entity.
We’re past the point of registrations across multiple states, the supreme court is controlled by the right, and there is absolutely no way to swap those names out and get the new names on the ballot without pushing it all up the ladder to – you guessed it – An illegitimate supreme court who has shown us they’ll make shit up on the spot to get the result that their owners want.
So people calling for Biden to ‘step down’ - are either doing it because they’re too stupid to realize the reality of things, or they are a foreign agent attempting to sow division and limit voters on the left. Follow those social chains up to who they originate from – I guarantee they originate from people who are intentionally there to sow division in an attempt to sway our elections.
and is doing it likely as someone who is horribly misguided
This is Abigail Disney. She's rich but she's not the brightest crayon in the box politically. Her PhD is in philosophy and her dissertation was about the role of romanticized violence and war in American life. Her lists of philanthropy is what one would expect from a run of the mill rich person level activism. Tossing money at the high level stuff, never diving deeper to the root of the problem.
I'm not dissing the lady, but she absolutely falls into the misguided on this aspect.
I mean I wouldn’t call all people who want Biden to drop out as intentionally being for Trump. Alot of it is fear, panic, and maybe a bit of ignorance of historical trends. By alot of historical metrics, it does increase the chance for Trump winning, I’ll admit that. But I wouldn’t say that it’s guaranteed.
We’re past the point of registrations across multiple states
LOL, no we’re not. Biden hasn’t even been nominated yet. The earliest deadline is Ohio, which is requiring the Democratic party to do a special virtual vote to get on, but that’s still in the future.
Your link is a list of filing deadlines for the primary.
So maybe after being wrong and accusing everyone else of being foreign agents, check your own information sources that are trying to convince you of this.
and is doing it likely as someone who is horribly misguided, or intentionally to try and sway our elections by a foreign entity
And once again we come back to the liberal conspiracy theory of “We’re the only adults in the room, and anyone who disagrees with us is co-opted by foreign powers”. The worst part of it all is the shamelessness of pulling this bullshit when so much people knows you’re talking out of your ass. Fuck off.
Correction - you should believe them that such will happen when nobody else but them has knives and they are certain they won’t get a scratch while it’s happening. Until then they’ll be very afraid.
The dangerous part is that the fact that they are cowards may over time become more notable than the fact that they really want this.
How many openly queer farmers and ranchers are there? Does sexual orientation have any relevancy at tractor supply? I use a co-op most of the time because tsc is overpriced on majority of stuff
I embarrassingly did something similar (lighted up a firework in my mouth and took a long inhale straight to lungs like a cigarette before throwing it away nonchalantly seconds before explosion) when I was young and stupid. But 41 cmon
And also I didn’t care about my life whatsoever unlike now but I was still stupid because there are less painful and quicker ways to go. I was too much of a coward to approach suicide seriously so I gambled with life seeing no value or sense in it all.
Still have burn scars from extinguishing cigarettes on my own skin, they are super ugly but also remind me of the long road travelled and how much better I am doing now.
What is ironic is that some good people that cherished life and were really, diligent and kindhearted are gone or on the streets or went insane. While I was desperately trying to fuck it all up and made a poor job out of it in the end. Just because I was given randomly better brain at birth that did what they diligently strived so hard for as if it was nothing at all or better parents or more money
Yeah many years ago a co-workers wife went to pick up a “dud” firework and something similar happened to her infront of him and his two kids. None of them were ok after that.
Dumbass, or Darwin award winner, or whatever he might be called, yeah he was just some dude who did some dumb shit he’s probably done before or seen someone do before. This time it just went bad. There is a malignant complacency in American culture surrounding fireworks. These are explosive materials that are constantly disrespected. I’ve done it, I’ve seen it done, it is very common in the US. I really feel for this guys family, could very easily have been mine at one point in time.
The crazy thing about every one of these stories is actually how completely unsurprised the wife always is. “Well, you know, we always assumed it wouldn’t be cancer.”
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