Why do they have a statement from the investment firms’s pr department? What does that add to the story? Wgaf what their thoughts are on the matter? It’s really strange.
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.
I always assumed that was a notice to people stealing cars from the lot.
You know. Make sure the car with the keys wasn’t left running cuz the kid was sleeping.
Definitely don’t want the 3 kinds of hell for stealing a car with a kid in it. (Cops gonna totally blame you aren’t they PIT lil’ Tommy into the ditch.)
Why leave the kid in the car at all? My kids go inside with me if the wife isn’t there wanting to stay in the car. Doesn’t matter if I’m going in a store for 2 minutes.
The crazy thing is that the news here in the Midwest tells people each year to put something important, like their phone, in the car seat to remember the kid.
Nobody INTENDS to leave their kid in the car to die.
Fatal Distraction is a Pulitzer Prize winning article that examines how the mind works and why this sort of incident keeps happening over and over again.
They are. The people who do this? They are you and me and your neighbor.
Check out this article: Fatal Distraction, it won a Pulitzer Prize. It’s about how the mind works and why this incident keeps happening over and over again.
Skip calling the cops, if it’s hot break the window THEN call the cops, same for pets. In many places this is now the fully legal thing to do. If you wait even a little bit that can be the difference, you never know how close to death they are even if moving
You can buy keychain tools for breaking windows easily, the trick is something hard and POINTY, really concentrated the force applied
The reason to call the cops right off is so they get there faster.
If the kid is going to die in the seconds it takes to make get them rolling, they’re probably going to die outside the car, too. On the other hand, the sooner they get there, the faster they get advanced care.
Additionally, it provides a bit of legal protection, having dispatch on the phone.
Also, not even animal control will break into a car- they let the cops do that. The last time I dealt with it the cops waited for them to make the call that it was necessary.
There was a puppy in the back of an suv. The window was cracked but the puppy was in a dog crate covered in blankets. The car interior was just under the threshold at like 90 or something, but the crate when they did open it was at like 105. It was a little cocker spaniel that was the sweetest little cuddle-bug.
The assholes left the dog in the back in 90-degree weather to go to a baseball game. The worst part is that they could go pick up the dog after paying a fine. That dog deserved better humans.
I thought that one was about letting the baby drive the car. Did they mention the ambient air temperature or any locally posted heat warnings in that one? Can’t remember all the lyrics.
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.
And this is the reason why the democratic party does not respond to the interests of the working class. The words of a super rich person have more influence than thousands or millions of people saying the same thing in surveys. This time those voices are aligned, but if next time they are not, the voice of the super rich will be the one they hear instead of yours.
With all these calls for him to drop out, there would need to be a viable replacement that could ensure a win with a four month campaign. I’m concerned that it’s just as risky to change the horse this close to the race.
It’s not a bad idea. His “scandal” won’t mean shit next to Trump’s. I’d still like to see some polls of his potential before we start calling for Biden to step down.
You ignore that scandals only matter to Democrats. Like Trump said, he could murder someone on Fifth Avenue and not lose any voters. Meanwhile, Al Franken does something in poor taste and gets cancelled.
I think a person who should be in the running for president needs to have some name-recognition but also be non-polarizing which unfortunately is hard to find in combination. There are some names floating around like moving the candidacy to Kamala Harris, but… I feel like a lot of people don’t like her. Which shouldn’t matter but I think a lot of people base their voting on “would I enjoy sitting down at a dinner table with this person and could I speak candidly” and don’t look into the actual political standpoints of that person, so likeability more than anything.
I’m not American, but I still feel a slightly vested interest in the outcomes of the elections because the outcome of the US election will shape global politics and even more than that in the next coming years, especially if Trump and his fascist cronies take control. But my point being is that I don’t know every single name in American politics, but I would say your average American voter probably knows as much as me, and the names that people know about are usually the polarizing ones that wouldn’t have a chance of winning. The Democrats are sorely lacking a strong candidate with a name that can rival Joe Biden in name-recognition without being polarizing.
Joe Biden is too old, but he has good people around him so I could see him doing 4 more years while doing MORE to find a good replacement for him would be the best thing for the US.
There have been several polls of Kamala vs. Trump. She barely surpasses Biden in some when the poll brings “fitness” into question, and polls worse than Biden in experience. That’s the real problem.
You right. I think it’s reactionary nonsense to be calling for him to pull out of the race without a stronger candidate on the bench.
There is no dropping out, and there’s no replacement. All political donations have been to the Biden campaign, it is illegal to transfer those funds to a new candidate. The only person who could run for president in his place is Kamala, since she is the other person on the ticket.
It’s extremely clear no one talking has any clue how any of this shit works.
Political parties that pay more attention to their voters than to the rich? Yes, many. Parties that fulfill that and are electorally successful? None or almost
The hell are you on? I’m just saying that rich people making absurd demands is a really shit citation for politicians listening to rich people’s demands. You haven’t caught Biden or the DNC red handed, you’ve got a picture of the cookie jar devoid of hands and still full of cookies.
You mix teenagers and guns and it doesn’t really matter how nice the mall is.
As the parent of a teenager, I know exactly how moody they can get and how quickly their moods can change from happy to “I will fucking kill a motherfucker.” I wouldn’t give a teenager a gun in a million years.
The idea of mandatory enlistment gives me nightmares. But also the fact that you can be old enough to kill but not old enough to be trusted with alcohol or tobacco. That is just ludicrous on the face of it. This nation is a madhouse.
Aren’t non-competes basically unenforceable anyway? At least for individual contributors. You can’t contractually ban an individual from making money from their literal profession.
Senior execs and company founders with privileged information are a different story.
Not American, but in my country non-compete clauses are routinely put into employment contracts even though they have been demonstrated to be illegal in most cases.
When I was at the worker’s council in a company a couple decades ago, we insisted that the company update the contracts to remove illegal clauses. The companies’ position was that since they were illegal and therefore unenforceable that they did not matter. We argued that employees are less likely to know which particular laws impact which clause of their contracts than, say, full-time HR staff. And that not knowing they might assume that they are legal.
I’m happy to have moved to a country with worker councils in the law to protect workers in this way.
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