As a Latino I don’t give a fuck about the USA paying for its crimes, to my eyes that’s a crazy dream. I just wish they stop being bully two-face assholes already. The world needs the best USA right now.
And please, I’m talking about representatives of the USA state that most of the time represent corporations, not the actual people.
The US has always been a bunch of companies pretending to be a country. Literally, the founding companies were the Plymouth Company and the London Company (both later known as the Virginia Company) and since the very beginning the US has been a story of hostile corporate acquisition of land and resources and people. It can’t stop being a bully two-face asshole, it’s in the company charter!
Well, this makes a lot of sense, but the US people might want to try to change it. Certainly, the rest of the world is terrified of the US government since Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
I do not think so. The USA is an important part of our world, whether we like it or not. It’s been around for centuries now, and has a well-deserved place as a leading nation. However, they need to address so many problems within their borders before they start meddling everywhere.
The rules based world order™ is a global imperialist system of monopolistic capital extraction and exploitation of the periphery. The US is the head of that hegemonic order. It provides no value to the rest of the world. It exists to extract value from the rest of the world.
The US position in the world is no more earned than a person who buys a slave deserves the title “master”
I believe that a balanced --more fair for everyone-- status can be achieved and the USA is instrumental for that to happen in current times. I’ll believe the same about the next “head of the hegemonic order” if the USA collapses.
Believe what exactly? It’s only logical that a more balanced status between nations is possible. History backs that claim. Of course it can go both ways. Honestly don’t know a lot of people in the ruling class to presume what they’re all doing or thinking. I know organized regular people can change things through politics, through culture.
Because children don’t matter to them at any age, not even as a fetus. It’s all about getting to tell other people what to do and gaining leverage in the most hurtful ways possible.
She was likely going to use them to stage something at a clinic in the future. Probably going to create some propaganda about how sick these clinics were for keeping these remains and not even giving them the decency of treating them with dignity.
So confused by the use of “liberal economics” here. Was Brexit liberalism? Is privatizing NHS liberalism? In the US, that would be the conservative wing, not liberal.
The author is British. Liberalism in its theoretical aspects autonomy, equality of opportunity, freedom of choice, protection of individual rights is a wonderful promise. But the author argue that in our unchecked capitalist environment it’s just a pipe dream which leaves individual vulnerable and exposed to exploitation.
Liberalism is not what people in the USA understand by the word (i.e. anything left of pretty far right). If you hang out with socialists you’ll find they’re not fond of liberals, because liberals are capitalists. This meaning of the word is why the most damaging, ultra-capitalist, right-wing economic policies of the past 50 years are known as neoliberalism.
Most certainly. They are exploiting issues in masculinity that have been here for decades.
One of the ones they like to use is the ‘strong man’ and a callback to our forefathers (eg., miners from the 1800s. Typical ‘manly’ men). There is nothing wrong with being strong, determined, or ambitious, provided you’re a decent human being beforehand. These grifters, though seem like it’s the only thing that validates a guy, and that we must achieve it no matter the cost. If we don’t, we are failures and must find someone or something to blame
On the one hand, sure, you’re not wrong. On the other, why are young men entirely passive in your analysis? “The right”, neither the talking heads nor the nebulous concept, can radicalise anyone without some level of their consent in being so radicalised.
I’d say they’re doing it to themselves. Feminism doesn’t come across as inclusive, and has a “fall in line or get left behind” mentality.
Even something dumb like Sokka’s character growth from being a sexist 12 year old to respecting & appreciating women was said to have gotten removed from Netflix’s Avatar TLA remake.
At some point, that rigidity is going to push people away, and it appears that it didn’t take much to push people to villainize feminism.
Well here is the fucking thing, you can never “win” with feminists cause they all slightly believe something else to be of utmost importance. Every women that does not agree is brainwashed by patriarchy but as soon as you got a penis your deviation from their believes makes you a sexist or even anti feminist. This is of course not true for all feminists, maybe its even a minority but it is a very vocal one and it does not help to have your sister be one… help😭
I’d say they’re doing it to themselves. Feminism doesn’t come across as inclusive, and has a “fall in line or get left behind” mentality.
And on this I’d say I blame the parents most of all. I consider myself a feminist and grew up in an extended family of strong female figures. At no point was feminism (the word) discussed. What was, was an understanding that women are equal to men and deserve everything that a man has be it good or bad.
The problem is that many people fell on feminism as an ideal to latch on to without better understanding and espousing the core principles behind it.
Fast forward to now where I am a 46 year old man with a daughter and 2 boys I have far more concern for the boys than the girl and I make sure as often as possible to stress the principles of feminism and not just the word.
For women, “a rising tide lifts all boats”. Just as many men (I like to include myself) are doing all we can to bring women to a place of equality, women must also be beholden on themselves to ensure men do not get left behind.
Doesn’t seem super well theorized to me. How exactly is porn playing into it? I do think the black and white language around metoo (yesallmen, believewomen) marginalized a lot of guys and contributes to this mindset. People who took it literally found the moral imperative it implied absurd and decided they’d need to find another narrative that they could be proud of themselves inside of. This is what they found when they looked. Invalidating all expert opinion as liberal makes it hard to bring sense into the conversation.
I do think apps like tinder are directly responsible for all the self published bullshit they read mixing terms from economics to analyze the ‘sexual marketplace’ and seem mostly premised on the idea that some woman owes you in particular because of statistics.
Some will, but when you are fighting to change norms language and optics are an important part of that. I think the movement would have been stronger had it avoided language implying gender essentialism.
But yesallmen/believeallwomen DID, as you say, come with widely available explanation and purpose.
…and you don’t think that choice of language played a part in the reaction to things like when Jimmy Bennett accused Asia Argento of statutory rape and she paid him off to shut him up? I mean, she more or less literally did what #metoo was accusing powerful men of doing, had done it recently at that point, and didn’t get half the shit most #metoo targets got as a consequence. Or that aide that accused a CA legislator of being inappropriate with him, so she investigated herself and found no wrongdoing on her part.
And even the people who claim to be all about #metoo and #believewomen get…picky about that when a woman accuses the wrong person - see Tara Reade’s accusation against Biden.
It absolutely did not. It came with shouting down anyone who wanted to question women who came forward with rape accusations. That’s how some of these highly-publicised cases, like Matress Girl, resulted in immediate expulsion of those accused. Had they done actual investigating into the matter, they would have seen the woman absolutely should not be believed, but that went against the slogan.
Let me know when we get universal healthcare, the federally protected right to abortion, equal pay across race and gender, federally protected rights for lgbtq folks, federal legalization for cannabis, and all the other things progressives have been demanding for decades…
If I’m wrong and I don’t know how it works, what about the people running the party who made those promises?
Or are you saying I don’t know how it works, because I should have known they were lying to voters? I missed that moderate argument, is it coming back?
I’m not going to defend the claim that all they need is fifty senators and the Oval Office to pass sweeping regulatory changes. I don’t know who said that, but they should be called out for lying. It wasn’t true then and it isn’t true now. The most that can be said for fifty senators is that it gives them enough of a majority (with the Vice President) to set the agenda. It doesn’t stop Republicans from obstructing the way they have been for over two decades, and it doesn’t force the Republican-led House to pass bills that progressives want.
Someone is lying to you. Democrats do their share, but at least they’re not actively trying to make your life worse the way Republicans are. Biden’s policy and legislative record as President are far more impressive than anyone expected, and the author of this piece outlines how and why. I’m sorry if that’s not enough for you, but politics is the art of what’s possible. For fantasy, try Anne Rice.
Yeah, the moderates running the party… They lied to all of us.
No idea how you forgot about that, it was only a few years ago.
It doesn’t stop Republicans from obstructing the way they have been for over two decades, and it doesn’t force the Republican-led House to pass bills that progressives want.
Damn bro, you forgot Biden saying they were only like that with Obama and once Biden became president all his old republican friends would magically do a 180?
He called Mitch McConnell “an old friend” last week, have you forgotten that too?
Yes, Biden lied to you. He’s not perfect. He’s not a saint. I’m not defending anyone’s lies. I’m asking you to acknowledge reality instead of insisting that everything be exactly the way you want it to be the instant you want it. There are things he can’t do, whatever he said during the campaign season. Educated voters know how to parse through campaign promises to assess what’s possible versus what the alternatives will be.
Biden has been a neoliberal shill for most of his political career, in bed with corporate interests. I’ve never been a fan of him. That’s what makes me so surprised that he’s done as well as he has. He’s still handing freebies out to his corporate masters, and I’m not going to praise him for that. But he’s also done an extraordinary amount of good for the entire nation, and it doesn’t compromise my integrity to acknowledge that as well.
Seriously, this black-or-white thinking isn’t how the adult world works. Stop throwing tantrums because you didn’t get the lollipop you were promised.
It addresses in a large part of how the government works and why the person I’m responding to doesn’t understand why Biden can’t just govern by fiat. A concept that a depressing number of people in these comments seem to be ignorant of or purely dismissive.
The problem with governing by fiat is what happens when the opposition gets their turn. It’s how Republicans want to run the country, and it’s not doing us any favors.
We’re seeing state legislatures all over the country ignore the courts to prevent democracy in their domains. The court can’t actually do anything. Biden could tell them to fuck off, abolish student debt, and they’d be powerless.
So you want Democrats to discard the rule of law the way Republicans do, giving Republicans the win at destroying our government so they can replace it with private interests? Seriously?
Yes. I do not care about “the rule of law” if all it does is make my life worse and the capitalists can ignore it whenever convenient. It has no value to me.
One of the biggest battles for republicans, that of ending bodily autonomy, was achieved under Biden. How is that not a better example of republicans winning than whatever you’re trying to say with your link? (I didn’t read it, not sorry)
Because that was a product of the Trump administration getting to replace three Supreme Court Justices and tipping the balance toward conservative extremism. It wasn’t something Biden did, it’s something he couldn’t prevent and not relevant to the topic.
But he could have prevented it. He could have appointed more judges. He could have pushed a legal case. He could have declared the court’s process of judicial unconstitutional, which it obviously is.
How about this: why doesn’t he enforce the rule of law on the Republicans who flout it? He’s in charge of the justice department and could charge the politicians blatantly ignoring the court that he says must be respected. If he believed that, shouldn’t he prosecute the state Republicans ignoring the SCs order to create new district maps? We would accept the legitimacy of the “rule of law” much more readily if it were actually applied consistently.
The gerrymandered house and the gerry-landed Senate make this impossible. Put whatever candidate you want to replace Biden. The results will be the same or worse.
We can't even fill basic pentagon positions thanks to "Coach." But Biden should have unilaterally fixed everything. Sure.
The simplified science of it all says that if a voting method forces you to choose between candidates or rank them in a fixed order, then that very ranking will, over time, promote two dominant parties. (Arrow's Theorem)
A cardinal voting system, such as STAR, is immune to Arrow's Theorem. STAR was designed to be the absolute best voting system possible. It's easy to use, easy to count, and gives better results than any other system.
I'm a fan of MMP voting (used in Germany, New Zealand, and the Scottish/Welsh parliaments in the UK), where you vote for a district representative and a party and the parties get extra seats to ensure that the proportions balance out. It's easy for voters to understand - no ranking or rating or whatever - and it simultaneously lets you support third parties (because they'll get some seats even if they don't have a majority in any district), lets you vote for the best candidate in your particular district without regard to their party (if you like your local Republican but you hate national Republicans you can simultaneously vote for your guy + for him to be in the minority), eliminates gerrymandering (since party representation comes from a percentage of the overall vote), and makes every vote count (since even in a deep red district your blue vote still contributes to the national total for your party and therefore its share of legislative seats).
If that proves successful then we can explore other systems for national/presidential votes, but you're never going to get a serious third-party movement in the US if you insist on starting with the White House - reforms to support third-party presidential candidates are the sort of thing you do after you've got 40 or 50 minor party representatives in Congress.
The problem with multi-member districts (which are required for proportional voting) is the fact that to get rid of an incumbent, you need a vast majority to actively vote against them. For example, in a 5 member district, you need over 80% of the vote against one bad incumbent to get rid of them.
Proportional voting also explicitly makes political parties part of government. The goal is to not do that.
MMP doesn't require multi-member districts; the extra seats are not tied to a particular district, they draw from a list of names submitted by each party.
Every voting system has pros and cons. It’s impossible to create a perfect voting system because there are multiple mutually-exclusive criteria by which a system can be measured.
So it’s important in such discussions to be forthright about which criteria you consider more or less important than others.
In order to avoid the spoiler effect and to discourage trivial tactical voting. To these ends, criteria like the Later-No-Harm criterion and Favourite Betrayal are important, but one need also look at the ways in which systems that fail them do so.
Approval Voting fails LNH trivially. In a genuine three-candidate race (i.e., one where prior to the election, you know all three have a genuine chance of winning) where your honest vote is to approve of Left and Centre and to disapprove of Right, but where you more strongly approve of Left, you are disincentivised from voting honestly because that will hurt the chances of Left winning. Unfortunately in so doing you also increase the chances of Right winning, compared to if you voted honestly. Basically, you’re forced to make a decision between your honest vote which increases the chances of a mediocre result, and a dishonest vote which increases the chances of either a very good or very bad result. It’s LNH because you’re incentivised to not vote for Centre even though you honestly would have.
In IRV you get a similar outcome in theory, but what we’ve seen in practice is that it doesn’t actually play out. The difference comes down to how preferences are distributed and who gets eliminated. If Centre ends up coming last on first preferences, that’s where Favourite Betrayal comes in. In your honest vote, Centre’s preferences distribution is entirely up to those who voted Centre, which could be a mix of Left and Right, which risks Right winning. If you had voted dishonestly and put Centre ahead of Left, you’re increasing the chance that Centre isn’t eliminated first, and instead Left is, with Left votes going to Centre—a better outcome than Right winning.
But the thing is, in practice this doesn’t tend to be the case. I live in a seat where this happened in our election last year, and it turns out that people who vote for one candidate overwhelmingly tend to second preference the same candidate (at least once smaller non-viable candidates are ignored). The Australian Greens (Left) and the Australian Labor Party (Centre) actually preference each other at the same rate. And so it came down to the fact that Labor was eliminated first (after non-viable candidates) by a very narrow margin, giving almost all their next preferences to the Greens, resulting in a Greens win. Not voting strategically, in the real world, actually pays off under IRV. Under Approval, because the ability to actually express your nuanced preference doesn’t exist, tactical voting is more strongly encouraged. In summary, while LNH and Favourite Betrayal are, in a sense, “equally bad”, the former is more of a problem when looking at the real-world preferences of voters, and a system which fails the latter should be preferred over one that fails the former.
Later-no-harm is sort of a meaningless criterion that was invented by a group called Fairvote to push IRV under the name Ranked Choice.
They invented it to say that Cardinal voting systems don't let you rank preferences. Which is sort of the entire point of cardinal systems. It's not much of an issue in the real world, because if you're happy with A or B, then you put down a vote for A and B. In any large scale election, there will be enough people who have a set preference that they only chose A or B and not both. The point being, a vote for one does nothing to impact a vote for the other, because you count the votes independently of each other.
The problems of IRV are many and varied. It has to be counted in a single centralized location, which leads to problems and security issues. It still has favorite betrayal, and the more viable candidates you have, the worse it gets. This means that you have to have some strategy while voting, but it's much harder for the average voter to know if their strategy will do any good.
Then there's the issue of exhausted ballots. Again, the more viable candidates you have, the worse it gets. Most of my data is from US elections that use the system, but the city of San Francisco sees about 18% of ballots thrown out due to ballot exhaustion. That alone is horrific.
Now, switching to another plot here, STAR is not approval. Star lets you voice your true preferences for candidates in a way that Approval and even IRV do not. Take a look at this graphic again.
First off, the average person sees it and says oh, it's a 5-star review. I know how those work. Then they rate each candidate on the scale of 0-5 stars. That's actually one of the most common ways people fuck up an IRV ballot. They think it's a 5-star review and give multiple candidates the same number.
So the next part of STAR is the automatic runoff. You take the two highest scored candidates and then put them head to head, but you use the preferences on the ballots to do it. If A is rated higher than B on that ballot, then the vote goes to A. If A and B are the same rating, then that ballot is counted as "No Preference". And the number of those ballots is also released at the end.
STAR gives you so much more information about candidates than any other system. You have an instant approval rating in the form of a 5-star average for every candidate.
Later-no-harm is sort of a meaningless criterion that was invented by a group called Fairvote to push IRV
Oh sorry, I thought we were here having a civil conversation about an interesting and complicated subject. If you’re going to start off with that sort of tribalistic bad faith bullshit I’m out.
IRV is a terrible system, I know in another comment you said it was your favorite, but it's almost as bad as First Past the Post, and actually worse in a few areas.
And seriously, Later-no-harm is meaningless. It's basically a "did you vote for this person? They might win". It's like, no shit, that's how elections work.
If you want an actual issue with elections, look at the Monotonicity criterion. IRV fails this one. You can actually almost guarantee your most hated candidate wins, by voting for your favorite in the first round.
This brings up the issue of ballot exhaustion again. If your first round pick survives multiple rounds before being eliminated, your ballot suddenly doesn't have any valid candidates on it. This means your ballot might as well have been empty.
If you had not voted for your favorite, your vote could have gone to one of the others and helped them win, instead no, all that information about your preferences is just thrown out because of a stupid, arbitrary rule. If every single voter puts Candidate B as their second choice, Candidate B has 100% approval, and yet, under IRV, Candidate B is the first eliminated.
Another issue. Ranking candidates in order tells us nothing about how you actually feel about them. We know you like number 1, but number 2 could be anything between Jesus and Hitler. There's no information there, just that you like them less than 1.
It’s my favourite single-winner, because I’ve looked at all the others and decided the downsides of the others outweigh the downsides of IRV. But I’d still rank any proportional system much higher than IRV. And ironically, STV (which is a multi-winner version of IRV) is among my least favourite, due to its relatively limited almost quasi-proportional nature.
Later-no-harm is meaningless. It’s basically a “did you vote for this person? They might win”
Well, no. It’s that by adding more candidates to your ballot who were not your favourite choice, you could actually decrease the chance your favourite candidate wins. It’s that a tactical dishonest vote can be more optimal than an honest vote. And that’s bad. That’s bad in the real world.
I know IRV fails in a lot of theoretical ways. But when it’s used in the real world that just doesn’t matter. I mean, it could theoretically matter, but with how real people actually vote, it doesn’t. I explained how that happens earlier.
This brings up the issue of ballot exhaustion again
Definitely a problem. And unfortunately I’ve seen it matter, with some candidates dishonestly promoting “just vote 1” in the closest thing Australia has to the type of voter discouragement campaigns that are so rife in America. Federally and in my state, Australia uses compulsory preferential voting. You have to number every candidate. This eliminates the exhausted ballot problem. Our local council elections are where exhaustion becomes a problem. The solution isn’t to move to an inferior voting system, it’s to use the same compulsory preferential system used in other elections.
We know you like number 1, but number 2 could be anything between Jesus and Hitler. There’s no information there, just that you like them less than 1.
This is a feature, not a bug. The fact that you’re thinking about it as a disadvantage says a lot to me about why you like cardinal systems. I fundamentally disagree.
It doesn’t matter if I love one candidate, like another, and hate the third, or like one, dislike another, and hate the third. What matters is who my vote helps elect. And I want the first one to win, or if they can’t, I want the second one to win. And that’s what IRV perfectly represents. In a cardinal system, if I vote 5, 2, 1, as is my honest preference, all that does is help my least favourite candidate win if my favourite doesn’t, compared to if I voted 5,5,1, or 5,4,1. That’s how any cardinal system inevitably devolves into approval. And again with approval, I lose the ability to distinguish preference. You say it’s bad that my second preference could be Jesus or Hitler, but at least with IRV I can clearly say I like Jesus more than Hitler, instead of just saying I “approve” of both because the only remaining option is Pol Pot. At the point where I know Jesus isn’t going to win, it doesn’t matter how much more I prefer Hitler over Pol Pot. I just want to ensure Pol Pot doesn’t win. Ordinal voting better represents how a rational voter thinks about the candidates than cardinal voting does. And that’s why it’s better.
Okay, you take two of the worst parts of IRV and pretend they're somehow good. That's mind-boggling.
Ballot exhaustion is not solved by compulsory preferential voting. It only hides the fact that you now have to rank all the candidates. So when your middle preferences are eliminated before your first is, you've now been forced to elect your most hated option.
And again, later-no-harm is still a “did you vote for this person? They might win” criterion. Because if you don't like someone, don't vote for them.
Finally, you still have no clue how STAR works. It's not 1-5. It's 0-5. And the Automatic runoff part is pretty important, that part of it means that your vote goes to the finalist who you rated higher, not to merely the person who got the most points in the first round.
I think one other important detail though. While IRV is my preferred single-winner system, I fundamentally think that single-winner systems are flawed. Elections should avoid them as much as possible, in favour of proportional multi-winner systems.
This is by design, they want to lower the standard of living for the average American, so that we get more and more grateful for table scraps. We have created this culture where when someone complains that they don’t have enough to eat, we blame the complainer instead of wondering why one of the richest Nations on the planet, can’t spare $20 for a coffee and donut from time to time.
theguardian.com
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