There was a podcast I listened to some time back where one of the people was describing exotic pets, particularly lions and tigers, and how their uncle had kept some, and they were told to never let the cats play bite, because they would keep doing it into adulthood, and then you'd have a dead owner.
This is why Joe Exotic's "Tiger petting zoo" had such a high body count. Turns out that meth and tigers shouldn't mix.
alt textScreenshot from rosypiriani @ instagram: Stop calling Gaza an “open air prison.” Prisons are filled with convicted criminals. Prisons have food. Prisons have water. Prisons have electricity. Prisons have medical treatment. Gaza is not a prison; it is a concentration camp.
The US Army Corps of Engineers is planning to barge 36 million gallons of freshwater daily into the lower Mississippi River near New Orleans as saltwater intrusion from the Gulf of Mexico continues to threaten drinking water supply, officials said Friday....
We're not quite there yet, but we will be in a few more years.
It will likely kick off with China against Russia. See, China is also in the midst of a massive years long drought, and just on the other side of Mongolia is the largest freshwater lake on the planet.
China actually had a bottling plant being built on the shores of the lake until Russia said no.
Hell, Eastern Russia has a lot of resources that China really needs. So while the two countries are currently allies, the alliance is an uneasy one.
The "censorship" from before Musk took over was mostly banning hate speech, death threats, and calls for violence. Sometimes all three were in the same tweet.
Now it's banning union organizing and people wanting to be paid a fair wage for a day's work. Totally the same.
Now it's openly full of Nazis, because Musk unbanned them.
But you're right, it is a private company, and thus not subject to any definition of free speech.
Here's the thing. People do have free speech and can publicly say that they think the new twitter is a Nazi fulled dumpster fire run by a racist man-baby who got rich off of an Apartheid era emerald mine.
The Hindu far-right’s actions in Nuh, in India’s Haryana, echo Israel’s policies of trying to delete histories and legacies of the Palestinian people....
Government policies have included the arbitrary detention of Uyghurs in state-sponsored internment camps,[11][12] forced labor,[13][14] suppression of Uyghur religious practices,[15] political indoctrination,[16] severe ill-treatment,[17] forced sterilization,[18] forced contraception,[19][20] and forced abortion.[21][22]
Seems like elimination is the goal. Failing that, forced assimilation and banning of any cultural identity.
After the most recent revelations, Thomas’s defenders have gone conspicuously silent. Organs like National Review and conservative legal apparatchik Ed Whelan, who loudly dismissed evidence of wrongdoing by Thomas, have had nothing to say about Thomas’s many billionaire patrons....
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
If he’s caught (which I think will be soon) this is a great way to guarantee the maximum sentence. If he’s not caught, he gets to spend the rest of his life hiding and afraid. Either way, the public wins… but I’d rather see him in prison.
The questions is, why was he on house arrest after the guilty verdict? I could understand house arrest during the trial, but after the verdict is rendered?
As always, conservatives are not pro-life, they are anti-women. Everything they do is about control.
To the conservative mind, white men should be in control, and all others should be lower down on the hierarchy, obeying those above them, and keeping those below in line. If viewed through that lens, every argument conservatives make becomes consistent. They want to be in control, and will burn the world to stay in power.
U.S. Senator Joe Manchin, a maverick Democrat who has often bucked party leadership, told a radio station in his home state of West Virginia on Thursday that he is “thinking seriously” about leaving the party....
He's much more likely to pull from republican voters than democratic. So he should go ahead and try. All of these conservatives who don't like Trump wanting to run as third party candidates, thinking they'll get support from the Democratic voters... Kind of makes me laugh.
The white supremacist group Patriot Front is suing a left-wing activist for allegedly infiltrating the group and revealing the identities of members, USA Today reported. The lawsuit says the alleged "doxxings" cost the members their jobs and personal relationships. As USA Today points out, Patriot F...
Right-wing mentality says that it's alright when they do something, but if you do it back to them, that's cheating and shouldn't be allowed. You know, spoiled 5-year-old shit.
The second indictment in Florida was a superseding indictment, It replaces the previous indictment to add in new charges. It has to reaffirm the previous charges as well.
So it's currently true that Trump currently has two indictments against him, even though he's been indicted three times.
I've never actually seen a democrat or true independent who supports Kennedy. The only people treating him as anything other than a joke are republicans.
The people not really paying attention, but still wanting to vote democratic, will just vote for Biden. The idiots who claim to be left leaning but hate Biden more than Trump are more likely to vote for Trump than Kennedy, but some might support him...
But not when the only news that pretends that Kennedy is a viable candidate is Fox.
Conservative groups have crafted a plan for demolishing the federal government’s efforts to counter climate change — and it wouldn’t stop with President Joe Biden’s policies....
The Nazis actually had a policy of killing their slave doctors every 6 months. There was no, "until they stop being helpful". It was mandated to be 6 months. (but some camps were slightly more lax about it)
It was all pretty horrific, and the worst part is, the Nazis themselves never had very competent doctors, which is why they forced actually competent Jewish doctors to carry out the twisted experiments.
There are very few books written by people who survived the camps, and the one by Miklos Nyiszli is likely the best account of what these doctors were subject to.
I was searching info on a crypto scam and saw that now reddit has jumped on the crypto bandwagon too? Everything must be on a blockchain for some reason
Except that if you control the majority of computers that said blockchain is stored on, you can just edit the chain. And now that's the "official" story.
Apparently there was a guillotine on the French Flag that had the word spez below the blade. Admins cheated and replaced it all with white pixels to match the background of the flag.
The amendment to the defense authorization bill would forbid service members from contacting the Military Religious Freedom Foundation or its leadership.
His first show brought in over 26 million “video views,” which is a Twitter metric that records a view as anyone who watches a video for more than 2 seconds. While the metric’s reliability has been questioned, it has nevertheless declined significantly since the show’s launch, with Carlson’s most recent show only...
To be fair, Facebook employs a man named Joel Kaplan as their head of Global Policy. Formerly their head of US Policy, Formerly a Bush White House Toady.
Kaplan is the reason who all the right-wing conspiracy websites pretending to be news orgs weren't banned from Facebook news feeds. He personally exempted them all from community standards and Facebook terms of service about lying and shit. He then ordered left leaning news to be scrutinized more heavily.
He's been stuffing the ranks of Facebook's middle and upper management with loyalty tested conservatives.
Kaplan also refused to make changes to the algorithm that would have helped fight hate speech, because anger and outrage drive higher engagement.
He's also ignoring at least three ongoing racial cleansings that are being actively powered by Facebook, because they're happening in countries that are not the US.
So in a way, it really is a vehicle for the fascist control of the population, or at least a fascist friendly media stream.
In a phone call, Trump tried to pressure Arizona's governor to overturn the state's 2020 election results. Trump then asked his vice president to repeatedly follow up.
14th Amendment Section 3. No person shall be a Senator or Representative in Congress, or elector of President and Vice President, or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any State, who, having previously taken an oath, as a member of Congress, or as an officer of the United States, or as a member of any State legislature, or as an executive or judicial officer of any State, to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof. But Congress may, by a vote of two-thirds of each House, remove such disability.
One could easily argue that an attempted coup qualifies as rebellion, or the January 6th insurrection, which qualifies all on its own.
The ex-president praised the Supreme Court’s devastating decisions during a summit for Moms for Liberty — a right-wing, anti-government group — on Friday
Progressives know damn well that Republicans have already stacked the court. It's the establishment Democrats that are whining about an imaginary retaliation. You know, the centrists who are basically Republican lite, the assholes who whine about how extreme the Left-most parts of the party are, while ignoring how extreme the entire right-wing has always been.
We've seen this shit play out dozens of times in the past, the centrists say we progressives need to moderate ourselves to appeal more broadly, that we need to compromise or lose support. The reality plays out that any compromise we make is what loses us our support, and the centrists then side with the extremists on the right to hurt us more.
It didn't originally exist in the Senate either, but the worse Vice President we ever had, decided that the Senate had too many rules and got rid of most of them. One of those original rules allowed any senator to call for a vote, even when someone was on the floor speaking.
This rule, called the previous question for some reason, still exists in the House, along with the Hour Rule which limits the time a Representative can spend holding the floor.
So we already have the framework to end the filibuster, but conservatives on both sides of the aisle like it because it means that they can thwart progress.
Of course, when it gets in the way, Republicans quickly carve out an exception for themselves, like they did with Judicial appointments.
The left doesn't say that one man doesn't have the power to pull strings, the left says that there's no evidence of Soros doing it.
A subtle distinction, but an important one.
Leonard Leo literally hand-picked every judge that Donald Trump appointed, all 234 of them, including 3 supreme court justices.
Leo then paid for nonsense cases to be filed in jurisdictions with friendly (read his own hand-picked) judges. These cases were all based on lies. Because it never mattered if there was any truth to them. They then get kicked up the chain to Leo's hand-picked supreme court, where the justices rule how Leo wanted from the beginning. Well, 3 hand-picked, and 1 bribed, all that's needed from there is to get Alito to fall in line, and that man has Fox News brain so bad that it's scary.
And that's how one man can shape the law in any way he wants, even if congress and the presidency are controlled by Democrats
It’s one thing to have differing views, but I’ve seen enough attempted reddit migrations to be relieved that the popular communities in the fediverse so far haven’t been about crazy racist stuff or other extreme right bullshit....
They already said quite clearly that they're transphobic. The "I don't think children should undergo gender or sex transition" is almost verbatim an anti-trans talking point.
Here's some actual research on the subject of trans people, including trans youth, and suicide risk. With citations;
Bauer, et al., 2015: Transition vastly reduces risks of suicide attempts, and the farther along in transition someone is the lower that risk gets.
de Vries, et al, 2014: A clinical protocol of a multidisciplinary team with mental health professionals, physicians, and surgeons, including puberty suppression, followed by cross-sex hormones and gender reassignment surgery, provides trans youth the opportunity to develop into well-functioning young adults. All showed significant improvement in their psychological health, and they had notably lower rates of internalizing psychopathology than previously reported among trans children living as their natal sex. Well-being was similar to or better than same-age young adults from the general population.
Gorton, 2011 (Prepared for the San Francisco Department of Public Health): “In a cross-sectional study of 141 transgender patients, Kuiper and Cohen-Kittenis found that after medical intervention and treatments, suicide fell from 19 percent to zero percent in transgender men and from 24 percent to 6 percent in transgender women.)”
Murad, et al., 2010: "Significant decrease in suicidality post-treatment. The average reduction was from 30% pretreatment to 8% post treatment."
De Cuypere, et al., 2006: Rate of suicide attempts dropped dramatically from 29.3% to 5.1% after receiving medical and surgical treatment among Dutch patients treated from 1986-2001.
UK study: "Suicidal ideation and actual attempts reduced after transition, with 63% thinking about or attempting suicide more before they transitioned and only 3% thinking about or attempting suicide more post-transition.
Heylens, 2014: Found that the psychological state of transgender people "resembled those of a general population after hormone therapy was initiated."
Perez-Brumer, 2017: "These findings suggest that interventions that address depression and school-based victimization could decrease gender identity-based disparities in suicidal ideation."
Here's a study showing that children know what gender they prefer and don't change their minds on it.
I don't know, I'm always in favor of banning transphobes. Their arguments are always based in hatred, not any verifiable science. I gave you the science.
Fierce ( startrek.website )
xkcd #2877: Fever ( imgs.xkcd.com )
xkcd.com/2877...
Jonathan Frakes Returning To Direct For ‘Star Trek: Strange New Worlds’ Season 3 ( trekmovie.com )
It's not that hard ( kolektiva.social )
alt textScreenshot from rosypiriani @ instagram: Stop calling Gaza an “open air prison.” Prisons are filled with convicted criminals. Prisons have food. Prisons have water. Prisons have electricity. Prisons have medical treatment. Gaza is not a prison; it is a concentration camp.
A touching quote from Nimoy's "I am Spock" book (1995) ( startrek.website )
Army Corps of Engineers to barge 36 million gallons of freshwater a day as saltwater intrusion threatens New Orleans-area drinking water | CNN ( www.cnn.com )
The US Army Corps of Engineers is planning to barge 36 million gallons of freshwater daily into the lower Mississippi River near New Orleans as saltwater intrusion from the Gulf of Mexico continues to threaten drinking water supply, officials said Friday....
Automaker CEO Elon Musk Strips UAW Twitter Verification as Union Strikes Against Big Three ( theintercept.com )
Modi’s lesson from Israel: Demolish Muslim homes, erase their history ( www.aljazeera.com )
The Hindu far-right’s actions in Nuh, in India’s Haryana, echo Israel’s policies of trying to delete histories and legacies of the Palestinian people....
Even Clarence Thomas’s Law Clerks Can’t Defend His Misconduct ( nymag.com )
After the most recent revelations, Thomas’s defenders have gone conspicuously silent. Organs like National Review and conservative legal apparatchik Ed Whelan, who loudly dismissed evidence of wrongdoing by Thomas, have had nothing to say about Thomas’s many billionaire patrons....
Bernie Sanders urges left to back Biden to stop ‘very dangerous’ Trump ( www.theguardian.com )
Leftwing senator advises ‘unification of progressive people in general’ because threat from Republican ex-president is too great...
Proud Boy Christopher Worrell, on house arrest in Jan. 6 case, disappears ahead of sentencing ( apnews.com )
If he’s caught (which I think will be soon) this is a great way to guarantee the maximum sentence. If he’s not caught, he gets to spend the rest of his life hiding and afraid. Either way, the public wins… but I’d rather see him in prison.
[MSNBC] Opinion | Why "pro-life" Texas is arguing in court that a fetus has no rights ( www.msnbc.com )
US Senator Joe Manchin says 'thinking seriously' about leaving Democratic Party ( www.reuters.com )
U.S. Senator Joe Manchin, a maverick Democrat who has often bucked party leadership, told a radio station in his home state of West Virginia on Thursday that he is “thinking seriously” about leaving the party....
NEWS: Patriot Front sues left-wing activist who infiltrated the hate group and named members ( www.rawstory.com )
The white supremacist group Patriot Front is suing a left-wing activist for allegedly infiltrating the group and revealing the identities of members, USA Today reported. The lawsuit says the alleged "doxxings" cost the members their jobs and personal relationships. As USA Today points out, Patriot F...
Donald Trump mugshot promised in looming indictment ( www.newsweek.com )
Robert F Kennedy Jr’s campaign bankrolled by Republican mega-donor ( www.theguardian.com )
A few notable quotes from the article follow:...
Conservatives have already written a climate plan for Trump’s second term ( www.politico.com )
Conservative groups have crafted a plan for demolishing the federal government’s efforts to counter climate change — and it wouldn’t stop with President Joe Biden’s policies....
News: White House slams Fox News’ Greg Gutfeld for saying ‘useful’ Jews survived Nazi camps ( www.independent.co.uk )
Museum on site of former concentration camp said host wasn’t being historically accurate
WTF is this new crypto scam on reddit? Karma is now on the blockchain???? ( feddit.it )
I was searching info on a crypto scam and saw that now reddit has jumped on the crypto bandwagon too? Everything must be on a blockchain for some reason
Biden draws laughs after touting Marjorie Taylor Greene ‘endorsement’ ( www.independent.co.uk )
The president is leaning into the GOP congresswoman’s description of him as following in the footsteps of Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson
RFK Jr replaces Trump as Russia's favorite candidate ( www.newsweek.com )
A Russian state TV commentator praised Kennedy for injecting "his pro-Russian talking points about Ukraine into the mainstream."
Trump Threatens Would Be ‘Very Dangerous’ If Jack Smith Sends Him To Jail In New Interview ( www.mediaite.com )
Trump threatened it would be "very dangerous" if he were jailed over the new charges he's likely facing, citing the "passion" of his fan base.
r/places is back up, hopefully there's plenty of this going around this time ( media.kbin.social )
Ban on troops communicating with religious freedom group clears House ( www.armytimes.com )
The amendment to the defense authorization bill would forbid service members from contacting the Military Religious Freedom Foundation or its leadership.
Views for Tucker Carlson’s new Twitter show have dropped 86 percent since its launch ( deadstate.org )
His first show brought in over 26 million “video views,” which is a Twitter metric that records a view as anyone who watches a video for more than 2 seconds. While the metric’s reliability has been questioned, it has nevertheless declined significantly since the show’s launch, with Carlson’s most recent show only...
Twitter traffic sinks in wake of changes and launch of rival platform Threads ( www.theguardian.com )
Data shows the micro-blogging website has been shedding users since early 2023, not long after Elon Musk’s takeover
Trump pressured Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey to overturn 2020 election ( www.washingtonpost.com )
In a phone call, Trump tried to pressure Arizona's governor to overturn the state's 2020 election results. Trump then asked his vice president to repeatedly follow up.
Trump Threatens to Appoint ‘Maybe Even Nine’ Supreme Court Justices if Elected ( www.rollingstone.com )
The ex-president praised the Supreme Court’s devastating decisions during a summit for Moms for Liberty — a right-wing, anti-government group — on Friday
The king of dark money effectively controls the US supreme court now | Joel Warner ( www.theguardian.com )
From its recent rulings to its billionaire donor scandals, this supreme court term has been defined by judicial activist Leonard Leo
Unlike previous attempts at trying reddit alternatives (like Voat), kbin and much of the lemmyverse doesn’t seem to be plagued with extreme far right buffoonery. ( kbin.social )
It’s one thing to have differing views, but I’ve seen enough attempted reddit migrations to be relieved that the popular communities in the fediverse so far haven’t been about crazy racist stuff or other extreme right bullshit....