If you chose to eat shit now, you’ll keep on getting served only shit.
This vote is not just a vote on the next president, it’s also a vote for what kind of candidate the DNC will chose for future Presidential Elections.
This is very much a scenario from Game Theory were there are two sides, one side which decides how to approportion something between both (in this case, the DNC choses how much the Democrat candidate represents lefties) whilst the other side can only “accept” or “reject” (i.e. lefties voting of not for a Democrat candidate, leading to a Democrat victory or defeat) and if the second side rejects nobody gets anything (i.e. a Republican President gets elected and the DNC don’t get a guy who mainly represents their interests and the lefties don’t get a guy who represents their interests a tiny bit).
What Game Theory shows us in this kind of scenario is that if it’s a multiple round scenario (in this case, each round is an election, with each time the DNC de facto chosing upfront how much the Democrat candidate represents lefties and lefties chosing to vote or not for him, which often decides the election) if the second side keeps “accepting” no matter how little they get, then the first side will never improve their proposal, and sometimes it will even be worse.
This is actually what you see happen in American politics: only when the lefties refuse to vote Democrat does the DNC, in the subsequent election, chose a slightly more leftie candidate.
The whole idea that lefties should always vote for “better a tiny bit representativeness now than none at all now” and completelly ignore the implications of that for future rounds is an incredibly short-sighted (or maybe self-serving, depending on the real interest of those pushing that idea) ultra-simplification.
Note that this doesn’t mean lefties must “reject” now, it means that they should be considering not just the current round but also subsequent rounds for their accept-vs-reject decision since a “reject” now does mean getting nothing this round (instead of a tiny bit which some will see as too little but others will not) in order to induce the other side to improve their proposals in subsequent rounds, which is a risk.
Yeah those are basically the Scenarios with two big corrections in scenario #2:
The next will probably be worse than Biden since the DNC, upon seeing that lefties will even vote for a candidate that supports a quasi-Nazi regime activelly commiting a Genocide will likely conclude that they will not rebel not matter what, so expect an even further shift to the right of the Democrat party.
The Democratic Party is not centrist, not even close: it’s pro-Oligarchy, which is an anti-Democratic hard-right position (anti-Democratic because it places Money above The State, which is the Power that voters supposedly control hence gives primacy to Money and those who have most of it, hard-right because defending that those who have most Money get the most Power and choices is in direct opposition to Equality, even just that of Opportunities).
As for the DNC not being able to stop a left of center candidate, just look at what they did against Sanders, even before counting the super-candidates which were going to vote against him anyway and override the popular vote. The idea that Obama is in any way, form or shape left of Obama is hilarious for anybody who, like me, was in Finance at the time of the 2008 Crash and had a front row seat to see how exactly Obama unconditionally saved the wealthiest people and made everybody else pay the price - just because the guy is a true political songbird who makes amazing speeches doesn’t mean “the greatest good for the greatest number” - the core principle of the Left - is even in the tinyiest of ways part of his principles. The Clinton-vs-Obama primary was a fight between two kinds of neoliberals that put in opposition two factions within the American Elites, not a fight between somebody representing the average American and somebody representing the Elites.
We don’t know really how bad a Trump presidency will be, though we know for sure just how far to the right are Biden’s principles, but yeah, you are right that a Trump presidency might (it’s all speculation until it actually happens) be incredibly destructive, which is why I pointed out in my comment (last paragraph) that it’s definitelly a risk and people should consider all things in their voting decision.
Personally I think either of them will lead to the death for good of Democracy in America, though doing it via Biden will probably mean it will happen with more steps, but that’s just my opinion based on the trend so far (and, that I expect that a guy who supports what are basically the modern Nazis whilst they mass murder civilians because of being from another etnicity is either a sociopath or an extreme racist and that means he will just as happilly fuck up the lives of Americans - though, no doubt, unlike Trump he will be telling them that’s not what he’s doing - just as as he is right now happilly helping out murdering en mass Palestinians: good people don’t knowingly help others commit mass murder).
I might be wrong on all of this and even if I’m not, not being American or living in America I’m way more isolated and have no real stake on that choice, so I openly admit that I have the priviledge of being able to hold a Thinking Person’s highly intellectual position on this because either way it impacts me very little personally, so I can just analyse the whole situation and point out the broader implications of the voting decision for a leftie and the profound hypocrisy of the Propaganda which tries to deceive people with the idea that it’s a simple consequences free choice, with no real additional risk either way for my own future.
People who think rather than be mindless tribalists can approve of a specific action of a group without approving of their ideology or other actions of theirs.
For example I approve of what the Biden Adminstration has done towards Ukraine whilst not approving of their ideology that puts the Democratic control of people’s life in a nation (i.e. the vote that controls the leaders of the state who make decisions for how the state acts for the good of the many) below Oligarchic control (I.e. Money decides) by defending that the state should not regulate anything that might impact Money or “interfere in the Market”, and do not approve of their unconditional support of the quasi-Nazis know as Zionists even in the middle of them committing a Genocide.
One has to wonder if the endless posts by this user constantly trying to misportray “lefties” as basically all “commies” (including a cartoon the other day where the leftie character wore a red shirt with a hammer and a sickle just in case we were in any doubt what he thought “lefties” were) isn’t very purposeful tribalist propaganda from a very specific American Political Tribe that passes itself for left over there whilst being pro-Oligarch hard-right.
Certainly this endless hammering of the same drum has a very similar stink as the kind of argumentation we get from mindless Trumpists (pre-made generalizations about other people presented as “I know best what they are [even though I’ve never been anywhere close to that political side]”), clearly driven by the same mindless tribalism and structured as broad strokes group slandering Propaganda (it’s hard to stroke more broadly than the entire Left) only this messaging is coming from the pro-Oligarch American Right rather than from the Fascist American Right.
If that’s you intention, you’re not at all being clear in making the distinction.
A lot of your criticism is against doing things which can just as easilly be the natural conclusions of having run of the mill Leftwing or even just Humanist principles (say: “though shall not kill tens of thousands of children due to their etnicity or help doing so” or “politics should aim for the greatest good for the greatest number in preference to making an aggregated Economic number larger”) as they can be the mindless idiological parrotings from actual “commies”.
For example, one needs not be an instinctive pro-Russia tankie playing mind games to somehow support Trump, to state that voting for somebody activelly supporting an etnic genocide being commited by the supporters of a quasi-Nazi ideology would be too much for anybody with Humanist principles: absolutelly normal general Humanist Principles such as “though shall not kill innocents such as children” (which aren’t at exclusive of the Left) explain that posture of not voting for any candidate.
I mean, I’ve seen posts of yours that I totally agree with (because they align with my Principles), but in anything which is to do with Political Factions, in my view you totally abandon principled thinking and just go full on tribalist often passing the impression that you have the very same kind of “everybody has a tribe” expectation as the Far-Right muppets.
Might want to consider that many people don’t have Tribes (were people blindly follow the chief and untinkingly parrot the tribal slogans), and instead they have Principles, so support or not things based on how much those things align with their Principles not with any Party Line.
My impression here in Lemmy is that there are a lot more Lefties By Principle than Members Of Self-Proclaimed Leftwing Tribes, though there are certainly a lot more of the latter than in the average English-speaking social media.
All I see there is a pier still serving the purpose it was always meant to serve: supporting for the “we tried to help Palestinians” fable from the Biden Administration and other Zionist allies.
Ukraine should be allowed to strike military bases on Russian territory from which Moscow carries out missile attacks against Ukraine, French President Emmanuel Macron said on May 28, Le Monde reported....
People have no idea what true wealth really is like, not even close.
I remember this one time I was living in a working class area of London whilst working as a freelance software developer in Investment Banking front-office, which means making systems for actual Traders and Analysts, the kind of people who get millions in bonuses every year.
So I’m waiting in line to pay at the local supermarket and some old lady dressed in a nouveau riche style (you know the kind: old lady that thinks she’s poshly dressed but instead just looks overdone) has a till openned just for her and somebody from the supermarket is helping her pack her shopping. A different old lady, behind me in the queue for another till, in manner and dress clearly working class, turns to me and says: “Look at her, she’s involved in the Council and is rich”.
Now, remember, I was working with people who got millions in bonuses to work or the trully rich. They weren’t rich, they were the employees of the rich.
So I turned to her and told her: “Madam, if she was rich she wouldn’t be shopping herself at the supermarket”.
I’ve also seen pretty similar things amongst the older members of my extended family in my homeland, all of which come from poor origins: one of my uncles saved maybe half a million euros over a lifetime of owning and working long hours at his familiy operated restaurant and he thinks he’s rich.
I suspect this kind of shit is incredibly common: all but a handful of people are so distance from the ultra-wealthy that they have no clue of just how far from them they are, and the result of that is that you have old people with a bit of savings and shop keepers who make a tiny bit more money than the average working-Joe, voting for policies that benefit billionaires.
Neoliberalism wants that The State, which is led by people chosen by vote with the votes of everybody - rich or poor - counting the same (ish) to stop “regulating”, “interfering in the Market” and in general opposing the Power of Money. The Power of Money remember, is not at all equal for everybody, quite the contrary.
So essentially Neoliberalism, which is what the Liberals who control the DNC want, seeks to replace Democracy - were the greatest power is the one controlled by the vote - with Oligarchy, were the greatest power is that of Money.
Outside the moral arena, the only difference between Oligarchy and Fascism is that in the former the Pyramid of Power has the Moneyed at the top, then The State, then the riff-raff, whilst in the latter it’s The State, the Moneyed and then the riff-raff.
Well, the most well known of all national socialists, were not nationalists (they most definitelly weren’t for all of the nation, and claimed to be for a specific race) and even less socialists.
Seems to be a general rule that party names are complete total bollocks: does anybody trully believes that the Democrats want that everybody, rich and poor, has the same amount of control over the future of their country?
Most of Mankind is not American and even in a perfect Democracy (which the US is not, not even in the same universe as one) the leaders only ever have a duty towards the citizens of that Democracy - i.e. the voters - not the rest of Mankind.
Basically, for any person who lives outside a big and military powerful country, that country is just as bad being a Democracy as it is being an Authoritarian regime because both kinds of regimes don’t give a rat’s arse about outsiders. I mean, the leaders in the Democracy will naturally use beautifull words and say they “really do care” - because they’re politicians trained to talk a pretty talk in order to win elections - but when it comes what they actually think and do they care just as little as the Authoritarian ones.
The only reason why Democracies are a bit safer to be around of is because, if they’re real Democracies (i.e. have the interests of all of their citizens as top priority rather than being “vote for which agent of the oligarchs you would like to have” like America) they’re way less likelly to initiate wars without significant upsides because it’s not in the interest of that country’s citizens to suffer due to War, whilst Authoritarian regimes will happilly sacrifice their population in a War if that is good for the leader(s).
So the reality is that for Mankind it’s unclear if the end of Pax Americana will be a good thing, a bad thing or just a change of assholes.
You original argument wasn’t about what’s good for “Democracy”, it was about what’s good for “Mankind” - they’re quite different things: as I pointed out, Democracy somewhere, even if perfect, isn’t good for people elsewhere (because it doesn’t represent them at all), and that’s without going into the whole point of “Is a Democracy which is deeply subverted (like in the US at the moment) actually a good thing even for the locals?” or maybe “How subverted must a Democracy be before it turns into a bad thing even for locals?”.
I think your NATO point is indirectly largelly about America because most of the military power in NATO is that of the US and if NATO collapsed without an American power collapse (or just America turning isolationist), America would still be a major military power in its own right, and the EU (which does have a mutual defense part in its treaties, but which not really used ATM because NATO exists and works) would be as well (and a NATO collapse would force strengthening EU internal military cooperation, something which people like Macron have already been pushing for) and they would be facing the likes of Russia and China with parity and would likely align as two big blocks when need just like China aligns with Russia because of convenience, not mutual love.
The other alternative NATO collapse scenario, what I call the nasty scenario, would be a total collapse of whatever is left of Democracy in America (in turn leading to a collapse of NATO) or at least extreme isolationism, which would leave EU vs China (+Russia as its poodle) and America in “splenderous” isolationism or worse. However in that scenario my point still stands that for all the unalligned nations in the World it wouldn’t really matter if dominance was of “Democratic” nations or “Authoritarian” ones because neither regime represents foreigners.
I do however agree that the secret for stability for Mankind is a multipolar world, not because one side is “Democratic” but because when there are more than one dominant side, attacks against unalligned little guys by one of the sides tend to pull in support from other sides of the multi-pollar world, making them far more risky than they would be in a World with a single dominant power.
They’re trying to impose an obligation or task on a customer after the purchase, even if it’s only the customer having to go through the trouble of getting the refund (which is a task they were not informed about before the purchase).
If it’s not before the sale it’s void and even in some cases before the sale (for example bait and switch, were you’re mislead with fake contract conditions until the last minute) it’s void.
The whole point is that they must be clear upfront about any conditions attached when the customer is making the decision to buy and adding any conditions after the sale is not acceptable even if the seller gives options (such as refunds) because the customer has a right to use the product under the conditions at the time of the sale and cannot legally be forced otherwise, including forced to refund.
Well, this is because it’s access to Money that determines power, not actual merit.
That’s the purest Capitalism you can think of and you see it at such an extreme level in present day Tech Startup Culture because nowadays it’s basically the Even Wilder Wild West Of Finance so it operates by the same principles of Finance - (I actually went from Investment Banking to Startups back in the UK a few years ago and for me it looked a lot like the Founder and Investor level culture of the latter was very similar to that in the wildest bits of the former). Back in the 90s Startups weren’t quite like that, but nowadays it’s different.
That kind of thing also operates at the people level: I’ve seen Startups with so-so ideas get jump-started with a couple of millions because mommy and daddy of a main founder are rich whilst ideas with a lot better legs to go places keep limping along unable to generate sufficient cash flow to takeoff or to get enough investment to do what’s needed to generate more cash flow, until running out of founds.
What survives is either those with access to lots of no questions asked money upfront (which actually works because a well funded half-arsed idea can still triumph in the market over barelly funded good ideas) or those who manage to portray their stuff as paradygm-changing (“The next Google!!!”) which why one sees incredible levels of bullshit in the Startup space and endless jumping on hype-trains (like, for example, anybody looking for funding now will be pitching “something-something-AI !!!”)
What followed was a wave of shooting and arson attacks across 11 Palestinian villages in which a dozen homes and more than 100 cars were torched, thousands of animals were slaughtered, four people were shot dead and scores of others were seriously wounded.
You know how Google’s new feature called AI Overviews is prone to spitting out wildly incorrect answers to search queries? In one instance, AI Overviews told a user to use glue on pizza to make sure the cheese won’t slide off (pssst…please don’t do this.)...
The problem is that given the way they combine things is determine by probability, even training it with the greatest bestest of data, the LLM is still going to halucinate because it’s combining multiple sources word by word (roughly) guided only by probabilities derived from language, not logic.
If you train you LLM on exclusivelly Nazi literature (to pick a wild example) don’t expect it to by chance end up making points similar to Marx’s Das Kapital.
(Personally I think what might be really funny - in the sense of laughter inducing - would be to purposefull train an LLM exclusivelly on a specific kind of weird material).
More than a thousand Harvard students walked out of their commencement ceremony yesterday to support 13 undergraduates who were barred from graduating after they participated in the Gaza solidarity encampment in Harvard Yard....
Oh, yeah, I agree with you that at a systemic level, for-profit education isn’t serving the best interests of people in general or even of a country.
And it’s simply due to how any private company works: their objective is to maximize shareholder (or stakeholder, for companies which don’t have shares) returns, nothing else - they might provide the “customer” with something positive if that’s what it takes to generate said returns, but what you see very often in complex enough situations or those where the final outcomes for the “customer” take a long time to materialize is the companies selling something that ultimatelly doesn’t provide the promised benefit to the customer.
The For-profit motivation has no place in things which are strategical for a country’s future and its people, and that includes Education IMHO.
Personally I’m fortunate to have been born in a country where higher education is mainly a Public service (there are a few Private Universities nowadays, but they’re not considered the best ones) and selection for entrance is reasonably meritocratic (based entirelly on grades and domain specific entrance tests, though people who went to better highschools in nicer neighbourhoods or whose parents were themselves highly educated, provided them a good environment and taught them good practices like reading, still have some advantage).
Seeing a lot of this lately... (lemmy.world)
Via Berkeley Mews
Positively bizarre to praise racist far-right theocrats (lemmy.world)
US pier constructed off Gaza has broken apart (www.cnn.com)
Macron: Ukraine must be allowed to strike bases on Russian territory from which missiles are fired (kyivindependent.com)
Ukraine should be allowed to strike military bases on Russian territory from which Moscow carries out missile attacks against Ukraine, French President Emmanuel Macron said on May 28, Le Monde reported....
A beginner's guide to nationalism (lemmy.world)
EU ministers fume as ‘outrageous’ Hungary yet again blocks military aid for Ukraine (www.politico.eu)
A large number of EU resolutions on Ukraine are being blocked by Hungary, said Lithuanian Foreign Minister Gabrielius Landsbergis....
World leaders "outraged" after Israeli airstrike kills dozens in Gaza refugee camp (www.salon.com)
Valve confirms your Steam account cannot be transferred to anyone after you die | Your Steam games will go to the grave with you (www.techspot.com)
Every time I hear news from the tech industry lately (lemmy.world)
‘Exterminate the beasts’: How Israeli settlers took revenge for a murder in the West Bank (www.bbc.com)
What followed was a wave of shooting and arson attacks across 11 Palestinian villages in which a dozen homes and more than 100 cars were torched, thousands of animals were slaughtered, four people were shot dead and scores of others were seriously wounded.
If Windows XP was released in 2024 (lemmy.world)
Credit: grimgreenfo.rest/notes/9tn7wtthrdb5013t
CEO of Google Says It Has No Solution for Its AI Providing Wildly Incorrect Information (futurism.com)
You know how Google’s new feature called AI Overviews is prone to spitting out wildly incorrect answers to search queries? In one instance, AI Overviews told a user to use glue on pizza to make sure the cheese won’t slide off (pssst…please don’t do this.)...
1,000 Harvard Students Walk Out of Commencement to Support 13 Seniors Barred from Graduation over Gaza (www.democracynow.org)
More than a thousand Harvard students walked out of their commencement ceremony yesterday to support 13 undergraduates who were barred from graduating after they participated in the Gaza solidarity encampment in Harvard Yard....