BeautifulMind

BeautifulMind, 4 months ago

Don’t you see the contradiction in “she won the popular vote” and “she was a shit candidate”?

Both of these things can be true. If “did not vote” had been a candidate in 2016, it would have won in a landslide. Just 8 states + DC had enough voters turn out such that any candidate won more votes than there were eligible voters that didn’t bother. As a percentage of eligible voters, Clinton received 28.43% of eligible voters, with Trump trailing at 27.2% of eligible voters. While Trump outperformed Romney (2012) by 2M votes, Clinton underperformed Obama in 2012.

As a percentage of the entire US population (including those too young or other ineligible to vote) Clinton got votes from 20.30% of the population and Trump got votes from 19.41% of people.

They both sucked so badly that just over a quarter of eligible voters/less than a fifth of everybody was all it took to elect Trump

https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/01e87219-85e0-45ec-9932-c65fdd6c523f.png(source brilliantmaps.com/did-not-vote/)

BeautifulMind, 4 months ago

Because of course that’s the top priority for Kentucky Republicans right now 🙄

BeautifulMind, 4 months ago

Good, smaller federal government

This isn’t about the size of government, it’s about who rules- and whether or not they answer to the public. The buzzword-talk you hear about ‘burdensome regulations’ revolves around pretending that if you get rid of regulatory agencies that there will be no regulation in the spheres they regulate- but that’s not how that works. Taking away the authority of a regulatory agency really means handing regulatory authority back into private hands, the way it was before regulators answering to the public were authorized.

So, what happens when you take away the SEC’s power to regulate banks, or the EPA’s power to regulate environmental matters? Power to regulate banking reverts back to trade associations made up of… banks, and the people who will be in charge of protecting the environment will be the people profiting by polluting it. prospect.org/economy/rise-of-neo-feudalism/

BeautifulMind, 4 months ago

"We’re tracking you for your privacy 🙄

BeautifulMind, 4 months ago

Well maybe the intelligence community is gonna turn against you when you had access to info on sources and methods and those sources started turning up dead. Giving Trump access to classified material and not expecting him to monetize it for himself is insanity, really

BeautifulMind, 4 months ago

Republican presidential candidate Nikki Haley claimed the US has “never been a racist county” pandered to racists during an interview with Fox News on Tuesday.

fixed it

BeautifulMind, 4 months ago

They’re not the ones being affected by the boomers.

My dude, they’ve been riding us our whole lives

BeautifulMind, 4 months ago

Rhetoric of this sort just promotes distrust in election systems, which of course prompts demagogues like Trump to promise voters they can fix it if they gain power. The fun thing here is that the right here needs you to believe things that aren’t true in order to justify them doing a coup, the stupid thing is that stupid people take this kind of talk seriously.

But seriously, American voting is relatively secure- it’s just that where lawmakers don’t want voters deciding the ‘wrong’ way they’ve gerrymandered them into districts to prevent them doing it, and they’ve done things to strip voters of their voting rights and to suppress voting and to make it inconvenient or difficult to vote. This has been a bipartisan thing in the past, but today the GOP are the chief offenders.

Also, Putin’s Russia is in the stage of democracy where elections are an exercise in flaunting the death of democracy itself, and nobody should ever take his talk about elections as being in good faith, ever

BeautifulMind, 4 months ago

nOboDy wAnTs tO WoRk aNy MorE

BeautifulMind, 4 months ago

Simple jinx should cause most firearms to fail or jam In a universe where guns exist and level-1 wizards can cast magic missile/fireball and cantrips like firebolt, setting fire to things (like gunpowder), my bet is that low-level magic users aren’t going to be trumped by steampunk-grade tech that easily

BeautifulMind, 4 months ago

Article IV, section 4 : “The United States shall guarantee to every State in this Union a Republican Form of Government, and shall protect each of them against Invasion; and on Application of the Legislature, or of the Executive (when the Legislature cannot be convened) against domestic Violence.” [~constitution.congress.gov/browse/…/ALDE_00013635]

The ‘guarantee clause’ was both a promise that the federal government would help suppress state-level insurrections and protect member states from foreign attack, and a requirement that in order to be a member state, you had to have a government in the form of a republic (i.e., no monarchy-states, no dictatorships). This can be read to mean that democracy of some sort is required, as republics implicitly derive their public authority from the people living in them.

BeautifulMind, 4 months ago

It could, depending on how the court is feeling about it that day, and on whether or not congress writes legislation to provide specifics to just what Article IV, sec4 means. (This seems to have been one of those clauses the framers left as a to-do for future legislators to fill out)

BeautifulMind, 4 months ago

What seems to be going down is that tech firms are laying off AI teams that aren’t based on large LLMs like ChatGPT. My read: they’re thinking it’s time to lay off those workers in anticipation of replacing that functionality (in siri, cortana, echo/alexa) with a large LLM stack

BeautifulMind, 4 months ago

I think the thing for everyone not making >$1m/yr to firmly understand is that when top marginal rate income isn’t taxed seriously and antitrust laws aren’t enforced, they have to bid for housing in markets where the prices are set by top-bidders, and your grocery bill is whatever they feel like charging you and that means your normal $50k/yr income can’t afford rent and food without roommates. High inequality means everything becomes expensive.

It’s the “low-tax” countries that create unaffordable real estate, the ‘free market’ countries are where you can’t afford necessities. It’s the ones that invest in public goods and infra (and regulate their capitalism) that yield high standards of living for most people.

BeautifulMind, 4 months ago

Yeah it’s kind of amazing that the domination and expense of regulations and taxes is unbearable, but the domination of water being scarce and expensive just could not have been anticipated

BeautifulMind, 4 months ago

It’s wild to me that when the phone companies need to bill for a phone call they know exactly who to bill for it, but when it’s something like this everyone is helpless because you can’t track these things

BeautifulMind, 4 months ago

It’s useful to consider both sides of a political controversy when both sides actually fall within the realm of respecting and sustaining the democracy and social contract keeping people bought into it.

When the choices are between ‘you get some human rights’ and ‘you get no bodily autonomy’, one of these doesn’t fall within the bounds of reasonable discourse, where ‘reasonable discourse’ isn’t lighting the basis for democracy and individual rights on fire.

The exercise of gamely considering ‘both sides’ like it’s genuinely for the good of democracy when one side is actively hostile to democracy is… gaslighting, hostile to said democracy and to the social contract.

BeautifulMind, 4 months ago

“Can’t tell if obviously-criminal things are illegal”, and “still thinks he should be president” 🤡

BeautifulMind, 4 months ago

I seem to recall that when southern states wanted to prosecute Martin Luther King, Jr for “hate speech” on the theory that his calls for equality amounted to anti-white racism, the way SCOTUS dealt with that was by punting on the question of what hate speech is or isn’t.

By taking the ‘hate speech’ stick away from states, the high court effectively ruled that Nazis had the right to rallies under the rubric of free speech. It was this optimistic dithering on the court’s part (surely, the way forward is free speech and everybody will use that in good faith right?) that is part of why the US’s stance on hate speech diverged from that of Europe and the commonwealth

BeautifulMind, 4 months ago

Where the first speech absolutists at?

They’re buying social media platforms and censoring speech they don’t like

BeautifulMind, 4 months ago

Give Boeing a choice- retain 25 hours of flight records, or pay a billion dollars for every incident where the data is requested but was destroyed to save disk space that costs about nothing to keep

BeautifulMind, 4 months ago

Religion is America’s original sin

It’s worse than that. Religion was co-opted into the maintenance of slavery, and it caused schisms in multiple sects, including the Baptists, Presbyterians, and Methodists

Generation after generation, Southern pastors adapted their theology to thrive under a terrorist state. Principled critics were exiled or murdered, leaving voices of dissent few and scattered. Southern Christianity evolved in strange directions under ever-increasing isolation. Preachers learned to tailor their message to protect themselves. If all you knew about Christianity came from a close reading of the New Testament, you’d expect that Christians would be hostile to wealth, emphatic in protection of justice, sympathetic to the point of personal pain toward the sick, persecuted and the migrant, and almost socialist in their economic practices. None of these consistent Christian themes served the interests of slave owners, so pastors could either abandon them, obscure them, or flee.

What developed in the South was a theology carefully tailored to meet the needs of a slave state. Biblical emphasis on social justice was rendered miraculously invisible. A book constructed around the central metaphor of slaves finding their freedom was reinterpreted. Messages which might have questioned the inherent superiority of the white race, constrained the authority of property owners, or inspired some interest in the poor or less fortunate could not be taught from a pulpit. Any Christian suggestion of social justice was carefully and safely relegated to “the sweet by and by” where all would be made right at no cost to white worshippers. In the forge of slavery and Jim Crow, a Christian message of courage, love, compassion, and service to others was burned away.

politicalorphans.com/the-article-removed-from-for…

BeautifulMind, 4 months ago

Yeah when I visit boomer relatives they seem to think retail stores in big cities are war zones- and they vote, which kinda tells me there’s political support to put S.W.A.T. teams in every retail store