Ranked choice voting is just a primary with fewer steps
This is wrong. It is a multi-stage runoff election with fewer steps (hence why it's called "instant runoff"), and that's a good thing because it means that people are much less likely to invalidate their ballot by voting for a first-preference candidate with no chance of winning.
Ranked choice gives you the most moderate candidate and weeds out the others
Ranked Choice Voting gives you (more often than not*)the most broadly popular candidate. Which is what you should want if you believe in democracy or the concept of a republic.
I feel like this should go without saying, but the goal of democratic reform is not to put the person you like in power, it's to put the people back in power.
If the most popular candidate happens to be too "moderate" for your tastes, then it's up to you to advocate for your positions in a way that will change hearts and minds in order to get more people on your side. If you can't do that, then you really have no business winning a truly democratic election, right?
There are some statistically possible scenarios in which the most broadly popular does not win a RCV election, but they are far less likely than any version of our current first-past-the-post plurality voting system.
Sure, I get you, but I don't know how we even begin to solve that when the US Republican Party have made it their mission to be staunchly antagonistic to anything that the Democrats advocate.
Take climate change policy, for example. One would think that every reputable scientist on Earth saying that our actions over the last few centuries are directly contributing to existentially damaging effects to our environment (on top of a clear and dangerous increase in natural disasters like hurricanes and wildfires) would be enough to convince every American that we need to do at least the bare minimum to reduce our impact on the climate. But clearly it's not, so why?
Because the American right (which includes the Republican Party, the right-wing media, and the global billionaire class of oil tycoons and corporate execs that funds them) has decided that they'd rather turn it into yet another issue in the "culture war" that they can use to recruit the stupidest and angriest among us to be their useful idiots.
And it's not just climate change, it's fucking everything. The left supports LGBTQ rights, the right (including people who call themselve libertarians, somehow) are against it. The Democrats want to support Ukraine against Putin's imperialism, the Republicans suddenly love Putin and don't give a fuck what happens to the people that he kills. The entirety of the American right's ideology is anti-"woke", which just happens to mean that they're just blindly against anything that the left happens to be for.
Yeah. Sorry about that. I think Kbin was lagging the hell out when I posted originally, I don't know how that resulted in 3 posts but it wasn't my intention. lol shrug
... which, if you really feel that way, is exactly why we need to implement more democratic and efficient voting systems, like ranked choice (instant runoff),, STAR, approval, etc.
As American political systems are today, the only viable candidates to win the presidency in 2024 are Joe Biden (a well-meaning, old white man) and Donald Trump (old white narcissistic Putin-loving vindictive criminal rapist who doesn't care for democracy and can't remember his wife's name).
I'll be voting for Biden because even if you really believe he's "evil", he's certainly the far lesser evil than Trump (for the reasons listed above and then some).
That’s not even touching on the fact that most democrats don’t want Biden for a second term, but the DNC is going to force it on us anyway.
Well, you might say that, but when Biden is winning with >90% as a write-in candidate in primaries where he isn't even on the ballot, it's a little bit hard to take it seriously.
There is no serious or viable candidate challenging Biden from the left in 2024, which is why Bernie is out here endorsing him. To pragmatic socialists like Bernie, electing Biden isn't the destination, but the next necessary step to keeping the country on the right path and defending against an existential threat to our democracy. Don't take it from me though, read what he's been saying.
I'll add that the only, and i'll say it again, ONLY, viable path to 3rd party success in this country is through more democratic voting system reforms. (ranked-choice, STAR, approval, etc.)
Anyone who doesn't understand this is either ignorant, stupid, or playing dumb for sophistry and manipulation's sake.
Among the great tragedies of our time is the fact that this slimy rapist dirtbag conman isn't already yesterday's news. Fade the fuck away, Donald.
The American right are beyond pathetic that this whining fat orange bitch is the best they've been able to come up with for 3 consecutive election cycles. At best he's a distraction from the shit our country needs to do and at worst he's a danger to the entire world, us included. Demented dotard belongs in jail and nowhere near the levers of power.
Their TOS says they own your content in any current or future formats or derivative works.
Their ToS could say they own you and your children and grandchildren, but that doesn't make it enforceable.
If I post a frame from the movie Akira on Reddit would any reasonable person suggest that they own not only that frame, but also the entire movie that it came from as a derivative work? There is a glut of second-hand data just like that all over Reddit, Twitter, and every other social media network, and I'm willing to bet that's also part of what's being sold.
But hey... I'm not saying you're wrong, just that the idea that they automatically "own" the things that people post on their website is ridiculous. It's a bit like UPS or FedEx saying they own the contents of your package while delivering it.
And yet that exact kind of data is all over reddit in ways that are impractical to enforce by case by case DMCA. How many memes are there using footage from popular shows? How much fanart?
More importantly, is that stuff not included as part of the data that reddit "owns" when they sell their data to tech companies? Because whether a DMCA takedown has been requested on that kind of data or not, doesn't change the fact that they don't hold the copyright in the first place. How can they sell things that they don't even own?
Something smells. The logic of this entire industry doesn't add up.
Reddit licensing/selling copyrighted data to other parties.
The DMCA covers hosting and dissemination. If a user submits copyrighted data to Reddit that they do not own and Reddit unknowingly (because, to be fair, they can't know what is or isn't owned or by who), then Reddit is not liable for copyright infringement as long as they comply with DMCA takedown requests from people who claim to own the original IP.
But again, none of that implies that Reddit themselves (or Twitter, Facebook, TikTok, etc.) can realistically claim ownership over all of the data that is on their website. The reason they are subject to DMCA at all is because there is a globally shared assumption that data that users submit may or may not be owned by some other party, and while the DMCA protects them from being held liable for simply hosting and disseminating that data, it does not magically make them the owner of all data that hasn't had a DMCA claim made against it.
In other words, if I post a picture of Homer Simpson on Reddit (and there are many), it is ridiculous for anyone to suggest that they have any intellectual property rights over that picture, that character, any trademarks, etc., whether someone has made a formal DMCA take down request or not. And if they don't own the picture, the character, the trademark, etc., when what exactly are they selling (licensing) and where did they get the right to sell it?
They might not be liable for just hosting/distributing it, but just like you can't sell someone else's car, you can't license out someone else's IP.
Just because he wasn't charged with treason doesn't mean he didn't commit treason by advocating an armed insurrection against our democracy. (See: the US post-Civil War Reconstruction Era for further examples.)
And if you want to why he wasn't charged for that, it's because of Republican Special Counsel Ken Starr's disastrous opinion that sitting presidents are above the law and can't be prosecuted, and must instead be impeached--which, if you remember, Trump was, not once but twice. Of course now Trump is arguing that he's still above the law and deserves "total immunity", which only further shows that he is, in fact, a wanna-be dictator.
Saying "Trump wasn't charged with a crime so therefore he did nothing wrong" and "Trump can't be charged with a crime because current and former US Presidents must have total immunity from prosecution" is very clearly circular logic.
Guns, knives, blunt weapons, tasers, bear spray, hand cuffs and zip ties.
Taking the stand in the seditious conspiracy case against Oath Keepers founder Stewart Rhodes and four associates, Terry Cummings showed jurors an AR-15 firearm and an orange box for ammunition that he contributed to the so-called quick reaction force the Oath Keepers had staged at the hotel outside of Washington in case they needed weapons.
“I had not seen that many weapons in one location since I was in the military,” said Cummings, a veteran who joined the Oath Keepers in Florida in 2020.
But a review of the federal charges against the alleged rioters shows that they did come armed, and with a variety of weapons: stun guns, pepper spray, baseball bats and flagpoles wielded as clubs. An additional suspect also allegedly planted pipe bombs by the headquarters of the Democratic and Republican parties the night before the riot and remains at large.
Online sleuths who have aided in hundreds of Jan. 6 prosecutions say he is the same man they identified to the FBI who is currently individual No. 200 on the bureau’s Capitol Violence page, which he first appeared on three years ago. Videos and photographs from the Capitol on Jan. 6 showed him with what appears to be a gun in his waistband. As NBC News previously reported, that man, John Emanuel Banuelos, told Salt Lake City police that he was at the Capitol and had been captured on film with a gun. “I was in the D.C. riots,” he told the investigators, according to a police transcript. “I’m the one in the video with the gun right here.”
And I recall Hillary’s plot to get electors to “vote their concious”
The source you've linked quotes Martin Sheen and other "celebrities", not Hillary Clinton, who conceded the election as someone who believed in democracy would (despite being much more popular than Trump and winning the national vote by millions).
Also, you should know that official electors are not always bound. As a Trump voter I know you're not big on education or knowledge, but if you want you can read all about unpledged electors here.
Meanwhile, what Trump and his gang of indicted co-conspirators did was to submit a slate of fraudulent and fake electors to the election certification process in order to literally steal swing state electoral college votes and appoint himself President. Or as he likes to say "dictator on day one".
I don’t follow sports nor care enough about pop music to really know what was going on. I truly though she would be performing with the sheer amount of press on the matter even here. What the hell did Republicans think she was going to do inside a luxury box other than have weirdos snap photos of her drinking beer?
Right wing cultist morons do, because I guess they think that everything is somehow a giant conspiracy against Trump, because thinking that helps them process and cope with the fact that Trump is always in the news for saying and doing bad or dumb shit.
It seems to me like you Trump defenders always want to have your cake and eat it too:
On one hand, you want to claim that he's the only honest and straight-shooting politician and he always tells it as it is. (Despite a long and well-documented history of saying things that are blatantly false. Sometimes simply misspeaking, other times outright lying.)
On the other hand, you quickly rush to hand-wave away concerns and criticisms every time he says something wrong, stupid, unhinged, antidemocratic, authoritarian, racist, bigoted, or downright evil. (It's always some kind of misunderstanding or some kind of conspiracy by the democrats/deep state/lying media/taylor swift/etc.)
So once again he's here literally spelling out the fact that he is willing to betray our NATO allies and thereby plunge us into World War 3 (just in case you think that's an exaggeration, look up what happens if Russia attacks NATO or vice versa). He's saying something that's (a) stupid, (b) wrong, (c) oblivious to how NATO works, (d) a betrayal of our allies and therefore American values, (e) a gift to Putin, among other things.
And so you're claiming it's what..?
A joke?
...Because usually when someone tells a joke people laugh.
A brain fart?
...Like he said something that he didn't actually mean to say? If so, then why is it so similar to the other things he's said about NATO in the past?
Is he confused maybe?
...Because Biden and Haley don't seem to get confused about important things like who we're loyal to.
Or maybe you're saying he's so damn stupid that he doesn't know the ramifications of what he's even saying?
...Because then maybe he needs to take yet another cognitive test so we can make sure that he can still remember what an elephant looks like.
And no, I am not even going to vote for trump, but I see you guys just eating up the propaganda, and they could literally tell you anything and you would eat it up.
Go for it, tell me.
I'm willing to let you try to convince me that the video I saw of Trump speaking, where he said exactly the thing we're talking about, is somehow "propaganda".
Please do go ahead and tell us all who made this "propaganda" and how they did it. Are you trying to claim that he didn't say these things or that they're taken out of context some how? Do you mean to say that he doesn't want to betray NATO in favor of Putin? Are you telling us that it's a AI deepfake or something? I honestly can't wait for you to explain just what you mean when you call this "propaganda".
I'll say this last thing:
If you believe that Trump (or anyone else for that matter) is being straightforward and honest every time they happen to be saying something you like or think is good, and at the same time, you also believe that Trump (or whoever) is being smeared, framed or taken out of context when they something you know is bad, then you are probably in a cult (whether you know it or not).
The majority of American elections are winner-takes-all, first-past-the-post races decided with plurality voting. Among other things, this means that if you are voting for someone outside of the realm of the statistical possibility for victory, you are simply throwing your vote away. That is the way the system works today, whether we like it or not, and wasting my vote by writing in Bugs Bunny or whatever isn't actually a reasonable, productive, grown-up, or intelligent thing to do--especially not in the face of impending autocratic fascism.
In other words, the winner of the 2024 Presidential Election will either be Joe Biden (D) or Donald Trump (R). Of those two, I can easily pick Joe Biden as the person I would like to see running the country, controlling the US nuclear arsenal, and watching over the western world. Again, it's an easy choice for me. As someone who does probably too much research and overthinking into voting, I've never had an easier choice.
But hey, if you're like me and you don't like the current American two-party political system, then I encourage you to vote for democratic reforms like Ranked Choice Voting, STAR voting, approval voting, etc. Multiple states have implemented better, more democratic voting systems, and more will hopefully continue to in future years, because unsurprisingly they are almost all better and more democratic than plurality voting.
The problem with not voting (lemm.ee)
‘It will be the end of democracy’: Bernie Sanders on what happens if Trump wins – and how to stop him (www.theguardian.com)
Donald Trump calls wife Melania ‘Mercedes’ in CPAC speech (www.independent.co.uk)
‘My ultimate and absolute revenge’: Trump gives chilling CPAC speech on presidential agenda (www.theguardian.com)
Reddit says it's made $203M so far licensing its data (techcrunch.com)
Trump breaks silence on Navalny, casts no blame on Putin (www.yahoo.com)
Anon experiences Joe Rogan (sh.itjust.works)
Relatable (lemm.ee)
Why did we care that Taylor Swift was ATTENDING the super bowl
I don’t follow sports nor care enough about pop music to really know what was going on. I truly though she would be performing with the sheer amount of press on the matter even here. What the hell did Republicans think she was going to do inside a luxury box other than have weirdos snap photos of her drinking beer?
Trump Says He Might 'Encourage' Russia To Attack NATO Allies (www.huffpost.com)
Trump attacks Haley for absence of her husband, who is deployed | CNN Politics (www.cnn.com)
Biden Calls Egypt’s Sisi ‘President Of Mexico’ After Blasting Memory Concerns From Special Counsel Report (www.forbes.com)