Your position would be more sensible and coherent if you were looking to achieve it through a mechanism outside of voting, but to insist on trying to use the tool you recognize as broken to repair itself is an absurdity, it’s completely irrational.

Your position would be much more sensible if RCV had never been achieved through voting. But it has. And notice the states where it does exist - these are the same places where lots of people vote for Democrats. And the places where it’s banned statewide? Those are the places where lots of people vote for Republicans. We need more of the former, and less of the latter.

I know I’d be a lot cooler, especially around here, if I just put on the Che Guevara shirt and say revolution is the only answer. But it just isn’t. Because every example of that sort of thing just leads to more fascism under a different name. Voting works, it’s the best choice, and I have yet to see any evidence other than wanting to be cool to convince me otherwise.

But as for making it a red line for supporting democrats, sure. I mean honestly, credit to you for proposing something that might actually work. I think if there’s a big enough movement to do that, every Democrat would get behind it.

The two party system is bullshit, and the solution is electoral reform like ranked choice voting.

One party, the Democratic party, usually (but not always) approves of such reform efforts.
The other party, the Republican party, universally opposes such efforts with extreme fervor.

So it makes sense to hate the two party system, but that system is one party’s fault in particular.

I’ve played civilization and I’m pretty sure there’s other forms of government besides Communism and Monarchy that have low corruption, albeit lacking the ability to force the citizens into war on the leader’s whim.

15 Senate Dems vote to cancel billions in Israeli military aid

There’s 49 senate Democrats, which means 30.6% of Senate Democrats have voted for ending aid to Israel. 0% of Republican senators voted to cancel aid to Israel.

Furthermore Republicans absolutely love to abuse pro-Palestine people in the worst ways they can, including arresting and deporting pro-Palestine people and cutting off funding for colleges that allow you to protest. I don’t think that’s “slightly less” evil.

Finally even “slightly less” evil is by definition less evil. Getting in a car crash at 80 MPH is only slightly less likely to kill you than getting in a crash at 90 mph. So what’s the point of hitting the brakes?

To be honest, to someone who’s observed this conflict for a long time, your side is getting its ass kicked. Israel has taken more land for 8 decades and no one is stopping them as they take more. You need every last advantage if you want to turn the tide. Don’t be lazy, make the necessary distinctions between those who might help you and those who will do whatever a judge will allow them to do to harm you.

Republicans are fully committed to supporting Israel and its extermination campaign. Democrats have several members who have called for ending aid to Israel. They are not the same.

https://www.axios.com/2025/04/03/senate-democrats-cancel-military-aid-israel

This was in Canada and we asked people, how much would you pay to clean one lake from acid rain pollution? And we asked other people, how much would you pay to clean up all lakes in Ontario from acid rain pollution? And people gave roughly the same number.

• Daniel Kahneman

Point is, the vast majority of people are black and white thinkers. You’re either cleaning pollution, or you’re not. 100% of the party supports cutting off aid to Israel, or they’re all literally committing genocide. You are merely one of the vast majority.

I don’t look at it as thanking them for these things, but rather the fact that we’re all doing those things with our tax dollars and they’re the ones getting shot at because of it in my place. To a large extent if you live in the US and reap the benefits of American dominance you’re just as guilty. Obviously the problem is - where else do you go? It makes infinitely more sense to stay and vote for a better world. Not blame the working class people the bad voters have abused.

Teddy Roosevelt never said “The only good indian is a dead indian.” That quote is typically associated with Philip Sheridan.

A number of sources claim a similar quote (“I don’t go so far as to think that the only good Indians are the dead Indians, but I believe nine out of every 10 are…") alleged to be from an 1886 speech in New York, but this still goes against how he treated native americans generally and I can’t find the original speech so I’m a bit suspicious of this as well.

People are seriously acting like Bin Laden was bait and switched by the US. I somehow remember it differently…

And your evidence for the US installing this government is what exactly?

Let me say this as a westerner - if someone all of a sudden tried to put me in a Putinist puppet state, shit would burn. To the ground.

Well Trump can say whatever he wants, whether he actually can do what he says is another matter. In this case for example, congestion pricing has simply continued as before because Trump doesn’t have power to change the laws of New York. When it comes to killing people, government employees are subject to the same rules as everyone else about unlawful killing, even if they were ordered by the president. Of course Trump can pardon his assassins for federal crimes, but states can still prosecute them and if nothing else the victims can still use deadly force to defend themselves without being guilty of a crime.

So legally speaking, Trump isn’t so much a king as just some fat, old, possibly mentally-challenged man who can’t be punished for things.

But in the technical sense, we’re all kings and can do whatever we want. We’ve just agreed as a society that if people do certain things we all unite to help put them in a cage or whatever.

The cybertruck is exactly the sort of thing Nazis would come up with. It’s the King Tiger of trucks - impressive specs and appeals to insecure men, but way the fuck too big and designed for unrealistic situations instead of practical reality.

shutting out a significant portion of your community without seeking their input first isn’t a sensible move for such a foundational open source project.

Ironic when X shuts out anyone who isn’t logged in and shuts out anyone who doesn’t pay for a blue checkmark from having visible replies.

Having an X account isn’t consequence-free - if it becomes where updates occur, people have to sign up for an account and subject themselves to nazis everywhere and all manner of crypto spam just to see updates. And they have to pay Elon tribute to be heard in response. It’s crazy that anyone sees it as being friendly to users.

I don’t think they say “No intellectual would be a socialist”, instead they say intellectuals are bad and evil. It’s a classic pattern among dictator cults of personality.

As soon as the government oligarchs who own the media thinks it might matter, they have a million tools to silence you.

But it’s also worth noting that the Chinese don’t even have that. At least in America, you can get your message out by getting a billionaire to agree with you.

It’s funny that we’re arguing this on a platform that’s legal in the US, and banned in China. Is lemmy.ml a US surveillance op too? Are you? Am I?