1·
15 minutes agoHe was appalled by my decision to punt the cat, and the 17 I rolled before he could object, but in my defense, I was playing a ratman.
Cripple. History Major. Vaguely Left-Wing.
Alt of PugJesus for ensuring Fediverse compatibility and shit
- 409 Posts
- 1.96K Comments
Joined 1 year ago
Cake day: July 21st, 2023
You are not logged in. If you use a Fediverse account that is able to follow users, you can follow this user.
1·16 minutes ago34.7%
Which is a pretty normal percentage for candidates, and not at all evidence of small dollar donations ‘drying up’.
But Biden’s campaign said the bulk of its funds came from grassroots donors – 96% of its first-quarter donations were under $200. In March alone, 704,000 unique donors made 864,000 contributions to the Biden-Harris campaign.
Unless my sense of time is mega-fucked, March is only four months ago. Do you have any sources to the contrary substantiating your claims on Biden’s small dollar donors drying up?
Its also worth considering that Biden doesn’t get practically any funding from small dollar donors. He’s basically completely dependent on a very specific class of “megadonor”, who can write million dollar+ checks.
The great advantage of guns is the ability to kill at a distance. If you’re close enough to talk without screaming at the top of your lungs, guns lose a lot (though not all) of their utility. And even specialized martial artists will tell you that being outnumbered, even just by a small amount, is an incredible disadvantage in a close-up fight.
14·4 hours agoWhat the fuck
“Is it okay if I have an anger problem?”
“I shout at the door.”
“I lift the spyglass so my rat can see.”
“Does the rat look through the spyglass?”
“It’s hard to tell.”
“I aim the paper airplane at the crowd.”
"IS CHILD ABUSE WRONG? LIKE ME CHECK MY CHAIM.
…
NO."
“Is there a cat nearby?”
“Like, a normal cat?”
“Yeah.”
“It’s a mansion, I don’t see why not. Yeah, let’s say there’s a cat.”
“Is anyone looking?”
[DM, suddenly filled with concern] “… no…?”
“I will teach these halfling savages the meaning of private property!”
We were taught in the military that if we are armed, and run into local unarmed resistance, try to deescalate the situation.
I know because I’ve discussed and seen it innumerable times, but it always gives me a feeling of absurdity being reminded that the RoE for modern militaries in most combat zones is stricter than it is for US police.
Again, I appreciate the advantages of ranked choice and support the implementation of ranked choice as a massive improvement over FPTP - but it’s not an answer to the question of “What system offers more than two choices, practically speaking, when two candidates have near-majority support”, which is the question under discussion.
Parliamentary systems.
So then I don’t get a choice as to who becomes the executive at all. Wonderful.
Ranked choice or approval voting.
Ranked choice still results in one of two candidates if those two candidates have near-majority support. They simply allow voters to pick one of those two candidates whilst expressing support for less-popular candidates. It creates MORE scenarios in which there are more than two candidates with a chance to win, but it neither eliminates the existing problem nor prevents it in all cases.
Ranked choice is better than FPTP. But it’s not a silver bullet to the issue being discussed.
What system would present more than two choices when two candidates hold near-majority support?
Given that the overarching question here is “is biden really the best candidate?”,
Yes, he is the best candidate currently running.
and that ranked choice voting would immediately fix that issue
No, ranked choice would give us an option to express a stronger preference for other candidates. It would not fix the fact that Biden and Trump hold near-majority support in this election cycle and one of them will be the winner of the election, making every voter with any sense pick one of them to support over the other.
while retaining democracy, yes i feel fairly confident that the current situation is one brought on by an imperfect implementation of democracy.
Okay, cool, if ranked choice voting was implemented, who would have the support of the electorate who isn’t Biden or Trump?
If you ignore the fact that trump wouldn’t be running if he hadn’t lost the popular vote in 2016 and still won, sure.
How is that relevant to my choices being narrowed down to Trump and Biden by the opinions of the electorate?
This started as you deriding the US’s system as an oligarchy, but now when pressed it’s your ideal democracy? What are you doing, friend? Are you okay?
Sorry that the idea that the candidates with near-majority support being the only choices is a symptom of democracy is so foreign to you, and the idea that an ultrawealthy megadonor attempting to change one of the candidates without democratic support being a symptom of oligarchy is, likewise, apparently incomprehensible to your worldview.
Or in other words, the system you’re in is flawed but you’re working within the constraints of those flaws to get the best outcome you can find.
Making the best of a bad system
Except that the issue you’re discussing, the choice being narrowed between Biden and Trump in this election, is not related to the anti-democratic flaws of that system.
However it’s clear from your repeated and deliberate attempts to reframe criticism of that system as an attack on the very concept of democracy itself that you aren’t arguing in good faith here.
Sorry that you find democracy such an offensive concept.
You think the US’s implementation of democracy that forces you to pick the least bad between two candidates you don’t like is
Democracy, yes. It will always be the ‘least bad’ choice in a democracy, unless you have some miracle roll of the dice where a candidate 100% agrees with you, or a cultlike devotion to them.
A good system
What parts of the system that make it bad are anti-democratic elements - which are not particularly relevant in whether my choice should be Biden or Trump.
The only implementation of a democracy
This may come as a shock, but if the majority of people in any democratic system prefer candidates that I think are shit, those are what my effective choices are going to be narrowed down to. That’s kind of the point of a democracy.
but no evidence was put forth before the case was dropped.
The case was dropped because the victim received death threats from Trump’s fanclub.
That’s literally “making the best of a bad system”
I didn’t realize I thought democracy was a bad system.
No, I think Biden is the candidate who has the widest support in the electorate, which is why he’s worth rallying behind to stop Trump.
Bernie was in the 60s and his whole ‘thing’ was his ability to motivate small dollar donors. Most Dem politicians, even excluding Blue Dogs and the like, have numbers that resemble Biden’s, post-Citizens United.
This is true and I don’t disagree. I only disagree with the assertion that small dollar donors have ‘dried up’ for Biden recently. Fact is, most of us who are politically motivated enough to not just be ready to vote, but actively donate, are still quite concerned with the prospect of fascism winning. Biden’s loss of support is largely with the sadly important contingent of low-information low-engagement voters who are the difference between victory and defeat in most elections in this fucking country.
The only silver lining there is that other events can (not necessarily will, but can) sway them back. Low-engagement voters necessarily have short political attention spans.