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Cake day: June 17th, 2023

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  • Why aren’t the protesters calling for Hamas to release the hostages if they really want an end to the war? You have a far better chance of influencing Hamas than influencing anyone else at this point with your extreme rhetoric.

    Methinks the goal isn’t actually to end the violence it’s to continue it indefinitely because many so-called pro-Palestinians are profiting from the suffering of Palestinians. A sickening turn for social media where human suffering has been monetized.


  • They currently don’t have the necessary majority in Congress to pass such legislation. The legislation has been proposed, but if the Dems don’t control Congress it’s not going to happen.

    So even if you aren’t in a swing state you might want to go out and vote down ballot if you want ranked choice voting.

    Also proportional representation is a whole different thing from ranked choice voting.





  • Republicans are also always on about how the government is bad (even when they’re the incumbents) and how deregulating things make everything better. Libertarians are people who drank a full jug of that particular kool-aid. Also like republicans, they tend to only care about gun rights, though they will sometimes pretend to care about other rights to make it feel like an ideological thing.








  • The GOP is going to hold locksteady either way. The goal is to get the undecided.

    In the debate, Harris played Trump like a fiddle. She made him go on a rant on her cue and he didn’t disappoint. He ranted about Haitians eating dogs. Turns out he said this because he was manipulated by a nutjob in his circle, most likely Laura Loomer.

    So Trump was goaded into doing a rant by a woman and the most memorable part of the rant was something planted into his head by another woman. Kind chips away at the “Trump is alpha” thing that might be influential to low information undecided male voters.

    Also in 2016 it was Trump himself dominating the news cycle, not the nutjobs he surrounded himself with. If Trump can be convinced to rant about the dog thing, what else can the people he surrounds himself convince him to do? If Trump is portrayed as easily manipulated, that puts Project 2025 back on the table. Because no matter what he might say about it now, everyone knows the likes of Laura Loomer can manipulate him into doing it.

    Anyway it all fits into the news cycle on the debate. Trump lost, ranted about people eating dogs, and showed everyone he’s easily manipulated. Next week Harris will push for another debate, probably landing on “Trump is too scared to have another debate.” The media will latch onto that in hopes Harris can succeed in goading Trump into another debate, because the last one had an audience of 67 million. Either there’s another debate or Trump looks weak. Which is good for Harris either way.


  • Yeah so Israel is a democracy. You’re saying a democratic country is a Nazi country.

    I think a common thing among Nazis is to try to de-legitimize democracies. Trump does it, Putin does it, and you’re doing it while claiming they’re the Nazis. What does that make you?

    Also Hamas came into power by winning a plurality of the votes and refused to hold elections after that. Their goal is to at best ethnically cleanse and at worst commit genocide to remove people of a certain ethnicity from a region. They use extreme violence and a narrative about past injustices to maintain power. They keep people in a perpetual state of angry fervor to control them. That all doesn’t seem just a little fashy to you?

    How do you know when you’re not the one being a Nazi accusing your enemies of being a Nazi? Is it just that you’re always not the Nazi and everyone that disagrees with you is a Nazi? How are you different from Trump, Musk, Putin, etc?


  • What you see and don’t see on social media is already decided by nation states. It’s just countries like Russia, China, and Iran do it covertly.

    They can push the things they want to the top of the algorithms with a relatively small (for a nation state) amount of resources. Sure they usually don’t outright ban content (but that can happen too by spamming abuse reports) but they can effectively shadow ban people by simply promoting everything except for the things they don’t like and use bot spam to do the social media equivalent of signal jamming.

    And of course (as we’ve seen with Musk) the leadership of social media companies can be influenced (by a combo of same the misinformation they use on everyone else + money) and made into assets for nation states. This allows them to have some influence over who gets officially blocked on social media.

    Yes it’s not ideal to have nation states influencing speech, the current is to have foreign adversary nation states influencing speech. The choice is between having democracies having a de jure influence on social media or have authoritarian countries have a de facto influence on social media.





  • Yeah I’ve seen all of these videos before. Problem is, these aren’t isolated concepts. There are very specific power dynamics within a proportional representation system that aren’t the same as the power dynamics in a community representation system. He doesn’t go into those details in the rules for rulers videos, only the broad concept of democracy is mentioned. He only goes into a some math on the FPTP video but doesn’t discuss the differences power dynamics for those different systems.

    Basically in a community representation system (called FPTP by people trying to make it sound arbritrary an unfair) the power flows up from the communities. In a proportional representation system the power flows down from the party leadership.

    Considering the “rules for rulers” video it seems CGP Grey thinks all government has to be top down, so he doesn’t seem to have even considered the possibility of power flowing upwards from a community. This is what happens in the system he thinks is bad, so I’d say he hasn’t adequately considered everything about the subject.

    We don’t actually elect rulers we elect people to represent our communities. Sure they’re usually part of a party but because we elect representatives, not parties, that representative has the option of leaving the party if it serves the interests of the community they represent. Since parties can lose seats between elections they have to listen to the the elected representatives (community leaders) to avoid losing seats. People in a community put pressure on their representative, the reps but pressure on the party leadership, power flows upwards from the people.

    Proportional representation only seems better if you think as CGP does and believe we can only be ruled over and we need to find a better way to select rulers. It’s a fundamental misunderstanding of representative democracy.