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Skios posted:Chip Bok Alternately: Some carbon is already released from other sources so why bother at all?
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Jun 9, 2023 14:41
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While tree himself is made of carbon
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Jun 9, 2023 14:45
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Trapezium Dave posted:Rall: That's Democracy I've seen this meme a lot, even from cartoonists less lovely than Ted Rall. It isn't true. Right now, Biden's approval rating among Democrats is about 75-80%. This isn't the 95% approval rating he had among Democrats at his peak back in early 2021, but it's still pretty good. Voters that lean Democrat are less favorable, but he's still got a majority of them, about 55% (down from a peak of 88%). In primary polls, he's getting about 60% while his closest opponent (RFK Jr.) is getting 20%. In other words, the people responsible for deciding whether Biden represents the Democratic party, Democrats, very much want him to be their candidate and don't have any clear alternative that they favor. His overall approval rating is driven down by non-Democrats (for instance, his approval among Republicans is 7-8%). Meanwhile, Trump is polling about 50% with Ron DeSantis at 25% - in other words, the people responsible for deciding whether Trump represents the Republican party, Republicans, want him to be their candidate, at least at the moment, and don't have any clear alternative that they favor, although there's more room than there is with Biden for someone else to vacuum up all the support and beat him. The Republican race is just getting started, and those numbers might fluctuate a lot; it is way too early to say we're definitely getting Trump as the party nominee, although he's clearly in the lead at this point. This isn't a matchup that nobody wants; a majority of people seem to want pretty much exactly this matchup. It's just that because of the polarization in our politics at the moment, everyone hates the other party's standard-bearer so much that their overall poll numbers tank pretty hard. People who don't identify or vote with either party tend to not like either of them, but there aren't enough of those people to actually move the needle that much, even now. (About 80% of theoretically independent voters "lean" towards one party or the other.) The thing about democracy is that, for better or worse, it depends on getting together large blocks of other human beings that agree with you and getting them to vote the way you want. That seems to be pretty much exactly what's happening here, so how is it undemocratic? It'd be better if we had IRV or some other non-FPTP voting method, but I'm pretty sure we'd still end up with exactly these two candidates for the two biggest parties in the general if the primaries were held right now, and I don't think it would change which of them would win that election.
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Jun 9, 2023 15:17
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Discendo Vox posted:Note that while this one’s great (earlier every year, etc) it’s a repeat of one from an earlier year. What wildfire did he do this for originally? Kinda funny he could reuse it and it still sort of fits.
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Jun 9, 2023 15:39
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So it's true that most Americans don't want Trump or Biden to be president but somehow this is less important for calling our system a democracy than the fact that both are popular among the members of their own political party? E: Stalinist USSR was a democracy because Stalin was popular among the only people that count in choosing a candidate: members of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union VitalSigns fucked around with this message at 16:48 on Jun 9, 2023 |
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Jun 9, 2023 16:42
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VitalSigns posted:So it's true that most Americans don't want Trump or Biden to be president but somehow this is less important for calling our system a democracy than the fact that both are popular among the members of their own political party? Most Americans don't want any particular person to be president. The Republicans don't want any Democrat to be president and the Democrats don't want any Republican to be president. It's hard to crack 50% when almost nobody in the other party will even accept the idea of you being in charge, since inevitably some people in your own party won't like you either. Historically, there's been more crossover in approval ratings than that. The difference between my example and yours is that Democrats, Republicans, and Independents are each about a third of the electorate, and if you include leaners, Democrats and Republicans are actually a combined roughly 85% of the electorate. So if you've accounted for all of them, as I just did, you're already covering almost all people in the county, not just a handful of jerks in a smoky back room somewhere. If you just ask the question of approval generically, yes, respondents may wish for a person to exist who could be president and unify a majority of both parties, but no such person has presented themselves. (And if they did, inevitably I'd be saying, well, if they can get Republicans on board, what terrible positions have they adopted to do that?) The instant a real human being is put into the role of being a candidate for any party, major or minor, they've automatically lost the support of large swathes of the country. E: To be clear, it used to be you could tack to the middle to minimize this effect and get more people on board, but because the Republicans have gone bugfuck insane that doesn't really work anymore. If you're anywhere to the left of Adolf Hitler you're going to get called a Woke Socialist in the alternate reality the Right inhabits, and that fact has hardened the stance of people on the Left as well. idonotlikepeas fucked around with this message at 17:40 on Jun 9, 2023 |
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Jun 9, 2023 17:34
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i wouldn't call a slim majority of 60% is overwhelming support for the primary. it is a majority. but there are 40% dems who want someone else (even if they don't agree who) not really arguing the rest, just that
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Jun 9, 2023 17:41
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Fair enough. It also varies some, as well; for instance, I just took a peek at a couple of sites that do polling averages and they have his support at about 65% (and it's hard to say "one third of the Democrats want someone else" isn't overwhelming). It might be back at 60% or 55% in a week, though. I don't expect it to bounce around as much as the Republican one, but we will see Biden's support in the primary change a lot over the next year too. I think it's still fair to say there's majority support for a Trump vs Biden matchup, though; if you can imagine 40% of Americans want Biden and 40% of Americans want Trump, probably a lot of that 60% that don't want Biden wants Trump to win and vice versa. Republicans won't support a Trump vs. Biden matchup not because they don't want Trump, but because they don't want Biden anywhere near the presidency. You can say that there's support for that matchup on both sides as long as your preferred candidate would be guaranteed to win.
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Jun 9, 2023 18:10
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idonotlikepeas posted:In other words, the people responsible for deciding whether Biden represents the Democratic party, Democrats, very much want him to be their candidate and don't have any clear alternative that they favor. I think those two things are reversed in causality - there isn't a clear alternative to Biden (especially since that would mean dumping an incumbent President) so the majority are sticking with him.
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Jun 9, 2023 18:15
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Very possible, but I also don't see how that's undemocratic, so even if that's the motivation, Rall is still wrong. For reference, Bernie Sanders is also in those polls; maybe people aren't picking him because they've soured on him and want someone further left, or maybe they aren't picking him for strategic reasons for the general election, but they still aren't picking him.
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Jun 9, 2023 18:23
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These are just explanations of how our system creates undemocratic outcomes, they aren't good arguments that our system is actually democratic. Most voters don't want the other political party to win so they have to vote for one of two candidates presented as a fait accompli regardless of whether they even want either of them. The actual selection of those candidates takes a minority of the country (members of the Democratic or Republicans parties), a slim majority of that minority picks a candidate (with institutional backing helping direct the choice), and everyone else has to vote for one of them even if they hate both. Something something one party state, typical American extravagance, we have two of them
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Jun 9, 2023 18:37
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Skios posted:
Can we add "elongated nose" to the list of Branco's Biden Paraphernalia yet?
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Jun 9, 2023 18:42
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But then we're getting into questions of "literally what is a democracy", because the idea of some number of organizations picking candidates that voters then choose between is how all democracies work globally. It's hard even to imagine another system; we have to have someone or something presenting a menu, because there are 258 million American adult citizens right now, and that's certainly too many for anyone to select from individually. (Some people wouldn't be hostile to randomly choosing ten people as candidates or something like that, but I strongly suspect the vast majority of the country would.) So what we have is a bunch of groups (in our case, two big and a number of little) that organize around a set of principles and put forth a menu of candidates that align with those principles to a greater or lesser extent. The people who are adherents to those groups pick amongst them, and then the leading candidates for those groups go up against each other. In some democracies, we get even less say than that and some portion of the leadership is picked at one remove by the representatives elected using that same system. Are we saying (or is Rall saying) that no democracy exists on the Earth and never has? If so, fine, but that's torturing the definition of the word beyond what most people would understand it to mean.
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Jun 9, 2023 18:50
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You do not have to pretend the authoritarian propagandist’s no true democracy argument is worth entertaining.
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Jun 9, 2023 18:56
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If Joe Biden vs Donald Trump is the best democracy can do, then democracy is worthless.
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Jun 9, 2023 19:00
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Byzantine posted:If Joe Biden vs Donald Trump is the best democracy can do, then democracy is worthless. There is more to it then the presidency you clown. (USER WAS PUT ON PROBATION FOR THIS POST)
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Jun 9, 2023 19:03
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I think you can say that any part of any election sucks without also adding "and it's also not democracy".
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Jun 9, 2023 19:05
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Byzantine posted:If Joe Biden vs Donald Trump is the best democracy can do, then democracy is worthless. 
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Jun 9, 2023 19:09
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idonotlikepeas posted:But then we're getting into questions of "literally what is a democracy", because the idea of some number of organizations picking candidates that voters then choose between is how all democracies work globally. It's hard even to imagine another system; You can design an electoral system so that people have a real choice between those organizations. If organizations choosing a candidate that people have to vote for is democracy then the USSR was a democracy. The US government was set up as an oligarchy by design, the authors of the constitution were quite explicit on this point. The electoral college, the US senate, the disenfranchisement of non-state territories (including the capital), party-controlled primaries with superdelegates, effectively unlimited corporate money influencing elections. And the natural (and intended) result of all this: It's been shown that the government does what the wealthy wants not what the voters want. E: just to be clear my definition for what is a democracy includes things like whether the government has majority approval and whether the government reliably implements policies favored by public opinion, so rules lawyering about how the 20 million votes Biden got in the 2020 primaries are what matter for the rules even though it's less than 10% of the electorate doesn't do much for me VitalSigns fucked around with this message at 19:54 on Jun 9, 2023 |
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Jun 9, 2023 19:34
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ZZT the Fifth posted:Can we add "elongated nose" to the list of Branco's Biden Paraphernalia yet? Don't ask me to go back and measure his nose and produce a chart showing it lengthening over time Because I will
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Jun 9, 2023 19:57
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Discendo Vox posted:You do not have to pretend the authoritarian propagandist’s no true democracy argument is worth entertaining. Yeah true a Rall cartoon isn't a good starting point for this conversation because it poisons the well immediately. Still, worst person you know, etc.
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Jun 9, 2023 19:59
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Microplastics posted:Don't ask me to go back and measure his nose and produce a chart showing it lengthening over time Can you just go back to very early pics, and pics between then and now so we can get a general idea?
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Jun 9, 2023 20:00
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socialsecurity posted:There is more to it then the presidency you clown. If Mitch McConnell vs Amy "Mitch doesn't support Trump enough" McGrath is the best democracy can do, VitalSigns posted:You can design an electoral system so that people have a real choice between those organizations. If organizations choosing a candidate that people have to vote for is democracy then the USSR was a democracy. In the USSR, if a candidate didn't get 50% of the vote, they would be withdrawn and the party would put somebody else up. Obviously that only ever happened at the lowest levels, but I think it's a good rule.
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Jun 9, 2023 20:05
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China Daily Rising inequality by Zheng Huawei  Le Monde Charlie Hebdo  Knife Attack in Annecy "Do you have your papers?" In a perfect world it wouldn't have happened.  "Me Tarzan. You Jane." This is on a dating site for radical conservatists that went under.  Breasts Easy Girl... the same pretext for 3000 years.
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Jun 9, 2023 20:11
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Definition of democracy is pretty important. I'm thinking of one of the guys behind REDMAP who argued that gerrymandering is more democratic because competitive districts and close elections maximize the number of people who are unhappy with the outcome (since they voted for the loser), and drawing uncompetitive districts maximizes the number of people who voted for the winner. It was such a beautiful example of rules lawyering I'm really still in awe.
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Jun 9, 2023 20:21
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The stupid rear end thing about this is if you showed it to anyone outside the US they would just say "yes, and?" with the exception of landline phones. I mean, it's summer, I take 10 minutes to hang clothes outside (or in the cellar, where there is a room for the purpose) and they're dry in 2 hours. I have a dryer! I usually use it for towels in the winter! Neighbors around me have either plug in hybrids or full electric cars because gas and diesel is loving expensive! People opt into, and pay more for exclusively renewable energy! And I live in Germany, and there is nowhere on earth where people want to gently caress their vroom-vroom cars more than here. I know that there are more hateful cartoonists out there but Payne's deliberate ignorance and "better things aren't possible, especially with cars" makes me see red every time.
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Jun 9, 2023 21:56
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socialsecurity posted:There is more to it then the presidency you clown. True there's also the clowns in congress.
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Jun 9, 2023 22:10
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VitalSigns posted:Definition of democracy is pretty important.
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Jun 9, 2023 22:17
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SubG posted:It's also exactly the opposite of the truth. Gerrymandering increases the number of wasted votes. That's kinda the whole point. Like...counting wasted votes is one of the most unambiguous ways of identifying gerrymanders. His argument was that wasted votes are good when they are for the winner because if you pack a district to D+80 or whatever it means that 90% of the people there got the representative they wanted! A D+1 district would mean 49% of the people there voted for the loser and aren't represented. Of course it's all nonsense, just an example of how you can pick a convenient definition for democracy and focus on one narrow part of the process and say "this is what democracy is" while ignoring the big picture items like are the results fair, does the outcome represent the public will, do the people approve of the government, etc. If you define a specific process as "democratic" yet most people hate the result how democratic is it really.
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Jun 9, 2023 22:26
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VitalSigns posted:His argument was that wasted votes are good when they are for the winner because if you pack a district to D+80 or whatever it means that 90% of the people there got the representative they wanted! A D+1 district would mean 49% of the people there voted for the loser and aren't represented.
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Jun 9, 2023 22:36
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Well yeah obviously I agree the argument is nonsense, that is easily shown. Its purpose was to justify an unfair system on some grounds other than "we want our party to get more seats with the same votes"
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Jun 9, 2023 23:05
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 Pope:  Rowe:  Le Lievre:  Leak, Son of Leak:  Leunig: 
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Jun 9, 2023 23:43
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Trapezium Dave posted:Leak, Son of Leak: Kellies nomination: worst concern trolling
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Jun 9, 2023 23:46
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Jun 10, 2023 02:49
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BIDEN SUX VOTE RED NO MATTER WHO
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Jun 10, 2023 03:13
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Kellies nomination: worst gaslighting
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Jun 10, 2023 03:31
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Trapezium Dave posted:Leunig: Holy gently caress this is painful
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Jun 10, 2023 03:57
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When/how did Ishida turn hard right? Last I saw of him he was a more-feminist-than-thou leftwing whackjob. I'm going to guess he went TERF because he protects women so much and got radicalized from there?
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Jun 10, 2023 04:44
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I immediately assumed that Leunig was about the war in Ukraine, because of his usual poo poo takes. Could just be platitudes, though. Clay Bennett  Lisa Benson  Matt Davies  Kevin "KAL" Kallaugher  Lee Judge  Mike Smith  Kirk Walters  John Branch  Jimmy Margulies  Ed Gamble  David M. Hitch  Mike Peters  Dave Whamond  Bill Bramhall  Drew Sheneman  David Horsey  Ann Telnaes - DOJ reels in Trump 
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CapnAndy posted:When/how did Ishida turn hard right? Last I saw of him he was a more-feminist-than-thou leftwing whackjob. I'm going to guess he went TERF because he protects women so much and got radicalized from there? This transition is documented fairly well in this very lengthy twitter thread: https://twitter.com/bitterkarella/status/1498104642881798149
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