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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 4th, 2023

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  • The US needs a a legitimate grassroots movement that is well-funded (fucked if I know how to be honest, hopefully it’s just a lot of small donations from regular people) that consistently lobbies for voting reform. The following changes should be up for debate:

    • Replacing FPTP voting with ranked choice voting
    • Instituting proportional representative voting where appropriate, particularly for state senates
    • Referendum on changing the number of federal senators per state to better represent population
    • Referendum on abolishing the Electoral College and instituting a simple, ranked choice popular vote for president
    • Systematic review of every single electorate by an independent organisation to unwind gerrymandered districts; this organisation then sets the districts on an ongoing basis in an apolitical way
    • Expanding ease of access to voting by every sensible measure possible (much of what AG Garland is doing now) and then considering mandatory voting
    • Real-time full disclosure of all political donations to all political bodies (especially PACs)
    • Sensible caps on political donations
    • Truth in political advertising laws

    I’m sure there are plenty of others but if all of those things were managed to be achieved, the body politic’s state and Overton Window of the US would shift dramatically.




  • The kind of people that eat up his “debating” style are people who treat the idea of an open debate of concepts the same way - that is to say that they’d be flipping tables and shitting everywhere themselves. They’re uneducated and hold unqualified and unjustifiable positions, and the only way to maintain those positions is to simply ignore or reject all rhetoric to the contrary.

    They eat it up because that’s exactly how they’d act when faced with reason, logic, facts or statistics.



  • If the government, 5-10 years ago when it would have been apropos to do so, looked into vaping and drew up specific regulations to have legal vaping, we wouldn’t have the issue we have today. Instead, because of almost a decade of inaction, we now have a new generation of nicotine addicts that they’re hurriedly trying to stop.

    We needed regulated, plain-packaged and limited-flavour vapes available to legally buy at a reasonable price to quash out both smoking and prevent kids from getting addicted, but that horse has already bolted.

    The cynic in me says they intentionally didn’t regulate vapes because the science wasn’t ready yet, and they didn’t want to accept any blame for legalising something that could end up to be pretty harmful in the long term. So, because they didn’t want to accept that risk then we now have a whole generation of vapers whose health issues we’ll be dealing with for 80+ years to come.

    Spoken as an ex-smoker, current vaper as a smoking cessation method.


  • Racism is not an immutable concept. People are not either “racists” or “not racists”. Racism is a behaviour that people engage in.

    Calling people ‘a racist’ implies that that’s all they’ve ever been and that’s all they’ll ever be. It leaves no room for improvement. Don’t call people ‘a racist’, call their behaviour racist.

    People can grow and change. I’ve met a good handful of people who were raised in households that engender conservatism, racism and sexism who have been able to deprogram that bullshit and become well-rounded human beings who care about social justice. When they were young, you’d have incorrectly called them ‘a racist’ and may have driven them further down the conservative rabbit hole.

    The way we speak to and about one another needs to get better. We need to identify that people are flexible and have capacity for change if we ever want to see that change. People cannot be bullied away from these positions, they need to be guided.


  • Your idea is right, but your numbers about population are wrong. Republicans definitely don’t make up 50% of the country given that your voter turnout for presidential elections tends around 50-60% and many who vote Republican in a given year are independent or swing voters who aren’t rusted-on voters. It’s hard to get a 100% clear number on it, but I’d estimate that Republicans only make up around 20-25% of the country at most.

    It only seems like they’re 50% of people because they win a lot of elections, but a lot of that has to do with the Electoral College, First Past the Post voting, and a lack of mandatory voting coupled with low voter turnout.




  • Well, yes and no. Paying that fine once would just be a cost of doing business, but now that the precedent has been set if they continue to do it they’ll continue to get fined in that order. Those fines won’t need court cases, so they’ll need to be paid quickly and in full. Sure, the fine they received didn’t really hurt them but it will change their behaviour. It will also prevent others from engaging in the same behaviour.

    I don’t think the EU wants to bankrupt companies like Apple - it’s not in the collective best interest. They need to guide behaviour by setting up punishments that are deterring but not destructive. I think €500m fits that pretty well - it’s akin to giving a child a timeout while their friends play or a smack on the back of the hand. It’s doing what it’s intended to do.


  • Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The anti-Semites have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past.

    • Jean-Paul Sartre

  • Then put the games onto high-storage solid-state cartridges like Nintendo does. There’s no reason to be limited by existing technology like Blu-Ray except for laziness. Hell, they could even just put an SD card reader in as the physical game tray and put games onto SD cards if they’re that lazy and don’t want to spend on R&D.

    Removing the capacity to have physical copies of games at all is always a bad move that is disingenuously masked with a “but the world is going all digital!” all the while knowing that this gives them greater control over things we’re supposed to own.



  • It’s also such a dehumanising concept. The ‘First World’ is the Anglosphere and Western Europe, the ‘Second World’ is the Sovietsphere, and the ‘Third World’ is just everything else. How the hell are Eritrea, India, the UAE and Brazil in any way related to one another or even similar? What a stupid way to group nations that’s extremely outdated for the modern world.

    While I prefer the modern term ‘Global South’ as encompassing developing nations, it still has its own issues - particularly as an Australian because we’re southern hemispheric but definitely don’t fall under the banner of ‘Global South’.