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Sounds like you lack an understanding of taxonomy. But, to be completely fair to you, that is a typical state of knowledge for monkeys.
Sounds like you lack an understanding of taxonomy. But, to be completely fair to you, that is a typical state of knowledge for monkeys.
Humans are monkeys. We can’t not fuck like monkeys, it’s literally impossible.
In one single election, yes. It means nothing, especially when you understand that his job is not to generate an accurate prediction, it’s to energize core supporters into donating to the campaign.
By the way, you can make the same argument in reverse—Trump always overperforms his polling right? If that prediction is accurate then Biden is absolutely going to get trounced. Now I don’t necessarily think this is correct, but it’s a slightly more sophisticated version of the fallacy you are falling prey to here.
Lol no that’s not how any of this works. If I flip a coin and correctly pick the outcome in 2024 will you start paying me to forecast elections?
All true but just fine again may depend on your definition. It’s going to cause major inconvenience for everyone at minimum I think.
Party strategists always say their party is going to do well. It’s part of their job. I don’t think this is particularly meaningful, unless you think there’s some particular methodology he has access to that’s better than Silver’s.
OK so probably a translation issue. But to respond to your statement, if your city announced it would punish illegal parking with penalties ranging from 3 years imprisonment to fucking murder, which would you be more concerned with? And which would you rather local journalists make you aware of? Would you really be criticizing their clickbait headlines if they ran a similar story?
Like I said, focusing on the more severe possible punishment makes perfect sense in this context. Not to mention that all of the punishments are extremely excessive.
I mean I think it makes sense to focus on the most severe possible punishment in this context.
That said, I did not find any mention of the death penalty in the linked page. I do not speak Chinese so I was relying on the translation feature in my browser, so I’m not sure if it was mistranslated, the article is wrong about that, or what. Curious if anyone has further information on this.
What are you referring to here? Your statement seems to contradict not just the headline but the entire article.
I don’t know what to tell you. I am fully aware of the history and difficulties in migration out of authoritarian governments. Sometimes situations that are quite different in some ways nonetheless share common features. That is all I’m saying, but you seem to be too emotionally triggered by the differences to acknowledge the similarities. Maybe take a step back and think on it and you will see them.
As far as your second point… yes… that’s exactly the problem I am outlining. The current system will almost inevitably lead to non-democratically managed instances, regardless of intent. In order to change that, we need to change the underlying system. I mentioned democratic decision-making around defederation but it’s likely other changes will be needed as well.
I’m not sure why you’re giving a history lesson when I already acknowledged that point in the comment you are replying to. Again, ease of migration has an effect on the severity of the problem, but not the underlying dynamic itself.
Sure, I theoretically could create my own instance, but then I would have the same problem as current instance admins, even those who are sympathetic to these ideas, as I suspect Lemmy.world and my own are. That there is no structure within Lemmy to enable collective decisions to be made or executed, and I would need to build them from scratch. Fundamentally, I lack the expertise to do so, though I’d be interested in a community discussion on how this could work.
This is very similar to telling people being exploited at work to get a better job or start their own business. Sure, theoretically, this might sometimes solve the problem, but it’s going to be a much better solution if we change the underlying system that creates these problems in the first place.
One could also simply move to another country if desired. I think there is a parallel. Obviously that’s much simpler with instances than countries but there is still a commonality here.
The fact that there I can choose which authoritarian system I want to be under means little when they are all quite similar. I don’t know of any instances that have such democratic governance. They are all run by their admins as they see fit. It would be like choosing if I want to live in North Korea or Nazi Germany. Sure, they might be different in some ways, but I don’t have a real voice in decisions either way.
Again, I have acknowledged the problem is far less severe with instances compared to countries. But the power structures involved are quite similar.
I think you have a point here, although I think the issue is less with defederation itself, which is an important tool to manage conflict between instances, but rather with the lack of democratic governance in instances themselves.
So, you are right that admins imposing defederation unilaterally is an authoritarian action in line with things the North Korea or other repressive governments have done, though obviously far less severe due to the lack of violent enforcement behind it.
In a shallow analysis, one could blame admins for not implementing democratic governance (as you claim LemmyGrad has done). But you need to remember that running an instance is typically an unpaid act of mutual aid done for the community—blaming admins for not doing more work to make a better system seems a bit harsh when it would take substantially more work to set up such a system.
A better solution would be to build democratic mechanisms into a social media platform itself. This would allow democratic decision-making in defederation and other issues by default, rather than forcing admins to create such a system from scratch. I actually think both Reddit and Lemmy were steps in this direction, with Reddit adding upvotes and downvotes to democratize content curation, and with Lemmy’s federated nature at least allowing user choice in which admins they want to be subordinated by.
However, both of these platforms were created by people who believe in authoritarian ideologies. These democratic elements were added individually to solve specific problems—neither Lemmy nor Reddit had an explicit goal of making a more democratic platform in all respects.
I am hoping that the online space will continue to evolve in this direction. Since I doubt Lemmy developers share this vision, there may come a time when people who want this will need to migrate to another platform, or create a fork of the current software. Since I’m not a developer, can’t contribute myself, but I will keep my eyes open for good ideas in this vein.
Sadly I doubt the US would ever go along with this even though our citizens would strongly support it. The wealthy have too much power here.
It seems like every voting system has pros and cons, but I’ve become interested in STAR voting as it seems to have a nice blend of positive characteristics without the worst flaws of other systems.
It’s effectively a mix of score voting and instant runoff (ranked choice).
You can read more here: https://www.starvoting.org/
It hasn’t been tested much, mainly because it’s relatively unknown, so I’d like to see more real-world testing before I say it’s the best, but it’s definitely intriguing.
We have a similar system in California called the jungle primary—basically there are no party specific primaries (except for president because this system is incompatible with other state’s elections), and the top two advance to the general election.
There are a few issues though. If a candidate wins more than 50% of all votes in the primary, they win the election and don’t appear on the ballot in the general election along with the president. Since there is generally higher turnout for the general election rather than the primary, you can sometimes have a generally unpopular candidate win in the primary with 50+% of the small number of primary voters.
We also have issues with spoilers—if a bunch of similar candidates run, and all split the votes between them, it’s possible they don’t make the final ballot, even if any of them individually would have won the final election. This seems like a fringe issue until you realize that parties have actually supported lots of minor candidates on the opposing side in order to eliminate an otherwise dangerous challenger.
So overall it is somewhat better than first past the post but it still has significant issues. In general I think elections that select a single candidate are somewhat undemocratic by nature and we should think about ways to give the minority a voice but not the ability to shut things down. This may be a difficult balance to achieve but it’s still worth aiming for.
Awesome tool, thanks for sharing. I wish they included STAR voting since I’ve become interested in that one.
Long-term, possibly. But if the collapse happens too quickly it may cause a lot of issues. A slow steady decline would be best but may be difficult to achieve.
Humans are apes which are monkeys which are primates. Taxonomically speaking of course. In common parlance they can be considered distinct, but this isn’t scientifically accurate.
Your statement is like saying both iPhones and smart phones are phones. It’s technically true but it contains a logical error in you are implying a comparable status between one category and another category that contains the first.