Campania Herculonius

@espurrs_eyes @CameronCorduroy But their decisive power comes from being in play, a state like Vermont is small but gets ignored because it’s not in play

@CameronCorduroy The idea that Pennsylvania is the heavyweight of the EC is a ridiculously surface level and ignores the fact that there are a dozen flyover states who carry five times the electoral votes with the same population. If they were weighted correctly the swing states wouldn’t matter!

an extremely potent midwit test is whenever people brainlessly copy-paste Senate justifications onto conversations about the Electoral College the EC doesn't reward small states or rural states, it rewards whatever states happen to have a 50/50 partisan split

@theproteindance @QiaochuYuan @selentelechia Yeah and requeening will kill the old queen

@QiaochuYuan @selentelechia Honey harvesting kills some honeybees unless under special conditions

if you decided for ethical reasons not to eat any food whose production requires killing a living organism, animal or plant, what would you be able to eat? i think fruit, berries, nuts, seeds, eggs, milk maybe? which grains can be harvested without killing a plant?

@Tomycj1 @soncharm There are people who self describe as populists who would agree with the first part of what I said but would say they don’t do the things in the second part, they think they’re acting rationally based on an accurate understanding of the world.

@JTTSoundSystem @soncharm I know that usage of the term, and that is still meant to be demeaning, because in that case it still refers to a misleading action. That's how the term is used, except by people that hear "popul-" and just assumes it means popular, without checking how it's used first.

'populist' is such a weird term to throw around in a democracy, because ostensibly literally all politicians are supposed to, indeed required to, be 'populist'. but i guess they're not! i guess we still have elites and nobles who rule us with no reference to public approval

@darkacademician @northington764 Well for Marx the 20th century sense of dictator hadn’t come around and it was the classical Roman idea like cincinnatus, I think when Hasan says it he does mean a 20th century dictator.

@northington764 lefty version of benevolent dictator?

sincere q: what is a dictatorship of the proletariat? like operationally?

@GeodesicForce @SaveTheLibs @JamesSurowiecki the senate is the bigger distortion and more central to the design of the government

@SaveTheLibs @JamesSurowiecki It was really more about logistics and practical election integrity than high principles.

There's no good civic argument for the electoral college. It was arguably necessary to ensure the ratification of the Constitution, but it's an anti-democratic device that gives some American citizens far more voting power than others, based purely on where they live.

@upgyre @HedgeDirty it doesn't necessarily, the history of populism is the new guy cuts a deal to join the elite

@HedgeDirty This assumes that removing harmful actors from power does not generate positive outcomes? If not purely economic, we can look at the idea that elite sensibilities were propping up deleterious gay race communism, and kicking those people in the teeth is systemically constructive.

No, this is backwards. Populism is very, very real, but is pre-economic The motive belief of populism, of both right and left, is the the Wrong People have unjustified high status and that justice should be restored by the state kicking them in the teeth

@Towlie1981 @mttjon @tomhfh the majority in america is not impoverished or living in slums that's insane

@mttjon @tomhfh Yes I'm aware, I've spent a lot of time in America. Did you also notice the massive amounts of poverty in the majority outside those highly paid skilled jobs? The millions of people living in trailers alongside highways? It doesn't take much hunting to find it.

I think a huge part of the reason why no government has been able to enact difficult pro-growth reforms is that the average voter still believes we remain a rich country. You hear this in politicians’ rhetoric “the sixth richest country in the world”. We’re the sixth largest economy but now far from the richest. Per capita we’re tanking down the rankings. One of the reasons why Poland or China have been able to have growth miracles in recent years is they think like a developing country. They know they were poor and they have to build to get rich. We think we are rich and that we don’t have to build anything anymore, or that when we do, it has to be the most expensive possible version of what we build. Bat tunnels. Fish Discos. Kittiwake hotels. We think we’re rich so we can afford to chase some wealth creators away, afford to mandate public biodiversity net gain on every development in the country, and afford to ratchet up state pension spending five times faster than the rate of growth in the economy. We’re suffering from acute ‘rich country delusion’. It’s only once we realise we’re far poorer than we should be that we can start to fix this nonsense.

@Nowooski this boomer wants to play on a jungle gym 😆

It’s strange how people fetishize a style of playground that was trendy for like 4 years in the mid 90s.

@hammert1me9 @AlimKamat @ZaidJilani South Carolina is the same just with smaller cities, the question is the composition of the Dem primary electorate

@AlimKamat @ZaidJilani No it's not. Atlanta is a significantly left leaning city and throw a lot of weight in the over all results. South Carolina is not even remotely comparable, hell North Carolina wouldn't be either

It needs to be said by Democrats now so that people won't, in bad faith, call you racist if you say it later. South Carolina is not a good way to pick presidential candidates for Democrats when the voter base there is nothing like the voter base in swing states.

@Tomycj1 @soncharm There's a more value-neutral idea that populism is a worldview that pits "the elites" vs "the people" in a simple zero-sum relationship to power. The conspiracism, illiberalism and demagoguery are sort of second order associations but not inherent to the concept.

@soncharm I don't see the logic behind that conclusion about all politicians being supposed to do it. Coherent with what? I explained populism does have a definition that's clearly not meant to be good. If then people misuse the term that's another, separate matter.

@RedGreenBC I like lisa simpson... unpopular opinion i guess...

Thinking mental health care was run by sadists wasn't that uncommon of a position among the left for decades. Sad seeing everyone wanting to be a Nurse Ratchet instead of a Freud success story. Anyone else noticed this? I presume they're doing the exact same shit nowadays.

Might have something to do with not sitting them in rows and hitting them with sticks when their minds wandered idk

@alanthefisher they consider ontario to have water access through hudson bay lol

This map is wrong in so many ways, also related I find it so funny that Idaho has a port thats capable of international shipping

@mattyglesias @MattZeitlin those were the days

@MattZeitlin Leading professors have proven with political science that it's actually not possible to combine pro-growth policies with an expanded social safety net. crookedtimber.org/2011/07/19/209…

the quesiton this raises is why doesn't every center left party do this when they take power

@DanielDayJewish @agraybee @neontaster Not only that he’s read nearly one million tweets and short online articles

@agraybee @neontaster He has a whole (I think) degree in politics stuff, he is very educated so you are probably wrong (This is apparently the standard for streamers)

He doesn't even know what the dictatorship of the proletariat means. He's not just dumb about politics, he's also dumb about Marxism.

@myonlinetrust yes, coercively, otherwise it would never get built because it's not worth it for any single ship owner to pay for the whole thing and have everyone else free ride

@JTTSoundSystem Who is benefitted by it? Probably it would be paid by the shipowners using the port.

The chart notably has no answer (ie. a loop) for those things that are important & no one would be willing to pay unforced

@myonlinetrust how would you collect the "light toll"?

@JTTSoundSystem You think no one would be willing to pay for that?

@myonlinetrust @fawwazanvilen lighthouse

@fawwazanvilen There are no such things.

@zb6nyz9zzk @topoproc @imPenny2x well some forms of argument are logically valid like deductions from established premises

@JTTSoundSystem @topoproc @imPenny2x Ok, but do you have the example of any public argument that the last sentence isn’t true for?

Is slippery slope even a fallacy? I feel like it's a very real concept. A valid arguement in many cases.

@zb6nyz9zzk @topoproc @imPenny2x it's just not logically true that starting down a path inevitably leads to going all the way down it so observing we are going down a path isn't enough to say where things will end up. A process logically could start and then settle at a new equilibrium half way.

@topoproc @imPenny2x Is there any argument that doesn’t work this way? You could even say a factual statement - “OJ Simpson was acquitted of murder”, but if you don’t share details of the trial how valid is your point?

@FosterThePrnxtr if they could just tell people what to like then every band would be a big hit, katy perry would still be huge

People grossly, vastly overestimate how good they would think an artist was if that artist were not introduced to them via major corporate brands & marketing campaigns. It's not about whether the music is "good" or not. It's about manufacturing perception first.