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Cake day: June 17th, 2023

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  • I’m not skipping anywhere, I’m familiar with the argument. I heard it ad nauseum from Fox News in 2022. The entire theory depends on ignoring the actual ideology on the ground and assuming Palin voters would just as soon vote for a Democrat.

    And you haven’t mentioned any other type of approval voting until now so yes that’s what was assumed. STV is also a multiple winner election system. Which is also incompatible with our Constitution. At this point I’m not sure you’re familiar with the US Constitution but in order to do anything that has multiple winners we’d need at least 40 votes to support it in at least 40 different parliamentary bodies. 29 of which are controlled by a party that massively benefits from tying land to seats. No voting system that gives multiple winners going down the list is going to be compatible with our election system for the foreseeable future. Where STV was used in city elections, it’s been deprecated because having two different systems on a single ballot is needlessly confusing.



  • any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group, as such:

    (a) Killing members of the group;

    (b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;

    © Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;

    (d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;

    (e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.

    Article 3 defines the crimes that can be punished under the convention:

    (a) Genocide;

    (b) Conspiracy to commit genocide;

    © Direct and public incitement to commit genocide;

    (d) Attempt to commit genocide;

    (e) Complicity in genocide.

    Hey, how complicit do you figure someone is if they keep sending military aid, knowing they’re being used in war crimes and knowing the government receiving them is openly talking about clearing all the “bad people” out so they can build settlements?




  • I’m not going to write an entire paper on the differences between journalists and spies to satisfy an Internet stranger. Organizations like the NYT act completely differently with their sources than Assange did. They release documents only after carefully checking for information that can put people in danger, and they never do something for the sole purpose of harming a country.

    We know this law doesn’t apply to journalists because they tried to use it against them during the Cold War and the courts told them it wouldn’t fly. So all this hand wringing over civil rights is just concern trolling to defend someone who made themselves an enemy of the US by working with Russian intelligence agencies to interfere in our elections.

    Edit to add - if you really want to claim our civil courts didn’t have jurisdiction we could always have let the military handle it. We certainly wouldn’t be watching him go home right now though.


  • SPAV still requires a proportional system. You cannot just magic it into our system. And even if there’s a state willing to go proportional, asking voters to use two different systems is a non starter.

    Second. That source is shit too. It’s a bunch of mathematicians playing what if? This quote is as far as I got because it makes it obvious.

    Peltola, could have lost by getting more 1st choice votes from Palin supporters.

    If you’re going to criticize RCV it needs to be on facts. Not on fantasy situations that can be generically applied. Yes if some Palin voters in an alternate universe decided to abandon their entire ideology and vote blue, they could have kept Begich in the race and prevented Peltola from getting those second round votes. But that’s an absolutely ridiculous assumption and shows these guys are just playing the numbers game.

    Which is what every conservative attempt to attack RCV voting in the wake of 2022 came down to.

    You’re not bringing any novel evidence to the argument and you’re proposing a niche replacement that doesn’t even fit our system.




  • Yeah no. That’s a lot of noise to ignore that the party and Republican voters preferred Palin. Begich wouldn’t even have been there in traditional FPTP. Calling the most popular candidate from a party “a spoiler” is a rhetorical device republicans came up with to go after RCV.

    Peltola is also hardly some far left representative. So calling it a center squeeze is a bit rich. This entire write up screams, “I can’t approve of the Alaskan RCV election because I’m paid not to.”

    To be clear, not you, the author of that Wikipedia article.

    Edit to add- and sure enough if you go to the talk page there’s a partisan group defending it from any changes to bring it towards Wikipedia objectivity standards. This is why your teachers told you Wikipedia is a bad source.






  • SPAV is specifically constructed to work with proportional representation. It iterates until all seats are filled. But in the US, by Constitutional law, it’s one seat per geographical district.

    About RCV though it’s still head and shoulders above FPTP, and easy to understand. About Alaska specifically, I don’t understand why you would call the party backed candidate who got more votes a spoiler?

    Palin lost in the second round because roughly half of Begich’s voters did not want Palin. If the less popular Republican candidate wasn’t in the race then Peltola still wins. This was a case of RCV working exactly as advertised. A traditional party primary would have nominated Palin, not Begich, and she would have lost anyways.