That one came out of left field.
Trump was taking a premature victory lap, and hires a comedian to warm up the warm up the crowd, and the proceeded exactly like Trump wanted.
And then everyone suddenly wakes up and says wait, these hate spewing assholes are actually hate spewing assholes.
All because one comedian didn’t use the code words.
Or maybe some Russian State backed programmers have tried to slip in backdoors in various key systems, numerous times. Including one that almost went live on millions of machines.
One man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter.
Did you know that Nelson Mandela was the leader of a literal terrorist organization?
He ordered attacks that killed people. That’s why he was in prison.
And every one forgave him, and even voted him into power.
All because South African Apartheid was fundamentally evil.
Israeli Apartheid is orders of magnitude worse than the South African version.
Have you checked out Live from Emmett’s Place?
Live jazz streamed every week.
Lenin betrayed the revolution. You mention the banning of the political parties. While it’s true that they “took up arms against Sovnarkom”, you’re leaving out the part where Lenin used Sovnarkom to coup the newly elected government because his party didn’t win.
Again, Lenin was flat out wrong. But I don’t think he ever actually cared about Russia ever reaching the true Marxist communist utopia. Lenin cared about power first and foremost.
He built up that dictatorship, and then handed it over to a monster.
Tried a bunch, but tried wrong.
The Lenin model of communism is inherently flawed for one simple reason. An Authoritarian Communism is an Impossibility. It cannot exist by pure definition.
The true ideal communism is a stateless utopia.
So yeah, the Lenin model is flawed to the point of uselessness. Or worse because any authoritarian government is going to kill its own citizens, while also being a low grade threat to neighboring countries.
No. The only path to true communism is via democracy. And there are countries that are moving in that direction.
There’s actually some merit to this statement.
In the late 1940s, the philosophical arm of the Lehi terrorist organization literally plagiarized Nazi race science with Aryan scratched out and “God’s chosen people” subbed in.
You may not, but the company that packaged the rice did. The cooking instructions on the side of the bag are straight from the FDA. Follow that recipe and you will have rice that is perfectly safe to eat, if slightly over cooked.
Edge cases like you describe are a key part of Ordinal voting systems, Cardinal voting systems are immune to that sort of thing.
Also, Cardinal voting systems can be super easy. Take Approval.
Simply take a list of names, and mark next to each candidate you approve of. If you feel like you need to have a moral conundrum over what you feel like approval means, then go ahead, but just mark the next to any or all of the names on the list that you like.
After that, the counting is simple as well. You add up the approval of each candidate, independent of what any other candidate gets, and then the winner is the one with the most approval.
It is literally impossible to elect an unpopular candidate via Approval, unless only unpopular candidates run.
STAR is slightly more complex, in that you rate each candidate on a scale of 0-5. Again, no one actually cares about your personal journey in rating someone a 4 or whatnot, just do it and move on.
Then when counting, you again add up the numbers, take the highest two, and see where they rate on each individual ballot. If one is rated higher than the other, they get the vote from that ballot.
Changing the voting system so that third parties are actually possible.
You need a cardinal voting system, otherwise you’ll fall prey to Durverger’s Law and Arrow’s Impossibility Theorem.
I favor STAR, it’s the best system designed to date.
What is 2C-B?
As a teen, the main question I had was, “can I make a pipe out of this?”.
Now that I’m old, the question is mostly “why the hell is this still illegal on a federal level?”
It would have made shit so much worse, but is a sign of weakness in Putin’s rule.
That’s why Putin is so murder happy right now. He’s having to reconsolidate his rule.
Ukraine was a massive fuck up for Putin. He believes in the bullshit known as color revolution.
So he thought he’d pull one in Ukraine. A few years of some soldiers fucking around in the East, then he’d walk in and be welcomed.
Which is fucking stupid.
But Putin has long since killed anyone who would tell him that an idea is stupid, or that people don’t work the way a paranoid, backstabbing KGB trained psychopath thinks they do.
No, Putin fucked up hard due to the dictator trap.
Now he’s scrambling. He’s been killing off rivals and opponents at a breakneck pace the last few years, all because his position has never been weaker.
And he barely managed to diffuse a coup attempt.
He had to use treachery to do it, so the next time, the coup leader will not back down.
No, Putin is desperate to pull out some sort of win in Ukraine, because anything else is the end of his rule, and likely his life.
He hired Joel Kaplan over ten years ago.
Kaplan was a Bush toadie who participated in the Brooks Brothers Riot that stopped the recount in Florida in 2000 letting the corrupt jackasses on the Supreme Court to steal the election for Bush.
Kaplan has personally exempted right wing “news” sources from Facebook’s truthfulness standards.
There were actually several zionist military groups. The Irgun, the Haganah, and the worst of the bunch, the Lehi.
And they did more than bomb a single hotel. They were a bunch of evil assholes who massacred villages, which is what started the first Arab-Israeli war.
The Lehi hated the British so much that they repeatedly tried to join the Nazis in WW2. The death camps were common knowledge among Jews who escaped Germany, and yet, the leaders of Lehi still wanted to join Hitler in fighting the British. They also really liked the Nazi writings about wiping out “inferior races” but decided that since they were “god’s chosen” they swap the races around a bit and put Arabs at the bottom.
And in 1980, the surviving members all got medals issued to them by the IDF for their role in helping to found Israel. Issued by the surviving (second) leader, who was the Israeli Prime Minister at the time, and was Netanyahu’s political mentor.
Israelclaims that was Hezbollah’s plan.
A claim used to launch a massive military strike on a neighboring county.
I’d call that an unprovoked act of war.
Israel calls it a normal day. Because they pull this shit all the time.
There’s a reason Israel has no allies in the region.
Did you know that Nelson Mandela was a terrorist? Seriously. He was a terrorist leader. He co-founded uMkhonto weSizwe. A anti-apartheid terrorist organization.
And the IRA. Terrorists that lived their car bombs.
The US military has explicitly used terrorist tactics in war.
As for Hezbollah… They were founded when Israel invaded Lebanon to act as a resistance force. Since Israel still holds Lebanese territory Hezbollah still has a reason to exist.
It also doesn’t help that the IDF has been launching air strikes and assassinations in neighboring countries since the 50s…
Which really makes the IDF the true terrorist organization here.
The war in Afghanistan was lost the moment Bush switched gears to invade Iraq.
He pulled resources out that never went back, and then Obama did the same to fight ISIL. And then Trump pulled even more out just because.
As the years went on, more of the security was offloaded to a corrupt interm government that never quite managed to become self sufficient.
When Trump did his pull out, he got Congress to pull funding. That funding was all that wa keeping the Afghani military going.
Then Biden had to finish the pull out, and he did not stick the landing.
Also bonus fun fact. The Taliban is very likely going to start the world’s first Water War. They’ve been damming and diverting rivers that their neighbors rely on.
No, it won’t change the minds of his base.
But there are people he wouldn’t consider his base, that also tend to vote conservative, who were actually offended by some of those jokes. And then realized that hey, Trump and company are white nationalists, and that means that no minority will be safe.
It’s a tiny minority of Trump supporters, but as close as this election could be, that’s more than enough.
Now, Trump is planning on stealing the election anyway. Via disrupting or delaying certification of votes past December 11th, Which then means that there will be incomplete slates of electors, which means the election goes to the House, and each State gets one vote instead of the house itself voting.
They’re going to try to use Section three of the 20th amendment.
Fun times to live in…