Youse guys wanna play stickball?

Individual politicians and political parties routinely use count a vote as approval. In that way, if no other, voting does serve to support the existing system.

I don’t think that tracks.

The highest turnout in any US election since 1908 was 62% in 2020, and at no point has a party won an election and been like ‘look at all the people who didn’t vote, I guess we don’t have a mandate to govern’

Parties win elections and govern in power with less than 50% of voters backing them all the time, it’s literally the standard. A low turnout will not change the way any party acts once in power.

same thing lol

Except for immigrants, queer people, black people, Muslim people, and women. For those groups it is decidedly not the fucking same

But because the Democrats aren’t going to reverse capitalism and it doesn’t affect you personally, who gives a shit, right? Fuck everybody apart from you

I see your point but again I’d say it’s because of the US’s winner-take-all system, as well as 50 states vs 650 seats

Farage posed enough of a perceived risk to the Tories that they moved in his direction to avoid losing votes to UKIP. UKIP never would have won more than a handful of seats, let alone a majority, but by splitting the right vote Labour could have beat the Tories in swing seats

And yes, that could be broadly true of a ‘spoiler’ candidate in the US presidential election, except that:

1. Only 50 states, and therefore a tiny amount of swing seats compared to the UK

2. more population per state than per British seat. By a whole huge margin. So its not enough to potentially appeal to 8,000 people to ‘spoil’ a seat

3. The above leads to funding issues. Not only is there more money generally in the US elections, but because you have to flip a big state not a small constituency, you have to spend way way more to make an impact. You can’t focus a small budget on one tiny area and win a seat

4. Winner-takes-all means that as long as a campaign thinks it will win a state, and then a presidency, who cares if some counties went to a spoiler candidate?

I’d love to be wrong, and I do think that there’s probably also a cultural/historical element to the US’s two party dominance. But that said, its just a different system, different processes, different outcomes, different challenges than in the UK

There are 650 MPs in the UK, and unlike ind the US it isn’t winner-takes-all; if you win one of the 650 seats you get to be an MP

In the US presidential election, there are 50 states for a bigger population and even then winning one while losing the others achieves nothing

In the senate and house elections, which are more analogous to the UK, independent candidates are viable, right? There’s at least a few. But it’s not comparable to the Presidential elections

FPTP is fucked, but it’s only one element of why the USA is deadlocked into the two major parties being the only contenders. The electoral college, the winner-takes-all nature… all sorts

For anyone who is politically involved and knows the issues, Walz won by having better and more consistent positions; as well as Vance saying some scary fascist level shit

But I fear that most undecided voters aren’t in that camp, and for those people Vance did well just be being coherent and vaguely normal.

Vance lied and twisted the truth a bunch, but if you just tuned in without knowing all the facts and context, that wasn’t necessarily clear

For me though I was pleasantly surprised by Walz actually making a moral case for immigration, you don’t see that nearly enough

Coppola was heavily involved in the production of the film where some of the abuse happened, and during the fallout he allegedly tried to sue the victim of the abuse for breach of contract

I don’t know why you’re being down voted, he is literally a billionaire

‘No ethical billionaires’ apart from this guy apparently

Right, I was trying to imply that it wasn’t really okay, hence the ‘okay’ in inverted commas and stuff - this obviously isn’t okay

While this prosecution was completely fucked up and was 100% linked to the criminalisation of abortion (and therefore miscarriages and pregnancy in general), the issue was that following the traumatic premature birth she didn’t immediately remove the baby from the toilet

Moving north wouldn’t have helped on paper, as the alleged crime of letting your baby drown is still illegal

That said, possibly a more progressive state might have had the good sense to not prosecute or even treat this as a criminal matter. On the other hand, the DA where this happened was a Democrat according to the article

A grand jury declined to indict her, so it ended ‘okay’, apart from all the unnecessary additional horrific trauma inflicted on a grieving mother and being a harrowing sign of dark repressive times

I think it means + more than zero but less than one

So like, +(between 0.01 and 0.99)

They’re using it as (+0<1), there’s no - here bc that would be + (the other candidate)

Honestly looks pretty good as actiony eye-candy

Bit ironic seeing this right after that post about how the fan-service and callbacks ruined the new Alien film though

The Stanford Prison Experiment. But it shouldn’t be taken seriously, it was terribly done, biased and unscientific

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31380664/

Could be interesting to run something similar under actual experimental conditions, if that was doable

There was a really good article on this and unfortunately I can’t find it now to share

But the gist was that Titan exploited a bunch of loopholes, among other things. The paying customers on the sub were in fact ‘marine researchers’ who coincidently made a donation, and things like that

Some of the people who were at one point involved but left due to safety concerns raised the issue with OSHA (? - or whoever the more specific body was) who repeatedly failed to investigate or take any action

So for me, whether or not they are able to charge the company, the industry regulators and government bodies overseeing them need to face some questions and judgements too (though it would take a more knowledgeable person than me to know what exactly that looks like)

‘There’s no point voting against Hitler right now because the opposition is right leaning and may one day grow into Hitler’

In the UK, you can’t decide whether to ‘press charges’ or not, the decision is the CPS’s.

But in practice, saying you aren’t interested in pursuing a conviction often ends it, because:

1 - the prosecution must be ‘in the public good’ which is undermined if the victim isn’t interested

2 - a lot of the time the testimony and cooperation of the victim is key to the prosecution case

3 - the system is horribly underfunded so if they can justify dropping it they will

I read in the paper today that a bankruptcy court is going to take 40% of Katie Price’s OnlyFans income

When i saw this headline my brain skipped to Rudy Giuliani’s OnlyFans income

Has Rudy Giuliani considered OnlyFans?

I’d like to recommend The Trojan Horse Affair. Its a limited series and a few years old now, but a a really interesting listen

Its about the scandal in the UK in 2013, where an anonymous letter ‘exposed’ an Islamist conspiracy in Birmingham schools to radicalise children.

The investigation in the podcast is helmed by two people; a rookie journalism grad who is muslim, and an experienced white journalist. The contrast in perspectives and emotion between them adds to it

And yeah it’ll probably make you angry, and for those not in the UK it might key you in a bit on the tensions that do and don’t exist with British Muslims, how they’re viewed and treated by lots of parties here (including the Government)

“Yes, I lost this election, but I’m young, beautiful, and rich as f**k,” she concluded. She lost her job at Purina dog food over her extreme rhetoric and her campaign was unable to purchase ads.

She came 6th. Its funny, but I think she was never a real candidate and hasn’t learned anything