Dude brought receipts that had nothing to do with the topic at hand.
The issue I was raising was that he posts non-stop, and that a lot of it is transparently and objectively false. This post is a great example. He then brought receipts about how people were mean to him, and that it's okay to provide true information that doesn't match the bias people expect to see. Neither of which is related to what I was saying.
It's all good. I was only surprised that you seemed to have arrived at exactly the answer, clearly just by making up numbers to make a point. I was trying to agree with you and add a little data.
Thank you, friend! :)
It’s public forum, and I can express my opinions or ask questions even if you may disagree with them. As many here do. And as you have done just now.
Thank you, friend! :)
How did you get the exact right answer?
There are 3.9 million Democratic-registered voters in PA, compared to 3.6 million Republicans, and 61,126 of them switched their registration to Republican this year. That's 1.5%. It came from 0.9%, not 0.5%, but your ending answer was spot-on.
I can't for the life of me figure out where Newsweek got the 103% increase, since it was 36,341 voters switching to Republican last year, and 61,126 isn't a 103% increase over that. It is, as Newsweek notes, "nearly twice," which is incompatible with 103%, so maybe they are just making up random numbers. I don't know.
I could also, as a separate way of illustrating how totally worthless this whole article is, total up the people who switched their registration from Republican to Democratic in 2023, and in 2024, and measure how much the number went up by, since it wasn't an election year last year and so obviously the numbers are going to go up in the year where it matters. But what would be the point? I don't want to do that, because I'm not a partisan hack trying to make a disingenuous point.
Edit: @revelrous@sopuli.xyz figured it out. I needed to include the "other" affliliations, not just R and D. I could redo the math to see if it adds up to 103% that way, but as I mentioned, the whole comparison is useless and dishonest anyway, even with the right numbers, so why bother?
Hey @Rooki@lemmy.world and @jordanlund@lemmy.world: When I was sending that code to parse Wikipedia's sources list for a possibly better fact-checking scanner, one of the notable things that I found out is that Wikipedia regards Newsweek as unreliable. It used to be reliable, as most media outlets are, but they say that since an ownership change a few years ago, they're not. I have to say, now that I've been paying attention, their stories definitely seem to have very little to do with factual information, and quite a lot to do with amassing clicks or communicating a particular partisan message which isn't true, or both. Case in point, this explicitly propaganda-framed article.
I don't see a community rule which is specifically against unreliable articles, as measured by any source, but how would you feel about that? In conjunction with a more robust standard for what is and isn't reliable? In my judgement, this link is clearly in violation of "Articles should be worth reading. Clickbait, stub articles, and rehosted or stolen content are not allowed."
Also, why is this guy still allowed to post? It seems weird. He's so openly spamming the community with unwelcome trolling and propaganda that it seems strange that he's still being welcomed with open arms. In what way is this improving the community to have him putting up a steady flow of posts, and having every one met with universal downvotes and jeering?
It's a broader question than this one post, but this post is a good example in reference to both questions.
I completely agree. For me, it's a serious thing. My safety will definitely be impacted if Trump wins. I might go to prison or have my livelihood upended. But I'm not even the lowest on the pole. There are people who could die at the drop of a hat, or at the very least get kicked out of the country. There are whole nations whose fate is at stake. And, of course, making genuine progress on economic justice and real representation of the people is a key thing I would love to see, now or in the future. That's why it's irritating to see someone trying to undermine it under the guise of advancing it.
It's pretty obvious that this whole "lol" "don't care" "Gaza war stuff" pretense is just that. The guy clearly cares about the election, or he wouldn't make such a full-time mission out of posting his flood of content. It's only because he's being backed into a corner where he has to justify it that he's all of a sudden pretending that none of it means anything.
“Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The anti-Semites have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past.” -Jean-Paul Sartre
The technology and tactics have evolved since 1944. "Intimidate and disconcert," in online spaces, has turned into "confuse and overwhelm." But the strategy is the same. Truth is irrelevant, an obstacle to be ignored or attacked, until it becomes a casualty.
Did you not just post an article which said:
“If you vote for either of the genocide candidates you are endorsing genocide, you are affirming it, you are enabling it,” she said. “Every vote for our campaign is a shot across the bow of the empire.”
Do you agree with that, meaning you agree you've endorsed, affirmed, and enabled genocide? Or do you reject it, meaning it's okay to support genocide-enabling candidates as long as they align with your values the most, and you make sure to disclaim that you don't agree 100 percent with everything they say?
Because it sounds like you voted for a candidate who is furious at the existing administration for "backpedaling from defense of Israel and stepping up pressure on its government to stop the war, claiming they’re concerned about the humanitarian disaster in Gaza."
More information:
https://themilitant.com/2024/03/22/rachele-fruit-for-president/
Here's what Rachele Fruit says about the war in Gaza:
In the U.S. and other imperialist countries, organizations of middle-class radicals claiming to be socialists explicitly disavow any course to advance class solidarity among working people. They celebrate the murders, rapes and torture of Jews and others by Hamas on Oct. 7. They accept the Jew-hating course of the Iranian government and Hamas as if it was an expression of the national aspirations of the Palestinian people.
Nothing could be further from the truth. The war between Israel and Hamas is not about the Palestinian national struggle. Israel is not at war with the Palestinian people. It is fighting to eliminate Hamas whose leaders say openly their reason for being is to kill Jews and destroy Israel.
Hamas leaders say that they have no responsibility for the welfare of the Palestinian people. They’ve met protests by Palestinians in Gaza with repression. To speak out against Hamas has meant to take your life in your hands. There is no one claiming leadership among Palestinians who recognizes the right of Israel to exist or proposes a working-class road forward.
Hamas’ Oct. 7 pogrom confirms that there is no “two-state solution” possible today. Under its rule it’s impossible for a leadership worthy of the Palestinian people to develop. It will take the defeat of Hamas for a working-class leadership to be forged among Palestinians.
The capitalist government in Israel is committed to defeating Hamas because there is no other way to ensure the survival of the Jewish people. No other government on earth makes that commitment.
Here's what UniversalMonk said about her:
Yeah, this is actually the socialist party I joined. But it’s much smaller, but I feel like their values line up with mine the most. They were much more popular in the 1970’s. They really concentrate mostly on workers rights here in the US, more than anything else. In fact, Rachele Fruit, the candidate actually still works as a hotel housekeeper! So she is right there in the trenches with workers. And the VP nominee was an airline food service worker until he quit that to run for this campaign. So yeah, I like them. They’re my people. lol
You have made 15 comments that reference ranked choice voting in any way, with several of those emphasizing that in your opinion, Green Party support needs to come first, and only after that, can ranked choice voting come about.
Here are some examples:
I don’t feel that democrats and republicans will ever allow ranked choice to happen.
If you truly support ranked choice voting and breaking the duopoly, then you should understand that the fight starts with challenging the status quo, even if it’s uncomfortable.
There's also this absolute gem:
You argue that voting third party only serves to undermine the party most similar to it, effectively helping the opposition. But this perspective assumes the current system is the only possible framework.
The very act of voting third party is a challenge to this idea, a refusal to accept that our choices must be limited to two parties that both uphold the same capitalist structure.
While ranked-choice voting would definitely take care of some of the issues you mention, the push for third parties is not just about winning elections under the current system—it’s about forcing a broader discussion, about demanding that the system itself be questioned and eventually changed.
You've also made two posts about ranked choice voting. I don't know how many of your 5,000+ postings have dealt with Jill Stein, since the API doesn't let me count up that high, but if we conservatively say that one-third of what you say is supportive of third parties in some fashion, that means you've posted approximately 99% content supportive of third parties within our current FPTP framework, and 1% supportive of changing the framework in a way that would let third parties get some traction, which in the current system they cannot.
The question I was asking, which you didn't answer, was: Why? It seems like putting 99% effort to changing the system to allow the third parties to succeed, and 1% effort into supporting them in their currently-doomed effort, would be a better use of your time to accomplish the future you claim that you're trying to accomplish. What am I missing?
Not really. I was being sarcastic, but the overall goal is to improve the quality of the discussion, not detract. I was curious how UniversalMonk would respond, but he's chosen not to, so there's not much I can do.
Any third party that’s telling you to vote for them under FPTP, but isn’t heavily promoting RCV to fix the system, isn’t trying to win. They’re trying to spoil the FPTP election.
RCV is already law in a surprisingly large number of places. It may change the majority in the house in this upcoming election, because the difference in vote-counting within the two states that use it for US congressional elections might be enough to change the razor-thin outcome.
RCV is on the ballot, in one form or another, in 7 states and DC this year. Go vote. You might be able to fix the system, and move toward the future that all the people in this thread who are being vocal about Jill Stein say that they want. Remember back when marijuana was illegal? That changed. This can change too, and it would be glorious, for a lot of important goals that a lot of people claiming to support Jill Stein claim they’re supportive of. It would be practical and realistic. It would work.
Since you're saying Jill Stein is extremely important, but you haven’t been saying anything about ranked choice voting or changing the voting system to make third parties realistic: Why? What’s your goal, why did you make that decision about your priorities?
Register and vote, for RCV as well as for Harris. We have 19 more days.
If someone posted 15 times a day some objectively misinformational story about how great Kamala Harris is on some issue, then yes, that would be a bunch of crap. I still wouldn't react to it with the same level of vigor, because it's not potentially harmful in the same way to the same level to myself and my country's government, but yes, it would be inappropriate.