I can see the golf course now, wasting more water than Nestle just to keep the greens in shape.

Do tell that to all the brown and queer people in America. I’m sure they’ll all be reassured that there won’t be any more genocide.

You might want to reassure the Navajo while you’re at it. If you can get to them before they’re put into what is definitely not in any way a concentration camp in Guantanamo Bay.

RCV is a bad option that’s presented as if it could fix anything.

RCV was first invented in the 1780s, and the inventor wrote about it as the bad idea that it was, but because he was a mathematician, he wrote about the dead ends in the search for something better than the simple First Past the Post system that was in use in America.

The inventor, by the way, was Nicolas de Caritat, Marquis of Condorcet. His life was fascinating, and his death tragic, but for the moment we’ll focus on his efforts to find a better voting system.

He created a criteria for a better voting system, now named in his honor. The Condorcet Winner is the candidate who can win against any other candidate in a one on one race. They’re sometimes called the pairwise winner.

The point being, RCV, or it’s older name of Instant Runoff, cannot reliably elect the Condorcet Winner.

This was why Condorcet abandoned the system.

It was revived by some guys a few decades after Condorcet’s death. They didn’t care that it was a flawed system, just that it was slightly better than the only other option available at the time.

But that was 200 years ago. We now have quite a few options that are not deeply flawed.

First is Approval. It’s a dead simple system that always finds the Condorcet Winner.

How Approval works is thus; you get a list of names on your ballot. Mark any and all that you approve of. You may mark more than one candidate for each position.

The candidate with the highest overall approval wins.

Then there’s STAR. It’s brand new as far as voting systems go, only created in 2014. But it’s also the best system designed to date.

Basically the voter rates each candidate on a scale of 0 to 5. Multiple candidates can have the same rating. To find the winner, you simply add up the ratings for each candidate, then you take the highest two and look at each ballot. The candidate with the higher rating on that ballot gets the vote. If neither of the top two is rated higher on a ballot, either being not rated or rated the same, then the ballot is counted as No Preference, and that number is reported as part of the final tally.

Here’s the thing, in a sane world, the president wouldn’t matter quite so much. If you actually had a more reasonable legislature, they would have the political will to actually hold the president accountable for going beyond his scope.

That is to say for those wanting a more “perfect” president than some moderately inactive centrist, don’t expect that out a country like this. It’s a singular position and really should be the second choice of people who want a more hardcore candidate, with a failure to build consensus on ‘the’ hardcore candidate.

Obligatory this thing

I’m wondering what the best path forward is… it doesn’t seem likely to pass in either Texas or Florida, but sometimes purple states will surprise you. Backup plan is getting ballot measures in enough of the smaller states to make up the same number of electors. The captured SCOTUS would probably shoot it down somehow, but I think enough people would literally riot in the street over that that they’d at least think twice about it.

National reform will only happen from the bottom up. Need to change the local elections first and push every incumbent out of their seats. The current people in power will never cede.

Was a ceasefire deal and prisoner exchanges not happening days ago? Were people not out there on the streets rejoicing that the fighting had stopped? Were Gazans not forming lines along the shore walking miles back home? Are we reading the same news? Are we reading the news articles at all?

If you have special words for what that was let me know. Because it seems that you think I’m taking about something else and doubling down with typical irrelevant American conservative brand whataboutism without asking clarifying questions.

Lmfao I guess I don’t read the news every single day, huh. You tell me what’s been happening with Gaza. Go ahead, explain with your superior intellect for us delusional vermin who crawl out of the rocks.

Typical insufferable, better-than-thou and pretentious Lemming. A dime a dozen.

Not that delusional, the genocide was running in a pretty steady pace.

Opposing genocide is a losing battle to begin with. A political movement organized around a policy, changing policy was resolutely rejected, and the movement was crushed.

It would be more accurate to say letting Trump win was preferred over opposing genocide than the other way around.

Exactly this. People don’t understand that if you’re at the point where your only option is protesting in the street then you’ve already lost. I’m sure the Palestinians really do appreciate us standing around with a sign for a couple of hours.

Maybe glue your hands to the pavement and stop traffic, that’ll really help them.

Essentially they think the citizenry are too stupid and/or lazy to decide how things should be governed.

Well… Yes. This is more or less true. But that’s an argument to increase education and engagement, not to discard the whole system.

Which is stupid. The Republicans crashed the world economy in 2008, destroying 40% of working people’s wealth, and were only out of power for 2 years.

Accelerationists gotta accelerate

This is always my biggest gripe too. Even if the right doesn’t “win,” they take whatever they can get and they hold on to it. They’ll put players in every position and strike together and often. There were tons of interviews of concervatives saying, “I don’t agree on x, but I like y, so I’m voting for Trump.” A lot of the left is “if I can’t get literally every single thing I want right now, then I don’t care if it all burns down.”

As a example, look at slavery. Slavery is abhorrent, but we didn’t stop because we weren’t getting it all. Only half of the country allows us to be free? Alright, we’re running north and we will keep fighting. We learned how to read in poorly funded schools, we sat at colored only tables, we got lesser medical care, lesser resources, but we knew that every small battle was getting closer to winning the war. Yes, it’s painstakingly slow, but we did what we had to do to keep moving. Yeah, Harris was not our savior. She had/has issues, but she also seemed like she wouldn’t be doing, well… gestures wildly.

Agreed. I didn’t hear much if any grumbling from the US conservative base in the decades before Roe was overturned toward their politicians, provided that politician opposed abortion. It was enough they believed the “correct” thing and did what they could within the restrictions of the law, until process aligned in their favor via convenient Supreme Court vacancies.

Don’t let a perfect plan get in the way of a good plan.