Wait

I thought Biden was the worst person in the world and hated unions and working people and loved the rich and was so much a tool of capital he was indistinguishable from the Republicans they were collaborating to strengthen the corporate oligarchy strangling our country and that’s why we have to vote for Cornel West etc etc

Now that he can’t actually be elected, we need to be upset that Kamala Harris only wants to increase the capital gains tax by 40% and not the 100% that Biden was going to do

Do I have that right?

Texas has an initiative. I kinda agree with you that it seems a little unlikely right now but at least it might be good to help build the network out for a future day when Ken Paxton is in prison on federal charges and there’s some realistic pressure possible on the Texas legislators.

NC has one too

Guys

Every single RCV initiative that I am aware of has come from a ballot referendum

Just put it on the ballot. Y’all are adding too many extra steps that require cooperation from the political class.

I think your chance for RCV or STAR increases if you take over a major party

This is totally wrong. RCV is already in place in a few places, and on the ballot in multiple states in November.

You don’t have to have anyone from the existing parties on board to enact RCV. You can gather signatures, put an initiative on the ballot, vote, and presto. I don’t even really agree that “both sides” are trying to fight tooth and nail to prevent RCV (it is mostly one side in particular that’s doing that), but in any case it’s besides the point.

Check fairvote.org, see if it’s on the ballot for you, if so vote. If not then try to sign up with a group working to make it happen in your state.

The idea that most voters are disheartened with “both sides” and that’s what’s wrong with politics right now is actually pretty much backwards from the statistics – people are getting involved more and more in every recent election, which kind of makes sense since “one side” is so actively and obviously dangerous right now – but again, that’s even kind of besides the point. The point is, keeping FPTP and pushing for a third party is going to produce exactly the opposite of whatever the third party you’re pushing is advocating, because what you’re going to do is split the vote with whichever their ideological neighbor is. Reform of the voting system is the only approach that makes sense, and it’s currently happening at actually a pretty surprising pace.

It’s fun sometimes to ask them what they think of NATO, or Alexei Navalny or democracy demonstrations in Hong Kong or etc.

You would think that they would say “Oh yeah I was talking about Claudia De la Cruz because I like her policies / I’m upset about Biden approving Alaskan fossil fuel leases / whatever United States thing we were talking about, but OF COURSE them killing Navalny was a horrifying human rights abuse yes.” And yet, the few times I’ve tried it, that has never happened - it’s always either “well you know he had ties to X Y Z white nationalists” or else silence.

I don’t think it pays very well

Hey, neat! It’s a couple of talking points.

When people hold up dollar amounts like Biden is doing a lot, that number is inflated by fraudulent interest

“They are lying to you about numbers, don’t pay attention to the numbers! Just in general; no numbers. Pay attention to my vague, inflated, ever-shifting claims, instead.”

Biden is just paying with our tax money.

“This politician is spending our money!” (mostly this one is emotional impact – it is true that practically everything the government does is spending people’s tax dollars, but suggesting that some specific thing is them spending your money is alarming to people on a survival level and triggers this kind of hatred for the situation overall)

But he’s literally doing the bare minimum

“Okay, he is making progress, but it doesn’t count!”

drastically overpaying meaning for the same dollar amount, more people should be getting loan forgiveness.

Literally no idea what you are talking about here. I think you messed up by making it too specific, so it’s factually untrue – you gotta keep it within the realm of technically true but wildly misleading things (“paying with our tax money”).

Are you suggesting that when Biden forgives $10k of student loan debt, the borrower is receiving less than $10k worth of forgiveness? How would that even work? I think you got too excited at the keyboard and let your typing-froth get too close to factual reality and kind of exposed the fact that it’s all made up bad faith bullshit.

It sounds great if you only read headlines tho…

“I’m the well informed one! If you disagree with me you are foolish / naive / victim of propaganda / etc!”

Making excuses for Biden always just ends up arguing against moderate politicians like Biden. It’s their fault we’re in this shitty situation to begin with

Bringing factual reality = “making excuses for Biden”

General bad faith bitterness and blaming. It’s actually pretty remarkable how effective this is at turning “Biden tried to forgive $500B in student loans and has been fighting against efforts to stop him and still has succeeded in forgiving $167B and is still trying to do more” into “it’s his fault student loans even exist in the first place! Fuck him for pretending to care with his massive student loan forgiveness program positively impacting millions of people!”

Overall I rate this like a 4/10. You hit a bunch of general points that can produce an emotional impact and could literally be applied to anything, and you hit honestly a pretty good rhythm of nonstop firehosing claims wrapped up in a way that they could produce an impact. You got too factual, though; even one claim that is objective and testable and 100% false (the thing about “drastically overpaying” which doesn’t even make sense as applied to student loan forgiveness), can sort of snap people back into the realization that you’re just jabbering anything you can come up with to attack Biden with no connection to reality.

Almost as if there’s a coordinated effort up to and including this headline

Start?

He forgave a little over $150 billion so far

I’d go a step further than that. It’s not all bullshit.

If right at the moment that young men are starting to figure out, hey it’s important to make some money, it’s important not to be a coward, I think I’m gonna start working out and waking up early and keeping my house clean, hey I think at least some of these people I see who are downtrodden by life are at least partially responsible for their own situation and problems and I don’t wanna be that way… if right at that exact moment all the left has to offer them is getting in their face and saying NO NO NO, FUCK YOU THAT’S ALL WRONG TRANS RIGHTS VEGAN CAT FOOD FUCK YOU ARARGBGLGLLGLGL then they’re not gonna wanna join with the left. The left is going to seem stupid and crazy to them, and for a certain segment of the left, they’ll have a point about that.

Trump like all fascism is a malicious lie which will bring them only misery. But just being conservative (like authentic conservatism) in your viewpoint isn’t automatically wrong or “the enemy.”

Hi! I feel like we just talked about this - there are quite a lot of Democrats who are actually currently pushing, with some level of success, for reforming the voting system away from the duopoly-favoring FPTP system.

It doesn’t make a lot of sense either for you or for some Democrat to support introducing 3rd parties in a big way into the existing FPTP system, splitting the vote and leading to a Republican win. It makes perfect sense to support reforming the system so that 3rd parties can gain traction without being spoiler candidates.

I wonder why you are fighting for that first thing and not that second thing. Seems like fighting for that second thing would make more sense, yes? Definitely more sense than somehow criticizing the Democrats for not wanting the first thing.

Since your goal is obviously good leftwards progress and victory for left wing causes, and all

Copilot and that whole model is a bunch of shit

Get Claude.ai, do the thing of pasting the code you want it to modify into the chat window, and it’ll spit back out some modified sections of code you can put back into the file. It is more time consuming, but it actually works.

For intense operations you can make a project, upload the main headers and documentation, and it’ll absorb them into its sphere of awareness and start being able to take account of them when it does the above in chats within that project.

It is not perfect (as no LLM assist is) but it saves a lot of time and is not beset with the growing incompetence and failure with which OpenAI seems to be afflicted more and more with every passing month

TL;DR Here’s how my model works model model model anyway you gotta subscribe to hear the answer.

BS like that may be against the communities rules since they aren’t posting in good faith. It getting very close to trolling territory.

Reply to a link to a big list of Democrats who are actively reforming the voting system with “What do I want the Democrats to do? How about stop sabotaging third parties and start fighting for the kind of voting reform that would actually reflect the will of the people?”: A OK

Highlight that the person who did that reply is not addressing important elements of the message they are replying to: BAD FAITH ARGBLBLBLB

Good luck with that, I guess. I’m perfectly open to input from mods or anybody if I am the asshole here, but in my mind the first is worse than the second.

Fuckin’ hell, I typed a long comment and Firefox crashed and I lost it. I’ll keep it short:

Idk why you are bent out of shape about me pointing out your bad faith. I originally posted a direct and polite response to your argument, and you ignored a big part of it and went on a long strawman tirade. THEN, I started “belittling” I guess, but it was still in service of making the point of how you were approaching the conversation. Maybe I shouldn’t do that but I felt like it was a creative way to make the point. If you wanted to have a factual exchange instead, great! But I started that way and it wasn’t reciprocated.

If you don’t want to talk any more, that is obviously okay. The fill in the blank answer was “supporting.” A lot of Democrats are “supporting” ranked choice voting which is a more realistic answer to the duopoly. Here’s the list I sent you previously

No, I replied to what you said with my points.

You didn’t, though. I said that there are quite a few Democrats who are supporting ranked choice voting, I.e. the effective form of the exact reform to the voting system that is the genuine solution to the duopoly. And that having the Democrats split the vote with a third party and lose isn’t any kind of step towards reform of anything, and that to accuse the Democrats of blocking reform because they don’t want that to happen, when the actual reform is something they are making happen, is silly.

Then you sent me back a big message all about what a travesty it is that the Democrats are blocking reform.

I get it if you feel like the method I chose to use to address that was a little convoluted and condescending. I mean, it was. But surely you can see how I could get a little startled on my side by the discontinuity and want to address and highlight it. No?

you were talking about FPTP and asked if I wanted dems to lose instead

Incorrect

Want I said was “What do you want them to do, try to lose, instead?”

Can you compare and contrast those two statements and why they are radically different?

There was also a pretty central point I made towards the end of the message, which you seem to have missed. I’ll give a hint: It was that quite a lot of Democrats have been s_ppor_ing efforts to reform the voting system so that third parties could have a decent chance of winning

And I had a link which listed quite a lot of them by name

Can you fill in the missing two letters in my fill in the blank? I’m tryin to make it easy to recall my argument here, which you seem to have missed in a particular ironic fashion hence the whole runaround of asking you what I had said.

I don’t think you are a bot, no. I think you forgot what I said, and what you replied with had absolutely no bearing on any point that I made or the link I included. You just kinda had something you wanted to say, and didn’t notice the relationship that existed between the points that I had made and the things you were typing “in response” to them, just kind of went ahead with typing your talking points as if I hadn’t said something that related to them in a pretty direct way.

So… what was it? I mean, you made a reply to me, so presumably you were responding in some sense to what I wrote down, so you should be able to skim your reply and recall what I linked to and remember your thought process when you were typing it up in response to the reply that you definitely read and understood. Right? Or not?

Hmm fascinating

So, I just now edited to take away my comment that you were responding to. Can you tell me what my comment said before I edited it? I.e. what parts of it you were responding to when you typed your response?

(Temporarily removed to make a point. Here’s the original comment, now restored:)

The Democrats’ etc etc is yet another example of their fear of things that will lose them elections in the FPTP system. What do you want them to do, try to lose, instead? Say “yes split the vote so the other people will win and start shooting everyone’s pets on sight if they look Mexican or whatever our opponents want to do?”

Reform the voting system

If only some of the supporters of that reform were Democrats, it might be gaining traction in some places

Oh wait