I seriously believe that wealth factors into weather or not you’re considered low or high functioning.

Take someone who is low functioning and make them stupidily rich and suddenly they’re treated like they aren’t on the spectrum at all.

Based actually comes from freebased. Which is what you do to cocaine to make it crack.

Based used to mean something cringe worthy until the rapper Lil B started using it in a positive context.

Now it’s sort of the opposite of cringe.

Spouses can move to the village, it’s just that the children never leave.

At least one parent was born in the village.

The thing is, Left vs Right is already a measure of authoritarian vs Democratic.

The original use of the terms comes from the French Revolution. There was a vote on if the King should have an absolute veto over laws passed by the assembly. Those who said no sat to the left of the Speakers podium. Those who said yes sat on the right.

The reason why left and right were applied to economic policy was because Marx described Communism as a form of extreme Democracy. Whereas Capitalism concentrates power into the hands of a select few.

It’s still a measure of where the power rests. In the hands of the people or the hands of the state/leader.

You can break it down to dozens of categories, but it’s all authoritarian vs Democratic in the end.

As a note, Lenin style single party “communism” is about as far from Marx’s ideal as you can get.

Dictators and Kings are all the enemies of the people.

Ah yes, the Noem Chomsky. Famously when he was defending Pol Pot’s regime.

Ah, Cato the Elder. He had a good cheesecake recipe, but was otherwise a complete jackass.

It’s quite a bit less functional. There have been dozens of high profile outages and service interruptions.

The first article is from someone who wants to save RCV, despite that one flaw that they’ve drilled into.

The problem is that it’s a known attack vector, the Wikipedia article talks about how it was used intentionally by a political party in 2005 in Germany to effectively steal an additional seat in their parliament.

My second link is a deeper dive into more of RCV’s many flaws. Because why stop at monotonicity? Seriously, the fact that increasing support can cause a candidate to lose, and not just lose but elect the worst choice, is insane.

That fact that there are more flaws, just as game breaking, means we should all follow the example of the Marquis de Condorcet, the guy who invented RCV, abandoned it because he saw how broken it was.

Then you have the lying liars at FairVote saying that the Condorcet criterion doesn’t matter in elections.

The Condorcet criterion is that if you were to hold a series of one on one elections between all candidates, the winner of those should be the same winner of your election system. RCV fails this in most elections, which is why Condorcet abandoned it.

It wasn’t until about 30 years after Condorcet’s death that an Englishman revived the voting method, but added a proportional twist. It still had all the flaws that Condorcet wrote about, but Condorcet was French, and lost the political games of the French Revolution, so he was mostly ignored.

As a side note, the political writings of Condorcet should be required reading. The guy wrote this in 1790

‘The rights of men stem exclusively from the fact that they are sentient beings, capable of acquiring moral ideas and of reasoning upon them. Since women have the same qualities, they necessarily also have the same rights. Either no member of the human race has any true rights, or else they all have the same ones; and anyone who votes against the rights of another, whatever his religion, colour or sex, automatically forfeits his own.’

https://medium.com/@Gbgrow/understanding-non-monotonicity-in-ranked-choice-voting-and-how-to-prevent-it-55ad54fdad06

https://electionscience.org/research-hub/the-limits-of-ranked-choice-voting

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negative_responsiveness_paradox#Specific_examples

We’ve seen it happen in actual elections, as shown in the Wikipedia link.

RCV is just a flawed system, which is expected for something created by a couple of guys 150+ years ago.

IRV, or RCV as it’s being sold here, has a lot of problems.

It’s the only voting system in existence where ranking someone higher on the ballot can cause them to lose the election.

Australia gets around most of the problems of IRV by just not telling people any information about the vote except the winners.

Also you only use straight IRV for a single part of your government.

The US would use it for every part of our government. It would be a shit show.

Which is why RCV has been banned in half a dozen states.

Now, there are better voting systems. Systems that live up to the hype.

STAR is the single best voting system designed to date.

As a cardinal voting system, it’s actually immune to the Spoiler Effect.

Ethanol is incredibly inefficient as a fuel source.

If not for the massive subsidies it would not exist.

Still, ethanol is a better fuel additive than lead. (Both reduce knocking)

Still, the far better use is to grow food.

Harris was the path of things slowly getting better. Wages finally overtaking inflation.

Given a couple years, we would all be in a better place.

Trump’s tariffs will drive up the price of everything. The last few years of inflation and greed will pale in comparison.

And egg prices will still go up.

Catastrophicly so.

A tungsten cube that size would weigh a fuckload.

To just deliver it would be an undertaking. There will be roads between you and the where ever this came from that are not rated for that weight.

You may need a specialized truck just to move it, and a crane to get it on and off said truck…

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.

If someone poured a shitload of money into it, and had actual humans on quality control and some writing… You could generate a setting with a bunch of NPCs who have generated back stories and connections and shit.

And it would still come out as some of the blandest of bland as for as game went. But hey, a bad game is better than no game right?

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.

That’s some blatant Russian propaganda there. Blame NATO twice for Russian imperialism.

The “Russia had to invade a sovereign nation because they were talking about joining NATO to prevent Russia from invading them” logic has some holes to it.

The fact that Russia has invaded their neighbors 14 times since the end of the cold war tells you why one of their neighbors would want to join NATO.

Also, remember that time that Russia shot down a commercial airliner? The Ukrainians sure as hell do. That was the true beginning of the invasion, which is why Ukraine was in talks to join NATO.

And yes, people have the right to defend themselves. But the Israeli government has locked down the anti-terror propaganda, because Hamas is pretty vile as far as organizations go. It’s why Israel let Hamas grow and become powerful, and why the Israelis paid to keep Hamas in power for the last decade or so.

As long as Israel can point at Hamas, they have just enough of an excuse to claim their ethnic cleansing is actually just an anti-terror campaign.

Hamas is a full on terrorist organization, not that all terrorist organizations are bad. Or rather, there are some causes where a terrorist organization is the appropriate response. John Brown tried it. So did Nelson Mandela. But Hamas is a religious extremist terrorist organization. One that has distasteful views, and was sort of put in place by Israel for those views.

You see what I’m getting at here? Hamas is fucking evil, and Israel has mostly succeeded in making Hamas the face of Palestinian resistance against Israel.

I doubt many of the original leaders of Hamas are still alive, but that doesn’t matter either when Israel can just lie and say that whoever they kill is Hamas. It’s a bit maddening, and I doubt there’s an answer to it all except for the other Palestinian resistance groups to step up their social media game.

There was no economic or rational factors. The only thing that makes a lick of sense is the irrational.

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/03/putin-dictator-trap-russia-ukraine/627064/

https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2022/3/24/22982864/vladimir-putin-russia-ukraine-war-brian-klaas

Those are a warm-up, but then you have the purges since the invasion began.

https://www.newyorker.com/news/q-and-a/the-purges-in-putins-shrinking-inner-circle

Putin has sort of been the butt of jokes for years for killing anyone who looks at him funny. He’s a KGB stooge, who made his career out of backstabbing and paranoia. His entire inner circle were afraid to tell him the truth, because he would kill them if they did.

He’s never been “savvy”, he’s just been willing to kill as many people as necessary to secure his own power.

The classic authoritarian dictator who throws people out of windows for saying no. And whose vaulted military had body armor made of cardboard, because the corruption was so ingrained that every single level was accepting bribes and stealing shit.

I’m surprised that they’re still going, but Russia has shown the world that they’re a third rate military, at best.

As to Palestine. It doesn’t matter what the resistance movements call themselves now. Israel will just say they’re Hamas, and no one likes Hamas. There are good reasons not to like Hamas, they’re religious extremists who want to kill all Jews.

And for decades, Israel has funded Hamas behind the scenes, while coming down extra heavy on any other resistance movement. And now it’s all paid off for them because they can just claim that anyone they kill was actually Hamas.

https://www.timesofisrael.com/for-years-netanyahu-propped-up-hamas-now-its-blown-up-in-our-faces/

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2014/07/30/how-israel-helped-create-hamas/

This tactic of creating the perfectly detestable opposition has been used in quite a few places. For example, Greenpeace gets a lot of money from oil company heirs. Specifically the Rockefeller family.

I doubt anyone from Hamas, or Greenpeace, ever took orders from the people giving them money. They were given the money with no strings attached, because they were already jackasses. The money just extended their reach.