Liz

https://youtu.be/me60gWzbMXw

Stun guns are useless.

Nope. Decades of people choosing Republicans is what got us here.

But again, change the system, don’t ask people to change. They never will.

If we remove the Republicans, things get better. If we remove the Democrats, things stay the same. It’s not a question of who is better, but who is worse. Until we change the voting and representation systems (hello Approval Voting and Sequential Proportional Approval Voting) picking the lesser evil is the only logical and moral choice.

Strategic voting can be an optional strategy under ordinary approval voting. If I don’t like either of the top two candidates, it’s still in my best interest to vote for the runner-up, if I hate them less than I hate the front-runner.

And look man, I’m honestly not interested in picking over the details. Any proportional system is better than single-winner. By miles.

Okay, actually though? Keep the mustache, drop the beard, and cut weight (fix your diet) and you would be killer. You look great now, but I can see an even hotter version of you in your future with just a little hard work.

1. While this complaint is technically true for SPAV, the likelihood that a popular candidate would fail to win a seat because everyone thought they were too popular is just… Not gonna happen. We already know from real-world AV elections that voters largely prefer to vote honestly, there’s no reason to think they would get more strategic when it gets harder to figure out the optimal strategy.

2. This is a problem inherit to nearly all systems designed to produce proportional results. I honestly can’t think of a worthwhile system that doesn’t have this problem. Anyway, the goal is not to make the parties take turns. It’s to make it possible for minor parties to win seats in the legislature. In the end, no single party would ever have a controlling majority, and they would be forced to form coalitions to pass legislation.

Hey! You come back here with that irrelevant commentary!

You’re going to have to get more specific if you want a response beyond “yeah man, it is 250 years old.”

He certainly wasn’t horrified about doing it in the original myth, as far as I remember.

Gonna need fundamental change to make the president less powerful and make it so that no one party ever holds a majority in Congress ever again. The first would follow the second, so we should be pushing for something like Sequential Proportional Approval Voting for every legislature we got.

So, I agree with everything you said, I’m just not as confident as I would like to be that Iran would stay their own hand. I agree that it’s an idiotic idea, actually using a nuke, which is part of why even North Korea hasn’t used theirs, but I’m just not that confident Iran could resist the temptation once they’ve got it. Making Israel disappear is high on their priority list, even if it’s a stupid idea.

I’m not dedicated to the preservation of Israel or anything, but part of preserving the taboo against nukes means making sure that we never actually have to retaliate after a strike. Like you said, the cat is out of the bag as far as owning nukes goes, we don’t want to end up in a situation where we have to say “okay, WWII and then that time Israel disappeared but we’re serious, no more nukes?”

I would happily give up all our nukes if everyone else agreed to do so as well.

So… Yes, but we still can’t allow them to have the ability to take out an entire city in one strike. Sucks, I know, but there are lines.

“Death to America” does not constitute a slightly different world view. They are perfectly reasonable in their pursuit of nukes, and we’re perfectly reasonable in stopping them. When someone repeatedly says “we want to drop a nuke on people” you believe them and do what it takes to stop them.

So were they going for nukes or not? Because your first comment seemed to claim they weren’t interested in nukes, but now you seem to claim they were justified in going for nukes this whole time.

(For the audience, Iran has been interested in nukes since at least the 90s, but has been prevented from getting one by lots of outside actors.)

There is no reason to be weeks away from an atomic bomb unless you’re interested in building a bomb. Tulsi was wrong about the timeline, but they were/are doing all the things a country interested in building a bomb would do.