• 0 Posts
  • 75 Comments
Joined 4 months ago
cake
Cake day: March 13th, 2025

help-circle




  • I totally agree that primaries are far easier. Orders of magnitude. But you hold on to a lot of baggage that way. There’s something attractive about a fresh start, and there are very successful independent candidates. Bernie has good reasons not to be part of the Democratic Party.

    And ranked choice isn’t the only thing you need; you need proportional representation in Congress. That’s the only way to actually represent all Americans. It’s always going to be hard to get one of the two parties in power to give up that power to share it with more parties.

    But as I said, such a big third party is incredibly hard. The system is rigged against it, and the financing and media even more so. You’d have to have a very broad popular movement, more than just a party. There’s nothing like that but there are candidates for primaries.

    That’s not going make me stop dreaming about a big third party, though.









  • That is very well put, and as far as I can tell it applies to all forms of conservatism, from monarchism where the king is above the law and peasants have no rights, to oligarchy where the rich are above the law while the poor have no rights, to fascism where the inner circle and the stormtroopers who serve them are above the law while minorities have no rights, or class-based societies where your laws and rights depend on your class or caste, and theocracy where the clergy decides your rights and obligations depending on your position.



  • Medvedev’s credibility is low indeed. He’s always the one to do the nuclear sabre rattling.

    Even so, I wonder if this might not work as a devious plan for them. Give Iran a nuke, and if they use it offensively, they’ll be the ones testing the rest of the world about what they’re going to do about it without any risk of Russia getting turned into a steppe of glass.

    Israel might get destroyed, Iran might get destroyed, but Russia will survive. And if Iran survives, that gives Russia more confidence that they will too if they use a nuclear bomb.