That assumes this poster has a goal to stop the genocide. ;)

This poster doesn’t care one whit about the plight of Palestinians. It has but one goal – to be the nerdy girl that helps peel votes off the votes from the nerdy guy so her friend, the jerkish cheerleader favoured by the Jocks, can win the SGA election 49 to 48 to 3 (I’ve posted this example of how government works in First Past the Post if you’d like to understand what I mean by nerd girl and cheerleader in SGA). The purpose of this poster and others like it is to throw the election to Trump so we’re subjected to Project 2025, which incidentally aligns with Putin’s and Xi’s goals.

Please think carefully before you listen to this poster or any other like it.

You’re wrong. I suspect that’s not an uncommon occurrence for you and that your reaction will be the typical factless rant you people are really known for.

Fascism is all about demonising the ‘other’. It doesn’t care about truth and facts as long as there are enemies, external and internal, to scapegoat. Khelif is just a good boxer. Do you really think Algeria of all places would cover for a transgender female throughout her entire life, from childhood to when she got her Algerian passport that lists her as female through the ‘revelation’ that she was somehow male after beating down a Russian Oligarch’s undefeated prize fighter? No, but since the BS is out there, Reich-Wing authoritarian shitheads are harping on it to further their stupid fears that there are Transgenders EVERYWHERE.

And I agree with the others. This goes beyond opinion to slander. It’s Fascism because in this case, the slander is furthering the idea that transgendered people are somehow evil and wrong and must be opposed by all means … by attacking an Algerian who was assigned female at birth. Fuck off with that bullshit.

This is my worry too. We’ve survived Trump for this long because he’s not half as smart as he thinks he is, nor is he as charismatic, either. But he’s not alone in this. Republicans are chomping at the bit for “Permanent Republican Rule”, and if they have to outlaw Democrats and Democracy to do it, they will. They’re happy in a Banana Republic…as long as they are the ones in control. Which means merely getting rid of Trump isn’t enough. We need a constant campaign to keep Republicans out of office, which the Left isn’t keen on doing because the Left isn’t one unified group, but instead a loose coalition of Scientists, Academicians, Artists, Environmentalists, Civil Rights advocates, and countless other small factions, that are easily played against each other.

Go back and watch Star Wars Episode 3. That’s actually a good description of how a democracy falls to autocracy. The Republicans have been openly dreaming of a “Permanant Republican Majority” since AT LEAST Bush 43’s terms in office. And they’ve been laying the framework since Nixon – a newsentertainment channel that caters to Right-Winger fantasies, judges who put ideology over legality, partisan gerrymandering that concentrates Republican voters for power and dilutes Dem votes into meaninglessness, and political theories that basically advocate for the dismantling of our political systems if that will keep Democrats out of power even if they have a majority.

To answer your questions directly:

Can he do that? Yes. He can. Anyone can.

What would need to happen to convert our system to lifetime terms? There are a variety of ways, but they all boil down to the President doing outright illegal things under cover of a friendly Supreme Court. After all, they granted immunity to ‘official acts’, which we believe is cover for an autocratic takeover of the country.

What would need to happen to convert our system into a dictatorship/monarchy/whatevs? This is just a hypothetical situation. It’s July 2028. Mass incarcerations of Leftists, Immigrants, Muslims, and Minorities have begun and the country is in the throes of a civil war. Polling is reporting that Trump could lose the election, despite disenfranchising the Left’s voting base through various means. Trump announces he’s postponing the 2028 elections 'until things calm down, they have to get much better first before we can have a fair election." People sue. It doesn’t matter what happens in the lower courts, because they’ll appeal all the way up to the Supreme Court. The same 6 Conservative ideologues that said he has immunity for ‘official acts’ will rule that he has the right to suspend the election. And that, my friends, is how Democracy ends, with massive applause from the Alt-Right assholes that Clinton quite rightly fucking called “Deplorable”.

Can Trump actually make either of those happen? Yes. Yes, he can. The framework is already laid out. HK-65 laid it out elsewhere. Essentially, you start by shutting the Other Side out of government. You then take over all the levers of government. Then you set them so you can’t lose. You might need to just waive away the safetyguards that get in your way, and some you might use your lock on government to remove ‘legitimately’. If the 22nd Amendment gets in the way of a Republican dynasty, they’ll have it removed.

TL;DR? Never rely on checks and balances to stop authoritarianism. In the end, the Constitution IS just a piece of paper, and will be run over by authoritarian jerks if that means power.

Don’t forget getting Student Loans to be somewhat affordable. 5% of not just your total income, but your disposable income, accounting for basic cost of living. That actually convinced me to step away from my ongoing education and enter loan repayment. A huge deal considering how much loan debt I have…

Thanks for saying this.

In the late 70s, the Shah of Iran was a posterchild for authoritarianist shitheads. Everyone wanted him gone, from the religious Right to the academic Left and everything in between. A crowd of liberals, professors, businessmen, reactionaries, and mullahs all united to send the Shah packing. When it was all said and done, Iran had an opportunity to form a Muslim Democracy and join the world as a rising star.

Then the Left started arguing with itself. There were the Communists who wanted Glorious Revolution, and the Academics who just wanted a sane system of government, and the moderates who wanted only a LITTLE bit more socialist support for the underserved, and each of those factions split into sub-factions over some little petty policy difference or another. And while they were fighting, the Religious Right came together, unified in the belief that Gawd Himself was on their side, and promptly took over government.

Iran went from a secular dictatorship to a religious dictatorship while the Left argued.

France has shown us that that doesn’t have to happen, by unifying in voting against the Right and settling on one candidate for each district and not letting little distractions get in the way. Unfortunately, despite this win, it shows us that the more things change, the more they stay the same and the various factions of the Left that are unwilling to compromise a single tiny bit and are willing to burn down the house if they don’t get exactly what they want, which might just cause the fall of the coalition that defeated the Hard Right in France and another risk of the rise of a Fascist government. Let’s be like France before the election, and not like France after, if we possibly can?!

Exactly this. I knew all along that if Biden dropped out, it would be going from “I’m in this 100%” to “I’m out for the good of the nation” without anything in between. You can’t do anything but that in politics, because a wishy-washy ‘we’re evaluating what’s best for the country’ would be the death of his campaign, and he’d have no choice besides “I’m out” at that point. Might as well just rip the bandaid off and go straight to “I’m out” without any intermediary steps. Be fully invested until you make the decision you can’t be anymore.

You new to politics?

1000 people vote in 10 districts. Their choices are a Hard-Right party, a Centrist Party, and a Left coalition, representing the Left-Centre, Left, and Hard Left. PS: This is what the French had going on.

Let’s say 373 people wanted the Hard Right party, 269 people wanted the Left-Wing Coalition, 223 wanted the centre, 51 picked a minor libertarian party, 50 picked from a slew of minor parties not on the Right, and 35 picked from other Right-Wing parties.

In a proportional representation system, you’d expect 37.3% of the representatives be from the Hard-Right party, 26.9% from the Left-Wing Coalition, 22.3% from the Centrist party, plus about 14% being from minor parties. But France uses a First Past the Post system and so does our hypothetical nation. So here we go:

Riding 1: 95 people voted Hard Right. 3 vote Centre, and one each vote other Right and Libertarian. Hard Right wins this riding. Riding 2: 90 vote Hard Right, 5 vote Centre, 2 vote Other Right, 1 votes other Non-Right, and two vote Libertarian. Right wins this riding. Riding 3: 85 vote Hard Right, 10 vote Centre, 1 votes Left, 3 vote Other Right, and one votes Libertarian. Winner is Hard Right. Riding 4: 15 vote Hard Right, 65 vote Centre, 10 vote Left, while 2 vote Other Right, 5 vote Other Non-Right, and 3 vote Libertarian. Centre wins. Riding 5: 12 vote Hard Right, 60 vote Centre, 12 vote Left, while 4, 8, and 4 vote for minor parties. Centre wins. Riding 6: 20 each vote Hard Right and Centre, while 3, 4, and 2 vote third parties. Left gets 51 votes and wins the riding. Riding 7: 22 vote Hard Right and 11 vote Centre. 2, 9, and 4 vote Third Party, and Left wins the riding with 52 votes. Riding 8: 15 vote Hard Right and 21 vote Centre. 3, 5, and 5 vote Third Party, and Left wins again, this time with 51 votes. Riding 9: 10 vote Hard Right and 14 vote Centre, while an amazing 8, 10, and 8 votes being sent to the Third Parties. However, Left once again takes the riding with 50 votes. Riding 10: 9 people vote Hard Right, while 14 vote Centre. Another 21 vote Libertarian, with 7 voting minor right-wing third parties, and 7 voting for non-right-wing minor parties. Despite these 50 people likely having more in common with each other than with the Hard Right or the Left, because they couldn’t agree on one candidate to vote for, their votes get split, allowing the Left to win the riding with 42 votes.

End result: 3 Right, 2 Moderate, and a whopping 5 Left. It didn’t go this badly for the non-Left parties in France, but it illustrates how a party with a lower vote share can get more representation in a First Past the Post system. It illustrates why Gerrymandering is bad. If those voters in the first three districts are packed there because some partisan power broker got into the redistricting process, they’ve basically been defanged by political shenanigans. Doubly so if the left-wing coalition managed to spread all their voters out so that they had a solid lock on 5 of the districts.

This is a fundamental problem with FPTP, so that’s why many of us advocate for RCV or Proportional systems.

I would say it doesn’t really compare to any of the Star Trek Armada games. It’s more 4x like Master of Orion or Civilization (Or Star Trek: Birth of the Federation for an in-universe game). You start with 4 planets colonised, and a handful of other systems that have resources you can mine, but rather than building research stations where you have to spend resources for techs like Armada, you’re cultivating researcher ‘pops’ (population units) to generate research points that let you pick up technologies. And rather than like a single system you’re trying to take over, it’s a full galaxy that you’re having to spread around with. And you don’t just blow up enemy ships. You also spy on the enemies (and your allies sometimes), and conduct diplomacy. And there are plenty of anomalies around to keep your science ships busy doing Star Trek-y stuff.

[ace_ventura]o//Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaalrighty then....o//[/ace_ventura]

I don’t believe for a second that you actually believe this. I think you’re just a concern troll trying to hide behind the inequity that allows kids to go without food and water while pushing the false narrative that every actor earns millions of dollars a year and thus doesn’t “deserve” to strike. If you really are concerned about kids, then perhaps stand in solidarity of the hundreds of thousands of people NOT earning seven figures so THEIR kids may be guaranteed food and water, and pressure the folks who ARE earning seven figures to show a little charity for the kids you’re so concerned about.

Excellent comment. I’m just going to add some numbers ans a source to it.

If you’re in the United States and are working as an actor, your income is closer to Minimum Wage than to the big names in the entertainment industry, with wages (not salaries, these people are paid by the hour) ranging from $7.75 up to $36.00, averaging at $15.29. We talk about the big names, but these are the people really being hit. Hollywood execs don’t even want to pay these wages. They’d rather give you a month of wages in order to have access to your voice and face for all time. This is even worse when you factor in that your image might get big…imagine being a fresh face right out of acting college, going in for your first audition, and they say “We like you. We’ll give you $3000 if you just enter our scanning booth and spend an hour saying nonsense lines.” That pays your first month’s rent (barely), but lo and behold, down the road, your likeness is earning the studio execs a cool billion, and you ain’t getting a penny of that, because you signed a contract saying your likeness and voice could be used by them at no compensation for you for all time.

THAT is a big part of what this strike is about.

https://www.indeed.com/career/actor/salaries

Sure. The leading actors in a production are crazy rich. But according to indeed.com, the average actor earns between $7.25 and $36.00 an hour, averaging at $15.29. For every lead, you’ve got countless little people backing them up. Strikes aren’t just about the crazy wealthy leading actors. It’s also about the dude pulling in $15 an hour. In fact, the leads aren’t going to license their likeness and voices to the studio execs, so they really have nothing to worry about. But they’re here standing in solidarity with the people who don’t have that luxury, who will go in, get a $3000 cheque, then never work in the industry again.

Just to be clear, you’re busy simping for the billionaires who run the media industry, pointing to the millionaires who are saying they are being nasty to everyone in industry. Says a lot about you, buddy!

Indeed! But it still is useful to put the lie to his nonsense, if for no other reasons than to point it out to others.

OK, ngl that {democrat|republican} rendering as democratrepublican is pretty cool.

Some really good arguments. But here’s one from the Cyber Security side. We all know about the CIA, but do you know about the other CIA?

• Confidentiality – Information that you store or transfer is only readable to those you designate.
• Integrity – Information you store or transfer is only alterable by those you designate.
• Availability – Information you store or transfer is available to those you designate when they need access to the data.

Confidentiality is the heart and soul of a functioning life. You do have stuff to hide, even if you say you don’t. Do you want a rando to know your passwords? Do you want your wife to find out about your birthday gift to her before the big day? Do you want your nosy neighbour to start gossiping to the entire neighbourhood about what you and your wife did on her big day? Do you want that big secret plan that will make you the next Mark Zuckerberg be found out by the real Zuckerberg and now he’s rich and you’re not? All of these are things that aren’t illegal, yet are still private information that someone like you might want to make confidential.

And this isn’t even the tip of the iceberg. Sure, you might argue, you shouldn’t be posting your plans for the Zuck-killer on Facebook, but your actual words are not the only thing Facebook stores and analyses. They know a lot about you. What you liked. What you commented on. What you searched for. What you looked at. They know things about you that you never ever said. For instance, even if you never said “I’m a DemocratRepublican” in so many words, or even if you don’t share overtly political posts, they still know your ideologies and are willing to sell this information to everyone and sundry. Facebook is even building profiles on people who never created accounts on Facebook. Imagine being RepublicanDemocrat and working for a DemocratRepublican boss. You’ve worked hard to keep politics out of the workplace, because while there may be anti-discrimination laws if you’re a woman or a minority, having an unpopular political opinion is not protected in as many places, so you could easily lose your job if Facebook discloses to your boss that you’ve not got the right political views.

If Confidentiality really was not an issue and everyone could live open lives without consequence, we’d be talking about the IAs of security, not the CIAs. That we are talking CIAs shows that yes, there actually IS a need for secrecy, and we actually DO have things to hide, even if we don’t moonlight as murderers, cat-burglars, or strippers.

PS: I don’t believe you have never had it explained to you why 'I have nothing to hide" is a bad argument.

PPS: Very strong sea lioning vibes here.

PPPS: Seems like this nonsense started cropping up on Reddit when it became clear the protests were having an effect. And now it’s here. So much dishonest debate tactics being thrown around the whole “we want an alternative to the creepily intrusive policies of main-stream social media” debate. I wonder why? </sarcasm>

Try 1912. https://bigthink.com/the-present/1912-climate-change-prediction/

There’s actually a news article from the March 1912 edition of Popular Mechanics warning about how ‘the furnaces of the world’ are ‘burning about 2,000,000,000 tons of coal a year’, and how ‘when this is burned, united with oxygen, it adds about 7,000,000,000 tons of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere yearly.’ They conclude that adding 7 billion tons of CO2 per year ‘make(s) the air a more effective blanket for the earth and raise its temperature’ and that ‘the effect may be considerable in a few centuries’. Their only mistake was underestimating how much CO2 future generations would put in the atmosphere. They estimated a few centuries for 7 billion tons of CO2. I’m wondering what they’d make of 43 billion tons.

Capitalists ignored the clear warnings from scientists about pumping CO2 into the atmosphere for over a century because it wasn’t economical for them to do something about it. It was always somebody else’s problem. Until it wasn’t. Where do you live? New York, that has recently had some of the worst air quality in history thanks to Canadian wildfires? Or Denver, where it was our turn in April and May? Or when we got the horrible DECEMBER wildfire that burned into Boulder? Man, wildfires in fucking December. NOW it’s fashionable for Capitalists to at least pretend to care about the environment, but shit, if there could be a dollar made burning down the last forest, you fucking better believe that capitalists will gleefully play a Captain Planet villain while they do just that.

Edit: A fun link: https://bigthink.com/the-present/1912-climate-change-prediction/