AbouBenAdhem

Stuck a wire in a power socket.

Direct democracy—except instead of directly voting on legislation, voters vote on the desired effects of legislation and a metric for measuring if those effects are being achieved. The actual legislation is then written by specialists trained on effective policy implementation, who can adjust the legislation on the fly if it isn’t having the desired effect. Their mandate is limited by the associated metric—if they can’t meet the goals, they lose their mandate and the case goes back to voters for review.

The way to push them left is to actually push them left—protesting, calling your representatives, donating to campaigns you support, voting for candidates in local primaries where your vote is exponentially more influential, et cetera.

But voting in a presidential election doesn’t push anyone anywhere. For one thing, pushing is a continuous, incremental feedback process, while the outcome of a presidential election is a discrete binary one—there’s no map between the two. But more significantly, this buys into a narrative that the media has constructed over the past few generations, in which voting is a semiotic process with the people signaling their desires with their votes and politicians signaling their response with legislation. This leaves the media in full control of the political process by interpreting for each side what the other “means”: because the votes and bills in themselves are devoid of meaning beyond their real effects, the media is free to insert whatever meaning suits them.

Voting is a direct act of endorsement

endorse | verb [with object]
to declare one's public approval or support of.

Your vote is expressly not public—you’re prohibited from keeping or sharing any proof of your vote. In part this is to prevent people from using their votes as signals of anything outside the immediate issue.

There aren’t only two candidates.

In the event that your vote actually decides the election, it does so by giving the winner one more vote than the runner-up; at that point those are the only two candidates at issue. And that’s the only event in which your vote matters.

Voting for a third party, like trying to walk through a third door, is an indication of intent. Going through the door would be getting them elected to office.

And yes, supporting a party would be endorsing whatever evil policies the party supports—but voting isn’t an act of endorsement. Nobody knows how you vote; it has no meaning as a personal statement. Its only meaning is in the differential effects of the policies of the two candidates your vote decides between, in the most likely scenario in which it is the deciding vote.

You absolutely should support and endorse a party you believe in, but don’t mistake voting in a presidential election for either of those things.

At least Oracle Weblogic is being useful for someone.

Typing with long nails is the embodiment of “beauty is pain.”

The pain is real, but the beauty is subjective.

The presence of minor parties on the ballot doesn’t “place immense pressure on the duopoly”—it just tips the balance toward one or the other component of the duopoly. Which is why either party will actively encourage it when it suits them.

Edit: There’s a historically-proven method of forming new parties in the U.S., which is why we don’t still have the Whigs or the Federalists. In the past, distinct factions would form within one of the dominant parties, until the parent party imploded and two or more new parties emerged. That process of internal fission was suppressed after the Civil War, and that’s how the “duopoly” now maintains its power.

Of course, a different voting system would serve the same purpose (arguably better), and the suppression of alternate voting methods is also duopolistic. But the existence of minor parties under the current system just reenforces the duopoly by channeling dissent away from internal factions.

It applies to any house that isn’t designed to infer your intended goal and automatically rebuild itself to suit.

The legal definitions can be far removed from normal usage: in California “lynching” is when a crowd forcibly removes a suspect from police custody, which historically was often a prelude to what we would recognize as actual lynching (presumably it was defined that way so participants could be charged even if they were stopped before harming the victim). But it’s been used in more recent times to charge protesters with “lynching” for interfering with the arrest of other protesters.

Haitians of all people? Why?

Because if they said “Jamaicans” it would be too obvious they were talking about Kamala Harris’s family.

The Steerswoman series by Rosemary Kirstein, and the Merchant Princes series by Charles Stross—both series that may not seem like sci-fi at first, but become increasingly so as they progress.