• 0 Posts
  • 168 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: June 25th, 2023

help-circle
  • In small (population-wise) rural areas like that, where positions are running uncontested or only contested in the primary, it’s actually possible individuals could make a difference. But there’s some caveats.

    If the area is extremely Republican and would never vote for a Democrat, don’t run as one. Unlike in races like President and Senate, independent and third party are actual choices at this level, they’re not simply false choices.

    An individual could find some local issue that matters to a lot of people in the area but seems to be being ignored. Talk to neighbors, local people, etc, figure out what they’re upset about that actually falls under the purview of local or state government, then make that the core of your platform.

    As long as you’re not officially listed as a Democrat, you’re not platforming on things that the locals would never vote for (and you probably couldn’t do anything about anyway in the lower office you’re running for) and you’ve actually done some local research and found an issue that a significant number of people in your area are upset about, you actually have a chance. You’d probably lose, but there’s a real chance.






  • It’s kind of a difficult issue. Jury nullification has been used for both good and bad, with the simplest and most obvious examples being from Civil War type stuff - people who unambiguously broke the law against helping slaves escape have had their verdicts nullified. Good thing. But also people who lynched black people in the south have had their verdicts nullified. Bad thing.

    Making sure that verdicts are determined purely based on the law and whether the law was broken means that people need to work to change the law, they can’t just apply the law unevenly by nullifying against some defendants and not against others. So I can see the case for nullification being a bad thing. Ideally, you deal with that by removing or reworking the law so that it doesn’t come to the point of needing nullification.

    But, well, reality isn’t ideal. Still, it’s unavoidable - as long as a jury can’t be forced to explain the reasoning behind their verdict beyond insisting ‘I was not convinced of guilt beyond a reasonable doubt’ and as long as a jury verdict of Not Guilty is final and cannot be retried, jury nullification will de facto exist. That said, it’s the entire system not just ‘this judge’ that is attempting to prevent jury nullification from happening. The judge’s question about following the law is boilerplate standard basically everywhere, and it’s a systematic and intentional attempt to weed out potential jury nullifiers.



  • Yup, exactly. The only regulation I’d be in favor of for AI is this: if it was trained on data which can be accessed by or was posted by the public, it must be freely available, such that if anything in the training data was posted online in a way anyone can see, then then I have free access to tge AI too.

    Basically any other regulation, even if the companies whine publicly, is actually one that benefits them by raising the barrier of entry and making it more expensive for small actors to create AI tools.





  • I don’t think ‘going’ anywhere would be an option. If you’re in basically, most of the civilized world, and not in a very secure structure, you’re immediately fucked. I said more than 50% but I guessed that as a very conservative estimate. We don’t normally realize just how many living things are around us, mostly bugs, but also small rodents and the like. If every one of those within a significant radius of every human suddenly went berserk and wanted the humans dead, most people are not in areas where the number of attackers would permit much survival.

    Those who currently live in certain desert environments, in certain cold environments, and so forth, would probably survive the first day, and then might have a hope of making it longer. But most environments in which there isn’t enough animal/bug life around to immediately kill you present serious other problems such as food supply. If you live at McMurdo Sound Antarctica, you’re probably not going to immediately be killed. But you will soon have issues feeding yourself and keeping warm.

    People in Iceland or northern Norway and other similar places might have the best chances. Probably not quite enough things around to kill everyone immediately, but the environment is one in which they might be able to become self-sufficient, but in the long term I have my doubts even for them. If the bugs and animals and such are so focused on killing humans that they no longer perform their normal functions, then you’re looking at immediate and total ecological collapse. If they’re not, then the population of bugs and animals will increase in all areas other than the most extreme environments, and sooner or later what few humans survived in those extreme environments are going to have to attempt to emerge.

    If humans had prep time, maybe. Assuming we could get over our normal difficulties cooperating and actually prepare for the event. There’d at least be a lot of survivors. But if it came as a surprise, suddenly someone flips a switch and the entire animal kingdom is trying to make every single one of us dead? We’re pretty much fucked.



  • This started to become noticeable years ago when Google decided to start censoring searches even with SafeSearch off.

    I switched to Bing at that time, which was good for a while, but eventually they have started doing the same thing.

    I can now no longer find a search engine that actually works to find me all the relevant results. I’ve tried all that I’ve heard of, and none will provide complete results.

    The easiest canary in the coal mine for this is NSFW stuff. If I search for a popular character of which I know there’s lots of porn/hentai, with SafeSearch off, and do not get a heavy mix of SFW and NSFW results, I know that search engine is messing with those results, and is also definitely doing it with searches that are not so obvious.





  • Mnemnosyne@sh.itjust.workstotumblr@lemmy.worldSSDE
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    1
    ·
    27 days ago

    Way to miss the point.

    The point is his career took twelve years and it was considered a meteoric rise, incredibly fast. You want better candidates, start working for it and help them make their way through the system.

    Who’s your representative in your state house? Who was their primary opponent? Did you vote in that primary to try and get a more progressive candidate? Have you worked to get your local community to support more progressive candidates in small offices, so they can eventually become high level candidates?

    There’s a chance you can answer those questions and have done what you can, but the vast, vast majority of progressives seem to just complain that no perfect candidate has been delivered to them despite no effort on their part.



  • Mnemnosyne@sh.itjust.workstotumblr@lemmy.worldSSDE
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    19
    arrow-down
    4
    ·
    edit-2
    28 days ago

    Sure there is, but too many progressive voters just seem to be unwilling to act to get them. It takes long term planning.

    Let’s look at Barack Obama, a man whose political career to President was considered to be extremely fast, and who was considered to be very inexperienced and a shockingly fast rise.

    He was elected President of the Harvard Law Review in 1990, 18 years before he would become President of the USA. In 1992 he directed a voter registration project/drive in Chicago that was successful enough to be big news. In 1996 he was elected to the Illinois State Senate, and in 2000 he lost the primary for a US Representative position.

    But here’s a very important part: in 2003 he became chairman of a state committee when Democrats regained a majority. This allowed him to have some legislative successes, specifically in the field of racial profiling. Hmm, that ain’t gonna be important in Illinois ever again, is it?

    With that legislative success, he was able to win the primary for Senate, but even then, this essentially required the incumbent in that slot to be gone. Then he was a Senator for merely four years before becoming President. And also notably for those who act like the DNC simply anoints candidates, he beat Hillary in the primary, despite her being favored by most of the entrenched elite of the party.

    And the important thing to remember is this was a startlingly fast political career, considered by everyone to be a meteoric rise, an outlier. He was in politics for only 12 years before becoming President, though he did politics adjacent things even earlier. A more expected career would probably go for 20 to 30 years before becoming President.

    So you want voter action for more progressive candidates? It starts a quarter century ago, in state-level offices like the Illinois Senate. It starts by getting those candidates elected over goddamn decades.

    Politics is like farming, you can’t show up in harvest season, look around, and go ‘where are all the crops?’ and then be pissy that there’s gonna be a famine this winter. You gotta show up in the planting season, plant those crops, take care of them, keep them healthy and watered and fertilized as they grow, so you can finally get your food when harvest time comes.

    So you want to complain about the lack of candidates, well here’s my question: where the fuck were you all in planting season a quarter of a century ago? Cause these crops take a goddamn while to grow.