So, A Comparatively High Amount Of States Are Voting On The Fate Of Ranked Choice Voting This Year. Missouri

So, a comparatively high amount of states are voting on the fate of ranked choice voting this year. Missouri is voting on whether or not to kill it, Alaska is voting on whether or not to keep it, and most importantly, Nevada, Oregon and Idaho are voting on whether or not to adopt ranked choice voting, with maybe Colorado to follow.

And if you live in these states, even if you don't want to vote at the top of the ticket, I urge you to get out there and vote in favor of ranked choice voting on all of them.

Like, the two-party monopoly is a big part of the reason why politics in this country is so shit, and a big part of that is our "first past the post" system making it basically mathematically impossible for candidates outside of them to win anything beyond a local or state level.

So, if you want to try and break the cycle of voting for the lesser evil, of bipartisan cruelty towards the Global South and the country's own citizens alike, we need to change this and we need to vote on it where we can.

Foreign Policy

Biden’s ‘Escalation Management’ in Ukraine Makes the West Less Safe

Washington should abandon a failed approach to Moscow that does not learn or self-adjust.

Strongly recommend everyone read this article

"Samwise," meaning "in the manner of Sam."

'Edward', meaning 'in the direction of Ed'

I'm not on Twitter, and I wouldn't know this Ungar-Sargon "pundit" from a worm-induced hole in the brain, but this post does speak to a greater trend involving one of my favorite concepts: the paradox of tolerance. What on Earth is the point of "exposing oneself to diverse viewpoints" when those viewpoints include racist insanity like "The Haitians are going to eat our pets!" or even pseudo-normal claims like "Kamala Harris is better at regurgitating establishment talking points than Donald Trump, harbinger of authentic truth, and that's the only reason she won the debate"?

Trump doesn't have a single principled opinion, nothing that doesn't involve his own, personal access to power or luxury. What are we supposed to learn from listening to him? What are we supposed to learn from listening to once-great publications like the NYT and WSJ read his gibbering like tea leaves to impose fake meaning on it, a journalistic pareidolia that serves no purpose but to justify their own continued existence amidst a power-dive into false equivalency? I don't have an answer... but I do know that my conversations with the right-wingers in my life have gone from "persuasive rhetoric" to "intervention" over the past 10 years.

There But For the Grace of God

Over at the bad place, Batya Ungar-Sargon is mainlining copium to explain Donald Trump's debate performance. My take on the debate is that Harris did well because she's a factory settings Democratic apparatchik, and the main skill for doing that well is one she's good at: acting, pretending the neoliberal (or now neoconservative!) agenda of the Democratic elite is your own,… — Batya Ungar-Sargon (@bungarsargon) September 11, 2024 Ah yes, that explains it. Donald Trump is just too pure authentic for this world. His raw untamable independent streak just couldn't be corralled to please "the elites" ("on either side"!). Harris gets "if anything, she was too prepared" version 2.0. It's amazing how hard one has to work to avoid the Occam's Razor explanation* that Trump sounded like a madman because he is one; that Trump's inability to articulate a concept of a plan for America beyond crude xenophobic nativism is because he lacks one. Batya's descent into utter madness brain worms territory (which has been ongoing for years, including being a key player making Newsweek the house journal for the alt-right and antisemitic White supremacists and parroting the crudest Putinist propaganda about how funding of "Zelensky's War" is why Americans don't have manufacturing jobs) legitimately frightens me, because I don't know what zombie bit her and so I don't know how to ensure it doesn't bite me too. My main inference right now is "don't become opinion editor for a Jewish media outlet", because it was her experience at the Forward that seemed to drive her into the arms of madness, but I'm terrified that if exposed to the wrong trauma I too might go from being a reasonable intelligent and thoughtful commentator to a true believer in every fever swamp inanity imaginable. I'm not really exposed to Batya these days, since she's not on BlueSky. There's a line on BlueSky that it's an echo chamber, and that's something I worry about too -- isn't it important that I be exposed to more views like Batya's, to ensure that I'm not cocooning myself in an epistemic bubble? The problem, though, is that while when I expose myself to the Batya's of the world I may pat myself on the back for being a good, virtuous epistemic citizen willing to challenge myself with views-not-my-own, in reality exposing myself to the likes of Batya feels less challenging than it is confirmatory. Reading her takes only makes me feel incredibly relieved that I don't have her takes. She is anti-persuasive.  If the point of reading diverse views is to have that "huh, I never thought of it that way" moment, reading these people makes me go "huh, turns out that the caricatured mental model I have of brain-rotted right-wingers isn't a caricature at all." They're saying exactly what I expect them to say; there are no surprises. I'm unconvinced that confirming that instinct is actually healthier, even along the axis of remaining open-minded to divergent opinions. * Of course, this circle also struggles mightily to understand what an "Occam's Razor" explanation is. via The Debate Link https://ift.tt/juXKUBd

I have this desk (or rather, a slightly different model from the same company) and can confirm the phenomenon is replicable.

Removed the top of my desk for cleaning. Cat did not understand 

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