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I don’t know what country you are from or how your voting system works. But I will guess that your country has many parties and after the election, a governing coalition is formed.
In the US voting system, similar parties get punished by stealing votes from each other. So, in effect, we have to form our coalitions before the election and choose the single candidate that will stand for all of us. So, you can think of the Democratic Party as the Democratic Coalition, made up of some truly left-wing factions, as well as some not very left-wing or even centrist factions, and so our candidate will be much more watered down than what you’d see in a different system.
5·1 month agoThis is probably a fool’s errand, because it’s all or nothing, making it inherently unstable. If we ever get within striking distance of having enough states to cross the threshold, the law will be fought tooth and nail to prevent passage, and this battle would continue in perpetuity in every remotely purple state that has the NPVIC law in place, trying to get enough overturned to stop it.
Maybe it accomplishes something useful simply by bringing the conversation about reform to the forefront? But as an actual solution I’m completely skeptical, as much as I like the idea.
“How do I help my uncle Jack off a horse?”
103·1 month agoA problem with this question is that the US is such a big and diverse place, that you could have this same question posed to Americans only, asking about their experience visiting other parts of the US.
You think an American wouldn’t also regard that interaction as weird?
Do I just live in a weird bubble? I live in the US and I am rarely at someone’s house who doesn’t remove their shoes nowadays. I certainly grew up wearing shoes at home, but that’s changed significantly over the past 20 years or so.
Yeah, I always wonder how often there’s a need to refer to inhabitants of two continents together as a single entity. Like, if you say someone is South American or North American, that is never confused with being someone specifically from the US. When would those terms be insufficient?
Don’t you mean “from AND into”?
It is genuinely amazing. I have watched it multiple times since I first saw it! It feels like something that would be funny but should get old after a few minutes, and yet it never does.
The whole talk appears to be done in one continuous take!
Bill Clinton never debated George W Bush
What kind of Dem candidate is pro fracking?
One who exists in a fucked up electoral system where the entire fate of our country rests upon a few thousand votes in western PA.
“You” and “thou” come from different roots. They are not simply different orthographies like “ye” and “the”.
If “literally” means “figuratively,” then we literally have no word for “literally.”
It’s worth pointing out that you just used the word for “literally” and we knew which sense of the word you meant through context. Just like the verb “dust” can mean to put a layer of small particles on something but can also mean to remove the small particles from something. Humans are able to sort these things out.
However, one of the best things about language is that if a need actually arises for more clarity about “literalness”, a solution will naturally emerge to address it.
Even the word “literal” started out as a word that pertained specifically to the written word, and scholarly things, and its sense evolved to refer to things not necessarily written down, to the present meaning of “the most straightforward interpretation of what I’m saying”. A need arose and a word filled the need.
I’ve always wondered why so many people have this reaction, rather than seeing it as a cool thing that languages can do. Namely, taking bits from other languages and making them into something new.
I don’t know if this is true everywhere, but I can say my elementary school kid and friends all say “search it up”, and although they have school-issued Chromebooks and use Google for search, I can’t actually recall ever hearing them say “google it”.
It seems to me that the question of free will is only truly meaningful (aside from being an interesting thought experiment) if we could then perfectly or near-perfectly predict what a person will do. But the system in which we exist is so complex that we will never be able to model that or come close.
So we might as well consider humans to have free will, just as we consider a roll of the dice to be random.
For about seven years, and then he went back to calling himself Prince again.