On the one side I really like c and c++ because they’re fun and have great performance; they don’t feel like your fighting the language and let me feel sort of creative in the way I do things(compared with something like Rust or Swift).
On the other hand, when weighing one’s feelings against the common good, I guess it’s not really a contest. Plus I suspect a lot of my annoyance with languages like rust stems from not being as familiar with the paradigm. What do you all think?
We need legislators who aren’t all literally older than cryptography. If they weren’t bought and paid for by billionaires that would be nice too.
It requires score voting so that, even if heavily gerrymandered, one can still meaningfully express a preference without throwing one’s ballot in the garbage.
It’s never throwing your ballot in the garbage though. I used to think the same way, but every vote on the left, even if for the lesser evil, even if they lose, moves the conversation to the left. When we all stay home you get maga nutjobs stealing the show running unchecked.
Last thing is that gerrymandered states are the EASIEST to upset by increasing voter turnout. To gerrymander effectively you have to put your opponent in dense areas they’ll win by a large margin, then spread your side so that you barely win the rest of the districts. That means that a 5% increase in votes on the left can take you from a loss to a nearly complete victory in a gerrymandered state.
Vote splitting on the other hand is a trickier beast, but in the end if all the left votes go to a moderate then that gives the left a lot of leverage because if the moderate candidate doesn’t bend to the left then they’ll lose the next election.
Always vote.
Don’t blame the victims for a sham of a democracy. First-past-the-post (FPTP) is there to prevent anything outside of a two party system where primaries are filled with (fully allowed) election fraud and cheating.
“we could have voluntarily decided that, Look, we’re gonna go into back rooms like they used to and smoke cigars and pick the candidate that way. That’s not the way it was done. But they could have. And that would have also been their right.” - DNC Lawyer
FPTP does destroy a lot, I’ll give you that, but municipal and regional elections have miserable turn-outs too and they have much more potential for perceptible change than state or national change.
In the USA things have to get way worse than they are now before they get better. A very very large percentage of voters would have to be fed up with FPTP to force change in that area. Also, they would have to be educated enough to understand that FPTP is a problem.
