• @[email protected]
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    4 months ago

    It’s been democratically instituted many times. And every time America marches in and “liberates” them.

    It’s difficult to provide good examples when they’re all actively destroyed.

    • @beejboytyson
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      254 months ago

      Cuba. Cuba has the most educated population in North America, more doctors per capita then almost any other nation. The only reason they’re struggling is because America’s embargo. They want stuff too.

    • @eatCasserole
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      4 months ago

      Mostly this, although Vietnam is doing quite well, especially considering their circumstances.

      Cuba is also really interesting…not thriving, to be sure, but you have to end the US blockade before you blame them for their own hardships. And in spite of everything, they have democracy like we’ve never seen in the west.

      Edit: also what beejboytyson said about Cuba.

      • Dessalines
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        164 months ago

        The US dropped more napalm, and bombs, and agent orange on vietnam (a comparatively small country) than it did during all of WW2. Lots of its people are still suffering from this atrocity.

        • @eatCasserole
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          114 months ago

          Sadly true. And most people aren’t aware that they did pretty much the same thing to Laos, who they weren’t even at war with. They just carpet bombed the whole country, “just in case.”

          Fuck the USA. They’re literally the evil empire from star wars.

          • Dessalines
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            124 months ago

            It’s so funny that george lucas was like: “the rebels are the vietnamese communists, and the empire is the USA (its soldiers the storm troopers)” and somehow a lot of modern star wars fans are extremely pro-US, and never connect the dots.

            IMO the biggest critique of star wars, its that lucas didn’t focus at all on the lives of the stormtruppen, and force its audience in the imperial core to look in the mirror, at their values, their chauvinist culture, their pro-war ideology and news media.

            Still gotta keep blaming the rebels for all the world’s problems.

            • @eatCasserole
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              44 months ago

              That’s true, the storm troopers and stuff are basically presented as automatons. I guess some audiences like not having to think, but it would have been much more impactful to show them as people with their own beliefs and motivations and stuff.

              • @[email protected]
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                34 months ago

                There’s a lot of short stories about that in various books, though they tend to overuse both the tropes of banality of evil and the cackling evil maniacs.

                • @eatCasserole
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                  34 months ago

                  Oh interesting, I’ve never really delved past the movies.

                  They did also choose to humanize a storm trooper with Finn in the new films, but I don’t remember him going through any “deprogramming” or anything, he just kinda realizes he’s a nice guy one day.

                  It would have been much more interesting to see him struggle with his changing worldview.

                  • @[email protected]
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                    34 months ago

                    From recent books, short stories anthology “From a Certain Point of View” have some quite good ones, can recommend.

            • @eatCasserole
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              44 months ago

              May he have pineapples shoved up his arse in hell, right next to old hitler.

    • @[email protected]
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      -44 months ago

      Yeah but all forms of government are constantly attacked. You’re like a multicellular organism crying foul because bacteria and other pathogens are trying to invade it.

      One of the reasons capitalism wins is it produces enough wealth to win wars. Consistently. The same wealth that leads to ever-lower levels of poverty also wins wars.

      • davel [he/him]
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        214 months ago

        Our current attempt at democracy—the methods we’re using to elect our leaders—are fundamentally irrational.

        They are rational, and they work as intended, it’s just that they’re not popular democracies, they’re bourgeois democracies, designed by & for the capitalist class and against the working class. They’re not meant to represent us.

        Take the US, which has has been ruled by the bourgeoisie since the 1776 bourgeois revolution. The wealthy, white, male land-owning, largely slave-owning Founding Fathers intentionally constructed a bourgeois state with “checks and balances” against the “tyranny of the majority.” It was never meant to represent the majority—the working class—and it never has, despite eventually allowing women and non-whites (who aren’t disenfranchised by the carceral system) to vote. BBC: [Princeton] Study: US is an oligarchy, not a democracy

      • @zzx
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        104 months ago

        Ah yes my favorite authoritative source on the mathematics of democracy: a YouTube video.

        Fuck off

        • @[email protected]
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          44 months ago

          Veritasium is legit, they cite their sources and explain concepts exceptionally well.

          However, I don’t think the conclusion of the video is “Democracy is mathematically impossible”, but rather “perfect representation in a democracy” is mathematically impossible (but can still be much much better than FPTP).

          The video basically goes through all the top voting systems and explains their pros and cons and the history of the mathematicians who invented the systems.

          • @Olgratin_Magmatoe
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            24 months ago

            but rather “perfect representation in a democracy” is mathematically impossible (but can still be much much better than FPTP).

            It’s not even that. The more accurate title would be “Ranked voting types cannot mathematically meet all of the requirements of democracy this one guy made”

            The whole video I wanted to yell out “so switch to approval voting”.

        • @[email protected]
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          4 months ago

          The dude makes some pretty legit videos. He has a PhD in physics education research. Using YouTube is just a sign of the time we live in. Imagine if your professor quit their job to become a YouTuber because they thought it’d be a more effective medium for education than a whiteboard.

          Mathematics is, in a sense, about abstraction and generalization, and the video covers an ideal, or set of axioms, you’d want from a voting system. This perfect system was proven to be impossible and the researcher was granted the Nobel prize in economics. In short, there can be no perfect voting system, and we must accept a compromise (much like an engineer). You can also say mathematics is about proofs, and, no matter how unintuitive something might seem, it leaves no room for doubt. It doesn’t hardly matter if the source comes from a YouTube video.

          Edit: I don’t agree with the context the video was posted, but I was bothered by this response to it.

      • @Olgratin_Magmatoe
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        24 months ago

        The title of that video is wildly misleading click bait. We should just switch to approval voting and be done with it.

        • @bitjunkie
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          24 months ago

          In the “I disagree but can’t articulate a cogent reason for it” sense of the word “nonsense”, of course. 🙄

          • @[email protected]
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            24 months ago

            Might be worth reading up on history to put some facts behind those feelings. Either you’ll find out you’re right or you’ll update your beliefs to be more correct.