queermunist she/her

Why are you applying this fuzzy logic to democracy when democracy, itself, does not? If one candidate gets 49% of the vote and the other gets 51% of the vote then the candidate with the most votes wins. Nothing fuzzy about it. If we apply liberal democracy’s logic to itself then a country that isn’t at least 50% democratic can not be called a democracy.

Roughly 50.1% but that’s still assuming none of these people would’ve switched to trump

That’s not assuming none switched to Trump, merely that most switched to Harris. I think having such a close runoff race would also be likely to change how people voted more broadly. Turnout would be through the roof if everyone felt like their one vote would be the one that swung the election. It’s really hard to say what the results would have been.

And we’ll never know because this shithole country doesn’t do runoff elections.

and this is how US elections work

Yes, and it’s bad. I’m saying the way US elections work is undemocratic. They are designed from the ground-up to favor the ruling class and suppress the will of the People. They are meant to be undemocratic. This was all intentional.

Imagine an alternative USA where every single state was gerrymandered to hell by whoever won, where electors were routinely bribed by opposition parties to vote against their states results, where people were bullied at the polls or where minorities were entirely disenfranchised. That would be a worse place than our USA, but by your definition both would be the same.

Okay. Now imagine an alternative USA where only a small selection of royal families are allowed to vote and electors are aristocrats chosen by birth and court intrigue. By your definition this hypothetical is also a democracy, even if it’s an awful very very bad one. You have nuanced away the meaning of the word entirely.

He got less than 50% of the vote. If you add all the non Trump votes together you get more than 50% of the vote.

Many countries use variations of runoff voting, where if no candidate gets a majority then the top two candidates move on to a second round and the other candidates are eliminated. This is actually the most popular way to run elections worldwide.

He got a lot of votes, but he didn’t actually get the majority. He got a plurality.

fairly democratic, in the sense that most people can vote, they didn’t pressure or threaten voters much, they didn’t fake lots of votes, and the flaws can only influence and skew the result to some extent, rather than being the deciding factor.

Unless all people can vote it isn’t a democracy. It totally reverses the power dynamic of democracy - rather than the People choosing their leaders, the leaders choose who gets to be of the People. It’s completely backwards! As long as the enduring legacy of settler-colonialism can choose who is allowed to vote there will be no democracy.

The way electoral districts are drawn, the way voters get purged or have to go through hoops to get registered, the way people can have their right to vote taken away, the way noncitizens and disenfranchised citizens in federal prisons are counted by the census for the purpose of allotting representatives, the efforts to keep voter participation as low as possible, it’s all rigged to produce undemocratic results.

It’s useful for us to recognize that this isn’t democracy. Not yet.

He didn’t get a majority of the votes. Less than 50%. That should mean something.

It can always be worse! How come you can acknowledge that it’s shit, but you can’t acknowledge that it’s fundamentally undemocratic? Where’s the disconnect here? The US was not founded as a democracy, it was founded as a white supremacist settler-colony. Today it’s had many democratic reforms, and that’s good! But we have to acknowledge these root problems.

Has it had enough reforms to be called a democracy? Trump got less than 50% of the vote and he’s been elected twice!

The United States was founded as a white supremacist settler-colony. This shit is the same as calling Israel a democracy.

How come the US can be “flawed” but China is “red fascist”? The US is white fascist. You want to talk about fascism? The US’s prison population is higher than either the USSR was or China is, and under Trump it’s going to get worse! Where’s the democracy for the millions of undocumented workers that the US relies on to run its economy, that the US is gearing up to round up by the millions into prison camps? Where’s their democracy? Where’s the democracy for the hundreds of thousands of child brides and child laborers all across the US? Half a million children pick almost a quarter of the food currently produced in the United States. They pay taxes, are forced to give birth, but they can’t vote.

Trump didn’t even get 50% of the vote, and now he’s in charge of everything. “Democracy”

We have to accept that the US is not democratic; it’s reformed fascism, and those reforms are in danger right now. If you ever want the US to be a democracy you need to recognize this and protect the democratic reforms we have.

It’s democracy when only white men are allowed to choose representatives? What?

It’s settler-colonialism. Fascism. Where was the democracy for the Natives? Or the slaves? The original system has had many democratic reforms, but denying its roots as fundamentally undemocratic is historical revisionism and blinds you to the US’s flaws. You’ll never fix this country’s problems if you can’t even recognize this.

Is it? Do you think the US was founded as a democracy?

Is it democratic when the largest state and the smallest state both get two senators?

True, but also, there will be plenty of morons that just openly reveal who they are on their Facebook timeline. That’s still useful.

Although being called slurs by a chatbot will probably just make people stop using Facebook.

On the bright side, Zuck’s influence on California politics is going to drastically decrease.

Look on the bright side: they’re saying these things under their legal names. You’ll know who they are and where they live.

I don’t like watching videos.

Does it make them money? Or is this a bubble?

DeepSeek is really interesting! Leave it to China to solve some of AIs biggest problems - if we can have these models without needing football fields of compute powered by nuclear plants then it would totally change my perspective on the industry. As it is they’re just too wasteful to justify their utility, but if DeepSeek just leapfrogged that problem then I have no complaints.

I have heard that these LLMs are really good as coding assistants, so good point. I shouldn’t dismiss that. I don’t think they’re good at music, and really the art isn’t that good either, but I’m sure people without artistic training like being able to make images and songs. Not sure it’s worth the cost, since it’s all built on plagiarism and so massively wasteful.

As for web searches, really? I don’t think they’re trustworthy. They can, and do, make shit up. No, that’s not the same as the boomerism of saying “anyone can edit Wikipedia so you can’t trust it” because Wikipedia has quality control. LLMs don’t. There’s literally nothing stopping it from spitting out lies and so it’s up to the user to double check whatever the LLM spits out, which means I might as well just search through results myself. And if you don’t always double check, it will bite you in the ass eventually. Good luck with that.

If it wasn’t for the web being an absolute social media shithole with no moderation resulting in AI slop being pasted all over the place, AI would genuinely be the greatest tech revolution I’ve seen since the iphone.

If it wasn’t for the web being a monetized SEO algo shithole we could still just search the web! AI summarization is only “useful” in the sense that the search engines have destroyed themselves in their search for profitability, google is garbage now and we don’t need to build acres of compute powered by nuclear reactors to fix the problem.

So really, the problems that are causing AI slop to pollute search results are the same problems that made search engines so bad over the past ten years.

If we demonetized and de-enshitified the search engines by nationalizing google I don’t think AI result summaries would be useful at all.

Shall we make California its own continent because of the Rockies?