They added a line to the bot that includes Wikipedia’s stance on a source. And Wikipedia doesn’t consider MBFC to be reliable, so the bot reports that.
If you scroll below that, MBFC rates themselves as maximally reliable, which I’m sure is based off of a rigorous and completely neutral assessment.
Edit: although, reading the links in question they don’t seem to correspond to what the bot is saying. Perhaps this is some sort of mistake in how it was coded.
Well, I generally agree that party leaders have way too much power, but that seems to be an issue across many different systems. Your example is from a FPTP system. Is there some reason to think it would be worse if we had proportional voting? I mean I can see how party leaders might have more power in some ways. But on the other hand it’s much easier to abandon them for another ideologically similar party if they abuse it. Yes it means abandoning AOC or whoever your favorite is but they can also jump ship if need be. I think we need a different solution to overly powerful party leaders.
But the thing is, there are so many things I would want to change about the Democratic Party, but I can’t abandon them because my only alternative is far worse. If we had a diversity of somewhat similar parties then it would be much much easier to pressure them into doing what voters want.
Ranked choice would do this to some extent as well, so I broadly support both. However, I have concerns about election security with ranked choice. Unless the election authorities share their ballot data, it’s very very difficult to determine who the true winner should be from exit polling or similar. There was a major fiasco in Alameda co California where the wrong candidate was seated by accident and no one even noticed until a later audit was done by a non-profit group.
Well, as AOC famously said, she’d be in a different party from Joe Manchin if we had a multiparty democracy.
If you feel the party doesn’t represent your views then either vote for or found another one, or advocate for a split. To me this seems much smaller than the problems with the current US system. But maybe someone with direct experience in multiparty democracy can share their experience.
Also, I think it’s possible to create a direct candidate election system that is also proportional. One idea would be to grant each candidate voting power relative to their vote share. So if there’s three parties, you send three members to represent your district, but maybe one gets 50% of the voting power, one gets 40%, and another gets 10%. But I haven’t heard many people discuss such systems.
This is the purpose of federalism—to manage governance by and for smaller, like-minded groups of people. However, people seem to have a hard time staying out of each other’s business. Furthermore, it’s hard to justify a hands-off approach when a state or lower level of government is using 55% majority to oppress the other 45% (see the American South). And maybe most importantly, it’s always in the interest of national leaders to increase their power, so we tend to see a steady creep of stronger national governments at the expense of states or smaller units.
I suspect there are ways to counteract these forces but we’ve yet to trial most of them. Ideally you want your basic level of government to be as small and like-minded as possible. But I think to avoid tyranny of the majority, you need to let people opt out. Most people don’t seem to be too aware of these issues in the constant struggle for ultimate power but I think it would solve a lot of our issues if we just let more people live how they want to live.
So I agree that smaller democracies work better, but I hope you’re not saying the solution for larger democracies is to make them not democracies. The solution to me is clearly that we need to make them smaller again.
The thing is, the CIA might be as villainous as tankies think it is, but it’s far less competent. They see spooks in every shadow but many, perhaps even most CIA programs have been abject failures. Not everything wrong with the world can be attributed to the CIA, influential as they may be.
I think it the tankie mythos around them actually makes them more powerful.
The New York Times Company is majority-owned by the Ochs-Sulzberger family through elevated shares in the company's dual-class stock structure held largely in a trust, in effect since the 1950s;[118] as of 2022, the family holds ninety-five percent of The New York Times Company's Class B shares, allowing it to elect seventy percent of the company's board of directors.[119] Class A shareholders have restrictive voting rights.[120]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_New_York_Times#Organization
What you’ve written here is very misleading, bordering on incorrect, but does this distinction even matter? Both a singular billionaire and a collective of rich owners will manage the business to enhance their personal wealth, not for the common good of ordinary people. If Trump creates an incentive structure where businesses are penalized for going against his will, I think both types of management are rationally going to choose to obey him.
There needs to be a completely different type of management structure if we want leaders in the press to weigh things like the health of our democracy in their decisions.
Yes, it’s exactly the same as post-war Germany… if we ignore the bombings, indiscriminate murder, lack of productive capacity, lack of free movement, evictions and land theft, lack of democratic processes and institutions, and many other factors that have been imposed on them externally.
I think a two state solution is probably the most realistic one, even if it might not be my perfect ideal solution. But a big issue with it (at least as currently conceptualized) is that Israelis already occupy a large portion of the more valuable and productive land and water resources, while Palestinians have been pushed into marginal areas. So drawing up the boundaries where people currently live perpetuates this injustice.
Additionally, creating two hostile neighboring ethnostates creates a lot of future problems. Will these nations coexist more peacefully than in the past? That’s not totally clear but at least it will make the ongoing settlements and ethnic cleansing more politically complicated for Israel and give Palestinians more official recognition at the UN and elsewhere. Furthermore, it will also be very likely to result in the expulsion of some people from their homes and lands which I oppose in almost all circumstances.
All that said I don’t see how any other solution is really possible so if the parties could agree on it I would support it, imperfect though it may be. Peace is rarely perfectly fair but it is still worthwhile nonetheless.
Depends on what you mean by condemn. All of those things were bad when they happened. But we can’t forever condemn the descendants of warlike people as tainted colonizers.
On the other hand, in the case of some of the more recent events, we still have people today who are marginalized, impoverished, and lack access to land as a result of those past atrocities. Most notably for the west, this includes native Americans and Palestinians, among others. This situation calls out for a just solution. The redistribution of land, extra services, reparations, etc. should all be on the table for the descendants of the colonized. But notably, the expulsion of the descendants of the colonizers should not be—this will just perpetuate a similar injustice into the future.
Most likely they are, actually. But of course, their inheritance was a lot different than these senators…
Unless you’re looking for the off-road capabilities this doesn’t seem like the most practical way to get around.
For 1-2 passengers and limited cargo electric motorcycles or mopeds are likely the best option.
If you need to regularly carry more passengers or cargo, the more conventional EVs will make sense.
As others have pointed out, the anti-car movement is mainly focused on cities and urban design because using cars as the dominant mode of transit there just doesn’t make sense. But that doesn’t mean they’re bad in every scenario. Living in a remote area without a fast vehicle seems impractical to me, so I would just focus on making sure it’s powered by renewable energy and operated safely.
That said, I would argue that other urbanist ideas like dense town centers might still make sense in rural areas. Unless you’re engaged in agriculture or some other activity that needs acreage, concentrating living space, goods, and services into a smaller area just makes good sense. This is the way all small towns were built throughout the entirety of human history until the last 100 years.
It doesn’t though. Or at least, I didn’t see anything resembling that on that page. If you can find it, let me know. It’s possible I missed it.