Probably did -6 instead of +6

I’m autistic, which results in me deconstructing and analysing jokes instead of laughing (often to the displeasure of the people who think I didn’t find their joke funny – I promise, if I’m taking the time to disassemble your joke that means I found it funny and want to understand why).

The flipside is that I occasionally crack out carefully engineered bangers, because I understand the importance of a setup, building expectations and putting the brain on one track of thought, then capping it off with the “derailing” of those expectations. The shorter you can get it, the less time the brain has to get off track on its own, diminishing that derailing effect.

Of course, getting the inspiration and figuring out a way to put that into practice is it’s own unpredictable beast, and some jokes just fall flat despite my effort. Sometimes I misread the room or the audience too. I’m not a particularly talented comedian.

But at least I’m not a setup without a punchline.

A particularly nasty version of absurdism, more like. If nothing matters in the grand scheme, might as well go and make the best of your life. Except most people can still acknowledge that empathy does matter for your life at least, while he doesn’t give a shit.

A definitional concession to make exponential series work. xⁿ for n ∈ (0, 1) is the nth root of x, which gets ever closer to 1, while x^n for n < 0 equals 1÷ (xⁿ). Between them lies the neutral element with respect to multiplication 1 (neutral meaning that x × 1 = x; a factor of one doesn’t actually change anything). Hence, x⁰ = 1.

That rule breaks down for x = 0, obviously. Negative exponents don’t work at all because they’re division by zero, while all exponents > 0 result in 0. Semantically, 0⁰ probably should be undefined, but the neutral element rule does provide a definition. There also isn’t really any reasonable use case where you’d need that to be consistent with anything else.

Sometimes, I wish the other 26 would just collectively agree to kick it out. It’s not even a Trojan Horse at this point, just a wrench in the gears.

Short version: If we’re talking national level (that is, electoral votes), then Congress elects the president (House for President, Senate for VP).

If we’re talking state level however, for most states the 34% will win and take all of the state’s electoral votes.

This is the cornerstone of the two-party system, which emerges naturally as a consequence of plurality voting systems. If you have two left-wing parties, one of which gets 10% and the other 42%, they both loose to the 48% of the single right-wing party. Hence, it’s strategic for the left wing to unite, which would theoretically earn them 52% of votes (practically, voter disillusionment makes it more complicated).

This is called the Spoiler Effect: A left-wing party would end up splitting votes off the Democrats, leading to a plurality victory for the Republicans. And in winner-takes-all systems, that plurality is enough to get the respective state’s electoral votes.

There were resistance movements, some of which got quite famous. Most well-known to me would be Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a Lutheran theologian who was quite vocal about his opposition to the Nazi regime and eventually participated in plans to assassinate Hitler. It failed, as we know, and he was sentenced to death for his role. He very much grappled with the question of whether murdering a tyrant was a sin, but eventually came to the conclusion that it had to be done either way.

He also petitioned the allies to differentiate between Germans and Nazis once the war was over, pertinent to your post.

pay off the national debt

As if

Right thing for the wrong reasons is still the right thing. We’ve got bigger fish to fry than him.

For now.

I think spoilers on Lemmy use triple colons:

::: spoiler Spoiler title
hidden content
:::

Territorialism. He thinks he can just demand Denmark to sell Greenland to him, but neither Denmark nor Greenland are having any of it. Big Baby didn’t think he’d get pushback and does what he does best: get pissed.

That’s a feature with poetry all over: twisting grammar to make the content fit the line. “Some of those that work on the police forces” just doesn’t fit as well. It gets the point across anyway, so what’s the issue?

if you dont do exactly what I say the way I say it then you are basically voting for trump

Welcome to a world where FPTP has managed to create a binary choice, and one option is clearly worse. It’s not even “do what I say” or “voting for trump”, it’s failing to oppose him. Everyone that advocated against voting for Harris is complicit in the damage Trump will do that Harris wouldn’t have. Trans kids, abused spouses, victims of labour safety violations, all their blood will be on the hands of those that said “I don’t care”.

Like you.

I dont play those dumb centrist hostage games

So you’re going to let the hostages die? How noble and enlightened.

I didn’t set it up. I don’t agree with all of Harris’ views. But the General Election isn’t the place to make that point. Local elections, primaries, protests - great! But for all that it sucks, the General Election is a hostage situation. And unfortunately for the hostages, it’s not a “game”, it’s fucking life-or-death and you found “death” acceptable. Their death, namely.

No anger for them eh?

I’ve been plenty angry at them, as I am at all enablers of this fucked-up dilemma. But I can be mad at multiple people for different reasons.

Just for the slaves who didnt mind the whip and support the genocide?

Right, and who was the anti-genocide candidate?

Oh right. Neither. Because this election wasn’t about supporting or opposing genocide.

It was about all the points in which Trump and Harris are different, all the things you don’t care about, those “hostages”, which you’ll gladly let die for the sake of feeling good about doing nothing.

You let people die in the name of pretending to save people. That’s the hypocrisy.

So you thought Trump was the better option.

I dont vote for war criminals.

You don’t vote against openly bigoted felons seeking to destroy what’s left of democracy either?

With respect to Israel? Sure.
With respect to international policy otherwise? No.
With respect to domestic policy? Hell no.

By focusing on one issue - a horrible issue, don’t get me wrong, but one this election wouldn’t influence - to the detriment of all others, you pretend that everything else doesn’t matter. Fuck transgender kids, fuck immigrants, fuck labor laws, fuck economic exploitation, fuck the Ukraine too while we’re at it, fuck everyone and everything, but at least you didn’t vote for one genocide supporter (but got the other, so you achieved nothing anyway and never were going to).

Instead of directing that frustration at a more precise channel like protests, pestering your representatives, more severe forms of activism specifically messaging your discontent about that one issue, you used the vaguest possible opportunity with the most side effects. The US democracy may be broken, mutilated and in dire need of a fundamental overhaul, but it still has some democratic elements. Pretending it doesn’t is disingenuous.

If that changed your view after all, then I’ll take back everything else I’m about to say, but if you genuinely think nothing but making a show of caring about Palestine matters, this is where my charity and civility ends.

You’re a transphobia, racism and christofascism enabler, and a hollow gesture of caring about Palestinian lives that was never going to do anything for those lives except put a bunch of other lives in jeopardy doesn’t weigh that up. In a word:

You’re a hypocrite.

An impossible choice between…?

The persistent myth that both parties are equally bad is patently bullshit propaganda by those fostering that disengagement. Pretending that all the other issues don’t matter in the face of the decision between “not going to stop genocide” and “going to make it worse” is narrow-minded. Again, if someone thinks “I’m not going to vote for genocide” is a justification for “I’m not going to vote against the fascists”, they’re trying to show their virtue with respect to genocide, while not actually caring about anything else except that signalling of virtue. That’s the hypocrisy.

If life’s a game, it’s chess and we’re the pawns. Except that pawns in chess have a higher chance of promotion.

Oh I have plenty of people to be mad at - Putin, Netanyahu, Trump, Harris, Biden, the DNC, the conservative wing of the Democratic Party, authoritarian bootlickers masquerading as leftists…

Voter disengagement is an issue, yes, but people advocating for voting against Harris on grounds of voting against Genocide (which, you know, is the whole topic here) fail doubly: First, they pretend it’s the core issue of the election and their vote puts them on the anti-genocide side, and second, they pretend it was a topic of the election at all, such that there would even be an anti-genocide side to put them on.

So yes, I am mad at people pretending that voting against Harris somehow makes them more virtuous. I’m even more mad at the people voting against her for actually relevant reason, but that’s not the topic here.

I think that’s what they meant by wealthy