• 0 Posts
  • 18 Comments
Joined 8 months ago
cake
Cake day: June 10th, 2025

help-circle
  • I already stated that unconditional support for Democratic nominees is not my position. I also already stated the circumstances under which I believe your vote can be effective when cast for a third party. I also never said to not vote based on your values and beliefs. I said that if you choose to not vote against the person who is least aligned with your values and beliefs, you’re making it easier for them to win. The winner of the election will be one of the candidates on the ballot, whether they’ve earned your individual vote or not. And it’s your only opportunity to pick which one of them it will be. Neither will align perfectly with your values and beliefs unless you yourself are running. Even with ranked choice voting. So you may as well take that opportunity to get as close to your values and beliefs as is possible given the choices.

    Since you brought this up specifically, did a “no genocide” candidate win? Was there a “no genocide” candidate for president on the ballot in enough states to even be mathematically capable of winning enough EC votes? Not even likely to win but just mathematically able to? Did you then believe that Trump, who Netanyahu supported, would be better than Kamala on that issue? If you thought that were indistinguishable, were there any other issues besides that which mattered to you, for which there was a measurable difference between the Democratic and Republican candidates.

    If you had an ounce of spine, then you would demand RCV, then you would say that you should only vote for those candidates who support it.

    I have the spine to use my voice to strive for better rather than to silence myself in wait for perfect, because if I’m not helping to make the choice of who is in power, someone else will make it for me.


  • If they do away with primaries we can discuss what to do at that time, but they haven’t at this time and they’ve actually reduced the power of super delegates since 2016 (before the 2018 primaries they made it so super delegates don’t even get a vote at the convention unless the pledged delegates can’t elect a nominee in the initial round).

    I never said to unconditionally vote for the Democratic candidates to begin with so the rest of your response to this imagined position is moot.

    I’m advocating for maximizing the power of your vote in the system we currently have. If you’re living in a district in a state with any kind of ranked choice voting, absolutely vote third party if that’s where your alignment falls. Otherwise you need to accept that the winner will be either the Democratic or Republican nominee so your chance to influence that is in either of those primaries and not voting for one of them in the general means the one with whom you least align has one fewer votes to overcome to win. For your one vote against them, they need two votes to get the lead.

    Third parties just aren’t viable in districts without ranked choice, so to get ranked choice we the voters need to put candidates who support election reform in power thru the major party primaries. Which is exactly what I’m advocating for.






  • I will say, not too long ago there was some question if I had setup a WhatsApp account with my number due to some emails I was receiving. Not wanting to install the app and unwittingly create an account just by checking if I had one, my wife created a group chat with just her and my number, sent a message, and then we saw it get marked as read by all. Which in an E2EE system should not have been possible without me having the app setup. so I did go ahead and wiped an old and setup the app to make sure I was in control of any account for my number, and I did then receive that group chat. But still, very sketchy.


  • An e2ee group chat would need every member to have every other member’s public key. So for 5 people, your client would sign with your private key and send 4 unique messages encrypted each with 1 other person’s public key. Each of them would decrypt their copy of the message with their private key and verify the signature with your public key. So I think what arcterus was saying was that employee who requests access to a user’s messages then becomes just another member of a group chat, but the UI just doesn’t show it as such. Every message you send is then secretly encrypted, on your client, with their special public key and sent to them to be decrypted. That would still be E2EE.




  • Please cite the legal mechanism that Obama and the Democratic Senate minority had available to them to force the confirmation of Supreme Court a nominee in 2016. Please be aware that Obama did nominate someone for that vacancy. In fact he nominated someone the Republicans themselves name-dropped as a good option. They methodically and purposefully prevented over 100 judicial nominees from receiving a vote, because they held the majority and there was no legal way to get around it.