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Cake day: November 10th, 2023

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  • While the original text neglected to specifically outline the right to vote (other than saying the states were responsible for running elections), there are six amendments to the constitution expanding and clarifying the right to vote. One of these amendments is that senators must be elected by popular vote – not out of a hat.

    As far as your point about electors, that’s just for the presidential election. Most elections you vote directly for the people running for office. Sometimes you even get to directly vote on policy matters (propositions or referendums).



  • That’s not entirely true. We’ve had change-ups in which two parties are THE two parties before. Noteably, the GOP. But it MUST start at the local level. We can’t just wait until the presidential election and then complain about the voting system when all that’s left to be done is act as a spoiler candidate. We have to start now, in our own communities.

    It’s also helpful when there is infighting among factions within one of the big parties. That’s one reason behind the success in getting the GOP off the ground so quickly: they made common cause with like-minded members and currently-sitting politicians of the older, underperforming Whig party. This is especially helpful when moving from local support to state and then federal level support, since you can put the apparatus of the old party to work for the new ideas (this obviously doesn’t mean absorb all the old party, just the ones that are already aligned with your mission).

    The final piece is a central tenant of your platform that is both easy to understand and easy to justify simply based on morals and feels. The GOP had antislavery. We could have anti-oligarchy.

    Edit: There is also another way, though: just take over the already existing party, like what the Tea Party did to the GOP. There are some pros to this, the biggest being the ability to utilize the first past the post voting system to greater advantage and ride on name recognition with the underinformed parts of the base. But there are also some big cons, mainly that the “new” party is still saddled with all the corruption and bullshit within the old party from the get-go and now have to convince voters that they are different and will change things from within. With how the top brass of the Democrats have been processing their loss in November, I’m of a mind that starting from scratch could be more beneficial. Especially since there were a lot of voters that just wanted “change”. I also don’t think that simply having a D next to your name on the ballot will work as well for progressives as having an R next to their names worked for the Tea Party.








  • deo@lemmy.dbzer0.comtoScience Memes@mander.xyzPatch this Bish!
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    2 months ago

    This is actually a result of changes to our larynx and stuff, which allows us to make such a variety of sounds when speaking. In other animals (and human babies), the air and food tubes are physically separated at rest. But in humans, our epiglottis can’t properly keep things separate because our larynx is further down in our throat.

    So, I’m gonna have to deny this request on the grounds that it will necessarily break the speech feature, which many of our users depend on heavily.


  • Eh, not totally. Some languages have phonemes that are completely absent in other languages, and some phonemes (especially vowels, though sometimes consonants, eg: “r”) are different enough that a transliteration can never do them justice. Although, I guess transliterating into the international phonetic alphabet would do the trick…