baronvonj

spring forward

that means convincing enough people to demand that support from the developer.

I think it means convincing people to drop the proprietary platform and telling the sales rep that both lack of Linux support is why you’re dropping them and what application you’re switching to. As long as you’re still a revenue stream for them they’re not incentivized to change. I do recognize, though, that this isn’t always professionally possible as the end user.

I don’t think Trump would have any trouble taking the money from both parties and then doing whatever the fuck he felt like doing without the bribes.

Anyone who wanted could just bribe him into approving their projects, though. I think it more likely that he’s just petty and thinks windmills “ruin” the land for more personally profitable development usage.

Just matching your energy.

“Everything I don’t like is Blue-MAGA.” - a book for basic DingDongs

🍻

the first step is really to push the idea of rewriting a constitution.

I’m asking what does that look like to you? Voting? Protesting in the streets and/or at the capitol buildings? Armed revolution?

My own belief is that it comes down to voting. We do not currently have a legal means for the people to directly initiate a Constitutional Convention. So we need state legislators who say they will vote to call for one, and federal legislators who say they will vote for Constitutional Amendments. But I don’t want the current majorities to be in charge of that. We would just end up with a fully Christo-fascist Constitution given the makeup of the delegations. Most states don’t have any means to recall legislators or for voters to directly initiate ballot initiatives to write new legislation. So we need to put better representatives in office first. My belief, as stated in other comment in this thread, is that we have to have 3rd party and independent candidates run in the major-party primaries, and we have to vote in those primaries for those candidates. We’re seeing it work more and more for DSA-aligned candidates, so hopefully we can keep building on that momentum and finally get some real change.

How could Smith possibly have succeeded when the judges, up to and including the SCOTUS majority, were ignoring the Constitution with their rulings on the 14th amendment and immunity to protect Trump? How does any of that translate to Smith doing a bad job? How was Smith supposed to go over the SCOTUS rulings? Biden failed here by nominating, and then keeping, Garland as AG to begin with. Biden failed by not pushing for judicial reform including the size of the SCOTUS bench and impeachment of corrupt justices. None of those things are Smith’s fault, though, because he had no mechanism to anything about any of it.

I’m literally in this thread advocating for more DSA-aligned candidates running in Democratic primaries to push out the ineffective old guard neoliberals, but somehow me not blaming Smith for Biden’s failures has you bleating about that I’m a pro-Biden/AIPAC/MAGA cultist. You just don’t come across as a serious person.

Nice. You’re actually free to vote for 3rd parties!

The point that you are rabidly trying to ignore and convince people not to acknowledge is that recognizing that Jack Smith was doing a good job doesn’t in any way mean you must also then wholly approve of everything Joe Biden ever did. Biden failed in many ways. See? I’m aware of it and nobody is arguing that with you. Smith went hard on building his cases and securing indictments and fighting in court. It’s ok for you to acknowledge that. Nobody is going to think it means you’re a Biden supporter if you do. If you won’t ever give praise for the good, then nobody is going to give a shit if you think what they’ve done is bad.

Perfect must always get in the way of better, and we can’t acknowledge anything that was good until there is nothing bad left. Keep on keepin’ on Señor DingDong.

Are you using that metric to vote in the primary? Major party or 3rd party?

Just copy European countries that have renewed their constitutions as time passes

Which of our existing processes do you think will produce the result you want? Passing an amendment through Congress seems quite unlikely with our current field of partisan legislators. We can’t even meet the lower thresholds for passing legislation for things like raising minimum wage, which is supported by about 2/3 of the population. The Koch brothers were highly successful at stacking state legislatures with Tea Party nutjobs with the ultimate goal of calling for a Constitutional Convention to rewrite it. Republicans still control 28 state legislatures, and they’re generally pretty beholden to Trump and the MAGA base, so I don’t think we’d have a positive outcome with a Constitutional Convention.

So in my opinion, we need to have favorable majorities in our representation before we can have a favorable outcome with amending the Constitution. Do you have a different approach in mind?

instead of asking empty rhetorical questions.

You have this backwards, you’re giving rhetorical answers to non-rhetorical questions.

Biden and Garland failed to prosecute Trump. See, that’s easy for me to say and I never said contrary. Smith did not fail to prosecute Trump, he did in 6 months of having been given the assignment to do so. The judicial system failed to uphold legal frameworks and made Smith’s prosecutions moot, that wasn’t Smith’s fault.

My dude, Jack Smith was appointed in November of 2022 and filed the first indictment in June of 2023. You can call out Garland and Biden for slow-walking it, but not Smith.

Wash. Your. Ass.

What do you think of my observations on that in my other comment I’m this thread?

How do we action the acceptance? What actual step comes after that?

Ranked choice voting (or similar) needs to be pushed through
People need to recognize and relate to new parties.

So I’m inferring you believe people will suddenly start voting for 3rd parties in order to then get voting reforms enacted, rather than voting reform being the necessary catalyst to making 3rd parties viable?

Just look at the numbers. At present there are a grand total of 3 (out of 535) federal legislators who are not either Democratic or Republican. Bernie Sanders ran in the Democratic primary for Senate in 2008, winning the nomination but then declining it to run as an Independent. Kevin Kiley was first elected as a Republican and then declared as Independent after several years in office. In all state legislatures combined, there are a total of 6 state senators and 22 state representatives out of 7,578 total state legislative seats.

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third-party_and_independent_members_of_the_United_States_Congress
• https://ballotpedia.org/Current_independent_and_minor_party_federal_and_state_officeholders
• https://www.ncsl.org/about-state-legislatures/state-partisan-composition

Fewer than half of US states have a process for voters to initiate new legislation by direct ballot initiative (if you include voter-led veto ballot initiative of existing legislation, or state Constitutional amendments it’s 26, but strictly for writing and passing new legislation it’s 21).

https://ballotpedia.org/States_with_initiative_or_referendum

And 13 states have already banned RCV.

https://news.ballotpedia.org/2025/03/25/thirteen-states-have-now-banned-ranked-choice-voting-as-municipalities-decide-on-whether-to-adopt-it/

So I think we need the 3rd party candidates and voters to run and vote in the major party primaries in order to get elected. Like we’ve been seeing with DSA candidates winning Democratic primaries and previously Tea Party candidates winning Republican primaries. Either that or successfully calling a new Constitutional Convention to rewrite the whole damn thing, and I really don’t think that will play out the way we would want it to in the current political climate.