cleric-of-jank

[cleric-of-jank]

the name i was thinking of when i posted this might have been the "gove system"? as described that system wants candidates to pre-register how they'll distribute votes instead of doing it after the election has happened, meaning backstabbing is a lot weaker. i think that's silly - backstabbing is a big portion of the gains you can get from it

Honestly, I *don't* want to mix things with proportional representation. I see proportional representation as an excellent way of increasing the importance of dealings between politicians and reducing the incentive effects of the voters. But in my ideal world I'll need to negotiate with people who do like proportional representation, and this system is a compromise I could get behind. Plus you can plug and play any three different electoral systems for different compromises.

First past the post is a bad, undemocratic electoral system. First past the post privileges large parties by making small ones unviable, and distorts the composition of parliaments by wasting votes. It can be gerrymandered in a way proportional representation cannot be. It produces highly unrepresentative outcomes. It is a bad electoral system! All good voting systems are to some degree inclined to more proportional results.

I've never heard the accusation that PR "increases the importance of dealings between politicians," but look. I don't know how else to put this. That is a stupid objection. Just absolutely boneheaded. You haven't thought about this at all, I reckon.

People hate on "politicians" as a generic class, but it's like hating on lawyers as a generic class. You need politicians. You want politicians. You want people whose specialized job it is to read legislation, fight about what should go in it, represent your interests, and come to balanced compromises about those interests. People percieve politics as messy, venal, and corrupt, and it can be all those things, but guess what? The alternative to career politicians is part-time citizens who don't know what the fuck they're doing, have no expertise in the legislative process, and therefore are at the mercy of lobbyists who can walk them like a dog because they're naive and inexperienced.

There's this especially (but not exclusively) American pathology that is a suspicion of government that works too well. This peculiar notion that if only we sabotage government a little bit it will keep tyranny in check and make politicians more honest... somehow. But filling government with random yahoos doesn't get you a noble collegium of Tocquevillian citizen-lawmakers, it gets you a pack of Marjorie Taylor Greens and Lauren Boberts. You know--morons. Americans will support all these ballot initiatives that fuck up government on purpose, like term-limiting legislators and keeping their salaries low so only rich people can afford to go into politics (and even then are only willing to do it as a stepping stone to other gigs), and vote for people who promise to make government work even worse by cutting the budget and lowering taxes, and then have the absolute gall to whine about how badly the government works. My fellow Americans, you did that on purpose.

(And there's this weird paradox where Americans all loathe Congress. Who keeps voting these creeps in? Well. You do. Congresscritters are generally pretty highly approved of by their own constituents. The stereotype of lazy, stupid, venal politicians always seems to apply to the other guys.)

And you will also note that since the abolition of things that used to facilitate deals between politicians in the U.S. congress--since the abolition of earmarks and chummy socials between congressmen and the post--generally, since the post-Gingrich upheaval in the House--it has gotten harder to pass even necessary, basic legislation, because it is harder to make the basic compromises necessary to keep government functioning. Having three separate legislatures that each can claim a different sort of democratic mandate isn't a recipe for good legislation, it's a recipe for paralysis and constitutional crisis.

[cleric-of-jank]

i mean you can also hope they're able to merge losslessly somehow - that happens a few times throughout fiction. (i'm not sure how much minds losslessly merging would make sense if you weren't in the realm of fiction but it'd be kind of hot if it did)

The pokedex entries for Zweilous make it clear that the two heads have separate minds and indeed often disagree with and fight each other. The pokedex entries for Hydreigon instead say that only the central head has a brain and the ones on the arms do not.

it's a good thing pokedex entries aren't canon, or otherwise i would have to emotionally deal with the fact that if i evolve a Zweilous i am effectively killing one of its heads

[cleric-of-jank]

“people don’t like it when they don’t get their treats” and “people don’t like it when their standard of living decreases” are both the exact same idea but one phrases it sympathetically and the other phrases it unsympathetically. This is known as rhetoric.

[cleric-of-jank]

I think people take the wrong lesson out of "all LLMs are actually trying to do is predict the next token". It's not that we're failing to create a dizzyingly complex artificial world model capable of some level of reasoning and inference, it's that we're failing to find a way to interact with that core system once it exists that isn't filtered through the medium of the silly word games that are the only way we know how to grow these things.

[cleric-of-jank]

here's an article by a not-a-person I trust to know what it's talking about regarding itch and why they're kind of fucked, and why all the "just use a different payment processor" options are really not as easy or as viable as people have been saying

[cleric-of-jank]

learnign that the new deal was economically stupid, but in an utterly foreign way, like about stuff like government-coordinated price minimums and production caps which not even the people that want to claim the legacy of FDR would defend as a reasonable response to a recession and thus not a live target for conservative attack, opens up an interesting possibility about Trump. That he will remain a polarizing figure and all subsequent political discourse will be in his shadow, but his economic policy will not be considered part of his legacy, neither emulated by the new Trumpian Republican party nor attacked by the opposition, because it will be forgotten except as a vibe or posture.

[cleric-of-jank]

very interesting how there's a real country that's just "what if bronze age pervert wrote 1984"

[cleric-of-jank]

I made a bad comic and now you have to look at it

[cleric-of-jank]

Israel said Thursday it was moving forward with controversial plans to build thousands of new housing units in the occupied West Bank, a development far-right Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich said would “permanently bury the idea of a Palestinian state.”

The E1 settlement project, frozen for decades because of vociferous international opposition, would connect Jerusalem to the settlement of Maale Adumim, making a future Palestinian capital in East Jerusalem virtually impossible. It would also split the West Bank in half, preventing the establishment of a contiguous Palestinian state.

“They will talk about a Palestinian dream, and we will continue to build a Jewish reality,” Smotrich said. “This reality is what will permanently bury the idea of a Palestinian state, because there is nothing to recognize and no one to recognize.”

Yisrael Gantz, head of the Yesha Council, which advocates for Jewish settlements in the West Bank, the occupied Golan Heights and Gaza, celebrated the plans.

“We are on a historic morning that brings us one additional step closer to the vision of sovereignty,” Gantz said. “We are exercising our historical right to the land of our ancestors.”

[cleric-of-jank]

tipping is very confusing ethically, to me. it FEELS like theres some ethical obligation to tip, but its also very hard for me to ground this obligation in a coherent ethical theory? like it cant just be "the person needs the money more than you" or whatever because 1) obviously for some people that isnt true and 2) there are lots of people who need the money more than you, who you (evidently?) have less of an obligation to give the money than like, a server or whatever.

i think the natural model is one of an "implicit agreement", that when you enter the exchange you implicitly agreed to tip the person, they fulfilled their end of the bargain with that assumption, and so its essentially theft. but like, no one who thinks tipping is mandatory thinks it becomes okay not to tip if you start the interaction by saying you're not gonna tip. but i mean, part of the reasoning is that the server cant just choose not to serve you if you say youre not gonna tip.

so maybe the implicit agreement is between the server and the business? like, the server and the business make an agreement on pay or whatever, and that agreement comes with the assumption that you will tip, and so if you don't, the server then gets screwed over in that agreement (which you werent party to). so that's weird. but it does seem important that like, if you say youre not going to pay for the food, the business says "ok, then we wont give it to you", but the server cant make the corresponding choice re:tips without losing their job.

anyway, i think the ACTUAL reason people tip is that they dont want the tippee to be mad at them, because its understood as a socially sanctioned reason to be mad at someone, and there is a strong instinct against causing other people to have socially sanctioned anger against you.

[cleric-of-jank]

constitutions have cultural effects on their population. Thus, writing into the constitution: "If a person holds the highest office for 18 years, consecutively or non-consecutively, through any means; they are a tyrant of the most illegitimate sort and every citizen is encouraged, nay, even required to undermine and assassinate that tyrant at every possible opportunity" I think that would make a dictator's life at least 4% more difficult by providing shelling point 18 years into their reign, even without any institutional way of enforcing such a clause; it is an authoritative standard to say "this president is definitely a illegitimate dictator" and likely a good fraction of the citizens will just believe the constitution when it says that, even if it is perhaps philosophically unsound. Constitution writers should consider a least a little bit the constitutional equivalent of defensive programming. Perhaps write rules and guidelines for what happens if somehow tyranny happens.

[cleric-of-jank]

when I'm sending 👀👀👀👀👀 I do mean this:

[cleric-of-jank]

we cannot save the world through hate or division... the only way to save the world,, is by fucking around with tax credits

[cleric-of-jank]

instead of an adapation, what the Homestuck team would do in my ideal world is something live action (vibes of the 2010 Scott Pilgrim film, but plow as much money as you can into cool montage sequences) set in the B2 universe starring Ben Stiller (who they can miraculously afford), who canonically would have acted as Sweet Bro in a 2011 movie directed by Dave Strider and went on to produce Severance, which I think is just an extremely interesting and funny resume for a character to have

i guess any such project would be crushed by the absolutely cursed discourse of why they have a black-coded woman who seeks to control reproduction stand in as a proxy for trump/elon though even though the condesce came first

[cleric-of-jank]

The Canadian senate is an undemocratic institution of political appointees. However, I received a personalized reply to an email I sent. This has never happened when I have emailed anyone in the house of commons. And the senator agreed with me, and gave me tips on who I should also email. So now I have a hard time feeling like it is a bad institution, because I feel I have a stronger voice through the senate than through the house of commons. Now it is an undemocratic institution that listens a very little bit to me. I have seen no evidence that the actual democratic institutions do that.

[cleric-of-jank]

There was some discussion on my discord yesterday about whether or not (implied straight?) cis men would react with horror, disgust, discomfort, or threat at the hypothetical of "would you turn into a girl for a day?"

And my personal experience, having talked to many guys in high school and college, is that most guys, even those who are not progressive, have basically no negative reaction whatsoever. To me, this is stock "bro conversation" and I've seen it played out a few times. And in my experience, if you say "no, I wouldn't turn into a woman for a day" this is met with disbelief, like what, why? Are you insecure as a man? Are you, perhaps, a pussy? And even those who say "no" aren't saying it with disgust, they're just saying "nah".

I guess my model of what's happening is that for most guys, there's nothing happening under the hood here. The hypothetical gets interpreted as "I would be a man, in the body of a woman", or the more skeevy "I would be a man, having access to the body of a woman", or the downright gross, "I would be a man, having access to the women's locker room". It doesn't get interpreted as a journey of self-discovery or as reflective of who you are as a person, because why would it? You're a tourist. There are loads of Americans who would be happy to spend a day in France, but many fewer who would want to live in France and speak French and present themselves as French. Going to France does not fundamentally challenge the American identity.

Anyway, I was trying to get some hard data on this, and found a study from 2016 that gives some numbers:

We found that 30% indicated that they would choose to be the other gender if reincarnated, 56% for a week, 67% for a day, and 65% for an hour. There were no significant gender differences. Content analysis of responses indicated three primary reasons for choosing to experience being the other gender: wanting a new experience or perspective; the perceived positives of being the other gender; and, the perceived negatives of being their current gender. It also yielded three primary reasons for choosing not to experience being the other gender: desire to maintain the status quo; the perceived positives of their current gender; and, the perceived negatives of the other gender. Many participants also identified the temporary nature of the change as important to their decisions regarding a time-limited experience of being the other gender.

There's a fairly large degree of sampling bias here, but this does more or less confirm my own experiences with these kinds of conversations.

But it did occur to me that most of these conversations I was having were from roughly 2000-2012, when I was in high school, then college, or at least hanging out with people in that age range. And it's possible that as trans visibility has increased, the question gets interpreted differently, and now is seen more as "hey, are you a little bit trans".

So maybe it's just totally different in 2025. Maybe guys don't have this particular conversation anymore. Maybe Gen Z approaches the whole thing differently. I do wish that I had some data though, and unfortunately, a poll on tumblr would be, uh, extremely biased.