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Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending Sunday 9 September 2024 (awful.systems)
submitted 2 months ago by BlueMonday1984@awful.systems to c/techtakes@awful.systems
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Need to let loose a primal scream without collecting footnotes first? Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid: Welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh Awful you’ll near-instantly regret.

Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.

If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cut’n’paste it into its own post — there’s no quota for posting and the bar really isn’t that high.

The post Xitter web has spawned soo many “esoteric” right wing freaks, but there’s no appropriate sneer-space for them. I’m talking redscare-ish, reality challenged “culture critics” who write about everything but understand nothing. I’m talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. They’re inescapable at this point, yet I don’t see them mocked (as much as they should be)

Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldn’t be surgeons because they didn’t believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I can’t escape them, I would love to sneer at them.

(Semi-obligatory thanks to @dgerard for starting this)

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[-] zogwarg@awful.systems 13 points 2 months ago

Another dumb take from Yud on twitter (xcancel.com):

@ESYudkowsky: The worst common electoral system after First Past The Post - possibly even a worse one - is the parliamentary republic, with its absurd alliances and frequently falling governments.

A possible amendment is to require 60% approval to replace a Chief Executive; who otherwise serves indefinitely, and appoints their own successor if no 60% majority can be scraped together. The parliament's main job would be legislation, not seizing the spoils of the executive branch of government on a regular basis.

Anything like this ever been tried historically? (ChatGPT was incapable of understanding the question.)

  1. Parliamentary Republic is a government system not a electoral system, many such republics do in fact use FPTP.
  2. Not highlighted in any of the replies in the thread, but "60% approval" is—I suspect deliberately—not "60% votes", it's way more nebulous and way more susceptible to Executive/Special-Interest-power influence, no Yud polls are not a substitute for actual voting, no Yud you can't have a "Reputation" system where polling agencies are retro-actively punished when the predicted results don't align with—what would be rare—voting.
  3. What you are describing is just a monarchy of not wanting to deal with pesky accountability beyond fuzzy exploitable popularity contest (I mean even kings were deposed when they pissed off enough of the population) you fascist little twat.
  4. Why are you asking ChatGPT then twitter instead of spending more than two minutes thinking about this, and doing any kind of real research whatsoever?
[-] sailor_sega_saturn@awful.systems 11 points 2 months ago

What does "seizing spoils of the executive branch" even mean here?

[-] self@awful.systems 11 points 2 months ago

fuck, I went into the xcancel link to see if he explains that or any of this other nonsense, and of course yud’s replies only succeeded in making my soul hurt:

Combines fine with term limits. It's true that I come from the USA rather than Russia, and therefore think more in terms of "How to ensure continuity of executive function if other pieces of the electoral mechanism become dysfunctional?" rather than "Prevent dictators."

and someone else points out that a parliamentary republic isn’t an electoral system and he just flatly doesn’t get it:

From my perspective, it's a multistage electoral system and a bad one. People elect parties, whose leaders then elect a Prime Minister.

[-] mountainriver@awful.systems 7 points 2 months ago

Here it sounds like he is criticising the parliamentary system were the legislative elects the executive instead of direct election of the executive. Of course both in parliamentary and presidential (and combined) systems a number of voting systems are used. The US famously does not use FPTP for presidential elections, but instead uses an electoral college.

So to be very charitable, he means a parliamentary system where it's hard to depose the executive. I don't think any parliamentary system uses 60 % (presumably of votes or seats in parliament) to depose a cabinet leader, mostly because once you have 50% aligned the cabinet leader you presumably have an opposition leader with a potential majority. So 60% is stupid.

If you want a combined system where parliament appoints but can't depose, Suriname is the place to be. Though of course they appoint their president for a term, not indefinitely. Because that's stupid.

To sum up: stupid ideas, expressed unclearly. Maybe he should have gone to high school.

[-] V0ldek@awful.systems 5 points 2 months ago

The US famously does not use FPTP for presidential elections, but instead uses an electoral college.

Which is objectively worse, but apparently Yud thinks it's better than FPTP? Since FPTP is "the worst".

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this post was submitted on 01 Sep 2024
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