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)
It means that Yudkowsky remains a terrible writer. He really just wanted to say “seizing [control of] the executive branch”, but couldn’t resist adding some ornamentation.
less charitably, it seems he might mean to say “their job is to do their job, not to get rewarded because of position”, i.e. pushing the view that he thinks parliamentary bodies are just there for the high life and rewards
and while I understand that this is the type of “what did he actually mean?” that you might get from highschool poetry analyses, it is also the kind of thing that eliyuzza NotEvenWrong yud[0] seems to do pretty frequently in his portrayals
[0] - meant to be read in the thickest uk-chav accent of your choice
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.
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.
