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Cake day: July 21st, 2024

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  • It’s a term that goes back to the cold war. There was a strike and the Soviet Union ended it violently by rolling tanks into the city. This put communists all over the world into a bit of a dilemma: on one side of the conflict was the working class making their opinion known (a communist value) and on the other the Soviet Union (the good guys). So whose side should they take?

    It was British communists who coined the term “tankie” for those who defended the SUs actions to brand them as “fake communists” who are more interested in identity politics (the good guys did it, therefore it’s OK) than the plight of the working class.















  • There is another downside. The local and global feeds are potent discovery tools. But they only work if you group people with similar interests onto the same instance. Your proposal assumes a certain amount of homogeneity. If everyone is interested in the same content anyway then yes you can distribute it randomly. But all the people interested in Linux memes are already here. If we are to expand our reach we need to have instances catering to other interests.

    And it also doesn’t work with international communities. German speakers for example go to feddit.org, precisely because that’s where German content is going to be amplified via the local feed and therefore easier to discover (for people an that particular instance)



  • Vittelius@feddit.orgtoWorld News@lemmy.world*Permanently Deleted*
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    2 months ago

    It’s projected from the actual (then still unfinished) count but I think it uses some data from the exit polls to fill in the gap. So both?

    We now have a preliminary official result. You can see it here: Saxony, Thuringia

    @barsoap@lemm.ee has explained the basics of our electoral system pretty well: The first vote (Erststimme) is towards a candidate in a FPTP system to represent an electoral district and the second vote (Zweitstimme) for a party in a closed list proportional representative system. A party nominates a bunch of candidates and ranks them on a list. If they get enough votes to get a certain number of seats then those get filled first with candidates elected by Erststimme and then with candidates from the list starting at the top.

    A party needs to win at least 5% of the Zweitstimme or win at least 3 seats using the Erststimme to be awarded any seats. This was done as a lesson from Weimar Germany where too many small parties made coalition building impossible which helped Hitlers rise to power.

    But what if a party gets more seats via Erststimme than they should have? In that case we just start adding seats until the proportionality is maintained (those seats are referred to as Überhangs- und Ausgleichsmandate). That has lead to ballooning parliaments with our national parliament the Bundestag (small pronunciation guide: Bundes-tag not Bunde-stag - compound words can be tricky) being one of the biggest, right behind China. Recent reforms should curb that. We’ll see next year how well they work.





  • Maybe? But I am not that cynical. I think the answer is actually both easier and more complicated. The US’ public position has always (or at least for a long time) been support for a two state solution. And I don’t think the Democrats are capable enough of convincingly lying for this to be untrue. Someone would have leaked something etc. Plus it plays into their compromise fetish. And to satisfy that it helps to actually have some land for the second state left. That’s the easy part.

    The complicated part is in understanding why they keep sending weapons. I think Dems have genuinely convinced themself that if they didn’t arm Israel, Hamas would wipe them out. And for a two state solution it helps to keep the first state around. So they keep sending weapons but they also want everybody to know that they are really disappointed whenever Israel uses them to kill civilians. Plus Biden thinks he can push Netanjahu more effectively if he stays on his good side. That’s the “hug Bibi” strategy. I think we have more than enough evidence that the strategy doesn’t work.

    Also there is a difference between “enough weapons to level Gaza” and “enough weapons to secure the border”. And maybe someone should tell the people in charge of weapon shipments.