8 days
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- Slashme@lemmy.worldEnglish7 days
Holy shit, that article is tedious to read. Nowadays “good writing” seems to mean “jump around in the timeline a lot and write a whole lot of irrelevant backstory”.
- 7 days
The writer needs AI to pad the words in an article, and the reader needs AI to sum up an article quickly.
6 daysOh good, it wasn’t just me then. Admittedly I’m ADHD but usually I have no problem reading long form articles if they’re well written, but this shit was just… uh… shit
- SabinStargem@lemmy.todayEnglish7 days
Should America be reformed, there should be a rule about pardons: A governor initiates the pardon, then 51% of all participating voters has to reject the pardon to prevent it. Further, the pardon’s effect is restricted to their state. A presidential pardon is national, but again requires 51% of participating voters to deny it.
This form of cancelling vote allows decision makers to have reasonable autonomy, but if voters vote against it, the pardon is easily denied by the public. The voter pool is whoever sends in a vote of yay or nay. So if there are people dedicated to preventing a leader from making bad pardons, they can get out the word and swell the pool of rejection votes.
IMO, we should have open-sourced digital and standardized direct voting on all matters, with physical laminated printouts for verification against the digital votes. Everyone attached to a city can vote there, those who live in a state can vote on state matters, and occupants of the nation can do the same on that level. No gender or qualifications, beyond having a residence within the nation, and having citizenship - regardless of how it was obtained.
- MerryJaneDoe@lemmy.worldEnglish6 days
It seems a LOT easier to just take away pardons entirely. They are abused more often than not.
Yeah, it sucks for innocent folks. But their sentence can still be commuted.
51% of all participating voters has to reject the pardon to prevent it. Further, the pardon’s effect is restricted to their state. A presidential pardon is national, but again requires 51% of participating voters to deny it.
Who are the voters in this scenario?
EDIT:
we should have open-sourced digital and standardized direct voting on all matters
First of all: digital voting is famously difficult to pull off. Source: last two US elections, especially the 2024, where - somehow - the guy who’s friends with the guy whose company makes the majority of the voting machines, and who provides them all with Internet access, somehow knew the result 4 hours before the count ended.
Secondly: direct voting is probably the worst thing you could think of in terms of systems of governance.
Just think about it - all the flat earthers, all the anti-vaxers now get to vote in critical, strategic things. You get idealistic pacifists to vote on the military budget, and people who failed primary school to vote on the NASA budget. Laws are famously convoluted and full of tech- and lawyer-jargon, and you want to have Buck and Darlene from the trailer park voting on them?
- hraegsvelmir@ani.socialEnglish6 days
While pointing out that the public at large is just wildly ill-suited to be making policy decisions on many topics which absolutely need to be regulated, lest companies cheap out on worker safety and get people killed, you’re missing the far more pressing matter with this idea. This level on granularity is just absurd for direct democracy. The sheer number of votes such a system would entail would rapidly induce voter fatigue. Besides, even if it’s just opening an app and clicking a button, how many voters have the time to stay informed on relevant developments related to upcoming matters to be voted on to actually have an informed opinion on the topic, and of those, how many would actually turn up to vote for the thing? NY had 39.6% of eligible voters not cast a vote in the 2024 presidential election, slightly below the national average of 36.1%. Last year alone, Governor Hochul pardoned 24 people, according to her site’s press releases, 11 of which were the day before New Year’s Eve, smack in the middle of the winter holidays. You folks really think you’re going to get meaningful voter participation in 24+ elections a year (ignoring how many elections Trump would trigger with his presidential pardons, because this number is already unreasonable enough), when nearly 40% of eligible voters sat out the most heated presidential election in decades?
You can have direct democracy to an extent, but for the most part, you’d still need to leave the politicians and technocrats to do their jobs. Sure, there ought to be mechanisms for either the people or the government to trigger a popular referendum on a given matter (say, voters strongly feel that none of the politicians or governing bodies are reflecting their will on a matter, or a broadly popular policy is being blocked by obstinate opposition factions in a closely divided legislature, for example), but they really ought to remain exceptional incidents. Otherwise, you’re doomed to get bogged down by rule by committee under a different name, and nothing is ever going to get done.
- humanspiral@lemmy.caEnglish6 days
The discussion is about liquid democracy. It is only form of democracy that doesn’t result in zionazi oligarchist corporatist supremacism, but generally, the privilege of voting on every pardon is not the main appeal.
My, bestest, form of liquid democracy is that you have the option to delegate your vote on any silo of topics/legislation to anyone who can delegate all the votes they “control” to anyone else too. So voter fatigue is not a real argument. You’re not obligated to vote. If you had delegated your vote to someone who voted for pardon in OP, you might be pissed off at them, and “recall” your support immediately.
Digital ID is only reasonable under guarantee of a non evil state. Liquid democracy is both a great use of Digital ID, and only permitted imposition of it.
It is only form of democracy that doesn’t result in zionazi oligarchist corporatist supremacism
That’s just wishful thinking.
Voter fatigue + lack of time to actually read the laws they’re voting on means it would be even easier for “zionazi oligarchist corporations” to just have a group of couple of hundred employees whose only job would be to vote along the “zionazi oligarchist corporation’s” line.
My, bestest, form of liquid democracy is that you have the option to delegate your vote on any silo of topics/legislation to anyone who can delegate all the votes they “control” to anyone else too
What do you do if you delegate your vote to X, X delegates their votes to Y, Y delegates them to Z and you realise that Z goes completely against your views?
Anyway, that’s just representative democracy with extra steps. We already have this.
- humanspiral@lemmy.caEnglish6 days
What do you do if you delegate your vote to X, X delegates their votes to Y, Y delegates them to Z and you realise that Z goes completely against your views?
You withdraw your delegation from X, and lobby for others to withdraw support for Z, and introduce recall/revote resolution to overturn a bad law if you care about the bad law.
just have a group of couple of hundred employees whose only job would be to vote along the “zionazi oligarchist corporation’s” line.
That’s going to be far less than the 50% voting margin required to institute evil.
Generally, UBI means an alternative to any corrupt giveaway to a lobby group has the alternative of increasing the UBI. Business/Employees can still get rich by making something useful for the larger consumer base instead of lobbying government to extort employees, consumers and tax payers.
that’s just representative democracy with extra steps.
Corrupt representatives that ziosplain why you should suffer and die, and oligarchy needs all your money, instead of responding to people’s needs, occurs because of the 2-4 year election cycle, and distractions during election time. You only need to fool most of the people on one day.
Why didn’t you respond to my point about voter fatigue?
You withdraw your delegation from X
And you really don’t see a problem with people giving and taking their votes away willy-nilly?
You really, honest to god, don’t see this as yet another avenue for fraud, masqueraded as mistakes?
That’s going to be far less than the 50% voting margin required to institute evil.
It’s going to be vastly more than the 50% voting margin, because most people will be so overloaded with non-stop voting prompts, that they’ll just stop doing it.
Generally, UBI means an alternative to any corrupt giveaway to a lobby group has the alternative of increasing the UBI
UBI only works for the “little man”. It doesn’t solve anything for Big Business and CEOs who make six to eight figures.
Corrupt representatives that ziosplain why you should suffer and die, and oligarchy needs all your money, instead of responding to people’s needs, occurs because of the 2-4 year election cycle, and distractions during election time
OK, here’s an idea: before you start campaigning for a complete rebuild of the voting system that is 100% doomed to fail, how about you first read about democracies in other countries? Read about France, Spain, Sweden, even Poland with all its shortcomings.
Maybe you’ll see that the issue is not with the system as it is, it’s with education, involvement, and enforcement.
The US failed because of the lack of these three elements. If people were more educated, Trump wouldn’t win. If more people were involved, Trump wouldn’t win. If there was proper law enforcement, Trump wouldn’t have been able to even start.
All three of these elements failed, creating the ultimate shitstorm.
Your system works perfectly fine… on paper. Just like capitalism (remember “trickle down economy”? Assuming it works, we can presume everyone will be happy) or communism (assuming it works, we can presume everybody has access to everything).
The issue with your system is the exact same issue that makes capitalism or communism impossible - greed and laziness exist.
- humanspiral@lemmy.caEnglish6 days
voter fatigue?
You get to delegate/redelegate your vote as often or rarely as you want to, instead of every 2-4 years.
UBI only works for the “little man”. It doesn’t solve anything for Big Business and CEOs who make six to eight figures.
UBI makes the rich richer, even with high taxes on the rich. Instead of government protecting the wealth of the rich through extortion power, the rich need to invest/work (or hire more) harder to collect back all of the tax money they spend. UBI saves money for society/taxpayers because war on (against???) poverty costs huge a huge bureaucracy expense, and while only essential role of governance, is a pointless distraction that would contribute to voter fatigue when all political capital is entrenched to make poverty a practical threat to oppress workers.
how about you first read about democracies in other countries? Read about France, Spain, Sweden, even Poland with all its shortcomings.
These are at least dysfunctional as US. Even more Russophobia and foreign (US) bootlicking control, with ultra cheap CIA/Atlanticist control of every political party allowed to run and all media. Democracy might as well be defined as how much a country supports genocidal US/Zionazi regime, because the correlation with “legitimate government” is absolute.
Liquid democracy, and perhaps even more, UBI makes truth and freedom more powerful for pluralist outcomes, because of the multitiude of personal freedom, including the freedom to promote social prosperity outcomes, without the corruption of money/media making truth/progress impossible. Constitution, and electoral theater, is absolutely worthless. There needs a military coup in order to evolve progress, because corrupt power politics ensures corrupt oppression.
Your genuinely absurd grasp to protect existing corruption and dysfunctional lack of any progress, saying the magic solution is better education and news fatigue, doesn’t even have a path to more education, or more hate programing when the educated pick the less evil binary choice. You are simply disgusting for whatever dementia made you write this.
- SabinStargem@lemmy.todayEnglish6 days
Buck and Darlene don’t have financial incentives to attack Iran. Our richest and ‘wise’ leaders who had the resources and time to better the world, failed to do so. The argument you present is looking pretty frail, in light of the last decade. Also, in previous centuries, it wasn’t possible for direct voting to be effective in the US: The nation is huge in size. It wouldn’t have been easy to collect votes quickly. With a (free) smartphone in hand, anyone can instantly check out a voting measure and cast their opinion on it.
Secondly, I mentioned that there should be laminated receipts from the voting machines. Every voter may ask for it after casting their vote. Their cellphones can also have a QR code, so they they can go into the local print shop to immediately have their voting record printed out. Plus, open-source voting. That means instead of Diebold making the software, the federal government does, which has to allow inspectors from any state to make unannounced audits of the software chain.
Thirdly, I already mentioned who the voters are: the ones who cast an vote. Requiring absolutely 51% of EVERYONE is unrealistic. Instead, the voting pool should adjust according to how many people cast a vote. So if 5,000 people cast votes, 2,501 have to say ‘Nay’ to prevent a pardon. We can require pardons and other voting things to have 60 day deadline. The first 30 days are an announcement and commentary period, the later 30 days are for the actual voting. This helps prevent secret ‘riders’ and whatnot being free of scrutiny or getting a surprise vote.
Buck and Darlene don’t have financial incentives to attack Iran
Financial? No. But they’re using Facebook, and the military industrial complex has been bombarding their feed with rage-bait of how Iran is going to rape their children, so they decide that US has to bomb Iran first.
Our richest and ‘wise’ leaders who had the resources and time to better the world, failed to do so
Mate, that’s not a problem with democracy. That’s a problem with the fact that you currently have an organised crime ring that’s taken over the country, and your entire rule of law got kicked in the balls.
With a (free) smartphone in hand, anyone can instantly check out a voting measure and cast their opinion on it.
Mate…
First of all: digital voting is famously difficult to pull off. Source: last two US elections, especially the 2024, where - somehow - the guy who’s friends with the guy whose company makes the majority of the voting machines, and who provides them all with Internet access, somehow knew the result 4 hours before the count ended.
Did you miss this part?
Secondly, I mentioned that there should be laminated receipts from the voting machines. Every voter may ask for it after casting their vote. Their cellphones can also have a QR code, so they they can go into the local print shop to immediately have their voting record printed out
You seem to be under the impression that “vote fraud” means Belarusian or russian levels of comedy, where the person committing fraud wins by taking 90%+ of all votes.
How it actually happened in your case was by flipping a couple thousand votes here and there.
Which means one of two scenarios:
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Nobody gives a shit because the difference looks realistic enough to not suspect anything.
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People get salty and call for re-counts for every single vote they lose.
Also: people get receipts? Great. How do you anonymise their votes?
Also-also: people can call for a re-count? How many people? One person can cause the re-count of all votes? Do you need a percentage? If so, how is it collected? Via an online service, such as change.org, famous for being botted non-stop? What happens if most people forgot to take their receipts? Or threw them out?
Plus, open-source voting. That means instead of Diebold making the software, the federal government does, which has to allow inspectors from any state to make unannounced audits of the software chain.
Open source doesn’t protect you from exploits, mate.
Thirdly, I already mentioned who the voters are: the ones who cast an vote. Requiring absolutely 51% of EVERYONE is unrealistic. Instead, the voting pool should adjust according to how many people cast a vote. So if 5,000 people cast votes, 2,501 have to say ‘Nay’ to prevent a pardon
Right. So, knowing that the vast majority of people would lose interest after the second vote (it’s already difficult to drag their arses into the booths once every four years), you’d end up with big businesses offering thousands of votes for whatever case in exchange for a payout.
- SabinStargem@lemmy.todayEnglish6 days
It is my assumption that an America that has been overhauled, would have UBI. Thus free smartphones, because they make it easier for people to do stuff. Anyhow…
1: Open-source means anyone can look at the code, be it on their machine or at the repository. With things like hashing, it can be verified at each step of the voting process that the vote remains intact by auditors. The voting software should be device agnostic, and be something used in all elections and voting. By making the software itself uniform each year, it is easier to notice when something is off. This is very different from Diebold and other physical devices, because those are black boxes.
2: The receipts are not about anonymity. They are laminated so that people can keep them in storage, and bring them to a poll verification booth if the call goes out. The digital vote is anonymous when cast, the physical ballot reserved for when volunteers are willing to reveal their vote in public. While obviously not fool proof, it is an extra step against corruption if needed.
3: Obviously, there would have to be laws against corruption to go with a redefined nation. Also, a UBI-based society would have less corruption, because money is associated with luxury, rather than necessity. The punishment for being bribed to vote for an interest, could be to have UBI income penalized. UBI supplies, such as beds, food, housing, internet, ect, aren’t taken away - just the money for buying fancy stuff that UBI doesn’t provide. People who are greedy, would have to think about whether they want to lose their guaranteed income for a potential bribe.
4: When it comes to calling for a recount, it could be something like 20% of previous participants of a voted measure calling for it, or 30% of eligible voters, whichever milestone is reached first. Presumably, frivolous calls for a recount would automatically fail if they haven’t garnered support. Presumably, the open-source voting software would be used for collecting the voting metrics.
Open-source means anyone can look at the code, be it on their machine or at the repository.
Yeah good luck with that. There probably aren’t more than a few hundred people, thousands at best, in the world who understand the mathematics required for properly pulling off electronic voting, because it requires some sort of zero knowledge protocol – you want tamper-evident votes, but you don’t want anybody to be able to connect a specific vote to a specific voter, and you also need to eg prevent the same person from voting multiple times, while also making sure that only citizens can vote.
Here, read this 2025 article on Estonia’s system: https://eprint.iacr.org/2025/506.pdf
Super simple. Yeah, sure anyone can look at the code, but 0.00001% of the people looking at it will understand it, and even fewer can actually spot any potential problems because the systems are so damn complex. And what’s worse, you can have holes in your voting system that you don’t know about until way after a vote, and then you may not have any way of knowing if the vote was valid or not
- SabinStargem@lemmy.todayEnglish6 days
The point of laminated receipts, is to allow a voter to give physical proof if something is wrong with the digital system. If there are enough people who reveal their votes, they can use it to force an investigation. By having every physical ballot laminated by default, people can just toss it into a storage box and not worry about it falling apart if something comes up some years later.
What do you even need the digital system for at that point?
Like, did you even bother to look at that article? Electronic voting is incredibly complex, and if you end up having to rely on physical receipts anyhow because you can’t be sure the result is right, why even bother?
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- SabinStargem@lemmy.todayEnglish7 days
I nominate this bastard as a potential resident of Luigi’s mansion.
- zemo@lemmy.worldEnglish6 days
Awful article, its truly hard to read. Why is the entire backstory of the victim relevant? We shouldn’t need to be told to have empathy for an innocent victim, that should be automatic. The driver deserves a sentence for second degree murder.
- OldQWERTYbastard@lemmy.worldEnglish6 days
I have unhinged family members who would gladly hunt down an individual who did this to their loved one.
tl;dr - convicted Guilty by jury, then-Governor of NJ who was handing out pardons like candy immediately pardoned him via a pre-existing clemency request that went into public view on the nj.gov website while they were clearing the courtroom after the jury left. Rest of the article is word salad, probably AI.
- Fedizen@lemmy.worldEnglish8 days
The article is so poorly written. I can’t believe people pay for this kind of garbage writing.
- sem@piefed.blahaj.zoneEnglish7 days
I don’t have a problem with the writing style. Doesntseem like AI to me.
- 8 days
Not just a rich man, the nepo baby of a Democratic party power broker, apparently
FTA:
“Unfortunately, when politics pervades justice, the rule of law becomes subordinate to influence and power…a conviction can be rendered meaningless not by the verdict of a jury, but by the intervention of political power and connections,” the ACPO spokesperson wrote. “Justice must be blind to status, relationships, power, and expediency; when it is not, the community loses faith in the very system meant to protect it.”
Well give that fucking family OJ treatment cant pardon away a civil suit. And since he was found guilty well then take that fucking families wealth.
- incompetent@programming.devEnglish7 days
How so? I’m not that familiar with either of them other than knowing they are news outlets.
- JoshuaFalken@lemmy.worldEnglish8 days
Unsurprisingly the same Governor that made plates and insurance mandatory for all e-bikes. Guy had a busy week as he was leaving office apparently.
Issuing this pardon before the jury had even rendered the verdict. Funny how mountains can be moved so expeditiously when it’s for a friend.
Here’s a similar story from a couple years ago about a racist piece of shit who shot and killed a protestor, was found guilty by a jury of peers, then governor and likely klan member Greg Abbott pardoned him.
Here’s a quote from Daniel Perry on social media before he murdered someone at a BLM protest in cold blood:
“I might go to Dallas to shoot looters.”
And
The friend replied to Perry, “Can you catch me a negro daddy", and Perry responded, “That is what I am hoping.”
Abbott pretended it was a self defense killing when Perry drove up, shot his victim who was pushing his girlfriend’s wheelchair, the drove off. It didn’t hold up in court so he lied about it in his pardon. Murderers and would-be slavers, Abbott and Perry deserve a long drop and a short rope. Pardons are a mockery of justice by jury decision.
- Fedizen@lemmy.worldEnglish8 days
Its clear pardons are a major component of institutionalized corruption and should have some kind of formal review process by legislative bodies.
- 8 days
Pictures of the victim and his family/friends, no pictures of the dickhead or his piece of shit father in either article. Interesting.
- Mouselemming@sh.itjust.worksEnglish8 days
Image search of Harris Jacobs Joe Jacobs brings them all up if you want. I’m not likely to run into them from 3000 miles away.
But if I did, I wouldn’t flee the scene like a coward.
- 8 days
I’m sure the pictures are not hard to find, which speaks to the journalism.
- dylanmorgan@slrpnk.netEnglish8 days
The power of the pardon is so fucking stupid. Make prosecutors and cops and judges accountable for legal malpractice, and make legislators include negating convictions as part of legislation that changes a law.
- bagsy@lemmy.worldEnglish7 days
I really like the idea of invalidating the law if a pardon was issued. I immediately wonder how fascists would use it as a weapon somehow.
- 7 days
They pardon someone for being a pedo.
Maybe your plan wouldn’t work so well.
