this post was submitted on 26 Jun 2023
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Relaxed section for discussion and debate that doesn't fit anywhere else. Whether it's advice, how your week is going, a link that's at the back of your mind, or something like that, it can likely go here.


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although this is unlikely to substantially and directly impact us and is a more immediate concern for Mastodon and similar fediverse software, we've signed the Anti-Meta Fedi Pact as a matter of principle. that pact pledges the following:

i am an instance admin/mod on the fediverse. by signing this pact, i hereby agree to block any instances owned by meta should they pop up on the fediverse. project92 is a real and serious threat to the health and longevity of fedi and must be fought back against at every possible opportunity

the maintainer of the site is currently a little busy and seems to manually add signatures so we may not appear on there for several days but here's a quick receipt that we did indeed sign it.

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[–] Gaywallet@beehaw.org 12 points 1 year ago (2 children)

While I appreciate the analogy, the electoral college is a seriously broken system which hasn't protected proportional representation in a long, long time.

[–] Ertebolle@kbin.social 4 points 1 year ago

Oh certainly; my point was simply that in a system where population = influence, letting in a new group with several times as many people as all of your existing groups put together means that that new group effectively takes over.

[–] Bdking158@kbin.social 1 points 1 year ago (2 children)

The electoral college was never intended to protect proportional representation. The whole idea of equal representation in the Senate was to avoid high population states running roughshod over the smaller ones. This obviously dilutes the influence of higher population states and amplifies the smaller ones at the electoral college.

The system is not broken though. It does exactly what it was originally intended to do 240 years ago. You just don't agree with it's intention and results

[–] Gaywallet@beehaw.org 3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

The electoral college was never intended to protect proportional representation.

Article 1 of the constitution very clearly lays out how electors are supposed to be chosen based on the census. To say that the house is not supposed to represent proportional representation while the senate represents non-proportional representation as a counterbalance is ignoring the long history of debate and the many laws passed to attempt to bring representation in the house in proportion with the population.

The system is broken. We do not know the 'original intent' and anyone trying to argue for constitutional originalism is either completely ignorant of how literally everything changes with time or trying to enforce their conservative ideals through a different lens as an attempt to enforce their beliefs through a guise of legitimacy.

But this isn't really the right place to have this discussion (we're on a thread about defederating from meta) so I'm gonna withdraw now and not reply to any more responses about this.

[–] blivet@kbin.social 2 points 1 year ago

Each state gets a number of electors equal to its congressional representation (senators plus representatives). If the number of representatives weren’t capped it would go a long way towards making the Electoral College more representative of the population.