For those out-of-the-loop:

However, in May of this year Furuya, who’s been married to his second wife since 1985, admitted to having been in a four-and-a-half-year extramarital affair with a fan. He also admitted to having struck the woman, and also pressuring her to get an abortion after she became pregnant with his child.

They set a slamhound on Turner’s trail in New Delhi, slotted it to his pheromones and the color of his hair. It caught up with him on a street called Chandni Chauk and came scrambling for his rented BMW through a forest of bare brown legs and pedicab tires. Its core was a kilogram of recrystallized hexogene and flaked TNT.

He didn’t see it coming. The last he saw of India was the pink stucco facade of a place called the Khush-Oil Hotel.

Because he had a good agent, he had a good contract. Because he had a good contract, he was in Singapore an hour after the explosion. Most of him, anyway. The Dutch surgeon liked to joke about that, how an unspecified percentage of Turner hadn’t made it out of Palam International on that first flight and had to spend the night there in a shed, in a support vat.

Blind.

Sir.

We were promised Neuromancer and instead we got Robot Jox.

Burn the phoenix again.

“Look officer, I don’t know how that bar fight kicked off, all I asked was how to get from this river to the sea.”

See also Dumbing Of Age.

Ruth: “You can do karaoke sober.”

Jennifer: “You can do karaoke sober.”

And the author spent a year hassling Mozilla about how killing XUL plugins would make his wildly popular plugin nearly impossible. Did they move one iota to help that? Nope. Did they adopt DTA functionality natively, like they’d absorbed Pocket? Did they fuck. Their mantra for two straight decades has been “just rewrite!” and they cannot imagine why they kept hemorrhaging devs and plugins and users once Chrome slimed its way into everyone’s options.

fearmonger that it would split the vote

… it’s a ranked ballot. This country already prevented that, as a concept.

It’s gonna bug me for ages that these people seem unaware how functional their democracy is.

There’s a dozen Firefox extensions that really matter, at any given time. Mozilla has never appeared to give a particular shit about any of them. Paying special attention based on popularity wouldn’t be ideal, but for fuck’s sake, their passive-aggressive treatment keeps burning out the developers who fuel their ecosystem, and it would take vanishingly little effort to shield their keystone plugins.

If their active neglect had ruined both uBlock and DownThemAll - I’m not sure I’d be using Firefox anymore, and I’ve been using Firefox since before it was called Firefox. Why the fuck would anyone normal even consider it?

Never give Nintendo money.

This is why the JVP was able to win - they consolidated the working class Sinhala vote, while not threatening Tamils and Muslims.

With Sri Lanka’s ranked ballots, they didn’t need consolidation. Working-class voters could have had this, at any time, with no risk. And if voters keep wasting their second and third votes, then this new plurality-winning party is going to trounce the split alternatives, until one of them disappears, or both of them disappear.

I appreciate the background - but it doesn’t change the math. When voters only get (or only use) one choice, and there’s two parties on the same side of a divide, one of them has to utterly dominate the other, to stand any chance against a popular third party. If you think these two parties have irreconcilable differences then they’re probably both fucked.

Either these voters start using their ranked ballots properly - or they’re going to keep getting a two-party system. Changing which two parties matter doesn’t change that system.

The most anticipated release of 2013.

The left has people like this: tankies. Shallow loyalists who don’t really grasp that reality exists beyond who-says. It’s just - people in that mindset are endemic to the right, because a hierarchy-driven worldview maps neatly onto consolidating power and mumble mumble it’ll work out for the best, whereas you have to go pretty far around the bend to make it fit egalitarian self-direction.

Leftists and progressives have their crazies. The right puts them in charge.

Useless fascist desperately grasps for relevance.

Si.

Oh, then you mean a naginata. Or a glaive. (The non-Krull kind.) A single-edged polearm.

If most voters keep picking one guy, these three parties will become two parties, or the two more-similar parties are fucked. That is what Duverger’s law is about. It doesn’t mean third parties can never win - it means a three-party system cannot last.

If Sri Lankan voters remember how their own goddamn electoral system works, they can have a four-party system, no problem. But as you point out, they’re acting like they have America’s elections, where this schmuck who got 17% is now a massive liability to the runner-up who got 33%. If those two presumably-liberal blocs got together, they could handily oppose the leftist bloc. But if they’re competing for the same exclusive votes then they’ll both become irrelevant.

Sri Lanka already fixed the thing that breaks Plurality. Their voters just aren’t using it, for some goddamn reason.

Or they were the people who made this year’s result possible.

Objectively not. Every single person who wanted him, last time, could have listed him… also. They sure didn’t. His support was three percent. That’s not a viable path to power, that’s a punchline.

He’s done stuff since then. Right? Campaigned, presumably? Been in the news? Built up the expectation that a meaningful number of people would prefer him over other major candidates? That is what made this result possible. Losing a prior election is not a prerequisite.

Okay, pelican eyes have yellow skin around them. They’re not some mutant blend of owl eyes and a goddamn cartoon.