๐ณ๐ฑ
Aaaaannnddd another person murdered in the good ol' USA for a nonviolent crime.
Home of the free and the brave is no longer reality, it is propaganda.
@freemo > Home of the free and the brave is no longer reality, it is propaganda.
Completely. It was probably True and Right at the time of the Founders, who got off from under the British monarchy and started a new social contract experiment.
Now? ๐
Sadly it seems a new Revolution is the only way the country will find its course again. It would be bloody, but the status quo is unreal.
@design_RG Yea the thing about revolution, and civil wars, is there needs to be one of two scenarios for it to work...
1) there needs to be a geographic divide between the two sides. In this case left and the right are geographically intermixed so there are no lines that could be drawn
2) The whole of the people need to unite and universally envision the government as the bad guy with some unified sense of a public morality they are fighting for. With the left-right divide in america there is no unification.
As such revolution isnt likely to happen in the current climate.
@freemo I think it might happen, the country can't keep going as it is.
REgional tensions are high, and the Stupid in charge is only trowing gasoline in the fires. Likely it could end up in a bunch of new regional blocks, and this could take a long time to happen, maybe not.
Depends on many things. I love #Dystopic books and film, and have read and seen many; sometimes it feels like it's preparation for what's possibly to come.
Do you know the "World Made by Hand" novels by James Howard Kunstler ? Lovely, he's agreat writer, this series has 4 novels at the moment.
Highly recommend read.
His personal site : https://kunstler.com/books/world-made-by-hand/
@design_RG tensions arent enough... I think you are right that things may blow, but its more likely to look like riots and violence among americans than directed at the government in any real sense.
I mean just look at the people the population is voting for, those politicians dont look like revolution to me, they look like Status Quo with dementia.
We have a democracy, if things stood any chance of changing we would have a half-decent politician up for election right now.
@freemo > We have a democracy
Uhm, can be qualified, maybe "flawed" is a good adjective? I have frequently seen it used.
People are blinded by propaganda and noise, distractions. The political class is crass and corrupted. TWO parties, representing all the people?
Elections turn out, for presidential elections, under 50% ? OMG. And they go around harranging other people's countries and systems. Please.
@design_RG The flaws int he democracy, though, are not any unfairness in how votes are counted or any significant suppression in our ability to vote as we please.
All the flaws you mentioned are flaws inherent int he people, not the government. The people choose to read the huffington posts and the breitbart's of the world and get brainwashed by the propaganda, they choose to vote for the politically corrupt, they choose to buy the lie of a two party system and vote for it.
Every single one of these problems are problems inherent in the people and the choices they make. Every single one would go away if the people actually had any proper vision for a revolution and made changes, but they dont.
@freemo @design_RG Its a problem with system in use not the people. It is not a lie when winner takes all, scenario is applied. Even if some third party wins somehow it would still remain only two party system. Third party would just kick out one of those already in place.
That has no basis in reality. winner take all has nothing to do with a two party system. If anything that would mean its a "one party system" but the meaning there means something very different than what people even mean when they say "two party system".
If for example you saw year after year 3 or 4 parts having rather equal chance of winning then it wouldnt be called a two party system. That can happen simply by people voting as such.
@freemo This is the consensus in the political sciences actually. Look up Duverger's Law.
Yes, it can happen, but the winner takes all situation is going against that. Making additional parties does not make sense, because you can't meaningfully affect the country and people would not vote for third party because it is a waste of votes. Even if somehow a third party wins after some iteration, we are going to end up in two party system again.
@vnarek Hardly consensus that one *garuntees** the other.
It is true that because ofthe fact that people have bought into the lie of a two party system that a plurality vote tends to generate a two party system. This is absolutely true.
Likewise other systems of voting (even with a plurality rule in place) can effectively invalidate this sort of two-party thinking among the people, namely things like ranked-choice voting.
So there is some truth taht effectively, as long as people beleive the fallacy of the two-party system, it will be maintained unless and until counter measures are used to prevent it.
But it still, and always will, rely on the underlying fallacy being consider a truth by the voters and the people.
@vnarek In fact no only is not a scientific consensus that such a law is, in fact, a law, if you just go tot he wikipedia page about the law there are multiple counter examples that disprove the "law" listed.
@freemo Yea it says "tend to favour two-party system". I am just saying that it is hard to go against the system which makes two parties stronger and vote for third party. It is the same as systematic oppression of some race/ethnicity. You can escape poverty, but it is highly unlikely if the system does not want you to.
@vnarek Except it doesnt make the two party stronger. The only thing that makes twh two party system stronger is the fact that people beleive the lie that a two-party system exists in the first place.
It takes only very simple logic to realize as a voter there is no incentive to vote for the two parties. But enough propaganda has spread to convince people that they must vote two parties anyway.
Its little more than people being idiotic and letting that effect their vote. Ideally the system shouldnt need to correct for their idiocy, the people should be thoughtful enough not to let themselves fall into that line of thinking in the first place.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/First-past-the-post_voting
while it is certainly true that many people benefit from and want a two party system. Specifically those who are loyal to one of those two parties, in truth they have absolutely no power to force us to follow along.
The best they can do is spew advertisements at us (the rich).. but if we listen to those advertisements or not, or whether we actually bother to think for ourselves is entierly on us.
When the rich try to manipulate the public into a two party system, or a vote in general, and it happens to work, it isnt the rich who are to blame, it is the masses who were weak and gullible enough to turn on the TV in the first place, let alone listen to whatever nonsense it spewed at them without bothering to think for themselves.
Incorrect for aforementioned reasons.
If a majority of people voted for a decent candidate, the decent candidate would win... There is no math diminishing their vote so long as people stop believing the lie that they are forced into two parties in the first place.
It is entirely circular logic that such mathematical pressures exist at all, and becomes self fulfilling by ones belief in it.
You don't understand. A simple majority has to all vote for the same person. It is mathematically untrue
That means that one population base made of voters of both parties(or an entire party?)have to all decide to rebel and vote for the same third party. Otherwise, the "Conservative B Party" and the "Progressive B party" act as proxy parties and both sap 25% of votes from republicans, 25% from republicans, and after gerrymandering.... Republicans win.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vote_splitting#Spoiler_effect
This system is designed to be almost impossible to escape, it is hostile, and it adapts
Those are all excellent examples of things that rig the system and need to be fixed. but they are separate issues to some extent and not so much examples of things that guarantee a two party system.. well not too much anyway.
There is some truth in those examples though I'll give you that. But I think thats more general corruption than corruption guaranteeing a two party system.
Incorrect, third parties have won presidential elections several times throughout US history. Often once they do the party that was disposed struggles to become dominant again. Happens all the time.
Hell the democratic party didnt even exist till the mid 1800's and didnt become a major party until sometime after its founding. The Democratic party **was** the third party, until it wasnt.
yes it was a while ago, but the point is they had the same system of voting as we have today and parties switched all the time. the change that cemented a two party system obviously wasnt a system of voting or a plurality system, it was a change in the mentality of the people. It was polarization in our mentality.
It should be no surprise that the catalyzing event that cemented the two party system was the civil war, that was the marker where only two parties became the norm. It was also when state rights were abolished in favor of nationalism, it was when diversification of views and laws were diminished.
Regardless it shows you can have a non-two party system, in theory, with the current voting system.
by the way "all the time" refers to world wide. There are plenty of countries with winner take all systems like the USA who are not locked into a two party system.
the flaw in your logic is that 50% of people are on one side and 50% on the other.
Most people I talk to vote democrat not because they thought it was the best vote but because they thought it was the lesser of two evils. Similarly most people who voted for trump didnt feel he was the best choice but simply felt it was the lesser of two evils and anything was better than the democrats.
Most people dont want to be polarized, they are forced into it. In all reality maybe 5% of people want fascism, 5% of people want anarchy, and 90% of people want a reasonable balance of each.. In all reality 5% of people want the idea of sex to disapear and for trans to be the accepted norm, 5% of people want trans people to die, and 90% of people want something in between.
It is only because they buy into the lie of there being only two votes and they must pick the lesser of two evils that the divide occurs alone 50/50 lines in the first place. Very few people actually agree wholly with the side they wind up supporting, and feel they made a huge compromise to fight against what they perceive as a greater evil from the other side.
If the fallacy of the two party system was something people stopped ascribing to I think you'd find there is a lot more room for compromise than people think. the issue, especially in america, extreamism and polarization is so high (as a result of these two parties) we dont see much compromise from either side.
As long as no canidate can unify our ideals it's impossible. You can't say it isn't, a simple majority can never be achieved.