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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? 😔
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.
@freemo We can empirically see that it does. Most of the time this happens so we should adjust to the fact that it happens right?
@vnarek The reason that makes no sense is just because two parties tends to win in your area has nothing to do with if you should vote for one of two parties or not.
Its unrelated. The mentality is "voting for a third party throws away your vote". that statement is untrue whether a two parties are dominant or not. So arguing that two parties is dominant is not an argument for supporting one of two parties.
@freemo This argument is not about whether you should vote for one of two parties, but that the actual system implemented in U.S favours two parties.
@vnarek the two are unrelated. the **only** reason a two party system emerges is specifically because people buy into the lie that that they need to vote for one of two parties.
If we could remove that lie from the minds of the populace than there would be nothing inherent in the system that would favor two parties and there would not be a two party system.
@freemo I understood what you meant. So your argument is that it tends to favour two-party system because people think that it favours two party system right?
So shouldn't the system change to break this understanding?
@vnarek more or less thats the jist of it. People incorrectly think if two parties are dominant that voting for a third party is a less significant vote. Thus they feel erroneously compelled to vote for one of two parties. The cycle would be broken if people didnt beleive (or spread) this false logic in the first place.
I have no problem with using ranked choice voting. It has no downsides and will cause the original false assumption, if otherwise bought into, to become invalid. Thus could potentially move us away from a two party system. Since I see no harm in ranked chocie voting I have no object to switching to it in the hope it might create this effect.
The the truth is, when you try to fix people not thinking for themselves by correcting the system according to their false expectations, you likely wont get very far. If we adopted ranked-choice voting across the USA you are likely to see the exact same result. a two party system, because people will just come up with some new failure of logic to justify it to replace the old.. people will start saying nonsense like "If your first choice when you vote isnt one of the two parties its throwing away your vote".. yea its just as much nonsense as with the system of voting we have now, but that wont stop them from believing it and executing on it either.
There is no shortage of evidence to back this up either... 1) In countries where voting systems are in place that resembles america's current system in several ways we often see exceptions where we simply dont see a two-party system and thus debunks the fundemental logic... 2) in states in the USA where ranked choice voting has been implemented we continue to see a dominance of a two-party system suggesting what I said, that you basically cant fix stupid.
The failing in the logic is that everything is 50%, a dichotomy. Politics isnt broken down into left and right, thats the fallacy. Its a huge multidimensional landscape with overwhelming nuance that often doesnt fall into left and right.
Its only americans who have strived to make it that way out of ignorance.
@vnarek @vnarek I really have no problem with proportional representation either.
In fact in congress itself we already have proportional representation, and congress is the more important arm of the government more so thant he president. Yet despite employing proportional representation in congress it doesnt change the fact that the vast majority is a two-party system. Because again, the fallacy persists, not because of any functional aspect to the system, thats secondary.
@freemo
Problem is that even if you don't think this way others do. And one of the candidates is just better. Should I try to change people misconceptions about two-party system, get like 15% to third party and let somebody like Trump be blatantly racist and deny climate change for an additional 4 years? I think that the majority just forces you to don't do that.
@penny
Yes people do think like that. Just because most people are idiots isnt an excuse you should act like an idiot too though :)
In fact the only real way to dispel the two party system myth is by voting outside the two-party system, making sure the statistics around the vote show a greater split and thus breakt eh cyclic logic int he first place by demonstrating the logic is failed.
thats no more true than any other party. It just so happens that the two major parties keep having successful campaigns because people keep insisting on giving them their money.
Their campaigns need to be just as successful, well funded, and supported as any third party would need to be. Sadly people are just gullible enough to keep supporting it.
Generally we see that when third parties win it is sudden and happens over the course of only one or two elections when the people shift bases.
My hope is people will come to their senses and it will happen in the next few years.
This election we already have Handsy Joe and Prejudice donald at the reigns.. Its like watching two racist people from a nursing home with dimentia having an argument.
My hope is much more of this we might see a flip to a third party as we have seen historically. But that will only happen if people stop buying the propaganda of a two-party system.
You need a mixture of both conservatives and progressives, a simple majority of them rebelling against the two party system- most of the population(plus much more due to gerrymandering)to vote for the same person despite the IRRECONCILABLE differences mind opinion. How could we ever vote together?