ohhh makes me think. *doublepromote

Double-Promoting this video and sending it back into the queue for one more try; last queued Thursday, March 10th, 2011 12:48pm PST - doublepromote requested by legacy0100.

I always vote for the hooters!

I voted turtle =(

*quality

Boosting this quality contribution up in the Hot Listing - declared quality by dystopianfuturetoday.

don't look at me. i didn't vote gorilla!

I couldn't make up my mind how this video made me feel, even though I might've liked the message.

Rational discussion of politics... weird.

You're an Owl voter, aren't you.

>> ^blankfist:

I couldn't make up my mind how this video made me feel, even though I might've liked the message.

Finally! This needs to be discussed more.

Tho fuck voting cause all governments are a sham.

You like the idea of having your voice heard, but you want Democracy to fail. >> ^blankfist:

I couldn't make up my mind how this video made me feel, even though I might've liked the message.

>> ^dystopianfuturetoday:

You like the idea of having your voice heard, but you want Democracy to fail. >> ^blankfist:
I couldn't make up my mind how this video made me feel, even though I might've liked the message.



I don't want democracy to fail. And I certainly don't want any form of government I live under to fail, if that's what you were implying.

This video isn't glorifying democracy anyway. It's showing the failures of it, even if done so by way of a specific set of circumstance within this narrative. If anything, I thought someone like you'd not agree with how they show democracy being manipulated and reduced to bipartisanship.

What does this guy think primaries are for?

There isn't a perfect system. The candidate most compatible with any individual is the individual themselves. And if we are given too many candidates from which to choose, people are going to have to vote blindly, because there is no way in hell any great number of candidates will be able to get sufficient exposure to the electorate. Let's face facts, we Americans are a largely stupid people, and given anything more complex than the A-B system we have right now, the majority of us would be overwhelmed and ultimately ignore voting altogether. This system, for better or worse, keeps the country relatively consistent (centrist) from election to election. Sure, it makes sweeping changes (like suffrage or civil rights) slow to bear fruit, but also gives us plenty of time to foresee and stall grossly inappropriate or negative changes, as well.

Democracy gives a voice to all the citizens, but not control. Democracy simply gives the impression of control to the citizens, that aspect of it is just a facade.

People will eventually become dissatisfied and disillusioned, even if a government fulfills all of their needs. It is just natural.

The value that voting and democracy brings is that it incorporates peaceful means of "revolting", this eliminates the high cost of restructuring that comes after revolutions, as we know them.

Like PHJF said, there is no perfect system. But that doesn't mean the process can't evolve and change, the problem is, we have to ALLOW it to change and evolve. We're WAY better off as a species than we were a 100 years ago because we MADE CHANGES and we need to be able to make changes if we're going to continue to improve.

Problem is, we have too many armchair generals and quarterbacks. None of us know all the facts, yet we all claim to be experts on how things should be done. Sad thing is, even those in charge don't always know the whole story either.

Biggest thing, IMO, we need to do is to give up our arrogance, the arrogance that says what works for you will work for everyone else. We need to stop policing the world and start taking care of our own. We can't help others if we can't help ourselves first. We also can't be afraid to try new things and constantly re-evaluate. We can't learn or grow otherwise.

That was well laid out. I knew that countries with several parties tend to have runoff elections, and I knew the purpose of the runoffs is to discover what the second choice is of voters who chose the least popular candidates in the initial round of voting. But I never quite worked out that one round winner takes all elections tend to lead to a two party system.

I suppose defenders of the American system would say that the two parties are "big tents" that accept candidates from the electable political spectrum. But there are several problems. Gerymandering was mentioned in the video. Also, once elected, congressmen are expected get in line with their party's leadership or face serious consequences. And in many states, including mine, the process of deciding who will get the party's nomination is anything but open and democratic.

The most common alternative to FPP systems - MMP - comes with its own set of problems. We end up with people in parliament or even in government who have not personally received any votes at all, they are there thanks to their party winnning a certain number of seats in parliament.

Even worse, you can get a narrow race between the two major parties and suddenly some dumbass little third party with 7% of the vote gets to decide who the government will be - i.e. whoever they form a coalition with.

They tried to implement the single transferable vote here but it's method and benefit was communicated in such a convoluted and complicated way and had such ardent opposition (via mis-information) from the incumbent parties that it failed to be adopted.

Too bad.

>> ^PHJF:
Let's face facts, we Americans are a largely stupid people, and given anything more complex than the A-B system we have right now, the majority of us would be overwhelmed and ultimately ignore voting altogether.


Building a political system around the idea that people subject to it are mostly incapable of understanding the decisions made to run their lives sounds to me like a self-fulfilling prophecy. Why would anyone learn about a system they have no power to change?

After thinking a while about this i have to say: I'm not convinced. From an US perspective this may sound somewhat convincing i guess because the US has (more or less...) a two party system. But all "1st world" or developed, industrialized or however you want to call them countries i can think of (!) have a working system with more than 2 participating (!) parties.

Over here we have 5 "big" parties (among various others), all of them in leading roles in state governments, two of them leading federal government. Plus: The two larger ones (easily representing >60% of votes in the past) more and more lose votes to the others, i.e. votes move the opposite direction as portraied in this clip.

In my eyes the clip's argument is somewhat to theoretical and mundane.

Comment hidden because you are ignoring dag.(show it anyway)

Having voted in both US and Australian voting systems I have to say that, from a representative democracy standpoint - Australia is far superior to the US version for two reasons:

1. Mandatory voting - Voting turnout is 90%+ in Australia because you get fined if you don't vote - it's a civic duty akin to jury duty. Australia skews more to the left because it's not just the old farts who show up at the polling booth.

2. Preferential voting - I can vote for the Greens and my vote is not wasted. Preferential voting means that the Greens can "preference" another party (usually Labor) and give a portion of all votes they received to that preferenced party. This gives the Greens real clout, because the parties will court them for preferences by offering policy concessions. It seems to work pretty well.

It's been awhile since intro polisci, but I recall the upshot was this:

Any reasonable electoral system on a 1 dimensional spectrum (i.e. left/right)will eventually gravitate toward the preferences of the median voter. This is true of first past the post, proportional representation, and ranked preference systems.

If you model voter preferences in more dimensions (for instance one dimension on social policy, one on economic) theoretically you can have fairly chaotic and divergent results based on different electoral systems, but in practice it tends to end up near the median on each dimension anyway.

So it might feel good to be able to point to your green party representative in congress under a proportional system, or a candidate that shares your cultural background under a gerrymandered system, but you end up getting the same policies either way.

Not bad for a nation of criminals.

Yes, it joke.


>> ^dag:

Having voted in both US and Australian voting systems I have to say that, from a representative democracy standpoint - Australia is far superior to the US version for two reasons:
1. Mandatory voting - Voting turnout is 90%+ in Australia because you get fined if you don't vote - it's a civic duty akin to jury duty. Australia skews more to the left because it's not just the old farts who show up at the polling booth.
2. Preferential voting - I can vote for the Greens and my vote is not wasted. Preferential voting means that the Greens can "preference" another party (usually Labor) and give a portion of all votes they received to that preferenced party. This gives the Greens real clout, because the parties will court them for preferences by offering policy concessions. It seems to work pretty well.

>> ^blankfist:

This video isn't glorifying democracy anyway. It's showing the failures of it, even if done so by way of a specific set of circumstance within this narrative. If anything, I thought someone like you'd not agree with how they show democracy being manipulated and reduced to bipartisanship.


Actually, I would say that this video very clearly illustrates a point I've been trying to make to you for years now -- the two party system isn't the result of some sort of conspiracy, it's the natural result of the rules of the system, and people rationally reacting to information about the past.

The 5:10-end section in particular is one we've talked about a lot, in terms of Nader/Gore vs. Bush or Bush/Perot vs. Clinton. Voting 3rd party isn't bucking the system, it's increasing the chances that the major party you least like will win.

To break the cycle, we need to change the rules to something like this.

>> ^NetRunner:

the two party system isn't the result of some sort of conspiracy, it's the natural result of the rules of the system, and people rationally reacting to information about the past.


In the US, there's been a two party system since the beginning, right? Started as Federalist v. Nonfederalist.

How can a discussion about voting systems go this long without someone mentioning Arrow's impossibility theorem? Just about the most important economics finding of the 20th century if you ask me.

Also see the criteria in evaluating single winner voting systems. Now, whether we want or need a single winner is another matter though.

>> ^blankfist:

In the US, there's been a two party system since the beginning, right? Started as Federalist v. Nonfederalist.


Good point. Why do you think there were only two factions all the way back then, instead of 5 or 6?

Me, I think it's just that the US had a pretty tight-knit group of people who created the Federal government, and they split along a 1-dimensional ideological divide at an early date. So we started with two large factions, and the dynamic in the video kept 3rd parties from rising to dominance, save when we had a collapse in one of the major factions.

I just like how they throw in gerrymandering at the end. They tried to do this in Utah last year to keep democratic winners at a minimum.

If you wish to know why: Salt Lake City, it's northern neighbor city, Ogden, and the city that had most of the Olympic events, Park City, all vote democratic. However, the farther south of Salt lake City the more republicans you find. The only reason they vote Republican is for some reason we've yet to figure out in the main valley is why they vote Republican. These are typically good 'ol church going or listening to Rush/Beck type people and have a LARGE tendency of group-think and block voting.

In other words we always get screwed over (even in the suburbs) by this demographic. It's the same demographic that screwed over California on prop 8. The block or: "your religion wants you to vote this way" (which I see as a huge state versus religion debate that should be brought up) works VERY well. It's very tiring to watch it happen in EVERY election, but people are getting smarter as the cities, specifically, along the Wasatch Front (the western edge of the Rocky Mountains end in a huge corridor that runs N/S from southern Idaho to Southern Utah--close to Las Vegas) that are natural valleys that form every 40-70 miles and end with the mountain ranges on both sides "cutting off" the metropolitan areas forming about six major areas, and then some cities off to the east of the mountains (not many, some of them are: Moab, Tooele, Price, Vernal, etc...). Most of the populace lives in this area and it distinctly follows I-15 which runs straight into Los Angeles.

Strangely enough the more people that live in more urban type environments with lots of people, these people tend to have a democratic or atleast a very moderate republican stance. The smaller cities ALL vote republican. In other words, Salt Lake City is held hostage by Utah's small cities and developing cities along the I-15 corridor or cities that are not located next to I-15 and of course Utah County, just south of Salt Lake City or Salt Lake County (which has many cities, Provo being the biggest; but more importantly it has BYU; hence it's almost inane voting standard).

The politicians wish to divide Salt Lake County into an area unable to vote democratically as they would group us with just enough "typical republican voters" as to make our votes worthless. This got shot down last year, but I have no idea about this year. With our new law passed I can't even look to see if they're trying to do this--which is probably why they wanted to do this anyway.

Lots of these politicians were going to get kicked out in the next election cycle, some did. But, they got replaced by a worse setup: Tea Party or Glenn Beck followers that hide behind the all magical (R). The populace loving their block voting voted these idiots right in and of course the laws this year are inane. Mike Lee would be an example of this.

It should also be known that the LDS/Mormon church owns quite a bit of media in and around this area (the biggest is called Deseret, but there are a few more). The reach of this media reaches a lot of areas in the Intermountain West or Intermountain Region (which is HUGE): Utah, Wyoming, Nevada, Colorado, Arizona, California, Oregon, Idaho and Washington--there may be more, but the largest stronghold is Wyoming, Utah, California (around the Sierra Nevada and north), and Idaho. KSL (at KSL.com) is the LDS churches right arm in Utah and in the regions I listed above; it's also the churches direct feed to their semi-annual conferences that are followed by members voraciously. Many people consider coming to Utah to see the conferences much like a pilgrimage you see in other religions.

Wyoming and Idaho, as they do not have major news/media stations (or atleast in the past they didn't-this is still true for western Wyoming), KSL fills that void, as the church and the members have more than enough money to make this a very far reaching media outlet for the Intermountain West/Region. KSL plays it's role well when it comes to group-think and spreading the ideas created by the church and even LDS politicians, along with the churches run newspaper "Deseret News"; with the "satanic" or democratic/moderately conservative and more level headed news publication provided by "The Salt Lake Tribune" which is a very good newspaper. Even if you're a republican and not LDS, you'll find it to be a good source for news for anyone that isn't a "Republican Mormon"; they are very centrist in their opinions and provide a VERY MUCH needed counterweight in the region. KSL tends to follow Deseret News or likewise, Deseret News follows KSL--obviously following the LDS churches thoughts and opinions on subjects. Though they tend to do fine as long as they're ONLY reporting the news, like a breaking story...

Anything that has time to become an op-ed becomes an obvious religiously slanted opinion and more annoyingly, lately (the last decade or so), it has a politically charged republican view. Recently some Tea Party views have crept in. The LDS church doesn't seem to like or hate the tea party and I've never heard an opinion making their stance on that issue official at any level; but, at the same time I know a lot of Mormons that love Glenn Beck and Rush, so that situation to me seems "fuzzy" at best. As the church has never reprimanded Glenn Beck (as far as I know). If I said some of the same things that Glenn Beck has, would most certainly be incurring a disfellowship or even a excommunication. I'm an atheist, so if I made that known I'd certainly get the excommunication. But, you may need to go to the meeting to see that happen; which I wouldn't--I'd have to ask someone more "in the know" to get an idea what would happen as even when I was a Mormon no one ever talked about these meetings, they were taboo. Anyway...

Typically the Intermountain West or Intermountain Region is the "Mountain States or the Sierra Nevada, Cascades, and the Rocky Mountains" and the "Great Basin or Intermontane Plateaus and Colorado Plateau". Which is VERY large.

So that is my experience with church vs. state and the members of said faith trying to hoodwink others by using gerrymandering or other unscrupulous ways to change the vote in their favor. These people should be the excommunicated ones... But, since they aren't it makes me think MUCH less of the LDS church (but, since Proposition 8 I've had little faith that they were anything, but another religion trying to force people to see things there way--there is no middle ground). So if you live in "The Intermountain West", which is a huge region, make sure you find out who is behind your media. You may be surprised.

I think that should cover everything I wanted to say.

>> ^NetRunner:

>> ^blankfist:
In the US, there's been a two party system since the beginning, right? Started as Federalist v. Nonfederalist.

Good point. Why do you think there were only two factions all the way back then, instead of 5 or 6?
Me, I think it's just that the US had a pretty tight-knit group of people who created the Federal government, and they split along a 1-dimensional ideological divide at an early date. So we started with two large factions, and the dynamic in the video kept 3rd parties from rising to dominance, save when we had a collapse in one of the major factions.


The great thing about history is it doesn't care what you think. It only cares about the facts. Even the first president warned against the politcal parties.

"I have already intimated to you the danger of parties in the State, with particular reference to the founding of them on geographical discriminations. Let me now take a more comprehensive view, and warn you in the most solemn manner against the baneful effects of the spirit of party generally."

"The alternate domination of one faction over another, sharpened by the spirit of revenge natural to party dissention, which in different ages & countries has perpetrated the most horrid enormities, is itself a frightful despotism. But this leads at length to a more formal and permanent despotism. The disorders & miseries, which result, gradually incline the minds of men to seek security & repose in the absolute power of an Individual: and sooner or later the chief of some prevailing faction more able or more fortunate than his competitors, turns this disposition to the purposes of his own elevation, on the ruins of Public Liberty."

— George Washington, farewell address, September 19, 1796

@blankfist sigh. That's completely non-responsive to my question about what you think. Regardless of Washington's opinion (and yes, that's all it was), the system that got created out of the Constitutional convention made no provision for preventing the formation of parties, and the creation of political parties didn't have the effect he proclaimed it would (i.e. that they would inevitably lead back to monarchy).

So why do you think we had two parties right from the get go? If it wasn't something that naturally arose from the rules, and rational behavior of the people operating within those rules, how did it happen?

If history is all about facts that don't care what we think, what are the facts that led you to believe in your alternate explanation?

FAAAAAART NOISSSSSSSEEEEEEEESSSSSSSSS!!!

Fuck!

Promoting this video back to the front page; last published Friday, March 11th, 2011 2:24am PST - promote requested by Fusionaut.

No shit, I didn't see that coming a few weeks ago. I am happy with the decimation of the Bloc and the fact that Elizabeth May was elected.
>> ^Fusionaut:

Fuck!

In Canada, the Conservative share of the popular vote rose by only 1.8% from the previous election, the First Past the Post electoral system gave the party an additional 20 seats, enough to push it over the 155 needed for a majority.

http://www.enduringamerica.com/home/2011/5/3/canada-snap-reaction-to-the-elections-how-very-un-canadian.html

Indeed. And the NDP opposition will certainly be interesting!>> ^Zifnab:

No shit, I didn't see that coming a few weeks ago. I am happy with the decimation of the Bloc and the fact that Elizabeth May was elected.
>> ^Fusionaut:
Fuck!

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*related=http://videosift.com/video/The-Alternative-Vote-Explained

*related=http://videosift.com/video/Gerrymandering-Explained

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