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New Hampshire Bill Could Lead To Adoption of Approval Voting
Okian Warrior writes "The people at FreeKeene report: 'Four Republican state representatives have sponsored a bill that would replace first-past-the-post voting with approval voting for all state offices and presidential primaries. Under this system, voters would select every candidate they approve of (regardless of party), and the candidate with the highest overall vote total wins. This reduces strategic voting, and would often make elections easier for moderate and libertarian candidates. The bill, HB240, will have a public hearing Tuesday, February 1st, with the House Election Law committee.'"
what about the left candidates ? before anyone talks nonsense - you do not have any left candidates, or a left party in america. what you think as left there is WAY too much to the right of anything that is considered left in any other part of the world - then again this is the source of your main problem - you are way too right aligned without anything to balance it, and you arent even aware of that.
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That now they're adding a 'like' button, do we get a 'dislike' button too?
Instead of the 2 "pre-selected" candidates, we get more choices. I think this system would give non mainstream candidates a better chance.
Save a Life. Donate Blood. Please.
Change for the better, no matter who you support. This can only let people have more direct say in their elected officials.
http://CryoLANparty.com/ A lan I'm staff on!
This is New Hampshire, not Vermont.
The Legislature would still be dominated by the Rep and Dem monopoly.
BTW in the late 1800s it was pretty common for neither the R or D party to have a dominant majority. And they had the same kind of voting we do now. What's changed is the Reps and Dems have rigged the ballot so other parties have to waste efforts trying to get approval to appear. (Which is ridiculous because there's plenty of room on the computer ballot to list everyone.)
Information wants to be expensive AND wants to be free. So you have Value vs. Cheap distribution fighting each other.
If it really does make elections easier for third parties, I'm all for it (especially the Libertarians!). Personally, I'd love to see more parties come to power; our current two-party system is pretty much broken. Hopefully it would reduce or eliminate gridlock caused by representatives voting along party lines, and eliminate representatives put in their positions due to the same voting by the American People. One can dream...
This is a WONDERFUL start. I have been saying, for so many years, that until the electoral college is removed and things are switched to approval voting: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Approval_voting like Instant Runoff or similar: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IRV we will NEVER see any real change. The "two party system" ("Republicrats") we have is one of several factors that is slowly ruining the country.
Citizens deserve more choice, more power, and more say in who is elected. People should not be forced to throw away their vote by voting their true position OR vote defensively for someone they see as the "lesser of two evils"... which is often their only choice right now.
Approval Voting is a poor choice in comparison to the Schulze Method. Please stop advocating for a broken method.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schulze_method#Comparison_with_other_preferential_single-winner_election_methods
Hopefully, this will pass, and they will follow it up with getting rid of the primaries altogether. There's no need for a playoff if you're using a system like this.
Although, I think a weighted system would work a little better. Just because two or more candidates might be acceptable to me, doesn't mean that they're equally acceptable to me.
I think the best system, though, is one where everyone ranks the acceptable candidates, then the computer runs through every possible paring (shouldn't be too bad, it's just O(N^2) in the obvious algorithm, and there are a number of obvious things you can do to pare down N and reduce the data). In one of those pairs, the winning candidate will have more votes than in all of the other pairs. That's the most acceptable candidate. I'm sure that there's a name for such a system, but I'm too lazy to look it up.
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Left?
Well we have a Communist party.
And a Nazi party.
And the Liberal party - all of these are pro-big government and pro-maximum control by a central authority.
Information wants to be expensive AND wants to be free. So you have Value vs. Cheap distribution fighting each other.
what you think as left there is WAY too much to the right of anything that is considered left in any other part of the world
Perhaps you're right. Or perhaps the rest of the world is way too much to the left. Have you ever thought about that? It's a matter of perspective.
I hadn't known there were so many idiots in the world until I started using the Internet -Stanislaw Lem
My kingdom for a mod point.
Left?
Well we have a Communist party.
And a Nazi party.
And the Liberal party - all of these are pro-big government and pro-maximum control by a central authority.
If you think a Nazi party belongs to the left you should get your definitions of left and right straight.
Communist are far left, but a joke party here and not at all a normal left party. Nazi is a rightist fascist party. The liberal party is a joke as well, it too supports authoritarianism. Leftism does not mean authoritarianism, Neoconservativism for instance is a rightist authoritarian ideology.
No, we definitely have those parties as well, but much like the Libertarian party, they don't get much coverage or traction. Also, stop portraying Europe as some bastion of far-left politics. It's not nearly as far to the left as you're portraying. There are certainly more far-left political parties, but they're usually not the ones leading the coalitions forming the government. Here's the political compass chart for the major candidates in the last U.S. presidential election. Here's the political compass chart for the European governments as of 2008. They're not too terribly different.
None of the listed countries are even left of center. The Scandinavian countries are some of the closest to that line, but what really separates them is the gap on the Authoritarian-Libertarian between them and the rest of the pack. If the broad range of European parties is similar to the ones for the 2007 Irish election there certainly is more choice available, but your governments as a whole tend to be quite similar to the U.S. There are also several far-left groups that get even less media coverage than the Green party. Many states still have candidates that run under the Socialist party and there are a number of different anarchist parties, some of which don't choose to participate in the system. You almost never hear about any of these on the news.
I can see how you might come away with your impression if you watched Fox news, where almost anything is lambasted for being "socialist" regardless of whether it has anything to do with socialism. The other American news networks aren't really any better about promoting third party candidates or policies, possibly due to the vicious circle that only effectively allows for a two-party system. I don't follow European politics so I have no way of knowing how much media coverage some of the smaller parties manage to garner, but I don't expect it's as much as the major parties get. The only reason the Libertarian party has been getting any coverage is because it got lumped in with the Tea Party, to which I think several Libertarians would object.
Compare lifespans and generally happiness. Clearly we lose.
Nazis are not a left wing organization douche bag.
apparently you do not understand the political matrix (like every nut job on the right)... Nazis would be pro-corporate authoritarians, communists would be anti-corporate authoritarians. IE... Nazis are right wing, Communists are Left wing.
They do. The Nazi's are national socialists.
Wow, 70+ years later and their propaganda still gets you.
The NAZIs are about as National Socialist as North Korea is the Democratic Peoples Republic.
The libertarian party is the one most likely to gain from this move, as they are one of (if not the) strongest third party in New Hampshire, so it makes sense that they are the ones mentioned in news reports. If the law was passed in another state like New Mexico, it would be the Greens that people would be talking about, who are definitely left. The last green we had running for Governor was proposing socializing all natural gas and oil extraction (not just taxing and regulating it), which goes farther than most European countries.
by that definition. The LDS community which is traditionally right wing and longest lived in the world wins and the left leaning world is wrong.
Who mentioned Europe? The OP certainly didn't. You brought it up.
I love this assumption that any unsourced criticism of US politics *must* be from Europe. Do you realise that the rest of America is outside the US? Africa? Oceania? Asia even? Good grief, the geographic knowledge of the US is truly appalling. It's almost like they think the world is the US and Europe only.
I hope some day the city government of Buffalo enacts some bill that gets a /. story
I have to point out that politics, like everything else, is not "left" or "right". Trying to describe anything political in one measure is doing nobody any service. It is like trying to describe music, personality, biology as being left or right; or existing as only a single point on a line - it is crazy.
Case in point- Libertarians MIGHT be described as "left" for civil liberties and mixing religion with state, and yet "right" for foreign policy or spending, center on environment, and off in some other direction regarding defense. Where does one place THEM on a single line?
Note to anyone looking for approval voting in the linked chart: it's not there, that chart only compares "ranking" voting systems, and approval voting isn't one. Here's the Wikipedia article:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Approval_voting
Sounds like a good move. Getting Schulze voting would be better, and I hope it takes off in the future (I heard Australia uses a form of Schulze voting). I'd definitely be in favour of moving from first-past-the-post to approval voting.
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Common misconception held particularly by Europeans, which is reinforced by the fact people keep repeating this meme without examining it critically; honestly, anyone who thinks the Conservative party in Britain, for example, would not be considered a right-wing party in the US is extremely mistaken. Similarly, fringe fascist/right-wing parties in the UK get far more votes, and exposure, than their equivalents in the US, which usually don't even have enough support to field candidates. See, for example, the British National Party, the Nationaldemokratische Partei Deutschlands in Germany, and Front National in France.
That's not entirely fair. The nazis were certainly nationally oriented, for a certain extremely restrictive conception of nation.
Yes, that's right. We should all look at other countries when we find some politicians or political idea to be to the left or right of our own ideals. This way, not matter how stupid they are or no matter how much others don't like him, we can embrace voting for them because according to some other country or their scale, they aren't left or right enough.
Here is the thing. Politics is generally about home rule, local governments and all that. Pointing out that the left in Europe is different from the left in the US or China or Africa or where the hell ever is only useful in trivial pursuit. It's competely pointless and likely dangerous to base your political opinions on how bad they screwed up some other country and use that as a basis to accept someone you think will screw up your country.
I was going to just mod you but I couldn't find the -1 irrelevant and always will be moderation button. When you are talking about local politics, it's completely irrelevant to the topic to claim X isn't left enough because in some country that has no sovereignty over you, they are more left. It all has to be relevant to the person expressing the opinion in the first place. The left and the right is only an imaginary scale held by the people making the assumptions.
Assigning a score from worthless to perfect for every candidate is what any reasonable (techie/engineer/math/science) person would design if creating the system from scratch.
What we have now is stale legacy code. It's time to refactor.
I can think of no way this isn't equally good for everyone. In light of that, there's a very slim chance this will pass.
Right and left are relative. Generally they are relative to "center", which could be defined as the median or average view, within the voting population. It doesn't matter if people in other countries are far to another direction, just as it doesn't matter whether people in the distant past or distant future have different views.
Most Communists and Socialists nowadays are localists. Their attitude is that the real central authority in Washington is the one that allows the wealthy to avail themselves of state violence in order to protect property, and that private property cannot exist without constant and pervasive shows of police power -- which is true, and how you feel about communism and anarcho-syndicalism generally depends on how you feel about this.
The United States doesn't have a Liberal party, and most liberal parties in the world are libertarian and pro-business a the expense of Conservative parties, which generally support government welfare systems to benefit churches and cultural institutions, to benefit the moral and cultural character, and traditions, of the state, and Labor parties, which generally support government welfare as a government entitlement, to benefit Labor-with-a-big-L and drive up overall wages and living standards. Liberalism is the belief that both of these approaches are wrong-headed, and that the state should dedicate itself to securing individual liberty as a means of obtaining both higher living standards and higher moral culture. Both US political parties are "Liberal," they only disagree about which individual rights are more important.
I suspect what the GP is trying to say is that, compared to just about every other first world nation on Earth, the sort of policies advocated by US Democrats are basically the sort of thing you'd see from the CDU party in Germany, or the UMP in France, or the Conservative party in Britain. If you wanted to be called a libertarian-capitalist-Randian crackpot in any other country in the first world, all you'd have to do is advocate a privately-owned health insurance system with a purchase mandate, or for individual political subdivisions of your country to decide wether or not to honor particular kinds of marriages, or to decide if the possession of drugs was either a felony or not a crime at all. When it comes to the whole capitalism and decentralization issue, the US is simply far more radical and ideological than most other nation-states on the planet; that's just a fact.
Don't blame me, I voted for Baltar.
they were not socialist. they were basically fascist, seeing people as resource, and managing it. rest was total capitalism as fascism liked.
SO that, even at the waning days of war when full mobilization was sorely needed, they never fully mobilized, and a lot of production capacity lay unused in private hands, and the government was still handing out weapon and vehicle design & production as contracts to private corporations, paying them.
had they really been 'socialist' and actually mobilized, the war could take much longer.
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The curious thing about many of Europe's "right-wing" parties is that they are really only on the right when it comes to immigration and cultural issues. Many nonetheless support a strong welfare state, which puts them squarely on the left. So even with the rise of the new European right, I'd say Europe continues to be tilted considerably more to the left than the US.
Our democrat party is quite left enough for us, thank you very much. You imply that your definition of left is the only one, or rather that your scope of what constitutes left and right is the only one that counts, then you apply that to the rest of the world as a fallacy. To the average american, your definition of 'left' is practically indistinguishable from 'communist.' Your definition is not objective. Neither is mine. Americans value individuality much more than most other nations, so I don't see a problem with it. I DO see plenty of problems with right-left dichotomy being used as a model to solve problems though. It's very simple-minded.
It seems that the lessons of Reaganism need to be relearnt by each succeeding generation. According to the Kirkpatrick Doctrine a right wing dictator is authoritarian (good), while a left wing dictator is totalitarian (bad). I think the difference may have something to do with theism, but I'm not entirely sure.
firstly, statistically, if average population on the ENTIRE PLANET is to your left it means that you are on the right of the average. that's that.
second, no, you are way too to the left. when compared with the practices that have been successful in the rest of the world in balancing corporate and public (the people's needs), america is a disaster. you americans complain about it more than anyone else criticizes you, yet, at the same time you are STILL able to argue that you are not too much to the right. contradiction much ?
and you get all worked up when anything of the sort is mentioned or criticized, like how the grandparent got modded troll, despite stating something that is a common opinion in contemporary political science. (leave aside a lot of americans stating that themselves).
you gotta get your shit together. really.
'left' is not evil, 'social' doesnt mean satan, 'private' does not mean 'free', corporate does not mean good.
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2 party system is only one step from 1 party system.
Even if your perspective is well to the right of the "rest of the world", surely, unless you're prepared to admit you're a true fascist, you can appreciate that a representative diversity of political opinion promotes a healthier society. Insofar as I believe that the American population isn't *yet* so deranged as to be totally politically homogenized, I sincerely doubt that those of us on the US left aren't such a disproportionately small minority as to warrant no real representation. You'll also note that there isn't a left-wing homogeny anywhere in the world; those states with a real and active left also have a wide range of opinions on the right in all sorts of ways.
I honestly think that this is the single most important change we can make for our democracy (not to say that it's a total silver bullet, either). I'm kind of amazed that this might actually have traction anyplace. Go NH.
We know where leadership by an anti-intellectual "strongman" who scapegoats minorities and likes boisterous rallies goes
talk to da hand :
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_Development_Index
countries which have been predominantly socialist in the history of their last 60 years dominate the top of the index. whereas america fluctuates in between a measly and pathetic 12-15th rank from year to year.
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i didnt mention europe. however its good that you mentioned :
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_Development_Index
notice that the top is dominated by countries which have been predominantly socialist in their last 60 year history.
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1. government directed economy: check
2. centralized identification and tracking policies for citizens: check
3. newspeak style propaganda: check
This admittedly short list could describes and forms the pragmatic and operational basis of both the nazis and soviets (and america, too, more and more unfortunately). really, what is the difference? just about ALL governments claim to be for liberty and justice. very few (if any) actually get there. The grandeur of power damages all but the most wise of leadership. A modern fictional example would be the movie 'gladiator' which I'm sure was based off previous works. It's a classic story that describes the concept that, given sufficent time, absolute power corrupts absolutely. Those that should lead are the ones who can truly do it out of duty without getting off on it. These people are vanishingly rare.
first, what someone else posted will set you straight about your american misperception of the world - thinking that any criticism comes to america from europe.
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1973102&cid=35050240
he told it quite nicely.
naturally, i am not from europe.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_Development_Index
and, observe the top 10 of the above index, and research their history. you will see that your assumptions in regard to the political spectrum of europe, is wrong.
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There are certainly more far-left political parties, but they're usually not the ones leading the coalitions forming the government. Here's the political compass chart [politicalcompass.org] for the major candidates in the last U.S. presidential election. Here's the political compass chart [politicalcompass.org] for the European governments as of 2008. They're not too terribly different.
Please normalize those charts. Thanks.
Single dimensional dichotomies are about all that most people can handle when it comes to analysis, which is unfortunate.
I'm sure the Republicans aren't just using this to get some of their NH political juice back. And if they got some back, I'm sure they wouldn't reconsider the merits of the system.
I'm also sure the Democrats will wholeheartedly support allowing voters to have more choice, even at the expense of some of their own newfound political juice in NH.
Yes, I'm being totally serious. No, reeeeallllyyyyy
-- How I want a drink, alcoholic of course, after the heavy lectures involving quantum mechanics.
...voters flip-flopping at an alarming rate between just Democrats and Republicans because they don't get a specific thing they wanted. I know people hope this will open people's eyes to other parties, but power comes from $$$ for commercials/campain ads and people not wanting to think into detail about what their candidates really stand for outside of their affiliated party's definition.
That's why I said PARTICULARLY. Particularly does not mean "ALWAYS." Never has.
No, that is different. In IRV you don't compare every candidate to every other candidate; You rank them according to how many people voted each candidate as their first choice. Furthermore, you don't use all the votes at once; your second choice (and lower) votes only matter if your first choice candidate was eliminated.
What he is talking about is Pair-Wise or Condorcet voting. In that method all the votes are used from the beginning and each candidate is compared to each other candidate simultaneously. This removes many undesirable characteristics of instant runoff voting that result from the fact that only some people's second choice vote matters. The difficulty is that there are corner cases where there is no clear "correct" way to determine a winner in all cases, so there are a bunch of variations of pairwise voting with different ideas on how to do this, and they are all much harder to explain to the general public than approval or instant-runoff voting.
... of right and left is getting pretty absurd. There's more than one right and left. They're just general guidelines that show a position between communism and fascism, progressiveness and conservatism and atheism versus religiosity. All those are mutually exclusive of each other. You can be be progressive or conservative and still be fascist. North Korea is a great example of that. It's a "communist" state that's completely conservative and there are no Gods in North Korea save Kim Il-sung and Kim Jong-Il. Of course you can completely rip that statement apart, but that's why the idea of polar opposites is a guideline and all this arguing I see on slashdot is completely ridiculous. I'm intrigued by the post on slashdot, but the attached link is pretty sparse on details, so I came in here to read up on what other people had to say and I was amazed by the amount of eye-spitting and bullshit I had to sift through before I said enough.
My kingdom for a donkey!
Leftist philosophy:
- Large centralized government. Check
- Social programs for the citizens like free healthcare, retirement benefits. Check.
- Suppression of the individual in favor of the greater good of society. i.e. Collectivism. Check.
- Government ownership, or control of, the means of production. Check.
- Yep the German National Socialists, and the Italian National Socialists, and the Spanish Nazi Socialists were ALL leftists. They were side-by-side with the communists, but less extreme (they didn't outlaw private land ownership).
In contrast an American "right" philosophy suppresses the government, makes it as small as possible, and limits the actions it can do (either via a constitution or tradition). Examples include the Democrat-Republicans formed by Jefferson/Madison, and the Libertarian party more recently. Also the anarchist party (there's nothing smaller than no government).
Left = Supersize government.
Right = Supertiny government
Present = half way between the two extremes
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Did you even read my comment before responding?
I want to clarify that I was making a joke (and thereby ruin it). h4rr4r said, "The NAZIs are about as National Socialist as North Korea is the Democratic Peoples Republic." The implication is that, since DPRK is neither democratic, belonging (in action) to its people, nor a republic, the national socialists were neither national nor socialist. My joke was that they certainly were national, for a certain deranged concept of "nation".
I think, within that deranged national context, it's arguable that the nazis were "socialist" at least to the same degree the bolsheviks were. The state did ultimately claim ownership of the people and resources, as did the bolshevik state; the difference (within the "national" context) was hardly an economic one, but a political one, and largely on the basis of realpolitik. The nazis, in the context of a Germany which had been relatively free and open, calculated that it would be easier to manage a mixed economy than a command economy. And they were probably right.
But I didn't advance that argument, because it's a tough sell (and I hardly feel strongly about it) and I didn't want to detract from the humor. Instead, I undermined that argument and deliberately conceded that the nazis were not socialist—but they were definitely "national".
the above gives out uncontested factual information about a historical FACT. ALL verifiable, with people and numbers, some of which being still alive today.
what is the reason the idiot modding the above down had used ? '-1 whenever you see anything against established political american right wing conditioning, mod down' ?
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Since one might have endless candidates a candidate with a very small percentage of voters could end up in power. A requirement that 51% of the people that vote being required to win seems like a better idea. Better yet why not have a voting requirement attached to getting a drivers license in order to get almost all voters to place a vote? Or state income or property owners taxes could carry a heavy wallop if a person fails to vote.
I see no reason to give more of a chance to candidates who have no substantial support from voters. Getting more people to vote would have merit.
I would not give up on this too soon either. Last session (before the last election where a large number of pro-freedom reps were elected), NH tossed out a years old arbitrary ban on various kinds of knives. This session, within days of swearing in the new reps, they overturned a ban on firearms in the statehouse.
There is already no income tax, no sales tax, no seatbelt law, no helmet law. $100 per year salary for state reps. No 'offices' or staff for the reps.
There is also a proposed bill going through this year to require the state government to prefer open standards/open source software.
Recommend googling the freestate project.
--- Liberty in our Lifetime
you are aware that 1984's government was a right wing fascist state, right? That is why their mortal enemy was from the east where Communism had already taken hold.
The fact that there is little difference between Fascism and Communist totalitarianism is not a surprise. They implement the same policies but arrive at them through different politics.
But Nazis are extreme right, not left.
You're mistaken. I've taken history courses about the war. Hitler had full control of industry and ordered the factories to full mobilization several times. Then when he achieved an objective, like conquering Poland, he ordered them back to normal hours.
Private industry but under the control of a large, over-arching central government, is what the national socialists were all about. It is just one step short of Leftist communism (no private ownership). Communists and Nazis are both left on the political scale. Both support massive, massive governments.
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i chose to give factual information relating to the subject over your post. that was what it was.
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I was just thinking that those charts either need to have 0,0 at some defined point, or they need to have 0,0 in the average of all of the points.
All of the above was encrypted with a Quad ROT-13 method. Unauthorized decryption is in violation of the DMCA.
>>>right wing dictator is authoritarian (good)
>>>left wing dictator is totalitarian (bad)
Interesting. Where would you put someone like Thomas Jefferson who thought government should be the size of a thimble? (i.e. small and weak) It doesn't seem to fit into your scale because you have Big government on both ends of your left/right scale.
i.e. I think your scale is flawed.
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How does it feel to be completely unable to think for yourself?
Government is not large in relation to business.
We lack social programs in many areas that we could use them.
There is no suppression of the individual in favor of the greater good of society. There is suppression of the individual in favor of the greater good of business.
Government does not own the means of production. Business owns the means of production. Business owns the government. And business owns the people.
The American right works to abdicate the role of government and give as much control to business as possible, even forsaking rights of the citizens to pad the corporate bottom line. The American "left" helps them do it.
That's corporatism and doesn't have a Goddamned thing to do with protecting the rights of individuals.
There is no American "left". This country is right-wing-to-drastically-right-wing.
Right. And Vladimir Zhirinovsky's Liberal Democratic Party of Russia are liberal democrats? Ever heard of the Strasser brothers and what happened to them? Please explain how the nazis where socialist in any way after that.
I've considered this type of system before. The idea came up when we had a "move day" at work. Let's say there were 4 movie options. If a majority of people like option A, B and C, and absolutely hate option D, but are indifferent regarding which of A, B, or C are chosen, the votes will be spread out. So movie A, B or C would be watched, right? Not if a group of people wants to see D and that group of people is larger than either A, B, or C by them self. Thus, movie D wins, even though a majority of the people explicitly do NOT want to watch it. In the new system, people would rate each movie in order of preference. In this case, A, B, or C would be watched, but not D.
I would disagree that our "left" party is not left enough, and our right party is too far right. I'd like to the right where our left is, and our left left of that...
I value individuality, but some things work better as large scale projects, the interstate system, healthcare, power generation/transmission, communications infrastructure, water and sewer services to name a few. Those are places where scale really does help in keeping per unit costs down.
I agree though with the need to move away from right/left and would add that we really need in the neighborhood of 5-7 somewhat evenly split up parties in the government. This would help keep things running smoothly and help with a general consensus.
All of the above was encrypted with a Quad ROT-13 method. Unauthorized decryption is in violation of the DMCA.
My point was that the more extreme the ideology, the more authoritarian it becomes. The more authoritarian it becomes, the more it becomes like other extreme ideologies. The differences only matter within the scope citizens have to direct their own lives. It's been awhile since I've read 1984 so I've forgotten most of the details, but iirc, socialism was not depicted as a utopia for contrast. I'll have to read it again.
The Nazis are national socialists.
That doesn't make sense. Socialists are (or were) internationalists-- it is class that matters, not religion, or race, or nation.
I think a lot of the problems with the current voting system could be fixed if states would quit officially recognizing political parties, and quit pandering to them by sponsoring and financing party primary elections, and quit registering voters as members of parties.
Let the parties maintain their own membership lists, and if the parties want to have primaries to decide who their representative will be in the general election, let them finance and run them privately.
If you disagree with me on social issues, then it's pretty clear that you are a narrow-minded bigot.
The parent is correct. Compared to most of the so-called "first world" the USA is dominated by radical right-wingers. Whether or not that's a bad thing depends on your own bias, but to deny it and mod people "troll" for pointing it out just makes us look like the kind of yahoos the rest of the world thinks we are...
Caveat Utilitor
In Israel the political system encourages relatively small parties. The result is that whoever actually gets elected finds it increasingly difficult to actually secure the majority one always needs in order to create a functioning government. During the latest elections, Zipi Livni claimed she won because she was leading the biggest party, while Binyamin Netanyaho claimed he won because he was leading the biggest block of somewhat like-ideology parties. The simple truth is that even if you took the two of them and formed a coalition between the two, that wouldn't have been enough to secure a majority.
If you believe that it is better for someone you do not agree with to hold the wheel than to have no one hold it, then this is not such a great move.
Shachar
Really? Engels:
âoeThe state, then, has not existed from all eternity. There have been societies that did without it, that had no idea of the state and state power. At a certain stage of economic development, which was necessarily bound up with the split of society into classes, the state became a necessity owing to this split. We are now rapidly approaching a stage in the development of production at which the existence of these classes not only will have ceased to be a necessity, but will become a positive hindrance to production. They will fall as they arose at an earlier stage. Along with them the state will inevitably fall. Society, which will reorganize production on the basis of a free and equal association of the producers, will put the whole machinery of state where it will then belong: into a museum of antiquities, by the side of the spinning-wheel and the bronze axe."
All socialists are agreed that the political state, and with it political authority, will disappear as a result of the coming social revolution, that is, that public functions will lose their political character and will be transformed into the simple administrative functions of watching over the true interests of society.
Marx:
The state is based on this contradiction. It is based on the contradiction between public and private life, between universal and particular interests. For this reason, the state must confine itself to formal, negative activities
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no, youre mistaken, not only that, but you are also off in your judgment.
temporary mobilization does not mean full mobilization. not mobilizing when needed, and not taking control of private industry in the most critical phase of the war in between 42-44, is an important reason why war lasted as long as it is, and not longer.
'over arching government' != socialism :
and as another poster so aptly put - nazis only were an over arching government for warfare efficiency, just like how bolsheviks were. there wasnt anything that reflected on the well being of the individual citizen - basically, socialization was not about the economy, but politics of how the country was run.
in socialism, goods and resources are controlled by the people. they decide the production through democratic process. NOT an overarching government.
a common misconception the american far right spread around to entire world is 'government means left'. no, government, means government. its nothing related to left or right. an overcontrolling government may be any kind of government, and people may still not get a dime.
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Yeah, my libertarian views place me just south of center-top on a nolan chart. Some conservatives("right") can end up falling towards the lower-right arm between conservative-statism others the upper-right between Liberterian-Conservative, and yet others towards the center on the middle line: any point in between really.
The funny thing is how people think Libertarians are against giving or receiving aide in hard times. Not true at all. It hurts my pride, but my grandfather freely chose to give me a place to live; that I freely accepted. It's about not interfering with my rights, or my interfering with the rights of others. My grandfather has a right to offer me help, and I have a right to accept it. Even if it hurts my pride.
I strongly dislike the idea of electing Libertarians; I don't want them to become a major force because their values are inimical to civilisation. Still, that's strategy - on the broader scale, I think this is a good idea, as it's two easy to buy off two parties and too difficult for voters to replace a bought party with one that meets their values.
I also like the idea of being able to vote for green or socialist parties without effectively throwing my vote away. We never get to vote for exactly who we'd like (as there probably isn't a politican around with whom we'd agree), but letting us get closer can't be a bad thing. It'd be interesting if this swept the nation and we replaced how the elected bodies function with a coalition system.
For every problem, there is at least one solution that is simple, neat, and wrong.
Americans value individuality much more than most other nations, so I don't see a problem with it.
Individuality has nothing to do with left-right. Anarchism is inherently individualist, but there are left and right wing anarchist theories. It mostly depends on the position regarding private property of resources and means of production (not to be confused with personal property).
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Nazis did not subscribe to the fascist views but instead supported a socialist system. Not communism, mind you, which they venomously hated. Hitler himself has stated this as being "socialism" and viewed capitalism as a great evil. They did believe in "private property" however in the end the government owned everything. I don't believe they had time to really implement their views but they did have major control over industries during the war. Attempting to replace nation wide capitalism in 5 years is how you cause massive famines (or industrial collapse as the case may be).
Fascism was, btw, also not a capitalistic system but did not go all the way to "socialism." The goal was to have capitalism but keep it under the control and management of the government so it'd work toward the state's goals (ideological and economic). They were both anti-communism and anti-capitalism. Personally I can't make much sense of what this really meant since it seems an ideological cluster fuck to me.
Anytime a Republican (especially when there's more than one of them) proposes a modification to election, you should immediately scrutinize it to death.
Republicans, and often Democrats too, don't do anything that isn't immediately advantageous to them and their own.
If you're going to modify elections, try direct popular vote for once. None of that "Well, your state only gets ___ votes so your vote didn't count" bullshit.
If the only way you can accept an assertion is by faith, then you are conceding that it can't be taken on its own merits
I am the overlord.
Jefferson would probably be the target of a CIA coup, since his conception of the state would leave his country at the mercy of the International Communist Conspiracy.
They were racist, socialists, and authoritarians. You cant just say he was far right because he was a racist, there have been a lot of left wing racists over the years.
http://xkcd.com/850/
"People don't want to learn linux" hasn't been a valid excuse since '03.
So it will never be approved
I like it. Approval voting is recognition of the fact that all politicians come in varying shades of evil.
your knowledge on this matter is incomplete. nazi party adopted socialist rhetoric because socialist votes in german were approx 30% of the voterbase. not to mention they adopted the nationalist jargon, AND on top of it, they especially adopted the army cult due to army being revered by all segments of the society.
in short, they had said whatever would get them votes.
in practice, their 'socialism' was a political control of everything. there was nothing socialist in regard to economic aspects, other than a few shows of sending workers on an overseas cruise a few times with a state cruiser as propaganda.
moreover, ussr had openly stated that they have adopted a 'socialist' method until true communism was possible. not surprisingly, their 'socialism' was also only political, meaning for the sake of efficient government control over economy for warfare, instead of PEOPLE controlling the economy and decision making for their own well being.
it is moronically ignorant to propose that either of these outfits were socialist, just because there was the word 'socialist' in their name. see, united states of america claims democracy, freedom, yet, we daily discuss on violations of these as a common practice, which the government and corporations dont even bother to deny anymore, but instead justify. so, does that make what is taking place 'democratic' ?
really. im tired up fixing the propaganda/conditioning american right has put in a lot of you people.
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It is easy to have a variety of political parties in a parliamentary system. Not as easy in a executive/legislative system.
There's a psychological scale known as Right Wing Authoritarianism. Essentially the test boils down to two questions--
How Xenophobic are you?
How strong does the state have to be to assuage your xenophobia?
Of course, the questions are many, and usually asked in a less direct fashion. Interestingly, Communists in the Soviet Union tended to score as Right Wing Authoritarians. Internationalism may have died a early death. In any case, Mao took a decidedly different path.
borda voting would have been awesome too
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Borda_count
the whole idea is to just make sure that the will of the people is adequately expressed, and for taking this brave step, i thank the people of new hampshire for doing this
no mere voting system can express the people's will 100%, but our current system, which seems to worship simplicity, represents the least approximate expression of voter will, and we suffer for that. the 2000 debacle, for instance, would not have happened with a slightly more complicated voting system like borda voting or approval voting
unfortunately, as others have noted, because a more copmlex voting system directly competes with the existence of politicla party, the parties will fight this tooth and nail. a good sign though is that independent voters are often becoming the largest single bloc in many areas: people are really beginning to understand what a stone around their neck the two party system is becoming on them, and maybe some of them will realize this two party system is actually a natural result of what you get with our current voting system
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
"Government is not large in relation to business" - really? Well, I guess it's a relative term and in the eye of the beholder. In this beholder's eye, with about 1 in 6 employees in the US employed by one level of government or another, I consider that absurdly large (and the federal government is at its highest number of employees ever, at about 2.15 million employees). When 1 in 6 employees (and growing) are funded by 5 in 6 employees (and shrinking), I'd suggest "big government" is firmly entrenched and has been for no little time...
it's about time for a 3rd party!
Oh, come on. How many sock puppets do you need? This brings you up to, what, five? Six? We all know that you're commodore64_love, trying to escape the negative karma from far too many arguments when you refuse to admit that you're wrong even after being shown evidence directly contradicting your position. Registering lots of Slashdot accounts doesn't make to less wrong, nor does it make you less of a troll.
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For example, if you are for the Tea Party, and are a Republican, by approving of both the TP and mainstream candidate (who is presumably more towards the center), you are going to disadvantage your preferred candidate.
Also, there's a reason to whittle down a field of candidates via a primary or other system: it is hard, almost impossible maybe, to take the time to realistically research a field of 10 candidates. Debates with this large a field give everyone just a minute or two, or if more, very few questions, and no real debate is possible.
Perhaps the best compromise would be to use approval voting for primaries, where you select the top 5, and then ranked voting/instant runoff to do the final selection.
In addition to the proposal, they should also make all elections non-partisan. Eliminate party affiliations from the ballot. The candidate could have a party affiliation, it just wouldn't be on the ballot.
Also, list the names randomly and if the ballot is on an electronic media, you could change the order of listing whenever a new voter used the machine. This would eliminate any advantage of being the first name on the list. You might have to limit the number of listed candidates to the first N candidates based on the nominating process to keep the list to a m manageable size..
The only issue is that when when person can vote for more then one person per ballot there is little possible over-site with vote numbers ALWAYS potentaly being far higher then registered voters. Which in a world of diebold machines (still legal in my state; Alaska, and look at he wacky numbers in our congressional election primary and vote) there could be problems (like there none now) with even less ability to sort it out.
I do not play in the middle of the road
There are dozens of different voting systems. Possibly hundreds. FPTP is one of the worst. Approval voting has certain advantages over that but doesn't do anything to discourage tactical voting or give a result that close to what the majority wants. Why not choose a better system?
Orwell was an ardent socialist, he went to fight the fascists in spain. By that I mean with guns.
No, left and right do not cover big and small. Different axis all together, you are confused about that clearly. Think of it this way left and right can be mapped on the X axis, amount of authoritarianism on the y axis.
If the GOP successfully gets its base to vote for every GOP offering and exactly 0 non-GOP offerings, while the Dems in their usual squishy way don't keep resolutely to message, the GOP will win every race. That's why the GOP is proposing this: because they believe (and according to research correctly) that thei followers will put personal preferences aside and vote the party line more reliably than the Dems will.
Isn't this type of voting inherently unequal, from the voters perspective? I mean, if I only approve of a single candidate but the guy next to me marks several, isn't he in effect getting more votes than me? How am I wrong here? Instead of "one man, one vote" isn't this "one man, up to as many votes as there are candidates on the ballot"?
How many years have libertarians or others been threatening to scurry to some state and declare it theirs? It's like threats of going Galt; all sorts of strutting and bold claims until someone actually has to act as promised, whereupon the plan implodes as everyone hesitates, then decides they'll do it... uh... soon. Besides, there's a new season of [insert reality tv title] coming up soon.
...I voted for Kodos.
I've been writing about approval voting for over two years now. /.ers should love it; approval is the kid-sister of range voting (approval is range, with a range of 0-1), which is used for by Fedora, and extensive computer simulations have shown that it's a better system than the Condorcet method used by Debian and Wikimedia.
Those who fail to understand communication protocols, are doomed to repeat them over port 80.
To be fair, the design of the United States is the same basic design as the European Union. Take a bunch of nation states and unify them under a larger 'Federal' government with limited power. As young as the US is, it is about 200 years ahead of the curve on the Federal issue. Our state laws are young in the world stage. Our federal power grabs are old. It is inevitable that the EU and it's member countries will eventually have major disagreements about the law of the land. Then we can tell if the US is any more radical than Europe when it comes to states vs. federal rights.
in practice, their 'socialism' was a political control of everything. there was nothing socialist in regard to economic aspects, other than a few shows of sending workers on an overseas cruise a few times with a state cruiser as propaganda.
No you're picking and choosing the definition of socialism that fits your arguments. That's not how it works. Government control over all industries and economic matters is socialism. It generally doesn't end well for the workers but the decisions are made by the government (which "represents" the population). This is close to the classical Marx socialism although as you noted reality is a bitch compared to his Utopian vision.
moreover, ussr had openly stated that they have adopted a 'socialist' method until true communism was possible. not surprisingly, their 'socialism' was also only political, meaning for the sake of efficient government control over economy for warfare, instead of PEOPLE controlling the economy and decision making for their own well being.
The people controlling the economy is not required for socialism and the stepping stone socialism envisioned by Marx explicitly rejects it.
it is moronically ignorant to propose that either of these outfits were socialist, just because there was the word 'socialist' in their name.
No, they're socialist because they meet the definition of the term or at least attempted to. Just because you associate fluffy fuzzy wuzzy views with that term doesn't discredit reality where socialism merely defined one aspect of a society. The rest of that society need not be pleasant nor does it's uses of socialism need to be pleasant.
see, united states of america claims democracy, freedom, yet, we daily discuss on violations of these as a common practice, which the government and corporations dont even bother to deny anymore, but instead justify. so, does that make what is taking place 'democratic' ?
Everything is an imperfect monster that we choose because it's superior to another imperfect monster. That said the US is a representative democracy in most senses of the word So where do you claim it fails and what freedoms necessary for a democracy does it not have?
really. im tired up fixing the propaganda/conditioning american right has put in a lot of you people.
You're the one who seems to be filled with propaganda, unlike you I have no illusions of magical Utopian societies that we somehow always fail to build. We're all a bunch of flawed pathetic bastards who often forget that in the end we're just a bunch of monkeys with slightly better brains.
He's copying MichealKristopeit's concept. They should have a fight to the death.
The rest of win no matter the outcome.
Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law
It still doesn't matter. Have you ever heard of a concept called sovereignty? The point you jumped to miss is that the USA is not England or France, or Germany or Egypts or South Africa or any other country. When someone says something in US politics is leftist, or rightists, they are speaking specifically in reference to how it's standing with in US politics. The US could be a complete fascist dictatorship and calling the guy who wants to elect the dictators instead of having them appointed by parliament a "leftist" would be accurate in reference those politics.
That is because no matter where the scale or standard sets in any other imagination, that reference is not referencing those scales and indexes. It's really not that much more difficult then that.
Now I know what you are doing, your trying to do the entire, it's not that bad, look at Europe thing in order to talk people into somehow excepting what they don't want. People in the US don't want some European style government or society. We go to visit there but if it was worth staying, we would have already.
The difference being that most of the EU member states have decently-sized, modern, well-equipped military forces of their own whereas the states of America today do not.
Random Thoughts From A Diseased Mind (Not For Dummies)
To the average brain-washed, right-wing american, your definition of 'left' is practically indistinguishable from 'communist.'
FTFY
Similar to the upcoming US election results
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_Development_Index [wikipedia.org] countries which have been predominantly socialist in the history of their last 60 years dominate the top of the index. whereas america fluctuates in between a measly and pathetic 12-15th rank from year to year.
If you're talking about year to year and the HDI then as your link clearly points out the United States is number 4 in 2010. Unless of course you want to switch to the IHDI but since it's never been used before 2010 you only have one year of data to work with and you're clearly talking about year-to-year comparisons. But then you probably knew that and decided to switch to whatever measure or algorithm places your country higher that year because good statistics doesn't matter to your nationalist pride and you figured no one would bother reading the link you posted. The very fact that countries could jump around so much on that list from year to year though should tell you that the list isn't very accurate for comparisons between countries based on rankings but perhaps should instead be used for it's intended purpose which is binning countries into development categories of which the United States is in the highest.
Lastly the HDI certainly isn't the end-all be-all of telling you which country is "better" to live in. You could have a country of immortal beings that have infinite wealth but they would only score a .667 if they were all self taught rather than attending education institutions.
Certainly's there's some benefit in "sending a message" with your vote. But we still need to consider the benefit to be gained by helping the not-as-bad candidate win over the quite-horrible candidate.
A = value of a symbolic vote
B = impact of a horrible candidate
C = impact of a not-as-bad candidate
Is A greater than B - C?
You could have put a capuchin monkey up against the Bush and his administration and the benefit of having Bush defeated either time would have still been worlds more valuable than any incremental message.
To everyone who's in support of "message" voting: People are not going to stop strategic voting in our FPP system. I can understand your frustration, but your wanting people to "do the right thing" is not going to amount to them doing the right thing. Take note: Just because there exists a "right way" or "logical way" doesn't mean people can be convinced to act that way. Thinking so gets you points on the Autism scale.
By not encouraging a form of preference voting, you are supporting a continued two-party system. Thankfully, you can boost preference voting in parallel with any other activism. Do so. Getting forms of preference voting enacted is a kind of reform that stands a chance, and has been making inroads.
Intention is one thing.
Competence is another.
And note that Intention is affected by Perspective. Some people would think they're doing everyone good using plans that most everyone would view as evil.
No. Nazis are extreme wrong.
They were originally set up to, and did. That is how our civil war was even possible. That has been neutered now. The EU just hasn't been unified long enough to neuter the states military, or to bring them under the control of the federal government. As I said, the EU states have a long history. The EU federal government is still a newborn. The long history of independent states will likely mean that it will take longer there for the federal government to usurp power, but you can be sure that every year, the EU's government will look a little more like the US.
Why not just go with Proportional Representation? It accurately reflects the wishes of the people. Generic 'liking' does not take into consideration people's preferences of one candidate over another.
People who think moderates bring change are dreaming almost as bad as those who think conservatives bring positive change.
It's all in right there in the names...
Conservative: Backward progress/status quo/prudish & close-minded society
Moderate: status quo/tiny efforts/stagnation
Progressive: forward progress/evolution/improvement/open-minded society
After Citizens United was passed by the Conservative partisan Supreme Court stating corporations are "people" that can make unlimited campaign contributions, any effort to bring a third party in simply results in what will from now on already be a challenge for Democrats to overcome the corruption and spending on behalf of the right wing, it will indeed "throw away"- meaning split- votes from the Democrats. This will result in nothing but Conservative wins, which will result in nothing less than the complete destruction of our nation within a few decades, maximum.
I don't. Left of our left enters socialism pretty quickly. Socialists are far too interested in peoples' personal business. Without any resistance, they'd legislate every little detail and/or use taxes as behavior modifiers. It's reprehensible...not that the right is any better, it's just that their blacklist targets would be different. Until we can find a better way of reliably retaining wiser leadership, minimizing government power is the way to go.
Privately funded, the services are built to benefit those who built them, and thus the customers who use them also become pawns in this. Publicly funded, they become subject to the whims of those in power, most of whom are myopic crusaders for some issue who have no concept of liberty, privacy, or decency (only their definitions of the latter count).
Cracking the two party system is only part of the solution. We need a government that doesn't listen solely to well-funded social and economic lobby groups. Good luck figuring that one out.
It's fair to quote Marx, and especially Engels, on this subject because they form a contextual basis to understand historical socialist theory. But it's not fair to imply that they characterize the socialist political program today, nor have for many decades. The Leninist line guides active socialist (not left-communist) agenda, and is unabashedly statist. It's also unfair to say that bolsheviks and nazis are indistinguishable, but at least here it leaves the realm of the laughable and enters the realm of nitpicking. Currently practiced socialist politics are unquestionably authoritarian. If you directly interrogate on the specific outbursts of this, where they had been politically and morally weak and might have learned lessons—for instance, Kronstadt—they will defend authoritarianism wholeheartedly. They're a bit more ashamed about their role in Spain, but still unapologetic.
The anarchist/left-communist critique of socialism was undeniably valid: a dictatorship of the proletariat cannot ever be anything but a misnomer, and will never be wrung—except, hypothetically, by bloody struggle—from the power-hungry. Socialism is for the opportunists.
Left and right are meaningless concepts by themselves. It's just a matter of where people like to sit in parliament. The nazis worked with the conservatives and not with the socialists, and I'd be pretty surprised if they didn't sit on the right side of the Reichstag.
In the end, though, left-right means what politicians want it to mean. In the 19th century, conservatives (supporting the things had always been, supporting the authority of the monarch, etc) were generally right, and liberals (people supporting the values of liberalism, including democracy, power to the people (or at least the bourgeoisie), civil rights, separation of power, basically the ideas behind the American and French revolutions) were on the left. Sometimes it was people in favour of religious/theocratic politics on the right and liberals on the left. During the 20th century, with the rise of socialists, liberals moved to the right in many countries, and often absorbed what few conservative ideas still remained. Also with western nations being mostly liberal, the existing system supported by conservatives was also mostly liberal. Nowadays it often looks more like the right is pro-corporate rights, while left the left is pro-people. The right is often more authoritarian, but not always, the left can just as easily display an authoritarian bent. There are lots of dimensions in the political landscape that aren't easily mapped together on a single left-right dimension.
In the end, though, left-right is mostly about tribalism. Who are the people on our side, and who are our opponents? This is most obvious in many African countries where political party lines are really divided along classical tribal lines. And the US seems to have a similar kind of neo-tribalism in politics: the political differences between Reps and Dems are really minor, they're mostly supporting the exact same system. It's only about whether your tribe or the opposing tribe is in power, and whose cronies get all the cushy jobs. It would be great to get out of that situation, but while approval voting can definitely play a role there, the real problem lies in the heads of the people.
You're the one who seems to be filled with propaganda, unlike you I have no illusions of magical Utopian societies that we somehow always fail to build. We're all a bunch of flawed pathetic bastards who often forget that in the end we're just a bunch of monkeys with slightly better brains.
No; Utopias are sunk by people who insist this.
Your thinking is flawed. Not everything can be mapped onto a single scale. The fact that there are left-wing and right-wing authoritarians doesn't imply that all left- and rght-wingers are authoritarian. There are also liberals/libertarians on both sides.
So which axis of the nolan chart do we drop to get your left/right?
That may be the reality, but I don't see how anyone could look at a system like that and not conclude that it's rigged from start to finish. And if you know the system is rigged, then exactly what benefit do you gain from participating?
temporary mobilization does not mean full mobilization. not mobilizing when needed, and not taking control of private industry in the most critical phase of the war in between 42-44, is an important reason why war lasted as long as it is, and not longer.
I'd doubt it. A mature economy like Germany's is a massive and complex interlocking framework. Attempting to take it over in a few years during a war is how you make it lose productivity rather than gain it. I'd actually assume off hand that the German industry was raw material limited by then and probably couldn't produce any more than it did since there was nothing to produce it from. Like the US where they were making planes out of wood and ships out of concrete because all the metal produced was already in use. The infrastructure increases needed for more materials were likely too long term and most were probably already done before the war where possible. Then again I doubt you've ever studies economics.
and as another poster so aptly put - nazis only were an over arching government for warfare efficiency, just like how bolsheviks were. there wasnt anything that reflected on the well being of the individual citizen - basically, socialization was not about the economy, but politics of how the country was run.
No, socialism in a general sense was always about the economy. It was not however about the good of the citizens. I'm not sure why you can't understand why those two are very different beasts. The Marxist claims were that one causes the other but that never really materialized since they're so separate.
in socialism, goods and resources are controlled by the people. they decide the production through democratic process. NOT an overarching government.
That's one form of socialism and the least likely one in practice. Democracy itself never exists but only more practical forms of it like representative democracy with complicated built in constraints (courts, constitutions, branches of government, etc.). Pure democracy gives you tyranny of the majority. A free market is, btw, in many ways a democracy where you vote with your money.
a common misconception the american far right spread around to entire world is 'government means left'. no, government, means government. its nothing related to left or right. an overcontrolling government may be any kind of government, and people may still not get a dime.
Understanding the economy is a complicated matter and understanding the people's desires is an even more complicated matter. The soviets never managed the latter while a free market does it rather well. In fact, the soviets would have likely done even worse if not for the various black markets that fixed their various mistakes (alcohol rations, the universal currency). Socialism requires a massive government bureaucracy because it has to understand, manage and predict the economy which is no trivial feat. The control it exerts must also mean it have massive power over the economy and thus everything.
This goes against everything that makes an election fair. One person is suppose to have one vote.
If there is only one candidate I approve of, then I only get one vote. If there are 3 candidates my neighbor approves of, he gets to vote 3 times.
The only "fair" way to do approval voting is that everyone gets to vote multiple times - one vote for each candidate on the ballot. So, if there are 3 candidates, everyone gets 3 votes to allocate as they please. They can give all of their votes to one of the candidates, or 2 and 1, or 1 for each (which is equivalent to abstention).
If you want to create a real penalty for not being an educated voter, here's a simple trick:
1) Remove party affiliations from the ballot.
2) Remove any option to vote straight party.
3) Prohibit the dissemination of political materials from any political party within 1,000 feet of a polling station.
Of course, in the interim there would be much wailing and gnashing of teeth as much of the electorate suddenly realized that it had to do research. People would complain that it's a form of "disenfranchisement."
But it's not fair to imply that they characterize the socialist political program today, nor have for many decades.
I disagree completely. Both in my country (Portugal) and in France, Trotskyist parties have close to 10% of the votes, so they definitively characterize some important socialist programs.
In analyzing the Tsarist regime, Trotsky had picked up on the strand of Marxist thought that saw the state as an independent parasitic body, feeding on all the social classes engaged in the process of production.
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socialism
Socialism is an economic and political theory advocating public or common ownership and cooperative management of the means of production and allocation of resources.[1][2][3] A socialist society is a social structure organized on the basis of relatively equal power-relations, self-management, dispersed decision-making (adhocracy) and a reduction or elimination of hierarchical and bureaucratic forms of administration and governance; the extent of which varies in different types of socialism.
apparently you have been conditioned by a biased source before, during your education. very probably american education in an american college or modeled after an american institution.
the definition of socialism is above. its that. COMMON OWNERSHIP of means of production and their profits. the word 'government' doesnt pass in that definition at any point, it never has been in it at any point. dont pass off the american conditioning of the word 'socialism' like its definition. it makes you look ignorant.
the only reason you may be excused is that, the MEANS to effect such common ownership of everything in crowded, big societies was not possible except using a central government as intermediary, up till today. to effect direct management of resources, the community needed to be small, because of communication and collaboration limitations.
however today we dont even have that limitation. we have instant communication, automatized factories, powerful computer systems.
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It still doesn't matter. Have you ever heard of a concept called sovereignty? The point you jumped to miss is that the USA is not England or France, or Germany or Egypts or South Africa or any other country. When someone says something in US politics is leftist, or rightists, they are speaking specifically in reference to how it's standing with in US politics. The US could be a complete fascist dictatorship and calling the guy who wants to elect the dictators instead of having them appointed by parliament a "leftist" would be accurate in reference those politics.
But that does not mean it "doesn't matter." Knowing that other groups of people hold different views and thereby attain better or worse results is relevant and possibly useful information, whether we use the information or not. Yes, we're sovereign, but if we continue to choose stupidity as national policy, e.g., by underfunding and resisting science and technological progress, we will not always be sovereign, I'd wager. Funding education is a socialist policy. Societies that fund education do better. We ignore useful data at our peril.
At the same time, I agree that a one dimensional "left-right" dichotomy is simplistic and harmful.
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Single dimensional dichotomies are about all that most people can handle when it comes to analysis, which is unfortunate.
It is definitely unfortunate. I think the only valid single-dimensional dichotomy upon which to place ideas is whether their implementation results in increasing well-being for people and society. Well-being here is defined by me, ala Sam Harris, as increasing happiness of individuals and cooperation between individuals.
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Common misconception held particularly by Europeans, which is reinforced by the fact people keep repeating this meme without examining it critically; honestly, anyone who thinks the Conservative party in Britain, for example, would not be considered a right-wing party in the US is extremely mistaken.
I'm not sure if the UK is such a great example for Europe. I consider Labour also a conservative right-wing party. (Then again, the Dutch Labour party has helped privatize lots of vital infrastructure too. Economic liberalism has become a bit too standard in Europe.)
This is definitely true of the Dutch highly conservative anti-immigration party. The slightly less right-wing conservative liberals (VVD), the mostly conservative Christian democrats (CDA) and supposedly slightly left-wing labour (PvdA) have seriously weakened our welfare state over the past 30 years. It's only the socialists (SP) and maybe the greens (GL) that want to reform and strengthen social security.
While Approval Voting is arguably an improvement over simple first-past-the-post voting, it doesn't allow for voters to express preference among those they can live with. Instant Runoff Voting is a little more complicated, but still understandable, and allows voters to express preference, not just acceptance. There are other voting systems with additional desirable properties, and it is worth reading up on them. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voting_system
yay!
Cause we need guns in the statehouse for some reason! FREEDOM!
Just crazy property taxes to make up the difference!
yay! Now when seatbeltless/helmetless motorists get in car accidents, publicly and privately funded emergency staff have to deal with more critical injuries and/or fatalities. Surely, this will save time and money. If I get an accident with someone, their decision to not wear a helmet or seatbelt may be the difference between my accident having caused their death. FREEDOM!
well, that's actually a good one.
Uh yes, when I elect a civil servant, I don't expect them to have an office or staff to assist them in their duties. It's just lunacy to expect them to be able to function solo.
I agree that some sort of 'ranked' voting system would be better, but this is still better than 'vote for one'.
Yes, in different contexts of conversations. But it's incoherently inane when you are speaking about the politicians in a specific area as they relate to the voters of that area. When someone says the left in American politics, they are talking about the left of center of American politics, not where the left would be in China for instance. Stating that the left isn't the left adds nothing to the point unless the goal is to somehow convince those people to accept the left of them in some way. And quite frankly, if you have to resort to politics in other countries in order to justify your choices in your own country, it's probably time you went to live in the other country.
And that's a valid political opinion that is worthy of politics within your own country. Stating that consolidate X is not left or right enough because Egypt is whatever or some invention of a scale, does nothing to strengthen that point whatsoever at all. The question then becomes are you concerned that it's important in your countries politics or some other countries politics. I don't particularly see that as a left verses right issue either. It seems to be in the US at least, a who's pockets are getting lined under the name of science and progress issue more then anything.
We do fund education. And no, funding education is not a socialist policy in the US. Or at least it's one of the few socialist policies that we all accept. The US has funded education for quite some time under the guise of national security and economic well being. Even the US government that has absolutely no constitutional authority to get into education at all, has funded it. I'm not exactly sure where you are going with this unless it's the tired old spend more for the same results- just throw money at the schools argument. You know, the give the failing institutions a raise without stopping them from failing policy that has degraded public schools over the last 40 or more years.
And hopefully now you see why comparing the left or right to Europe's version or China's version is irrelevant to the discussion within a countries politics. When you do, you end up in conflict with your own political opinions because you are abstracting them from outside in.
firstly, statistically, if average population on the ENTIRE PLANET is to your left it means that you are on the right of the average. that's that.
I don't think left-right works on a planetary scale. It's not something that's measurable or quantifiable, and it means something different in every country, and in many places, the meaning changes every couple of decades. It's completely subjective, and in my opinion, the left-right division is more a kind of neo-tribalism than that it really says something about political ideas.
He mentioned "right wing dictators" and "left wing dictators." Someone who thinks government should be small and weak could be either a "right wing non-dictator" (i.e., a libertarian) or a "left wing non-dictator" (i.e., a hippie).
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
Well, it's not his fault he was confused.
...the future crusty old bastards are already drinking the Kool-Aid.
Great article on the bill and approval voting here: http://www.electology.org/hb-240
Keep thinking that if it makes you happier but reality doesn't change just because it makes you sad. When you're wondering why the corporations are raping you up the ass, look back upon this. Unlike you they have no qualms about understanding the flawed nature of humans and exploiting it for all they can. The same goes for the Stalins of the world although they're not as systematic about it.
For better or worse, the flaws are what makes us human. To remove that, to make it possible for us to make a Utopia would turn us into something else. Machines or ants. It could never survive the sheer chaos that is humanity.
But you do not understand that because you do not fundamentally understand humans. You believe we can be trivially explained when in reality we are flawed but absurdly complex. Selfish, altruistic, loving, hating, sadistic, caring and so on and so on. Rational, irrational, emotional, short sighted, long sighted and so on and so on. And most of us think we're the only ones who are right.
The EU isn't a federal system, it's a subsidiarity system, which in effect is similar but is based on very different doctrines.
Don't blame me, I voted for Baltar.
Apparently, you didn't bother to read your link. The US government was also set up as a 'subsidiarity system'. The link you point to specifically mentions our constitution as specifically spelling that out. The founding principals of the US were designed to have the federal government only having say over the specific issues laid out in the constitution. Everything else was supposed to be decided by the states. This is the exact same founding principals of the EU. Unfortunately, over time, the Federal government increased it's power, as you can be sure the EU will also.
Really, go back and read your own link. Your splitting hairs that simply are not there.
I read the link quite well. I disagree with Wikipedia's exegesis of "federalism," and consider it's theory reductive and ahistorical. Subsidiarity is a global principle applied to local institutions: the greater body creates an obligation for local control, and devolves authority down. Federalism, at least in the American experience, is a local principle where a sovereign entity relinquishes some of its competencies to the global entity, and evolves authority up. Under both systems the constituents retain plenary authority but under subsidiarity the global authority maintains the discretion to decide what is global and what is local; under American Federalism the distinction between the two is considered constitutional and must be specifically enumerated in law.
If you look at the EC Treaty it requires the European Parliament to undertake a consultative procedure to decide when its Acts are not in alignment with subsidiarity, and requires that legislative Acts be justified in their draft language (something US laws don't need to do), and specifically creates a procedure to judge the legitimacy of rules that breach Subsidiarity; this is done because Subsidiarity is an ideological concept and requires subjective judegment. The US Constitution has no such procedures because the limits of the federal government are stated in objective terms (coin money, post offices, and "necessary and proper").
The reason that Subsidiarity and US Federalism are so similar in the modern era is because every activity, down to the breath you take, in the modern world falls under the definition of "interstate commerce." The outcome is similar but the historical justification and the production is very, very different and will definitely produce different outcomes under different circumstances.
Don't blame me, I voted for Baltar.
There's a highly informative article on Approval Voting and this New Hampshire bill here: http://www.electology.org/hb-240
You posted a link as evidence that you disagree with? Besides the fact that the imaginary difference you claim, would, if anything, create MORE of a central authority in the EU than it would in the US, the mere fact that you posted a link are part of your argument that when called on, you immediatly dismiss as incorrect, makes you extremely dishonest.
I'm entitled to disagree with one throwaway sentence in an otherwise-useful wikipedia article, particularly one that lacks citation or justification. Guess what, people use wikipedia to puke out out their B.S. politico-social theorizing all the time.
The word "federalism" never appears in Maastricht or the EU constitution, despite significant agitation on the part of very large member states for its inclusion -- I suspect the distinction means quite a bit to the Europeans, even if it's "all the same" to folks like random Wikipedia contributors and Belial6.
Don't blame me, I voted for Baltar.