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A New Way of Voting That Makes Zealotry Expensive

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Re: A New Way of Voting That Makes Zealotry Expensive

#71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree. For this "tribal" reason of picking a party I've been more inclined to have term limits on Congress.

Term limits in congress aren't really a good thing though. We have term limits for President because the President is uniquely powerful, they can almost unilaterally bend the aparatus of government to their will. If allowed to rule for too long, a president can easily become a dictator. The same is not true of a congressperson who weilds 1/535th of the power of a branch. Besides, if the people want to put someone in…

I have come to appreciate the wisdom of the Virginia governor's term-limiting system -- you can hold office as many times as you want, but you cannot succeed yourself.

Voters can restore someone to office, but each term must stand alone, avoiding the, "What does every first-term President want? A second term." problem.

Re: A New Way of Voting That Makes Zealotry Expensive

#72
post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Career congresspersons are beholden to those that secure their reelection. That's the current steady state system we have now. Term limits forces that dynamic to no longer apply to the final term, which frees congresspeople from this dynamic for at least one term. It also forces clearer the revolving door between the private sector and politics as then the no-longer congressperson gets hired into a company.

>Career congresspersons are beholden to those that secure their reelection Yeah, those people are called "voters". That's how it's supposed to work. We want congresspeople to feel beholden to them. > It also forces clearer the revolving door between the private sector and politics as then the no-longer congressperson gets hired into a company. Isn't this just motivation for more cronyism? You're basically arguing tha…

> Yeah, those people are called "voters". That's how it's supposed to work. We want congresspeople to feel beholden to them.

No it's not. It's to the people with money which let's them get to the voters. Because otherwise that money is going to an alternate candidate that plays ball. Have you ever wondered where the blue-collar Democrats of the 1970's went, for example? Businesses and those with money instead financing better campaigns in return for business representation, won. It's why both Democrats and Republicans have generally represented corporate interests since Reagan.

> Isn't this just motivation for more cronyism?

No, it's motivation for making the existing cronyism even more transparent. Or, incentivizing those who did their terms to return to the communities they helped represent and move on with their non-political life.

Re: A New Way of Voting That Makes Zealotry Expensive

#73
post #54

If I were a politcal group with lots of members up for reelction, I would be sure to flood the ballot with things the other side wants to vote against so they'd have to spread out their tokens whereas my group could clump them on a single issue/candidate.

The other party(ies) could do the same, so I don't see how this is any worse than the current system.

Re: A New Way of Voting That Makes Zealotry Expensive

#74

> An intriguing new tool of democracy just had its first test in the real world of politics, and it passed with flying colors. how can you even measure if a voting system is a success?

Specifically, how does one measure democracy? I hadn't thought about this before, but I'm intrigued and no good answers are springing to mind.

Re: A New Way of Voting That Makes Zealotry Expensive

#75
post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Career congresspersons are beholden to those that secure their reelection Yeah, those people are called "voters". That's how it's supposed to work. We want congresspeople to feel beholden to them. > It also forces clearer the revolving door between the private sector and politics as then the no-longer congressperson gets hired into a company. Isn't this just motivation for more cronyism? You're basically arguing tha…

> Yeah, those people are called "voters". That's how it's supposed to work. We want congresspeople to feel beholden to them. No it's not. It's to the people with money which let's them get to the voters. Because otherwise that money is going to an alternate candidate that plays ball. Have you ever wondered where the blue-collar Democrats of the 1970's went, for example? Businesses and those with money instead financi…

So if your real problem is with money in politics, why not get money out of politics instead of targeting this weird, roundabout, more difficult to implement, and antidemocratic method that may not have any actual impact on the problem?

Re: A New Way of Voting That Makes Zealotry Expensive

#76
post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Career congresspersons are beholden to those that secure their reelection. That's the current steady state system we have now. Term limits forces that dynamic to no longer apply to the final term, which frees congresspeople from this dynamic for at least one term. It also forces clearer the revolving door between the private sector and politics as then the no-longer congressperson gets hired into a company.

>Career congresspersons are beholden to those that secure their reelection Yeah, those people are called "voters". That's how it's supposed to work. We want congresspeople to feel beholden to them. > It also forces clearer the revolving door between the private sector and politics as then the no-longer congressperson gets hired into a company. Isn't this just motivation for more cronyism? You're basically arguing tha…

No, they are beholden to whomever can help them raise enough money for re-election. It is far easier to have 1-2 industries you make happy and can write you a big check every 2 or 6 years than reaching out to raise grassroots support from thousands of individual voters.

Re: A New Way of Voting That Makes Zealotry Expensive

#77
This would be an interesting strategy to apply towards measuring how an open source community feels about difficult tradeoffs in design where there is no clear winner among many proposals, such as the recent survey meant to measure how people feel about the various async/await syntax proposals in Rust.

https://www.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/biw1ic/asyncawait_syn...

https://www.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/bju8di/asyncawait_syn...

Re: A New Way of Voting That Makes Zealotry Expensive

#78
This actually looks like it could be applied very effectively to open source communities on a single project when setting priorities for future feature development. For example, you have 20 features in the backlog and you're going into a two month sprint in which you can only focus on 3. Might be an interesting way to open up voting to everyone. On larger projects this would be useful even if it's only the developers working on it that are voting.

Re: A New Way of Voting That Makes Zealotry Expensive

#79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the natural evolution of the two-party system The US has a long history, almost all of it with a two-party system. Only sometimes is there extremity. To my mind, 1860 is even more extreme than today. (My opinion is that an important common thread between then and today is a class of people with a great deal of money who are deliberately driving the political atmosphere. But in any event a claim that it is a natural…

Slavery was a particularly and uniquely intractable problem where a "moderate" or "centrist" solution was particularly unappealing. There's extensive literature on what's been driving polarization, but it really is a new "era" for it and not a cyclical thing. Factors include: - More democratic/open primaries, which select extreme candidates - More statistically targeted media (including social media) to take advantag…

> Increasingly partisan news media made possible by more fragmented media (first cable, then the Internet)

Isn’t the entire mainstream media owned by only like 6 corporations[1]?

https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.businessinsider.com/these-6...

Re: A New Way of Voting That Makes Zealotry Expensive

#80
post #77

This would be an interesting strategy to apply towards measuring how an open source community feels about difficult tradeoffs in design where there is no clear winner among many proposals, such as the recent survey meant to measure how people feel about the various async/await syntax proposals in Rust. https://www.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/biw1ic/asyncawait_syn... https://www.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/bju8di/asynca…

Totally agree, that's where my mind went to immediately. Features and/or proposals on design in larger projects.
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