For those of you who'd like to take a 10-minutes break to actually talk about issues instead of empowering future tyrants: https://archive.org/details/TrapNews
Andrew Yang Founds the Forward Party
261–270 of 638 posts
Re: Andrew Yang Founds the Forward Party
#262Earlier quoted context omitted.
Ranked choice seems to be the best one I've read about. Could you help us understand what voting system might be better?
https://politics.stackexchange.com/questions/14582/what-argu... Sums up most of the points about it. I want to highlight the "leads to two party dominance in countries that use it" (australia for example) point. This is exactly what we want to avoid. I prefer approval or score voting for single member elections as it does away with all these bad voting incentives. But regardless, I think single member elections are s…
I absolutely agree about the Zweitmandat system. For those unfamiliar:
> The Zweitmandat (English: second mandate) is a feature in the variation of mixed-member proportional representation (MMP) used to elect the Landtag of Baden-Württemberg. Unlike most variations of MMP, such as the German federal electoral system, Baden-Württemberg's system does not use party lists. Instead, proportional seats are filled by losing candidates who won the highest proportion of votes.
Re: Andrew Yang Founds the Forward Party
#263It is still astonishing to me that Yang was the betting favourite for NYC Mayor at one point.
I completely missed it at the time which is infuriating as a betting opportunity like that to lay him is a once a year occurrence at best.
Re: Andrew Yang Founds the Forward Party
#264I feel like a lot of people take it as obvious that ranked-choice is just better. I have an alternate take: We just went through a simple first-past-the-post election in the US that a significant percentage of voters believe was rigged. This is the simplest system imaginable, the data is easily available to verify it was not rigged. Do we really think the average american will be able to grok how ranked-choice voting…
do you really think those people don't understand how the current vote works? you can't wake up a person who is pretending to be asleep..
Well, we can, that's what buckets of cold water are for.
However, just like with pouring cold water on people in real life, you probably won't get the reaction you seek.
Re: Andrew Yang Founds the Forward Party
#265The top line, "Not Left. Not Right. Forward." kind of reminds me of Macron's "En Marche" ("Let's Go") that took over France in a storm, taking over the presidency AND the parliament only one year after its foundation, with very few previously known political figures in its ranks. The whole thing looked like doing management rather than politics, and offered an alternative to fed-up voters who didn't dare turn to the…
It's also almost the tagline Rita Verdonk used to use: "Niet links, niet rechts, maar rechtdoorzee" ("not left, not right, but straightforward"). This was when she started her own party after being sidelined by the party of the current prime minister of the Netherlands, after getting more votes than he did. Her party failed miserably, and ten years later he's still prime minister. Which is to say: success doesn't jus…
Happened in the UK as well. A group of centrist MPs from different parties got together and started a new party called Change UK. They got a lot of good press and good will from people wanting a more 'rational' center option. One catastrophic election later the party collapsed and later dissolved.
Re: Andrew Yang Founds the Forward Party
#266Seems cool, their platform has a lot of good elements given the party's main aim ("the current two-party duopoly is not working") . It does have some sort of minor points that seem less worth highlighting (eg "Department Of Technology" which is just a beuracratic revision), but many of the ideas like ranked choice voting, term limits, democracy dollars, etc. are very nice. Might well support this party...
It does seem to have much more to do with organizations like FairVote rather than actual political parties, and I suspect the former is the right approach.
Re: Andrew Yang Founds the Forward Party
#267We have Proportional Representation single transfereable vote system in Ireland and its great, as it forces formation of coalitions to actually represent a majority of population (hence less alienation), allows small parties and independents to potentially join governing coalition (Greens at moment for example), forces parties to compromise and drop more extreme policies.
As for the left / right divide in USA, from our point of view your two main parties are well on the right wing out there
Re: Andrew Yang Founds the Forward Party
#268Earlier quoted context omitted.
The Condorcet Method has a huge disadvantage that it is hard to understand. Being simple to understand is crucial for voting systems and I would argue is the most important factor since an election without public buy-in is worse than worthless.
Sweden has an extremely complex system for tallying votes and very very few people can explain the exact algorithm that turns a collection of ballots into a list of names of people in Parliament. Even people that follow politics closely only have a vague idea of how it works. Yet most people feel the system is fair and reasonable and there is no real push to change it or make it simpler to understand.
If your business relies on some big pile of spaghetti code, you might be very reluctant to change it, but you also would be unlikely to recommend that design to someone who was starting from scratch (unless they were a competitor).
Re: Andrew Yang Founds the Forward Party
#269I was excited about Yang’s candidacy in the NYC mayoral election, but it didn’t take very long to see that he was out of his depth. In the end, he didn’t even rank in my top 5 (NYC has ranked choice now). Why does he keep running for top positions? He clearly doesn’t have a record of success as an executive, either in private or public sectors. He seems like a nice guy. If he wants to get into politics, why not start…
I think it's important not to confuse the goal with the action. I don't think he wants to become a politician. He wants to enact political change. These are two very different things. Saying "if he wants to enact political change, why not start as city councillor?" Well... how many democrats or republicans are pushing for change? No one who is born and raised in party lines is pushing for reform; they're doing the op…
> I don't think he wants to become a politician. He wants to enact political change. These are two very different things.
No, they aren't. Well, one is an action, and one is the description of a person in a position to do that action (not every politician enacts political change, but everyone who enacts political change is a politician.)
Re: Andrew Yang Founds the Forward Party
#270The Platform page lists a selection of positions that I think would not be very controversial. https://www.forwardparty.com/platform Surprisingly, the issue that Yang is known for, UBI, is not on the list. UBI is, however, present here: https://www.forwardparty.com/whyforward I wonder if that was accidental.
Is there anything that's not "controversial" in American politics? Has the whole "evolution" thing been settled yet?
That depends a lot on what you mean by politics. Plenty of things are unctroversial in polls of the population, but either controversial or uncontroversial in the opposite direction in political discourse (medicare for all, war in Iraq, to give two examples).