81–90 of 152 posts
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Sorry - that also scares me. What is even worse (in my opinion) is people voting on candidates based on last names (which seems to be the trend lately) - especially when that's seen or used as a positive aspect.
Or voting against candidates based on their last names. Let's be intellectually consistent here..
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There's no correlation between having a lot of parties and a sound, well functioning political system. See: Italy, and a dozen other examples from Europe over the last 70 years If your culture is rotten, your politics will be rotten, regardless of whether you have 2, 5, 27 parties.
A multi-party system does not guarantee that there will be no political problems (particularly not if it polarizes into what's effectively a two-party system), but a two-party system is practically guaranteed to not represent minority opinions, and very likely to degenerate into a "vote for the lesser evil".
Sure, if you managed to get enough "viral" support and maybe some wealthy investor you could mount a campaign big enough to get into a debate but the frameworks that have grown around the two-party system make it very difficult to take advantage of any popularity boost.
Trying to compete with the two established parties in a "winner takes all" system would require working against the entire political system which is overwhelmingly made up of people in those two parties.
paper here(paper by google): http://arxiv.org/pdf/1502.03519v1.pdf
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I think "She has paid her dues" is meant to be justifying the claim that she's fit to be a candidate , not that she should win . Last time around there were suggestions that Clinton didn't have the political experience necessary to make a good president, and that's a harder argument to make now. (I do think it's a pretty fatuous article, not that that's a huge surprise from the Huffington Post. But it's probably not…
As opposed to Obama, who had absolutely zero track record?
When gjm11 said "justifying" they obviously meant "supporting". And yeah, after Obama's train-wreck foreign policy and complete disconnect with legislators on both sides of the aisle, it's pretty reasonable to highlight your experience as a positive quality.
Another unintended consequence of Google doing the things that Google recommends you don't do (in this case, scraping sites). Can we talk about how terrible a piece of pro-hillary propaganda that was? Namely this: > America is ready for the leadership of a Hillary Clinton. A new history will be made when she becomes the leader of the free world. The world of women everywhere will change Sure, this sounds very reminis…
Anyway, I don't think anyone really thinks like this, or at least a lot fewer than the people who talk like this. This is the kind of stuff that people come up with when they are already convinced and trying to make their case and not how they become convinced.
There is a common fallacy (or cognitive bias, I'm not sure what to call it) that affects almost everything we think but seems particularly pervasive in politics.
We use far more rational arguments to justify or argue for our positions and opinions than we do when adopting them. Adopting opinions is emotional (a bundle in itself), associative. Rational thought plays a part, but it's much smaller than we like to admit. We also see the logic in arguments with the logical conclusions we have already reached far more readily than the other way around.
"she has paid her dues" and "the world of women everywhere will change" seems convincing to someone who is already convinced. I doubt it convinces anyone (or many, anyway). In this case, it's almost testable. There are people on the other side of politics who are woman and have paid (or will have paid) their dues. If Hillary loses and one of them runs next time, do you think she'll switch?
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There are primary elections for both parties, aren't there?
Yeah and it's also the only country in the world where those elections lead to the same couple of families winning every time...
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What about the results of the two party system make you think it hinders democracy? Bearing in mind that the average voter is basically my mom? We have pretty much exactly the government my mom wants. Harsh drug laws, extreme jail sentences, generous social security, lots of regulatory protections, etc. Probably the only light between her and Obama is she dislikes his foreign policy (she's from a Muslim country, whic…
Duverger's law describes how the plurality rule (there can be only one winner) in elections usually results in a two party system, and the Hotelling-Downs model explains the Median voter theorem which shows that these two parties will generally settle on the (centrist) outcome preferred by the median voter. Neither are obvious and intuitive so without this understanding it can look like democracy is broken. Surround…
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Yeah and it's also the only country in the world where those elections lead to the same couple of families winning every time...
Every time? Hyperbolize much? Bush and the John Adams family are the only families to have more than 1 President in them. How about we stick to facts? As far as "only country in the world.." How many countries of the world have Royal families? How many of those were elected? Someone explain why the British Royal family gets a single pound in tax-payer money. What does the King of Sweden actually do again? Let's be in…
Speaking of intellectual consistency, the British taxpayer gets more money from the royal family than the family gets in taxes. The government administers estates owned by the royal family and takes the revenue - the net cash flow is about £100M annually from Lizzie and crew to the UK taxpayer. This isn't soft measures like "enhances tourism". It's direct income from the estates.
If the UK gummint were to cut them off, the Windsors could take back control of their estates, and the gummint would be that much in the red. Continuing in the vein of intellectual consistency, the UK is a representative democracy - the people who pass law are voted in by citizens. The monarch does not make law, so elections for the monarch are meaningless in the context of law- or policy-making.
You can hate on the royal family all you want, but it doesn't change that they contribute more financially than they get, and they don't get to make law. And the UK has a multipolar political system, though it's stupid FPTP voting method gives it a lot of similarities to a two-party system. Ultimately though, your hated royals actually inhabit a country with more political choices for the proles than the US has.
King of Sweden... I'm less familiar with.
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> Do people really think like this? All you have to do is "pay your dues" and you "deserve" it instead of voting on issues, track record & potential to make real change? Yes. Source: Click around the Facebook comments of any substantially large digital publication. Tonnes of people don't even vote. Of those that do, most vote for the parties they're already loyal to. Of the few that are in the middle, most decide acc…
I get voting on party - what scares me is voting on someone because they "paid their dues" - which is especially mind boggling when you look at people's approval ratings of those same candidates in their previous jobs (typically congress - which is hanging out at around 16%).