h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

It's largely to do with the voting system. Let's imagine there are two main parties: A (which I hate) and B (which is sort-of okay), but I'd really like to vote for party C (which is minor).

If I vote for C, then I have not voted for B, and I have thereby increased the chances for A to get in. So (a) if there's no chance C will get in, I'd be better off voting for B, and (b) if there is a chance C will get in, I need to do tricky calculations on unknowable factors to determine whether voting for C is worth the risk.

Point b. requires voters to be quite politically savvy, and point a. institutes a negative feedback loop which ensures that parties without political momentum never attain political momentum.

Here in Ireland we have the fairly rare PR-STV system, which is a lot more complicated to understand but a lot easier to use. I can give a first-preference vote for C and a second-preference vote for B. That's counted as a vote for C, but if C doesn't garner enough votes to get in, my vote isn't thrown away: it counts as a vote for B instead. This allows minor parties to gain momentum and get into power. It also tends to lead to a lot of coalition governments (and to a very long time spent counting the votes), but that's not necessarily any harm.

(I voted for a bunch of people in the last general election, and none of them got in. In the presidential election, I gave my first-preference vote to a candidate I was fairly certain wouldn't make it, and my second-preference vote to the candidate who ended up winning. And I didn't need to worry about what way I thought other people would be voting.)

TRiG.

I remember a lot of discussion about that about a year ago. I quite like the idea. Another idea I've recently read about (but that has a snowball's chance in hell of being adopted) is to use representative polling. Instead of having the general public voluntarily go to the polls, a representative and fairly random selection of the voters are chosen to vote. This negates many of the issues we have with voter suppression and voter apathy. Elections no longer are determined by which side can rally the most voters or suppress the most opposition voters. In places like the US which typically has voter turnout under 20% for non-national elections, this has a great affect. Of course, how representative pools of voters are chosen will be something that needs to be closely monitored for statistical neutrality. But since it will never happen there's not much need for discussion.

Another thing I'd really like to see that will also never ing happen, is publicly funded and much briefer campaigns. Our entire national election process is corrupted by moneyed interests and there's no getting rid of it short of some kind of revolution. The people in position to make such changes are not inclined to change the status quo.

But ... but ... but corporations are people!

TRiG.

Yes, so I fully expect Mittens to announce he's chosen a corporation for his Vice Presidential candidate.

TRiG, I really like Ireland's system and wish we had it here. You're spot on about the reason a third party can't rise to prominence. Voting for a candidate who has no chance of winning is giving your vote to the candidate you like the least.

Well, our constitutional amendment passed, as expected. I'm wondering how long it will be before the lawsuits start. This will probably wind up costing school districts, and therefore taxpayers, millions.

In a way, we are repeating -- or, rather, our country's right-wing ideologues are repeating the same mistakes as the late Soviet Union. Ideology is trumping intelligence and common sense. There is a parallel, for example, that can be drawn between our climate change deniers and the disastrous agricultural policies of Lysenko.

I would suggest that all candidates for national political office be obliged to take a minimum number of college credits in civics, economics and administration (in evening classes if needs be)... but the tea party activists would accuse the teachers of left-wing bias.

*deletes sentence that names an egregiously stupid congressional representative from Texas*

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Yes, so I fully expect Mittens to announce he's chosen a corporation for his Vice Presidential candidate.

If he could get away with it, he would. Hmmmm, which mega-corp would it be?

Is chik-fil-A mega? Otherwise, I nominate the New York Stock Exchange.

Goldman Sachs or its ilk would be my guess.

Oh, and Lil... the really sad thing is I can't even guess which egregiously stupid congressman from Texas you're suggesting as there are just so many of them.

So true

Here's a clue: terror babies.

I just Googled 'terror babies'. Am I am on a watch list now?

I just posted the words "watch list" on an internet forum. Am I on a watch list now?

I want Mittens to name Warner Exxon Walmart as his running mate.

Ah, good old Louie Gohmert... He was my first guess. He is the dimmest of his befuddled class. Yep, he recently blamed the Aurora tragedy on the fact that folks like me oppose sponsored prayer at high school graduations. He also defended the Trans-Alaskan pipeline as being good for the environment in that it promotes caribou sex.

According to Gohmert, "When [the caribou] want to go on a date, they invite each other to head over to the pipeline. So [his] real concern now [is] … if oil stops running through the pipeline … do we need a study to see how adversely the caribou would be affected if that warm oil ever quit flowing?”

You all caused me to look up this baby business, too...aargh.

I may have to retire my tinfoil hat. Apparently, some people can believe more impossible things before breakfast than I could possibly imagine...

Gohmert is a real chicken dinner winner. Actually, nut cases like him say as much about the voters as they do about the representatives. What on earth are people thinking when they step into a voting booth? Do they think at all? Has the American electorate lost all touch with reality? Oh, right. Developing critical thinking skills is the work of the devil.

Some years ago, the 90's, I read an article in which the author had attended a Republican rally and interviewed some of the supporters. What stuck in my mind was the young woman who described herself as a soccer mom, middle class, and concerned that America needed to return to traditional family values.

The reporter asked her to describe some of those values. She couldn't. She wound up repeating, "We need family values," before drifting off to another part of the floor.

Conservatives love speaking in code, in dog whistle phrases. Family values was coined before or during the first Bush (the elder) campaign. Dan Quayle was running for VP and accused the television character, Murphy Brown (Candace Bergen) of being a prime example of the erosion of family values in America as her character was about to have a child out of wedlock by choice. The connotation of 'family values' has grown to include "the protection of marriage" (homophobia), "the war on christmas" (religious bigotry), "the sanctity of life" (limiting the health choices of women concerning abortion and contraception), etc.

They use euphemisms for all manner of things that if spoken plainly would be frowned upon if not found abhorrent by a great many people. They also like to use dog whistle phraseology by turning terms into epithets, like "liberal" and "the democrat party" (as opposed to democratic party). Multiculturalism is a negative term for them as it promotes tolerance and encourages free thought which weakens the dominance of the religious and moral beliefs they pass along to their children.

Seriously, when you start to understand what they're really trying to say, it becomes so much more fearful and hateful.

I read Slactkivist, partly to remind myself that religious people are not *necessarily* the enemy, and partly because Fred Clark is really really good at decoding those dog whistles. One of his recurrent articles is that people (a) like to think they're better than others, and (b) like to think that they are doing something to make the world a better place, but (c) are too lazy to actually do anything. So they make up fake enemies and then sign internet petitions (or go have a chicken dinner). Look for the tags "anti-kitten-burning coalition", "IndigNation", and "satanic baby killers" on his site.

http://www.patheos.com/blogs/slacktivist/

TRiG.