7 ms·

Elementary school politics. This would be a hilarious sitcom if it weren't for all the thousands of people getting hurt by this dysfunctional joke of a governme

Elementary school politics. This would be a hilarious sitcom if it weren't for all the thousands of people getting hurt by this dysfunctional joke of a government.

RobRivera 6y ago
A part of me believes this is more feature and less bug of the government. "Blame the disfunction, not the leadership thats elected every 2 years".
- DaiPlusPlus 6y ago
  How is this not a bug? A straightforward patch would be the introduction of FPTP and moving the executive role from the office of the head-of-state to a body controlled by congress.
  - p1necone 6y ago
    FPTP tends to lead to the same heavily divided two major party politics you already have, it just avoids the possibility of winning with <50% of the popular vote. Something like MMP is probably a better system (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mixed-member_proportional_representation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mixed-member_proportional_repr...). Baby steps though.
    - dragonwriter 6y ago
      > FPTP tends to lead to the same heavily divided two major party politics you already have, it just avoids the possibility of winning with <50% of the popular vote. No, it doesn't. FPTP is a synonym for single-member plurality, which enables wins with less than 50% of the popular vote when there are more than two candidates. You may mean majority-runoff (which the US already uses for a fair number of elections) or instant runoff, instead of FPTP, both of which require a kind of majority, but are otherwise very close to FPTP in their incentives and effects.
      - p1necone 6y ago
        Oops yes I am mistaken about the non majority thing. It still leads to bi party politics though.
        Beldin 6y ago
        Only if the election is per-seat. In the Netherlands, elections for the lower house (150 seats) are nationwide. The 150 candidates/parties with the highest number of votes get a seat. The party system makes it a bit more complex, but in the end, there's roughly proportional representation: a party with 10% of the popular vote occupies roughly 10% of the seats. No superwinning like in the UK (where 30% of the vote can get you more than 30% of the seats), no cut-off except you need at least 1/150th of the votes to get a seat.
        jacquesm 6y ago
        And, crucially: minority viewpoints actually tend to be accommodated as larger parties lobby smaller ones to support their agenda. Coalition government is a lot better than the see-saw you get otherwise with one party undoing what the previous one did.
    - Mikeb85 6y ago
      Lol, Canada has FPTP and regularly features majority governments that win with 35% of the vote.
  - thephyber 6y ago
    I would argue the end-users (voters) mostly consider this a bug while the developers (majority party legislators at the state level) consider it a feature. Also, the founding fathers famously made it difficult for Congress to change anything, so dysfunction was definitely a feature.
    - dragonwriter 6y ago
      > I would argue the end-users (voters) mostly consider this a bug while the developers (majority party legislators at the state level) consider it a feature. Voters consider the paralysis a feature when it is presenting a hostile legislative majority or executive from realizing their agenda, and a bug when it is preventing a friendly one.
      - a1369209993 6y ago
        > Voters consider the paralysis a feature when it is presenting a hostile legislative majority or executive from realizing their agenda, and a bug when it is preventing a friendly one. Yes, that's what they said: paralysis is always a feature, because the legislative majority is always hostile to the people.
        thephyber 6y ago
        I think your parent was describing the nuance between "voters" and "voters who are aligned with the legislative majority", which is fair.
    - 0x8BADF00D 6y ago
      Not so sure about that. I suppose the original intent was to have a healthy debate around major policy decisions. It's a check against wanton liberalism or conservatism. Congress seems eager to pass spending bills and take away our privacy. They move at light speed when doing that.
  - dragonwriter 6y ago
    > A straightforward patch would be the introduction of FPTP The US uses FPTP for most elections, that's actually central to the problem. If you mean “a system approximating proportional repreaentation”, that's a valid fix, but problematic, both in terms of choosing the right one and the fact that doing so itself has ideological as well as functional impacts on outcomes, which means that the status quo faction which would ideologically be disadvantaged will be hard to sway no matter what the functional argument is. So you'd need unchallenged control by the opposing faction, which would have to be willing to surrender that control to a multiparty system which might be favorable ideologically, but not organizationally. And even that only is talking about the House. It's outright Constitutionally prohibited, even by Constitutional amendment, for the Senate.
    - jcranmer 6y ago
      > It's outright Constitutionally prohibited, even by Constitutional amendment, for the Senate. Not quite true. It can be changed with consent of the state, so it would require 100% of the states to ratify it.
  - karmelapple 6y ago
    Ranked Choice Voting, which is now the law for all elections in the state of Maine except the Presidency, is a way to help ensure that the winning candidate has been chosen by at least 50% of voters, even if the winning candidate wasn’t the first choice for all voters. Adopting RCV seems to me like one of the best ways we can improve the health of the US’s democracy going forward. Any voters Massachusetts can vote this November to have RCV statewide, just like Maine, from local elections up to the US House and Senate elections. I’ve volunteered with the group [1] helping Massachusetts join Maine in leading the way. [1] https://voterchoice2020.org/ https://voterchoice2020.org/
    - caf 6y ago
      It has also been adopted for all municipal elections in New York City.
    - Beldin 6y ago
      My current view is that having districts undermines everything. Once politicians are elected due to a specific geographical region, 1. they are beholden to that region, 2. You get an all-or-nothing approach to elections. With respect to 1: the main problem is that such a system will put the interests of the country second to the interests of the district. But even if you think that is an acceptable trade off, there's 2: all-or-nothing. RCV is one way to partially mitigate this, by letting voters specify more choices. Of course, ideally you'd want proportional representation. A simple solution is to abolish districts and have one multi-seat election. All votes count, the N candidates with the most votes are elected. (Of course, if you prefer to maintain districts, you can achieve the same by increasing the number of electable seats per district.)
    - ScottBurson 6y ago
      RCV is an improvement on FPTP -- almost anything would be! -- but Approval Voting is even better. It is easier to implement (the ballot doesn't change at all, just the way it's counted), simpler for voters to understand (you just vote for every candidate you approve of), much less susceptible to strategic voting and not at all to strategic candidate selection, and therefore much less likely to return an anomalous result. http://www.electionscience.org http://www.electionscience.org
klenwell 6y ago
Every night is Watergate now. We don’t even have a vocabulary for the volume and magnitude of corruption. It’s like a Sherlock Holmes novel where the killer just murders people in front of Sherlock one after another, then he painstakingly examines the bodies for clues. https://twitter.com/JesseCharlesLee/status/968675463827722240 https://twitter.com/JesseCharlesLee/status/96867546382772224... I've also heard it compared to a Denial-of-Service attack on functional government or democracy or common decency. Whatever. Actually, this Metafilter comment from a couple years ago seems to sum up the present state of the union pretty well: Unfortunately, the 21st century is proving to be the era of asymmetry, where individual bad actors can wreak greater havoc than ever before and are making use of that ability. Previous eras had bad actors of course, but they were either constrained by limitations of unamplified individual action or had power so the violations were built into the system as an expected function. That was terrible in many cases, but much more predictable. Now we have both the bad systems and less predictability for having individuals with such disproportionate ability to inflict harm on a massive scale. The commensurate ability to do good has also changed, but it can't easily get past the asymmetrical advantage bad actors have. https://www.metafilter.com/176876/This-post-is-not-a-hoax#7528589 https://www.metafilter.com/176876/This-post-is-not-a-hoax#75...
- johnny22 6y ago
  reminds of of the quote attributed to Karl Rove “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality — judiciously, as you will — we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”
KorematsuFred 6y ago
I am an immigration activist (Indian-national immigration) and closely working with students/h1bs as well as following work of anti-immigrant people. It is very clear to me that current admin is acting out of malevolence. This is not about protecting American interests or even upholding law. This is about a careful strategy called "attrition through enforcement". Make life difficult of immigrants so they leave voluntarily over time without need for any drastic law, also since the impact of this strategy is felt over time (just like climate change) no big players feel the need to act against it. (E.g. Google might not even realize what is happening by the time it is very late). There is a reason why most immigration law, processes and regulation exists and not all of them are implemented by "open border" folks in Obama or Bush administration. But the current admin people are operating under that weird assumption. So they look at every immigration benefit as "exploit" and try to close it without understanding its broader impact. Their approach is "lets try and see". They either lose in court or some lobby manages to convince Trump. This is not the first battle this admin has lost in court and it wont be last. Even though I am pro-immigration, I understand that American people have the 100% right to regulate who comes in, but regulation implies application of law, which must follow due process, should be predictable and in general should honor contract. Otherwise there is simply no incentive to follow law for anyone. Current admin's "attrition via enforcement" has worked pretty well for students from India. As of 2020: Total Indian students in Canada : 172,000 (up from 76,000 in 2016) Indian students enrollment in USA : 64,000 (down from 86,000) [Note this is new students enrolling. Total students is probably 2.5x and 4x if you count students working on OPT]
wuxb 6y ago
Indeed. It was like "I'm going to make them an offer they can't accept."

Elementary school politics. This would be a hilarious sitcom if it weren't for all the thousands of people getting hurt by this dysfunctional joke of a government.

RobRivera 6y ago

A part of me believes this is more feature and less bug of the government. "Blame the disfunction, not the leadership thats elected every 2 years".

DaiPlusPlus 6y ago
How is this not a bug? A straightforward patch would be the introduction of FPTP and moving the executive role from the office of the head-of-state to a body controlled by congress.
- p1necone 6y ago
  FPTP tends to lead to the same heavily divided two major party politics you already have, it just avoids the possibility of winning with <50% of the popular vote. Something like MMP is probably a better system (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mixed-member_proportional_representation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mixed-member_proportional_repr...). Baby steps though.
  - dragonwriter 6y ago
    > FPTP tends to lead to the same heavily divided two major party politics you already have, it just avoids the possibility of winning with <50% of the popular vote. No, it doesn't. FPTP is a synonym for single-member plurality, which enables wins with less than 50% of the popular vote when there are more than two candidates. You may mean majority-runoff (which the US already uses for a fair number of elections) or instant runoff, instead of FPTP, both of which require a kind of majority, but are otherwise very close to FPTP in their incentives and effects.
    - p1necone 6y ago
      Oops yes I am mistaken about the non majority thing. It still leads to bi party politics though.
      - Beldin 6y ago
        Only if the election is per-seat. In the Netherlands, elections for the lower house (150 seats) are nationwide. The 150 candidates/parties with the highest number of votes get a seat. The party system makes it a bit more complex, but in the end, there's roughly proportional representation: a party with 10% of the popular vote occupies roughly 10% of the seats. No superwinning like in the UK (where 30% of the vote can get you more than 30% of the seats), no cut-off except you need at least 1/150th of the votes to get a seat.
        jacquesm 6y ago
        And, crucially: minority viewpoints actually tend to be accommodated as larger parties lobby smaller ones to support their agenda. Coalition government is a lot better than the see-saw you get otherwise with one party undoing what the previous one did.
  - Mikeb85 6y ago
    Lol, Canada has FPTP and regularly features majority governments that win with 35% of the vote.
- thephyber 6y ago
  I would argue the end-users (voters) mostly consider this a bug while the developers (majority party legislators at the state level) consider it a feature. Also, the founding fathers famously made it difficult for Congress to change anything, so dysfunction was definitely a feature.
  - dragonwriter 6y ago
    > I would argue the end-users (voters) mostly consider this a bug while the developers (majority party legislators at the state level) consider it a feature. Voters consider the paralysis a feature when it is presenting a hostile legislative majority or executive from realizing their agenda, and a bug when it is preventing a friendly one.
    - a1369209993 6y ago
      > Voters consider the paralysis a feature when it is presenting a hostile legislative majority or executive from realizing their agenda, and a bug when it is preventing a friendly one. Yes, that's what they said: paralysis is always a feature, because the legislative majority is always hostile to the people.
      - thephyber 6y ago
        I think your parent was describing the nuance between "voters" and "voters who are aligned with the legislative majority", which is fair.
  - 0x8BADF00D 6y ago
    Not so sure about that. I suppose the original intent was to have a healthy debate around major policy decisions. It's a check against wanton liberalism or conservatism. Congress seems eager to pass spending bills and take away our privacy. They move at light speed when doing that.
- dragonwriter 6y ago
  > A straightforward patch would be the introduction of FPTP The US uses FPTP for most elections, that's actually central to the problem. If you mean “a system approximating proportional repreaentation”, that's a valid fix, but problematic, both in terms of choosing the right one and the fact that doing so itself has ideological as well as functional impacts on outcomes, which means that the status quo faction which would ideologically be disadvantaged will be hard to sway no matter what the functional argument is. So you'd need unchallenged control by the opposing faction, which would have to be willing to surrender that control to a multiparty system which might be favorable ideologically, but not organizationally. And even that only is talking about the House. It's outright Constitutionally prohibited, even by Constitutional amendment, for the Senate.
  - jcranmer 6y ago
    > It's outright Constitutionally prohibited, even by Constitutional amendment, for the Senate. Not quite true. It can be changed with consent of the state, so it would require 100% of the states to ratify it.
- karmelapple 6y ago
  Ranked Choice Voting, which is now the law for all elections in the state of Maine except the Presidency, is a way to help ensure that the winning candidate has been chosen by at least 50% of voters, even if the winning candidate wasn’t the first choice for all voters. Adopting RCV seems to me like one of the best ways we can improve the health of the US’s democracy going forward. Any voters Massachusetts can vote this November to have RCV statewide, just like Maine, from local elections up to the US House and Senate elections. I’ve volunteered with the group [1] helping Massachusetts join Maine in leading the way. [1] https://voterchoice2020.org/ https://voterchoice2020.org/
  - caf 6y ago
    It has also been adopted for all municipal elections in New York City.
  - Beldin 6y ago
    My current view is that having districts undermines everything. Once politicians are elected due to a specific geographical region, 1. they are beholden to that region, 2. You get an all-or-nothing approach to elections. With respect to 1: the main problem is that such a system will put the interests of the country second to the interests of the district. But even if you think that is an acceptable trade off, there's 2: all-or-nothing. RCV is one way to partially mitigate this, by letting voters specify more choices. Of course, ideally you'd want proportional representation. A simple solution is to abolish districts and have one multi-seat election. All votes count, the N candidates with the most votes are elected. (Of course, if you prefer to maintain districts, you can achieve the same by increasing the number of electable seats per district.)
  - ScottBurson 6y ago
    RCV is an improvement on FPTP -- almost anything would be! -- but Approval Voting is even better. It is easier to implement (the ballot doesn't change at all, just the way it's counted), simpler for voters to understand (you just vote for every candidate you approve of), much less susceptible to strategic voting and not at all to strategic candidate selection, and therefore much less likely to return an anomalous result. http://www.electionscience.org http://www.electionscience.org

klenwell 6y ago

Every night is Watergate now. We don’t even have a vocabulary for the volume and magnitude of corruption. It’s like a Sherlock Holmes novel where the killer just murders people in front of Sherlock one after another, then he painstakingly examines the bodies for clues. https://twitter.com/JesseCharlesLee/status/968675463827722240 https://twitter.com/JesseCharlesLee/status/96867546382772224... I've also heard it compared to a Denial-of-Service attack on functional government or democracy or common decency. Whatever. Actually, this Metafilter comment from a couple years ago seems to sum up the present state of the union pretty well: Unfortunately, the 21st century is proving to be the era of asymmetry, where individual bad actors can wreak greater havoc than ever before and are making use of that ability. Previous eras had bad actors of course, but they were either constrained by limitations of unamplified individual action or had power so the violations were built into the system as an expected function. That was terrible in many cases, but much more predictable. Now we have both the bad systems and less predictability for having individuals with such disproportionate ability to inflict harm on a massive scale. The commensurate ability to do good has also changed, but it can't easily get past the asymmetrical advantage bad actors have. https://www.metafilter.com/176876/This-post-is-not-a-hoax#7528589 https://www.metafilter.com/176876/This-post-is-not-a-hoax#75...

johnny22 6y ago
reminds of of the quote attributed to Karl Rove “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality — judiciously, as you will — we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”

KorematsuFred 6y ago

I am an immigration activist (Indian-national immigration) and closely working with students/h1bs as well as following work of anti-immigrant people. It is very clear to me that current admin is acting out of malevolence. This is not about protecting American interests or even upholding law. This is about a careful strategy called "attrition through enforcement". Make life difficult of immigrants so they leave voluntarily over time without need for any drastic law, also since the impact of this strategy is felt over time (just like climate change) no big players feel the need to act against it. (E.g. Google might not even realize what is happening by the time it is very late). There is a reason why most immigration law, processes and regulation exists and not all of them are implemented by "open border" folks in Obama or Bush administration. But the current admin people are operating under that weird assumption. So they look at every immigration benefit as "exploit" and try to close it without understanding its broader impact. Their approach is "lets try and see". They either lose in court or some lobby manages to convince Trump. This is not the first battle this admin has lost in court and it wont be last. Even though I am pro-immigration, I understand that American people have the 100% right to regulate who comes in, but regulation implies application of law, which must follow due process, should be predictable and in general should honor contract. Otherwise there is simply no incentive to follow law for anyone. Current admin's "attrition via enforcement" has worked pretty well for students from India. As of 2020: Total Indian students in Canada : 172,000 (up from 76,000 in 2016) Indian students enrollment in USA : 64,000 (down from 86,000) [Note this is new students enrolling. Total students is probably 2.5x and 4x if you count students working on OPT]

wuxb 6y ago

Indeed. It was like "I'm going to make them an offer they can't accept."