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In the end, it doesn't really matter who inserted the language. All of the Republicans in the legislature are voting for it, so pick any one of them (without lo
by psychometry 5y ago
In the end, it doesn't really matter who inserted the language. All of the Republicans in the legislature are voting for it, so pick any one of them (without loss of generality) to serve as an example.
The way the accountability aspect is supposed to work is that voters are horrified and hold their elected representatives accountable by voting them out. As it turns out, though, most people are profoundly ignorant and have no idea who/what they're voting for and lack the intellectual curiosity to figure it out. These voters will just keep getting reamed by their ISPs and if the GOP tells them it's somehow Democrats' fault, they'll probably believe it.
- justin66 5y agoThanks to gerrymandering, most people can have their shit together and awful stuff will still happen.
- nine_k 5y agoRepresentative democracy works when you remember who you voted for, and track whether they work on fulfilling their promises because of which you voted for them. In the US, people mostly remember the president / vice-president names, because they are so widely publicized, some possibly remember the name of their Congress representatives, or can google them up in the rare case when they need to write to them about some issue. AFAICT very few people even remember who did they vote into the state legislature. This is very sad, and certainly disfunctional.
- WoahNoun 5y agoThis isn't true. Polling shows people dislike congress but like their congressional rep.
- binaryblitz 5y agoHow does that make what he said not true?
- jfengel 5y agoIt implies that they're sufficiently aware of their local representative to approve of them. They may not "remember who did they vote into the state legislature", but they're not totally unaware of them.
- Buttons840 5y agoI've thought of starting a social media website where people can upvote proposed legislation to draw attention to it, and people can indicate their own preference on legislation and track it. Then, come election time it could tell you something like "Mr Your Politician votes the way you would prefer 20% of the time" or such.
- exoque 5y agoIn Switzerland there's http://smartvote.ch http://smartvote.ch. It's not exactly what you're describing but close.
- jkestner 5y agoI like it! Ping me if you want help. Draw the contrast between the popular policies and the reps that only pay lip service to them. Open API that might be a good place to start: https://openstates.org/tx/bills/?query=&session=87&classification=&sponsor= https://openstates.org/tx/bills/?query=&session=87&classific...
- gotostatement 5y agothe problem with this is that I think few people care enough to enter their preferences, let alone to come back and check. not to mention that most people don't really expect politicians to follow through on their promises, and anyone who does will probably figure out how they want to vote via other methods. the only way I see this idea actually becoming useful is if it starts being displayed somewhere people already go, like in a google results page
- Buttons840 5y agoWe can't fix people not caring. It might help make it a little easier to care and keep track. Especially if there's some good flamewars happening on the site (half joking about the flamewars). Seriously, if you could make it a decent place for concrete discussion of the laws people would probably visit just to get in on the discussions, just like Reddit.
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- tetrahedr0n 5y agoPromise resolution tracking for political choices could be a useful tool. With each promise tracked you could produce a percent which could be displayed with the candidates picture and a brief synopsis of their "score". The contact information and a tool to initiate communication would all be available (even if the communication is just email), and you could even have the politicians join so that they could have like an intern respond to messages or something. This has probably been done, right?
- andrey_utkin 5y agoThere is one in Ukraine, see links below. Interested to know about such ones for western countries. https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=uk&tl=en&u=https://www.slovoidilo.ua/ https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=uk&tl=en&u=https:/... https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=uk&tl=en&u=https://uk.wikipedia.org/wiki/%25D0%25A1%25D0%25BB%25D0%25BE%25D0%25B2%25D0%25BE_%25D1%2596_%25D0%2594%25D1%2596%25D0%25BB%25D0%25BE https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=uk&tl=en&u=https:/...
- smcg 5y agoit's easy to game and those sorts of stats mean nothing to most people.
- sigstoat 5y agoif it became effective enough that any politicians even heard of it, let alone started trying to game it, that would be great news.
- munificent 5y agoProbably worth pointing out that the great hollowing out of journalism is a likely causal factor here. The chain of events went something like: 1. Web comes out and makes it trivial to distribute information for nearly free. 2. Users find enough "information" (in quotes because I mean "data that satisfies their instinctual desire to feel in the know" regardless of its actual value) on the web for free that they don't want to pay for their local newspaper anymore. 3. Dying paper subscriptions forces newspapers to go online. Even so and even with copious ads, their profit margins collapse. 4. The only news agencies that survive are national news because they can aggregate their journalism costs over a larger number of readers. 5. Bereft of money, local news agencies get bought up by conglomerations that produce "local" news which is a slurry of national stuff, press releases, and relatively low quality local reporting. 6. People stop reading the local stuff entirely since it's frankly just not good any more. 7. Now everyone is only clued in to national politics since national news sources rarely write about state or city politics.
- tomrod 5y agoHave you ever read the local rags from two, three decades back? Think Buzzfeed with no spellcheck. You had colorful characters, but I wouldn't argue the informational content is all that more hollow today than in that time period.
- Analemma_ 5y agoThere have been actual studies done showing a clear correlation between the decline of local news and an increase in municipal- and county-level corruption, so it's hard to argue they were entirely useless.
- munificent 5y agoYes, I have. :) Sure the writing quality wasn't always great, but it was a functioning conduit of information about what local politicians were up to. And, more importantly it wasn't drowned about by other information sources so a greater fraction of people actually consumed it and were clued in to what was happening in their city and state.
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- fomine3 5y agoI wonder is there any country that's not true.
- athenot 5y ago> The way the accountability aspect is supposed to work is that voters are horrified and hold their elected representatives accountable by voting them out. As it turns out, though, most people are profoundly ignorant and have no idea who/what they're voting for and lack the intellectual curiosity to figure it out. It's unfortunately more than ignorance. These budget bills have to be balanced so they include hundreds of items in them. It's a take-it-or-leave-it proposition. With that large amount of provisions, it's easy to slide in things that only peripherally pertain to budget. I wish this were broken up in such a way that any changes to how things work and to laws need to be done BEFORE if required by the budget, such that the budget vote stops being this monstrosity.
- wpietri 5y ago> profoundly ignorant and have no idea who/what they're voting for and lack the intellectual curiosity to figure it out. This strikes me as unkind. It's true of some, surely. But people are just busy. The whole theory of representative democracy is that direct democracy is impractical, so we delegate most of the work to people who focus on governing. You also ignore the extent to which the average voter is energetically manipulated and actively discouraged from participation. In the 2020 election cycle alone, There was $14.4 billion in direct spending alone. That's ~$90 per voter. If we want more people to engage, wishing for better humans won't get us anywhere. We should do just like we do for tech products: figure out how to make useful behaviors easier.
- specialist 5y agoAgreed. I'm obsessed about policy and legislation. Books, a lot of participation, lobbying, comparing notes with others. I feel like I barely understand what's going on.
- mjparrott 5y agoA bit cynical take here? What if people vote for GOP for other reasons and because there is a two party system they have to weight this issue amongst others.
- psychometry 5y agoAre you referring to the billionaires who vote Republican because they believe it benefits their personal financial situation and they don't care about anyone else's? Or is there some other type of person who actually benefits under the sorts of policies like this that the GOP has been pushing for the last 50 years?
- krastanov 5y agoWhile I share your strong negative feelings, we need to be a bit more honest. There are such people as one issue voters that are perfectly aware of how the GOP will vote on other issues and do not like it (or even hate, e.g., Trump), but are abortion or 2nd ammendement absolutists.
- jacob2484 5y agoFor many, the Democratic party left me and swung to the left. I'm all for policies which are low taxes & limited government (remember under Trump & before corona, we had record unemployment even among minorities). Hence my move to a red, growing state (Texas). It's a vote between economic growth and personal freedom over culture/identity politics.
- psychometry 5y agoUnfortunately you misunderstand not just the indicators of a healthy economy (hint: look at cost of living and changes in wealth distribution and not just employment figures) but also the reasons for why such indicators change over time. On economic issues, people ascribe far too much blame or thanks to whoever happens to be president at the time. Whatever positive indicators you think pointed to a healthy economy in 2017 or whenever probably have nothing to do with the regime at the time; that was just the continuation of a decade of post-recession growth. Anyway, where are you going to move to next now that Texas is slowly turning purple?
- splithalf 5y agoHalf America hands it’s brain to one party, the other half to the other party. Many problems stem from this.
- psychometry 5y agoThat's overly reductionist considering one of those halves is generally making the rational choice.
- frockington1 5y agoI must have missed the rational choice on the ballot last year. All I saw was dementia man vs orange lunatic
- greyhair 5y agoChoosing between a bumbling, but harmless old codger and a raging lunatic with a knife? Not that hard.
- whydoibother 5y agoI think you'll find both sides are aligned on about 60 or 70 percent of things. This is due mostly to them all belonging to the same class and seeking to advance class goals. Pick a few wedge issues for either side and voila: you have a 'representative' democracy.
- xadhominemx 5y agoThat’s because the vast majority of things have a clear correct answer. Even in multiparty nations, many legislative acts passed with the overwhelming majority of mps
- whydoibother 5y ago>That’s because the vast majority of things have a clear correct answer. No, they don't. What is correct for rich western liberals often means further poverty, suffering, and death for those who don't belong to that class. The sheer arrogance to even say that is boggling to me.
- throwaway0a5e 5y agoPlaying "teams" with zero regard for individual legislators contributions is a large part of how we got here.
- psychometry 5y agoYou don't think it's fair to consider the Ohio GOP representatives who unanimously voted for this a "team"? Tell me how considering them as individuals is even remotely illuminating.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- Frost1x 5y agoThe lack of accountability isn't helped by the fact that terms can be 1, 2, 4, 6 years and it's incredibly difficult to remove someone once they've been elected. Many voters often have short-term memories and are so pre-occupied with life trying to stay afloat they can't keep track of politicians to hold them accountable during th next election. They end up forgetting the issues they had after the past election, eat up empty promises yet again, and re-elect the same people or new faces and names with the same platform of lies and lack of representation of their constituents, over-and-over again. Said politician is then free to step on the backs of their voters for some period before the next campaign for election starts without fear of being removed from office.
- Ericson2314 5y agoThis country is fucked without proportional representation. There's no accountability without alternatives, and this prohibition isn't going to make Ohio Republicans vote Democrat. Only PR can make enough shades of alternatives to break out of local maxima.
- smt88 5y agoProportional representation was a non-starter for rural states when the country was founded, and it's going to be one now. There's no deal you can make with rural states where they give up their stranglehold on the Senate and Electoral College and get... nothing... in return. It sucks, but that's the way it is.
- praptak 5y agoThis one is manageable. You could do proportional voting within each state without changing the balance between states. Say 5 instead of 2 senators from each state and proportional voting within each state. I'm not saying this doesn't have other problems, it's just an example that the rural states problem is not a hard blocker for proportional voting.
- threatofrain 5y agoYes it is a hard blocker. You haven't described any negotiation so far as to why rural states would like to surrender power without corresponding wins.
- Ericson2314 5y ago5 senators proportionally represented or 2x-3x representatives proportionally represented does not weaken small state power at all. It simply ensures more views within each state get heard. PR != no districting.
- threatofrain 5y ago
- rajin444 5y agoCan you blame them? Everyone on the left has been calling them stupid and ignorant for decades. How are you supposed to trust those same people? Both sides are guilty of this. We can discuss a myriad of ways to fix our political system, but the root issue is a low trust and highly divided society. No system will fix that.
- JKCalhoun 5y agoEveryone on the left.....
- rajin444 5y agoYou’re right! I’m sorry - I made the same mistake I’m criticizing for. I know it’s not everyone. Reading this thread is hard - even if one side is objectively right, it doesn’t matter. Compromise is the only way forward. I don’t like considering the alternatives.
- greyhair 5y agoI am all about compromise the same way Mitch McConnell is all about compromise. As long as you come over 90% of the way to my point of view, I'll give 10%.
- cujo 5y ago> The way the accountability aspect is supposed to work is that voters are horrified and hold their elected representatives accountable by voting them out. It's always too late by this point. It's a flaw. The elected official get's to screw over their constituents for the duration of their term..
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- tomrod 5y agoThat is one group. There is another that, while they may be informed of the ill their particular group supports, believes the group across the partisan chasm to be literal evil incarnate. Let's get rid of first-past-the-post already.
- noobermin 5y agoAs someone from Ohio, it's partly due to partisan voting but mostly due to gerrymandering that Republicans control the state.
- fallingknife 5y agoTrump won the state by 8 points in 2020. It's mostly due to voting, and partly to gerrymandering.
- noobermin 5y agoAre you from Ohio? Trump isn't imposing a ban on municipal broadband, state lawmakers are which are in power due to gerrymandering.
- WalterBright 5y agoWe don't have municipal broadband in Washington State, either, despite the DNC holding a monopoly in the State, County, and City level around here. And by monopoly, at the city and county level in the Seattle area, 100% of the elected are Democrats. At the state level, they hold the governorship and both houses. Somehow, it certainly is the Democrats' fault.
- anonymousab 5y agoWashington state law has recently been changed (rather, is in the process of changing) to explicitly allow municipal broadband. In the case of the Senate bill, we see all but one Republican opposing it, and all but 3 Democrats supporting it.
- psychometry 5y agoDid the Democrats make it illegal for your city to offer it, though? I think not.
- WalterBright 5y agoThere are many ways to make it illegal. A popular one is to make it so difficult for a competitor, that they just give up. I recall a story a while back of one giving up because the existing ISP successfully prevented them from running wires. Sorry, don't have a reference for that, as I don't recall specific details. But the point remains. Their lack of any opposition at all at the county and city level means they can, and do, whatever they want. They can also count on a judiciary that approves the illegal laws they pass (such as a city income tax. The judge's dubious rationale was the employer was paying it, not the employee, although both are at the expense of the employee). A state income tax is unconstitutional in Washington, so the city just required the employer to pay it. Sadly, the Democrats simultaneously argue that capital gains should be taxed as ordinary income, and yet passed a state capital gains tax arguing the capital gains are not income. So, yeah, blaming the GOP in Washington State isn't going to work.
- J5892 5y agoDemocrats like money, too. And ISPs have a lot of it.
- AnimalMuppet 5y ago> In the end, it doesn't really matter who inserted the language. All of the Republicans in the legislature are voting for it... Are they? From the article: > Last week's vote to restrict municipal broadband "was along party lines, with 25 GOP State Senators voting in favor of the Senate budget bill and the chamber's eight Democrats voting against it." (The quote was from the Institute for Local Self Reliance (ILSR)). But what the quote says was that the Republicans voted for the bill, and the Democrats voted against the bill. They aren't (at least on the evidence presented) voting for or against the broadband limitations, but for or against the budget as a whole. Are the broadband limits why the Democrats are voting against? From the evidence given, we can't tell. What we need are the voting records on the amendment that added this stupid ban to the budget. That's probably down in a committee somewhere, but it might be on the state Senate floor. What we need is the breakdown on that vote, not on the vote on the overall budget. But Ars is taking evidence of votes on the budget as a whole, and trying to make them say that Republicans are against municipal broadband. They may in fact be against it, but Ars needs to show that, not just claim it on somewhat-tangentially-related evidence. As it is, one could reasonably wonder if Ars is just trying to spin an anti-Republican narrative.
- renewiltord 5y agoSimone Biles would be hard pressed to match these gymnastics. And if you think I’m saying that because of partisan reasons, read my history: I am well downvoted in defence of banning municipal broadband in my previous comment. In any meaningful sense, they’re voting to ban muni broadband.
- shkkmo 5y ago> But Ars is taking evidence of votes on the budget as a whole, and trying to make them say that Republicans are against municipal broadband. If you voted for a bill containing a specific provision, it is entirely reasonable to supose that you support that provision, especially when you don't make a public protestation against the inclusion of that provision. The counter claim is not as reasonable. Just because you vote against a bill containing a provision, that doesn't mean it is reasonable to supoose you oppose that provision (at leat without additional context.) > What we need are the voting records on the amendment that added this stupid ban to the budget. That would might give us additional information on who takes a strong stance against municipal broadband (or possibly who got their palms greased.)
- Sebb767 5y ago> As it turns out, though, most people are profoundly ignorant and have no idea who/what they're voting for and lack the intellectual curiosity to figure it out. Next to the good points by the sister comments, there is usually the problem that you won't find somebody who fits you 100%. Are you going to vote someone who, for example, proposes widespread surveillance, just to get someone out who doesn't deny a bill that bans municipal broadband? As Southpark eloquently put it, sometimes you have to decide between a douche and a turd [0]. No ignorance needed (except, maybe, to stay sane). [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Douche_and_Turd https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Douche_and_Turd
- NaturalPhallacy 5y ago>In the end, it doesn't really matter who inserted the language. All of the Republicans in the legislature are voting for it, so pick any one of them (without loss of generality) to serve as an example. It's not impossible that one of the Democrats did it, so they could pretend to oppose it. Controlled opposition isn't a new thing. If one of the Republicans did it, can they have the numbers to pass it, why wouldn't one of them take credit for it?