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tagesschau posted:When a leftist party (Die Linke) gets seats, it also doesn't get invited. A significant proportion of this thread would find that unpalatable. The combined size of Die Linke and the Alternative für Deutschland nearly made government formation impossible after the most recent election. I don't really want Tanya Granic Allen to be kingmaker. The solution to this is not to manipulate the electoral system of your country so that certain people don't get their views heard, it's to create a better society so that these views aren't so common. It's not like AfD have been getting that share of the vote every election and playing kingmaker every time, they went from 0 seats to 94 in one election because of the particular circumstances of German politics in 2017 nearly tripling their vote share. If you want to keep extreme parties like AfD from being in coalitions, don't do it by disenfranchising their voters, do it by addressing the concerns of the people willing to consider shifting their votes to parties like AfD before they get so fed up with the major parties that they switch to radical options. For example, a ton of voter discontent in the developed world is emerging out of decades of worsening inequality driven by race-to-the-bottom globalization, neoliberalism, and regulatory capture by the wealthy. So maybe we should be actually addressing these problems instead of ducking them every four years and driving people away from TINA centrist parties towards radicals who tell them that actually something can be done about these problems. If the major parties in developed countries were actually trying to address the problems they've created with policies like undoing austerity, raising taxes on the wealthy, restoring cuts to the welfare state, and clawing back power from massive corporations, there would likely be a lot less discontent in these countries and many fewer people would be interested in voting for parties like AfD that promise to do those things but also scapegoat immigrants for the social problems emerging out of decades of inequality and atomization. But it's way easier to just disenfranchise unhappy people because we don't like the side effects of their increasing marginalization over the past half century. Also lmao at this entire debate when the model for our parliamentary FPTP system is Britain, a country that just Brexited (because the EU and immigrants have been scapegoated as the cause of the problems I was just talking about) and has a government currently propped up by a tiny radical socon Northern Irish party. But please tell us more about how the Westminster model prevents radical election results and small extremist parties from influencing politics.
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Jun 5, 2018 13:01
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Maybe if we don't want people to vote for full-on fascist pieces of poo poo, we should try addressing their concerns by just being moderately racist. Bing bong bing, so simple! I mean, I agree that FPTP isn't really a fix to this issue, as the UK has very aptly demonstrated, but let's not pretend the idea of AfD/National Rally style fascist assholes getting power isn't a significant risk. These parties -- or Donald Trump -- don't win power because of "marginalization," they win power because a bunch of scared, xenophobic whites see their privilege evaporating and are too fragile to handle it. If they really appealed to the marginalized, they would have the support of the most marginalized people -- the people who have surely been hosed over the worst by Western imperialism, instead of using them as scapegoats.
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Jun 5, 2018 13:06
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PT6A posted:Maybe if we don't want people to vote for full-on fascist pieces of poo poo, we should try addressing their concerns by just being moderately racist. I've explained this before, but marginalization and privilege isn't a one-way street. People cling to whatever privilege they have, but privilege isn't purely racial or purely economic or purely gender-based, it's an intersectional phenomenon that cuts across all these lines. Take away someone's economic power and they'll cling to their racial or gender or national or geographic identity because they have to cling to something. Spend 20 years letting the right-wing media tell people that all their problems are because of the EU, or because of illegal immigrants, and they'll blame their economic problems on these other phenomena. When people get status anxiety because of high levels of inequality, for the most part they don't punch up to improve their position, they punch down to maintain their position, and they'll punch down on whatever lines they have open to them, whether it's economic, racial, national, you name it. It's not like there's one easy solution to any of these problems, but let's not pretend that AfD or any other radical right (or left) party getting high vote shares is inevitable. It's a completely comprehensible result of 40 years of neoliberalism eroding the protections people used to rely on, while simultaneously changes in the way the world is structured give us new scapegoats to blame, whether it's migrants or segments of the population like LGBT people who are finally getting some increased levels of rights. Do you seriously think that the entire 13ish% of the German electorate that voted AfD in the last election were just closeted Nazis this whole time, waiting for their moment to vote Nazis into power based on their latent racism? Or do you think just maybe there might be some underlying factors that are driving people away from mainstream parties and towards parties they would previously not have considered voting for? vyelkin fucked around with this message at 13:18 on Jun 5, 2018 |
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Jun 5, 2018 13:16
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vyelkin posted:Do you seriously think that the entire 13ish% of the German electorate that voted AfD in the last election were just closeted Nazis this whole time, waiting for their moment to vote Nazis into power based on their latent racism? Yes, the very great majority of them. I mean, otherwise they probably would've voted for socialists instead of fascists in this circumstance, instead of voting for Nazis. If it walks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, I'm going to go with "it's a loving duck" instead of the possible "it really wants to imitate a duck because it's disappointed with its present circumstances."
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Jun 5, 2018 13:20
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If 13% of the electorate are willing to vote for open fascists then I'd much rather they have an open, obvious party to go to, rather than being an invisible but influential bloc in a supposedly more "sensible" party. Hiding your head in the sand and pretending those voters don't exist is only going to make stuff worse. If there was a "we love Nigel Farage" party in Ontario then maybe Ford and his fans would be in that party. As it stands that group has an outsized influence on a party that controls/gets votes from ~40% of the electorate, so now the leader of WLNF gets to be the leader of the "moderate", "respectable" party, and his cronies get to set legislature. Anti-PR arguments always seem nakedly undemocratic to me, and it's not surprising centrists are some of the most avid opponents to it. With FPTP they get to pretend that everything's fine right up until woops President Trump and Premier Ford.
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Jun 5, 2018 13:47
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The Monarch posted:If 13% of the electorate are willing to vote for open fascists then I'd much rather they have an open, obvious party to go to, rather than being an invisible but influential bloc in a supposedly more "sensible" party. Hiding your head in the sand and pretending those voters don't exist is only going to make stuff worse. If there was a "we love Nigel Farage" party in Ontario then maybe Ford and his fans would be in that party. As it stands that group has an outsized influence on a party that controls/gets votes from ~40% of the electorate, so now the leader of WLNF gets to be the leader of the "moderate", "respectable" party, and his cronies get to set legislature. I can agree with that, I'm mainly objecting to the rather disgusting idea that fascism is the fault of anyone but the fascists or their supporters, as if upset white people suddenly lose agency.
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Jun 5, 2018 13:51
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PT6A posted:Yes, the very great majority of them. What's generally more common than being motivated by the racism is just not caring about the racism. Everybody has their own reasons for casting whatever vote they cast, but we tend to reduce voters to broad stereotyped motives. "People voted for Trump/Brexit because they're racist", etc. And for some people that's definitely true, but it isn't a sufficient explanation for the actual millions, and I would argue a more full explanation has to take into account the people who just don't give a poo poo about racism because it doesn't affect them. It's not the selling point for the candidate, but it also isn't a dealbreaker, which is what confuses those of us who are anti-racist enough that overt racism actually is a dealbreaker. If you vote for Trump because he promised to bring coal jobs back to West Virginia, or because he promised to appoint an anti-LGBT or anti-abortion Supreme Court candidate, or because he promised to cut taxes on big businesses and wealthy people, all those different votes have been interpreted as votes decided by racism when really what they're communicating is that the voter simply doesn't care about racism--the racist parts of the campaign and of his rhetoric didn't turn them off the way they did a lot of other people. Note that this does not mean there weren't people motivated by the racism, whether building a wall or ending immigration or whatever, because there absolutely were, but that isn't a sufficient explanation. Focusing on a narrative like "all Donald Trump voters are racist otherwise they would have voted against Donald Trump" is completely unhelpful. You can do the same thing for Brexit: if you vote against the EU because you believe the narrative the right-wing media has fed you for decades that the EU is a meddlesome entity telling you what shape your bananas can be, or because you believed the lies about funding the NHS with Britain's EU contributions, and you don't care enough about racism to be turned off by the racism of the Leave campaign, that vote has been interpreted as a vote inspired by racism because that's the dominant interpretation of Brexit voters, but it's too simplistic to actually capture what happened. And, again, yes, there were absolutely Brexit voters motivated primarily by racism, I'm not trying to deny or whitewash that, but it's not enough to explain 100% of what happened. Incidentally, this was also what happened when the actual Nazis came to power. The Great Depression and successive rounds of austerity eroded support for the centrist parties completely, and over half of German voters flocked to the only two parties that promised to end austerity, the Communists and the Nazis. The people in power were conservative reactionaries, so of course they turned to the Nazis as their new partners rather than the Communists, and the rest is history. But the Nazis made no effort to hide their anti-Semitism, so why weren't people turned off by it? Is it because they were all, deep down, just as anti-Semitic as the Nazis? No, it's because they just didn't care. The other things the Nazis promised to them, like ending austerity and restoring the spirit of national greatness Germany lost in WWI were far more important to them. Certainly there were some Nazi voters who were motivated primarily by anti-Semitism, but for most it was just something they didn't give a poo poo about, either as a motivating factor or as a dealbreaker. This can also be a helpful paradigm to understand other electoral contexts where you have a hard time understanding people's motivations for supporting someone who seems completely odious to you. Over 50% of Albertans aren't going to vote for Jason "out LGBT teens to their parents" Kenney because they hate gay people, though some of them certainly will. They'll vote because of some other reason combined with the fact that they just don't care enough about gay people to change their vote based on that bad policy. PT6A posted:I can agree with that, I'm mainly objecting to the rather disgusting idea that fascism is the fault of anyone but the fascists or their supporters, as if upset white people suddenly lose agency. White people don't lose agency, they express agency based on more factors than just whiteness, and fascists have policies other than "white is right" otherwise they wouldn't win. There's a reason it's President Donald Trump and not President Richard Spencer. Whiteness tends to be a determining factor for not caring about racism, but not caring about racism only gets you halfway to actually casting a vote for the racist. vyelkin fucked around with this message at 13:58 on Jun 5, 2018 |
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Jun 5, 2018 13:55
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Ignoring the many reasons why people turn towards and make themselves open to the ideals of fascist organizations, or racist ones, or harmful cults, isolating religious sects or any other harmful group that preys upon people who are distressed in one way or another as merely "stupid white people"  is just handing them more power to do more harm.Kudos, PT6A, you tremendous piece of poo poo.
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Jun 5, 2018 14:00
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Won’t somebody please think of the white men??? 
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Jun 5, 2018 14:16
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PT6A posted:Won’t somebody please think of the white men??? If you want to understand why people vote for right-wing extremists, you have to think of the white men.
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Jun 5, 2018 14:17
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If you support racist policies, or racist parties, you don't get to bitch when people call you a racist, even if racism was not the primary factor motivating you to do so. If you "don't care about racism" enough to actually vote for a fascist, then you are, in fact, a giant racist.vyelkin posted:If you want to understand why people vote for right-wing extremists, you have to think of the white men. Why are they supporting fascists instead of socialists? Answer: because they're racist, and they don't want a society based on social equality. You can't remove that simple truth from the equation.
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Jun 5, 2018 14:21
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Rob Ford's widow is suing Doug.quote:Rob Ford's widow has launched a multimillion-dollar lawsuit against brothers-in-law Doug and Randy Ford and their family businesses claiming she and her children were bilked out of millions of dollars.
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Jun 5, 2018 14:34
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PT6A posted:Why are they supporting fascists instead of socialists? Answer: because they're racist, and they don't want a society based on social equality. You can't remove that simple truth from the equation. What do you do every day to move us towards a society based on social equality? How bad do you want it?
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Jun 5, 2018 14:36
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PT6A posted:Why are they supporting fascists instead of socialists? Answer: because they're racist, and they don't want a society based on social equality. You can't remove that simple truth from the equation. Because their only source of information tells them that those socialists will take their job away. Should we remind you that some people are working with very bad and very little information when it comes to politics, and that we're the weird ones that actually pay attention to this poo poo?
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Jun 5, 2018 14:43
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Hungary has proportional representation, although it doesn't seem to work considering that the fascist coalition got a little under 50% of the vote and over 2/3 of the seats. Maybe the lesson here is that trying to rig your electoral system in favour of "harmless centrists" isnt a long term solution to preventing "extremism", however you care to define it?
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Jun 5, 2018 14:43
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Actually I think the lesson is bash the fash.
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Jun 5, 2018 14:45
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PT6A posted:I can agree with that, I'm mainly objecting to the rather disgusting idea that fascism is the fault of anyone but the fascists or their supporters, as if upset white people suddenly lose agency. You can keep blaming fascists for being fascists and nobody is going to tell you to stop because gently caress em, they're fascists, but it's not a coincidence that extremist and xenophobic movements catch on much faster in some social and economic contexts than others.
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Jun 5, 2018 14:51
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I'd say the "harmless centrists" seem to be getting more and more right wing with each year. Wealth inequality, immiseration and a decline in living standards is leading people to radical parties, the standard liberal response is to accuse everyone of being irredeemable racists so they don't have to talk about it. Keeping the spotlight on the culture war stuff means they can keep jerking off their donors behind the scenes, it's the reason the Democrats in the states main priority for a while seemed to be the DACA stuff and while people were focused on that, half of them quietly voted to repeal most of the 2008 regulations on the financial sector that they were paid off to do.
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Jun 5, 2018 14:55
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NZAmoeba posted:Because their only source of information tells them that those socialists will take their job away. 100x this. As soon as I step out of the bubble of this thread the vast majority of people I talk to don’t really know much about politics. These are the people who won’t vote NDP because they heard from a friend of a friend that the Rae government was a disaster. That’s as far as their information goes. They don’t have time to ask why. Nobody has the time or the willpower to do the critical thinking and research we do when it comes to politics. Socially this discussion makes a lot of people’s eyes glaze over. Or they get emotional knee jerk reactions and shoot arguments from the hip at you based on the brand the politicians you’re debating have built vs the actual effects of their policies. Most people see ford and assume he’s a successful business man without really investigating that he really isn’t. We’re gonna look back on Wynne and wonder wtf was the reason we even elected Ford when he’s done with this province.
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Jun 5, 2018 14:57
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https://twitter.com/ConsumerSOS/status/1003766665035776000 This is the spiciest election
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Jun 5, 2018 14:59
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Postess with the Mostest posted:https://twitter.com/ConsumerSOS/status/1003766665035776000 These people realize that Aird & Berlis is a real Bay Street firm with like 150 lawyers, right?
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Jun 5, 2018 15:07
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tagesschau posted:When a leftist party (Die Linke) gets seats, it also doesn't get invited. A significant proportion of this thread would find that unpalatable. The combined size of Die Linke and the Alternative für Deutschland nearly made government formation impossible after the most recent election. I don't really want Tanya Granic Allen to be kingmaker. The combined size of Die Linke and the AfD is 163 seats and a majority in the Bundestag is 355 seats. Neither were close to kingmakers in this scenario. PT6A posted:Actually I think the lesson is bash the fash. This is great to say, but how do you propose actually shrinking the number of people that vote for far-right, fascist parties?
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Jun 5, 2018 15:08
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In Australia the senate is elected by PR at the federal level, and also in (most?) states where they have a second house. When I left, the Shooters and Fishers party, with like three seats, held the balance of power in NSW.
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Jun 5, 2018 15:12
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Postess with the Mostest posted:https://twitter.com/ConsumerSOS/status/1003766665035776000 When you very definitely know how to smile.
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Jun 5, 2018 15:26
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infernal machines posted:When you very definitely know how to smile. lol
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Jun 5, 2018 15:28
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It’s Trump all over again. Ford seems to be bulletproof against all the scandals. And on track to be premier. Everyone’s calling it.
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Jun 5, 2018 15:41
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Kraftwerk posted:It’s Trump all over again. Posting the same uninformed opinion every day to own the libs
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Jun 5, 2018 15:52
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People who vote for these populists are lovely people, and economics are a minor indicator of shittiness and likely a cover for the real reasons. Both the Brexit and 2016 vote provide great examples. For Brexit, the major common reason to vote Leave was immigration control. And it turns out that the Leave voters were driven by values, not economics. Since the decisions are being made based on values, facts don't have to line up for them to be supported. Looking at the rise of Donald Trump, multiple studies have pointed out that status threats, personal values, and straight up racism and sexim, were the main drivers for voting. Certainly not economics. Even scarier is the fact that for those racists, they would abandon their democratic values if they perceived non-whites were benefiting from it. In general, people who vote for populists are voting based on their values and their desire to maintain those values as the dominant social standard by punishing those they deem as Others. I'm not convinced that economics is such a major driver that fixing that problem would prevent the rise of the values voter and the continued growth of populist politics. Just that fact that they view the civil rights gains of LGBT and people of colour as threatening to their status is enough to drive them towards embracing lovely candidates. In general, if you vote for a lovely candidate, you are probably a lovely person.
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Jun 5, 2018 16:07
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John Lorinc over at Spacing has some analysis of the campaign and likely outcomes
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Jun 5, 2018 16:19
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Tertiary Stresses posted:People who vote for these populists are lovely people, and economics are a minor indicator of shittiness and likely a cover for the real reasons. Both the Brexit and 2016 vote provide great examples. A very good post! Further, if you look at the groups which are most heavily marginalized in society, they are the ones most likely to be scapegoated by the right-wing populists in question, so to say it's marginalization and loss of status that's primarily driving people to adopt lovely political preferences is nonsense. If Donald Trump spoke to the needs and legitimate problems of the poor and the marginalized, he'd have had much more support amongst people of colour, as well as higher support among poor white people (who were less likely to vote for him than white people in general, if I recall -- it was the white middle class that broke hard for Trump as much as anyone).
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Jun 5, 2018 16:27
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Zeeman posted:These people realize that Aird & Berlis is a real Bay Street firm with like 150 lawyers, right?
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Jun 5, 2018 16:37
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DariusLikewise posted:The combined size of Die Linke and the AfD is 163 seats and a majority in the Bundestag is 355 seats. Neither were close to kingmakers in this scenario. This is a very roundabout way of revealing that you've read the infobox on Wikipedia and nothing else. There's a reason it took more than five months to form the government. You act like 163 seats is a small number, but that's nearly a quarter of the house, and more than were won by any party not headed by Angela Merkel. Paths to a coalition that represents a majority of the house disappear very quickly in that scenario. If an election were held today, the largest two parties (CDU/CSU and SPD, who form the current grand coalition) might actually fall short of a majority and require the help of a third; Die Linke and the AfD would gain seats.
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Jun 5, 2018 17:09
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Tertiary Stresses posted:People who vote for these populists are lovely people, and economics are a minor indicator of shittiness and likely a cover for the real reasons. Both the Brexit and 2016 vote provide great examples. You're right, but the point is that higher levels of inequality leads to higher status anxiety. And I don't just mean economic inequality. That tends to be what we study, because it's easiest to measure, but inequality manifests along every line you can think of: economic (both income and wealth), gender, sexual orientation, race, nationality, geography, etc., etc. To grossly simplify, as inequality worsens, the different rungs on the social status ladder get farther apart, and we become more anxious about where we stand relative to others. Of course, that status ladder isn't solely determined by economics, but economic conditions exacerbate other forms of status. Here's a passage from a recent article that I think illustrates this fairly well: Kyung Joon Han, "Income inequality and voting for radical right-wing parties", Electoral Studies 42 (June 2016): 54-64 posted:The social identity hypothesis provides a theoretical explanation for why traditional left-wing party voters have turned to RRPs [Radical Right Parties]. Roemer (2001) and other scholars in the post-materialist tradition argue that as the salience of non-economic, sociocultural issues rise, the poor move from left-wing parties to other parties that mobilize on these issues. The cultural threat hypothesis argues that higher levels of immigration increase the salience of sociocultural issues, help the poor recognize these issues, and thus drive the poor to switch their support to RRPs. The social identity hypothesis presents another micro-level theory for why individuals in the lower socioeconomic class switch their focus from socioeconomic issues (e.g. taxes) to sociocultural issues (e.g. nationalism and immigration).25 At low levels of income inequality, the poor identify with their peers and emphasize their socioeconomic background in political behavior. However, as income inequality rises, they feel less comfortable self-identifying with the poor and would prefer self-identifying with a cross-class sociocultural identity and increasingly shift their attention to their sociocultural traits, such as nationalism. In my opinion, everything you said in your post is pretty accurate, but you're pointing at symptoms rather than the underlying cause. We live in a grossly unequal society divided along numerous lines, and that makes people anxious about their status. For straight white men, especially, seeing others climbing the status ladder is particularly threatening because all of those categories have granted unearned privilege in the past, and losing that privilege means a relative loss of social status, which is made more valuable by the economic problems of our unequal society. The easiest way to preserve this status is to punch down by keeping down those who are currently asking to rise up to that level, whether by fighting gay equality, preserving sexist norms in workplaces, discriminating against people of colour, etc., rather than the much more difficult fight of trying to raise your own level relative to those above you. Wilkinson and Pickett, The Spirit Level, p. 207 posted:Maximizing status depends on being seen as superior. This is fertile psychological ground for the development and expression of forms of downward prejudice, discrimination and snobbishness intended to express superiority. And the more we feel devalued by those above us and the fewer status resources we have to fall back on, the greater will be the desire to regain some sense of self-worth by asserting superiority over any more vulnerable groups. Also, a lot of the racism and sexism and desire for immigration control and so on, I would argue, is driven by a scapegoating effect rather than by inherent racism and sexism. In Britain there has been decades of right-wing propaganda about how terrible the EU is, how terrible immigration is, and how the EU and immigration are responsible for Britain's problems. Now, we could argue all day about what's actually responsible for Britain's problems (I would argue neoliberal austerity and globalization have played a much greater role) but what matters are perceptions, not reality--this is true of both inequality and values-identity voting preferences. In a situation of high inequality (not just economic but racial, class, etc.) and scapegoating against the EU and immigration, people respond by punching down with racism (trying to maintain status relative to immigrants), and by acting against the thing they perceive as the cause of their status anxiety (immigration and the EU). I think the major cause of almost everything we're talking about is status anxiety, not economic anxiety. Status anxiety can play out economically but also regularly manifests along lines of race, sex, gender, nationality, and so on. But, again, I don't think it's enough to say "okay, status anxiety is the problem" because where does the status anxiety come from? It comes from inequality: Wilkinson and Pickett, The Spirit Level, p. 44 posted:If inequalities are bigger, so that some people seem to count for almost everything and others for practically nothing, where each one of us is placed becomes more important. Greater inequality is likely to be accompanied by increased status competition and increased status anxiety. PT6A posted:A very good post! You've missed the point. The point is not that marginalization leads to support for politicians like Trump from the marginalized. The point is that high levels of inequality (again, along many lines, not just economic) leads to higher status anxiety among everyone, not just among the poor and marginalized. The rich feel more anxiety because they have farther to fall and because the masses get restless (but also because competition for status between the wealthy becomes more extreme and expensive--the book Richistan by Robert Frank is full of stories about this), the middle classes feel more anxiety because the poor are so destitute and they know one slip-up means that's where they end up too, and the poor feel more anxiety because their lives are so precarious. When each rung of the ladder is so far apart, when enormous wealth and privilege coexists with absolute poverty and disadvantage, every person on every rung of the ladder becomes more anxious about where they stand. So it makes perfect sense that it's the white middle class that lashes out by voting for Trump, because they're trying to maintain their white-middle-class privileged status by kicking those below them. This gets referred to by Wilkinson and Pickett as the "bicycling reaction" because it involves bowing down to those ahead of you and kicking those behind you: Wilkinson and Pickett, The Spirit Level, p. 166-169 posted:Bigger differences in material wealth make status differences more important, and in more unequal societies the weight of downward prejudice is bound to be heavier; there is more social distance between the 'haves' at the very top and the 'have-nots' at the bottom. In effect, greater inequality increases downward social prejudices. We maintain social status by showing superiority to those below. Those deprived of status try to regain it by taking it out on more vulnerable people below them. Donald Trump didn't get elected speaking to the needs and legitimate problems of the poor and the marginalized, he got elected appealing to the status anxiety of the white male voter in the middle, by kicking those below them. He promised that if he got elected he would improve their relative status by preventing those with lower status from rising to their level through increased enforcement of hierarchies of dominance based not on economics but on race, sex, and gender. But that status anxiety was there for him to exploit because the United States is a grossly unequal society where those millions of potential Trump voters were already anxious about their relative social status and ready to be appealed to along those lines. vyelkin fucked around with this message at 17:20 on Jun 5, 2018 |
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Jun 5, 2018 17:18
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vyelkin posted:Donald Trump didn't get elected speaking to the needs and legitimate problems of the poor and the marginalized, he got elected appealing to the status anxiety of the white male voter in the middle, by kicking those below them. He promised that if he got elected he would improve their relative status by preventing those with lower status from rising to their level through increased enforcement of hierarchies of dominance based not on economics but on race, sex, and gender. But that status anxiety was there for him to exploit because the United States is a grossly unequal society where those millions of potential Trump voters were already anxious about their relative social status and ready to be appealed to along those lines. That's a very lovely, long-winded way of saying "a bunch of selfish loving assholes voted for Donald Trump" -- a statement which I believe to be completely true whether you phrase it in the friendly, longer form I've quoted, or the terse version I just typed.
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Jun 5, 2018 17:21
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PT6A posted:That's a very lovely, long-winded way of saying "a bunch of selfish loving assholes voted for Donald Trump" -- a statement which I believe to be completely true whether you phrase it in the friendly, longer form I've quoted, or the terse version I just typed. Okay, so you've established there are a large number of selfish people who will vote for the worst possible option as long as it disadvantages someone else more than it does themselves, so what do you do about them?
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Jun 5, 2018 17:35
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infernal machines posted:Okay, so you've established there are a large number of selfish people who will vote for the worst possible option as long as it disadvantages someone else more than it does themselves, so what do you do about them? Make it untenable for them to express their opinions in any public venue by metaphorically ripping off their head and making GBS threads down their neck anytime and every time they try to promote hatred and xenophobia.
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Jun 5, 2018 17:38
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PT6A posted:Make it untenable for them to express their opinions in any public venue by metaphorically ripping off their head and making GBS threads down their neck anytime and every time they try to promote hatred and xenophobia.
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Jun 5, 2018 17:46
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My hot take about PR is that if extreme parties get traction as a result its fine because democracy is intended to represent the views of the people even if those views are dumb and trying to design a system that avoids the election of people you find abhorrent is a trap. I recognize there are problems with this in a practical sense. E: I guess I'd think checks and balances you put in stuff would be better placed in rules about how parties campaign instead of what voting system you use, but this is getting beyond me.
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Jun 5, 2018 17:48
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PT6A posted:Make it untenable for them to express their opinions in any public venue by metaphorically ripping off their head and making GBS threads down their neck anytime and every time they try to promote hatred and xenophobia. Well, the good news is we seem to be heading in that direction, the bad news is there's a lot of 'em and they're getting madder because of it. MMM Whatchya Say posted:My hot take about PR is that if extreme parties get traction as a result its fine because democracy is intended to represent the views of the people even if those views are dumb and trying to design a system that avoids the election of people you find abhorrent is a trap. The arguments against PR are that democracy simply doesn't work. Maybe we can hope for a benevolent autocrat. infernal machines fucked around with this message at 17:51 on Jun 5, 2018 |
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Jun 5, 2018 17:48
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If your excuse for voting for a fascist is "I wasn't motivated by the idea of a literal gestapo rounding up brown people and putting them in literal concentration camps! I just don't care if our government does that." Then you are in fact enormously racist.
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Jun 5, 2018 17:52
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