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Comment by mandmandam | Hacker News Reader

It's a small but crucial part of a wider class war, which is beyond belief in its scale and sheer evil.

"Vote blue no matter who" isn't gonna get us out of this one, and neither is donating to the ACLU and NPR.

It's really a shame that my options right now are either the anti-freedom "no abortions, no weed, and absolutely no criticizing us" party, or the anti-freedom "no critical thinking, no guns, and absolutely no criticising us" party. Unfortunately under first past the post tribalism is rewarded, and moving to the center only gives room for a more radical same-party challenger to appear making you both lose. In my opinion, the greatest boost to freedom in current American politics would be the introduction of a better voting system[0] to allow third parties to exist and encourage them to work together to legislate.

[0] I prefer score voting, but I'll vote for anyone who will get any alternate form of voting out there. For an easy explanation of the different voting systems, look at https://ncase.me/ballot/

Come to slovenia... we just had an election which was (a bit simplified), "a bad guy we have now, and most people hate, but right leaning grandmas like" vs "a guy we didn't know existed two months ago, but media propped him up, and he's the only chance to take on the current guy".

Because of the voting systems, parties need 4% of the votes to make it into the parliament, and all the votes for <4% parties are basically "lost".

The end effect was people not voting for the "new guy" because they liked the new guy, but because they didn't want the new guy to stay, causing a huge discrepancy between the the parties they actually wanted to win vs the voting results.

Score Voting, Runoff Voting, something, anything to fix the red/blue mess here.

Trump was pro medical and thought rec should be decided at the state level. Seems pretty balanced and mainstream to me.

I'm outside the US, but I see similar issues everywhere. I think it's time modern democracies stoped having "representative of the people" voting on laws. Laws should be considered each on their own value, and everybody should be able to vote for/against them.

Perhaps going back to one representative per 10,000 would help? We'd have to use technology to hold a quorem though.

Unfortunately, United States has a population of ~330 million and that would mean a House of Representatives with 33,000 members. There's no way it would be able to effectively deliberate topics with that many people. Just imagine how little time each representative could be allocated to speak, given there are only 8,760 hours in a year. Additionally the individual power of each representative would be so watered down as to be practically meaningless.

It's an unacceptable solution but it seems to me that the US is just too big and splitting it up would make more sense.

Why do people need to debate on the house floor? Do such debates actually change anyone's mind or how they vote? Let them debate in an electronic forum with written arguments, let them debate in public and on social media (a good portion of political debate already happens on social media). Debate on the floor isn't so sacred we can't do without it.

And yes, the power of individual representatives would be watered down, that's ok. It would be much closer to the direct democracy the parent comment suggested (and the reason I brought it up).

It allows representatives to deal with boring bills the public doesn't care about, but there are enough representatives that I can reasonably expect to be on a first name basis with my representative if I care enough to get involved.

Debate on the floor of the House and Senate is largely faked for TV cameras already in the current era.

CSPAN camera angles are limited on purpose to hide this, but most speeches are given to an empty or nearly empty chamber. Actual floor debate that might change viewpoints is rare to non-existent now - the real debate and discussion happens off of the floor in private intra-party meetings and lunches, or in 1:1 meetings between leadership.

Yes. I want specialists debate ideas out in the open, not politicians forging stronger alliances to support parties of heterogeneous agendas.

> It's an unacceptable solution but it seems to me that the US is just too big and splitting it up would make more sense.

We already have this. The divisions are called states. And it's solid argument for a weaker federal government.

I wholeheartedly agree, but sadly the Federalists "won" this power struggle long ago.

I think the same thing, for the most part.

The issue is coming up with the text of a bill to actually vote on and finding a way to avoid laws that contradict each other unintentionally.

In my country a law saying "you don't have to work, but you still get 10k eur from the government" would win by a huge margin... how this would actually work, noone cares...

Sadly, an average person is stupid, and half are even stupider.

There are countries that do something close to that, and it does in fact work. In many, many ways. Basic Income is a very real and powerful thing.

Reduced crime, increased economic strength, increased education and skills, better overall wellbeing, a stronger economy, better health.

Whichever European country you're in, I'd wager that the .1% are using tax loopholes and straight up fraud to fleece more taxpayer money than 10k per citizen would cost.

Sounds a bit like you're a victim of class war propaganda. Try looking into BI and how it actually works.

Then specialists will explain that to be able to spend this, other budgets will have to be cut, like healthcare.

If people are stupid and we need to be ruled by elites, then why do we have democracies? Why popular vote? Shouldn't we have PhD's decide who are rulers are?

Lookup "sortition", experiences show that common people tend to make better decison for the good of society, while any "club" (politicians, elites) end up working towards expanding their power.

Some ancient democracies did similar things. You should read about what the people who lived in them had to say.

Switzerland does this today. They have a blended system of direct and representational democracy.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voting_in_Switzerland

The "citizens", the people who could vote, did pretty well. Not surprisingly, laws were not so good for slaves and other non-citizens, laws were not good for the people who could not vote.

Look how favourable our current laws are to politicians!!

That's probably worse.

Out of? It’s how we got it. I can’t be the only one left that is wondering how the window shifted so far left so quickly. Well, I guess me and Elon.

It shifted because the powers that be saw an actual unified, targeted movement aimed against the ultra rich (occupy), and got scared. So now, instead of fighting against the people who own the government, we are fighting each other based on skin color. So progressive!

Nothing really shifted to the left, certainly not the DNC. We just gave Bezos a $10B bailout. The rich are getting richer and richer. Roe is being overturned. There is not "far-left" presence in the US with any actual power. The right-wing (and Elon) freakout about the "far-left" is about people expressing their gripes with the state of things online, much of it being actual, salient criticism that gets handwaved away as "communism."

There isn't a single far-left politician in the federal government. There are a few that are maybe left of center, but "far-left?" Absolutely not.

Show me a rep or senator calling for public ownership of the means of production and then we have a conversation, but there simply isn't one. Nobody with a say is advocating for abolishing money, the state, class, etc. Even the list of politicians that support worker unions is really short. The furthest left US politicians go is social democracy, which is just democracy with strong safety nets to help keep as many people as possible from rock bottom.

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