• 17 Posts
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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 14th, 2023

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  • OK so probably a translation issue. But to respond to your statement, if your city announced it would punish illegal parking with penalties ranging from 3 years imprisonment to fucking murder, which would you be more concerned with? And which would you rather local journalists make you aware of? Would you really be criticizing their clickbait headlines if they ran a similar story?

    Like I said, focusing on the more severe possible punishment makes perfect sense in this context. Not to mention that all of the punishments are extremely excessive.








  • We have a similar system in California called the jungle primary—basically there are no party specific primaries (except for president because this system is incompatible with other state’s elections), and the top two advance to the general election.

    There are a few issues though. If a candidate wins more than 50% of all votes in the primary, they win the election and don’t appear on the ballot in the general election along with the president. Since there is generally higher turnout for the general election rather than the primary, you can sometimes have a generally unpopular candidate win in the primary with 50+% of the small number of primary voters.

    We also have issues with spoilers—if a bunch of similar candidates run, and all split the votes between them, it’s possible they don’t make the final ballot, even if any of them individually would have won the final election. This seems like a fringe issue until you realize that parties have actually supported lots of minor candidates on the opposing side in order to eliminate an otherwise dangerous challenger.

    So overall it is somewhat better than first past the post but it still has significant issues. In general I think elections that select a single candidate are somewhat undemocratic by nature and we should think about ways to give the minority a voice but not the ability to shut things down. This may be a difficult balance to achieve but it’s still worth aiming for.





  • I think you’re being a bit too generous. Despite the fact that this particular video was pretty good overall (though the potshot at environmental activists at the end was wholly unnecessary and the opposite of helpful) I didn’t hear any real admission that her past views were mistaken here. If what you say is true, then she needed to own up to that far more clearly than she did.

    Although I have only watched a few of her videos in the past before stopping. I found them quite opinionated and misinformed. So I don’t have the full context of what exactly she got wrong previously.