Kieran McConville
ONE love, blood, life
I can only imagine.
whenever i think of athletes and the gold coast, i think of this oldie but goodie:I'm more concerned about condemning the athletes to the Gold Coast. Nobody deserves that.
seriously. i'd been a democrat my whole life but was part of the whole demexit movement after bernie dropped out (i just don't like clinton) and i like the policies of the us green party and stein, but i do wonder how effective of a leader she'd be. and don't get me started on the harambe meme. how is it still a thing? thing whole election is such a shambles.The US Greens are a great example of how farcical American politics are. Every other Western democracy has a functional, coherent Green party. Those without first past the post even have Green parties strong enough to hold the balance of power or participate in government as a significant partner. The US one has a leader who is barely credible and it seems to be struggling to even get momentum from disaffected Bernie fans. I mean, fuck me, that tired meme Harambe can poll just as well. (Yes, one poll, yes, statistical margin of error; still pretty fucking damning. You're not going to see Richard Di Natale under threat by Harambe or Warnie or Crocodile Dundee or Ernie Dingo even in the most shoddily conducted poll.)
Maybe it's precisely because those US parties have endured such massive ideological shifts that they can persist, some kind of duality... or Manichaeism... seems to be built into the culture if not the system (as you say, the UK isn't so different with its first past the post deal). If this were Australia, a party like the late nineteenth century Republicans would likely have vanished without trace the way our Federation-era 'Liberal Party' did, instead of morphing and evolving into a mirror of itself.
Maybe there is something in the politicised nature of US culture, where so many officials seem to double as politicians in a way that would be unheard of here in Australia (school boards, sheriffs, you get the picture).
Yeah, agreed on what you say about Queensland vs NZ and I guess that just bolsters my own suspicions, that it's never purely a case of designing the right technocratic system. I certainly think for instance that the US could stand to benefit from some form of preferential voting system, an arms-length electoral commission, compulsory voting backed up with a national holiday for the election and so on... but I am thinking it unlikely that US politics would start to resemble Australian politics in that hypothetical world.
sorry for kinda taking the thread off-topic but i'd rather just talk politics in here instead of fym
Yep. The "right" electoral system may enable more people to feel as if their vote counts, give voters greater flexibility, and produce more representative outcomes, but those outcomes are only going to reflect the prevailing political culture. Queensland, as I read it, has a preference for stability (the result in 2015 being all the more a shock for that very reason), state intervention in key assets and services, and a high tolerance for assertive if not authoritarian leaders. New Zealand has a similar but not as striking preference for stability, but a much greater desire for consensus politics and its acceptance of state intervention has been eroded in recent decades. It's worth noting that members of the New Zealand Labour Party are allowed to cross the floor while ALP members cannot. That inflexibility and unrealistic insistence on rigid party unity is why I could never join the party even if it were to somehow regain my primary vote from the Greens.