2020 Political Chatter

[zachateseverything]

So in Australia we've got two key parties. The meanspirited and ineffectual ones and the genuinely ineffective ones.


I've seen a few snippets of the GOP "convention" thingy. Why is it that in the US there is "us" and "them" and the "them" will bring down hellfire and damnation. I don't really get it. I don't think either of our two main political parties could organize armageddon. And I don't think the public would believe you if they said they would.

Ooh, and guns. We were thinking about having a rational discussion with a possum. Looked into air rifles. For which I would have to get a gun license in Australia. WTAF is going on with that pink shirted barefoot dude with the assault rifle and his wife with a pistol. Even ignoring the bairfooted pink shirted thing, it's just weird.

There are a lot of systemic issues with America and what you're seeing are the symptoms. We probably have some of the same stuff going on as the rest of the western world regarding the spread of misinformation on social media, the addiction to 24 hour news coverage, etc but there are some distinctly American phenomenon that likely doesn't exist in much of the rest of the world. This is a non-inclusive list.

- like some other countries we use a first past the post system of choosing the winner of an election. this guarantees a two party system for any election larger than a town council position. in theory this forces the political parties to be "big tent" operations but the reality turns out to be a bit different because...

- gerrymandering. This also exists in other countries but it's very pronounced here. In the short term one political party divvying up the voting districts to their own benefit does help them stay in power. in the long term the issue it creates is that non-competitive districts feature a party primary as the defacto general election. You know who wins a party primary with no concern about winning a general election? Cranks capable of passing a purity test but not compromising with others and governing effectively.

- 100 years of military, economic, and political dominance has really rooted in this idea that America is the greatest country in history and shouldn't change at all. The founders of this country have been deemed infallible despite their horrible records regarding slavery, women's suffrage, civil rights, genocide, etc. The people with strong America fetishes really by into this idea that taxation is theft, they aren't free if they can't do whatever they want when they want regardless of the consequences to others, and that they need a gun to protect themselves and their property from a police state (but somehow police gunning down unarmed civilians doesn't qualify as such).

- money in politics. There are effectively no caps on the ability for special interests to poor money into elections and key issues. We've seen stuff like gun rights advocacy go completely off the rails.

- a good chunk of the early settlers from Europe were religious kooks who got chased over here. Early in the history of America that's a net positive. The constitution was written with the idea that Government should be separated from all forms of religion. However, those kooks still lived here and had children here. Low and behold a lot of the ancestors of those people seem to display high degrees of cognitive dissonance.