It's more like each candidate has support from less than a quarter of the population and most people don't support either.
Somehow I find that reassuring.
This covers a vast group of people in the united states.
As George Carlin (loosely) said: If you voted for the people in power, you have no right to complain when they do things you dont like. You voted them in. I on the other hand... Did not vote for them and have every right to complain about the mess you made and I had nothing to do with.
Each voter has to figure out where to best cast their vote, compromising some of their values for others they prioritize. One hopeful way to view this is that they're likely a lot of values we hold in common. These are things we can hopefully work on together.
* This is really a very general statement I've tried to keep in mind in reading all of these comments, not just this thread. It's placement isn't a reflection of my opinion of the immediately preceding comment or the one prior. It just had to be placed somewhere.
In the hopes of better communication, if you'd like to down vote this comment, will you also take the time to add a brief reply? I appreciate it.
Is opening up communication channels responsible for social conflict?
Is Mark right or wrong in his last paragraph.
I've always assumed he was wrong but the premise should be examined explicitly.
Naturally I don't claim that the radio or newspapers invented the social conflict. I am saying they could be responsible for the actual incidence of conflict itself.
If you picture each person as a collection of memes, then;
> The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. - H.P Lovecraft
The potential for conflict in the individual is not resolved with conflict for the most part. We do know the more intellectual among us tend to be more neurotic, perhaps another hint at the essential lovecraftian truth.
That means barefaced conflict is only possible when an individual meets another and communicates. It is then latent contradictions become evident.
Far from the notion that communication acts as a meditator and leads to peace, the truth might be the opposite.
tldr; if we don't talk to each other, everything will be fine!
I mean this is ridiculous.
He's all like "oh don't hate on Thiel just because he supports Trump. Half of the US does it so it's a valid opinion"
Why not support other republicans who aren't chauvinists?
They talk like "Oh we just have Trump and Hilary and Hilary is corrupt, so what should we do? Vote Trump of cause!"
I mean if you're a chauvinist and like what Trumps says, just vote for him, it's your right to do so. But talking about diversity and then supporting people against it is bullshit.
"Hey yes, you can work at FB, we think you got mad skills, but we will invest the money you make in people who make your life worse!"
It's the natural consequence of a plurality voting system.
Conservatives remember H. Ross Perot spoiling the election for George H.W. Bush, and throwing the election to Bill Clinton. Progressives remember Ralph Nader making the contest between Al Gore and George W. Bush close enough that G.W. was given the election by a Supreme Court stocked with his dad's buddies.
Voting for third parties is a terrible political strategy in the United States. The spoiler effect is real. I'd go so far as to say that our plurality system all but guarantees bad candidates--it's not the fittest that survive the primary election process, it's the most memorable, the one who we feel will best appeal to our neighbors.
Going further, I'd suggest that having a strong majority political belief is a major liability in U.S. elections.
When Bill Clinton was elected, the nation was largely happy with the center-right GOP of the time. As a result, the further right bloc had the confidence and diversity of small differences of opinion to split and lose the whole thing. (Never minding the fact that Bill Clinton was far to the right of traditional Democrats).
The same was true with Nader and Gore in 2000. Bill Clinton's policies had been so popular that people largely wanted another Clinton, but perhaps a little more progressive. Disagreement ensued as to how much more progressive, and thus we had Nader and Gore losing to the much more hawkish right-wing George W. Bush.
So, in the U.S., you're best off being part of a popular political leaning, but pray your political leanings don't grow so popular as to result in a split.
My personal feeling is that this country desperately needs to move past plurality voting. The easiest path to this is for states to apportion their electors based on ranked choice voting. It doesn't solve all our problems, but it does remove the spoiler effect. With luck, that would allow us to have less shrill, more substantive candidates--even if the major parties continue to dominate.
Another thing that I've noticed is that it also optimizes for moderates/centrists, since that's where the Nash Equilibrium is[1].
With the growing polarization in our politics, I think that the political spectrum in the U.S. now looks less like a Gaussian distribution and more like a bimodal distribution. At this point the median voter is becoming a smaller and smaller plurality, and the equilibrium is becoming unappealing to more and more people.
I think you've made some insightful points here, particularly when you said "In the U.S., you're best off being part of a popular political leaning, but pray your political leanings don't grow so popular as to result in a split." This does explain a lot.
However, I'd like to see some evidence that ranked-choice voting actually leads to better outcomes. I believe Australia has this system, doesn't it? They've elected some of the worst sorts of people I've ever seen in public office outside of an outright dictatorship, pushing the worst sorts of policies.
My concern is that RCV-like voting strategies may encourage a tyranny of the majority to emerge. While I'm no supporter of either Jill Stein or Bernie Sanders, I do like the idea that Hillary Clinton has to worry about what they have to say, for fear of being Nadered in one or more critical swing states. Likewise, I can see the Libertarians, both big-L and small-l, having a moderating influence on the knee-jerk theocrats who would like to take over the GOP. It seems that ranked-choice voting might have the effect of removing those beneficial "spoiler effects."
Just as one example, most Americans self-identify as members of the Christian faith. (Not picking on religion per se, just saying that it's probably the one cultural attribute that Americans share more widely than any others.) The same is true in Australia. There, a wave of neo-Puritanism has swept over the country, resulting in legislative micromanagement of everything from Internet censorship to the bra sizes of porn actresses.
So, does ranked-choice voting inevitably lead to the emergence of a nanny state? If so, I think we're better off here in the US with the strong two-party system. If not, are there any other downsides that should be discussed before switching over to RCV?
Not that he is answerable but if he has good reasons I'm sure he wouldn't mind talking about them.
