Funny events in anti-woke world
- Thread starter Agema
- Start date
It's a political slogan, usually presented with specific design features... like "MAGA".
"Flag" can carry a lot of implications for what we might understand, that may be very dubious in this case. I would therefore be inclined to avoid the term.
Isn't Make America Great again pretty app for the group that wants to turn 2024 America into 1950s America? I am pretty sure it is.
In Other news.
So lots of people who would otherwise love this video either hate it if they are progressive due to AI art bad or hate because it's too 'woke'. No, it seems pretty on point. Not 100% perfect but like 87 to 93 percent there.
Edit:
Houthis indoctrinating children in Yemen 'with violent, anti-Semitic and extremist material'
'The closest we have seen to being this is extreme is ISIS materials,' said one analyst
Last edited:
Nope, it's pretty relevant to point out there's a huge well of evidence that the Israeli defence forces are committing war crimes.
Which handily makes yours not worthy of a response.
Yes - there is a powerful idea amongst some conservatives and reactionaries (think MAGA, or Brexiters, or Al-Qaida) that if only a country can be reverted to the habits, morals and traditions of a past golden age, then a new golden age will follow. It is, of course, utter nonsense.
Does that mean you approve or disapprove of the changes to the electoral systems I suggested?
"I don't know, honestly." is a valid answer.
If I can take a tangent to this - will it really matter?
There was perhaps one thing that ill-fated British PM Liz Truss managed to demonstrate: you might be the leader of the world's fifth largest economy, but you don't have a lot of power when it comes to some of the big stuff. She offended against the markets, and she was crushed in short order. Thus even the argument between FPTP or some form of proportional representation borders on the trivial, because no matter which one gets elected, it'll still be operating in the same relatively narrow range of potential policies, those policies determined by the overarching circumstances and power structures (mostly perhaps economic).
Assuming that to be true, there's still leeway in social issues. Or even basic competence.
This is why I currently choose to stay away from the Star Wars fandom. I know they are good people but you got so many of these asshats dictating what the franchise should be (only for them). Hey disney, can you make this franchise public domain too? Not much would change except everybody could profit off of it now. It would make much difference to me, but it would be hilarious.
All leaders are limited. For all the ills in the world, there are parts that we would like to remain, so leaders will not be able to change those without getting the electorate against them. This is true in all countries.
The reason I brought the idea up is because Phoenixmgs expressed a desire to vote third party, something Silvanus rejected on the grounds that it would hurt the party of the true contender that is the most alike Phoenixmgs' own opinion. This leads to a situation where if Phoenixmgs were to vote for the person that he thinks best represents his own opinion he is harming his interests. And I doubt he is alone in wanting to vote for a third party but being unlikely to for these reasons.
People not voting how they actually think is terrible for representation. It leads to disengagement and apathy, and it leads to politicians being able to pull stuff that they otherwise might not have, since the electorate effectively have no other options. I'm talking gerrymandering which is in place to ensure job security for politicians more than representing the electorate. It also leads to the possibility that if there is some latent opinion lurking in the people that could realign politics (which it should, if it is popular enough) it might not.
We have a real life example of this in the French election were the two establishment parties had to see themselves on the sidelines after the National Front and Emmanuel Macron turned out to be the most popular choices in their preliminaries. Specifically in American politics, in the 2016 election Trump sought and won the nomination despite being treated as a joke by the establishment for half the campaign; evidently there was something in what he said that people reacted positively to. Latent opinions coming to light, political concerns not addressed by establishment politicians leading to extreme candidates. With a better representation politicians would need to take a look at the increasing number of votes upstarts like Trump would gain over the years and adapt accordingly, by seeing what the underlying concerns are and actually address what the people care about.
This is why I'm positive to more proportional representation, but as I said, there might be some issue I have overlooked.
What I wonder is whether there is enough.
It seems to me that Western civilisation is gradually slipping to the far right. The mainstream right is mostly either collapsing in the face of the far right, or being taken over by it. And the left is mostly nowhere. The mainstream left is struggling just as hard against the new further right as it did against the mainstream right, and the further left pretty much doesn't exist. Much of this is that, perhaps, the left has broadly failed, in the sense that it has simply not been able to deliver people's expectations. And perhaps it cannot deliver because institutional forces in wider society prevent it doing so. The end result is that millions who could be sympathetic to the left have given up on it, and seek alternatives - and they're tending to back the further right.
So, let's imagine the left wants a more radical programme. First up, the usual suspect capitalist bosses are liable to move a lot of money to persuade people away from that. The left wants to borrow money to fund social services and infrastructure? The finance industry can just not lend any - perhaps not necessarily because its bad business, but because the people who run the finance industry do not tend believe in social services and infrastructure, and so is biased to view it as waste. Perhaps things like tax havens and other shenanigans simply cannot be prevented: the very rich cannot realistically be taxed. And maybe think about the source of money that is the middle classes - but the left needs their votes. And it's hard to persuade them to pay up, especially when the rich aren't, or they're being bombarded with fears about their house and pension assets. It's all sorts of things like that which constantly drive the left towards the centre. That then leaves the losers of it all, the needs and desires of sectors of the population consistently not being met, who often end up backing the further right. One might hope they could be won over by the left in some form, except I don't think a lot of the left are very good at appealing to people who don't share certain ethical convictions.
Broadly, I agree that PR allows for a wider representation of views, and on balance I would favour them.
However, democratic politics inherently tends to be about compromise. PR tends to mean coalitions which in practice often don't really meet the objectives of many voters anyway. If we imagine a typical sort of coalition - green / left / centre - the end policies are probably not much different from a single "broad tent" centre-left party. What broad tent two-party systems tend to do is arrange their policies to build ideological coalitions to go into an election where PR tends to form coalitions from the ideological parties after the election.
While that is true, laws put in place to secure the rights of, say, LGBT, don't hurt the economy. That can be done.
And, not being a bunch of clueless muppets who botch the handling of crisises like the pandemic can also be done, and doesn't hurt the economy.
There's still things that can be done, even if a lot cannot.
And if we imagine that the votes went
5 % green
10 % left
36 % centre
49 % rest
we get a different parliament than if they went
10 % green
5 % left
36 % centre
49 % rest
which will lead to different policies and different compromises during the next administrative cycle. I am not sure what you mean with "don't really meet the objectives of many voters anyway"; that is true of all sorts of representations.
Well, i live in a parliamentary democracy and it is not that simple.
You generally still get a coalition to form a gouvernment. And as long as the gouvernment exists, they vote mostly aligned. However to actually form such a gouvernment, the parties must bargain which points of each program to pusrue und which to give up. The gouvernment program will always be a compromise program and never fit a party bill completely.
And it can happen to you as a voter of a "winning party" that this party gives up your most important topics in this bargaining to form a gouvernment.
And while the percentages might have some influence on bargaining power, they are not that important. As long as a party can get the coalition over 50%, it is enough. More important is which other possible coalitions could form and if there are competing parties that have a better offer.
So do I.
Politics is difficult, no objections there.
I more or less said the same thing. 5 % green and 10 % left lead to different policies than 10 % green and 5 % left; of course there will be compromises. If the parties thought exactly the same they wouldn't be separate parties.
Politicians failing to deliver on their campaign promises is hardly exclusive to non-FPTP democracies.
Going back to the example again, assuming the greens would need to compromise away too much to their liking to form a coalition in both those scenarios they have a greater bargaining power to try to form a different coalition if they had 10 % than if they have 5 % of the votes. So percentages matter, representation matters, being able to have your opinion represented matters.
I'm sorry, I'm not sure what we are arguing about?