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Comment by bsder | Hacker News Reader

It's hard to feel sorry for people who want public lands to be accessible but who, as a bloc, keep voting for politicians who want to privatize everything.

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I assume that part of the problem is that we don't have politicians with whom these people agree on most topics other than privatization who also don't want to privatize everything. When you have a binary choice of politicians in a multidimensional space, you're likely to have to elect someone with whom you disagree on a lot of things.

If everyone agreed on this universally, why is nothing being done about it? You would find candidates who do the single-issue thing on reforming the electoral system and you elect them, because you know in advance nothing else matters until you have actual representation.

Then perhaps privatization is more important than they thought, no? And perhaps maybe that should be their single issue until they dislodge their representation?

The problem is that these same jerks aren't against privatizing YOUR stuff; they're just against privatizing THEIR stuff.

This is a common theme among the right wing of the US political system right now.

You can vote for a party and still disagree with some of their policies.

You can vote for one of two near-identical parties but the vote will be decided by Facebook.

Sad but true for most Americans.

You can exert some effort to solve the two party system by getting your state to implement ranked choice voting.

https://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/03/us/maine-ranked-choice-vo...

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrow%27s_impossibility_theo... "Although Arrow's theorem is a mathematical result, it is often expressed in a non-mathematical way with a statement such as no voting method is fair, every ranked voting method is flawed, or the only voting method that isn't flawed is a dictatorship."

That theorem says that no voting system is perfect, for a certain definition of perfect. It does not say that all voting systems are equally bad.

I'm Dutch, so no. Discourse is the only tool I know I have here.

The reason I'm invested in the U.S. political system is that it produces something resembling international jurisprudence ("if the U.S. is doing it, we should too!"), because it influences our policies through trade agreements and the U.N., and because many U.S. companies are very influential internationally.

That, and Trump's climate policies affect every conscious being on Earth.

There will be resistance, though. Here in Maine we passed RCV via a referendum, but the legislature is still pushing back and trying to find ways to prevent the change from coming into effect.

It doesn't take rocket science to realize that the reason our politicians are so unpopular and that faith in our institutions quite low is because the people you refer to have no legitimate representation. Maybe they want hunting and public lands, but one "side" clearly wants guns and hunting to go, while the other "side" clearly wants to sell off public land. The key thing to realize is that "lesser of two evils" really is a choice between evils, and that until people can feel that they have a choice between "the most decent of two goods" things are just going to get more and more wild.

I am quite sure there is no such thing as a politician with whom everyone agrees.

It is all about compromise.

Agreement with politicians is not a binary, and what we're trying to do is maximise the agreement between the most people and the most politicians.

In fact, when designing a good voting system, we're literally trying to minimise the amount of compromising that voters have to do, when voting for their representative.

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