Internet-Based Political Movement Aims To Put Presidential Ticket On Ballots | Hacker News Reader

Internet-Based Political Movement Aims To Put Presidential Ticket On Ballots

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33 pointsolalonde12 comments

Sample question, choose one option:

  a) we are winning the war on terror
  b) we are losing the war on terror
  c) unsure

This right here tells me "More of the same". How are they going to change things if their very thoughts are constrained by the propaganda machine. Might as well ask if we are winning the war with Eurasia [1]

How about d) there is no war on terror. it is all made up.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nations_of_Nineteen_Eighty-Four

I downvoted, but I shouldn't have. My apologies, this is a thoughtful comment but I read it the wrong way at first (as a conspiracy theory).

I actually agree with you that "War on..." is conducive to terrible thinking (poverty, drugs, terror, whatever). Something like, "Identifying members of organizations willing to take terrorist action, and arresting or killing them, removing their resources, and securing targets and educating people" would be a much better way to look at it.

Obviously there are people who are comfortable destroying things at large scale and hurting people, and it needs to be dealt with. But you can't win a war versus an ideology. Much better if they defined it more clearly, estimated numbers, and saw if success was increasing or decreasing. (Of course, that doesn't make for political soundbites)

The idea that Americans are crying out for some kind of radical centrist is much cherished by technocrats, but is completely false. People decry partisanship in Washington while continuing to reward the most extreme members of their party, because "partisanship" is generally code for "the other side won't do what I want."

Why are they targeting the presidential elections? No matter how you change that system, you will get a president that is from either the democrats or the republicans.

Targeting the elections for the house of representatives should be more rewarding, because there you could actually get candidates elected that aren't part of the two-party system. And if you do that, then maybe you could get rid of first past the post, which is the underlying cause of the mess.

This sounds like a really, really bad idea in a country with the first past the post system.

While this is likely, it is nearly impossible to get the people who are kept in power only by FPTP to vote against FPTP. The movement's goals seem somewhat more achievable. Also, we would hardly do worse by electing a Republican instead of a Democrat or a Democrat instead of a Republican.

Rangevoting.org had the interesting idea of trying to promote a non-FPTP system (in their case, range voting, obviously :P ) by convincing the major parties to use it in their primaries/caucauses. The idea I think being that using it for internal elections is something they (for now) stand to gain from, and since those are often truly multi-way contests there's no internal equivalents of the "major parties" who would (know that they could) benefit in the primaries from sticking to FPTP.

I don't think they're really active anymore, but it remains the most plausible approach I've heard.

Anyone who thinks that the position of president has power enough to make substantial change in the way the US government operates is living in a world of fantasy.

The ability to decline to sign budgets seems, to me, quite powerful.

Not really, the US hasn't passed a budget in over 800 days.

Right, thanks for reminding me. My mistake. I suppose the president can at least command the United States Armed Forces and veto HR3808, though.

I think this is one of those, great in theory but bad in practice kind of things.

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