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Comment by busterarm | Hacker News Reader

We're (at least) 10 years into this mess now and still everyone is focused on restructuring our systems and prosecutions instead of putting forward a platform that broadly appeals to enough Americans to decisively win elections.

What I said applies to both parties. We're not really all that different but all the incentives align towards pleasing extremists. Do you really need any more evidence of this than people getting shot and people/press generally being okay with it?

Anything you build can be exploited against you when you're on the other side of the power balance. The solution is truly moving politics to the center.

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> Anything you build can be exploited against you when you're on the other side of the power balance.

You're responding to someone who's explaining to you that this is exactly the problem.

If an extremist can do whatever they want if they happen to excite people with a "platform that broadly appeals to enough Americans", then the problem is structural, and has to be addressed there, or literally everything you do and have can be undone by the next moron that riles people up again.

You raced over the key word in that sentence.

Anything.

Your patches will be the sources of your next exploits.

No. A language with checked arrays can never have a buffer overrun like C arrays can.

Some things are better. Game theory demonstrates this.

Some things are better but in the case of political systems, you typically can't prove that ahead of time.

Especially when the suggestion is to talk about changing a bunch of variables at once.

That's akin to a revolution, which historically work out badly for the people clamoring for it.

There's already a revolution going on and we're losing. They stacked the courts. The blood of innocents in the streets and ICE prisons.

Either we overhaul the system that got us to this point or we concede.

I'm tired of dumbasses in Montana having 50x the vote in the Senate and 4x vote on the POTUS as a Californian. That's not democratic.

Our systems are highly undemocratic. A vote in Wyoming is at least an order-of-magnitude more impactful than one in California.

> all the incentives align towards pleasing extremists

Systems create the incentive! Changing the system changes the incentives and is the only way we can reduce extremism.

Do you really need any more evidence of this than people getting shot and people/press generally being okay with it?

Democrats who push gun control at the cost of everything else -- such as the possibility of turning Texas blue -- are a big reason why the party lacks power to influence anything else.

It's First Pass the Post that causes that. We have maybe 30% is the population that wants guns highly restricted and a different 30% that wants abortions highly restricted. We have something like 52% that want Medicare4All. But we just seesaw between gun grabber and pussy grabber because those M4A aren't the majority of either party primary.

MMP means the person running on M4A gets ranked in the middle by everybody, which is enough for a seat.

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