What infuriates me is that not enough people care for them to demand change.
It goes on the news one day then the next it's gone. Information-overload. That's their card and they'll keep playing it.
It goes on the news one day then the next it's gone. Information-overload. That's their card and they'll keep playing it.
This is a common theme on Hacker News, and an understandable one: You see a situation that seems unjust, and you want other people to be upset about it. But they're not, because people don't work that way.
People will become upset when they have social proof that they ought to be upset. This takes a long time, which means that politics, metaphorically speaking, has massive momentum and takes a long to change direction.
At this stage, watch the decision makers, the influencers, and the people who pride themselves on being "middle of the road" above all else. When they start to flip, it means a larger political shift has started. And sure enough, obsessively middle-of-the-road writers like Andrew Sullivan are starting to doubt the government's arguments.
If the government keeps raiding newspapers, detaining spouses, and otherwise getting caught, public opinion will continue to shift. But it will do so slowly.
I've said for a very long time that Newton's First Law (conservation of momentum, or inertia) applies for all masses. Including masses of people.
Hell, I've even joked that it may actually apply better to masses of people.
The silly thing is, I had arrived at that conclusion before I had ever read Asimov's Foundation.
It's not gone. There's a continuing battle over the effects of these revelations, and quite a pitched one.
In aggregate, it has infinite power over an incumbent politician's future office. It's hard to know what you're getting when you vote for someone new, but it's easy to vote for or against an incumbent based upon past performance.
Congressmen generally aren't even afraid of losing their jobs anymore. They'll just stick around in Washington and become conference speakers or lobbyists. There's a rule saying you can't lobby for two years after you lose your seat, but that doesn't stop them.
To understand how politics works at the national level in this country, This Town is required reading.
http://www.amazon.com/This-Town-Parties-Funeral-Plus-America...
We can vote for whomever we choose. The notion that a third party vote is 'wasted' is false. Even in a two-party system, it's an irrefutable signal to the dominant parties that available votes are being left on the table.
There are lots of unpleasant realities about our present system, but that can't stop us from voting for the reality we'd like to see. If we do, it will happen.
TL;DR : "Because if they didn't vote for a lizard," said Ford, "the wrong lizard might get in. Got any gin?"
You don't have to buy votes. Just the politicians.
The electorate doesn't receive anything for their votes. What they receive is entertainment in exchange for their attention. Their attention is then sold to the highest bidder, i.e. the politicians with the most money.
>The notion that a third party vote is 'wasted' is false. Even in a two-party system, it's an irrefutable signal to the dominant parties that available votes are being left on the table.
You have two problems here. The first problem is that the votes aren't actually on the table. If you vote for the Green party, the Democrats can't move to the left and end up with a net increase in votes because if they move to the left they may pick up a four Green voters and lose six centrist voters. What putting a viable Green candidate on the ballot does is require the Democrat to move toward the right because they'll have to capture more of the middle in order to defeat the Republican. It also allows the Republican candidate to move even further to the right at a given level of risk of losing to the Democrat. (And obviously vice versa if the viable third party candidate is an arch conservative.)
The second problem is that the third party candidates know this, so anyone you would actually want in office and who has any realistic chance of being elected just runs on the major party ticket of the party most aligned with their views. So you don't actually have any good third party candidates to vote for, because anyone who satisfies the criteria of being plausibly electable is just going to run on a major party ticket. Feel free to trot out a few count-on-one-hand counterexamples, but your average House race doesn't exactly have a plethora of desirable third party alternatives.
I've said it before and I'll say it again: If you want to vote where it counts, vote (or run) in the primaries for the major parties.
If you don't know what you are getting, how can you possibly make a choice when voting that will elect someone that does represent you?
This is our first problem. Too many people still fall for "voting", as if it accomplishes anything at all.
Voting is only effective when it is the final action which follows all others and makes them real to the elected officials.