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[Amperzand]

This is true.

Mainly because I'm more concerned with the issues the conservatives yell about. The democrats don't actually seem proactive enough to fight anything I care about.

[Nullsrc]

Last few posts got me thinking about how feel the same things about the opposite groups. Makes me wonder if people are simply more likely to project the side they support as correct but weak, and the opposing side as strong and organized.

I would be interested to find out the answer to that...

[Amperzand]

That does strike me as likely. I don't necessarily support the Democratic party, incidentally. Much better a less-polarized system.

[Frumple]

It's fairly common rhetoric, yes. If you want an easy time of listening to some of it, just tune in to limbaugh for a few hours.*

Incidentally, the current answer to why you'd want to off the conservative politicians in a binary choice of who will live is just because the other side is significantly less politically indebted to complete bugnuts at the moment. That religious right reacharound stopped being fun for a lot of conservatives quite a few years back.

Personally, I wouldn't really want either side to just keel over. Or both sides, even. Voluntarily step down, or better just actually start trying to help people instead of fuck the ones they don't like, sure, but not die. Not most of them, anyway. There's a handful whose policies have killed/crippled/etc. a great number of people who would probably be in front of a firing line in a more perfect world. A more perfect than that one would find some appropriate consequence that doesn't involve killing them, but still.

*Or don't, because why in the name of the seventy hells would voluntarily do that to yourself, but anyway.

[Amperzand]

It's fairly common rhetoric, yes. If you want an easy time of listening to some of it, just tune in to limbaugh for a few hours.*

Incidentally, the current answer to why you'd want to off the conservative politicians in a binary choice of who will live is just because the other side is significantly less politically indebted to complete bugnuts at the moment. That religious right reacharound stopped being fun for a lot of conservatives quite a few years back.

Personally, I wouldn't really want either side to just keel over. Or both sides, even. Voluntarily step down, or better just actually start trying to help people instead of fuck the ones they don't like, sure, but not die. Not most of them, anyway. There's a handful whose policies have killed/crippled/etc. a great number of people who would probably be in front of a firing line in a more perfect world. A more perfect than that one would find some appropriate consequence that doesn't involve killing them, but still.

*Or don't, because why in the name of the seventy hells would voluntarily do that to yourself, but anyway.

Yes. Very much yes.

[Nullsrc]

It's fairly common rhetoric, yes. If you want an easy time of listening to some of it, just tune in to limbaugh for a few hours.*

Incidentally, the current answer to why you'd want to off the conservative politicians in a binary choice of who will live is just because the other side is significantly less politically indebted to complete bugnuts at the moment. That religious right reacharound stopped being fun for a lot of conservatives quite a few years back.

Personally, I wouldn't really want either side to just keel over. Or both sides, even. Voluntarily step down, or better just actually start trying to help people instead of fuck the ones they don't like, sure, but not die. Not most of them, anyway. There's a handful whose policies have killed/crippled/etc. a great number of people who would probably be in front of a firing line in a more perfect world. A more perfect than that one would find some appropriate consequence that doesn't involve killing them, but still.

*Or don't, because why in the name of the seventy hells would voluntarily do that to yourself, but anyway.

This is a good explanation. I find myself hoping that both parties basically split in half so you can basically have the right-leaning moderates, the left-leaning moderates, the religious right, and the socialists. Every party adds an exponential layer of choice and intelligence to the system (IMO).

[mainiac]

I'll just leave this here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Median_voter_theorem

[misko27]

Personally I don't think a multi-party system would be all that helpful, because I've seen enough multi-party systems in other contexts to know better. They do exist, you know, out there in "the rest of the world", and they do not seem to have added a whole lot. All it would accomplish here is take what I consider our biggest problem: partisan gridlock, and make it significantly worse then before, because now the party machines, already fairly weak (as we've seen in the republicans), will totally lose their ability to stop the madness. And a corollary: a situation where that partisan gridlock wouldn't happen would be true in both a two party and a multi-party system; that is, saying "well fix the partisan gridlock" might as well be applied to today instead of going out of your way to change 200 years of political tradition, and THEN fix the problems the government has.

Unrelated: I feel bad for some of the people running. Or at least their families. Short of actually being President, campaigning means the entire media (and tons of people just like us outside of the media) constantly judge you and mock you for basically any reason you give us. I'm really glad Biden didn't run, because he doesn't deserve this nonsense. I mean hell, I feel bad for Bush, and I could not have given a rats ass about the man until he started losing and we got headline after headline of people taking about how W was always the cleverer brother.

[Bauglir]

I'll just leave this here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Median_voter_theorem

but mainiac, i don't believe any of the assumptions listed in the second paragraph of that article, nor do i believe that voters are generally competent at voting correctly (that is, for the politicians who represent their preferences)

[Shadowlord]

I mean hell, I feel bad for Bush, and I could not have given a rats ass about the man until he started losing and we got headline after headline of people taking about how W was always the cleverer brother.

I remember W. It looked to me like he more or less won by being stupider, or appearing to be stupider, than every candidate the Democrats ran against him*. The only election that was even close was 2000 when he ran against Al Gore, who was so wooden he was accused of being a robot, etc, etc.

For example, John Kerry. He speaks FRENCH! That makes him a foreign elitist! And he's a traitor to the military, because he protested the VIETNAM WAR! Like, what? How did that attack work? Seriously, someone please explain that to me. I didn't live through Vietnam and that attack on him still makes no sense to me. It was a pointless shitty war, and we were losing a ton of troops while murdering copious amounts of Vietnamese civilians.

Edit: removed some f-bombs.
Edit: oops, missed one.

[Amperzand]

I think it worked by targeting the demographic with sufficient crazy-juice to think Vietnam was a good idea.

[MoonyTheHuman]

I think it worked by targeting the demographic with sufficient crazy-juice to think Vietnam was a good idea.

*Stare*
Updattteeeeeee.....

[Flying Dice]

I mean hell, I feel bad for Bush, and I could not have given a rats ass about the man until he started losing and we got headline after headline of people taking about how W was always the cleverer brother.

I remember W. It looked to me like he more or less won by being stupider, or appearing to be stupider, than every candidate the Democrats ran against him*. The only election that was even close was 2000 when he ran against Al Gore, who was so wooden he was accused of being a robot, etc, etc.

For example, John Kerry. He speaks FRENCH! That makes him a foreign elitist! And he's a traitor to the military, because he protested the VIETNAM WAR! Like, what? How did that attack work? Seriously, someone please explain that to me. I didn't live through Vietnam and that attack on him still makes no sense to me. It was a pointless shitty war, and we were losing a ton of troops while murdering copious amounts of Vietnamese civilians.

Edit: removed some f-bombs.
Edit: oops, missed one.

Oh, no, no, no, it's worse than that. Kerry served in the Vietnam war for ~4 years and was decorated multiple times, including three Purple Hearts and a Silver Star -- here's what wikipedia has on the latter:

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Only eight days later, on February 28, came the incident for which Kerry was awarded the Silver Star. On this occasion, Kerry was in tactical command of his Swift boat and two others. Their mission included bringing a demolition team and dozens of South Vietnamese soldiers to destroy enemy sampans, structures and bunkers. Along the Bay Hap river, they ran into an ambush. Kerry directed the boats "to turn to the beach and charge the Viet Cong positions" and he "expertly directed" his boat's fire and coordinated the deployment of the South Vietnamese troops, according to Admiral Zumwalt's original medal citation.

After the South Vietnamese troops and a team of three U.S. Army advisors that were with them had disembarked at the ambush site, Kerry's boat and another headed up river to look for the fleeing enemy. The two boats came under fire from a Viet Cong B-40 rocket-propelled grenade, shattering the crew cabin windows of PCF-94. Kerry ordered the boats to turn and charge the second ambush site. As they reached the shore, a Viet Cong soldier jumped out of the brush, carrying a loaded B-40 launcher. With the enemy soldier only a short distance away from the boat and crew, forward gunner Tommy Belodeau shot him in the leg with the boat's 7.62×51mm caliber M-60 machine gun. "Tommy in the pit tank winged him in the side of the legs as he was coming across," Fred Short said. "But the guy didn't miss a stride. I mean, he did not break stride." Belodeau's machine gun jammed after he fired, and while crewmate Michael Medeiros attempted to fire, he was unable to do so. Kerry leaped ashore and, followed by Medeiros, pursued the man and killed him. The medal citation notes that Kerry "then led an assault party and conducted a sweep of the area" until the enemy had "been completely routed." The mission was judged highly successful for having destroyed numerous targets and confiscated substantial combat supplies while sustaining no casualties.

Kerry's commanding officer, Lieutenant George Elliott, joked that he didn't know whether to court-martial him for beaching the boat without orders or give him a medal for saving the crew. Elliott recommended Kerry for the Silver Star, and Zumwalt flew into An Thoi to personally award medals to Kerry and the rest of the sailors involved in the mission. The Navy's account of Kerry's actions is presented in the original medal citation signed by Zumwalt. In addition, the after-action reports for this mission are available, along with the original press release written on March 1, a historical summary dated March 17, and more.[10]

Sources close to Kerry say the incident had a profound effect on him: "It's the reason he gets so angry when his patriotism is challenged. It was a traumatic experience that's still with him, and he went through it for his country." It affects the way Kerry lives his life every day, the source said, since "he knows he very well would not be alive today had he not taken the life of another man [he] never ever met."

Meanwhile Bush got to sit out the Vietnam war doing coke in the Texas Air National Guard because his daddy was rich and important.

But no, it wouldn't do for the Democratic candidate to be a deeply patriotic decorated veteran and the Republican candidate to be a literal congressman's son who dodged the war, so they invented a wholly false controversy over Kerry's military record to try to distract the public from the facts. And it worked.

[Amperzand]

I think it worked by targeting the demographic with sufficient crazy-juice to think Vietnam was a good idea.

*Stare*
Updattteeeeeee.....

Dude, as much as my shenaniganry-incarnate update schedule is pretty lame, please keep it to relevant threads. Bump em', I do read all the stuff.

[Powder Miner]

Parties actually are much more powerful in quite a few countries abroad compared to the United States -- a common trend (IF my Gov class is not being blatantly wrong at me, which it has been before) is that the individual will have to actually ask the parties to run under their name whereas in the United States you can call yourself a Republican and the Rep party can do absolutely nothing about it, even if you're the literal reincarnation of Lenin.

Buuut that said, I don't feel strong parties stop gridlock. Congress, after all, is perhaps where the parties remain the strongest in organization, but it is what eeeeveryone loves to point out as the example of gridlock these days.