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Cake day: June 10th, 2023

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  • CoggyMcFee@lemmy.worldtotumblr@lemmy.worldDance Dance Revolution
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    14 days ago

    There is actually a border problem, and actual fixes for it are Congress’s job. They are the legislative branch. And Biden worked with them to come up with legislation to fix it, and they came up with bipartisan legislation that was basically a lock to pass, but then Trump suddenly told the Republicans to tank it in order to hurt Biden (I guess you missed that). So he is doing one of the few things that the executive branch can do to address the border without legislation, to do something to address the real problem. And lo and behold, the GOP plan of tanking it has worked: you think Biden is giving Republicans everything they want.

    Just think what else you’re blaming Biden for or mischaracterizing out of ignorance.













  • It makes perfect sense why we only have two parties while many countries in Europe have lots of parties. It’s not magic and it’s not because our parties are just so good at stopping third parties.

    The reason we are like this is because our voting system punishes similar candidates who run against each other. This results in parties that are more like coalitions, each made up of various factions that would be separate parties in a better system, who run a primary to pick one candidate to send forth, so that they don’t cannibalize each other in the general election.

    The bad part is that even the primaries generally have the same flawed first-past-the-post voting scheme, so similar candidates often have to strategically drop out or not run at all.

    This voting system desperately needs to be fixed. But you can’t fix it by simply acting like we just have to decide to have more parties, nor can you fix it by voting third party and screwing over one of the parties. I think this idea of voting third party in this election is appealing to some because it makes you feel like you’re doing something to fix it. You’re not.

    In my view the best hope of fixing this is pushing for election reform locally and winning over communities to the idea. There are some parts of the country with better voting systems in place. We should build on that.






  • In the primaries, sure, that’s your chance to send your party a message about who you really want. In the general election? You are just a vote and you don’t get to decide how that is interpreted.

    Are the Democrats likely to look at the results and say “oh the libertarian vote is gaining ground, we need to move our platform to the left”? Or will they see themselves losing ground and try to appeal more to the center? Or will the Republicans look at it and say “we need to be even more anti-government!” Or any number of other things that could be antithetical to the change you want?