Politics Discussion Thread (Heated Arguing Warning)

[Bacchus]

@ipecac,

If you think that serfdom can be well characterized as a purely economic relationship based on the assymteric distribution of ownership, you just don't really understand what serfdom is or how opressive it is. Regarding land, for example, the issue with serfdom is not just that serfs didn't own the land, is that they never even could own the land, even if they managed to earn money to buy it, as many did. It's like saying that the issue with slavery was that the landlords owned plantations and the slaves didn't.

Being able to interact with others purely economically, contractually, as two independent, if unequal parties is a major recent achievement of human politics. For most people, through most of history this was an unattainable privilege. You don't need to be "liberal" in any sense to register this, you just have to know what conditions of living in bondage were like beyond calories consumed or hours worked. The quickest way to understand this, though, is just to look at what people fought for against their lords, when they did get a chance to organize and exert power -- rights always came before property, for example European cities in Middle Ages did not ask for land, they asked to be left alone, to be incorporated, so they could deal with the sovereign as a person at least collectively, and to be subject to their own law, and they would gladly give property and tax for that. Being a person, rather than a thing, is really valuable, but it can be a little difficult for a modern to really feel this value.

[darrelljs]

I think this is typical and the hysteria around disenfranchisement has done a lot to convince people that they are being disenfranchised even when they aren't.

The cynic in me sees dark robed actuaries (Ruff?) in the bowels of the RNC compound, pouring over spreadsheets to find the right cocktail of allowed IDs to ensure victory in the coming war...err, election.

Then again most of the sympathy democrats have for illegal immigrants is cover for the work of their own mathematical sorcerers.

Darrell

[Huinesoron]

The cynic in me sees dark robed actuaries (Ruff?) in the bowels of the RNC compound, pouring over spreadsheets to find the right cocktail of allowed IDs to ensure victory in the coming war...err, election.

Then again most of the sympathy democrats have for illegal immigrants is cover for the work of their own mathematical sorcerers.

Darrell

I've never understood this. What exactly is so difficult about letting everybody vote that America has such trouble with it?

The electoral system I'm used to goes like this:

-They survey every house (by mail; I think we had an option to reply by internet) to see how many people there are eligible to vote.
-(Presumably) in the background, they check to see how many of those people are actually eligible.
-They send a polling card out for each person, saying where their polling station is.
-On election day, the polls are open from about 6am to 10pm. You walk in, tell them your name and address, and they tick off the list that you've been. You vote. You leave.

Our polling station covers a couple of dozen roads; I've been both in the morning and at night, and never encountered queues (at any of the places I've voted, actually, though I've never lived city-centre). We also have access to postal voting, or voting by proxy if need be.

Checking the Electoral Commission website, they report that out of over 51 million votes placed in 2015 (on multiple different elections), there were a grand total of 481 alledged cases of electoral fraud. Meanwhile, the only issue I can find regarding voter disenfranchisement was when they changed the registration system and people didn't realise that they had to re-register. Some newspapers think it was a deliberate move to keep traditional Labour voters out, so I guess there's elements of the same thing here?

But even so... why is America finding this so hard? I don't get it.

[Commodore]

So is this a speck/log thing, or are the Euros here actually talking about Catalonia right now?

[scooter]

But even so... why is America finding this so hard? I don't get it.

Because suppressing votes is profitable and not that difficult.

[Dreylin]

Especially since you don't even have to enact Voter ID laws, you can (currently) just Gerrymander the districts - as long as it's not on (obviously) along Racial lines:

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/21/us/de....html?_r=0

[darrelljs]

So is this a speck/log thing, or are the Euros here actually talking about Catalonia right now?

I doubt the Spanish government could have found a more epic way to bungle this .  I hope this doesn't turn into another ETA situation.

Darrell

[darrelljs]

But even so... why is America finding this so hard? I don't get it.

I get the "some form of evil" theories people are positing, but a small & sad part of me thinks its just cause we're stupid.

Darrell

[Huinesoron]

So is this a speck/log thing, or are the Euros here actually talking about Catalonia right now?

The fact that a Western nation feels that the appropriate response to a quote/unquote illegal vote is to send in the police to beat them up is terrifying, yep.

I mean, I see where they're coming from with 'you're not allowed to do that'. But this was never the appropriate response.

But even so... why is America finding this so hard? I don't get it.

Because suppressing votes is profitable and not that difficult.

But the point of a government is to do what's best for the people in its country, not to suppress them.

Okay, so that was tongue-in-cheek. But still. Democracy is, like, America's thing; why doesn't it care enough to, eg, keep the polls open long enough that the 31% of people who couldn't get time off work have a chance to vote? That's a terrifying number! I hope that it includes vast swathes of people who didn't have to take time off (but just knew they couldn't), but sweet burning stars! That's a terrifying number.

[Bacchus]

@Huinesoron,

America aside, the "let everyone vote" system that exists in Britain can only exist in a society where no significant force exists that seeks to play unfair. Already in Britain this has ran into significant trouble in Tower Hamlets. In the vast majority of countries, there exists far more infrastructure around voting, and a system similar to a British one would just be laughable and collapse at the first try.

Consider, in the UK, what's stopping people from surveying the electoral roll, which are public, and then just taking a busful of people around the polling stations, and representing themselves as local residents? Nothing except goodwill. And this actually happens in countries where organisations feel comfortable in doing something like this, parties do it. And why wouldn't they?

Bottomline is that tradition and internalized values really count for a lot. Where these erode, governments are forced to introduce formal institutions which substitute for decency. Of course, the substitution is always rather weak, which is why democracy is so damn difficult. Not saying that this erosion is happening in the US -- don't have the knowledge for that.