domain:eigenrobot.substack.com
Well, the EU President is not elected at all
Yes, that would be my point
so that's kind of a bad comparison
I think it's a great comparison, precisely for the reason you outline later on. The American system is a leftover from an era when the country was a lot more disjointed. If the executive of the EU was elected, you'd end up with something similar, for very similar reasons. Superficially the EU is a union, but different countries have different cultures and sometimes different interests. If you try to run a union-wide campaign, it's going to end up being either full of completely empty platitudes in the best case, or stoking ethnic tensions in the worst.
Given the size differentials between countries, you'd also inevitably end up with something like the electoral college, because "one man, one vote" just gives you "do what the Germans tell you", and that's not a particularly enticing system for anyone. Maybe instead of delegates they'd just give a vote multiplier to certain countries, and that would simplify things relative to the USA, but it's pretty clear they'd come up with some analogue.
omfalos
1yr ago
Sounds like Harvard and Yale needs to put together a "presidential science" master's program. People in the future will be horrified that politicians without presidential science degrees were allowed to be president.
My point isn't about the raw population sizes, but the amount of competing interests ,and their geographic distribution. I don't know much about India, but if they're also heterogenous in that regard than yeah, that's a good example.
My impression is that the US system is a leftover from another era, and America probably could pull off a simplification of their system at this point, but the interests boiling down to "NY+California vs everyone else" is still a bit of a sticking point... which might be another way of saying, "they can't pull it off, and the system is still serving it's purpose".
zeke5123a
1yr ago
Doesn’t that sort of lay bare that the public doesnt get to vote for their government?
No one expects the president to be in charge of everything but you expect him to be a CEO. It is clear Biden isn’t capable of being a CEO. So…who is that person?
zeke5123a
1yr ago
How we select candidates in America is through a democratic process. Lying about the state of the presidents heath only to switch him out when it is obvious he will lose is a subversion of democracy.
hanikrummihundursvin
1yr ago
I don't know why you're blaming me. I didn't come up with this.
If you want to breach a persons medical privacy you are welcome to be the one to do that here and face the relevant legal consequences.
If you want to rail against genderless bathrooms you will just look like a lunatic. Don't want to share a changing room with a trans person? Well, we are spending money on fixing that problem for you by building a third one so you and your penis or vagina can be safe.
If you want to pick a fight with an organization of trained media handlers who have been arguing the opposition into the dirt for half a century or more, go right ahead.
I'm waiting for a real solution from America, given they brought most of this stuff over. It was American academia that pushed this forward. American media that picked it up. American public that made it into some cultural battleground where the 'against' side does nothing but lose.
I mean, in what world does the collection of crime stats matter in the US? The existence of said information seems to have no bearing at all on policy.
Throwaway05
1yr ago
Nurses are blue collar construction workers and physicians are architects. Yes one implements the vision of the other and can see patterns in what the other requests, but that doesn't mean they can safely do the planning. They do think they can however.
Not commenting if this has situational parallels lol.
I actually think it is the opposite. President is there to lead and communicate policies of his team toward the public. If his staff members are the writers, president is the actor or comedian delivering the lines and bits. Presidents are supposed to debate, they represent their administration while giving State of the Union, they should represent the state behind closed doors meetings with other world leaders, they should inspire in times of need and be the face of the administration and above all else they should provide legitimacy for the government they represent, as they are the person that people get to vote for as opposed to their PR managers or analysts.
This take that person of POTUS is just unimportant position and that a corpse remotely controlled by unnamed staffers could do as good of a job, and that people really should just vote opaque party machinery and believe in the best is absolutely surreal to me. If the politicians can no longer be bothered to even pretend that they care, the legitimacy of the power is gone. It is incredibly dangerous direction imho.
SlowBoy
1yr ago
Reagan's senility has been greatly exaggerated with time. It all comes down to a few moments where aides caught him sundowning in private. McConnell, Pelosi and Biden have all had much more serious moments caught on camera, multiple times.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
1yr ago
Why did England lose the Hundred Years War?
Aside from Joan of Arc, their tough and vigorous king Henry V died and was replaced by his infant son, Henry VI. The whole system relied on having a strong king to keep the powerful nobles organized and on-mission (conquering France). A child can't do that. A regency council couldn't do that. Nor could a soft, weak, peaceloving king like Henry VI. And that was before he had a mental breakdown. Civil war broke out in the 1450s as various cliques and nobles struggled for power.
The US is not a medieval kingdom. But it does have powerful actors, the military-industrial complex, the intelligence agencies, the State department, the Democratic Party and so on. There are surely people who want to preserve the regency, so to speak. They want to act freely and advance their agendas while there's nobody in full control (or while the Presidency is ruled by the last person to brief or whoever's closest to Jill and Hunter). There are people who want their own candidate on the throne. You have factional strife and plotting, none of this is good for the country.
SlowBoy
1yr ago
All three of those cases involved covering up the details from an unknowing public. (Although in Reagan's case there wasn't too much to cover up.) FDR was widely-recognized as being too old to run in 1944, but a great deal of self-willed delusion about how old he really was kept people from thinking about it too hard. (There was also a fairly open process for choosing a new VP that gave a lot of people confidence, Truman had a small national profile but was popular in 1944 for investigating army contractor waste.)
That self-willed delusion about Biden's age just crumbled and could possibly never be restored.
Corvos
1yr ago
Second person plural ‘you’. The equivalent of ‘vous’ in French. In this case meaning ‘the people of Sweden’. Best used cautiously for exactly this reason, it risks offending.
It’s not royal, incidentally. The royal ‘we’ refers to using an explicitly plural pronoun to refer to a singular person (the king or queen), presumably on the basis that as King they embody all the people of their nation.
hanikrummihundursvin
1yr ago
Ah, that makes more sense, thank you.
07mk
1yr ago
The man who does evil accidentally has a non-evil goal and may be persuaded to pursue that goal through a different, non-evil path.
I'm highly skeptical of this notion. In practice, my experience is that the man who does evil accidentally in service of a non-evil goal, will inevitably double down on that evil as not actually evil and then call out even considering following some alternative non-evil path as the ultimate evil. On the other hand, the man who does evil in service of an evil goal can often be coerced into stopping his evil actions, by forcibly preventing his evil actions from accomplishing his evil goals. This is a different point than the one about the virtue of competence, but I think it's true nonetheless, that in terms of effect to the rest of society, someone doing evil deliberately is better than someone doing so accidentally.
WhiningCoil
1yr ago
The bet I would make is that come November Biden is the nominee, and the New York Times is full throatedly endorsing him. I won't bet on the specific events or causes between here and there, because the whole point of my post is that anything could happen, but that is the destination. I don't know how we get there, but there is where I am sure we are heading.
The_Nybbler
In the game of roller derby, women aren't just the opposing team; they're the ball.
1yr ago
That's fine about personal virtue. But if we're talking about candidates, I prefer the candidate who incompetently pursues the evil goal over the candidate who competently pursues it.
The_Nybbler
In the game of roller derby, women aren't just the opposing team; they're the ball.
1yr ago
Any hot-swap is going to leave some part of the Democratic party unsatisfied: they're a year behind in the game of buy-in and consensus.
Without the primary process, they don't need consensus. They need to not anger the black caucus (so they can keep the "get-out-the-vote" stuff in the cities), but what are the Democrats going to do? They're going to vote against Trump. So a new candidate without the problems for the squishies in the middle who WANT to vote against Trump (because that's the Thing to Do) but actually care about things like senility should be a winner for them.
The_Nybbler
In the game of roller derby, women aren't just the opposing team; they're the ball.
1yr ago
I suspect most pre-debate RFK Jr. supporters are COVID single-issue voters from the blue side of the aisle.
The_Nybbler
In the game of roller derby, women aren't just the opposing team; they're the ball.
1yr ago
I'd appreciate if you didn't restate what I wrote in a way that's infantile and inaccurate.
And I'd appreciate if you didn't post such infantile and inaccurate things as suggesting that Zionism was somehow responsible for the American response to 9/11, but I think we're both going to be disapppointed.
When Europe got hit with terror attacks it didn't go out bombing, it didn't condemn muslims. In fact, no amount of rape and murder even put a dent in their immigration rhetoric. That's what the west is today.
That's what Europe is today, a shadow of their old selves. The US is part of the West as well, and is not so accommodating.
From what I can gather its 50/50 on whether or not using force in Iraq was the right choice.
Remember Iraq didn't even do 9/11. So if this is true, 50% of Americans think using force to topple an innocent (at least of that particular crime) Islamic country was fine.
Corvos
1yr ago
When England led the world in coal and textile production, we proselytised for Free Trade. It became one of our great societal convictions, and as a country we became very rich.
Then the coal started running out and we didn’t have oil. Factories in other countries could take advantage of cheap labour and generous subsidies. And suddenly Free Trade meant globalisation hollowing out our economy.
Because the West is in many ways an ideological concept, and the US is an explicitly ideological state (reflected in the constitution), and because western countries have historically been rich and pleasant places to live, we have avoided asking ourselves if our ideologies caused our success or were contingent on it.
I don’t think we can assume that due process causes high trust societies (rather than vice versa), and that free markets produce prosperity. They may! But I’m not currently willing to take it as an axiom in the way that I was 20 years ago.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
1yr ago
Nobody is dragging you into anything, Chris.
Clearly you haven't met my in-laws...
An open Democratic convention strategy was always doomed. The people who say that an open convention would never work, that as Klein put it on his podcast it was Aaron Sorkin fanfiction, are correct.
...and yet here I am, defending Klein and the DNC.
That's utterly beside the point.
The Pod Save America guys and the NYT editorial page and Vox and all the rest were united on the point: vote blue no matter who, Trump is a threat to democracy so we need to prioritize "electability" and get behind Biden, if you say Biden is too old you're working for Trump. Kamala became VP largely for idpol reasons.
So you single out Klein (I'll reiterate, one of the only voices on the left who called for Biden to step down), and then give examples of three other organizations (unless 'NYT editorial page' is a stand-in for 'Ezra Klein wrote an editorial' or 'Ezra Klein works for the NYT and is guilty by association').
'Vote blue no matter who' - so what, people were supposed to abstain or vote for Trump in 2020? How is that in any way advantageous to the party?
'Trump is a threat to democracy so we need to prioritize "electability" and get behind Biden' - so in your hypothetical, it's a given that any candidate could have beaten Trump? Not to mention you assume that a handful of news organizations could coordinate to tank Biden's candidacy after he won nearly a dozen primaries on Super Tuesday to Bernie's four. He beat Warren 48% to 7% in South Carolina! The idea that Vox and the NYT editorial section have that much power is ludicrous. You, and most everybody else here, engage in these absurd contradictions where mainstream media is failing (go woke go broke, fox news viewership compared to CNN, clearly The People hate the product the media is selling) while simultaneously crediting them with godlike powers over elections and public opinion. You take it as a given that anyone holding a ballot on the left is some moronic, sheep-NPC milling about waiting for Ezra Klein to gently shepherd them towards the Uniparty's chosen puppet.
Not to mention that even if this had happened, I guarantee you there would be a firestorm in the media (conservative, liberal and the motte) about the subversion of democracy, the people wanted Biden and the party machine intervened to foist a woman/gay/black/Jew/communist/whatever candidate on the country, because idpol.
Biden was popular because people cared about electability more than anything else in 2020, and because he crushed the black vote. Who's more electable, the Jewish communist from Vermont, or the centrist former Vice-president in a popular (on the left) administration?
Part of the argument for Biden from the beginning, in the NYT opinion section et al, was that he could always be a one term president replaced by someone younger near the 2024 election. That turned out to be impossible, for all the reasons we're seeing now, chief among them Biden's choice in the matter.
And the fact that Biden is choosing to cling to power due to ego rather than follow in the footsteps of his betters and step aside when his time has come is entirely his own fault. I am disappointed in the president and his family, not Ezra Klein.
It was their choice in putting Biden on the ticket that I'm criticizing, not endorsing Bernie as an alternative.
Whose choice, the voters? Are you even confident that Klein was shilling for Biden prior to his wins on Super Tuesday? The list of episodes of his podcast has two episodes on Biden after Super Tuesday, after which Biden already had a commanding lead of the field. Perhaps his coverage of the debate on January 16th was slanted towards Biden, I don't know, but that's a pretty deep cut to be holding him responsible for. Or do you think he should have been putting out attack pieces on Biden for being too old after he was the frontrunner?
It's easy to act smart and opine on how glaringly stupid the establishment is with the benefit of hindsight. Actually running a newspaper, or a political party, or a company is orders of magnitude harder.
Tanista
1yr ago
We also just have more video and it just lives for longer. Anyone can find it.
If anything it's a wonder it's gone on this long
IGI-111
God was a dream of good government.
1yr ago
Understandable, but of course, Socrates, Confucius and other classical philosophers of virtue and natural law consider public virtue an extension of personal virtue.
Not to wallow in contrarianism but I think there is also a legit argument for wishing your enemies to be somewhat competent in general in that competence is predictable. Idiots can throw a wrench into the best of plans and ruin not just what they seek to ruin.
In the particular circumstance of democracy where you know power will be shared with your enemies at some point in the near future, you should want for this minimum out of mere pragmatism. It is a risk to all of us that the nominal head of the most powerful army in the world is mentally incapable.
And I understand none of this applies if you wish to see the end of the United States as we know it. In some sense the actual accelerationist argument is that it is good Biden is so obviously incapable, because it shows everyone how power actually works in the American regime and lets all decide what to do about it instead of continuing to play act at republicanism.
The reason is that a quota to get elected is 14.3%. This is the smallest number that ensures that only 6 people can win, much like how in a single member election 50%+1 is the smallest number than ensures only one person can win.
So straight off the primaries you have 5 senators elected on full quotas. 2 Labor, 2 Liberal 1 Green. There's one seat left.
Once you take 2 quotas away from Labor and the Liberals they are left with 5.9% and 3.1% respectively. There's a bunch of small parties as well, the biggest being One Nation on 3.5%. So Payman has a clear lead here. But none of these parties are close to 14.3% so they start getting knocked out, starting with the smallest ones, and their votes get reallocated to their next preference.
If the preferences flowed strongly to the Liberals or to One Nation, they might have been able to overtake the lead that Payman had. But they didn't, and she ended up beating the One Nation candidate by 23,490 votes.
Now of course while this is the way that the senate counts votes, you can theoretically use all sorts of other methods. But just looking at the primary votes, and knowing that you have to elect 6 people, it's hard to see a combination that makes more intuitive sense. 2 ALP 2 LIB 2 GRN? 2 ALP 3 LIB 1 GRN? 2 ALP 2 LIB 1 GRN 1 ON? All alternatives are pretty hard to justify.
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