Formerly /u/Zagorath on the alien site.
Any web page can be printed. Any print can be sent to a PDF generator. It might not look super pretty, but it’ll get the job done. I recommend making sure you’re on light mode before you print though, because dark mode has grey text instead of black.
It’s a joke about how Greenland often appears on maps like this as “no data”, along with extreme isolationist countries like North Korea and disputed areas like Western Sahara.
Greenland being “no data” is a running joke, like New Zealand not appearing on the map at all.
Yeah me too. Since when did Greenland have data?
Whoops, late reply. Sorry.
it removes the ability for the most depraved and power-hungry people to achieve high office with any frequency. The real problem with power is that it attracts evil people like moths to a flame
I genuinely believe a lot of people get into politics for the right reasons. Some of them might have bad ideologies, but they genuinely believe they can make a difference for good. But the political system works against this goal, exactly as you describe.
Sortition solves this problem entirely. I like the idea of maybe just using it to select 3 candidates. That way the voters can hopefully prevent the real crazies from winning office, if one happens to have their lot drawn
To me, sortition works best in situations where there isn’t just a single person. You don’t do sortition for president, you do it for a council, a parliament, an inquiry, a board, or, obviously, a jury. That, by its very nature, prevents the one crazy from taking charge and causing havoc.
I do think there are some issues with sortition when it comes to providing actual leadership. It’s a great approach to figure out what policies to go for, but who does foreign diplomacy? Who meets leaders of other countries? Who makes hard in-the-moment decisions in times of war? In some circumstances, there is an actual advantage to people with experience being at the highest rungs of politics. I’m sure there would be a way to deal with that in sortition, but it’s at least worth considering.
I unironically really like the idea of sortition. I’m not convinced it could or should make up the totality of all governance, but for at least broad strokes/high level decisionmaking I think a group of random people given access to a variety of expert opinions and the resources to help consult more broadly could come up with something that is genuinely a good outcome. I’d especially like to see it tried out at the local level, around things like development approvals/zoning laws, street design, locations of parks, libraries, and other public facilities, and the other important work done by councils. I believe the power of local people making decisions about their local community would be a really powerful way to get around NIMBYs.
It’s definitely not a complete scam tech, and it will likely have its place. It’s just not especially feasible at the same scale that battery electrics are.
It is big tech. It’s just less big tech than Xitter and Facebook. And it at least kinda-sorta has some vague federation-like design. And it’s a “public benefit corporation”, which doesn’t mean much because it’s still for-profit, but it at least means they’re allowed to not put profit ahead of public good, unlike normal for-profit companies. Not as good as Mastodon by far, with its true federation and true not-for-profit status in the guiding entity, but it’s not nothing.
I’m not particularly surprised about China. They’re making big advances in this area. Their continued growth in carbon emissions is alongside growth in renewables because their total energy usage is growing insanely fast.
With cars specifically, think about cars you’ve seen on the road here in Australia. Of the EVs, where have you seen them from? Apart from Teslas, the vast majority I’ve seen have been either Chinese or Korean.
As an Australian I don’t find this beautiful at all 😠 We only have a single tiny territory (our equivalent of America’s DC) with any phase out plans. Our government is just so incredibly beholden to fossil fuel interests. It’s incredibly frustrating.
But Japan is one that surprises me, considering how slow their domestic industry has been to adopt electric cars compared to China and Korea. I thought they were going in on hydrogen, despite it not really making serious progress.
(Although an obligatory [email protected] and reminder that even EVs are terrible for the environment and are much worse societally than public transport and bikes.)
The way overhangs are handled is one of the key differences between Germany and New Zealand, as I understand it. New Zealand makes no effort to level its parliament, and simply accepts overhangs as a distortion of the pure proportionality. I like the simplicity of it, but for fairness I think Germany’s system is probably better. The new system is almost like the inverse of how I suggested party seats should work, which I quite like.
One thing I don’t particularly like is the 5% minimum both countries use. It’s not unreasonable to have a minimum I think, but it’s unfortunate for all the voters whose vote is essentially wasted because they didn’t support a popular enough party. It’s a less severe version of the problem FPTP has, IMO. Over 13% of voters had their vote completely wasted in last weekend’s election. It’d be nice if there was, like, a preferential system, where if your first choice of party doesn’t get 5%, it can go to another party of your choice instead. BSW voters, for example, might have chosen to give their vote to Linke, and FDP voters to Union. So the end result would have been:
I’ve also often been curious how it would work if the local seats were elected not by FPTP but by IRV. Would that have a positive or negative effect on the representation, or not really have much effect at all? I don’t think any place has done it, and I don’t even know if anyone has seriously sat down and theory-crafted it.
A little disappointing that Bluesky is on there as well, but pretty awesome other than that. And I guess even Bluesky is probably better than Threads, and definitely better than Xitter.
I’m particularly glad to see Pixelfed as the only Instagram alternative, because it’s a great space that could use more support.
Ah thanks, that’s some really useful context.
Foreign policy they’re pro Israel
Ohh wow. Ooof. I had assumed they’d be pretty similar to the Australian Greens. I don’t know why exactly I assumed that, given I know for a fact the UK Greens and US Greens are both much less left, but that was the assumption I made. Shame it’s not true, especially if they end up being part of the governing coalition after this election.
I actually really like it as a system. Though I prefer a version where instead of using a party list you use the “nearest loser” to decide who fills the proportional seats. It or STV (though preferably on a slightly larger scale than how Australia currently uses it in our Senate—electing 10–20 representatives per electorate rather than our 6) would be my favourite systems.
MMP, if we’re comparing it to a fully proportional system, has a few distinct advantages. Many but not all relate to it having a local representative. You might not know who yours is, but plenty of people do. Even if you don’t though, having one specific person be your primary contact with politics is useful when public pressure campaigns happen. It’s easier to say “write to your MP” than to say “write to a whole bunch of MPs. Which ones? I dunno, all of them I guess?” It also means you have a politician who is specifically supposed to help look after your area’s needs. Who can push for local infrastructure upgrades etc.
It also gives you the option of doing something other than party-list proportional representation. If you don’t do local representatives, the only feasible way to decide which MPs are elected by each party is for the party to decide. Which, IMO, I don’t like. If a party puts someone near the top of their list who is deeply unpopular, despite the party as a whole being popular, voters should be able to say “nah, not him”. With MMP, you can use a system like “nearest loser” where the people who get elected via the proportional system are the people who came closest to winning in their local seat, demonstrating that, out of the people who were not directly elected locally, they are at least the most popular in their electorate. I don’t believe either Germany or New Zealand actually do this, but it’s at least an option.
I’d say it’s more about the poorer areas wanting a change either with the afd or linke/bsw
Yeah thanks. That was sorta my initial guess, and I think it makes sense.
This split is also part of the reason for their gains in the West as more left leaning people who are hesitant to be associated with the old school communist now have a party.
Ah, that’s interesting. Where do the Greens sit in this? Are they not particularly left in Germany?
I don’t see what you mean
What I mean is that they’re in Leipzig and East Berlin, not Hamburg or Frankfurt or Munich, or even West Berlin. So I was wondering why it would be that they only seem to be having success in former East Germany, which is very similar to AfD. I was wondering if any Germans had an understanding of why that might be, and perhaps if there are lessons that leftist parties elsewhere could take from that.
Centre left, as in to the right of the Greens?
I’m just trying to figure out why it might be that Linke and AfD seem more or less to share areas, while the Union, SPD, and Greens take the rest. Why Linke and not Green, for example?
Can any Germans tell me what the deal is with the Left? It looks like the only seats they’re winning are in areas you’d think of as AfD areas. Is it just a matter of the poorer more overlooked areas becoming polarised? Or are the German Left kinda tankish?
Nope. MMP.
I also want to know this.