US Puppet Democracy
June 13, 2016 at 12:01 am
(This post was last modified: June 13, 2016 at 12:22 am by Aractus.)
It's absolutely astonishing to me that a country that claims to be democratic is unashamed to be overtly two-party, and to run "presidential primaries" where the results can be tallied before people even have a chance to cast their vote. In fact, if they could pass their votes at the same time, we also know there'd be many more voters as well. Frankly I think it's fucking disgusting and the idea that a bitch like Hilary Clinton announces she's the presumptive nominee before many voters have even been given the chance to vote on it is absolutely absurd - to say the least. In fact I would say anyone who values democracy should find that statement highly offensive. How is it democratic that people haven't been able to vote - and where they have they haven't been able to vote equally (due to candidates dropping out and different standards State-by-State) - and yet a decision has been made?
I think the whole idea of presidential nominations is absurd anyway, so let's move on to the meat on the bone - the election. In Australia as you know we have preferential voting, and long long overdue reforms were just passed in time for this election. The reforms mean that parties can no longer nominate a ticket for people to vote on - which is a huge improvement for democracy as I'll explain.
Imagine, as here in the ACT, that there are 12 parties (there's actually 13 but two are running their candidates together) on the Senate ballot paper and that there are two senate seats. The major parties and the Greens make up three of those 12 parties, leaving 9 remaining minor parties or independents. Now it's the independents I want to focus on for a moment. Under the previous rules you could vote "1" above the line for the party of your choice, and use their party's ballot paper, and more than 90% of people choose to vote that way. Not me, I've never voted that way because I don't know where my vote would go after my first preference. So I've always numbered all the boxes below the line, that way I know who I'm voting for. Now this presents a massive problem in particular for Independents, and for democracy. Independents still have to produce a party ticket, and that means that ultimately they still have to put either Labor ahead of Liberal and Green, or Liberal ahead of Labor and Green, or Green ahead of Labor and Liberal. In other words, they cannot be truly independent because they have to nominate where their party preferences go for the ~95% of voters who put a 1 above the line for them. Now this is a huge problem for voters because as we saw in the last election, all the minor parties sent their preferences to each other and the major parties last - so you could vote for a far-right neo-liberal conservative, and end up with your vote helping elect a Green. Or you could have voted Green and ended up with your vote helping elect Jacqui Lambie, or worse, David Leyonhjelm:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-n_8r0LU1i0
Now to compound these problems, there are other things that confuse voters when they go to vote anyway. For example the "Liberal Democrat" David Leyonhjelm got elected partly because of preferences flowing to him from the minor parties (including the Greens!!), but also because many voters wrongly perceived his party to be "Liberal" due to the name he chose for his party. Another one is Health Australia Party, which drew the first position on one of the NSW ballot papers. Imagine a voter, presented with oh let's say... 42 different parties on it (which is what that particular Senate paper has and you can view it here), with "Health Australia" in the number 1 spot - they might be inclined to vote for them just on instinct, without knowing their policies. They don't follow evidence-based practise, they're lunatics. They claim for example right at the start of their policy document that "Australia is experiencing an epidemic of chronic disease which is rarely discussed by health officials or in the media" - absolute rubbish, it's discussed ALL THE TIME! They claim that the correct solution is to "make people healthier" instead of giving them pharmaceuticals - again that's akin to victim-blaming, and we do both. We have to manage people who are already suffering a NCD and do what we can to prevent future incidences. You can't just do one or the other they're both important. They also have a policy that "natural medicine should be placed on an equal footing with pharmaceutical medicine" - and again, it's a waste of taxpayer money to subsidised medicines that aren't proven to be effective. If you want them on an equal footing, do the scientific research and have them placed on the PBS - that's the process, it's very simple. Natural medicine is fully allowed to do that if they want. They claim water fluoridation is toxic (which is not what the evidence would suggest, but there's limited high quality evidence on it as well, just as there's limited high quality evidence that would prove that seatbelts save lives - you just can't do randomised controlled trials that involve seatbelts on populations, and you can't do RCTs with water fluoridation either, it's impossible). They've also been labelled anti-vaccination, but I haven't seen anything from them that claims that - they simply oppose the "no jab no pay" legislation as do I and I'm not anti-vaccination.
So let's come back to this circus in the USA. There is a reason why preferences are absolutely essential to a functioning democracy. Let's imagine a ballot paper for the lower house with 8 candidates. ALP and Liberal (the major parties) represent the centre-right. The Greens represent the far Left. Let's imagine the 5 other parties all represent the far-left as well. That gives voters a clear choice between two political persuasions: centre-right or far-left. Next we'll imagine that 70% of voters decide to vote for a far-left party while 30% vote for the centre-right candidates. Statistically speaking the centre-right candidates would each receive about 15% of the vote and each of the far-left candidates would get about 11.7% of the vote. Thus with no preferences it is more likely that the centre-right candidate is elected because the larger number of far-left candidates has split the vote. In other words it leads to this problem:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r9rGX91rq5I
WA was the first place in the world to introduce preferential voting (actually, no it was Queensland in 1892 - it wasn't full preferential, but it was partial, WA was the first with full preferential voting), and Australia was the first nation-state to do so also. So it is an Australian invention, and I think that goes a long way as to why the UK and USA stick by the centuries old and less democratic model of "first past the post". Of course there are those batshit crazy people that actually think we'd be better off with the "divide and conquer" nature of first-past-the-post, but they're pretty rare in actual politics. But in the USA the Republican Party and the Democrat Party both reject supporting a preferential voting system.
There are a couple of different words for what the USA is: It could be a Oligarchy, or a Corporatocracy, or even a Kleptocracy depending on your point of view. But what it's not is a democracy.
https://youtu.be/5tu32CCA_Ig
The banks are a perfect example, and even Australia is terrible when it comes to this. Banks can quite literally mint money just by typing in numbers to people's bank accounts because the government back the account credit as if it were real money. There are of course regulations in place - but enforcing those would be impossible whilst also guaranteeing account credits as real money. To put it another way, the banks are in complete control of the monetary system - hence why moves by the RBA do next to nothing - hence Corporatocracy.
I think the whole idea of presidential nominations is absurd anyway, so let's move on to the meat on the bone - the election. In Australia as you know we have preferential voting, and long long overdue reforms were just passed in time for this election. The reforms mean that parties can no longer nominate a ticket for people to vote on - which is a huge improvement for democracy as I'll explain.
Imagine, as here in the ACT, that there are 12 parties (there's actually 13 but two are running their candidates together) on the Senate ballot paper and that there are two senate seats. The major parties and the Greens make up three of those 12 parties, leaving 9 remaining minor parties or independents. Now it's the independents I want to focus on for a moment. Under the previous rules you could vote "1" above the line for the party of your choice, and use their party's ballot paper, and more than 90% of people choose to vote that way. Not me, I've never voted that way because I don't know where my vote would go after my first preference. So I've always numbered all the boxes below the line, that way I know who I'm voting for. Now this presents a massive problem in particular for Independents, and for democracy. Independents still have to produce a party ticket, and that means that ultimately they still have to put either Labor ahead of Liberal and Green, or Liberal ahead of Labor and Green, or Green ahead of Labor and Liberal. In other words, they cannot be truly independent because they have to nominate where their party preferences go for the ~95% of voters who put a 1 above the line for them. Now this is a huge problem for voters because as we saw in the last election, all the minor parties sent their preferences to each other and the major parties last - so you could vote for a far-right neo-liberal conservative, and end up with your vote helping elect a Green. Or you could have voted Green and ended up with your vote helping elect Jacqui Lambie, or worse, David Leyonhjelm:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-n_8r0LU1i0
Now to compound these problems, there are other things that confuse voters when they go to vote anyway. For example the "Liberal Democrat" David Leyonhjelm got elected partly because of preferences flowing to him from the minor parties (including the Greens!!), but also because many voters wrongly perceived his party to be "Liberal" due to the name he chose for his party. Another one is Health Australia Party, which drew the first position on one of the NSW ballot papers. Imagine a voter, presented with oh let's say... 42 different parties on it (which is what that particular Senate paper has and you can view it here), with "Health Australia" in the number 1 spot - they might be inclined to vote for them just on instinct, without knowing their policies. They don't follow evidence-based practise, they're lunatics. They claim for example right at the start of their policy document that "Australia is experiencing an epidemic of chronic disease which is rarely discussed by health officials or in the media" - absolute rubbish, it's discussed ALL THE TIME! They claim that the correct solution is to "make people healthier" instead of giving them pharmaceuticals - again that's akin to victim-blaming, and we do both. We have to manage people who are already suffering a NCD and do what we can to prevent future incidences. You can't just do one or the other they're both important. They also have a policy that "natural medicine should be placed on an equal footing with pharmaceutical medicine" - and again, it's a waste of taxpayer money to subsidised medicines that aren't proven to be effective. If you want them on an equal footing, do the scientific research and have them placed on the PBS - that's the process, it's very simple. Natural medicine is fully allowed to do that if they want. They claim water fluoridation is toxic (which is not what the evidence would suggest, but there's limited high quality evidence on it as well, just as there's limited high quality evidence that would prove that seatbelts save lives - you just can't do randomised controlled trials that involve seatbelts on populations, and you can't do RCTs with water fluoridation either, it's impossible). They've also been labelled anti-vaccination, but I haven't seen anything from them that claims that - they simply oppose the "no jab no pay" legislation as do I and I'm not anti-vaccination.
So let's come back to this circus in the USA. There is a reason why preferences are absolutely essential to a functioning democracy. Let's imagine a ballot paper for the lower house with 8 candidates. ALP and Liberal (the major parties) represent the centre-right. The Greens represent the far Left. Let's imagine the 5 other parties all represent the far-left as well. That gives voters a clear choice between two political persuasions: centre-right or far-left. Next we'll imagine that 70% of voters decide to vote for a far-left party while 30% vote for the centre-right candidates. Statistically speaking the centre-right candidates would each receive about 15% of the vote and each of the far-left candidates would get about 11.7% of the vote. Thus with no preferences it is more likely that the centre-right candidate is elected because the larger number of far-left candidates has split the vote. In other words it leads to this problem:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r9rGX91rq5I
WA was the first place in the world to introduce preferential voting (actually, no it was Queensland in 1892 - it wasn't full preferential, but it was partial, WA was the first with full preferential voting), and Australia was the first nation-state to do so also. So it is an Australian invention, and I think that goes a long way as to why the UK and USA stick by the centuries old and less democratic model of "first past the post". Of course there are those batshit crazy people that actually think we'd be better off with the "divide and conquer" nature of first-past-the-post, but they're pretty rare in actual politics. But in the USA the Republican Party and the Democrat Party both reject supporting a preferential voting system.
There are a couple of different words for what the USA is: It could be a Oligarchy, or a Corporatocracy, or even a Kleptocracy depending on your point of view. But what it's not is a democracy.
https://youtu.be/5tu32CCA_Ig
The banks are a perfect example, and even Australia is terrible when it comes to this. Banks can quite literally mint money just by typing in numbers to people's bank accounts because the government back the account credit as if it were real money. There are of course regulations in place - but enforcing those would be impossible whilst also guaranteeing account credits as real money. To put it another way, the banks are in complete control of the monetary system - hence why moves by the RBA do next to nothing - hence Corporatocracy.
For Religion & Health see:[/b][/size] Williams & Sternthal. (2007). Spirituality, religion and health: Evidence and research directions. Med. J. Aust., 186(10), S47-S50. -LINK
The WIN/Gallup End of Year Survey 2013 found the US was perceived to be the greatest threat to world peace by a huge margin, with 24% of respondents fearful of the US followed by: 8% for Pakistan, and 6% for China. This was followed by 5% each for: Afghanistan, Iran, Israel, North Korea. -LINK
"That's disgusting. There were clean athletes out there that have had their whole careers ruined by people like Lance Armstrong who just bended thoughts to fit their circumstances. He didn't look up cheating because he wanted to stop, he wanted to justify what he was doing and to keep that continuing on." - Nicole Cooke
The WIN/Gallup End of Year Survey 2013 found the US was perceived to be the greatest threat to world peace by a huge margin, with 24% of respondents fearful of the US followed by: 8% for Pakistan, and 6% for China. This was followed by 5% each for: Afghanistan, Iran, Israel, North Korea. -LINK
"That's disgusting. There were clean athletes out there that have had their whole careers ruined by people like Lance Armstrong who just bended thoughts to fit their circumstances. He didn't look up cheating because he wanted to stop, he wanted to justify what he was doing and to keep that continuing on." - Nicole Cooke
