• wpb@lemmy.world
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      1 day ago

      Sadly, similar stuff does happen even when you have more parties.

      In my opinion, what’s happening here is that the policies of the parties do not align with the opinions of the public. If you care about not doing a genocide, there wasn’t a candidate to vote for last cycle. If you care about universal health care, there wasn’t a candidate to vote for. And so on.

      And you can measure this. Research has been carried out into the congruence between policy and public opinion in the US. For example, in the paper Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens, it was found that the impact the average American (as a group) has on policy is miniscule compared to the influence of economic elites. You and I don’t benefit from invading Iran, but the owning class sure does, so that’s what we do. All this is independent of who’s in charge.

      And so now you might rightly theorize that since there are only two parties, the democrats can fully cater to billionaires, as long as they’re less bad than the republicans. And as time goes on they move further and further right, since they really don’t have to care about voters, because the only other party consists of actual demons, and people will vote for them anyway.

      However, you see this effect (the wealthy having a disproportionate amount of influence on policy) in pluralistic systems as well. Norway has about 9 major political parties, yet the study Affluence and Influence in a Social Democracy finds that here too, the rich have an outsized influence. Similar studies exist for other western European countries, most of which (if not all) have more than two major parties.

      So I don’t think the root of the problem is the two party system (although I’m sure it doesn’t help).

    • TrickDacy@lemmy.world
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      1 day ago

      Yes but more importantly this is what happens when people are so ignorant and uneducated that someone like Trump makes it past a humiliating response to a social media post about him considering a run for president. Then he is a horrible president, killing thousands of citizens through negligence, commits an insurrection, and voters are like “I dunno he’s not that bad. He’s male at least”

      • ltxrtquq@lemmy.ml
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        1 day ago

        More importantly, he should have been charged for all the crimes he did in his first term. Shouldn’t have even been able to run from his prison cell, or at least not between all the court cases he’d need to be worrying about.

          • ltxrtquq@lemmy.ml
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            1 day ago

            Correct me if I’m wrong, but I believe that happened after Trump was reelected, meaning there were four whole years of Biden as president where it never happened.

            • Lawnman23@piefed.social
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              1 day ago

              Because he didn’t lose the 2020 election remember, Biden stole it. So therefore he never left office and was covered.

              /s

              Truthfully, I’m not sure why it seemed to be retroactively applied to his first term. Reality is probably because its all fucking corrupt so of course it did.

    • 8oow3291d@feddit.dk
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      2 days ago

      So you have an average normal politician running against literally Hitler. And people vote for Hitler.

      And you don’t think the problem is the people voting for literally Hitler?

      Don’t get me wrong, the US voting system is also bad. But that is really, really not the main problem here…

        • 8oow3291d@feddit.dk
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          10 hours ago

          What do you mean? Hitler committed genocide, so Hitler was given the weapons. And Hitler was given the authority for those weapons through a democratic process, by way of average normal politicians (mainly Paul von Hindenburg, specifically).

          • CityPop@lemmy.today
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            3 hours ago

            I mean Netanyahu is Hitler and they were giving him weapons. That’s not what normal does.

      • LittleBorat3@lemmy.world
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        1 day ago

        If you had this system in Europe you would not like the results. Best outcome: 200 years of middle of the road conservative shit Christian party

      • FooBarrington@lemmy.world
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        2 days ago

        IMO the bigger problem is that the “average normal politician” managed to be so bad that voters didn’t feel motivated to vote against Hitler.

        This should have been a slam dunk - and there were literally a number of easy ways to motivate voters, like promising to stop the ongoing genocide the country is funding. But when given the choice between “letting Hitler win” and “stopping the genocide”, Harris and the entire DNC leadership chose to let Hitler win.

        Isn’t that deeply fucked up?

        • TrickDacy@lemmy.world
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          1 day ago

          It was a slam dunk. I still know trump supporters who think everything negative said about him is a lie. Why did this never happen in human history before (an unrelenting smear campaign running for over a decade against an innocent man)? Meh I dunno something about woke.

              • FooBarrington@lemmy.world
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                1 day ago

                She was! But since a rather large portion of the US public seems to have 0-3 neurons, it’s not enough to be the obvious choice for everyone else.

                Harris and her campaign knew this. They had polls clearly showing that she’s so bad at motivating voters that she’ll likely lose.

                • theolodis@feddit.org
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                  21 hours ago

                  No, it was the voters fault that Harris decided to fish for the republican vote by shifting more to the right in her rhetoric. Those stupid people should have voted blue no matter who!

                  empty meme of the guy that puts a branch in the wheel of his bicycle and is laying on the ground holding his leg in the third panel

        • 8oow3291d@feddit.dk
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          2 days ago

          Israels actions now do qualify as genocide - because Trump told Bibi to do whatever. But didn’t actually qualify as genocide back when Biden was President.

          Remember that the current Gaza crisis started when Gaza did a genocide against Israel, on October 7. Israel certainly had a legal right to enter Gaza, to get their hostages back.

          • Cassa@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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            1 day ago

            your whole comment is provably false. claming the attack on the 7. was a genocide is laughably false.

            do not forget that Israel has made gaza a concentration camp long before that time.

            • 8oow3291d@feddit.dk
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              1 day ago

              claming the attack on the 7. was a genocide is laughably false.

              I linked a source (Well, a wiki article which itself link sources). You spew bullshit.

                • Aqarius@lemmy.world
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                  1 day ago

                  It’s not insane, it’s a rhetorical tactic. “OK, fine, Israel is doing a genocide - but they did it to us first!”.

              • Ignotum@lemmy.world
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                1 day ago

                A wiki page listing people who have called it a genocide doesn’t exactly prove that it was one, and regardless the israelis have long been oppressing the people in gaza, including illegally capturing land by force for many years, so them striking back would be less a genocide and more an act of war, a warcrime in this instance as they largely attacked civillians, but so does israel which is why both the leader of hamas and israel are wanted war criminals

                It’s like saying the slave revolts in ancient rome were genocides because the slaves were attacking romans, who else were they supposed to attack? And could you really blame them for striking back at their oppressors?

                Ideally it would have been resolved peacefully but the international community turned a blind eye to what was happening, and israel sure as hell wasn’t about to stop out of the kindness of their heart

              • Cassa@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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                1 day ago

                you linked the wikipedia article. it’s allegations. if you had read it you would first notice that the allegations are about “intent” and genocide. As the power imbalance is laughably.

                The empire long called the rebellion murderes with genocidal intent. When the rebellion hit what they could, the empire killed their own to avoid hostages. The empire then told all that the rebels had murdered babies and made up other lies to make the rebels look bad.

                • 8oow3291d@feddit.dk
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                  1 day ago

                  it’s allegations.

                  So are the current allegations against Israel, right?

                  To be more than allegations, there would have to be a ICC judgement in either case, I think?

                  As the power imbalance is laughably.

                  Just because you are laughably weak, it does not mean you can’t do evil.