Expat Perspectives on Politics · 8:53pm Nov 8th, 2016
One of the difficulties I face when judging US politics is that the commentary I receive has a certain imbalance, as a lot comes from certain friends who are expat Americans living in the UK. Domestic politics always looks a bit different from 7000km away. For some reason this group is disproportionately vocal in their criticism of the US. Listening to them you would form the impression that their homeland is a dangerously intolerant gun-filled cesspit, ruled by incompetent and corrupt authorities. They would have me believe that they were lucky to be able to escape such a mad country (shortly after the 2000 presidential election), and move to this great European bastion of international friendship and sound diplomatic policy.
But surely, I say, it can’t be like that. America is an awesome place. The country with a real positive can-do spirit, where people have the confidence to follow their dreams. They invest really generously in science and technology (more per GDP than Europe). You have literature, films, art and computer games second to none. A civil rights movement which changed the world. You led the way in equal treatment of communities and spread values of tolerance around the world. Yours is a country enthused with a very genuine friendliness. And of course, it is the place which created our favourite cute cartoon ponies.
Then I listen to them rant on about the creationists, the government-approved use of torture, and climate change deniers. But surely, I reply, that is no more. The recent legal cases have gone against the intelligent-design lobby. The stories of waterboarding are a thing of the past. The US has now ratified the Paris agreement, and now we can fight the risks facing our planet together in a rational scientific way. Surely the intelligent and compassionate US electorate would never chose to undo this? They would never support a candidate who had insulted people around the world? Who endorsed torture? They would never elect a president who considered global warming a conspiracy theory? Surely having seen what has happened to Britain, they would never vote to make America a global laughingstock?
Tomorrow we will know.
Pray for us little Americans. Here's hoping my vote goes to keeping a particularly [BLEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEP*Princess Celestia frowns at this abuse of language, it has been censored to protect the ears of one Flurry Heart. She does not need to learn anymore naughty words. Like skelumpkrick.] with a side order of haybacon strips on a flan of rusty nails!!!
Night of the final day: 12 hours remain.
Well, like any representative republic, there's a variety of views, and not all of them are gonna make sense. I understand ya'll have the Raving Mad Looney Party. We have Vermin Supreme.
On a more serious note, climate change deniers still have significant sway in congress (though they may not be a majority), creationists get pandered to a lot, and government-sanctioned torture still happens, though it's not official policy anymore. Consider Pvt. Manning, who has been psychologically tortured during most of their stay in military prison, and who was physically tortured when awaiting trial. The nice thing about the US system is the President does have the power to pardon people in that sort of circumstance... but politics being politics won't do so near an election.
I'd also like to point out that creationists are not all intelligent designists, and vice/versa. It's a Venn diagram kinda thing. Some creationists are 'last thursday'-ists, who hold that the earth was created 6000-ish years ago in such a way that it looks old. I'm not judging their beliefs, but it's not falsifiable and thus not science (ergo, it doesn't really belong in a science course. A philosophy or religion course, sure.). Conversely, plenty of intelligent designists actually believe in a form of evolution.
Our general counter to people putting us against England is Brexit these days. XP
My general problem with US politics is the 2 party stranglehold. It's set up to make it nearly impossible for a third party to break in. Actually, the system is explicitely set up to keep there from being more than 3 viable parties (if no candidate for president gets a majority, the 'tie-breaker' is only between the top 3), but the 2 main parties have no real interest in letting a 3rd gain power. That's a place where I do think ya'll have a leg up. 'Course, ya'll also still have a monarch, and I'm very much a republican in the traditional sense of being pro-representative government and anti-monarch, even if she doesn't have much real power.
"..For some reason this group is disproportionately vocal in their criticism of the US..."
If they're still US citizens, perhaps its because they pay their taxes in the country they're living in, then the US wants its percentage too, even if they've been out of the country for *years*
As for gun-filled, I believe the neighborhood I live in has an average Gun:Human ratio of around 3:1. It's also almost crime-free, and you can leave your car unlocked without worrying about your radio getting ripped out of the dash at 3AM. I believe there may be a relationship between those two...
4290679
The monarchy is an indefensible institution, looking at the political theory. But on the scale of faults in the British Constitution, her Majesty is pretty insignificant. If you want to fix our flawed political system, higher priorities would be replacing the House of Lords with an elected upper chamber, and replacing the 'first past the post' voting with some form of proportional representation. But I doubt that either of those will be on any agenda for a long time. Dealing with the fallout from Brexit will take long enough.
4290735
When staying in Illinois, in a neighbourhood with a similarly low crime rate, I was struck by how local shops would leave merchandise (buckets of flowers and such like) outside overnight. That would never happen at home. I did wonder if guns had something to do with it. But somehow, I don't think a 3:1 firearm:people ratio would work in London...
4290745 Fair enough. I think a Single Transferable Vote system would be better both in the UK and in the US on the state level. Interesting point on that in the US is for the House of Representatives and the Electoral College, the states could do that on their own. If one did it randomly and it worked, others might follow: that's the beauty of the state system. However, for that to happen, it would require state legislators to not act in the immediate interests of the national party, and most state legislators want to go into national office, so there's really no incentive for them to change the system that allows them to 'gerrymander' districts as the party in power in the state likes.
4290735
Maybe.
Gun:human ratio around here is about 1:200 and the neighbourhood is just as free of car radio thefts. But then this is central Denmark, so I guess you can't compare the two situations all that well.
Welp. Speaking as the opposite - a British expat living in the US, Kansas to be specific, if such is the correct term for "married an American, never plan on leaving" - here's my perception of the situation on the ground.
About 80% of everyone fits that genuine friendliness stereotype, and manages to get along with each other quite happily despite their various differences, which does, indeed, make it a pretty awesome place to live. I like the atmosphere and the people around here an awful lot...
...but then, there are 10% over on the left and 10% over on the right who are loud, screaming, appalling nutballs who live to pick fights with each other. Basically, every stereotype each one has of the other is mostly true: we have would-be theocratic Dominionists demanding a 1984-esque security state and going to war with everyone insufficiently pale engaged in eternal tedious battle with neo-Marxist Social Justice Warriors who firmly believe that Harrison Bergeron was an instruction manual. (This is probably a consequence of our mostly unlimited freedom of expression - all the nuts come out of the woodwork. Which is probably a good thing on net, even if sometimes embarrassing that we always end up represented by our worst stereotypes.) And since they're the loudest screamers, the less obviously insane moderate fringes of these fringes tend to pass the government back and forth between themselves depending on the moral panic of the day.
But if you can manage to stay out of politics and just roll your eyes at the loonies, everything's shiny. Not to fret.
The nuts never left, they just got slowy outpopilated over time.
Mimetic viruses die hard, and fight dirty.
You dont know who is a carrier until they bite.
4290679
Personally, I'm inclined to suspect the two-party system is less an outright intent of the system and more a result of that simply being the most stable state. If a major third party does show up, one of the three is going to vanish pretty quickly either as a result of two parties merging or one of the parties getting undercut by the other(s) modifying their positions to attract its voters away. I'm not sure there's any plausible method of preventing that long-term other than explicitly forcing people to maintain the extra parties, which seems... inconsistent with democratic ideals, shall we say.
Of course, that does at least mean supporting third parties isn't totally useless, since the undercutting process involves the vote-capturing party taking on some of the undercut party's characteristics. Not necessarily as good as having an extra choice, but potentially better than nothing.
4290735
4290810
It still might not be directly comparable, since there's a lot of variation in culture across the US, but I also grew up in an area with a very low gun:human ratio and very low crime. It's plausible that gun preponderance has some impact on crime rates, but if so, it seems pretty small compared to the other factors involved. (Which strikes me as making intuitive sense: people driven to crime by desperation or irrational thinking aren't going to let danger stop them. And of course, having more guns around makes it easier for criminals to re-equalize things by buying or stealing guns for their own use, at which point noncriminals with guns are at best just a little better off and noncriminals without guns are probably worse off.)
pineta i'm dying
please help
4291355 That's mostly true. It's a well-known theory called (and here I had to look things up) Duverger's Law: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duverger%27s_law
But it's more iron-clad in the US than even in the UK or Canada. Scroll further down in that article to see exceptions. I suspect without the specific set-up we have in the US, where for instance electoral votes in 48 states are plurality-takes-all, there would be at least a minor 3rd party showing. This is somewhat inevitable in the Senate, but proportional representation could be done in the House and Electoral College purely on state initiative, and once it's not plurality-takes-all, Duverger's law no longer applies. Though the senate system would still favor 2 parties, you might at least get the minor parties such as seen in the UK and Canada.
Yeah, I'm rather pie-in-the-sky dreaming here, but it's a thought.
4291355 True, it's more a cultural thing. After all, you could not simply give every member of a violent community a firearm and expect violence to decrease. You'd probably just get a giant firefight, with all the wrong people getting shot.
Our neighborhood is made up of people who talk to each other, call the police when they see suspicious activity, come over and knock on the door when a 90 year old neighbor doesn't pick up their newspaper from the driveway, let the kids play all across the yards, put loose dogs in the back yard and call around to see if they can find the owner, and so on. Church attendance is probably around 80%, even though there's no real 'clustering' of any particular religion, since we have around a dozen churches in our small town. (Although, down Highway-24 in St. Marys, the whole town is about 80% Catholic due to the school there) The preponderance of guns is a symptom of the rural area at large, because hunting is a big thing. (Please, come visit Kansas and kill some deer. My wife has rammed two of them with her van, at a cost of $2500 each) Also, guns are treated more like cars than destructive weapons of violence. (During Thanksgiving out at our family farm, all of the kids (now 50 years old and up) go down to the creek for target practice with their 'toys' and more than one car hood is propped open with a couple of us looking down into the engine to see if we can figure out just what's rattling when the car goes at a particular speed)
Big toys for big boys. Five guns is not an armory, real men build their own AR-15 lower assembly, Bambi makes good jerky, and gun control means hitting your target.
4290679
My understanding of intelligent design, or at least my belief, is that everything was set up to happen the way it did. And that a little extra help was made in ensuring needed mutations occurred, etc. I see the science, but I firmly believe there is always going to be something we don't understand. The more we do learn, the more we find we have to learn...
4292615
I like neighborhoods like that. Well, minus the playing with guns part, but if it's all done very safely, then it's ok by me. I get the need to hunt deer, even if personally I'd never hunt (unless it was the only way to survive, and even then I probably wouldn't like it). My personal preference would be to rebuild the damaged ecosystem to allow it to control its populations properly, but so many people are irrationally terrified of wolves and other larger predators that reintroducing them isn't going to happen very thoroughly very soon, and in the absence of predators--caused by humans--humans are basically required to hunt deer to help stabilize the population. It's kind of pathetic, the environmental imbalances we cause without even understanding...
4304806 "....My personal preference would be to rebuild the damaged ecosystem to allow it to control its populations properly, but so many people are irrationally terrified of wolves and other larger predators ..."
Yeah.... No. The ecosystem I live in used to be buffalo and wolves (lots and a few). Buffalo carry brucellosis, wolves spread it, cows catch it and die or it kills the calf and spreads to humans. The list of things wildlife carry that can infect humans is very, very long, quite deadly, and one of the reasons both wolves and wild bison are kept away from cows/sheep/goats/etc. The reason you have deer 'overpopulation' is not just lack of predation, it is a deliberate effort by many states to lure in hunters from other states. Hunters who buy licenses from the State, buy gear, buy beer, buy food, stay in hotels, etc... If *commercial* hunting is permitted with the intent to lower the population of a species (see hunting Feral Hogs around the impact range at Ft. Riley, which is pretty much a human-free zone), there's no problem keeping the numbers in check, and it provides venison for sale. Still, the State doesn't get as much money that way, so every year, we have to be on the constant lookout for deer bounding across the roads, which costs the inhabitants of the state much more in auto repairs than the State pulls in due to taxation. (grumble, grumble)
4304906
I'm not familiar with the diseases you mentioned. I live in the Northeastern U.S., and with the forests we have here, the deer populations would be much more stable with wolves. Have you heard how reintroducing wolves affected Yellowstone Park? It's incredibly impressive. Maine has actually reintroduced wolves, though I don't know very much about the situation. I can understand keeping illnesses at bay, but we as humans tend to destabilize nature radically and a lot of things are thrown out of whack to fix one thing. No, it's not all necessarily bad, but it does have unexpected consequences. We need to balance out our effects on nature and try not to wildly disrupt it.
4304795 That's the more science-oriented take on it, or at least close enough. You're missing one key point, though, in that while some systems are inherently unpredictable by humans, under certain interpretations of quantum mechanics (though they're not exactly the mainly used ones), the universe is, in the absence of sapient beings anyway, completely deterministic. Thus there is no NEED to micro-manage with mutations or whatnot: once it's set into motion, as long as nothing interferes, it is in principle possible for an omniscient being to know exactly what will happen and when up until the point when sapient life emerges (and the determinists would say even then).
Even if quantum mechanics truly is random (and not just unpredictable), the set of possible outcomes is knowable. One theory (though not one much in vogue) even says the wave function won't collapse unless there's a being intelligent enough to observe it, so any universes without intelligent beings will never emerge in a sense. ...Yeah, QM is confusing.
The less science-oriented form of intelligent design (which I believe is what earlier commentators were referring to) is really just creationism over time, with God micro-managing the emergence of new creatures.