The government won’t allow you to get an abortion even if giving birth would kill you (p.449 - 503)
The government won’t let you buy condoms or plan b (p.449)
The government will give more free money to the ultra-rich and the largest corporations (p.691)
The government will not allow for workers to be protected at work (p.581)
The government will steal your social security (p.691)
The government will take away Medicare (p.449)
The government will not let you find affordable healthcare (p.449)
The government will refuse to help educate our children (p.319)
The government will give your tax money to private schools for christians (p.319)
The government will force public schools to become religious schools for christians (p.319)
The government will fire you for the color of your skin (p545 - 581)
The government will tell you what you’re allowed to think (p319)
The government will sell our land to be permanently destroyed (p417)
The government will sell the arctic to oil companies (p363)
Big business and oil will be allowed to do whatever they want without consequences (p.363)
The government will tell you what a family is supposed to look like. Anything else is a crime. (p.545 - 581)
The government will make us deaf/blind to attack by destroying the FBI and Homeland Security (p.133)
The government will build concentration camps to get rid of anyone deemed un-American (p.133)
If you’re born in the United States you are not automatically a citizen (p.133)
The government will make it legal for food to be poison (p.363 - 417)
Claims without a citation yet:
The government will not let you get a divorce without “proof” of wrongdoing
Your taxes will go up
The government will not let you retire
Drugs will cost more
The government will let your kids go hungry while they are forced to attend these schools
The government will tell you what you’re allowed to read and burn the rest
The government will freely kill citizens they disagree with
The government will attack single mothers because that’s not a “traditional” family
The government will order our active-duty military to attack us if we protest
The government will make being muslim on American soil a crime
The government will make sure all judges are more loyal to the party than they are to the country
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146 comments
As I intentionally filter out as much US politics as I can, this has come out of nowhere for me.
Australia has a couple of really simple things baked into its electoral system to resist something wildly unpopular like this from getting in power:
Compulsory voting. These MAGA crazies are not and will never be the majority. If everyone had to vote, they'd never get in.
Proportional voting. We vote for multiple candidates. If our first choice doesn't get in, our vote goes to our second choice. Then third etc. we aren't forced to vote for a lizard just to prevent the worse lizard getting in (it still almost always comes down to two parties, though).
I know these are total non-starters for our American friends. "You can't make me vote, that's against the constitution or something".
As an American, I think I'd support compulsory voting... But the right would fight that with everything they had, because if everyone had to vote, they'd never win with their current stances.
Ranked choice voting (proportional) is still making its way slowly into the mainstream, but with very little reason the change the main political parties torpedo it when they can.
I prefer approval voting, it's easier to explain and at least as good. Most voting systems also have support for it already.
Easy to teach people new to it too, just pick everyone you are ok with winning.
Most commonly suggested voting systems are better than FPTP, usually by a lot.
Yeah, nearly anything is better than FPTP. But approval voting in particular is simple to explain and basically already supported by nearly all voting equipment out there.
Basically instead of picking one person, you pick everyone you're OK with. Whoever gets the most votes wins. If the election is for multiple seats then the top X people for most votes wins. No ranking order, no multiple rounds, no way to fill out a ballot wrong, it's utterly simple.
Yeah, these have saved us on a lot of issues I feel. It’s simply a much more representative system than what the Americans do and it helps keep a lot of fringe ideologies at the fringes, where they usually belong.
Minor correction, we have preferential voting not proportional.
What's Australia's stance on immigration?
Mixed, as it is in every wealthy country that has more people wanting to move here than move away from here. Because we have such a large migrant population though it is difficult for politicians to gain traction by being outright anti-immigrant.
How about Coal?
Compulsory voting is definitely intriguing…even if you had the option to vote “null” meaning not vote for anyone but at least you had to make the effort to say something. The crazies I think are a relatively small portion of the US, they’re just SO much louder than everyone else
A null vote here is a option. Colloquially called a Donkey Vote, or statistically reported as an Informal Vote, you can write nothing on your voting slip and put it straight in the box. Also since voting is compulsory it is held on a Saturday, there are usually sausage sizzles, there must be enough polling places open so you're not in line for more than 30 minutes, and early voting is a viable option.
A Donkey Vote isn’t the same thing as an Informal Vote. A Donkey Vote means simply numbering the candidates in the order they appear on the ballot. In other words, a thoughtless vote that any donkey could do.
This is why there’s a benefit to appearing in the first spot and why the impartial and independent Australian Electoral Commission (another invaluable aspect of Australian democracy) randomly determines candidate order.