Israeli forces clashed with Hamas militants across the Gaza Strip on Saturday, the Israeli military said, deepening its engagement in the decimated enclave even as the Palestinian death toll from relentless airstrikes in 12 weeks of war soared higher.
The Gaza Health Ministry reported Saturday that 165 people had been killed in Israeli airstrikes and artillery attacks in the previous 24 hours, adding to the ministry’s toll of more than 21,500 people killed in Gaza since the war began with the Oct. 7 Hamas-led raids into Israel.
This is true, though.
The way the US elects presidents is terrible. It’s basically certifiably insane.
There’s an election in each state. The winner of that statewide election gets all the electoral college votes for that state. If no candidate gets an absolute majority in the electoral college, then it goes to the House of Representatives. However, each state delegation gets one vote.
Functionally, that means that if the election goes to the House, the Republican wins.
Third parties have never done well in the US because the system structurally disadvantages them. This is mostly because the US was the first modern democracy, and social choice theory was in its infancy when the constitution was written.
If you want to vote Biden out in favor of someone more progressive, the only chance of that is to primary him.
It’s pretty obvious that if you keep playing the character others have determined for you in that charade and cast a vote for the evil candidate whilst telling yourself it’s the “lesser evil”, it’s not going to get better, only worse.
The reason it’s obvious is because that’s exactly what’s been happenning for decades now, possibly all the way since Eisenhower - you get alternance of ever less representive and increasingly evil politicians, with at best “one step forward, three steps back” kind of change (even within the mandate period of the same President as the early hope quickly turns into the usual shit).
The only way that fake democracy will change is if the electorate starts doing the unexpected (3rd party voting, voting for independents, refuse to participate and vocally deride the whole process and so on) rather than predictably bending over: politicians don’t care why you vote for them, they only care you vote for them, hence why almost all of their campaigning nowadays is not about “here’s what I’ve done for you and here’s what I will do” but instead it’s “the other guys are worse”.
Sure, Tactically it’s always “we have to take that hill over there” but Strategically you should’ve figured out by now they’re always taking you in the direction they want, never towards the heights you need to conquer to actually end up in a better place: notice how almost all discourse in present day US politics, from both faces of the political duopoly, is about morality, not about - say - quality of life or more evenly shared prosperity.
Which is actually optional. States can split them (but iirc only 2 out of 50 do…). It just doesn’t make that much sense in a two-party-system mostly split in the middle. That’s the bigger problem.
Yeah.
Technically, the states can decide how they allocate their votes. Nearly every state currently goes with the winner of their statewide election.
There’s the interstate popular vote compact, though. Basically, states will vote for the popular winner if enough states to guarantee the popular winner wins pass the compact.
But until that happens, we’re stuck with the current system.