Police who raided a marijuana store, destroying security cameras and the DVR, harassing the store's customers, consuming edible marijuana products, and playing darts, were caught on camera. The cops claim that said recording is illegal because the cops had an expectation of privacy after destroying all of the security cameras.
I wish I could make up this stuff.
(Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Monday August 10 2015, @05:03PM
And two party winner-take-all systems don't encourage true democracy, because the majority is too stupid and short-sighted to realize that voting for The One Party instead of likeable third party candidates leads to a self-fulfilling prophecy.
It's a self-perpetuating situation. Given a choice between voting for the lesser of two evils and voting for a third option that everybody knows won't win, it makes sense to try to keep the greater evil out of office rather than wsting your vote.
The simplest remedy to change this dynamic is a preferential ballot -- you get to specify a first choice, a second choice and so on. If your first choice doesn't get in, your ballot gets transferred to your second choice.
This makes it feasible to vote for the third option without wasting your vote.
True proportional representation s my preferred voting scheme, but it isn't practical in situation s where there has to be a single winner, and it's is a much larger change than switching to a preferential ballot.
(Score: 2) by Anal Pumpernickel on Tuesday August 11 2015, @12:59AM
and voting for a third option that everybody knows won't win
Do you honestly not see the problem with this logic? You're creating a self-fulfilling prophecy. And even if they have 0 chance of winning, I will never vote for evil freedom-hating scumbags, because I actually have principles. If that's the kind of thing you want to show your support for, you are the problem. I don't care if it's a 'lesser' evil.
But third parties don't even necessarily need to win. Enough votes for third party candidates can scare candidates from The One Party into adopting some of their policies.
This makes it feasible to vote for the third option without wasting your vote.
The only wasted vote is a vote for an evil scumbag. I only vote for third party candidates, but not once have I ever wasted my vote. Not once.
(Score: 2) by Anal Pumpernickel on Tuesday August 11 2015, @01:03AM
Not to mention, if you keep voting for 'lesser' evils, the candidates can get ever more evil; it's just that one has to be less evil than the other.
I do agree that our voting system is complete garbage and needs to change. But guess who benefits from it? That's right: The same evil candidates that people keep voting in. Our voting system won't change unless people stop being short-sighted. Voting for evil is not and never will be strategic.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 11 2015, @11:38AM
The "self-fulfilling prophecy" is there whether you liked it or not.
You could call it the prisoner's dilemma, but it might be just a related phenomenon with similar consequence. The core problem is that optimizing for what's "good" for each individual voter (the lesser evil) does not yield globally optimal solution (3rd party).
If people had a true hive-mind they could just take logical advantage of the expectation that everyone else will do the same and jump over the "cliff", but unfortunately we just aren't like that in the required magnitude.
Don't confuse this with advocating voting for the lesser evil. That yields horrible results in time. The point is that the solution lies elsewhere if it exists at all. (ie. convince the rulers that changing the voting system is in their interest)
Alternatively, you can buy that "scare the scumbags into adopting 3rd party policies" actually works.
(Score: 2) by Anal Pumpernickel on Tuesday August 11 2015, @11:50AM
The "self-fulfilling prophecy" is there whether you liked it or not.
People create it. So yes, it is there whether I like it or not. Most people are extremely short-sighted and I do not expect anything else, but the answer is not to give up.