Thread by @sunnshiiny

Please read this NYT article about Israel. It’s like reading Canadian history and the result of 2019 future election.

Netanyahu’s Likud party doesn’t have enough seats to form a majority.

nytimes.com/2019/05/29/wor…

Netanyahu is unable to broker an agreement to get the required seats. So he tabled legislation to dissolve Parliament and arrange new elections.

No big deal. The parallel: there were rumblings about parliament opting to ask another party to try to build a majority government. Netanyahu panicked and quickly arranged an election in what seems like the Israeli version of proroguing parliament. A rhyme with Canadian history.

As for our possible future, PR is a way of “making every vote count”. Parties receive seats based on the percentage of votes registered in their favour. Rarely is there a true majority. Coalitions are developed between parties to bring the total seats held to a majority coalition

As evidenced by this article, PR can make the parties courted for seats extremely powerful, making the balance of power tip in their favour.

By holding out on demands to form a coalition with Netanyahu, a 5 seat party has run out Likud’s clock to form a majority government.

A party with 5% of votes can wield all the power in PR coalitions. They can force policy demands of a minuscule of voters (aka fringe party) be met, or withdraw from the coalition & force an election or another party with the second most votes to try to form a new majority.

This scenario is currently playing out in Israel.

The issue: “two blocs of [Netanyahu’s] potential right-wing coalition (the secular ultranationalist and ultra-Orthodox factions) refused to compromise on proposed legislation on military service.”

The ultra nationalist party, Yisrael Beiteinu, refuses to support the coalition unless the ban on ultra Orthodox Jews be removed regarding mandatory military draft. Otherwise it supports the far right coalition, being the party most militant about Giza crackdowns.

The ultra nationalist party supports a Jewish state, just not law based on Jewish religious law. The United Torah Judaism party does.

Israel is a state permitting exemptions based on religious affiliation by Ultra Orthodox Jewish.

This could easily be a reality in Canada if a coalition of Far Right Dominionist Christians formed their own political party under a Proportional Representation system. A reality NDP and Greens advocates refuse to acknowledge and refer to as fear mongering if mentioned.

The less popular political parties, NDP & GPC, state only a small number of extremists, maybe 5%, would ever be elected in Canada.

Israel sets 1.5% as its PR cut off for representation. Imagine the power an extremist group could wield, left or right, with a 1.5% threshold.

In Canada, 1.5% would be about 550K voters holding the rest of Canada’s 36M people hostage to their demands for policy.

That’s also all it takes in a far right coalition to install laws favouring theocracy and exemptions for extremist religious groups.

Precisely why NDP and Greens are making PR their hill to die on. It’s the only system where they could viably hold the balance of power.

This is similar to how a minority government works in a Westminster Parliamentary system.

It’s no wonder why the NDP & Greens are pushing for a minority government, a conservative minority government. They want to wield power without having to win the support of the majority of voters.

Neither leader or party has ever officially governed before. Both are untested.

NDP was Official Opposition, to Harper’s minority, but Mulcair did a crap job of protecting the environment or forcing climate action.

That’s it, that’s their experience. May has only recently doubled her seats to 2. NDP has a new very indecisive & unseasoned leader.

Are Canadians really prepared to gamble our literal future existence on a minority government with May or Singh as the moral conscience & official authoritarian strong arm of Canadian Parliament?

In 2019, or in perpetuity if PR is adopted by the next government?

It would guarantee a seat at the decision table and shift the balance of power away from the party with the most votes, to the two parties that need to be courted to maintain a majority government.

What’s broken in the FPTP system is democracy.

Three out of four Main political parties of Canada have abandoned democratic processes for populism.

CPC & NDP have formed an obvious populist coalition with CPC, to orchestrate a populist uprising, prior to the upcoming election. Also referred to as “mob rule”.

January 1, 2019, LPC held a commanding lead in the polls. A strong PM, though new and young, had led the party to deliver many of the mandated policies given to him in 2015.

In 38 days, that lead would crumble, from a coordinated attack by the coalition of NDP, GPC and CPC.

Political pressure applied to MOJAG was construed as immoral, inappropriate, but not illegal (as stated by JWR herself). All three party leaders and many MP’s piled on accusations, judged the PM before the whole story was out, and convicted Trudeau in the court of public opinion.

Along with much help from a compromised and complicit MSM that pumped out op-ed’s at an alarming rate. Were they pandering to clicks, or working in unison with the coalition? I have proof it’s the latter, but that’s another thread.

Any leader in a DEMOCRACY, is required to govern the entire electorate. It’s a balancing act. A portion of the electorate votes for the preferred mandate (policies) and the governing party compromises and seeks compromise to implement it.

Cooperation and compromise. The defining features of a DEMOCRACY. How is that done? By seeking buy in & negotiating trade offs w/ political opponents to deliver the mandate.

It means you do NOT have licence to impose change on groups who didn’t choose your mandate.

Who broke the Westminster Parliamentary system in Canada? Harper. Because he imposed CPC policies without the required cooperation and compromise of opposition parties or special interest groups.

Over the 10 years in office as PM he acted as a dictator.

Unless you’re my age or older, you won’t remember a time when democracy worked, bc it’s been under attack for 30 years.

Populism isn’t democracy. It’s actually the poison that kills democracy.

Read how democracy is designed to work in a Westminster Parliamentary system.

And then reject populism. Cooperation and compromise are the key to democratic peaceful existence. Populism leads to KKK lynch mobs, Jewish holocausts, Rwanda massacres, Syrian refugees, caged babies, and far right agendas being implemented.

To remain human, we must maintain our humanity and remember the humanity of all others.

Or we become the vicious, morally corrupt, humans who behave like wild animals, & commit unthinkable crimes.

Back lash from PR advocates. Not unexpected.

To analyze electoral systems, you need to look at the benefits AND deficits.

PR has many deficits that FPTP does not.

Also, political astuteness and comprehension of how politics work is essential before analysis of a system.

It’s like going to a doctor for a chest pain.

If the doctor doesn’t understand how the circulatory system works, should you trust the doctors opinion it’s just heartburn? I think I’d want a second opinion. Maybe a third.

Armchair critics demanding changes is called mob rule.

Populism. That’s how it works. Convince enough of the population that neither understand nor care what experts recommend and you can use their collective indignation and rage fueled demands to get your desired outcome.

Currently both Greens and NDP are employing populism.

PR does represent everyone’s votes count. But for what? The party, not a candidate.

WPS its the candidate who receives the most votes in a riding. Meaning, the electorate generally have the choice btwn candidates that are invested in the economic and community they represent.

It also means the local electorate has the opportunity to choose the nominee in their riding.

Not so with PR. The party creates a list of ranked candidates for selection after number of seats are determined. So ridings aren’t guaranteed a representative from their region.

PR has some benefits and some serious drawbacks. Fringe groups are far more powerful in a PR system. In a FPTP system, fringe groups can be all but ignored. Which is probably what got us into this situation in the first place.

The far right, ignored for most of the social democracy experiment, due to their regressive and authoritarian ideology, got fed up. This is their backlash. This uprising of authoritarianism and far right theocratic, patriarchal, libertarians.

Progressives took their power.

Patriarchs want it back.

Unable to use Democratic means because the ideological shift from 100 years ago is entrenched & well supported by the majority, they’ve resorted to using whatever means available to rig elections in their favour. Including rigging elections (cheating).

PR amplifies the power of fringe parties by providing them a platform and a seat at the decision making table.

When every party focuses on policy, then any electoral system provides a mandate and the opportunity to cooperate and compromise to address the needs of all.

That’s democracy. PR makes it more obvious by providing special interest groups a platform, but FPTP is also required to meet the needs of the majority and broker compromise to accommodate for minority groups.

Most dictatorships are a tyranny of the minority.

A small group of disgruntled and militant extremists want the whole system to reflect their demands and compromise isn’t an option for them. Everyone else is expected to compromise and cooperate with the leader, or their status of citizen is threatened.

However, a tyranny of the majority is also possible. When minority ideological needs are ignored and suppressed, special interest groups push for consideration.

WW2 was the allied forces of the world suppressing the demands of a special interest group. The far right.

They didn’t go away. They just fought every progressive policy individually, & failed. They slowed progress but didn’t stop it. Finally at the point of being overwhelmed by the changes to power access, they’ve conspired to reinstate the power structure prior to WW1, not 1950’s.

This was the far right’s golden age. When men ruled, women knew their place, children were property, power was in the exclusive hands of the rich & homogeneity was a valued feature. That’s what they want to reinstate.

Not the burgeoning civil rights movement of post war 1950’s

An NDP supporter was arguing the merits of PR with me today. No concept of the deficits in a PR system or how politics is “played” in any system.

He also had no concept that the rules, norms and mores of political conduct have been turned on their ear.

As a mother, one of my first duties was to tame the beast in both my children to make them presentable iro society. For the first couple years, we are all self centred and full of demands.

But by age 5, most children understand the concepts of politeness, taking turns, honesty, empathy, and the basics of right and wrong. Refining those concepts in children is a parent’s job, until they are a teen.

We’ve all met children who defy learning these lessons. Those who are rude, demand domination & control, lie with a straight face, seem void of empathy, & don’t quite get the gist of good and bad, right & wrong.

That doesn’t mean they are incapable of learning. Most learn it.

But there are a small number who refuse to play by the rules of civil society. Those are the teens in juvenile detention. The young adults who steal, lie, manipulate, intimidate and dominate.

For some reason unknown to me, in the last 20 years this has been called leadership.

It isn’t. It’s a mental illness that’s never been addressed. It’s Obstructive Defiance, Conduct Disorder, Anti-social Personality, sociopathy, psychopathy.

It happens in every culture and every society. Some blame mothers, lax rules, poverty, entitlement of wealth. It’s not.

It’s just part of the human condition. These people exist and the rest of society needs to cope with it. Like it or not. They can not be eliminated by social programming or extra attention. Their impact on society can be mitigated, but they’re part of the human spectrum. Period.

This is the special interest group that needs to be attended to, because their inclinations to violence, crime and manipulation lead to much suffering by the rest of the human spectrum. These are the dictators, autocrats, sociopaths, narcissists, psychopaths, etc.

Why anyone thought we could modify who they are as human beings, is beyond me. They aren’t malleable. They have always been and will continue to be the darker element of human existence.

For most of the last 6000 years, they’ve dominated power and control of society.

But 50 years of global devastation from war and poverty, and mass publication of socialist centred thought, led to the social democracy experiment. And it was an experiment. Never before had society/civilization been structured in a way to provide for rights of the majority.

Sure we had benevolent dictators over history, but handing power to the masses is a grand experiment roughly 70 years old. That’s it.

Libertarianism ruled the industrial revolution. Social democracy is a recent invention.

Democracy was defined as the shared rule of patriarchs and land owners. In Greece and in the USA when it was formed in 1776. Successful litigation to gain rights for all, by those who weren’t the elite,has led us to today. The vast majority of the changes took place after WW2.

Every year we celebrate the sacrifices of WW1 & WW2 vets & the fallen to defend our freedom, our western democracy. All the while, those displaced by the shift in power have quietly endured their banishment from authority & control. They had influence, but not control.

Now they want control back.

That is who is behind the global rise in autocracy, the switch to “guided” democracy, the push for oligarchy, the kakistocracy, theocracy and kleptocracy flourishing currently.

It means the rules we generally use to conduct ourselves within society have been turned upside down.

Those people who refused to follow the rules, they learned the rules. And now they subvert them to use against the rest of society.

Those who don’t think twice to lie, cheat, steal, and are morally and ethically void are the special interest group we taught the rules, but ignored their innate nature.

These people have no problems hurting others to get what they want. Every person has met and interacted with one of these people. Some of us have mothered one, hoping we got through. Hoping the connection to the rest of society took hold. Some of us are children of one.

They make up about 20% of the human population. Currently at 7.6B. Which means that’s about 1.5B autocratic humans worldwide we need to contend with.

Overwhelming numbers. And an overwhelming task in light of the resources they control.

But, we’ve done it before. And we can do it again.

So back to the point.

PR isn’t going to save us from anything. These people are driven to take over. We’ve stripped them of their power and they want it back. There is no negotiating, no trust, no compromise, no cooperation.

Everything we base public rules of conduct upon, norms and mores, is unable to be trusted as the rule.

If you learn nothing from my threads, learn that one.

They won’t play by the rules, because rules are for suckers and marks. Not “leaders”.

So I found another article to share. The NDP supporter arguing with me brought up New Zealand as an example of a successful PR system.

One google search and that’s all in the dust. Australia just had their federal elections. The cons won. Not the social democrats. Why?

Because cons don’t play fair, they lie, cheat and steal to get what they want.

And there is an keen lesson to learn FOR the radicals and firebrands in progressive political parties.

Huge social changes scare the shit out of people. They are afraid of enormous changes and personal discomfort. The adage “go with the devil you know” makes it a political reality NDP are ignoring to the peril of us all.

New Zealand’s social democrats were astute politicians and chose not to offer huge social change platforms. And they won.

One of the main reasons Australia social democrats lost? Huge changes proposed for climate change. And their opponents did not fight fair.

People are predicatable. They’ll sooner choose the devil they know, than the devil they don’t. When you tell the electorate huge changes are coming, and we aren’t quite sure how that’s going to impact you or the country economically, they’ll vote to save their job. Every time.

Every utterance of climate emergency and stop oil production immediately feeds that fear. If you want to lose the next election, make climate change action your top policy.

If you want to win, & extend human rights by 4 years in the hopes we can win the war on democracy, don’t.

Here’s the article.

PR won’t save us. Strategic voting will.

thespinoff.co.nz/politics/22-05…