It's the standard comment of people who, whenever it's pointed out what the system does, claims that the problem is human nature.
LOL. Is there a thread in which you participate where you don't get mad and tell people what they should and shouldn't say?
Reminds of a thing years ago, I knew this fella in the Navy. The nicest thing anyone ever said about him was, "you really shouldn't say that" Which was in response to the comment, "If he was my father I would have killed myself too."
There is, but what I'm objecting to in the case of your own "The sad fact is that some/many/most people abuse whatever power they get in order to maximize their own advantage even at the expense of others" and ahhell's "I suspect its based on an observation of reality and history" is that you both try to turn what appears to be your core beliefs into respectively a fact and an observation of reality without the least bit of documentation or actual fact.
Ideally, you win elections in order to implement ideas and policies.
You don't believe that power corrupts? An interesting take. What is your basis for that claim? Shall we trade examples by listing everyone in history who's ever held any kind of power, assessing whether they abused it or not, and then adding up the totals? Does the amount of power and the degree of abuse matter, or just the individual totals? Does Mrs Jones the sweet head librarian cancel out Emperor Tiberius?
www.jpost.com
Everybody's honest until they aren't, and at that point we can say they weren't an honest person all along. I don't think honesty is an inherent characteristic so much as it is a behavior, which is subject therefore to change at any point.
I am not sure if I would remain strong, empathic and moral if I gained great wealth and power. I would however, be willing to test myself this way to know for sure...
www.slowboring.com
It's really a question of keeping the Liberal/Democratic coalition together. A major part of Conservative political strategy is to attack the leftmost members of the Liberal coalition in the hopes that the rest of the coalition will expel them. Once this is done they change targets to the next leftmost part of the coalition and repeat the process. Once this has been done a few times, the Liberal coalition is broken up and politically ineffective.Came across an interesting post about the "representation gap" between voters and legislators on immigration issues today:
A boring theory of the populist right
A large minority of the public wants tougher policies on crime and immigration
I think it should be viewable without a subscription, but I'm not entirely sure.
In that post, the author attempts to apply the lessons of this new paper to the U.S., which sounds like a leap but the author of the original paper did say he was seeing similar effects on "nearly all cultural issues...in nearly all countries" studied.
On [cultural] questions, incumbent M.P.s are significantly to the left of the population average. Or maybe a better way to think about this is that in most countries, there is a large minority bloc of voters with extreme right-wing views that are echoed by few if any M.P.s, especially from mainstream parties.In proportional systems, that creates an easy space for new parties to fill. In the U.S., it created space for Donald Trump to remake the G.O.P. I don’t think “the center-left should become more right-wing on crime and immigration” is the only possible conclusion to draw from this data, but I think that everyone ought to take the data seriously and consider the tradeoffs involved in their own choices.
Many will say Democrats need to hold their ground on cultural questions, even if this causes them to drift ever further towards the purist stances of lefty activist groups and further away from the views of median voters. On this point, I must remain skeptical.