Never mind the depths I was already on edge when I met the fucking crashfish
Skua
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Joined 4 months ago
Cake day: March 17th, 2024
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8·3 days agoI suspect that this might be a tactic intended for the domestic audience. The current government is extremely unlikely to be in power a week from now, and might be doing this just to force the next government to either follow through or retract it
302·4 days agoDeadnaming is okay when you’re doing it to mercenary companies
Apologies, I was using “NATO troops” as a shorthand for the large number of countries involved rather than the specific command structure. You are right to bring that up
The Korean War had over a million NATO troops and also tens of thousands of Soviet troops and, somehow, remained a proxy war. A particularly bloody one, but there was still no actual open full-scale warfare between NATO and the Warsaw Pact. Even China and America remained officially at peace, despite making up the majority of the forces on each side
10·5 days agoIt used to be common! Over a century ago, sure, but it was
Yes, he is. It’s that you can usually expect FPTP elections to produce a winner from one of the two dominant parties. Since your vote does not count for anything if your candidate didn’t win in UK elections, you can use this information to instead pick your favourite of the two candidates that are likely to win and maximise your chances of seeing your preferred of the two win, as opposed to voting third party and achieving nothing. You don’t need to know how quickly a two party system entrenches itself for this to be useful. You just need to know if it already has and which parties are the dominant ones in your constituency.
It almost certainly does, but we still mustn’t be complacent. Instead we should aim for that stretch goal of knocking them below the Lib Dems. If nothing else it’d be really funny
Ahh, I hadn’t interpreted the comment that way. I thought that Jackthelad was suggesting Farage was being unfairly maligned by the article. My apologies if I got that wrong
Maybe read the article and find out
I don’t know, though I would be interested to read. Taagepera and Grofman’s 1985 work examined the elections of western Europe, the Anglosphere, and a couple of others across 1945-1980. They found that of the seven single-winner sytems, only France had a reliable third party (and of course, France does not use regular FPTP), and of the 15 multi-winner systems only Austria and Ireland did not have at least three. That is, of course, only correlation, and the authors have some other interesting points about major political issues within a country, but they do come down in favour of Duverger’s approach.
Some of the papers I’ve read on it have mentioned that particularly young democracies (such as Nigeria after re-establishing democracy in the late 90s, and I think the paper using that example was from the 2010s) do not appear to have settled into this pattern. On the other hand, in an older system like the UK, we see examples like the 1922 general election. The Liberals performed very badly in the prior election, Labour outperformed them in 1922, and the Liberals have never risen above third place since.
If Duverger’s law is completely off base, why do you think that the UK has such a strong two party donination? No party outside the top two has won a general election for a century, and prior to that it was the same story with one of the top two swapped out.
Since there is a finite number of FPTP electoral systems, we can indeed test to disprove it by seeing how many of them are dominated by two parties. However woolly the wording “tend to” may be, if no FPTP systems were dominated by two parties then it’d be untrue. So that just leaves the question of what proportion should count for “tends to”. In my opinion, that’d be more than half at a minimum, but there will be different positions on that
Nobody, including Duverger, thinks that it’s an ironclad thing. That’s actually discussed in the link. It does appear to be a pretty accurate predictor of the behaviour of British elections though. The fact that there’s even an outside possibility that the Conservatives might not be one of the two biggest parties after this election is noteworthy.
I’m not sure I understand why you’re calling it a tautology. It doesn’t seem to fit any of the definitions I know of that word. It doesn’t fit the formal logic one since there are clearly imaginable scenarios in which it isn’t true (a parliamentary system in which more than two parties consistently emerge as the largest), and it doesn’t fit the literary one because it’s not a repeat of the same thing twice. Could you explain what you mean here?
Their stuff looks really tasty honestly. Might have to stop by next time I’m there
Literally half of their goddamn comment is about doing other stuff. You’re all over this thread getting mad at people for voting because you’ve just made up that that’s the only thing they do.
Although I could definitely imagine it being a yearly tradition
Lesser evilism is a trap and you are better off organizing more direct action.
It is not and never has been a case of only one or the other.
Anglicisation of golpista, I assume