US "parties" are giant coalitions compared to the "parties" in parliamentary democracies. You're solving a problem that doesn't exist.
Change the American voting system tomorrow and legislators will belong to different nominal parties that end up forming precisely the same coalitions.
Love him or hate him, Trump is a great example of this - in 2016, Trump effectively formed a new party focused on anti-immigration and protectionism, which rapidly grew to dominate the "conservative" coalition. But those other parties, ranging from libertarians to the Chamber of Commerce (highly pro immigration and highly pro free trade) parties are still there in the coalition.
> Change the American voting system tomorrow and legislators will belong to different nominal parties that end up forming precisely the same coalitions.
The US is extremely partisan right now and the partisanship is strongly aligned with the two major parties, not the individual coalitions that make them up. And with two parties you get polarization, because then it's all about getting 51% for a single party rather than forming temporary coalitions between various parties none of which can do anything unilaterally.
A different voting system allows you to have more than two viable parties, which changes the dynamic considerably.
Coalitions are pretty static in most parliamentary democracies except sometimes when forming governments post-election.
The 51% is for the coalition, not the party. That’s what you’re missing. CoC Republicans for example have temporarily sacrificed their immigration policies to retain legislative influence - and they are a check on the Trumpist wing passing whatever anti-immigrant legislation they want, because they too cannot act without at least tacit support from the CoC wing.
The “major party” is from a systems perspective no different than a European parliamentary governing coalition.
> Coalitions are pretty static in most parliamentary democracies except sometimes when forming governments post-election.
The "except when forming governments post-election" is a major difference. It also presumes that a coalition in the legislature is required to persist for an entire election cycle rather than being formed around any given individual piece of legislation. You don't have to use a system where an individual legislator or party can prevent any other from introducing a bill and taking a vote on it.
In less partisan periods in US history, bills would often pass with the partial support of both major parties.
Moreover, the US coalitions being tied to the major parties makes them too sticky. For example, the people who want lower taxes aren't necessarily the people who want subsidies for oil companies, or increased military spending, but they've been stuck in the same "coalition" together for decades.
Suppose you want to do a carbon tax. People who don't like taxes are going to be a major opponent, so an obvious compromise would be to pass it as part of a net reduction in total taxes, e.g. reduce the federal payroll tax by more than the amount of the carbon tax. But that doesn't happen because the coalition that wants lower taxes never overlaps with the coalition that wants to do something about climate change. Meanwhile the coalition that wants lower taxes wouldn't propose a carbon tax on their own, and the coalition that wants a carbon tax to increase overall government revenue gets shot down because that would be extremely unpopular, so instead it never happens.
Even in the days of telegrams, FDR was opening and reading millions of American’s telegrams to use the information therein to target his political enemies.
You can’t build centralized systems that enable spying and not expect people to do the “forbidden” thing. We have to build systems that make this impractical.
Medicare also negotiates on a state based level and represents more people than most European countries.
Right now the US governments collectively spend more than most European countries per capita on health care. The states and Feds. Totally exclusive of the private market spending. Expanding Medicare/Medicaid may be great for other reasons but does not solve the underlying cost problems in the US.
> but does not solve the underlying cost problems in the US.
sure but neither does blaming the EU for its healthcare system as some odd mental gymnastics into twisting it into a rationale about why universal healthcare "isn't possible" in the US.
Its a choice the US makes, while creating huge deficits fighting pointless wars at the same time.
There are modern European states refounded after the Allies pursued a deliberate and calculated policy of ethnic cleansing to ensure Germans would never be a problem again - in some cases going from 25% of the population prewar to 1% afterwards, with mass violence and rape included. Ethnic cleansing is only really frowned upon when you lose, or when you win so hard it's a convenient virtue signal and disapproval doesn't threaten the status quo.
Yes, it's definitely true the USSR engaged in forced population transfers and genocides, but I'm talking about the Allied (not just USSR) policy for Germans outside of the then-newly-defined German borders, since the USSR on its own is generally considered a 'bad' guy. The US and UK supported and endorsed what happened in this case.
Can we not politicize historical events? This is not historically controversial. The Czechoslovak President literally called it the "final solution" to their German problem. Or do you just want more examples? There are plenty.
Typical armies usually had, if not maps, reliable intelligence and guides. "we've heard this chokepoint is heavily defended" would indeed be a common reason for routing around.
It would be even fancier if there was some logic to take into account the position of your mobile units as well - for example, to avoid massed troops except in favorable conditions.
Are you sure you haven't been victimized by manuscripts with modernized spellings?
When I look up ealry manuscript scans of the Comedy, I get:
*Nel mezo delcamin dinra uita / mi trouai puna(?) felua (long s letter) ofcura / che la diricta (some bizarre letter in there) uia era fmarrita (long s).
Note that the p is struck through below its loop; that is probably an abbreviation for "per". That would be an example of the spelling being the same as modern Italian, but the manuscript is written in a kind of shorthand because writing takes a lot of time and effort.
dinrã is probably also an abbreviation, given the diacritic.
> diricta (some bizarre letter in there)
No, the letters are exactly what you've just typed. There is a ligature between the c and the t. You could call this a difference in font, but not in spelling. (Though diricta for modern diritta is a real difference.)
> Nel mezo delcamin
This is a real spelling difference. There's a really glaring one in stanza 3, where poco is spelled pocho in contravention of the rules of Italian spelling. I don't know what an Italian today would think if confronted with -cho-.
High end estimates of people killed due to the deliberate spread of disease are dozens to hundreds. The pre-real-contact wave was obviously many orders of magnitude more deadly. Even your own link mentions one reason it was ineffective was prior exposure.
the vast majority of indigenous people died on the 1° 100 years of colonization (from 1500 (when America was "found") -> 1600); the number goes up to 80 million people dead... the paper i mentioned says partial immunity didn't taking effect on a war past 1700! do you really think pox wasn't abused the time they were killing millions of natives per year? that's what i'm reffering to, not (somehow) recent wars
Yes, there is no credible evidence of your claim. The big disease waves stuck most natives before they ever saw a European, after contacted peoples caught disease in the normal fashion. The very few later documented attempts we have are almost completely ineffective, and often from people in a very desperate situation (e.g., besieged and dying of smallpox) - just a last ditch gambit that never accomplished its goal.
It’s important to note that fiction does not map to reality. It’s fiction. You cannot learn how the world works through fiction. It’s just the author’s ideas about the world in a narrative framework that may or may not be true.
I find it very frustrating when people confuse the two. Reading fiction doesn’t give you an interpretive lens for reality. Reading history does. Saying this is “just like when in Harry Potter / Star Wars / Star Trek x happened” is totally meaningless and not predictive of anything in the real world.
Change the American voting system tomorrow and legislators will belong to different nominal parties that end up forming precisely the same coalitions.
Love him or hate him, Trump is a great example of this - in 2016, Trump effectively formed a new party focused on anti-immigration and protectionism, which rapidly grew to dominate the "conservative" coalition. But those other parties, ranging from libertarians to the Chamber of Commerce (highly pro immigration and highly pro free trade) parties are still there in the coalition.
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