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Originally Posted by Ledgem
There are a few reasons why the American system is arguably broken and in need of mending. I'd guess that many other democracies are prone to similar problems, but I don't know enough about them to say.
First, the concept that elections can keep politics pure. Ideally this would happen, but American politics have an issue here. First, because of the "winner takes all" approach, electoral races are always between two candidates. Voting for a "third party" candidate is said to be equivalent to "throwing your vote away," and there are compelling arguments for and against that idea. If you aren't a part of the largest voting group, then you aren't contributing to a victory. All it takes is one group to have even a slim majority and they win, hence there is a motivation to vote for the candidate who is most likely to win and who is the closest to your views and values, in that order of priority. Adopting a system like they have in Australia (rankings instead of a single vote) would fix this.
Another issue with elections is the amount of money required, which also ties in with voter turnout. Election turnout in America is shamefully poor, which could be remedied by making voting mandatory (again, like Australia). It's also very expensive to run a campaign. How can an average working American compete against a career politician? Said politician has the time to campaign, and they usually have the financial backing of a major political party (which is another kick that keeps "third party" candidates down). Americans need to be motivated to vote and they usually don't research issues for themselves; while it isn't a pure constant, money spent on advertising and events tends to buy votes.
Given these critical issues with elections, we run into another problem. What happens when the government doesn't obey the laws that chain it down? The NSA activities have already been ruled unconstitutional by courts, and even before then the government was arguably breaking the law with some of its activities (the Patriot Act had some unconstitutional clauses, such as suspension of due process). What can you do in this scenario?
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Well, when it comes to a multi party system, here's the kicker; if all goes right (or wrong, depending on who you are,) the party that takes less than a quarter of the votes can get an absolute majority in government. Hell, while Canadian elections aren't this bad, they're not too far from it, with a Party and a Prime Minister that many Canadians absolutely hate controlling everything without any sort of checks or balances, and the two main opposition parties are pretty much powerless due to the fact that both parties combined with the 4 or 5 MPs from the opposition isn't enough to do anything. Stephen Harper won less than 30% of the vote...and yet he has absolute control, with a mostly corrupt and useless government filled with shills. And who said politicians obeyed laws anywhere in any nation? There's a lot of shilling, corruption and bribery in every nation.
Plus, even if the NSA is completely struck down and closed down, you think that surveillance won't continue? They'll just rebuild it and call it something else, make it more secret and it'll run until the next scandal, and the cycle will go on. Again and again and again...
Contrary to what people believe, "Big Brother" isn't a recent development. The American government has spied on people since...the beginning of the US. And before that, England spied on the colonists. What, you thought the Cold War era didn't depend on unlimited and often illegal spying? There were "Communist bustdowns" back in the WWI era. Nowadays, it's the same damn thing.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Traece
Is it overbearing that they could do such things? Without a doubt. Perhaps I'm disillusioned that I think they don't care about what I post on AnimeSuki, or Reddit. I suspect the same is true for the vast majority of people. Mountains of irrelevant information with no bearing on legitimate (or illegitimate) investigations. Should they be able to look at what they please and how they please whilst viewing me as a potential threat to society or some such thing? I can't rightly blame them for doing so.
The true issue tends to be more about the 'why' than the 'what'. After all, when they're running around proclaiming traitors and security threats as they please and investing in discovering every little bit of information that can be gleaned, it's hardly appropriate. The time and place isn't whoever and whenever.
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Well, you *are* posting on a site that promotes piracy, overthrowing the government, and obscenity in the state of Kansas, and all that...
To be fair though, it's hard for government to really 100% completely target everything, and they really only look at the major stuff most of the time unless they have a lead, like facebook, Google, etc. Of course, since most people stick to those sites for goddamn everything and share goddamn everything sometimes on them (you're saying that sharing all of my personal info on facebook is a bad idea? You don't say!) that basically vets out 99.9% of people most of the time....