https://youtu.be/Yy-A3CLMunA

I unironically really like the idea of sortition. I’m not convinced it could or should make up the totality of all governance, but for at least broad strokes/high level decisionmaking I think a group of random people given access to a variety of expert opinions and the resources to help consult more broadly could come up with something that is genuinely a good outcome. I’d especially like to see it tried out at the local level, around things like development approvals/zoning laws, street design, locations of parks, libraries, and other public facilities, and the other important work done by councils. I believe the power of local people making decisions about their local community would be a really powerful way to get around NIMBYs.

The way overhangs are handled is one of the key differences between Germany and New Zealand, as I understand it. New Zealand makes no effort to level its parliament, and simply accepts overhangs as a distortion of the pure proportionality. I like the simplicity of it, but for fairness I think Germany’s system is probably better. The new system is almost like the inverse of how I suggested party seats should work, which I quite like.

One thing I don’t particularly like is the 5% minimum both countries use. It’s not unreasonable to have a minimum I think, but it’s unfortunate for all the voters whose vote is essentially wasted because they didn’t support a popular enough party. It’s a less severe version of the problem FPTP has, IMO. Over 13% of voters had their vote completely wasted in last weekend’s election. It’d be nice if there was, like, a preferential system, where if your first choice of party doesn’t get 5%, it can go to another party of your choice instead. BSW voters, for example, might have chosen to give their vote to Linke, and FDP voters to Union. So the end result would have been:

• Union: 207
• AfD: 131
• SDP: 103 or 104 (depending on rounding)
• Grune: 73
• Linke: 86 or 87
• SSW: 1
• Plus more to whichever of those parties the 28 seats’ worth of “other” voters gave their 2nd preference to

I’ve also often been curious how it would work if the local seats were elected not by FPTP but by IRV. Would that have a positive or negative effect on the representation, or not really have much effect at all? I don’t think any place has done it, and I don’t even know if anyone has seriously sat down and theory-crafted it.

Ha, fair! I avoid posting in ML as much as possible because of how toxic the admins and mods are, but when someone else posts something interesting that I want to comment on, I do it. Especially in cases like this which at first seemed like they’d be uncontroversial and interesting conversation. Which, in fairness, it was until dessaline stepped in and brought the toxicity.

The issue for me is that you were the one insisting that it was “arrogant” of certain Spanish speakers to have the temerity to consider themselves American by virtue of living in The Americas

The issue is that this is a mischaracterisation of my position. The arrogance is only when Spanish and Portuguese speakers come in and try to suggest this in a way as to correct someone who uses the word American only for people from the country America.

In the context of the US renaming the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America

Personally, I think that change is disgusting racist dog whistling that flagrantly flouts international standards.

But the funny thing is…I’d have thought if you’re someone who uses “America” to refer to the whole of the two continents, you’d be supportive of this change. It’s not the Gulf of the United States of America, it’s the Gulf of America, according to Trump, which according to you means it includes the US, Mexico, Cuba, and any other countries it borders.

I will not stop calling it arrogant, because it is arrogant when they try and insist their way is the only correct way. Coming into my replies to tell me I did something wrong when I did nothing of the sort is arrogant, and I won’t apologise for calling it out.

I actually really like it as a system. Though I prefer a version where instead of using a party list you use the “nearest loser” to decide who fills the proportional seats. It or STV (though preferably on a slightly larger scale than how Australia currently uses it in our Senate—electing 10–20 representatives per electorate rather than our 6) would be my favourite systems.

MMP, if we’re comparing it to a fully proportional system, has a few distinct advantages. Many but not all relate to it having a local representative. You might not know who yours is, but plenty of people do. Even if you don’t though, having one specific person be your primary contact with politics is useful when public pressure campaigns happen. It’s easier to say “write to your MP” than to say “write to a whole bunch of MPs. Which ones? I dunno, all of them I guess?” It also means you have a politician who is specifically supposed to help look after your area’s needs. Who can push for local infrastructure upgrades etc.

It also gives you the option of doing something other than party-list proportional representation. If you don’t do local representatives, the only feasible way to decide which MPs are elected by each party is for the party to decide. Which, IMO, I don’t like. If a party puts someone near the top of their list who is deeply unpopular, despite the party as a whole being popular, voters should be able to say “nah, not him”. With MMP, you can use a system like “nearest loser” where the people who get elected via the proportional system are the people who came closest to winning in their local seat, demonstrating that, out of the people who were not directly elected locally, they are at least the most popular in their electorate. I don’t believe either Germany or New Zealand actually do this, but it’s at least an option.

To be extremely clear, your summary grossly misrepresents what actually happens. Deliberately, I suspect, to back up the fact that the mods banned me and not you despite your extremely blatant violations of the sub’s (and your own instance’s) rules here. Or was it you who abused your admin powers here to silence someone criticising your bad argument?

I have only ever taken issue with Spanish and Portuguese speakers who try to correct my usage of the language, or others who say “American” when they mean person from the country of America. If they simply choose to use estadounidense or some English translation thereof, I have no problem with that. But trying to correct someone else for using the language completely correctly (and the flaws of your source have already been thoroughly debunked elsewhere in this thread, I shan’t bother repeating myself there) makes you the racist (as much as “race” is the right term to use here…which it isn’t, precisely) imperialist here.

The arrogance is when Spanish speakers say that English speakers are wrong for speaking English. The arrogance is you coming here and insisting everything to do with the English language is evil without needing to actually evaluate the specifics of the situation.

A Spanish speaker going about their day saying “estadounidense” is not arrogant, and at no time did I assert that they were.

A better boundary would be between Coatzacoalcos and Unión Hidalgo

Yeah, that’s more or less the southern limit of what I said could be sensible.

This is what I was taught growing up, too. But personally I don’t actually care too much about where the borders between continents are drawn. I can see it being reasonable to put the northern border of central America anywhere from a line between San Diego and Houston in America to a line near the eastern edge of Oaxaca and Veracruz in Mexico. And the southern border anywhere from the western edge of Panama to a line between Golfo de Uraba and Punta Pina in northwestern Colombia.

Still not as important as saying “European peninsula”.

Personally I’d call Europe a subcontinent, similar to how we talk about the Indian subcontinent.

If you look at their comment history, I’m pretty sure that user is a serial troll. Not really worth engaging with.

What I have seen suggests that Canada has not changed its legal name since confederation in 1867, and at that time they chose the Dominion of Canada. The name has been allowed to fade out of use and has not been used in a long time, but neither was the name ever officially changed. Its obscurity is precisely why I chose to bring it up.

Not sure what you put up point 2 for. I explicitly included one reference in my comment to acknowledge that, and at no time did I call out Brazil as speaking Spanish.

Tell that to @skillissuer@discuss.tchncs.de, who came in just before you in my notifications inbox (though that’s reverse chronological, so obviously your comment was written much earlier…) edit: disregard. They were apparently trolling

But yeah, the history of football as a class of sports is really interesting. You may know this, but I strongly suspect at least some people who might read this comment won’t know it, especially the sorts of people who get upset by “soccer”, so I’ll share, briefly, some of the interesting history.

Football sports throughout England have a long history, but football codes as we know them today really only begin to take shape in the 19th century. Different schools and towns would have different variations in rules around things like catching the ball, tripping, “hacking”, and a whole bunch of other factors. If two teams from different regions wanted to play, they first had to agree to a set of compromise rules. Sort of like how “International Rules Football” is a compromise between Australian Rules Football and Gaelic Football occasionally used for matches between AFL players and Gaelic Football players in the 20th and 21st centuries.

Rugby School actually codifiers their set of rules far earlier than the Football Association, but later in the 19th century, a bunch of different clubs get together to form the Football Association to try to come up with a standard set of rules everyone can use. Ultimately, Rugby School and a few others cannot come to agreement with those who remain in the Football Association, and so we end up with rugby football and association football, sometimes called rugger and soccer for short. Both sports end up evolving a lot after this stage, but this is where we can first concretely start talking about rugby and soccer as discrete sports. But both share a common history, and neither has a better claim to the name “football”.

American football also evolves more or less out of this same place, coming not out of rugby as is sometimes claimed, but out of that pre-standardisation football, albeit clearly with more influence from the rules that would end up becoming rugby than those that would end up becoming soccer. The same is largely true of Australian football, which drew heavily from Eton and Rugby school rules, among others, though there are some claims also that it may have borrowed from indigenous Australian games, or that it shares a history with Gaelic football. Even Gaelic football traces its origins in much the same way, albeit out of local Irish football-type games rather than schools like Eton and Rugby, along with much later influences from England after rugby and association football started being played in Ireland.

You’re at least the third person to incorrectly assume my nationality today. You’d think in this thread of all places, where the title explicitly calls out the fact that someone made that mistake, people would be more likely to get it right…

Can any Germans tell me what the deal is with the Left? It looks like the only seats they’re winning are in areas you’d think of as AfD areas. Is it just a matter of the poorer more overlooked areas becoming polarised? Or are the German Left kinda tankish?

For anyone interested in psephology or electoral systems, the system Germany uses is called Mixed-Member Proportional. It mixes the benefits of FPTP (having a local member who is your local area’s most liked candidate) with proportional systems (having the overall Bundestag proportionally representing the will of the people).

The term “American” is colonial regardless of what you apply to it. There is no acknowledgment of the native peoples of the land today called the Americas, regardless of whether you call them all Americans or only those from the country America.

When faced with multiple different colonial options, I’m going to stick with the one that is short, easy to say, and most widely understood.

If they want to use it, I’m not going to correct them. If they try to “correct” me for using my language in its most widely accepted manner, that’s when I start getting mad. The only one policing others’ language arethose insisting you cannot call Americans Americans.

Which part of what I said do you think is racist? Because I simply don’t see it. If anything, the ones being intolerant here are the ones who insist that the way they use words in their language is right and we have to all contort the definitions we’ve used for over a hundred years to match the etymological translation of words they use.

I’m really disappointed at how it went down, because I was actually at first really enjoying the discussion of linguistics and geography and how they intersect.

I think it really went south once dessalines piped up. Which…shouldn’t be a surprise, I suppose.