[stupac2]

At this point I think it's best to just completely ignore ferrari on these politics posts. It's clear that his particular combination of ignorance and vehemence is wildly out of place on this board.

Yeah, nothing vehement in your post.

Uh, could you at least do the me the kindness of pointing it out where I posted something that was similar to literally advocating political murder?

Re: California's "top two" primaries, I don't know enough about the system to have a solid opinion of how it would work. I tend to think that we'd get better (defined here as: more representative of the median voter) results with ranked choice voting (ie you pick your top N candidates, where #1 gets N points, #2 gets N-1, and #N gets 1, highest point total wins) but I'm not certain about that. I believe that's the system Oakland uses to pick the mayor, at least based on the ballot, but it's certainly not common. Though this obviously only works in somewhat crowded fields, there's no real point to doing it with only two candidates, unless there's a difference between "both are acceptable to me but I have this preference" and "only this one is acceptable to me". You could envision some moderation happening there, but it's really hard to know what would happen.

As I said before, though, I think the main problem is that our system was designed around finding compromise which is close to impossible when you have highly ideological parties. Given those parties, a parliamentary system works better, unless your preference is for the government to simply stop functioning, then our current system is just hunky dory.

[stupac2]

At this point I think it's best to just completely ignore ferrari on these politics posts. It's clear that his particular combination of ignorance and vehemence is wildly out of place on this board.

Yeah, nothing vehement in your post.

Uh, could you at least do the me the kindness of pointing it out where I posted something that was similar to literally advocating political murder?

Re: California's "top two" primaries, I don't know enough about the system to have a solid opinion of how it would work. I tend to think that we'd get better (defined here as: more representative of the median voter) results with ranked choice voting (ie you pick your top N candidates, where #1 gets N points, #2 gets N-1, and #N gets 1, highest point total wins) but I'm not certain about that. I believe that's the system Oakland uses to pick the mayor, at least based on the ballot, but it's certainly not common. Though this obviously only works in somewhat crowded fields, there's no real point to doing it with only two candidates, unless there's a difference between "both are acceptable to me but I have this preference" and "only this one is acceptable to me". You could envision some moderation happening there, but it's really hard to know what would happen.

As I said before, though, I think the main problem is that our system was designed around finding compromise which is close to impossible when you have highly ideological parties. Given those parties, a parliamentary system works better, unless your preference is for the government to simply stop functioning, then our current system is just hunky dory.