aclu tweeted that this is the first time in usa history that a journalist was charged under the espionage act for publishing truthful information... regarding assange. he was charged with 17 violations today

I live in Canada and the Prime Minister's name is not even on the ballot.

We have 338 MPs (Members of Parliament). In the riding I am in there is generally a Liberal Party Candidate (similar to US Democrats), a Conservative Candidate (similar to your Republicans), a New Democratic Party (NDP) Candidate, and some fringe candidates.

Once the election is over the party with the most seats forms the government, and the Leader of that party is the Prime Minister (as of now, the Liberals and Justin Trudeau).

If the governing party has more than half the seats they form a majority government and can usually get all they want passed. If they have less than half the seats they form a minority government.

We also have a 105 unelected (appointed) Senators that serve as a "sober second thought." They are absolutely useless. I think most Canadians would like the senate abolished.

EDIT. One of the problems with our system is that Ontario and Quebec total 199 of the 338 seats. This is a sore point with the other provinces, as they feel that these two provinces essentially can decide the election..

Remember when Zurvan ran for office, some local thing up there in Canada. He was a Libertarian iirc. This was back when he was a pog mod. He lost of course.

So you're saying he isn't elected directly by the people

Gotcha

This is similar to how Israel does it as well


Eyebooger

Im theory popular vote sounds fair but when the country is so radically different in different areas our current system is much more fair

Theresa May resigns, UK ****show alert level just hit 100.

You'll never get eyebooger to agree that anything outside of the popular vote is more fair.

Probably.

I can't see how it's "more fair" for someone from Ohio to have a say in who gets to be president, yet I don't.

Theresa May WOAT pm! Really comical how totally inept this lady was, and yet she still wanted to cling desperately to her power. Lots of lessons to be had in this little farce.

Despite her myriad faults, I'll still argue that Cameron was a far worse PM than May. The guy wrecked the country and then went "welp, not my mess to fix, going to go sit in my shed now, doo-dee-doo-do".

And I should by default be more closely aligned to Cameron's compassionate conservatism than May's traditional toryism. But this was his mess that she was handed the hospital pass of trying to clean up.

Can't see how this ends in anything other than a general election within the year tbh.

Ian Dunt comfortably my favorite political commentator at the moment.

Is first past the post voting part of the problem?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First-...he-post_voting

FPTP is awful, but unrelated to the problems I have with the electoral college.

With the 6 year old whose parents somehow trust me to influence. Going through some of her school materials this morning and discovered this. She wanted me to read it and I told her it was propaganda and I refused to do it. She was like "my teacher wouldn't lie". I told her that her teacher might believe it and that it isn't a deliberate lie and that explaining the issues with democracy and the two party system were difficult. Now that I can reflect on it, it isn't that hard to explain the problem with false-choices.
The next page was this below and she asked me: "is this true?"

I try to get her to question things and I tell her that not everything she hears is true and I try to never lie to her. Sometimes that can be difficult.

But everyone should vote on election day

The first time I ever met her I took her and mom to a birdwatching spot and she saw some Canada Geese and went nuts saying "patos patos patos!!!" At that time she only spoke Portuguese and geese are actually gansos and patos=ducks, but I figured anybody that excited about birds is somebody I need to keep close and I've managed to do that. Her mom used to get so upset with me because I would only take her to parks to teach her about birds and fed her pizza everyday when I was babysitting. I think if she knew the full range of contrarian values I'm trying to instill now she'd probably be pretty upset as well but she knows I mean well.
(And incidentally in Brazil--as she is a dual citizen--voting is actually mandated by law including Brazilians residing out of the country so she won't have a choice there). (Although the fine is apparently like $1.50 usd possibly less)

Your definition of propaganda seems pretty broad.

Sure. But in this case she was being told to vote for either team red or team blue and that is pretty blatantly bad.

And indoctrinating kids into the two-party system is propaganda pure and simple. Not to mention the idea that voting makes us free. Where is Birdman anyways?

#TeamRed

Bastard

Game of Thrones thread is ----------------------->

Ok, But you said you refused to read it because it was propaganda. Sounds more like it was just not fully inclusive. Why not, as a teaching moment, read it it to her and tell her the teacher is mostly correct, but that there are more voting options than red/blue or left/right.

Instead, by refusing to read it, you decided to be a censor. How will she develop critical thinking and analytic skills if adults in her lives are censoring things of that nature.

To me censoring in this case seems worse than simply read and clarify, as the 6 year-old learned nothing when you decided not to read it, yet there was a nice lesson to be learned.

I did end up reading it to her after she asked for third time which usually seems to be the trick. But going through that motion let her know how much I disagreed. This kid operates on emotion not logic and there isn't anything I can do about that.*
While shooting pool with her step-dad later we both tried to convince her that aliens aren't real and she didn't want to budge and claimed that because she saw something about them on tv that that was good enough. I said "if you aren't supposed to believe everything that people tell you definitely don't believe anything you see on tv". So I get my teaching moments in. I was put on the spot by the voting thing though.
Because I disagree with the whole idea that voting is some civic duty or that our political system is something that we as common people have control over. So it is more than the red/blue thing. And I think it's ridiculous to be indoctrinating 6 year olds into voting when they won't be of voting age for another 12 years.
*while I mostly believe this I don't know if it is fully true and I still use logic with her.

Voting is a civic duty

If you think the system is broke you vote to change it