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U.S. Senate's McConnell freezes up for second time in public appearance (www.ctvnews.ca)

submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Damn, he looks old in that video. It strikes me as kind of cruel that our political system so strongly incentivizes seniority, both for the young fresh politicians who're just getting started and the career politicians who feel like they can't retire because they need to justify dumping the best decades of their lives slowly shimmying up that totem-pole.

FWIW: I do think that connections and experience really do matter for good governance, but no other industry pushes things this far. It's messed up and it's messing everything else up, too.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

IDK, I don't think connections are that important, we should instead be reducing barriers to collaboration. If politicians had term limits, they'd need to figure out a different way of selecting leaders and getting information they need from other parts of government.

The main benefit I see from longer term government workers is that they ought to know the law better, but at a certain point, they seem to learn more ways around it.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I feel that's a reasonable perspective to have and I'm receptive to it. My main thinking against it is that coercing collaboration is really hard at a systems level -- I'm reminded of that one time Steve Jobs tried to make it so that the new Pixar building would have just one bathroom facility because he felt like that would lead to more people spontaneously bumping into each other.

That's just a flowery way of saying that I don't have any fundamentally better ideas, though. Traditional political greases like trading favors & porkbarreling are something I'm willing to settle for so long as they don't remain the exclusive domain of geriatrics. With that being said, I am by no means an expert and I'd love to hear more talk about alternatives

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

My preferred approach is to break the two-party system, which can happen in a couple ways:

end FPTP voting - implement something like STAR or Approval voting instead
proportional representation in the House - i.e. no more House districts, your chosen party would instead get X seats based on percent of votes; who gets elected would be chosen by a primary vote (i.e. Approval voting statewide, top X get House seats)

If no party has a majority, parties would be forced to form coalitions, which could lead to more collaboration instead of the constant push/pull we have now where parties often wait until they have control again so they don't need to compromise.