Linuses blog

[allix]

http://torvalds-family.blogspot.com/

Its just started , I thought this very interesting ...

http://torvalds-family.blogspot.com/200 ... -land.html

Most of the rest of the time I can kind of ignore it. We've been in the US for over a decade, and it's definitely "home", and we like living here. But being an alien means that you can't vote, and seeing all the news being about the presidential election (and all the streets here locally littered with signs about the local school bond) tends to remind you about that issue.

But being reminded about not being able to vote is actually the much smaller thing: much more than that, election season reminds you about what an odd place the US is.

But then voting season comes and reminds you that all those Americans that are individually sane and normal tend to be collectively crazy and very odd. And that's when you really notice that you're not in Finland any more.

That's when you also notice that the whole US voting system is apparently expressly designed to be polarizing (winner-take-all electoral system etc). To somebody from Finland, that looks like a rather obvious and fundamental design flaw. In Finland, government is quite commonly a quilt-work of different parties, and the "rainbow coalition" of many many parties working together was the norm for a long time. And it seems to result in much more civilized political behaviour.

Of course, in the US there are also much wider social, educational, religious and economic differences between people, and issues range all over the map. Which then means that it's hard to bring up any nuances in politics, since either people won't care about them (not relevant for that group), or they simply won't understand them (what does "foreign policy" matter to somebody who has likely never been outside the US unless you count things like day-trips to Tijuana?).

So you couple a polarizing voting system with a campaign that has to make simplified black-and-white statements, and what do you get?

Ugly, is what you get.

Most of the time I really like living in the US. But voting season sometimes makes you wonder.

What is it about you Americans and shitty politics?

[Claudio]

Most of us Americans ask the same question.

[allix]

fair enough , what I found abhorrent is that campaigns are directed at the oppositions personal life and not there policies.
In england it is just as bad , we have the same two-party system more or less.
I think a multi-party system with a parliament and Representative democracy where voting for a outside party is never a wasted vote.
Some countries have this, so its not utopian concept at all.

[Tsuroerusu]

Some countries have this, so its not utopian concept at all.

Not just some, a whole bunch have it! Here's just a handful of examples: Denmark (Herein including Greenland and the Faroe Islands), Sweden, Norway, Finland, Iceland, Germany, Belgium, the Netherlands, Austria, Poland, Ukraine, Turkey, Israel and Canada among others, have multi-party systems.

[allix]

Netherlands has some interesting policies in regard to sex and drugs.
People that are addicted to crack are not thrown in prison instead they are treated for a problem with drugs to take you off them.
Amsterdam had the first sex museum , although the Danes beat them to legalising hardcore porn first.