That is exactly how the US system works, with a handful of exceptions.

For the election of a Senator or Representative - it’s almost always FPTP. The candidate that gets the most votes wins the seat, regardless of whether or not they got a majority of the vote. The state of Georgia is an example of an exception, as they hold a runoff election for Senator if the leading candidate falls short of 50% - as happened with the elections of Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock, both of which went to runoff.

For the presidential election, this also how it works in the vast majority of cases. 100% of a state’s electoral college vote goes to the candidate that gets the most votes, regardless of whether or not they got a majority of the votes in the state. You have a situations like Texas in 2020 giving 38 electoral college votes to Trump and zero to Biden (versus a proportional allocation of more like 20 Trump, 17 Biden and 1 Jorgensen). That electoral college system results in situations like 1992, when Bill Clinton got a 370 vote electoral college landslide on 43% of the vote because of Ross Perot’s third-party candidacy, as well as situations like 2000 and 2016 where a Republican candidate who came 2nd in the national vote still came 1st in the electoral college by virtue of coming first past the post in enough individual states. (I believe the exceptions are Nebraska and Maine, which split their electoral college votes.)

First past the post - the party with the most votes ‘wins’. It’s in contrast to a range of other systems that rely on proportionality or preferential voting to ensure that the party or parties with majority support wins.

For example, imagine a scenario where there are 10 constituencies electing a representative by FPTP. In each of those 10 constituencies, the result is identical as follows:

• Nazi - 40%
• Liberal - 30%
• Socialist - 20%
• Conservative - 10%

Under FPTP, the Nazi would be the top candidate in every constituency, and so win 10 out of 10 seats and have total control of the legislature, even though 60% of people voted anti-Nazi. This is the system in the UK and US.

Under a proportional system, you would allocate the seats in proportion to the votes cast - so 4 for the Nazis, 3 for the Liberals, 2 for the Socialists and 1 for the Conservatives. The non-Nazis would then have a legislative majority (6 out of 10 seats) that reflects how people actually voted, and could form an anti-Nazi coalition government. This is the system in the Netherlands or Germany for example.

Under a preferential system, you still elect seats on a constituency basis, but you make sure that the winning candidate is preferred by a majority of voters in the constituency - either by having multi-round elections or by having voters rank candidates instead of just voting for one. In a simplified system, you could rule out all but the top two candidates (in this case, Nazi and Liberal), and then have a second round of votes two weeks later for voters to decide between those two candidates to represent their seat. This tends to favour more moderate candidates so it’s likely under such a system that the Liberal would generally defeat the Nazi in the second round in most seats. This is the system in France.

There are also hybrid systems like Single Transferrable Vote, which simultaneously achieve proportionality and preferential voting - this is used in Ireland.

Geert Wilder wins Dutch election

35 of the 150 seats in parliament

Let’s please stop using FPTP language to describe very non-FPTP systems and outcomes.

Yeah, Spanish. That’s the point. There were penguins, then was French, it was Spanish, it was British. It was never Argentinian. There were never civilians there.

The only civilians who have lived there are the Falkland Islanders, who identify as British. Argentina’s claim is based on the Spanish once having a very limited military presence there, on which basis they want to assert some sort of imperialist sovereignty over a bunch of civilians whose ancestors have been there for hundreds of years and who have only ever considered themselves British.

‘Get them back’. What does ‘back’ even mean in this statement? Of all the countries that have ever legitimately ruled the Falklands, Argentina was never one of them.

The penguins have a better claim to the Falklands than Argentina…

The reason the board have given is - if true - a very reasonable reason to fire a CEO. The job of the board is to oversee, scrutinise and challenge the management, and if the management were lying to or withholding information from the board then that’s an obvious reason for the management to go.

American corporate governance standards are really hit-and-miss, and in a lot of these tech firms you often end up with situations of CEOs doubling up as chairs of their boards - e.g. Musk, Zuckerberg , Bezos -something that structurally neuters the ability of the board to do its basic job of challenging the CEO! So when I see an American board standing up to a CEO that’s trying to evade scrutiny, I feel that’s something that should be applauded.

That’s a neat story but doesn’t bear much relation to reality. The Democrats want to fulfill the US’s obligations to both Israel and Ukraine, whereas many Republicans want to see Russian flags flying in Kyiv. The Senate Democrats blocked the Israel-only package because the Republican Congress may then not send a Ukraine package, hence the Democrats wanting the two together.

Historically yes, although I don’t think there’s been one as bad as Suella before, and certainly not one who is now among the betting market favourites to be the next Tory leader once they’re in opposition.

I see her more as a symptom of the nihilism that has overtaken British conservatism since the 2016 referendum. They’ve become obsessed with fighting meaningless symbols and vibes, and fixated on pulling down their opponents rather than building something up themselves. Nothing positive matters to them, it’s all about destruction.

In the 1980s, Thatcher’s Tories sold the British lower middle-class on a vision of home-owning, share-owning popular capitalist democracy, in which entrepreneurs and small-business owners would guide us all into a prosperous future. What positive vision like that do Tories have to offer to voters today? Single-sex toilets and criminalising the homeless? Suella literally has said that her ‘dream’ in politics is to deport refugees to Rwanda. They have nothing positive to offer and Suella’s rise is a symptom of that.

Exactly what I thought when I saw the username. Methinks the fascist doth protest too much.

For anyone unaware - that is the guy who’s spamming every comment section with a comment explaining how he considers all 2.3 million Gazans (including the 40% of whom are children under 14) to be equally responsible for Hamas’s 7 October attacks, and therefore deserving of what they get.

Yes. Literally the only truly evil senior British politician I have come across in my lifetime.

There are plenty of politicians in my lifetime who I have disagreed with quite severely on certain things - Thatcher, Blair, Corbyn, May, for example. But in each of their cases I honestly believe they were pursuing a course that they believed would improve the lot of the British people and bring about a better, fairer and more prosperous society - I might have disagreed with them (in some cases a lot!) about how to get there, but I never doubted their hearts were ultimately in the right place. Boris Johnson was the first who left me thinking he had no redeeming qualities - selfish and egotistical, heart very much in the wrong place. Boris was only in it for Boris.

But Suella is something else. Suella isn’t in it for the public good, but Suella isn’t in it for Suella either. Suella is in it to hurt people. That’s her overwhelming motivating goal in life and politics. She gets off on undisguised cruelty. She is genuinely evil.

Just imagine trying to use a terrorist mob as a yardstick to excuse the misdeeds of the advanced 21st century military of a modern democracy.

I mean, they’re obviously not going to, so I guess Zuckerberg better go dust off what I can only assume is his comically large chequebook…

Rishi Sunak’s father-in-law, everyone.

Some of us are able to comprehend complexity and hold multiple thoughts in our heads at the same time. It’s possible (and the only way to be logically consistent) to understand that:

• in Iran, Muslim fundamentalists are abusing/killing innocent other Muslims;

• in Israel, Jewish fundamentalists are abusing/killing innocent Muslims, and Muslim fundamentalists are abusing/killing innocent Jews;

• in Palestine, Jewish and Muslim fundamentalists are abusing/killing innocent Muslims.

This isn’t a weekend football game where you have to pick one side, wear their colours and then support them until the final whistle. This is real life, it’s complicated. Don’t turn mass suffering into a sport.

In the UK - that was a Liberal Democrat policy going into the 2010 election that was then implemented during the Coalition government. They increased the tax-free personal allowance, which effectively took two million of the lowest paid out of paying income tax altogether. It was hugely popular, and so the Tories later tried to claim credit for it even though it was literally something the Lib Dems forced onto them at the expense of some of the tax cuts for the rich that the Tories had wanted…

When the seagulls follow the trawler, it is because they think sardines will be thrown into the sea. Thank you.

What on Earth would lead you to think Hamas cares about Gaza residents? The whole point of Hamas’s attacks was to provoke this sort of Israeli reaction. The innocent Palestinians who are going to die in this attack are no more than disposable pawns and human shields to Hamas.

What a weird attempt at logic.

Would you hold Israel to the same standard? They invaded the Palestinian territories in 1967, have held them under military occupation for over half a century since and in that time have killed rather a lot more Palestinian civilians than vice versa.

But sensible people do not use that as a pretext to say a blanket ‘fuck Israel’, because it is unhelpful, unconstructive and racist to blame an entire people for war crimes committed by members of their military. But I’m curious if you apply your logic on Palestine to the other side too?

Hamas won a plurality (44%) - not a majority - of the votes in the last elections in 2006. They subsequently launched a coup, sought to purge their political opponents and have ruled the Gaza Strip as a de facto dictatorship ever since. The people of Gaza have spent the last 17 years suffering from the combination of a Hamas dictatorship and a full land, sea and air blockade by the Israeli military.

So to answer your question: Hamas gunmen put Hamas in power.

Gaza, the West Bank and East Jerusalem remain occupied territories under international law since the 1967 Israeli conquests.