Narauko @ Narauko @lemmy.world

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2 yr. ago

I like where you're going here, and the only things I disagree with are the Senate merge and Electoral College as these still serve a purpose. The removal of the House cap will rebalance there, and if anything the Senate could be reverted from popular election back to being appointed by the State Legislatures so they rebalance back to being actual actors for the State as intended vs overpowered Representatives.

The Electoral College helps balance democracy being 2 wolves and a sheep voting on what's for dinner, but maybe get some math experts to review the equation for apportionment and/or set all electors to be proportional to the vote percentages in every state.

Bees kill a number of people every year, yet people keep them in large numbers. Dogs do to, but we keep millions of them. This guy got unlucky with underlying health problems. Gila venom hurts like a son of a bitch, but is otherwise about as medically significant as a black widow bite. People keep those as pets too.

You are correct, and it is exacerbated by the cap on representatives. You will never really get it 100% perfect due to the land mass of the US, but uncapping it and making it proportional would go a long way.

That makes sense if the states were just administrative zones like the Canadian provinces and territories, all fully subsumed and beholden under the Federal Government. We are not. We are a closely connected economic and political union of individual states collected into a Republic, all of which work together and compete with different ideas. All powers not specifically enumerated to the Federal Government are each State's to decide and manage. This allows States to try different things and see what works best, from tax strategy, to universal healthcare (Romneycare), to UBI.

The people have their focus on what is best for them personally. This encompasses differing things from worldwide events to their neighborhood, but it is still a narrow scope. City/county leadership is focused on how best to keep their city/county running for maximum benefit of their population. States have the same focus over all the cities and counties therein.

We only have a ruling elite because people tend to vote for the incumbents, and we have no term limits except for the Presidency. It is also relatively stupid to put everything to a mass democratic vote, especially for things that should be decided by experts. Water rights, mineral rights, pollution controls, regulations, revenue allocation, etc.

That is like saying that the division leadership in a company shouldn't have a voice in decision making alongside the union and board of directors, just let the union make the decisions. You don't need input from finance and design/engineering and human resources and warehousing and production and quality control, the people in those departments all elected their union representatives so we don't need input from those department leads.

The Senate should go back to being elected by the State Government instead of by the people, the change to this brought by the 17th caused this muddling. The balance of powers with the 3 chambers should work, but making the 2nd chamber just a superior version of the 3rd throws everything slightly out of alignment.

"Well, that's just like, your opinion man". The constitution is still set up that way, and powers not explicitly granted to the Federal Government are the dominion of the States. We are still more like the EU than other "full-fledged" countries. You may not like that, but I would bet that just as many people feel differently as those that agree with you. It would also take the adoption of a new constitution to do that, and the odds of the Country remaining united through a complete constitution change compared to breaking up into several independent countries doesn't seem high right now.

The US is far more like the EU than it is like Britain or Canada, being a Republic of aligned States. We have a body representing the states themselves (the Senate, and each state is equal and gets 2 Senators), a body representing the People in those states (the House of Representatives, which has been capped for total size and is no longer equally proportional but serves the same purpose), and a body representing the entire Union (the Executive branch - the President, Vice President, Cabinet, etc.).

Minor correction: the Senate is 2 per state, so Wyoming's 1 state has the same representation as California's 1 state. The Senate is (supposed to be) the voice of the States in the Federal Government. The Senate wasn't even supposed to be elected by popular vote, they were appointed/elected by their state governments until the 17th amendment. The change made senators into super-representatives, which changed power dynamics. Arguments can be made here for whether this was ultimately better or worse.

The House of Representatives IS the voice of the people, and should be proportional to population size (but was artificially capped because the Feds complained it was getting too big so now Wyoming has more representational power per person than California). This needs to change because it's only going to get worse going forward.

With this breakdown, the Federal Government's interests, State's interests, and the People's interests balance each other. These three bodies have vastly different focuses.

If Microsoft can't figure out how to unlock the taskbar in Win11 so over/under monitor layouts can work (taskbar being bottom/bottom top/top), it will be for me. Drive me up a wall that the whole point of Win11 was a better UI, and basic fucking customization is dropped. I didn't buy a Mac, don't try and tell me how I am supposed to set up my desktops.

Game Theory is a hard mathematics concept and not an applied scientific theory, so you're in the ballpark but slightly adjacent. The fact that so many people can graduate high school without the basic understanding of the scientific method and the differences between a hypothesis, a theory, and a scientific law is concerning, I grant you that, but the number of graduates who can't read proficiently is even more concerning.

MatPat may not have been a Mr Wizard, Beakman, or Bill Nye, but he was not the worst Pop-science entertainment platform out there. Just like comic books didn't corrupt the youth and kill reading for the generations since the Golden Age, I doubt the Game Theorists did much harm to the public's knowledge of science. It is not the job of YouTube entertainers or ticktockers to teach science, and if a few people become interested in science because of channels or programs like these and go on to learn more or focus in STEM in school, then I think that's probably a net positive.

Why do you think that the States don't need a voice in Government? The country is divided between the Federal Government, the State Governments, and the People, with the former being elected by the latter 2. Each State having the same number (2) of Senators puts all States on an equal level. Wyoming is just as valid a state as California or Texas, and should have an equal voice. Proportional representation in the House puts the each person on the same level, eliminating the current unbalance between Wyoming and California.

The People elect their local/state legislatures, which influences those who appoint their Senators, but the People and the State have different perspectives and prerogatives as they have different "jobs". It's certainly fallen out of style, but the whole "everything not explicitly granted to the Federal Government belongs to the States" is still a thing. We are a Republic of States, or are supposed to be at least.

I for one want more States to experiment with things like Universal Healthcare (Massachusetts), UBI (Alaska, kind of?), etc. They can do this because they are States in a Republic.

The 17th should be reverted and Senators should be elected by the state legislatures, not abolished altogether. It should serve it's intended purpose as the voice of the States. The Electoral College also still serves a purpose, but all states should be proportional delegate instead of winner take all. Ranked Choice or something similar is also needed, because FPTP always results in 2 shitty parties and is a root cause of many of our issues.

The House definitely need to be unlocked and proportional to population. Term limits are needed in both House and Senate, and money definitely needs to be removed from politics. Government provided war chests and that's all you get, hard agree on that. Hard agree on no ads, no PACs, etc. Get your message out in debates and town halls in an actual real campaign.

May I introduce you to JNCO?

So you are saying that without US support the surrounding Muslim nations multiple attempts at the genocide and destruction of Israel would have been successful, and that this is preferable to the current failed Two State solution.

Do you have a problem when the same argument is used against the Palestinians, and Hamas? The narrative there is that Hamas is built on the framework of "death to Israel and the Jews", and since the Palestinians don't come out strongly enough against the requested then they are guilty. Other Arab/Muslim majority neighboring nations denying them as refugees because of the levels of radicalization that have occurred, which gives ammunition to the pro-Israel sides declaration that the rank and file Palestinians are hiding behind Islamic Jihad and antisemitism to try and genocide the Jews.

Damn, only three drinks to slurred? Dad's a cheap date.

The chain of laws would be the two Militia Acts of 1792, then the Militia Act of 1795 which made 1792's Presidental powers permanent, then the Militia Act of 1862 where they expanded every able bodied white male citizen to include black males, then the Militia Act of 1903 which made the organized militia officially into the National Guard and the unorganized militia of all other male citizens (and those who have stated formal intention to become a citizen this time) into the unorganized Reserve Militia, and then finally the National Defense Act of 1916 providing funding to the National Guard and creating the ability to draft the Guard for overseas service.

That passage on the makeup of the militia is from the 1792 Militia Acts, and is fully contemporaneous with the 2nd amendment being a mere 16 years after the Declaration and 9 years after the end of the war. There is clear continuity from before the founding to today that the militia is the citizenry.

Let's throw out the "flowery language" since you dislike it, it doesn't change anything. In plain English he wrote that the discussion was about and included all classes of citizens. I don't know if you are speed skimming or just that biased in your comprehension of the work. His use of "a well regulated militia" was to say that it was an unreasonable expectation and counter productive, and the only expectation was that the people be armed. He is literally saying "give up on the whole well regulated militia for everyone thing and be happy that at least everyone, the people at large, will be armed".

I don't know if you are trolling at this point, just not reading the paper, or so biased that you actually think that "the experiment [the project of disciplining the entire militia of the United States], if made, could not succeed, because it would not long be endured. Little more can reasonably be aimed at, with respect to the people at large, than to have them properly armed and equipped" is actually advocating in favor of only arming the disciplined [well regulated] militia.

Yeah, I made sure to capture the entire sentence so I wouldn't be cherry picking/quote mining to skew it to my "side" of the debate. In 1776, planning a yearly exercise/drill for a town or city was something that would happen when everyone got together for traveling judges, organizing fire brigades, and all kinds of civic tasks.

If you want to start planning a yearly get together for people to have a training day with the national guard or reserves like CERT does for disaster drills, it would probably be a huge hit with the tacticool dads and gravy seals. Would probably get better turnout than the CERT drills that serve critical importance to first responders and make the civilians better at how to respond to disasters too.

You are glossing over that the Federal Government to this day considers every (male) citizen to be the militia. Your saying the equivalent of "Nader's talking about specifically the Pinto, not cars in general when he says our roads are unsafe." I'll even conceed that your right that Title 10 does need to be adjusted to include women, because they already serve in the military and are fully capable to fighting in wars. You are also glossing over Hamilton saying that requiring everyone to be a well-regulated militia was unreasonable, so they would just need to rely on "the great body of the yeomanry, and of the other classes of the citizens" being armed and equipped. That right there is the definition of "every Tom, Dick, and Harry". He wanted to make sure that they didn't neglect to be armed and equipped by checking every year or so. I would like to direct the request for critically reading Federalist 29 instead of just using bits to confirm your bias" right back your way.

If "expecting them to be trained as a military is unreasonable, but we can still rely on them to bring their guns and fight with the professionals with just a little training once a year" doesn't rely on the right of all classes of citizens having a right to be armed, I don't know what else it means. The Militia Acts say the same thing; every able bodied citizen is considered part of the militia, and as such can be conscripted at any time of need. When conscripted, the "every able bodied citizen" needed to show up with a gun, initial ammunition, bayonet, and field equipment.

We have the same system now, except it's called Selective Service instead of reporting to your town hall when you move, except you do that too by establishing residency for local voting and tax purposes.

She committed the cardinal sin: stealing from the establishment. Steal from the working class with predatory financial practices and fees for being poor and they are fine with it; the powers that be have been trying to steal the working and middle class out of existence for years. But she stole from other companies, stupid lady. After a few handfuls of stores they won't stand for it.