I get that things are concerning and stressful right now, but read the thing and think about it - they have to actually commit a criminal act to get arrested. He’s trying to head them off from doing it before it happens. The governor of California didn’t say something like this, but the governor of Illinois is saying it.
They have to commit the crimes before you can arrest them. He’s saying if you do get deployed in Chicago don’t fuck around or we’ll hold you accountable. Yeah, have to actually see follow through, but this is more of a warning shot
You’re right it’s bad that they shut down. Does make me wonder about the use of “traitors” since I don’t think tiktok could ever have been considered on the side of the people.
I hope these events result in better lives for Indonesians.
Yeah most children I know accept the police escort over detainment
So in this system, would all citizens have to vote on a bill in order for it to become law? How would it be determined that a law is valid/good enough to be brought up for a vote? You could imagine thousands of proposed bills each year. And certainly most citizens wouldn’t pay the kind of attention you’d hope would be given to legislation affecting the entire nation, even if it was only a hundred bills.
I do like the idea of a referendum, where if you get enough signatures then it goes up for vote to the entire electorate. But I think that needs to be in tandem with professional legislators.
Thanks for your reply. I’m still having a hard time understanding how it would work. Say for example that there needs to be a new law. How would it get written, and then how is it passed?
When you say direct democracy what do you envision?
I’m all for that where practical, but the complexity of the necessary tasks and knowledge of issues quickly exceeds what people can realistically keep track of. Governing and legislating needs to be a full time job I think.
It’s not just the US. It’s pretty much every country with a high standard of living.
Right, but we could have the same number of people while being ecologically sustainable. The problem seems like more one of distribution and technology, not total number of people. And besides, what’s the alternative? So I think it’s ok to say it’s a good thing the population outlook is downward while recognizing we’ve still got problems
I could be mistaken but based on recent demographic trends I don’t think people are talking about overpopulation much these days. Seems to be a trend that industrialized countries population goes down. China is looking at falling below replacement rate. Of course there’s the argument that we already have too many people, but if everyone starts going down then hey problem solved
Yeah, Germany has a sort of mix of single transferrable vote and proportional representation. I’m jealous!
A lot of stuff in the U.S. is like an early draft of democracy that never got changed.
Whoever gets the most votes wins (aka “first past the post”), but if there are more than two people running, it’s very common for the winner to have less than a majority of the public supporting them. It’s why we don’t see much in the way of third parties.
Instead we have primaries, which are just elections for members of a specific political party, but which have much lower participation than the general election. These are also “first past the post” elections, so as a result we end up with a lot of candidates that people aren’t happy with, but you have to vote for the lesser evil.
The house of representatives is vulnerable to gerrymandering, especially because each state draws it’s own districts by it’s own rules.
The Senate is unfair as written in the constitution - each state gets two senators, regardless of population. So a state like Wyoming or Montana gets two senators while they have a lower population than individual cities like New York or Los Angeles. It’s one big reason why we can’t get any popular laws passed.
Ideally I’d love to see the president elected by ranked choice voting, the Senate eliminated, and the house of representatives elected by single transferrable vote. But we’re so far from that it’s science fiction.
I’ve been campaigning against gerrymandering in my state since 2016:
You’re right that no map will be perfect. The best practice in cases where you’re limited to electing a single candidate per district is to have people who don’t have a conflict of interest draw it - an independent redistricting commission.
In our state’s proposed bill members of the commission can’t be politicians, lobbyists or families of those groups. 4 members are selected from the largest political party, 4 from the next largest political party, and 3 from independents/smaller parties.
Then you have a variety of conditions on the way they draw - not allowed to consider partisan advantage, must hold x number of public hearings, versions of maps must be published in advance of final selection and more.
Final approved map must receive at least two votes from each of the three blocks.
Lastly there’s a fail-over process where if a winning map cannot be selected, then any member of the commission can propose a map, and they hold an elimination vote until one remains.
All that said, I think the best long term solution is single transferrable vote. Way fewer wasted votes, pretty much everyone has someone who represents them, encourages third parties.
Please let the US follow Brazil and South Korea
Yeah! First, I don’t think it would be weird to ask it elsewhere, but definitely ok to ask it here.
You should watch the documentary “Under the Sun”. North Korea agreed to let the director film with the understanding he would follow their directions, almost to the point of following a script. However he secretly kept filming. It’s pretty fascinating. https://imdb.com/title/tt5129818/
Busting out the slur deep cuts
No sense imagining a hypothetical Jesus, but if you go by what the bible says, Jesus said “it’s easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom is heaven.” He said sell all of your possessions and then follow me. The bible talks about how people in the church shared what they had in common. If someone had a need someone would sell their property and distribute it to those who needed it.
Of course they also thought Jesus was going to return soon, within their lifetimes, and bring a perfect world. Not wait over 2,000 years
He’s a shit show, but SpaceX is still doing great. They have more launches per year than any other company or country. While they’ve had multiple launches explode recently, that’s their newer larger rocket where they’re still working out kinks.
If they can’t get that into shape eventually it could be a problem for the company, but their smaller rocket has a great record, reusable, a fraction of the cost of any other launch provider. Right now they’re the only game in town for the U.S. getting to the ISS.
I’d love to see Musk ousted, and more importantly to see real competition from other private launch providers. But don’t let Musk hate color your view of reality.
I don’t generally think “we already know” is a useful response to a news story. Just because you already know doesn’t mean there isn’t a wide audience who is being exposed to information for the first time.
Specifically for Kirk, I remember mentioning him to my wife a week beforehand and she didn’t know who he was.
Now that he’s dead, MAGA people are trying to make him into a martyr who was such a great guy. It’s helpful to have countering voices saying loudly, no he was not.