Don’t be a dick

Interesting idea. Sometimes it’s easier to act and come up with something first, then ask other people to join later.

I don’t care what Shrek thinks

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.

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

It’s generally illegal to shoot someone

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.

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.

Busting out the slur deep cuts

Did you go to church? Cause I grew up protestant, if someone called our pastor “priest” I would immediately know they weren’t one of us.

From your initial comment I gather you don’t like Christianity, which is fine with me, I’m an atheist now. But the joke of OP is that you can give yourself away without realizing it because of a tiny detail.

In the movie screenshot the guy indicates “three” using a hand sign that’s different if you’re from different places. Same with calling the Pope “pastor”. It gives away that Vance isn’t really one of them. And the point of making public statements like Vance did are to endear you to the intended audience.

When you’re trying to pander to a certain demographic you don’t want to call their most important guy by the wrong title

For many people “have useful skills” doesn’t imply “is a senior engineer.” I’m a white collar worker in a relatively senior position and make a fairly comfortable living. I looked into Canada and Europe and my skills, useful as they may be to me and my employers, don’t give me any advantage in immigrating.

Could I do it? Sure, but it would be a step back in quality of life for a number of years, for some period I might be separated from my partner, and after the move I’d be separated from all my friends, family and professional network, with no guarantee I’d get back to my current earning level.

Unlike many people my standard of living isn’t so bad here. I also have some sense of responsibility to try to contribute and make things better where I can. But things are certainly looking dicey.

Have you looked into this? Please share one country that you’d suggest Americans move to and which would allow it.

You know most countries have laws that prevent people from just moving and working there? And they prioritize people with certain skills, sometimes require you to have a certain amount of money in the bank.