A modern civil war will not be fought on battle fields. That shit was pointless and stupid in the first civil war (which is a large reason why the South lost, they wanted glorious battles, and the north just burned cities)
No, a modern civil war will look like the mess in Syria or Haiti. It will be disorganized, chaotic, and there will be far too much pointless bloodshed, with no battle lines. Just a bunch of assholes killing people who they disagree with.
Or even the headline. It clearly says Georgia.
Honestly? Because a national popular vote (for president) would take an amendment, or every state joining the national interstate voting compact, but wouldn’t actually fix the deeper issue of the dysfunction of Congress.
Also, the compact might be of questionable constitutionality.
But fixing congress… This link spells out the problem as well as a one time fix for a problem that’s always going to exist.
A one time fix might be enough to fix things for a while…
But to truly fix things…
Set up something akin to Lemmy mixed with Wikipedia. Now, the only people who can post to this social media would be members of congress. Every single bill would have to be posted in its entirety to this platform for at least 30 days before a vote could be called. And then, members of congress could post in the comments, debating the bill. This would also give them ways to post links and research and shit,
Now, the important thing here, this platform would be open to anyone to view.
Hell, add in the ability to post video comments. Let these people play their popularity contests, but out in the open.
Oh yeah, if the bill is amended, then the 30-day timer restarts. Also, no more breaks. Congress is always officially in session. Then allow voting via the platform. Allow votes to be cast beforehand, but they finalize on the 30th day. If the bill does not get enough votes to pass, it’s dead, but can be resubmitted, or kicked back to committee. (a sub-lemmy for particular topics)
Maybe add in hired transcribers whose only job is to post transcribed text of any meeting or such.
Then make the software open, and get states to use it, and city councils. Basically all government should be done in text and in the open. With time for those making the laws to actually read them, and for the public to be able to know exactly what’s going on in government.
The benefit of my idea here is that it can support quite a bit of expansion, while still allowing a fairly local feeling representation. Because congress could easily work from home most of the time.
My ideal election laws would have an electoral college type setup, but based on congressional district rather than by state. Now, here are the changes that make it workable.
First, the number of congressional districts needs to increase. Massively. There needs to be a fixed ratio of Representatives to state population. At least 1 rep per X people. Then that number needs to be set in stone.
Congress got into a pissing match 100 years ago over how to do apportionment, so now we’re stuck with 435 Representatives when the population of the US has more than tripled and two new states have been added.
The next thing that needs to be set in stone is a way to draw districts. Shortest split-line is the method of choice here. Now, it can favor conservatives and rural areas a bit, but only if your number of districts is too low. With enough districts, the output starts to look a lot like actual population maps. If you squint.
I’d ditch the Senate. Or roll it into the House. Maybe say that each state gets an equal number of representatives who serve more than 2 years. So that there’s a group of people who have institutional knowledge when the next congress forms.
This would be important for the next change I’d make. Term limits, or rather, consecutive term limits. You’d be able to serve two terms, but then to serve a third you’d have to take one full term off, actually living in your district. You must spend 25 of every 30 days living in the district for at least 2 years to qualify to represent that district.
The final, and most impactful, change would be the voting system itself. We desperately need to ditch FPtP, and Ordinal voting systems in general. Cardinal voting systems are the only way to have viable third parties, with actual, separate identities.
My current favorite system is STAR. It’s the absolute best single winner election system out there. There may be better systems in the future, but for now, this is it.
So let’s talk practicality of these fixes.
Increasing the size of Congress is a single law. That’s it. If you want to push things a bit further, there’s James Madison’s Congressional Apportionment Amendment, which despite being introduced in the late 1700s, is still a viable amendment, and could theoretically finish the ratification process.
Fun fact, the 27th amendment, which was ratified within my lifetime, was introduced along with the congressional apportionment amendment.
Drawing districts is a State level thing, but Congress does have the power to set requirements on federal elections. They could require that federal districts be drawn via a certain way.
But still, an amendment is likely the only way that it would be implemented.
Term limits flat out need an amendment, same with ditching the senate.
And the final note, the voting system needs to either be done state by state, or via the ability to control federal elections. Possibly needs an amendment to actually apply to everyone,
Journalists are not lawyers…
Some actual lawyers have chimed in here and said that getting a judge, even one as blatantly biased as Cannon, removed from a case is basically impossible.
Turns out, there’s a set legal definition on bias, and it’s one of the hardest standards to meet.
That line is named Roger Stone…
The man with a Nixon Tattoo on his back, and who was coordinating Jan 6th with Proud Boys and Oath Keepers.
Nixon and Kissinger sabotaged the 1968 Paris Peace Talks so that Nixon would have an advantage in the election. He then massively increased the US presence in Vietnam, while allowing Kissinger free rein to order the carpet bombing of Cambodian villages. Often overruling generals that said there were no military targets in said Cambodian villages.
Nixon then started the War on Drugs because he saw hippies and black people as his biggest detractors, but because he knew he couldn’t make it illegal to be a hippy or black, he went after the drugs traditionally favored by both groups, in effect, making it illegal to be a hippy or black.
There’s so much more…
Conservatism was literally created as a backlash against the democratic movements of the US and France.
Conserving the power of the rich, to create a new nobility.
Monarchy was always the end game.
If that was your single take away from that book, you might want to reread it.
I was military before my first civilian job.
We had that lesson beat into our heads repeatedly, and yet there were still people who never quite picked up on it.
We had the consent to monitoring pop-up every single time we logged onto a government computer, and then had that consent to monitoring explicitly spelled out every three months as we had to complete a computer based training program.
For some people, it still didn’t take.
All that said, this particular thought crime detection effort is creepy as fuck.
We stood up to these assholes in the 30s
But did we really? I read my history, and if not for the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, the US would have either not joined WW2, or would have joined on the side of Germany.
The first CIA director (Before the CIA was formed) was doing spy shit in Europe before the US joined the war, and was very friendly with Hitler’s government. He reportedly cried actual tears when the US joined the was against Germany.
There were Nazi marches in the US in the 30s, but they weren’t popular for one reason only. The US population didn’t like that the Nazi ideology was German. The Homegrown Fascists were more popular. Especially the America First movement.
There are issues with Mixed Member Proportional, but the biggest for the US is that it would require a full constitutional amendment.
Also, most implementations of MMP use some sort of Ordinal voting system as a base. This is less than ideal.
STAR is not an Ordinal system. STAR is a Cardinal system. There are also proportional versions of Score (the voting system that STAR is based on)
Anyway, for the US, changing the voting method is far easier than changing to a proportional system.
Fun fact for proportional systems, if you have a 5 member district, you need more than 80% of the population to actively vote against an incumbent to get rid of them.
Third parties (in any form) under First Past the Post voting are actively harmful to the interests of the voters who support them.
The way to actually have viable third parties is to switch voting systems. The option that seems like the stand-out best for encouraging the growth of third parties is STAR
The legal way to enter the US is to immediately present themselves to Federal custody so that they can start the process of claiming asylum. That’s how this works.
The vast majority of migrants follow this simple procedure.
Step A; set foot on US soil via any means.
Step 2; locate the nearest border patrol agent and hope they aren’t feeling abusive and or murderous.
Step #; claim asylum.
That’s it. That’s the legal process.
Now, one a migrant has claimed asylum, that doesn’t mean that they get to stay. No, that starts the investigation and Asylum Hearings.
Conservatives absolutely hate brown people coming to the country, so have massively cut funding for investigations and hearings. This means that migrants seeking asylum end up sitting in federal custody (that they willingly turned themselves into) for months, or even years.
Meanwhile, the number one source of “illegal” immigration is, and always has been, visa overstays. Someone will get a visa to visit the US, and then just not go home when it ends.
Fun fact, the people who cross the border without then claiming asylum? They’re instantly deported.
It’s only the desperate who claim asylum, and often because their lives are so bad in their home country that taking the risk of dying on the way to the US border is the better choice. It’s often so bad in their home country because of US intervention over the years… We’ve done more evil in the name of making some rich asshole slightly richer than any other country, save England and the Dutch.
The CIA literally sent agents to South America to teach dictators how to more brutally torture newspaper publishers and elementary school teachers. And people were tortured.
The scars of that sort of shit, both figurative and literal, are part of those countries, even after the right wing dictators were ousted from power.
We owe these people, and yet racist jackasses keep cheering when we abuse them even more, claiming they deserve it for coming here illegally. They’ve followed procedure, and we’ve fucked them over yet again.
These jackasses have been caught lying before, and yet they’re still around peddling their obvious lies.
I even left out this bit.
Kaplan worked as a policy advisor on George W. Bush’s 2000 presidential campaign, during which he was a participant in the Brooks Brothers riot on November 22, 2000.[11]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brooks_Brothers_riot
Not a single person involved in the riot went to jail over it, and most got jobs with Bush’s White House.
In May 2011 Facebook hired Kaplan as its vice president of U.S. public policy, as part of a Facebook’s effort to “strengthen” the company’s ties to Republican lawmakers on Capitol Hill.[16][17] In October 2014, Kaplan succeeded Marne Levine as Facebook’s vice president of global public policy.[18]
Within the company, Kaplan advocated against restrictions on racially incendiary speech.[19] He played an important role in crafting an exception for newsworthy political discourse when deciding on whether content violated the community guidelines.[19] During the 2016 election, Kaplan advocated against closing down Facebook groups which allegedly peddled fake news.[19] Kaplan argued that getting rid of the groups would have disproportionately targeted conservatives.[19][3] During and after the 2016 US presidential election, Kaplan argued against Facebook publicly disclosing the extent of Russian influence operations on the platform.[20]
In 2017, after Facebook had implemented changes to its algorithm to expose users to more content by family and friends and less by publishers who were determined by Facebook to engage in misinformation, Kaplan questioned whether the algorithm disproportionately hurt conservative publishers and successfully advocated for Facebook to change the algorithm again.[19]
He pushed against a proposed Facebook project that was intended to make Facebook users of different political views engage with each other in less hostile ways. Kaplan argued that this feature would lead conservatives to accuse Facebook of bias.[7][5] Kaplan also reportedly advocated on behalf of Breitbart News and the Daily Caller within Facebook.[5][6] Kaplan has helped to place conservatives in key positions in the leadership of Facebook.[3]
In 2018, he advocated strongly for the Supreme Court nomination of Brett Kavanaugh.[21] Kaplan sat behind Kavanaugh during his Senate confirmation hearings.[21]
During Donald Trump’s presidency, Kaplan was on friendly terms with the administration.[20] At one point, the administration considered nominating him as head of the Office of Management and Budget.[20]
The true answer is to use maps created via Shortest Splitline.
How it works is easy. You take a map of the population of the state and then draw the shortest line possible that splits the population in half. You then continue this exercise until you have enough districts to satisfy the number of elected positions. For odd numbers of districts, you separate one district in to 1/3ds via the shortest lines possible.
This would fix almost every state’s gerrymander problems.
The next fix seems counter intuitive, but is not if you learn some basic history. We expand the size of congress. Expand it massively. See, then the constitution was written, it was assumed that the size of congress would grow to better represent the will of the growing population.
The problem started in 1920. WW1 had just ended, and it played havoc on the census. This led to a bitter fight in congress over how many seats to award each state. Now, because of the arguing, there was no 1920 congressional apportionment (the assigning of the number of Representatives in the House)
The arguing and fighting lasted until 1929. Congress decided that they were not going to start the 1930 apportionment without finishing the 1920 apportionment, but still couldn’t agree on a new number of Representatives, so they said “fuck it” and passed the 1929 Permanent Apportionment Act. This froze the size of the House at 435 members (The number from 1910). It’s been stuck at that level ever since, even with adding two new states and more than tripling the population since then.
This little quirk of law makes it so much easier to gerrymander control of the House today than it was when the term was invented. And all it would take to fix it is a single act of congress. Just one law to reapportion the House with a larger number. But then you have a fight over how many… Except that you can use any number of algorithms to automatically distribute seats.
She should be, and not just for this.
She got a job as a Trump lawyer by literally tricking a sexual harassment victim into signing a lopsided agreement that “absolved” the Trump property management of any wrongdoing.
LegalEgale has a video about it and the entire thing was scummy as fuck, and likely illegal.
Fun fact, this is exactly the sort of situation that Ivermectin was made for. It’s an anti-parasite drug.