Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

Ted Cruz

7 (6.5%)

Rick Santorum

16 (14.8%)

Michelle Bachmann

13 (12%)

Chris Christie

23 (21.3%)

Rand Paul

49 (45.4%)

Total Members Voted: 107

[kaijyuu]

Well, ya see, for some people, justice and morality isn't about helping people or saving lives, but rather it's about pinning blame. The health of the mother is irrelevant to some people because the mother is evil (tm) and deserves punishment, be it divine or mundane.


IE:
"Why do you care about baby killers!?"

[Descan]

And -that's- why I hate morals. :I

Doing things that are good, doing things that are bad, okay. Hell, I'll even give you that it's hard to know what "good" and "bad" are. (I just tend to follow "fulfills preferences for people, with the people on the lower rungs having a weight, and minimizing physical/mental/emotional harm as much as you can." but that's just me.)

 But "morals"? Rules you gotta follow even if they're detrimental, especially if they're detrimental (to get brownie points from other insane people around you. "I am very much against contraceptives, even in AIDs ridden countries! It is Gods law!") yeah no thanks. :I

[Darvi]

Don't they, like, stop being morals if they're imposed by other people or entities?

[Descan]

No, then they become Morals. You pronounce the capital.

[Sheb]

I actually met some guy that claimed infanticide should be legal on those terms. I guess the counter-argument would be that the baby can live without its mother at that point, so you don't have the right to kill it since you have an alternative.

[Sheb]

What argument? The "no killing if there is an alternative"?

[Helgoland]

^That stuff is why I goddamn hate Peter Singer. Not only is his philosophy trivial and uninnovative, he's a goddamn hypocritical self-righteous pseudo-intellectual who discredits people with similar but sane views by pulling that kind of crap.
/rant (He's still an asshat, though.)

[Sheb]

I was thinking of something. Has there been any attempt by Republicans to push states like California to move to a proportional system to allocate Electors for the presidential elections? It would be fairer to Californian republicans (their votes don't mean shit at the moment), would force Presidential candidates to pay more attention to California and of course would rob the Dems of around 20 Electors (it's like a free Pennsylvania!)

Edit: Or the Dems trying something similar in Texas or anything.

[GlyphGryph]

I've realized I can no longer have a meaningful conversation with most people about democratic reform, because our understandings of what democracy is, what democracy is for, and what would be considered an "improvement" are so radically different as to make meaningful dialogue on the topic almost impossible. :/

But honestly I don't see how direct presidential elections or knocking down FPTP are actually all that likely to help.

[Descan]

^That stuff is why I goddamn hate Peter Singer. Not only is his philosophy trivial and uninnovative, he's a goddamn hypocritical self-righteous pseudo-intellectual who discredits people with similar but sane views by pulling that kind of crap.
/rant (He's still an asshat, though.)

Who's Peter Singer?

I'm not trying to be innovative, I'm trying not to be an asshole. ;_;

[Frumple]

Who's Peter Singer?

This guy. Fairly influential ethics dude, particularly re: animal stuff and some other junk.

[lue]

But honestly I don't see how direct presidential elections or knocking down FPTP are actually all that likely to help.

Direct presidential elections would get rid of annoying situations like 2000 and whenever the winner didn't receive the majority of the popular vote.

The idea behind replacing FPTP with something more friendly to >2 parties, is that over time people will feel more confident in voting for a third party, because even if their party does not win, their vote is not wasted. In FPTP, voting for a Green Party or Communist candidate to a national position is about as politically effective as not voting. In a better system, such as Instant Runoff Voting, your ballot isn't wasted just because you picked the lesser-known candidate. Over the course of a few elections, you suddenly see the Green Party with 20% of the vote from people who know that they can pick the Green party and not lose their vote because of it.

That's how I understand the corrective nature of IRV or Range Voting or any of the other choices. For legislatures my pick goes for MMPR, though if I recall it requires making political parties an official piece of government.

[GlyphGryph]

Which really just makes it clear how different the positions we're coming from are.

When it comes to legislation, for political reasons it's still going to end up as a yes/no vote, and coalitions are likely to form like they do in all those other countries with strong third party support, giving you something practically indistinguishable from the "coalition-party" system the US has now. There would still be no advantage to being a third party, and significant cost because you'd be foregoing the support of joining on of the larger coalitions.

And there's nothing to say that viable third parties would even accomplish anything good. It's possible, sure - but only possible.

Direct presidential elections would get rid of annoying situations like 2000 and whenever the winner didn't receive the majority of the popular vote.

And what is the actual benefit of it? Is it that Bush would retroactively get elected? Is it that NEXT time we might insure Bush gets elected by changing it? Is it because it gives too much power to one group, removes too much power from another, harms a fundamental balancing component of our government system, or, worse of all, sets up an internally reinforcing system of perverse incentives?

It's not enough to simply say "This would be better!" unless you can provide an argument as to why it would be better. And to change something like this, you'd be best off not only providing such an argument but also arguing that things would be better enough to be worth the effort it would take to change how something like this works.

[Mictlantecuhtli]

I still think voter aptitude tests should be required to register to vote.

[PTTG??]

Well, it's more representative... slightly.

Of course, the congress is the real power, and where the most disfunction is. I'd like to hear some reforms in that area. For one thing, small states need to be, in game parlance, nerfed. Why, exactly, are Wyomingites 65 times more politically important than Californians? Just because 250 years ago some Rhode Islanders held twelve other colonies hostage unless they got to pretend they were a real state?

Now, I have an idea for something at least slightly better. Firstly, Congress is too large to function (there'll always be one of them crazy enough to shut down the whole thing), and too small to represent everybody (there's 535 of them to represent 313 million, or half a million each on average. Texas's two senators represent 13 million people each).

So, it needs tiers. There's still two houses, but now there's the House which is a larger body, and the Senate which is the smaller superior body to that. Each state gets one rep, plus one for each 100,000 citizens. The House votes amongst its members to advance them to the Senate, which has a number of seats equal to 1/20th that of the House.

There's lots of tweaks that can be done at this point, who proposes and who disposes, the powers of the two portions, and everything. Worth noting, the smaller Senate is specifically designed to break individual state control of the federal government; the Senators are from the states, but they rely on the approval of wider House. Pork barrels dry up because the Senate needs to approve it and they're all responsive to all the states, not just their own.

Downsides: Well, California is 10% of the population. In theory, all of the Senators could be Californian... but you'd need all the other states to support that.

I still think voter aptitude tests should be required to register to vote.

Yeah, and we'll make them pay a fee, too. And we'll have plenty of nice, white police officers at the voting stations to make sure the good voters feel comfortable.