Print

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

[Spehss _]

http://www.cnn.com/2016/01/01/politics/donald-trump-skywriting-rose-bowl-parade/index.html
heh.

Heh. "ANYBODYBUTTRUMP"

Anybody butt rump? Anybody? No? No butt rumps.

[Rolepgeek]

The issue with that is that with "what's the best for the country" is not an objective value. I know I believe that a reduction of government influence in many matters would benefit the nation, but there are others who DEFINITELY disagree with me (I had a few incredible discussions with a self-proclaimed authoritarian), and that's where democracy comes in in the first place. Short terms hold officeholders accountable to more than just their own definitions of this value, which would blow over dissenting voices with even greater efficiency.

Incidentally, the existence of Congress GREATLY GREATLY safeguards against tyranny of the majority, with voices for SEVERAL groups that would see very little sway otherwise, like the mountain states. The ability of congressmen to slow presidents down because they have to to get elected prevents the presidents from ignoring the voices that didn't vote them in.

Yet individual congressmen don't actually need to represent their voting district; just their constituents, because Winner-Takes-All style voting system. I'm not saying 'install X person and he will run the nation perfectly', I'm saying that if we had a single person who was genuinely trying to make the country better, was genuinely intelligent enough to go about doing it competently, and genuinely motivated enough to look into stuff about what policies cause what effects, or knew it already, you would be able to avoid a lot of the problems with democracy. Yet it's still the best we have because trying to get the perfect guy to be Supreme Leader, and trying to make sure he gets fed true information that isn't biased, mutated, morphed, nonrepresentative, and so on, is essentially impossible, so we're stuck with trying to do an amalgamation of the two methods which is having a democratic republic, and hoping we can elect people who are competent.

The problem with short terms is that it's susceptible to mob rule and means the politician is trying to do their job in order to keep their job, rather than keeping their job in order to do their job. And even if they're trying to simply do the best they can, if they make a mistake and don't spend their time covering their asses, they won't keep their job, and now you have someone else who's probably less concerned with actually doing their job correctly!

The problem with long/life terms or difficult to impeach people is that it's really hard to hold them accountable for their actions while they're in there, and their values/practices might change from what made them qualified in the first place

The problem with unlimited number of terms, particularly if short, is basically all the problems with short terms, plus they get more and more skilled at politicking, so the problems with long terms show up but still nothing can be really done.

The problem with single terms is that when you have a guy who's actually competent, he might not get the chance to stick around and get anything done, and you don't have much of a way of telling beforehand if they're competent, and if they were, they're about to replaced by someone else anyway.

Problem with winner-takes-all democracy is that it means you don't have to care about the rest of the people you're meant to represent. Problem with voting districts is that you don't have to care about anyone else in the country, period. Problem with not having voting districts is that people can't self-determine for their locality; and of course there's the general problem with solving these problems of having to care about other groups or areas at your own expense, determined purely by who got the most votes and tyranny of majority problem again.

So maybe the two-term thing of eight years actually is ideal, and we just keep screwing it up because we're still humans and thus flawed. First term means you have to actually have people supporting you, and be held accountable, but you still have enough freedom to lay the groundwork for your next turn, in which you don't have to worry about being elected again, so you can actually (try to) get shit done.

Huh. Somehow writing this post increased my hopes and confidence about America and it's government system, where it started off as a lament of democracy being the best we have yet still sucking. Weird. Now we just have to get Congress to function on four year (or possibly six, but four seems about right) two-term-max intervals, preferably offset to presidential election years....

[smjjames]

The two term thing was actually borne out of tradition. George Washington started the trend and everybody did the same thing with two terms up to FDR, though I guess there were a few that did try to run for a third term at a later point.

Basically, by the time FDR went and broke the streak, it was a big deal that he did that.

Anyway, there really isn't one absolutely perfect way to do a democracy, especially on large scales.

[MaximumZero]

Huh. Somehow writing this post increased my hopes and confidence about America and it's government system, where it started off as a lament of democracy being the best we have yet still sucking. Weird.

'Murica.

[TheBiggerFish]

The two term thing was actually borne out of tradition. George Washington started the trend and everybody did the same thing with two terms up to FDR, though I guess there were a few that did try to run for a third term at a later point.

Basically, by the time FDR went and broke the streak, it was a big deal that he did that.

Anyway, there really isn't one absolutely perfect way to do a democracy, especially on large scales.

And then they put it in the Constitution.

[Rolepgeek]

I know, smj. But it still seems like it's the best way to go about doing it if you're gonna have winner take all elections. Possibly with proportional representation, too, for that matter.

[wierd]

I cant say with certainty, because I was not there--

But a reasonable hypothesis for the "winner take all" approach being embraced may have been from the lack of solidarity that was seen in the early colonial governments concerning the revolutionary war effort.  IIRC, there was a lot of "House divided" propaganda from that era.

Instituting a "No, This group won, now shut the hell up." mode of government may have been very attractive at the time.

[RedKing]

Except that's not how it worked until the mid-1800s. Vice-President used to be whoever was runner-up in the national elections. Until they realized that this:

1) Created major tensions within the executive branch.
2) Increased the incentive to assassinate the sitting President.

[Lord Shonus]

I cant say with certainty, because I was not there--

But a reasonable hypothesis for the "winner take all" approach being embraced may have been from the lack of solidarity that was seen in the early colonial governments concerning the revolutionary war effort.  IIRC, there was a lot of "House divided" propaganda from that era.

Instituting a "No, This group won, now shut the hell up." mode of government may have been very attractive at the time.

Has nothing to do with it. The American government is explicitly modeled on the British one, stripped of legally endorsed political parties and all concepts of nobility. The Senate was essentially the House of Lords with peerages replaced by gubernatorial appointment (intended to provide a set of elder statesmen highly resistance to political fads), the House of Representatives was intended to duplicate the House of Commons (giving people as close to an up-to-the-minute voice as was possible in the 18th century), and the Presidency duplicated the governing role of the Crown (in 1787 days even the limited British monarchy was expected to govern, not merely preside).

Most of the drafters blamed the British party system for the difficulties leading up to the Revolution - the Tories (although not named that at the time, they presented as a splinter of the Whig party that had purged the Tories a few decades ago) had a slim but solid majority in Parliament that allowed them to shove the extremely restrictive trade policies (which, by the way, shoot the entire notion of the War of Independence as a "rich man's war" in the head - anyone with significant wealth had far more to lose than gain by getting rid of the status quo), unpopular taxes, and large scale impressment (naval conscription) that led to the break , and anticipated that making no provision for legal parties would prevent such a debacle from recurring due to the fractious nature of the new nation preventing any ideological movement from gaining dominance.

[TheBiggerFish]

And then we developed dipoles...

There's a reason Washington warned about partisanship...

[Rolepgeek]

I understand why they did it; if nothing else, it was the simplest way to do it, and they were some of the first to try implementing it in a 'true' western nation.

I just wish we could change it from that prototype version now that we've seen some new ones...

Also, I don't know, Shonus. Modern day rich people want to deregulate trade; why wouldn't ye olden times rich people want to do the same?

[Lord Shonus]

Also, I don't know, Shonus. Modern day rich people want to deregulate trade; why wouldn't ye olden times rich people want to do the same?

Under the colonial system, merchant ships (with a few exceptions) from the colonies were legally required to either go directly to Britain where their cargo would be transshipped, or to at least visit Britain (and pay extra fees) for inspection. That greatly bottlenecked the legal trade routes available, and gave the merchants that filled that bottleneck an immense advantage and a not-quite-monopoly status. Once those restrictions were ended, those merchants went from being the top dog in a decently-sized yard to just one more dog in a massive yard, similar to what happened to ABC, CBS, NBC, and FOX once the cable boom hit. Or, to use a different analogy, they went from having the entirety of a small pizza to having one slice of a large.

Short version: the British trade restrictions made them not only rich but selectly rich, while unrestricted trade made them less rich, and gave all of their competitors a major boost.

[Rolepgeek]

Yeah, but weren't the merchants doing those trade routes typically British, as in still primarily lived in Britain?

And the people competing tended to be the still fairly rich Americans wanting less of this?

[Lord Shonus]

Yeah, but weren't the merchants doing those trade routes typically British, as in still primarily lived in Britain?

And the people competing tended to be the still fairly rich Americans wanting less of this?

Nope. Apart from the East India Company, most of the traders on the colonial routes were colonial-owned, colonial-built, and colonial-manned. That's how the Continental Navy got up and running as quickly as it did, how the Continental Army was able to immediately start getting supplies from overseas (funnily enough, colonists in open rebellion see no need to comply with the restrictions of the mother country), and how they were able to find the trained sailors and shipwrights to put so many privateers in the water.

Had all the merchants on the trade routes been British, the War of Independence would probably not have lasted six months.

[smjjames]

http://www.politico.com/story/2016/01/trump-al-shabaab-recruitment-video-217286

rofl, turns out Clinton was partially right, Trump did end up in a terrorist recruitment/propoganda video, just not ISIS or one of their affiliates.