171–180 of 308 posts
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Most Senate business is unanimous consent. I don't think it's misleading.
That’s fine, I’m from the UK and didn't get that the Senate uses words to mean completely different things from the actual meaning in certain contexts. We do it too, I’m certain.
This is a good symbolic gesture, but making election day a federal holiday equivalent in standing with Christmas would have real and positive impact. But the latter never draws the votes in congress, so that should tell us how meaningless this vote truly was.
You will have a big sale at Macy's and people will go shopping or vacation.
We need 2-4 weeks of early voting & mail in ballots for everyone.
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They're hoping you click on the link in that paragraph, which is full-on Marxist propaganda. Also, it's not 6 states banning CRT, it's 20 states now. (CRT is calling white children oppressors, and black children victims. Neither is accurate or helpful. CRT is derived from Marxist Critical Theory. Since the US doesn't have a class struggle, racism has been inserted to make it a racism struggle.)
Marxism has nothing to do with Critical Race Theory, which is an explicitly non-marxist idea. Marx theory is that all of history is a history of class warfare, so any racism is a result of class warfare. Marx was unconcerned with race.
This is just incorrect. Critical Theory is a product of the Frankfurt School. They were explicitly applying Marxist thought to twentieth century politics, and wanted to understand why Marxism wasn't successful in the west.
This is a basic matter of record, not some wing-nut attempt to slander. Critical Theory is reworked Marxism to try to apply it to the modern West.
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Voting is also compulsory in Australia.
And that’s fantastic. It provides impetus to the government to make it as frictionless as possible. It means I can be in and out within 5 minutes.
Ahahahaha. Have you tried dealing with American bureaucracy? None of it is frictionless, it’s all horribly inefficient and fragmented, and one party is steadfastly committed to keeping it that way, and the other party only vaguely recognizes how big of a problem it is. Voting needs to be made easier, but making it compulsory would not automatically do that.
edit: besides which, voting already takes me only about 5 minutes. The problem is that that experience, which I have as a wealthy white person in a liberal suburb of a blue state, is not universal.
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In Australia we always have elections on Saturday. Works well for most people. Of course, there is a minority of people it doesn't work well for, such as people who have to work on Saturdays, and observant Jews. And for those people we have early voting and postal voting too. I never quite understand why voting is such a controversial topic in the US. In many countries (I'm sure Australia is not alone in this) it is…
It's largely because increased voting overwhelmingly (and almost exclusively) benefits one side in the US. While it's obviously good to have increased participation in democracy, the side that's going to more or less cease to exist if we ever get even 80% citizen participation obviously has an incentive to make voting harder.
"Republican legislation to limit teaching a historically accurate picture of U.S. history in public institutions has advanced in some half a dozen states." Mind-boggling propaganda.
I really encourage everyone who disagrees with this comment to reflect on it. The reporter just threw out, as though it was obvious, a partisan stance on an issue of great controversy completely unrelated to the topic of the article. A key component of media literacy is recognizing biases in your sources, so you have to be consciously aware of these kinds of things, or you'll be systematically misled. For example, on…
It bothers me when they're quick to make empty efforts like this yet when it comes to doing anything that actually matters an overwhelming majority of them (on both sides) will vote against it.
Do you have any evidence that both sides are equally guilty? This is the sort of thing that "everyone knows is true", but they "know" it because it allows them to express resignation and cynicism and get general agreement without offending anyone. It's like talking about the weather. But unlike talking about the weather it has the pernicious effect of dampening democratic action and rewarding the guilty. If a referee refuses to apply the rules of the game, throwing up his hands instead and saying "they all just foul each other all the time", how long do you think the game will have any rules? In a democracy the voters are the ultimate referees.
In this particular case, in the US, one side very much wants to fix the flaws in their democracy. Why? Well, in part because it's the right thing to do and in part because they are the ones disadvantaged by the flaws in the current system. If given the chance to vote the Democrats will pass a bill of sweeping electoral reforms with the net effect of equalizing voting power and thus giving themselves a better chance of winning elections. But Republicans will filibuster this legislation, so it won't happen. If by some miracle the filibuster is abandoned, not one will vote for it. On this issue the two sides are diametrically opposed, not equally guilty, whatever you think of the merits of their positions.
This is a good symbolic gesture, but making election day a federal holiday equivalent in standing with Christmas would have real and positive impact. But the latter never draws the votes in congress, so that should tell us how meaningless this vote truly was.
No. Make early voting widely available and mail ballots available to anyone who requests one. Stop thinking of elections as a single day. That’ll be much healthier for democracy.
This is a good symbolic gesture, but making election day a federal holiday equivalent in standing with Christmas would have real and positive impact. But the latter never draws the votes in congress, so that should tell us how meaningless this vote truly was.
This may be a case of preemptive optimization.
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Seeing as the initial sanity check before going to a vote is “do nays and ayes both shout at the same volume?”, bills are often unanimously approved because “nobody shouted nay” rather than forcing a lengthy vote for every single motion.
So if you were told the board of a company Unanimously Approved something, would it be secretly understood by you to mean there might be only a handful of board members present and that they didn’t actively agree to the motion, they were just playing with their phones or something and ignored it? All I was trying to say was I’m fine with it if this is understood to be how things are done in the US, but it’s not corre…
If you do not vocalize objection, you are counted as consenting.
And you can certainly give consent to something you would not approve. It's semantics, yes, but the definitions seem to align also.