111–120 of 192 posts
Like another commenter said, many people were probably unconstitutionally charged via parallel construction thanks to this crap.
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"Today, corrupt politicians put on another dog and pony show while continuing business as usual. Is our democracy secretly a farce? Details at 11."
Or, everyone could get off their asses and carry their weight as a citizen in a democracy. Nihilistic dismissal of the right to vote is lazy. Nobody said upholding your rights was going to be easy . Organization, affiliation, communication all take work. Get involved in primaries, for either party! Fewer voters and even more power there. Yard signs are cheap. Make your own. Make this an issue. Or, if you need to hear…
You would need some counter-elite faction that already has foothold on power to oppose current power structure. Revolutions (and that's what is necessary to change current policies) never come from the bottom up.
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Of course it will pass. The government will never willingly give up power and will only seek ways to expand it.
Discard this attitude. It is defeatist resignation, and it is indistinguishable from the opposition.
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>such as US states joining the Union This doesn't really count as freely joining, since half of them were forced to join by a bloody war.
> This doesn't really count as freely joining, since half of them were forced to join by a bloody war. In the South, do they generally consider themselves as forced to re-join the Union, rather than having been forcefully prevented from leaving?
I don't think it is revisionism and maybe I am wrong on this, but wasn't it the Confederacy who attacked the Union at Fort Sumter which kicked off the US Civil War?
It's my understanding the Union was more or less ambivalent to the Confederacy and figured they'd let things lie then the Confederacy attacked.
I don't know enough history to say whether the Confederacy was forced to re-join or whether the states asked to rejoin in light of their government collapsing (Davis fleeing Richmond, etc). My guess would be that it was more of a failed state situation where the US had dibs on propping it back up.
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No. We cannot have our cake and eat it too. We cannot have unprotected, open borders for decades, and then expect to identify and track foreign internal threats AND not provide the USGOV the means to detect and surveil. We cannot assume that because we're an HN regular who thinks power corrupts (it certainly does) the cost of that corruption is greater than what we pay if/when a foreign adversary acts against the US.…
Fun fact, "open borders" is a complete myth.
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I absolutely agree that the U.S. government has gotten more powerful since WWII almost monotonously. The times of honest reduction were in the 1990s and, potentially, now. That said, I would be careful about conflating the volume of rules and staffing with power. The bureaucratic imperative will drive a bureaucracy to expand. But it also does that to others, the net effect being a lot of intragovernmental arguing tha…
what are rules, but merely (legal) attempts to make the rule-maker more powerful ?
You've got to be kidding me. Here's one: coordination. Everyone drive on the right. That wasn't done to make anyone more powerful; it was done to prevent stupid crashes.
Here's another rule: don't fly you plane past its spec. That isn't to oppress the pilot. It's because the plane wasn't designed to be flown harder.
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Why are you LARPing based on first principles? Just give examples: * Trump's First Step Act. E.g., title III-- can no longer use restraints on prisoners during pregnancy-- and IV-- reducing mandatory minimums for drug felony convictions * Trump's Affordable Clean Energy rule which removed caps on emissions * Clinton's repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act back in 1999 * Carter's Airline Deregulation Act back in the late 7…
The Patriot Act (2001), The Homeland Security Act (2002), The Federal Information Security Management Act (FISMA) (2002), The National Defense Authorization Act, The Affordable Care Act (2010),The Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act (CISA) (2015), The Real ID Act (2005),The USA Freedom Act (2015), The Executive Order on Improving the Nation’s Cybersecurity (2021), The Economic Stabilization Act (2008), The Executiv…