381–390 of 413 posts
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Britain's problems are due to uncharismatic Blairite socialist.
This comment may or may not be wrong but it is quintessentially low effort. The point of HN is to discuss, not to tweet about your political enemies.
That leaves me to conclude HN is a left leaning circle jerk echo chamber, much like reddit. With any dissent to the right triggering the non-hateful liberal lefties.
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Britain's problems are due to uncharismatic Blairite socialist.
A populist far-right racist would fix all the potholes and bring HS2 in under budget? Got it.
The real distraction is the economic argument. The truth of the matter is natives feel like a stranger in their own country. I say this as someone who is mixed race and 2nd gen before you try and label me a racist. Yawn.
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I might take this argument seriously, if not for the fact that the party of “state’s rights” are pushing for a national ban on abortion. https://www.americanprogress.org/article/what-you-need-to-kn...
Exactly! What the Constitution /says/ and how it is interpreted... The Tenth Amendment is written (IMO) incredibly short to underscore its importance AND breadth: "The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people." But I've very seldom heard the phrase "states rights" uttered by anyone who isn't pro-gun and…
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My father-in-law always liked to see an exact number of democrats and republicans in congress, or congress held by one and the senate the other, for exactly this reason. With deadlock they can’t screw things up more. I’m not sure I disagree.
Congress has had one of the lowest approval ratings of anything in government for a long time now because it doesn't get things done. Most Americans are quite unhappy with Congressional deadlock being the norm. It's also directly lead to the continued rise of the powers of the unitary executive - the EO that have become the norm in the 2000s are in large part because Congress has largely voided all responsibility for…
EOs are a problem, but SCOTUS is walking at least some of that back in subtle ways, such as the end of Chevron deference. (Not that you'd get any of this from the media, who desperately want SCOTUS to devolve into the media-friendly horse race they've imposed upon all of the rest of politics.)
Congress isn't supposed to decide on social questions. Society is. Congress is meant to represent it. A divided Congress is accurately representing a divided country.
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Isn't that worse? You don't even get to elect the commander in chief, its just some random guy who was born into it?
The monarch being Commander in Chief is ceremonial. Everything is done on the advice of the Prime Minister and their cabinet. The chance of the monarch overriding said request is less than 1%. Even then, parliament is sovereign. Whilst the logistics are complicated due to how things are introduced to the house, if parliament says no to a prime ministers decision, it overrides anything the prime minister who has no ab…
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I love this about Ireland because they are such a young republic. And democratic systems are a technology. Something that we understand better over time, and somewhere new can pick and choose from what is best, where it is _extremely_ hard to change existing systems in established countries.
Yes, it's in my opinion one of the great tragedies of our time that some of our established countries are so hard to change. I don't mean this as the policy needs change, everyone will differ on those. I just mean the technology of government like you're saying. Efficient and more fair ways of voting on laws and electing representatives do exist. For example my own (US) has a political system basically frozen in ambe…
Please, please, please go read the Federalist papers. The Founders thought of a lot more than you realise.
The design of a constitution is the design of the distribution of power. The nature of power hasn't changed.
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Yeah, the assumption is that the non hereditary peers are somehow more representative, but all they represent is being friends of the PM of the time. It's a historical oddity of questionable usefulness. Meanwhile the house of commons can wipe out any civil liberty with a majority of 50% plus one vote. It is remarkable how a system that seems so unstable and prone to abuses of power has served the longest continuously…
50% + 1 is called democracy. Civil liberties are more liable to be swept away by minorities that come to power. In the US, the republicans often do this because they have minority popular support but a disproportionate representation in government. So the key is to make sure that it's 50% + 1 but also representative of the real population. The nobility is another example of a minority with disproportionate power. It'…
Countries like the Netherlands, Denmark etc all have safeguards the dilute the power of 50% + 1, and yet they are clearly not republics, being monarchies.
Political scientists tend to talk more of 'liberal democracy' (whether republican or monarchical) v 'electoral autocracy' etc. This depends on the classical use of the term 'liberal' of course, which is another word that Americans tend to use differently from everyone else.
> The nobility is another example of a minority with disproportionate power. It's important that they are reduced to ensure civil liberties.
Alexis de Tocqueville would disagree - he believed that intermediate institutions (churches, professions, elites, etc) blunt the power of the state before it reaches average people. A society without intermediate institutions is one where you have an all-powerful state on the one hand, and a largely un-coordinated mass of average people on the other. He thought this was the highway to democratic despotism. (Worth noticing that totalitarian governments focus a lot of their energy on destroying alternative centres of power such as these.)
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Not sure how you think this will improve things. None of these people are elected. They likely got these positions by doing political favors. They are likely even more out of touch with the electorate. They are even more likely to make decisions based upon ideology instead of practical quality of life considerations. Seems to me this just centralizes power even more in the hands of a few. And that's the last thing th…
> They are likely even more out of touch with the electorate. Not compared to the hereditary peers. In theory these people have proved themselves useful in some way and bring expertise to the upper chamber, rather than just being born in the right family. In practice there is some of that and some political cronyism. > Seems to me this just centralizes power even more in the hands of a few. That is exactly what hered…
Not true at all - there's nothing special about having a rich land-owner in your ancestry - most people do.
In fact, now, after a few centuries of reversion to the mean, the hereditary peers are the only people in government who are representative, in the statistical sense.
(Not that this is related in any way to the actual reason why this is being done - the actual motive is that a hereditary peer is necessarily British, and Starmer hates the British and wants them disenfranchised so that he can continue with their destruction. But that's another story..)
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A populist far-right racist would fix all the potholes and bring HS2 in under budget? Got it.
You don't understand the core issue at heart in Britain. The real distraction is the economic argument. The truth of the matter is natives feel like a stranger in their own country. I say this as someone who is mixed race and 2nd gen before you try and label me a racist. Yawn.
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This is the one argument left for monarchy; that the military in the UK (and technically Australia) swear loyatly to the monarch, not the Prime Minister. In the event of an obviously-lunatic elected official ordering the troops into civilian areas to "pacify" civilian populations, the monarch could (in theory) countermand that order.
Isn't that worse? You don't even get to elect the commander in chief, its just some random guy who was born into it?
Personally I love the idea that the codes for nukes are surgically implanted in a volunteer, and in order to issue the order to fire the nukes, the CIC must personally carve the codes from that person's chest with a knife, killing them in the process. Or the variant on that idea, that the codes are implanted in their own forearm, and to order the nukes they must cut the codes from out of their own flesh.
We could do the same for all military deployment orders.