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The United States’ Unamendable Constitution

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Re: The United States’ Unamendable Constitution

#551

Post by eppp »

jquery wrote: post #238
jdmichal wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They found a nice workaround with federal taxation though. There's a lot of instances where the states technically have the power to pass different laws than what's federally blessed. However, they'll lose federal funding if they do. And the majority of the time, that's just not a good trade-off. So the federal government is essentially taxing the state's citizens, then giving some amount of it back to the states in…

The biggest strike against states rights in recent memory was the removal of the SALT deduction, one of the strongest protectors of state power. Now states with higher tax burdens are much less competitive, because the citizens of that state don’t benefit nearly as much for what they pay.

The SALT deduction was a massive thumb in the eye to those of us that didnt get it. Why should local tax burden have anything to do with federal taxes? It was just a handout at the end of the day.

Re: The United States’ Unamendable Constitution

#552

Post by machina_ex_deus »

buscoquadnary wrote: post #160
machina_ex_deus wrote: post #52

I think the single biggest vulnerability of the constitution, which they had no chance of predicting, is mass media and the way it changed the dynamics of politics. Today it is a mediacracy undergoing a violent phase transition from tv and newspapers traditional media control to social media and search algorithms. At the root of the problem is that the media is owned by very few oligopolies, and they answer to no one…

> I think the single biggest vulnerability of the constitution, which they had no chance of predicting, is mass media and the way it changed the dynamics of politics. I think these men were more aware of it than possibly anytime in history. One of the biggest reasons that the US was able to become independent was because of the ability of people to spread their ideas through the mass media of newspaper that had recen…

It took me the trauma of 2020 to reconsider my own assumptions about the dynamics of these things.

It's one thing to see newspapers in 1776 and another thing entirely beyond human predictive ability to understand how decades and centuries can lead to inequality levels and power feedback loops with private media ownership.

I don't think I'm smarter, I think this is similar to code in that no matter how talented is the programmer, sometimes you just have to run it to see. It's not about anyone's superiority or foresight, it's about reality surprising even the smartest.

And I'd rather have a mediocre programmer able to dynamically debug than the most of talented programmer on earth writing static untested code.

I'm not on the side of censorship at all. I think free communication of ideas is good.

I'm just not sure if the 1776 revolution could have happened at all after decades of mind numbing propaganda by the British, after they would call their ideas populism daily and train people to associate it with it negatively. After the entire population was immunized against revolutionary ideas as fake news, conspiracy theories, terrorism, danger to pubic safety, misogyny, offensive. These things didn't happen back then. If the British had control over the newspapers and constantly spread propaganda that the cause was lost, how many would volunteer?

Re: The United States’ Unamendable Constitution

#553

Post by amanaplanacanal »

kepler1 wrote: post #308
m-p-3 wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So one way or another, the population will reach its breaking point, and the Constitution will change.

On what issues are we going to reach a breaking point that calls for Constitutional change?

The biggest issue in my mind is the potential for the election deniers to gain real power. If elections no longer work as intended, I don’t think anybody can predict what the outcome will be.

Re: The United States’ Unamendable Constitution

#554

Post by shin_lao »

tptacek wrote: post #33

It's an interesting article and if you bounced off it because you had a visceral reaction to the premise, like I did at first, I'd recommend taking another whack at it. Jill Lepore, if you're not familiar with her work, is a historian with a reputation as a more rigorous version of people like Howard Zinn. I don't think it's a good article though. In particular, I don't think it coheres. It's about how the modern Con…

Totally agreed.

The constitution should be hard to amend, its purpose is to give stability. That you disagree with parts of it is one thing, but remember that if it's easy to amend, there's no guaranteed it will be in a way you like.

Re: The United States’ Unamendable Constitution

#555

Post by scarface74 »

lupire wrote: post #235
scarface74 wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's set up to make it difficult for the majority to trample on the rights of the minority Two words: Jim Crow

In context, he meant the rights of the minority that was 18th Century slave owners.

Saying slave owners rights were being protected is not exactly a rousing endorsement about the constitution protecting the rights of the minority.

Re: The United States’ Unamendable Constitution

#556

Post by nkozyra »

tptacek wrote: post #33

It's an interesting article and if you bounced off it because you had a visceral reaction to the premise, like I did at first, I'd recommend taking another whack at it. Jill Lepore, if you're not familiar with her work, is a historian with a reputation as a more rigorous version of people like Howard Zinn. I don't think it's a good article though. In particular, I don't think it coheres. It's about how the modern Con…

> I think the rigidity of the Constitution is probably it's greatest strength

It's not just the Constitution, it's the entirety of the American system, which seems designed to use "checks and balances" as veritable roadblocks to slow everything down.

I agree that - in theory - it's great and very smart, because if the government was indeed designed around truths that are self-evident (i.e. inherently "true" and immutable) than everything should settle at the mean of those truths.

The problem is that when the country was being formed, incredible compromises to those self-evident truths were made left, right and center. So we ended up with a country that claimed that all men are created equal but did not actually adhere to this.

Further, the Constitution & Bill of Rights is full of things not related to these core truths. They tend, often, to be functions of their time. Those are the things that should be open for change, and the core truths should be canonized and unbreakable.

Re: The United States’ Unamendable Constitution

#557

Post by denton-scratch »

tomp wrote: post #531
denton-scratch wrote: post #530

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> individual rights over everything else I used to admire the US constitution. I've grown up now. Who could possibly be opposed to human rights - i.e. human beings having rights? And indeed, the US constitution does appear to be largely about rights. Over the years I've increasingly leaned to the view that these rights are mostly a legal fiction, and that the things that are supposedly rights are highly subjective po…

> Who could possibly be opposed to human rights - i.e. human beings having rights? And indeed, the US constitution does appear to be largely about rights. What do you mean? US citizens have pretty much the most rights of any people in the world. Can you list the countries that guarantee freedom of speech, freedom to bear arms, freedom from unreasonable searches and freedom to stay silent (not incriminate yourself)? (…

US citizens do indeed have a constitution that confers lots of rights.

My contention is simply that these rights are legal fictions and political footballs, and should not be in-scope for a constitution. They shouldn't be baked-in; they should be simple legislation.

I mainly don't believe in these "rights". I think people should be treated fairly and equitably; and I think that should be a matter of law. But constitution is about meta-law - how laws are made, not what their effect is.

Re: The United States’ Unamendable Constitution

#558

Post by tomp »

kasey_junk wrote: post #550
tomp wrote: post #531

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Who could possibly be opposed to human rights - i.e. human beings having rights? And indeed, the US constitution does appear to be largely about rights. What do you mean? US citizens have pretty much the most rights of any people in the world. Can you list the countries that guarantee freedom of speech, freedom to bear arms, freedom from unreasonable searches and freedom to stay silent (not incriminate yourself)? (…

That’s begging the question. If you define rights specifically by enumerating how they are defined in the bill of rights of course the US comes out on top. That’s before your hedge about implementation. In practice the US performs rather badly when scores on civil liberties. Here is one methodology https://knoema.com/atlas/ranks/Civil-liberties-index?mode=am... but you can find similar results across many others. Jus…

Yeah let's just say that any list that places Canada sixth on a list is very much suspect.

Nothing says "human rights" like criminalising protests, confiscating money, and prohibiting unvaccinated people from leaving the country.

Re: The United States’ Unamendable Constitution

#559

Post by machina_ex_deus »

jaybrendansmith wrote: post #130
machina_ex_deus wrote: post #52

I think the single biggest vulnerability of the constitution, which they had no chance of predicting, is mass media and the way it changed the dynamics of politics. Today it is a mediacracy undergoing a violent phase transition from tv and newspapers traditional media control to social media and search algorithms. At the root of the problem is that the media is owned by very few oligopolies, and they answer to no one…

This. The propaganda of the media, both intentional and accidental, is impacting our Democracy more than I would have thought possible. Being a critical thinker, I made the classic error of assuming that others could not easily be duped, and would actually do their own research on the issues. Boy was I wrong. We are all entitled to our own opinions, but we cannot survive as a Democracy if the citizenry believe they a…

I had a similar realization, and then I realized this is even worse. It's not about being duped. Getting to the truth is a really hard problem.

I also suspect at this point there is fault injection. There are actors spreading false information with the intention of catching others believing it.

I saw some cases where fact checkers had access to suspiciously hard to get information "disproving" a claim someone else picked up. The kind of information you're more likely to know because you created the lie in the first case. In the specific case I could even quantify the probability that they stumbled on that information (it required a choice from thousands of items, with very low probability of being the disproving item), and it had a very low probability.

Re: The United States’ Unamendable Constitution

#560

Post by ericmay »

checkyoursudo wrote: post #544
christophilus wrote: post #525

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the rigidity of the Constitution is probably it's greatest strength Yeah. I’m with you there. It’s that way by design along with things like the presidency not having ultimate power. The system’s not perfect, but let any modern politician make substantive changes, and I’d bet heavily on the system getting worse.

We should not idolize a past that did not exist. The politicians during the 1780s were not more virtuous, cooperative, or intelligent than the politicians of today. I tend to agree more with Thomas Jefferson: "On similar ground it may be proved that no society can make a perpetual constitution, or even a perpetual law. The earth belongs always to the living generation. They may manage it then, and what proceeds from…

But then you site one of those politicians who wrote actual thoughtful discourse. Is there a single politician in office or who has recently left office in America who has written anything approaching the thoughtfulness of even this short piece?

I have to believe that even if it were true that many or most politicians in 1780 were similar to politicians today on levels that you mention that they still had a serious crop of worthy political intellectuals whereas today we have probably 0.

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