"The Lesser Of Two Evils"...Why, Obama Isn't That Bad!

[justdrew]

and prey tell, how ever will we maintain toy-safety standards and testing in the absence of a the federal government?

[compared2what?]

I was being serious. I know it's probably hard to tell, though.

___________________

Toy safety: I think it should be handled by churches and prisons. It'd be a money-saver that way.

[justdrew]

me too. though I do refer to a broader problem than just toy-safety.

I don't really think the problem is the rule set. The problem is our willingness to see the rules constantly changed, misinterpreted, ignored, waved, etc. That social process will repeat itself in any new system.

Things need to be operated by a manual.

Any official who APPEARS to be not following the manual, in spirit or letter, is immediately removed and replaced by one of the two or three understudies "learning the job" and new elections are held to pick a new understudy. Anyone able to pass a reading comprehension test is qualified for most any government job. There's a lot of turnover. At some point they have to pass a test showing they know the manual for running whatever it is they want to run.

[Hammer of Los]

...

and prey tell, how ever will we maintain toy-safety standards and testing in the absence of a the federal government?

I don't want my children playing with dangerous toys.

So I would say that is indeed a serious consideration.

Of more consequence perhaps is the fact that its two minutes to midnight.

Insert iron maiden song here.

I ain't laughin'.

...

[compared2what?]

The safety of children is a very serious thing. And since the safety of toys is (in considerable part) an imports issue, it kind of does have to be overseen at a federal level.

For some stupid reason, I thought justdrew was saying something else. Heard him in the context of the conversation I was having with myself, more or less.

[Elihu]

That sounds surprisingly fair and reasonable to me. Very viable with the will of the people behind it. But not very gameable by figurative Bolsheviks and/or elites of any kind. Even the very richest kind.

want to acknowledge the cordial part of the exchange.

I think the convention should consider retaining that feature in some form when it ditches the federal government, if there's a place for it.

ditch the fedgov? who said anything about "ditching"? i think by definition a state convened convention deals only with items on the agenda. and results in amendment. my pet favorites are an end to gerrymandering, repeal of the change to popularly elected senators, an end to "personhood" of non-human entities and perhaps we keep the fed but categorically end their currency monopoly.

Otherwise, what's to stop the next roving horde that comes along from re-convening away their problems with your new and improved constitutional way of life? You can't really assume that nobody will try. There are always meddlers.

of course there will be. my "new and improved constitutional way of life"? you say that as if the roving hordes had not already succeeded. the point of writing some principles down and adhering to them is to eliminate the opportunities for sustained predatory collusion. you make it sound dangerous or not worth trying. i on the other hand think it will be fatal not to. time's a wastin'...

ps, ianeye if you're reading this, pass the hopium pipe ; )

[JackRiddler]

i think by definition a state convened convention deals only with items on the agenda. and results in amendment. my pet favorites are an end to gerrymandering, repeal of the change to popularly elected senators, an end to "personhood" of non-human entities and perhaps we keep the fed but categorically end their currency monopoly

Better yet, don't elect a Senate at all.

[compared2what?]

That sounds surprisingly fair and reasonable to me. Very viable with the will of the people behind it. But not very gameable by figurative Bolsheviks and/or elites of any kind. Even the very richest kind.

want to acknowledge the cordial part of the exchange.

No part of it was generated non-cordially! I swear. I was, as I said, serious. Your post prompted thoughts. I typed them. There was nothing else going on.

I think the convention should consider retaining that feature in some form when it ditches the federal government, if there's a place for it.

ditch the fedgov? who said anything about "ditching"?

I understood this...

Just out of curiosity - Are there any provisions in the constitution to disband the union and remove the federal government? Or would it take some "watering of the tree of liberty"?

if i haven't carped on this enough, bad on me. a constitutional convention seems to me the only viable and realistic chance to re-constitute (pun intended) the (insert adjective of choice here) federal government. as i understand it, if three quarters of the state legislatures call for a convention then it happens

...to be you responding to DrEvil's inquiry about disbanding the union and removing the federal government, which I colloquially rephrased as "ditching" it. I'm sorry if that was wrong. But you can see where I got the idea, can't you?

i think by definition a state convened convention deals only with items on the agenda. and results in amendment. my pet favorites are an end to gerrymandering, repeal of the change to popularly elected senators, an end to "personhood" of non-human entities and perhaps we keep the fed but categorically end their currency monopoly.

Again: I was responding to what was in front of me.

Otherwise, what's to stop the next roving horde that comes along from re-convening away their problems with your new and improved constitutional way of life? You can't really assume that nobody will try. There are always meddlers.

of course there will be. my "new and improved constitutional way of life"? you say that as if the roving hordes had not already succeeded.

The only parts of that I intended to assign values to were your way of life (new and improved) and the roving hordes/meddlers (an ever-present threat, potentially). :

If there's a statement of any kind about the present status quo in there, I don't see it.

the point of writing some principles down and adhering to them is to eliminate the opportunities for sustained predatory collusion.

It's one of them.

you make it sound dangerous or not worth trying.

WHAT ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT?

Sorry. Didn't mean to yell. But Elihu, come on. I was saying that I thought it was a good idea to insure the longevity of your constitution along similar lines to those currently in place, as described by you in your post. It's maybe a little rhetorically too colorful, but it seemed clear to me that roving hordes/meddlers = bad; and new and improved = good.

i on the other hand think it will be fatal not to. time's a wastin'...

I'm with you in spirit. Cordially. I mean it.
_______________________

ON EDIT: ^^That's mock outraged innocence, in case it's not clear. I'm not really outraged. And I am really innocent, wrt intent. But I'm also really sorry if I wrote something that was open to misconstruction. It's not always easy to know what hostility sounds like in another person's lingua franca. If I erred there, I apologize. I didn't mean it.

[Iamwhomiam]

With all the talk about how utterly corrupt our "system" is, especially in regard to elections, I think it would be madness to attempt a constitutional convention at this point in time. Now I've mentioned before that our constitution is not really a protective document; it merely allows for redress to violations suffered. Considering the pure geniuses we now have 'serving' in Congress, what we could wind up with could only be much worse.

IN CONGRESS, July 4, 1776.

The unanimous Declaration of the thirteen united States of America,

When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.--That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, --That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.--Such has been the patient sufferance of these Colonies; and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their former Systems of Government. The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States. To prove this, let Facts be submitted to a candid world.

[ninakat]

Phil Rockstroh essay -- moved to the "Election" thread

[Elihu]

Dear C2W,

No part of it was generated non-cordially! I swear. I was, as I said, serious. Your post prompted thoughts. I typed them. There was nothing else going on.

I understood this...

...to be you responding to DrEvil's inquiry about disbanding the union and removing the federal government, which I colloquially rephrased as "ditching" it. I'm sorry if that was wrong. But you can see where I got the idea, can't you?

Again: I was responding to what was in front of me.

The only parts of that I intended to assign values to were your way of life (new and improved) and the roving hordes/meddlers (an ever-present threat, potentially). :

If there's a statement of any kind about the present status quo in there, I don't see it.

It's one of them.

WHAT ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT?

Sorry. Didn't mean to yell. But Elihu, come on. I was saying that I thought it was a good idea to insure the longevity of your constitution along similar lines to those currently in place, as described by you in your post. It's maybe a little rhetorically too colorful, but it seemed clear to me that roving hordes/meddlers = bad; and new and improved = good.
I'm with you in spirit. Cordially. I mean it.

ON EDIT: ^^That's mock outraged innocence, in case it's not clear. I'm not really outraged. And I am really innocent, wrt intent. But I'm also really sorry if I wrote something that was open to misconstruction. It's not always easy to know what hostility sounds like in another person's lingua franca. If I erred there, I apologize. I didn't mean it.

your kind and accurate responses illustrates what a huge %^&@ i am. in my eagerness to get my points out i go all selfish and one-dimensional. please accept my apology.

by all means continue the discussion. i would like like to better understand iamwhomiam's perspective on why it's a non-starter, but i must check out for now....

[Iamwhomiam]

Not sure, but I believe this is the gist of it:

If a constitutional convention was to be held, we put ourselves at great risk of losing the rights we imagine we have.

[compared2what?]

your kind and accurate responses illustrates what a huge %^&@ i am. in my eagerness to get my points out i go all selfish and one-dimensional. please accept my apology.

Okay. But only if you take back the part about your being a selfish, huge %^&@. I mean, I do go around saying that a guy whose political views you support is a fascist from time to time. So (to put it mildly) you have more reason than none to think of me as a source of viciously critical opposition, let's be fair.

Just for the record, none of that stuff is ever addressed to you or anyone else here. I take it for granted that your aims are as true as mine or anybody's. We just have a legitimate political disagreement.

Thanks for your much appreciated graciousness.

Not sure, but I believe this is the gist of it:

If a constitutional convention was to be held, we put ourselves at great risk of losing the rights we imagine we have.

One of the reasons the rules strike me as fair is that I think the kind and amount of work you'd have to do to get there provides a reasonable guarantee that those issues would be addressed (or at least thoroughly considered) by the time you did. I mean, the pre-revolutionary colonial Americans didn't know exactly where they were heading, either. They were pissed off and some of them had some ideas. That's where all (raffishly attractive, implicitly heroic in a quasi-piratical/Robin Hood sort of a way) roving hordes of rag-tag (ditto) rebels start out. More or less. Or....I don't know. Maybe not. I guess that "all" is probably a dangerous word to use when you're talking about the entire sweep of human history.

Nobody knows it all when they're standing on square one, though. And...hence this thread, I guess.

[JackRiddler]

the point of writing some principles down and adhering to them is to eliminate the opportunities for sustained predatory collusion.

It could be.

The point could also be to enable a particular kind of predatory collusion, with emphasis on its sustainability by making it stable, grounding it in legalistic principle and institutions. That's easy enough to see in the case of the modern corporate-capitalist legal institutions like GATT/WTO and NAFTA, as well as many of the EU treaties including those that set up the EMU-ECB.

The US consitution of 1787 is more of a mixed bag. It includes commendable and groundbreaking protections of an important set of individual rights and liberties against the state, although the most significant of these protections were forced in as amendments, as a way to tame anti-Federalist resistance. (I would have stood with the anti-Federalists, who, we need to emphasize, were at least as "American" as the Federalists. Although scratch that, who can say for sure, if "I" had been a person at that time, my stance might have depended on the circumstances of my birth and upbringing.)

1787 also established a state that serves and protects the interests of the landholding, propertied class who wrote the document, agitated for it, and set themselves up as the new elite under its rules.

This is thanks to provisions like:

- leaving the definition of the franchise and of House districts to the states, most of which restricted that definition to white male property-holders, at least until a long series of amendments that began only after a civil war;

- making amendment extremely difficult, so that the hundreds of millions of people in the unrecognizably different United States of today (and in the world empire that it administers) are still constrained by the will (and sometimes the simply obsolete ideas) of 60 long-dead men who sat down for a conference in a balmy 1787;

- and the creation of elite-based and explicitly anti-democratic institutions, like:

1) a Senate immune to population numbers and clearly rendered superior to the House thanks to 6-year-terms, staggered election and exclusive powers like those to ratify treaties and confirm presidential nominations;

2) the Electoral College -- although it has almost never functioned independently as originally intended, but merely serves through its arbitrary mathematics to allow the possibility that a losing candidate may be handed the presidency;

3) the One-Big-Man executive, with a vague "Commander in Chief" clause that has allowed for infinite interpretability by imperial presidencies, and (as an unintended consequence) an opposite tendency (in the modern age of complexity and mass societies) to devolve power to permanent bureaucracies and a wholly unaccountable deep state with parapolitical tendrils;

4) a set of "checks and balances" on the legislative power, but conceived not as a division of powers between all of the different groups in society, but only between different sub-groups of the governing class a.k.a. ruling elite;

5) and a lifetime high court and a cabinet appointed solely by the President and confirmed solely by the Senate.

Probably my favorite words are the first three: "We the People," explicitly (if nominally) defining the state as a democracy, contrary to right-wing mythology. The word Republic occurs twice, I believe, "the People" are mentioned six or eight times. (And of course there is no necessary contradiction between the two concepts, one describing a process and the other a sovereignty.)

Now I've always wondered about the contradiction inherent in "originalism."

Does it refer to the ultimately unknowable and surely conflicting intents of the long-dead men? This turns them into gods of a sort, although zombies is probably more accurate; they're not around to assert a will. As zombies, any Scalia or Christianist of today can ascribe to them whatever will he pleases.

Or does it mean "the words as written"?

If the latter, then "We the People" should be quite easy to interpret, no? The people are sovereign. Most of American history has been about how some parts of the People act to exclude others from "the People," using the tools created for them by the dead men of 1787. The excluded almost always suffer in submission. When they don't (and these are the interesting times), they run away to a frontier; or they wage uprisings from the frontier; or, on certain rare but dramatic occasions, they wage uprisings from the metropolitan centers; or else, and this would cover most cases, they attempt to assert their membership in the Sovereignty and try to leverage use of the same tools written into the document of 1787.

.

[JackRiddler]

Under present-day conditions, given the awesome twin leviathans of Money and Stupid, and the literal armies of lawyers who would have a hand in it, a constitutional convention would almost surely be a galactic fuckerclust. Nine months later, it would give birth to a thousand-headed beast of fascistic Corporatist Feudalism in cloying PC guises. Except for establishing the principle that, yes, We the Living can write our own rules. After the surely disastrous experience that would ensue, one that may extinguish more than a few of us, perhaps a chastened second round would actually write the modern world's first genuine democratic republic, politically and economically, with a sense of humility before the limits of ecology. Ya never know. (The beast version will probably advertise itself as such.) It's not like the present course isn't daily arriving at the eventual extinction, if not of the human beings, then of their humanity. At what point are you willing to Gamble on Different?

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