Who had thought authoritarianism would see such a renaissance in the early 21st century?

[Kidlicious]

edit: if you think it's important feel free to start threads on your own. I do start the threads *I* like meanwhile

Didn't answer my question.

[Elok]

I'd hope that those checks and balances Dinner mentioned as well as ppl, businesses standing up against ..eh..certain things....plus at some point reality do their part. But time will tell....

I think constitutional checks and balances will have relatively little to do with it; those are rules, and Trump likes ignoring rules, and we're not used to people ignoring rules as blatantly as he does so we get caught flat-footed. No, I think we'll be saved by his temperament. He has a tremendous talent for offending people, and can't pass up the chance to use it. Also he's deeply ignorant and works hard to remain so. He seems likely to make enemies in all directions on a daily basis, and I don't think he has enough of the country ardently behind him to squish them all.

[Elok]

Huh. He drafted an EO that would have given sweeping protections to religious businesses, making them super-gayproof and therefore both fond of and dependent on him. Would have been a very canny move for an autocrat. But then Ivanka and her hubby intervened and he promptly nixed it. Either he's being led by whoever has his ear at the moment or he's making some effort, however vague and half-assed, to be an actual president. Either way, I'm feeling less nervous.

http://www.politico.com/story/2017/0...t-order-234617

[Dinner]

In our current gerrymandered system most regular joes have no power. Gerrymandering is the reason that a nation that is majority Democrat is governed by Republicans.

Gerrymandering is the biggest threat to workable government -- it creates the extreme, intractable polarization that we have today where compromise a dirty word.

You are ignorant on this topic. Yes, gerrymandering is a problem for house seats, no, gerrymandering is not a problem in the Senate (Constitutionally those seats are state wide elections so no gerrymandering is possible) nor the Presidency as that is a state by state election as set up my the Constitution.

The reason it doesn't matter that Hillary won the popular vote is because of the Constitution. I am more used to telling conservatives to read the Constitution but right now liberals are ignorantly melting down so the same needs to be said to them.

I agree gerrymandering is a bad thing and we need to get rid of it but at least it only effects the house.

[Aeson]

Huh. He drafted an EO that would have given sweeping protections to religious businesses, making them super-gayproof and therefore both fond of and dependent on him. Would have been a very canny move for an autocrat. But then Ivanka and her hubby intervened and he promptly nixed it. Either he's being led by whoever has his ear at the moment or he's making some effort, however vague and half-assed, to be an actual president. Either way, I'm feeling less nervous.

http://www.politico.com/story/2017/0...t-order-234617

Or it could be Fallon was right ...

[Ben Kenobi]

People are surprised?

The 20th century had Hitler, Mao, Stalin. It's been the most authoritarian century in a long time.

[Ben Kenobi]

I agree gerrymandering is a bad thing and we need to get rid of it but at least it only effects the house.

The problem is beyond gerrymandering. There's a program that has all the US states divided per county. Good luck creating 438 equal seats divided up per state. The problem is that Democrats are concentrated in very small areas. It's only because of gerrymandering that they are even competitive.

[Kidlicious]

The problem is beyond gerrymandering. There's a program that has all the US states divided per county. Good luck creating 438 equal seats divided up per state. The problem is that Democrats are concentrated in very small areas. It's only because of gerrymandering that they are even competitive.

Maybe they should try harder to get the social justice warrior and Muslim vote.

[Bereta_Eder]

On the issue of the ordinary joes, I have infinite confidence in them because nearly half of the population and more is left wing and they aren't shy about pushing their agenda, which means that every authoritarism is bound to failure, sooner or later.

I have no idea what gerrymandering (sp?) is, I suppose it's a form of not absolute repsresentative attrubution of votes.
They are worse examples. In Greece it only takes 0,1% of surpassing your oponent to be granted 50 extra parliementary sits, like that.
This demonstrates a difficulty in forming political coalitions. So, once someone has indeed the majority, he also gets a very strong tool to form an independent government.
This one party rule is similar to the anglosaxon model which also has not a clear political phisosophy of political collaborations and antithetical to the german model, which has that philosophy of political coalitions. The italians do too with large coalition governments but that hasn't helped corruption any. Which means that a strong one party government is no less or pro anti-corruption.


Coming to think about it the US also has no philosophy of political coalitions.

[Aeson]

Gerrymandering:

Say you have 3 districts in a state. One is 100% X, the other is 100% Y, and the other is 50:50. Rather than X or Y trying to convince anyone in the 50:50 district, they want to add a few of their supporters from a "safe" district to the "contested" district, or remove a few of the other side's supporters from the "contested" district to their "safe" district, by redrawing the lines.

[MJW]

On the federal level the GOP would only get a ~%5 boost due to their geographic advantage because the districts are too big for it to be used to its full potential. That 5% (~3% for presidential) is a pretty big deal because that's what probably induced the DEMs to ditch the blue dogs too soon. If the GOP/Trump knew what it was doing it would increase the number of seats in the House. The DEMs wouldn't be able to argue against it because the last time it happened was 1911 and the districts are now far too large to represent a community like they are supposed to. Someone how is hard-right and knows what he's doing could have caused real damage so the DEMs should be thanking Trump for stopping Cruz. BK is correct on the state level.

[Ben Kenobi]

I have no idea what gerrymandering (sp?) is, I suppose it's a form of not absolute repsresentative attrubution of votes.

In Canada and the US, if you win a geographical district you win the seats. Gerrymandering is altering the electoral composition of the seat by redrawing the geographical borders.

[Berzerker]

In our current gerrymandered system most regular joes have no power. Gerrymandering is the reason that a nation that is majority Democrat is governed by Republicans.

Gerrymandering is the biggest threat to workable government -- it creates the extreme, intractable polarization that we have today where compromise a dirty word.

Gerrymandering is bipartisan, both parties want to create safe seats. The individual Democrat politician sitting in an %80 Democrat district (usually a city) doesn't want it redrawn to make the district competitive, so Democrats in other districts pay the price.

[Dinner]

Gerrymandering:

Say you have 3 districts in a state. One is 100% X, the other is 100% Y, and the other is 50:50. Rather than X or Y trying to convince anyone in the 50:50 district, they want to add a few of their supporters from a "safe" district to the "contested" district, or remove a few of the other side's supporters from the "contested" district to their "safe" district, by redrawing the lines.

I saw a great video where a sample population was exactly 50-50 evenly distributed so that any election should result in 50-50 results. To show how effective gerrymandering can be they drew the line such that the results wpualways be 75% of the seats would go to one side while the other side would get only 25% even though the vote was a perfect 50-50.

The only reason gerrymandering exists is to thwart Democratic election results.