No Stupid Questions
No such thing. Ask away!
!nostupidquestions is a community dedicated to being helpful and answering each others' questions on various topics.
The rules for posting and commenting, besides the rules defined here for lemmy.world, are as follows:
Rules (interactive)
Rule 1- All posts must be legitimate questions. All post titles must include a question.
All posts must be legitimate questions, and all post titles must include a question. Questions that are joke or trolling questions, memes, song lyrics as title, etc. are not allowed here. See Rule 6 for all exceptions.
Rule 2- Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material.
Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material. You will be warned first, banned second.
Rule 3- Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here.
Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here. Breaking this rule will not get you or your post removed, but it will put you at risk, and possibly in danger.
Rule 4- No self promotion or upvote-farming of any kind.
That's it.
Rule 5- No baiting or sealioning or promoting an agenda.
Questions which, instead of being of an innocuous nature, are specifically intended (based on reports and in the opinion of our crack moderation team) to bait users into ideological wars on charged political topics will be removed and the authors warned - or banned - depending on severity.
Rule 6- Regarding META posts and joke questions.
Provided it is about the community itself, you may post non-question posts using the [META] tag on your post title.
On fridays, you are allowed to post meme and troll questions, on the condition that it's in text format only, and conforms with our other rules. These posts MUST include the [NSQ Friday] tag in their title.
If you post a serious question on friday and are looking only for legitimate answers, then please include the [Serious] tag on your post. Irrelevant replies will then be removed by moderators.
Rule 7- You can't intentionally annoy, mock, or harass other members.
If you intentionally annoy, mock, harass, or discriminate against any individual member, you will be removed.
Likewise, if you are a member, sympathiser or a resemblant of a movement that is known to largely hate, mock, discriminate against, and/or want to take lives of a group of people, and you were provably vocal about your hate, then you will be banned on sight.
Rule 8- All comments should try to stay relevant to their parent content.
Rule 9- Reposts from other platforms are not allowed.
Let everyone have their own content.
Rule 10- Majority of bots aren't allowed to participate here. This includes using AI responses and summaries.
Credits
Our breathtaking icon was bestowed upon us by @Cevilia!
The greatest banner of all time: by @TheOneWithTheHair!
view the rest of the comments
Drafting a new constitution is fairly unnecessary outside of deposing an aristocracy or a dictatorship. Plus, it only has any effect if everyone agrees on it so you will need literally everyone to have some input and agree or else you will have seperationists.
I would just add the following and call it good:
No cap on the house of Representatives.
Term limit on EVERY elected individual, cabinet appointee, and judge.
Senate seats proportional to population with the smallest state receiving 1, a state double its size receiving 2, etc.
The President is not immune to indictment and has no authority over the DOJ.
EDIT:
\5. Individual campaign funds are capped, organizations funds require signatures and count towards the individual totals, with enforcement of federal prison time on ALL involved in the case of going over. Proven illegal funding can invalidate election results and trigger a new election automatically.
\6. In the event of an absence a new election must be called immediately, and any attempt to delay the process can be met for prison time.
\7. Total Bodily Autonomy - doctors are still expected to adhere to strict antinegligience practices and conditions, can choose to decline patients, but if a patient is informed of risks for proven safe procedures then it is their choice to have whatever medical procedure or even cosmetic procedure performed on their body as they wish.
Number 3 structures the Senate (more or less) the same as the House. The whole point of the Senate is to give each state equal representation, while the House gives each person equal representation.
If you're going to restructure the Senate that way, may just as well get rid of it.
The senate was conceived at a time when the most populated states were filled with slaves and disenfranchised poors who couldn't vote. There's no reason to discard a longer-termed gerrymanderjng-immune chamber of Congress just because we want the 70 million Americans in California and Texas to not be subjects of the 1 million in Vermont and Wyoming.
Stacking the senate to reflect population is fine. Especially if we change the house to only care about voters
The reason they're gerrymander immune is that they only have two reps that aren't up for election at the same time. If you award seats proportionally Californa will have roughly a dozen seats in the Senate. What would be the schedule and process for electing them all? Why not just use that process for a single legislature?
CA can have four at-large seats for the whole state up for election every two years.
They would have the same long-view that existing senators have, and would not be internally less responsive than the current system
That sounds great.
Just use that in the House.
Having all of Congress be at-large would essentially eliminate gerrymandering by just letting any majority in a state decide everything.
I think thats the single worst change we could make, beating out term limits. ~Because if only lobbyists and staffers can be long-term careers we'd never have principled professional politicians, just short-term figureheads~
What does "be at-large" mean?
We're talking about a kind of stagered multi-member districts.
"At Large" means that the senators would be elected by the whole state, which is the only way to avoid gerrymandering and identical to how the current rules work.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/At-large
It's not the only way. Larger multi-member districts also work.
And while we're re-writing the whole constitution, we could do lots of things. Like requiring algorithmically generated districts, to remove the possibility of any arbitrary bias.
Algorithmically generated districts just give a sharper target, and allowing the existing systems to include multi-member districts just makes gerrymanding easier.
The only way to prevent gerrymandering is with either districts that don't change (statewide), or changing the rules of the legislature so gerrymandering doesnt matter
My favorite potential fix is direct proxy voting. Tie vote weight in the legislature to how many citizens voted for you, and send either the top N vote-getters or everyone who gets at least X% of the votes cast to the legislature.
Don't know what you mean by sharper target.
You can pick a specific algorithm based on nothing but population, without any demographics. Thus impossible to gerrymander. The Shortest Splitline is one. Another I don't remember the name of draws circles around the densest population centers as big as they need to be to include the required number of people.
Passing government functions off to a computer only encourages corruption and distortion in either the implementation, the input, or how the output is handled.
It's like trying to engineer anti-cheat on a system where not only does the user own their own hardware but also the marketplace vendors, the courts, the OS vendors, and your servers.
I think you're thinking of laws.
Code is better.
You can't game how many people live where.
I don't know whether it's cute or terrifying that you think you can solve a political problem with software.
Humans can and will game how many people are reported as living where. And they'll intentionally misinterpret the algorithm you write. And they'll lie about what your magic box says. And if they're ever caught doing it they can and will be either ignored by the humans who enforce laws or just be given pardons by the governing humans who wanted the system mucked with in the first place
The only thing in our species' history that has ever served as a check against the selfish creativity and audacity of humans is the selfish creativity and audacity of other humans.
How do you change peoples addresses; Not just a few, but several percentage points? And people don't interpret anything. That's the point. The data is collected in the census by thousands of people. You can't get thousands of people to lie about tens of thousands of addresses when they don't even know which way to fudge the numbers. Then the computer tells you where the lines are. Nothing for people do to change them. Any attempt to change it will be obvious.
Did you even look at the site I linked? Because all you have is vague promises that people lie. You offer no alternative. If people can just lie about everything (which even Rump has failed to do) what can laws do? Laws are even easier to lie about.
There was intentional miscounting in the 2020 census, even though that was only used to determine relative distribution of representatives among the various states. Every politician in the country already has huge lists of where their supporters live, and it is already obvious when they're pulling shenanigans. And yet they do it anyway, because mere shame is not enough to keep humans from being jerks to obtain power and wealth.
My preferred alternative is not to rely on software or laws, but other humans and a dramatic expansion of whose votes matter in the country from "just those who won" to "essentially everyone.".
How much miscounting? Enough to matter? How. If you want to convince the shortest splitline can be manipulated more than a bunch of people, you need to explain exactly how.
I'm not going to get into a pointless argument about whether or not the worst part of your proposal is "people" or "math", since this is a system question and the distinction is irrelevent.
Humans will attempt to distort whatever system you decide. The only thing that has ever constrained this impulse is other humans with opposing interests. If you do have that what math is actually used becomes irrelevant, and if you don't then the math is just a game that the humans who want to break your system may play or ignore as they choose.
If you're not willing to understand even the basics of what you're talking about enough to explain your view, there isn't anything to talk about. You're just obviously wrong, and you don't even care to know why. I've got nothing more for you.
Senate, not gerrymandered?
giving < 1/3rd of the population 2/3rds of the national political power is the most severe voter representative disenfranchisement there is in the US
The senate is by no means fair or democratic, but its borders reflect something that exists apart from the purpose of electing senators and whose borders are not drawn for the (sole) purpose of obtaining a majority in the Senate.
It's not gerrymandered in the way that a "whites-only" sign isnt sexist.
I don't see any logic behind giving every state equal representation when each state is not equal in population, commerce, or even territory.
I think the need for both a senate and a house is important, and the distinction between the two would be that individual districts select the house appointments while the state as a whole decides the senators.
I think the additional chamber of the senate helps quality control over changes by the house, and makes it harder for harmful changes like those by the GOP to pass while incentivizing changes popular by the larger majority.
1 = In the original Constitution there was supposed to be one Congressperson for every 30,000 citizens. We're apx 300 million, which would work out to about 10,000 Congresspeople. I think we can agree this would be a tad unwieldy
2= Term limits would just mean the same fat cats have to get new stooges more often.
3=The whole point of Senators was to make sure that the smaller states got equal representation.
We don't need to set the number at 30,000. But, hypothetically, if we did, then we can count 150 Million votes in a couple of days, so I think we can reasonably count 10,000 in a couple of hours, although we're going to have to rework who gets time to speak before congress and for how long and also do something about the Filibuster.
If the current system shows us anything it is that the corruptness of an individual does not correlate to a short time in office. Term limits are important to prevent corrupt people from amassing power and influence over a long period of time, such as in the SCOTUS. Monied interests have been shown more likely to put weight behind reelecting people known to play ball than newcomers.
Conversely it means larger population states get less representation. Fuck the smaller states. The few should not rule over the many.
There are 168 hours in a week.
If we had 10,000 Congress people and each had five minutes to present an idea it would take about 35 days for everyone to introduce themselves.
There's a science fiction novel that tossed this idea out as a very minor plot point, but I do like it.
Change from voting by location to letting people pick their own districts.
Any group that can show it represents a group of sufficient size gets one Congress member.
People can choose to be 'gun owners,' 'mass transit users,' 'single mothers,' 'factory workers,' 'farmers,' 'polygamists,' or any other designation they choose.
There should be a 5th one: A ban on religious discrimination.
Number six should be that, just like the Protestant Reformation, Catholicism should be banned. That's what controls all of Christianity. On top of that, the laws shouldn't be written in such a way that protect Catholics and Jesuits, and protect everyone, regardless of their personal beliefs.
As bad as Catholics can be, they are a bit player in the US religious landscape. I reject the premise that they are still the standard by which American "Christianity" sets its course. I'm not defending them exactly, I'm just saying they aren't the most serious problem. By far the most dangerous are the post-second-reformation evangelicals. American Catholics are barely even Catholic by most measures, and are far more heavily influenced by American Pentecostals, Adventists, Mormons, and most dangerous of all Southern Baptists. Even their own forebears would consider what they've become blasphemous heretics.
Evangelicals are controlled by the Catholic church, whether they know it or otherwise. Most of the danger comes from Catholic-style parenting and indoctrination that happens in these churches at the hands of the Jesuit Order.
That's almost entirely backwards
Catholics were always backwards in their traditions.
That's accurate. The idea that they have anything to do with American Christianity is however entirely false.
Most of the Founding Fathers in America's history were Catholic. In fact, George Washington's handler was one member of the Carol family, a bunch of Jesuits. He even had some praise for the Catholic Church, because Freemasonry was taken over by the Jesuits when the Bavarian Illuminati was created in 1776.
Seek professional help.
So you want me to go to a confessional and confess that I hadn't revered and obeyed the Pope?
Thanks. What a great idea. /sarcasm
No, I said professional help. See a doctor. Tell them these things so they can help you. You need help.
So you think I'm under a spell?
That's why I made the sarcastic remark.
No. I did not say that. I wish you the best
Religious discrimination is already prohibited by the Civil Rights Act and religious speech is protected by the first amendment. Furthermore, all recognized religious institutions are untaxed, there was even a segment where talk show host John Oliver founded his own recognized religion as an example.
The nation was founded by Anglican Seperatist Pilgrims fleeing the Roman Catholic influences. Protestants are double the number of Catholics in the USA.
If anything, I believe we need to start treating all religions like business institutions.
Indeed, we should. Especially since every single religion all goes to cause people to revere and obey the Pope, the Mark of the Beast. I've believed this since 2025 when I started studying it.