I'd vote for a candidate who campaigned to repeal the Second Amendment.
Also, America was formed because a bunch of rich, old, white guys didn't want to pay their taxes.
this post was submitted on 28 Mar 2024
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Yeah but maybe look at a modern written constitution. At least the guys wrote the American one had some ideals. The Canadian Charter of Rights was written by a career politician in the late 70s to specifically guarantee governmental rights, not citizens.
Or be around Catholics.
Anglicans. Who were, in fact, persecuting other religions because that's just what you did at the time.
More like a bunch of folk who were turfed out of Europe for being a bit too religiously weird
That takes some doing in the 16th century 😂
I mean, that was why the pilgrims left. There were a lot of other people that came for a lot of other reasons after.
How do constitutional alterations happen there? Is it by referendum like Australia (where everyone's opinion matters) or is it by some arbitrary majority in the houses of congress (where only the elite political class' opinion matters)?
An amendment may be proposed by a two-thirds vote of both Houses of Congress, or, if two-thirds of the States request one, by a convention called for that purpose. The amendment must then be ratified by three-fourths of the State legislatures, or three-fourths of conventions called in each State for ratification.
So basically only the political and by extension the upper class get to decide the rules by which they play. Sounds really fair. FREEDOM!!!
I have always felt that freedom of press was one of the most fundamental aspects of a working democracy. Without a free press, you cannot have proper checks and balances. Unfortunately, while press is still ‘free’, actual unbiased news gets only a small fraction of the viewership. Mainstream ‘news’ is nearly completely opinion driven, and profit is the incentive rather than the dissemination of information. The free press no longer serves its necessary function, there is no accountability, and democracy is at risk.
Yes, a functional democracy requires that users have real political agency to engage with political topics, and that requires a high bar for individual liberty including press and academic freedom. A ton of people here will try to argue an absurd absolutist case that freedoms don't matter because all governments engage in some curtailment of freedom, and that this all therefore reduces to preference.
The reality is that neither governments or institutions outside of government are perfect. Perfection is a vision which guides institutions, not a real endpoint. That's why you should always be very critical of anyone who is quick to engage in criticism of your institutions, but is unwilling to engage in criticism of their own. This is the surest sign that someone is not acting in good faith, be it in real life, or on a notoriously sensitive meme community.
What about public radio, NPR? Of all the crap news out there, the reports I get off NPR are usually well balanced
So yea, I hear you. I pretty much exclusively listen to NPR for news, and they are pretty balanced if not potentially a little left leaning from time to time, which I actually find refreshing.
But when a measurable percentage of the country thinks fox is fair and balanced, or that FB is a news source, the ability for our free press to safeguard democracy is severely threatened.
What good is free press when there are no longer facts and everything is opinion based?
Paraphrasing Asimov, ‘There is a cult of ignorance which operates under the false notion that democracy means that my ignorance is as good as your knowledge.’
When trump took a play straight out of the dictators handbook and started shouting fake news, I began to fear that this was the beginning of the end. The real beginning however was probably a few decades back when news went from dry and factual to sensationalist infotainment.
It's when CNN went to a 24hour news cycle and they had to fill that time with a bunch of talking heads spouting opinions.
We no longer have free press, not to any meaningful degree:
European version:
Given that the freedom of press is a requirement for a healthy democracy, and corporations owning all of these subsidiaries prevents that, I think it is well past time that we ban corporations from owning subsidiary companies.
Looking at the European version, I don't see any of the big serious journalistic outlets. Most of what's in there are just tabloids or lifestyle magazines. And even if a newspaper is part of a big conglomerate, doesn't mean that they are not free
Here's one for France:
It shows national and big local newspapers.
Idk if it's my lemmy client, but I can't read most of the text in the image, because it's too low res
And even if a newspaper is part of a big conglomerate, doesn’t mean that they are not free
Sure it does. If the CEO of a news organization doesn't want something published, it doesn't get published. That's why you never see articles on the Washington post that are critical of Bezos/Amazon/etc. And so when you get huge swaths of the media controlled by just a few people, it is no longer free.
I note a lack of NPR in the us version.... also seems like conspiracy bullshit.
At the very least, every product should be explicitly labeled as produced by the top parent company, right next to the actual name of the product.
Disney ate 21st Century Fox, so it's even worse now.
Who is P guy?
the meat of it is concerned with property and ownership, which has little to do with the general welfare of sentient beings, so i think it was alright for the time, and totally outdated now.
I don’t think the problem is that the government “wasn’t the best ever,” I think it’s that it hasn’t changed. And the US hasn’t done a lot to enforce some of the groundwork beliefs of the framers.
I still think the idea and balance of power of the US government is one of the best—but it was created to change with the times and address practical flaws (amendments) and hasn’t.
The problem is that they're still largely perceived as being the best ever. The American founding fathers are pretty much deified, and it's still expected that important policy decisions will be made based on what these centuries-dead aristocrats thought rather than based on what's needed in the here and now. Other countries don't do this. I've never in my life heard a politician try to attack or defend a position based on what John A. Macdonald would have thought of it, but in the USA that sort of thing happens all the time.
Yeah, but that's a structural flaw inherit in the initial design. We were doomed to quickly end up in a two party system, despite the fact that they all thought they were better than parties. The federal government pretty much immediately became a two party affair, that that inherently stagnates change and limits the actual will of the people from being enacted in government.
We need to switch to Approval Voting and proportional representation if we want the government to actually represent the people.
Many liberal countries have these alternative voting systems, and it means nothing. Australia and Japan for example use alternate voting systems, and yet are still far-right countries who are killing indigenous movements and have extremely unpopular governments.
The root problem is that in liberal countries, capitalists stand above the political system, and control it for their own purposes. No people's democracy can emerge from within it, regardless of any system of "checks and balances" or voting systems.
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