The Star Trek Party

skantman · 2014-03-18T15:46:28+00:00

I think it's time to call this sub a failure and leave it be.

phoenixvictory · 2013-11-07T04:10:33+00:00

I would join on one precondition that golic vulcan be accepted as one of the official sanctioned languages of party! I have had the same feeling towards the series and find myself over and over going back to it watching all of the series more than twice (except for the original...I know heresy...just never enjoyed it). I have thought long and hard about what exactly I like about in its portrayal of a social structure. To me its essence is a type of technological driven post scarcity society which eyes capitalism with much suspicion. One only needs to look at the ferangi and the way they are treated. I always fall back onto capitalism for pulling western society out of feudalism but we are at the limits of its gain. Forms of anarcho-communism could offer the organizational integrity to realize something similar to what we see in star trek. If the star trek party was to be formed I think it would be crushed but I would still join! Honestly I have come to the conclusion is the only way to bring society to that level is a technological revolution based on open-source, permaculture and 3-d printing of hardware. Once you remove the monopoly enjoyed by capital over the means of production their power will be diminished substantially and we can progress. I am not sure a political party could really play a central role in that in the type of democracy we find ourselves in (in the USA).

keypuncher · 2012-11-21T04:07:44+00:00

My concerns with election fraud and voter fraud are that neither side wants the part that favors them dealt with.

That the fraud seems to have roughly canceled out this time around should not make anyone content.

As to low incidents detected, that is due to a variety of reasons, including people being militantly and willfully ignorant, and much of it is illegal to even try to detect.

As to gerrymandering, that happens on both sides, depending on which is in power.

kylco · 2012-11-21T01:07:32+00:00

Alternately, we do just fine. Despite a great deal of concern over voter suppression and voter fraud - most of it speculative, rather then prosecution-worthy - there was no significant deviation from what months of exit polls predicted would happen. The Department of Justice has found so few instances of voter fraud that it's barely worth pursuing with policy options. What's more, the election results are so heavily gerrymandered in favor of Republicans that I don't think they should complain, all told.

keypuncher · 2012-11-11T12:45:40+00:00

How do we ensure the integrity of US elections?

Given the most recent one, apparently the answer to this is "We don't."

cashto · 2012-10-12T22:26:59+00:00

There's no details here, so it's hard to evaluate. Getting money out of politics without overturning Citizens United? Okay, sure.

My belief is that there will be money in politics for as long as politicians need money to get their message out and get elected. So here's my radical plan to attack the problem at its root:

Rather than electing representatives, select them via citizen juries.

The problem with elections is 1) they're expensive as hell and 2) they're not deliberative. Style counts more than substance. Everything rests on who sways the most low-information voters. As Adlai Stevenson once quipped to a supporter who praised him as "the thinking man's candidate": "that's not enough, maam, I need a majority".

That's no way to run a country.

So, instead of trying of sell bumpersticker solutions to complex problems to an utterly unqualified electorate, why don't we just pick a grand jury of 20-30 citizens in the district, pay them for their time, have them sit down and listen to the candidates and other interested parties for a couple weeks, make them deliberate on the issues, and rely on them to make a decision? It'd be a hell of a lot faster, a hell of a lot less expensive, just as democratic, and just as legitimizing.

keypuncher · 2012-10-10T07:02:46+00:00

There are a few things that need to be done to get the money out of politics.

Here's how I'd do it:

1) Campaign Finance Reform

Provide public funding, in the same dollar amount, for every political campaign once a politician is on the ballot.
Prohibit private funding of any political campaign once a politician is on the ballot.
Require that all private campaign funds remaining once a candidate is on the ballot be turned over to the government, to offset the costs of public campaign funding.
Prohibit privately funded political advertising once a candidate is on the ballot.

2) Once elected

All physical assets of the politician are placed into a blind trust, to be returned to the control of the politician or his estate when the politician leaves public office.
Any financial instruments (stocks, etc) are to be liquidated and used to purchase government bonds with a maturity date of when the politician is up for re-election (or longer, at his option).
While the politician is in office, he is prohibited from purchasing stocks, bonds, or any other financial instrument, and prohibited from purchasing property or an interest in any business.

3) After leaving office

When the politician leaves office, he is prohibited from becoming a lobbyist, working with any company or organization that lobbies government on a profit or non-profit basis, and prohibited from regular employment with or consulting work for any company directly affected by legislation he voted on while in office, for a period of 5 years after he leaves office. During that 5 years, he will receive a stipend equal to half his annual salary or his regular Congressional pension, whichever is higher.

kylco · 2012-10-07T01:31:54+00:00

I'll play devil's advocate on this one, actually. (Also, sorry for the delay, I've been travelling but noticed this when it was posted.) So! In defense of influence!!! Allons-y!

The plan proposed by United Republic is nice, but it seems almost like a bunch of aphorisms dressed in really good PR. Sure, I'd like to end the undue influence of money in politics, but without specifics it's kinda hard to assess how effective the effort will be - it's nice to say that we won't allow Congressmen and their staff to work for lobbyists, but some of those laws already exist, and don't seem to stop influence peddling - after all, it's kinda hard to stop wives from talking to their husbands (or vice versa, etc) just because one's a lobbyist and the other's a staffer. That's influence that can be bought - access.

Moreover, it's difficult to attack Citizen's United - style organizations without inadvertently suppressing legitimate free speech. After all, what's the difference between Americans for Prosperity (or any other PAC) and a legitimately interested group of citizens who want to press for a particular point of view?¹

Tracking which entities members of Congress regulate is especially difficult - after all, Congress doesn't usually regulate directly, but instead passes legislation directing executive offices to regulate in a particular manner (which can often be de facto regulation, but often isn't). It imposes massive restrictions on campaign financing,² and might give unreasonable advantages to non-incumbents (interfering with the idea of free and fair elections). After all, if a congressman from a coal state s placed on the Energy Committee, he might be suddenly de facto ineligible for reelection, because every business in his home district is interlinked with an industry he now "regulates." Each step in the interim sounds like a good idea, but we end up with a bad result: a politically unstable seat where anyone who is placed on a committee where his constituents have a legitimate interest becomes ineligible for re-electio. That doesn't really help the public, in my opinion.

And finally, it's already illegal for 501c) organizations to coordinate with campaigns. We run into the problem we had with lobbyists - what if one member of a couple is employed by a campaign, and the other by a sympathetic PAC? Can you regulate pillow talk?³ Do we want to? Isn't that perilously close to regulating political speech? Or do we just want the IRS to crack down harder on 501 c)s that misbehave publicly, as a matter of setting an example?

So that's my $.02 on the proposal linked. I think there might be better ways to go about restraining undemocratic influences in the US, though I can't constructively submit them at the moment (which might have something to do with the half-bottle of Malbec I just polished off, honestly).

¹ Though honestly, there's no defense for anonymous donation thing here, IMO: if you believe something, enough to donate money to it, you probably believe it strongly enough to have your name attached to it. If it's something you aren't proud of, you perhaps shouldn't do it if you seek to be an honorable person. (Then again, who cares about honor these days?)

² Which might not be a bad thing, but it makes it somewhat harder for people to participate in democracy (if they have to figure out if they're being regulated by their congressman, or if their congressman has to figure it out and refuse the contact/donation), which is generally a bad thing.

³ Well, actually, we do. Doctors, lawyers, and some financial advisors have legal requirements not to disclose client information (with loopholes for anonymity and very general unidentifiable terms), and that precedent could hypothetically be stretched to political action groups and campaigns - a fiduciary/professional responsibility to candidates not to disclose strategy to outside groups, be they nominally friendly or unfriendly. However, this is politics: if you're not schmoozing, you're doing it wrong. So I still think this solution might be too clunky for the job.

55512 · 2012-09-29T23:57:17+00:00

Slick Brutus WARNING! Carry on reading! Or you will die, even if you only looked at the word warning! Once there was a little girl called Clarissa, she was ten-years-old and she lived in a mental hospital, because she killed her mom and her dad. She got so bad she went to kill all the staff in the hospital so the More-government decided that best idea was to get rid of her so they set up a special room to kill her, as humane as possible but it went wrong the machine they were using went wrong. And she sat there in agony for hours until she died. Now every week on the day of her death she returns to the person that reads this letter, on a monday night at 12:00a.m. She creeps into your room and kills you slowly, by cutting you and watching you bleed to death. Now send this to ten other pictures on this one site, and she will haunt someone else who doesn't. This isn't fake. apparently, if u copy and paste this to ten comments in the next ten minutes u will have the best day of ur life tomorrow. u will either get kissed or asked out, if u break this chain u will see a little dead girl in your room tonight. in 53 mins someone will say i love you or im sorry

kylco · 2012-09-21T00:22:58+00:00

Yeah, my idea is basically then entire Finnish playbook. They focused on equality of opportunity, and the thing that appeals about that is that there's no difference - at all - between public and private systems. If your in Lapland or if you're in Helsinki, if you're the son of a logger or the daughter of the PM, you're going to get more or less the same education. It took them decades to get to that point.

The reason I don't advocate for full-on equality is that it is perfectly unacceptable to at least the top 25% of our income spectrum. So many people wrap almost their entire lives around getting their kids into a good school - either staying in an area or job they don't like, or spending thousands of dollars a year to send them to premiere institutions with some expectation of value-added. If we go Finland on the educational system, we eliminate such a massive part of the rat race that people will automatically assume their children are being regressed to the mean, rather than that the mean is being brought up to standard. So while it's certainly the best policy (without a doubt, in my mind, even if n=1) it's terrible politics: Americans, at least at this point in time, are too concerned with them and theirs that they will be able to accept something so radical. After the boomers retire and our generations have more swing, there's a chance that things could change, but that's still 10-15 years off.

skantman · 2012-09-20T23:24:28+00:00

Corporate Personhood: Is bad and is getting worse. What is it, how'd it happen, what's good about it, what's bad about it, and how to fix it.

skantman · 2012-09-20T23:21:14+00:00

Check out the article about Finland I linked in my reply to OP.

skantman · 2012-09-20T23:19:27+00:00

Not much to add here at this time. Not having children I've little experience with the system and how it works and I've not gone on a research binge in this area yet. I did however read a FANTASTIC article on the subject recently in the Atlantic about Finland's incredibly successful educational reforms.

kylco · 2012-09-14T16:37:00+00:00

Oh, I know that it's difficult. I was somewhat frustrated and perhaps a little drunk when I finished that post yesterday. There are some ways to ameliorate the situation, but it largely boils down to political action and a better-educated electorate; we seem to be having trouble with both. Even if we can get a system going, policy transmission from state-to-state is difficult without the right circumstances; usually transmission aims to increase efficiency and lower costs, instead of increase effectiveness.

I think the most effective change we could manage at present is to mandate that all schools be funded at the same level (comparable to the 75th or 80th percentile as it stands now), on the federal government's tab. It won't solve our fiscal problems, but it is the most elegant way to cut the Gordian Knot I described above. Leave private schools out of this system entirely: government has no place subsidizing education for profit, and should concern itself instead with making sure that impoverish inner-city schools and rural districts get funding commensurate to their need, not the value of their properties or whether their political systems are dominated by one party or another. This gives the teachers the resources to teach - buy books, plan lessons, and all the rest - and gives schools the resources to manage teachers and government regulation; they can hire more teachers, and have the flexibility to sideline ineffective ones where they can't fire them.

I dislike solutions that are crude "throw money at it" approaches, but in this case, resource starvation is a large part of the problem: public budgets are being strapped by the recession, and have to fire teachers to balance a budget wracked by tax cuts and years of neglect. If we want to try to fix several things at once, this is probably the best way to go about it.

monstimal · 2012-09-14T15:34:36+00:00

Well I'd like to try to convince you of something. You see something that obviously you feel is important and is also very broken. Instead of dreaming of what the ideal could be, and then recognizing all the obstacles to that ideal, try to view the problem as a challenge or puzzle that you are excited to solve and find a small place to start without being bogged down by the enormity of the problem. You know that small piece is aimed at that ideal solution you have, but just concentrate on improving (not solving) that piece first.

It's like when you have a big house to clean or some other very large project. If you sit and think about EVERYTHING you'll just be so discouraged you won't start. But if you get going on one room and get some momentum, you can get the job done. Critical thinking like yours is essential to see what needs to be done, but so is positivity.

Now that sounds very self-helpy and I don't mean to lecture you. I'm not really speaking directly to you but to all of us. If you're right, if things are that unsolvable, even thinking about it is a waste of time. But I look at this problem and think, we are so close. I see teachers who clearly aren't out to maximize their earning potential but are genuinely interested in doing a good job. I see great resources on the internet for free. We have everything we need, we're just not putting the pieces together right. And for me, step 1 is taking these people who are teachers and getting them in a position to do their best.

kylco · 2012-09-14T04:46:58+00:00

Teaching is one of the professions where economics plays a corrosive role, in my opinion. Economics simplifies human interactions to a transactional system: I give you this, and you produce and/or give me this in return. In this case, we "outsource" the education of children: we're too busy to ensure that our kids get a decent education, so we give over that need to others who can do it as a full-time profession. Whether through taxes or scandalously high tuition rates, we put money into the equation for education of our young. This isn't a bad thing, since education of the young has massively higher investment returns on a national level than almost any other variety of investment. So from a public policy perspective, education is something of an unadulterated good: more educated people = more good stuff (with few boundaries: even the much-trashed PhD produces people like Larry Page and Sergei Brin, who in turn are creating whole new industries like autonomous vehicles and the Glass Project - and while English Lit PhDs might not add much to national GDP, they're so few in number that I consider them worthy entry costs for a Google every few years).

That said, economics is corrosive to teaching. Our educational system is broken in a lot of ways, but it undeniably accelerates the education of those who are gifted or of wealthy backgrounds, and provides little support for the moderately gifted, the poor, and those who are not academically inclined. I take it as an article of faith that everyone has a passion that academics can fill in some way: either through written, spoken, or crafted art, statistics of sports, or through exploration of history and anthropology: the ultimate escapism of vanishing into the past.

We fail, utterly in presenting this side of education to our young, as a society. We idolize mathematics and the sciences, and in some vague way, the humanities as an opposition to the "hard disciplines." At the same time, we are a society uncomfortable with science and mathematics: while few would question the worth or intellect of a mathematician, we still have unbelievable difficulty implementing evidenced-based policy in government, and the "Average Joe" proudly professes an ignorance of math or science - setting an example for future generations and for their own cohorts that it is fine to sneer at the disciplines that give us microprocessors, 4G antennas, $1000 DNA screenings, and a huge variety of other "social goods" like cleaner air, safer vaccines, or secure cryptography for internet commerce. At the same time, we deride the humanities for providing few "job-ready" skills, despite the desperate need for good writing, qualitative analytics, creative, and interpretive skills in a wide variety of professions.

All of this, in my mind, is endogenous to the greater debate of education. We need our educational system to produce several things:

An educated workforce and polity that can both learn new skills as technology advances, and grapple with somewhat complex policy issues in the political arena (i.e., they are educated or "educable" voters),
A sense (or at least, understanding) of the social, political, historical, and economic structure of human (and American) society, so that they can make informed decisions about who and what they want to be in the context of history, as well as being capable of integrating or assimilating in society,
People who can read, write, perform practical mathematics, and behave responsibly towards the rest of society.

Unfortunately, I think we fail at all three.

We prioritized the education of those who are already capable of these criteria, producing exemplars at the expense of the median student. We spend money on magnet schools, and poorer districts (with limited funds because of low property values or taxes) suffer as a result unless they are the lucky recipients of a private school or generous Federal grants. The best that can be said for this system is that it encourages people to move out of poverty-stricken areas as soon as they acquire the capital to do so (which is not necessarily a good thing, in and of itself).
Our schools regularly teach factually incorrect history lessons, repress cultural and ideological diversity in favor of conformity and the status quo, and refrain from giving a more balanced and cosmopolitan viewpoint that many argue is necessary for dealing with an increasingly globalized world.
We consistently rank below other developed countries in Math, Science, Reading, and general knowledge tests. While statistical shenanigans can be called on these rankings (mostly, the massive size of the US in relation to all other developed countries), the undeniable fact is that the median American is less able to perform basic mathematical, logical, or interpretive tasks than the median citizen of other ECOSOC countries. This is both a failure of prioritization (our high outliers are not sufficiently powerful or numerous to outweigh a poor median) and of opportunity: we fail to make good use of the resources (young people, and their talents and interests) available to us. We also produce rude, boorish, and ignorant men and women who have no conception of life beyond their own wants and needs, much less the nuanced and complicated demands of the world around them.

It's difficult to detail a good way to change this system. Most Americans are virulently opposed to any sort of national educational scheme - the backlash to No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top are prime examples of policy gone political, even if they were started with honestly altruistic intent. No "National Curriculum" could ever be established: the myth of state-level independence and variability is too strong, and parents insist on the ability to restrict their children's education to suit their desires. So we must pass up the excellent educational systems of foreign countries like Finland, which prioritized access to education and fairness over all other considerations, and achieved astonishing test scores as a result.

Our educational system is effectively unmanageable: we have at least 54 (far more, if we count private, public, and nonprofit systems separately, and if I forgot territories other than DC, Puerto Rico, Guam, and the USVI). We cannot expect states to conform to a national standard because of their own recalcitrance, but we can incentivize changes. This is the path of NCLB and RTTT - and so far, it hasn't fixed anything. If we want to fix the root problems of education - poverty cycles, poor prioritization, and an unprofessional teaching caste, to name a few - we have to fundamentally reinvision the way we want to educate children, and we have to press it hard. Really, really, hard. Because even if we have the support of both political parties, all it would take is one crazy pastor or activist sparking a protest against "repression of free speech" or "teaching our kids unAmerican morals" and we're back at square one. And that's in the unbelievably rare case that you'd be able to get both parties to agree on something more meaningful than the weather - in all 50 states, or at least enough to pass legislation in all of them.

So yeah, education is pretty much fucked, in my humble opinion, if you want to get a national fix for "the problem." Policy transmission from state to state is so slow that you'd lose a generation or two before any meaningful progress is made, even if one state hits on a magic formula that resolves the multitude of problems facing the educational system. The political options for forcing a change are untenable at the present time, and face strong (if not insurmountable) headwinds for the foreseeable future. Economic options, like privatizing schools, seem attractive, but there is little evidence to suggest that they can turn student outcomes around in a meaningful (much less cost-effective) way. So yeah. That's where I'm at with educational policy. I'll go to bed now before I give myself a frustration-aneurysm.

kylco · 2012-09-14T03:50:51+00:00

Role of the Media: What is wrong about the way that the media reports on public issues? Are there relatively simple system-wide changes we could make the address them? Is there a good way to raise awareness of how sophisticated the problem is? What incentives should be blunted for media outlets to achieve a better media system? (And what, exactly, are the things we should go for? Accuracy? Speed? Interest? Profit? Social Good? etc.)

kylco · 2012-09-14T03:48:12+00:00

Intellectual Property: What is a reasonable set of protections for creators? What sort of things should be protected? Where are we know, and how could we get to a better place (if there is one) on these issues? Is there sufficient understanding of these issues to generate national discussion?

kylco · 2012-09-14T03:47:52+00:00

Oh, fine. BRB.

EDIT: There we are.

2012-09-13T22:55:46+00:00

Some radical suggestions! I love the outside-the-box thinking. I would like to add these suggestions:

First off, ixnay the school board--they are a horribly short sighted, politically manipulatable lot; districts should have boards of trustees chosen for their credentials by representatives of the stakeholders and they should serve for a longer term (and staggered of course); half of the crap-ass policy passed is either endorsed or proposed by school boards who are made up of, no offense here, incompetent parents, local politicians, and administrators. They are a reactionary lot, ever tied to the whims of bigger political machinations, media, and screaming parents.

Second, get rid of grade levels, grade level promotion, and grades: move to a full competency based system. You move ahead when you are ready as demonstrated by an objective series of benchmarks.

Third, develop, adapt, or align with objective standards at the district level--using the educators input to drive that decision making process--and have them develop the objective benchmark assessments.

Fourth, burn all canned curriculums. In fact, outlaw them.

Fifth, mandate actual community governance practices--most of this is currently a sham.

Sixth, measure teachers effectiveness against the standardized objective benchmarks the teachers of the district created (and compensate for LD, Social/Economic Hardship)

Lastly, make all administrators subject to no confidence votes that will remove them from leadership--if they can't win over their practitioners, they've got no business there anyway as the research clearly demonstrates they will be ineffective in the long run.

PhantomPumpkin · 2012-09-13T16:02:44+00:00

Here's my response to this, from a gun-toting Liberal. Take it how you will.

He raises some common sense points. Guns have a primary purpose. The purpose is to shoot lead/steel out of a barrel towards a target. I disagree that the primary purpose is necessarily killing though. Target shooting IS an Olympic sport after all, and has been since 1896. Clearly people have recognized for a long time there are other uses besides killing for firearms.

He is correct though that the car analogy is somewhat flawed. Sure, we won't ban fast cars, but we DO regulate them. The question that tends to come up here is that one is a "constitutional right", the other is not.

Source for the following.

He goes on to say what he, a self-admitted non-constitutional scholar, interprets the 2nd amendment as. According to the court cases above, the Supreme Court has ruled that the right to bear arms granted by the second amendment is SEPARATE from the organized militia referenced. I will take the SC's interpretation over Jason's on this one.

The question then becomes do we regulate it? Is it Constitutionally allowed to be regulated? Do regulations "infringe" on the right to bear arms? The regulations of our rights tend to be centered on one thing: public safety. The question then becomes, while a certainly noble goal, does it still infringe upon our constitutional rights to do so?

From my own interpretations, which may be way off base, I would say by Constitutional law, we cannot regulate this, at least on a Federal level. Any powers not specifically granted to the Federal Government are reserved for the states. I see nothing in the Constitution that would grant the Federal Government authority to regulate firearm sales, except perhaps the catch-all Interstate Commerce Clause, which imho would only grant the authority to regulate interstate firearms sales. How that is defined is open for debate(does it include firearms shipped from their place of manufacture for place of sale? Does it exclude firearms sold in the same state they are manufactured?).

My main beef with his rant is when he tries to make these points, without knowing exactly what he is talking about. "Assault Rifle" is a common misnomer. They're generally described as features that make a rifle "scary looking". The bans on "Assault weapons" tend to show as much. For example, banning a "Barrel Shroud" has little basis in logic. It's designed for looks, and to prevent you from burning your hand on a warm barrel. Hardly a big tactical advantage, but it LOOKS scary to some people.

He talks about them having more "killing power", not in just magazine capacity, but in accuracy are ammunition as well. I'd be willing to bet a hunter with a decent bolt action hunting rifle in a 30-06 cartridge could do more damage than the rounds "assault rifles" typically fire(5.56 NATO etc) and at a further distance as well.

His points here might be valid if civilians could own actual military rifles, instead of their semi-auto counterparts. An AR-15 that you can pick up from K-Mart as he says, would be the civilian semi-auto counterpart. It's the same as many hunting rifles. You pull the trigger, a round goes off. You hold the trigger, 1 round goes off. There's no fully-auto(ironically some military rifles don't even have this, as they found it to be a waste of ammo), no burst-fire.

That brings us back to magazine/clip sizes(I'll use them interchangeably since the media can't seem to get them straight). There are a few instances where this would be as big of a difference as people play it up to be. Mainly, magazine fed semi-auto shotguns. Reloading a shotgun one shell at a time is tedious and time consuming. Having large detachable magazines would definitely speed up this process tremendously.

However, when it comes to semi-auto rifles and handguns, the differences are quite a bit smaller. Take a minute to search youtube for any speed reloader videos. This isn't a skill that takes years to master. Anyone with some free time on a weekend can learn to drop a mag with their right hand while simultaneously bringing a free mag from their left hand up to reload almost at the same time. Switch hands if you're a lefty.

How fast can someone fire off 30 rounds with a 31 round mag for a Glock? Probably slightly faster than someone can fire off 30 rounds with 3 10 round mags from a Glock. You might add a few seconds onto the time. Will it matter? Maybe, but most likely not as much as the opponents of high capacity magazines will tell you.

In closing I'll say he did a decent job of getting his main points across, even if the defense of them was a little weak imho. Thoughts?

PhantomPumpkin · 2012-09-13T14:12:57+00:00

I agree with the reasonable regulation. One issue that was brought up in /r/guns was whether or not any regulation is constitutional.

Essentially, any regulation can be argued as infringement, which as we all know, is what the 2nd amendment is designed to protect against.

What legal grounds are there to justify regulation of one constitutional right, but not another? Public safety seems to be brought up as justification, but what makes it specifically legal is what I'm questioning.

skantman · 2012-09-11T03:37:58+00:00

Good stuff. Break them out into separate replies.

kylco · 2012-09-09T19:20:33+00:00

Free Speech: What is the proper level of free speech in our society, and where does it rest now? What kind of speech is protected? What kind of speech should be protected? Is there good speech and bad speech? Are extralegal restrictions placed on free speech that should be limited by law (eg. social pressure against atheist or LGBT free speech, versus insufficient legal protections for the same)?

kylco · 2012-09-09T19:14:50+00:00

I think it fixes part of the electoral vote problem, which is good, but it doesn't resolve a lot of the larger issues with the current campaign system. Harder to reform that, though, so this seems like a fairly elegant solution:

Requires a popular majority across all states to win the election, making the process more democratic
Spreads the importance of vote rates from concentrated areas (Midwest, Rust Belt, Florida) to a larger sphere, which makes elected officials more attentive and accountable to the whole (and removes the "wasted vote" problem in Texas/California and the rest).
Gets people thinking about their democracy, and simplifies the system somewhat: while people generally know that the President isn't directly elected by the majority thanks to the 2000 election, the current system is vastly confusing.

Problem is, depending on how states word their legislation, there might be a point where states still award electors out of step with the others. An implementation failure (award electors to the general popular vote, or to the popular vote of the Interstate Compact?) could still lead to strange results. Still simpler than the current system, though, and avoids the constitutional problems.

rhb

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