11 ms·

All of these changes that Trump is making in his first week are making me wonder: what's the population limit, really, for a well functioning democracy? I'm no

• cmdrfred 10y ago
  What other form of government do you propose?
  • basicplus2 10y ago
    One where one person in power, president or not, can not do pretty much what ever they like
    • scrollaway 10y ago
      This isn't just Trump's work, though. He can do "whatever he likes" because both houses and the senate are all red. If he changes his mind halfway through and becomes a liberal, watch him become somebody who cannot do whatever he likes. This just makes it worse because I've seen so many people defending Trump, or adopting a "what's the worst that could happen?" attitude because they are used to a president who, for 7 years, 10 months and 2 weeks didn't have an ounce of power in congress.
    • dragontamer 10y ago
      Trump can do what he wants because his party now has control of the Presidency, the Senate, the House, AND the Supreme Court. It was a huge, overarching win granting Republicans unprecedented power. Much like Obama's 2009 win which gave Democrats a ton of power. There's nothing "single person" about Trump's victory. The fact of the matter is that Republicans won more States, Representatives, and Senators in local elections across the country. So yeah, the Democracy is working fine, as long as you sorta ignore the electoral college stuff. Believe it or not, that's what people "wanted". The Democrats IMO were just too lazy with the get-out-to-vote attempts and support Clinton. The Republicans wanted victory more, and managed to pull it off.
  • serge2k 10y ago
    How about a parliamentary system? How about just fixing the problems of presidential elections?
• dragontamer 10y ago
  Horrible comic and completely misses the point. Trump was voted in by coal miners. Coal Miners whose jobs have been slipping away and towns devastated by the "Heroin Epidemic" https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/national/white-death/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/national/white-death... https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/the-heroin-epidemics-toll-one-county-70-minutes-eight-overdoses/2015/08/23/f616215e-48bc-11e5-846d-02792f854297_story.html https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/the-h... Continuing to ignore rural America will only make them more angry and continue to vote in assholes like Trump. Clinton lost precisely in the rural states that mattered: Pennsylvania, West Virginia, etc. etc. As long as liberal Americans are unable to understand that coal miners are literally losing their jobs and dying in their hometowns, then the discussion will not move forward. The numbers aren't pretty for rural America. It's a legitimate problem, and those citizens are blaming the EPA.
  • umanwizard 10y ago
    47% of votes went to Trump. I don't think 47% of American voters are coal miners. Focusing on them seems exaggerated.
    • dragontamer 10y ago
      Unfortunately, the popular vote doesn't matter. Clinton lost Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Michigan, the entire damn south (aside from New Mexico), etc. etc. If Clinton had slightly better showing with manufacturing-based southerners or the energy sector, she would have won.
      • serge2k 10y ago
        Since when does the south or west virginia go for democrats? Clinton lost because she wasn't able to get out her base in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania. If Trump lost Texas you wouldn't be talking about how he failed to reach voters in Washington.
  • tabeth 10y ago
    What are you even talking about? 1. I completely understand that coal miners are literally losing their jobs. 2. I understand that Trump was voted in by coal miners. 3. I didn't mention Clinton, like, at all.
• city41 10y ago
  I think climate change gets in the way of bringing back fossil fuel jobs.
• RKoutnik 10y ago
  It's worth noting that 3 million more people voted for Hillary. I wouldn't chalk this one up to a design issue, rather implementation (in this case, weighting votes by geographic region). We've submitted a patch and are waiting for enough reviewers to approve: http://www.nationalpopularvote.com/ http://www.nationalpopularvote.com/
  • daenz 10y ago
    It's also worth noting that 90 million people who are eligible to vote didn't vote at all.
    • Joakal 10y ago
      It's also worth noting the first past the post system encourages duopolistic government (Almost China and NK's monopolistic government ;) ) People vote against their sincere choice by voting for one of the two most popular candidates instead. Some other systems: http://www.aec.gov.au/Voting/How_to_Vote/Voting_HOR.htm http://www.aec.gov.au/Voting/How_to_Vote/Voting_HOR.htm http://www.elections.org.nz/voting-system/mmp-voting-system http://www.elections.org.nz/voting-system/mmp-voting-system
      • simonh 10y ago
        > Almost China and NK's monopolistic government That's one of the most perniciously false equivalence I've seen in a while, and that's saying something. The US has elected congressmen, elected senators, elected governors and an elected president. Even the top two presidential candidates are chosen from a wide field in primary elections. Portraying that as a stark choice between only two options and saying it's practically the same as China and North Korea, which provide no choice whatsoever, is really pretty disgusting.
        • Joakal 10y ago
          You do realise that in USA, people mostly vote for republicans or democrats despite some hating them? Rest of world have multi-party governments. Many more choices. So much for an example that puts people on defensive instead of raising awareness of how distorted the electoral system in USA is.
• coltonv 10y ago
  The United States can't be a functioning democracy not because of it's size but because our actual political rules are awful. The electoral college, built in gerrymandering, weak restrictions on lobbying, the rules of our democracy are immensely undeomocratic when compared to other first world nations.
  • ArkyBeagle 10y ago
    Arguments for a plebiscite - a full-democracy - were pretty much shot down in the Federalist Papers and haven't been entertained seriously since.
  • astrodust 10y ago
    It's also difficult to get consensus when you have several large demographic groups with radically different cultures. To take the South as but one example, the average African-American lives in a world that is completely different than your average white Southerner. The interaction on political, social and even geographic levels is extremely limited. They may as well live in different countries. Then there's regions like New England that don't interact with the Southern group, and the West Coast which does its own thing as well. You're left with these quasi-independent groups of states that are thrown together under a single national banner and forced to pick who gets to drive every four years. Spain has a similar problem, as does Belgium, and in more extreme cases such as Iraq where stark religious and tribal differences make conflict very difficult to reconcile. It's not population, it's consensus, and that gets harder and harder to achieve when you have large, demographically incompatible groups. No amount of fussing with the rules is going to fix this. Weakening the Federal government and empowering the states could alleviate some of the pressure, but it also puts a lot of people in a very bad place: They have to pick between living with their family in the place where they have a lot of roots, or cutting loose like some refugees for another state that will treat them better.
    • Diederich 10y ago
      This is related to an observation I've made before. Name any country that's been as functional as the United States has been, given our size, and especially given the enormous amount of diversity we have? We've been doing the grinding, painful and hard work of real national diversity, at scale, for hundreds of years. We've gotten it wrong a lot; we're still getting a lot of it wrong. But here we are, perhaps the most vibrant, large population in the world. We have a lot of problems...more problems now than we had 10 or 15 years ago. But damn it, looking back, it's really an amazing thing we've accomplished. Trump seems to be, more than anything, an agent of chaos. I suspect his presidency will harm us. But we've handling a lot worse in the past, from within and from without. Indeed, I like to think that the beautiful and painful results of our centuries long diversity have made us exceptionally strong.
• wklauss 10y ago
  > What exactly is he afraid that'll happen? [1] Why all of the resistance? He is afraid of being proved wrong. It's a very common problem with climate change deniers. Facts and figures keep piling up but they always grasp any possible alternative explanation. The longer they sustain their position, the fooler the look if they backtrack, so they tend to become more and more entrenched in their opinions. Trump just happens to have the opportunity to silence government funded organizations.
  • daenz 10y ago
    When you say he denies climate change, are you referring to climate change itself, or man made climate change? I know man made climate change deniers who fully believe in climate change. But the term "climate change denier" gets thrown around so loosely (sometimes I wonder if that's intentional), that I don't know what people are actually referring to.
    • erklik 10y ago
      I think most, when referring to "climate change denier" mean to say "anthropogenic climate change denier". Most people who are "climate change denier"s in the above sense do actually believe in climate change in general just not the fact that we have influenced it.
      • scrollaway 10y ago
        You'd be surprised the amount of people who very seriously say "Global warming isn't real! There's snow outside!". This is why there's been a push towards the "climate change" wording in the first place.
        • gozur88 10y ago
          >You'd be surprised the amount of people who very seriously say "Global warming isn't real! There's snow outside!". That's because, in a mistaken campaign to get people motivated, AGW activists say "See how hot it is today? Global warming is the reason!" Remember how the northern ice cap was supposed to be gone by 2013? Polar bears extinct? If you don't want people on the other side to make arguments based on today's weather, you have to call out the people doing it on your side.
• lbotos 10y ago
  My understanding is "denying climate change" is less so about the science of it and the reality that it's a nod to supporting industries that would be regulated away due to their climate impact.
• SmokyBorbon 10y ago
  I've always found it interesting that the civil war occured when the population was about 30 million, the war for independence at about 3 million, and colonial rebellions at about 300,000. The country is at about 350 million now.
• res0nat0r 10y ago
  > What exactly is he afraid that'll happen? Regulations on the corporate donors and friends of his that can't trash the environment as much as they'd like and hinder their profits.
  • nerfhammer 10y ago
    If you ever meet one of these people, their thesis is usually that that "liberals" think climate change is real, therefore climate change must be false.
    • Mtinie 10y ago
      #alternativeclimatefacts aka #profitdecreasinginconveniences Edit: I'll now include the obligatory "/s" tag that I should have included originally. It's obviously a lot more complex than a hashtag.
      • nerfhammer 10y ago
        What if I were to suggest that blaming climate change denial on "profit" resembles a conspiracy theory in every way? If it were an emergent phenomenon of hyperpartisan craziness instead, would that suggest different efforts in response to it?
• eternalban 10y ago
  > what's the population limit, really, for a well functioning democracy? I think that's the wrong question but it leads us to the corrective answer. The founders provided us with a Bill of Rights, a constitution, separation of powers, and democratic processes for 2 of the 3 branches. Of these, the first two scale to as large a number as you wish. We need to start insisting on a robust interpretation of our civil rights. That was always the intended protection mechanism. [fix typo]
  • bdamm 10y ago
    Not so. Until the early 1900's, the interpretation of the Bill of Rights was strictly on the behavior of the federal government.
• wtvanhest 10y ago
  I'm just curious, what are the absolute best articles/papers that prove the following: 1) Climate change (meaning the planet is warming). 2) Climate change is man made and causing the planet to warm.
  • CuriousSkeptic 10y ago
    Well there's this meta study of about 12000 papers on the subject http://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/8/2/024024/meta http://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/8/2/0240... which finds that roughly 97% of the published literature support that conclusion.
    • wtvanhest 10y ago
      I am more interested in a single paper which really proves either point, or at least presents compelling evidence. Im sure there are a bunch out there, so id like to read some of them.
      • acqq 10y ago
        Note that the natural science doesn't work as "proving the theorems" (mathematics even isn't natural science) but as "establishing the facts." It's like a doing the detective work, collecting "exhibits" and then bringing it to the jury, the jury then can decide which exhibits are valid etc. The jury is the total community of the scientists who devoted their lives to learn as much as possible about the topics they judge. If you ask "as a beginner" you should first learn about the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenhouse_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenhouse_effect If it's too hard for you to grasp how it functions, imagine that you cover yourself with the invisible plastic bag. The bag won't produce any heat but it would prevent the heat from your body to dissipate as it would otherwise, effectively warming you up. The same way function the greenhauses. CO2 has that effect for Earth, known since 1824 and elaborated since.
        • wtvanhest 10y ago
          Im fine with compelling evidence, but I just want to read something that demonstrates a high likylihood that there is in fact global warming and that it is caused by humans. I figure that there have to be 2-3 solid research papers on the subject.
• ArkyBeagle 10y ago
  The United States isn't a democracy. It's a Republic. A lot of the apparent jingoism was first WWII propaganda, then cold War propaganda. Prior to that, Americans simply considered the rest of the world to be mostly irredeemably corrupt. I don't know if we can determine Trump's actual opinion on climate change. He's opportunistically jumping on a bandwagon.
  • snuxoll 10y ago
    A democratic republic is still a democracy, albiet an indirect one.
  • vkou 10y ago
    North Korea is a Republic. Communist China is a republic. The Soviet Union was a republic. Russia is a republic. None of them are democratic. Canada is not a republic. The United Kingdom is not a republic. Those countries are democracies. The United States is a republic... And a democracy. All that being a republic means is that you are not governed by a monarch. Whether or not you are a democracy is completely orthogonal to whether or not you are a republic.
  • jonathankoren 10y ago
    >The United States isn't a democracy. It's a Republic. I'm really really tired of this misinformation. A republic simply means that you're a democracy without a king. Whether it's direct or representative democracy is immaterial. Unless you somehow think that Canada is a republic and France is not.
  • Mtinie 10y ago
    Pedantic correction, just because we are dealing with a topic where specificity matters and nuance can mean the difference between "acceptable" and "not allowed". The United States of America is formally a constitutional republic. http://www.conservapedia.com/Constitutional_Republic http://www.conservapedia.com/Constitutional_Republic
• throwaway91111 10y ago
  The population limit for democracy is about 500 people. That's why we have a republic.
  • serge2k 10y ago
    They are not mutually exclusive. The united states is a democracy.
    • throwaway91111 10y ago
      Err, how so? There is no direct vote on any governance; certainly not at the federal level.
      • mynameisvlad 10y ago
        So it's not a direct democracy but is still a democracy, specifically a representative democracy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Representative_democracy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Representative_democracy "Republic" is just a term to refer to a nation that is ruled without a monarch: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/republic https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/republic Therefore, the two are not mutually exclusive.
        • throwaway91111 10y ago
          Ok, but I wasn't referring to democracy as a general concept, because that's useless. Why not just say "people vote"?
          • mynameisvlad 10y ago
            "Democracy" just means "government by the people". That's why we have different types of democracies, to tell them apart. If you actually meant a direct democracy, then you should have said it. Don't expect people to be able to read your mind and then get mad and snarky when they don't. We can only interpret what we read, so being specific that you mean a direct democracy when you say the word "democracy" in a political thread is really needed.
• throw20180101 10y ago
  The democracy is nominally functioning "by design" and by that I mean the law is still being followed. I'm convinced there are spiritually two Americas here and I'm not sure the founding fathers could have forseen that. There are slow-motion economic wars happening. They are happening at a global level between China and the US and they are happening at a national level in the US between the red and blue states. I don't think the founding fathers could have forseen the exponential growth in the haves and have nots.
  • grzm 10y ago
    Please don't create throwaway accounts purely to engage in political debate with general ideological/philosophical comments. HN is not primarily a political site, and the HN community benefits from consistent account usage (even if its pseudonymous).
• deleted 10y ago
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