[CubaLibre]

It is funny that the government's solution to the labyrinthine, redundant intelligence services whose criminal negligence allowed 9/11 to happen is to crate a vastly larger, more labyrinthine, more redundant "counterterrorism community".
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[CubaLibre]

That apostrophe is really annoying.
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[CubaLibre]

I know they did. It's still really annoying.

Maybe it's a comment the tyranny of the white world's grammar and its history of linguistic oppression.
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[CubaLibre]

Just goes to show that hunger is about distribution, not production. This girl is awesome.
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[CubaLibre]

Contracts aren't obscure by design, nor are people simply too stupid to read them. They're specialized, highly technical documents. It's like saying a medical chart is obscure by design. The problem isn't how the contracts are written but the surfeit of laws that require them to be written that way. And, sure, all the bullshit the credit card companies add in (mandatory arbitration, I'm looking at you).
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[CubaLibre]

[CubaLibre]

America is a huge country with a massive economy and few borders. It's natural that its citizens fixate on its domestic policies to the exclusion of most other countries', especially when in the foreign arena it remains (disputably and certainly not for long at this rate) the most powerful nation on earth.

Or, if you want to see other domestic politics discussed, then go ahead. There's quite a bit on the UK in this thread, probably because the sb population's second-highest contingent is of Britons. I'm sure I'd have an opinion on Australian politics if you wanted to inform me about them, although it'd be a pretty ignorant opinion. Expecting everyone to have the same fixation on politics everywhere is ludicrous, not to mention impossible. Even a strict internationalist (who believes that all national boundaries are ultimately bunk) cares about his neighbors more than people halfway around the world.

Constitutional fixation is basically an unrelated phenomenon. It's the form that American nationalism takes because it is the literal foundation of American identity. It's no different from Tory fixation on Queen and Country, at least in its emotional aspects. In its legal aspects, the Constitution is the only justification for the forms of American power. Why is there a Congress - why is there a President - why are their terms x length - why do they have the powers they have - that's all contained in the Constitution.

Of course, that doesn't mean the document is inviolable. Actually it says nothing about how "right" or "wrong" the document is. (I think it could stand a lot of improvement, myself.) People who say that any exercise of American power must conform to the Constitution are simply stating a fact. People who say that any exercise of power that conforms to the Constitution is automatically good and any that does not is automatically bad are being emotionally mushy. I must say, that brand of mushiness usually falls to conservatives and I'd be wary of thinking that the "people" your friend talked to were actually liberal, unless they were co-opting the pseudoreligious "Constitution = good" language un/consciously in order to appeal to an American audience whom they perceive has taken an overall shift rightward.
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[CubaLibre]

[CubaLibre]

What's especially hilarious is that the same conservatives that paint the UN as the harbinger of a New World Order will turn around, when politically convenient, and accuse it of being completely impotent to deal with the world's problems (always in order to justify unilateral exercises of US power).
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[CubaLibre]

[CubaLibre]

[CubaLibre]

[CubaLibre]

[CubaLibre]

Via ruffing.
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[CubaLibre]

[CubaLibre]

Asomething Grey (Adrian? Auburn?), sort of philosophical standard-bearer of the practical immortality movement. Not actually a scientist himself though.

EDIT yeah that.
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[CubaLibre]

[CubaLibre]

[CubaLibre]

As it happens, Native Americans were migrants who settled on previously uninhabited land.

Perhaps hegemonic would be a better word than imperial, but I think both apply to America. I think what you're looking for is a subset of empire, viz. the colonial ones. America had colonial designs through the time you describe (pre-WWI) but abandoned them basically when everyone else in the Western world did (after WWI - though there were some hangers-on).
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[CubaLibre]

[CubaLibre]

The only problem with qualifying the vote is that the vote is already the last-ditch repository of public power. The more regulation the more potential for tampering and corruption. This is true in every public institution, but each of those institutions is monitored by some other institution which eventually ends with voters. The buck stops there. If you open voting to regulation (and therefore tampering) you shift the last resort to simple disobedience, which erodes civil society.
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[CubaLibre]

The best you can do is try to educate broadly. But you can't premise the right to vote on a broad education.
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[CubaLibre]

[CubaLibre]

As it happens, I believe precisely the opposite - especially when it comes to presidents (as opposed to legislators). But now that you've legally weakened my vote I have no way of asserting that my beliefs regarding what makes a good president are ever heard, because you've relatively disenfranchised me.
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[CubaLibre]

Sorry I didn't engage you on The Ills of Representative Democracy. My point is already proven, that any such test could and would be used as a means to disenfranchise those seen as unworthy by - who? Whoever writes the tests. Actually, it would by necessity disenfranchise people in that manner even if the people writing the tests had no intent to do so, simply by the fact that they would have to select some subset of relevant criteria to test for. Selecting those criteria by necessity excludes other criteria. This is fine at basically every other stage of governance but at some point the buck has to stop with the public in some manner. Making that last resort the vote is the most socially cohesive and least violent means yet devised.
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[CubaLibre]

At that point I'd be hard pressed to say that you could mine any useful data that is not already tainted by ideology. A researcher would have to make a distinction between "commercial indoctrination" and "compelling speech" in the first place.
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[CubaLibre]

People don't vote for policies. (Mostly.)
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[CubaLibre]

[CubaLibre]

That's exactly my point. People don't vote for policies, they vote for "personalities" which extract into "platforms" which have only the vaguest kind of content (like "farm assistance"). Not only do people not vote for specific policies which redistribute wealth in particular ways (which is all that really matters), they don't even really vote for "redistribution of wealth"; they vote for a guy who says "I will redistribute wealth" along with a million other things during a campaign which may or may not be lies.
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[CubaLibre]

That's not an ill, it's a benefit.
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[CubaLibre]

People can't know what they're voting for. Even knowing about, much less writing, federal legislation is a more-than-fulltime job. What they can know is who they're voting for. This is whole the basis of representative democracy in the first place; I don't think it's very controversial. The fact that politicians can lie about who they are is a necessary hazard, no less inevitable or more crippling than the fact that they could lie about what policies mean.
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[CubaLibre]

The politicians don't actually do much legislating. They select staffs that do that.
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[CubaLibre]

Scroll down to the end of that law professors' letter in opposition to the bill. What do you see? Georgetown, Stanford, Carnegie Mellon. What don't you see? Harvard, Yale, Columbia, Chicago. Therefore no senator cares. And why should they.
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[CubaLibre]

The Tea Party was originally not much of anything, which is why it was so easily hijacked. At any rate, I have a feeling that the guy favors property restrictions for voting not because of any considered opinion but because those were the rules at the time of the founding. At its core, the Tea Party is a nationalist nostalgia movement (and therefore proto-fascist); it has no actual ideology.
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[CubaLibre]

That's essentially true but if you dismiss them so easily you completely miss the very deep, very real, and very silly well of fear and resentment upon which those rich people have built. Cynically constructed as it is, it couldn't exist if there weren't this popular reactionary sentiment powering it.
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[CubaLibre]

Hell, I'd visit it.

I thought God was pretty specific to Noah about the ark's dimensions, you know, this many cubits here and this many cubits there. Been a while since I read my Genesis though; it might be that God was described as specific but that the actual dimensions aren't in the text.

As for "the Christian thing to do": even Jesus said you can't just spend all your time and money on the poor.
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[CubaLibre]

[CubaLibre]

[CubaLibre]

[CubaLibre]

[CubaLibre]