vorpa-glavo
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User ID: 674
Trump pardons a bunch of regular Americans who were targeted for political reasons and given heinous sentences way above any treatment similar situated people who weren't targeted for political reasons have ever received, and this was done after embarrassingly unfair clown-trials, and leaving the 14 most serious convictions to only be commuted. What were the facts of each case? Who knows, the trials were tainted and corrupt with the government lying and hiding evidence.
think whatever you like about the Biden pardons, but the Trump pardons were entirely justified and further reinforce just how important the pardon power is and why it should remain
I'm willing to use the hypocrisy standard here. Biden claimed he wouldn't pardon Hunter, then he did. He didn't have to make a hypocrite of himself, but he did.
J.D. Vance, when clarifying Trump's intention to pardon the January 6th protesters, said they obviously wouldn't pardon people who committed violence on the day of January 6th. He didn't have to make a hypocrite of the Trump administration he was going to be a part of, but he did.
I'm okay with holding both administrations to their own standards in this case, and saying that they both acted wrongly. I don't share your belief that we simply can't know the facts of each case. Trump isn't stupid. If he had wanted to actually investigate all of the people with violent offenses, he could have, and I bet he would quickly arrive at a gut feeling about which were legitimate and which were actual gray areas. I don't believe for a second that the number of unambiguously violent protesters was 0 or 14, given that 140 law enforcement officers were injured and 15 were hospitalized.
The following statements can all be true:
- There are similar lawless acts carried out by more left-sympathetic perpetrators that should have been prosecuted more vigorously than they were.
- Many peaceful January 6th protesters were treated unfairly in some way, and it was appropriate to pardon them.
- Many violent January 6th protesters probably should be in jail in a fair and just world.
- Trump acted irresponsibly in pardoning the vast majority of the protesters and commuting the sentences of 14 others.
- Biden's pardons were worse abuses of power than Trump's.
Biden attempted to direct the Archivist and the Office of the Federal Register to declare they had received sufficient documents to proclaim an Amendment has been added to the Constitution, but they refused.
I'll bite the bullet on this one. I don't have to carry water for Biden - he did wrong here, and I'm willing to walk back my weak defense of his actions.
I think I could weakly defend my original words, because even during Trump I, a lot of the cases where he didn't actually end up following through on his stated intentions was because underlings refused to follow his unconstitutional orders. But, "I couldn't get my underlings to violate their oath to defend the constitution, so I didn't violate the constitution" is still really bad, and I think I'm more willing to say even here we should strongly condemn both Trump and Biden.
vorpa-glavo
5mo ago
Yeah, Biden did a lot of indefensible stuff towards the end of his presidency, and eroded any ounce of moral high ground the Democrats might have had left.
I think Biden and Trump have both abused the pardon power, and I would personally be in favor of a Constitutional Amendment requiring Congressional approval for each use of the power going forward. It's a shame too, because I mostly like the pardon power.
Biden proclaiming a new Amendment was a cynical move, but considering he didn't actually do any official presidential acts to make it so, it's closer to Trump's "gaffs" where he says he's going to do something unconstitutional and norm-breaking, but doesn't follow through.
But I also agree with other posters in this thread that we can criticize both Democrats and Republicans when they do bad things. We don't have to try and parcel out who was the first to defect. That's just partisan-poisoned thinking.
vorpa-glavo
5mo ago
That said, what is your current position on the Covid response?
Honestly, the Covid response was one of the big hurdles that caused me to take a step back and reconsider a lot of my views, though I was interested in philosophy and ethics before that.
I'm capable of being pragmatic, and acknowledging that something like a one or two week lockdown at the beginning of the pandemic to wait for information to emerge was probably inevitable, if not mostly justifiable. But as the weeks stretched into months, and a hodgepodge of interventions with only a loose relationship to the evidence began to emerge, I lost a lot of faith in the response.
If Covid had been the Antonine plague with a 1 in 3 death rate in healthy young people, I think more draconian interventions might have been justified if people weren't opting to take the precautions on their own. But it wasn't the Antonine plague, and most of the people who died were old and on death's door already, or unhealthy in some way.
I do think the United States, at least in my neck of the woods, never adopted policies as bad as some of the things happening the UK, Australia or China, but that is damning with faint praise.
I'm mostly positive on the vaccines themselves, but I think pure social pressure without state backing would have been enough to get most people vaccinated, and so we probably shouldn't have used vaccine mandates. (I'm still developing my ideas around the appropriate use of social pressure. I think there's a place for it in a functional, free society, but I think it can also go wrong, as has been seen in cancel culture.)
vorpa-glavo
5mo ago
I feel like your "woke consensus of 2020" ASI would be a problem regardless of whether our governments bend towards liberty or not. All that matters is whether the creators of the ASI bend towards liberty.
The ASI's goals and the governmental constitution/societal culture seem fairly orthogonal to me under most circumstances. If a lone principled libertarian with a meritocracy fetish creates the first aligned godlike ASI, then that's what we'll get, regardless of whether the rest of America started with a woke consensus of 2020 culture. The same goes for almost any combination.
vorpa-glavo
5mo ago
I know you're not directly calling me out here, but I must say in my defense: I don't think I've ever claimed to be anything I'm not.
I'm neither a principled libertarian, nor a totalitarian statist, but I'm not just discovering the Federalist Papers for the first time. I've spent a lot of the last few years reading history from antiquity to modernity, and political theory from Rawls to Julius Evola. I don't think I've reached a point of equilibrium, but I do find a lot I agree with in the Classical Liberal tradition, especially in my recent forays into Mills and Locke.
But I have no idea where I'll end up once I fully digest all the ideas I'm considering, because I'll admit I think there are attractive ideas in a ton of mutually incompatible political positions. I'd tentatively say I'm a left-of-center state capacity libertarian, but my views are still evolving.
vorpa-glavo
5mo ago
We could still end up in the AI Fizzle world, even if it isn't the most likely possibility. If AI ends up being "just" another industrial revolution, and not a singularity then society will change quite a bit, but it might still bear a family resemblance to our world.
And for powerful enough ASI that we lose control of, or which is unaligned in some way, I don't see how it would make much of a difference whether we are a totalitarian state or a decentralized federation.
vorpa-glavo
5mo ago
I have already said words to the effect that I am fine with dismantling the administrative state, if that is what voters want Trump and Congress to do. I am less convinced than you are that Trump couldn't have done this the "right way" with actual laws. Sure, a few Republican lawmakers defecting would scupper his plans, but if they did, that too would be an important check in our system working as intended.
Trump has the bully pulpit. Trump claims he has a mandate. Let him actually do the work of getting the laws he wants passed.
This is a better path for one big reason: If Trump accomplishes his dismantling of the administrative state via EOs, that will mean that if Democrats ever get the presidency again they can just bring the administrative state back even if it will take some doing. This is all assuming we actually have a republic where Democrats could actually get back into power again, of course.
The Imperial Presidency is a bipartisan creation more than a hundred years old, not something created in 2008. Of course, point out all of the abuses of power by Democratic presidents - they're an important part of the story. But don't ignore the way Bush Jr. used signing statements to attempt line item vetos, or Reagan's actions in the Iran-Contra affair, or Nixon's abuse of the impoundment power, or if you want to reach back to the Civil War, all of the things Lincoln did that were clearly unconstitutional.
While I would characterize myself as broadly left-of-center, I still have a strong libertarian strain, and I've become increasingly convinced of the importance of Federalism over the last few years as I've turned more of my attention towards Renaissance and Classical political theory. I'm happy to condemn abuses of power whether they're Democratic or Republican, since I increasingly see myself as not being at home with either of them, even if I have my preferences.
I was mostly happy to nod along and agree with the far more able posters here, who condemned Biden for his abuses of the pardon power. I have no illusions that in the counterfactual world where Kamala Harris was elected president, many more able and interested critics would have taken the stage here and condemned her every abuse of power. But I would say that the forum has been strangely quiet about Trump - not that nothing has been said, but far less than I expected. And so, I felt the need to step forward and make my case, even though I know I am far less well-equipped than some of the posters here.
I'll be the first to say that the end of the American Republic doesn't have to be the end of America. Maybe we'll pull a Rome, and enjoy an empire that will last 300 years or more. (Or perhaps "Empire without end" if we believe Virgil.) I don't pretend to know. But in the moods where I was willing to put on my pragmatic hat, I actually felt like America was a largely functional society that got a number of "big questions" right. We're wealthy, powerful, and our institutions are mostly compatible with a life of flourishing, even if few people make choices that can actually result in flourishing. I was worried about some of the things Obama and Biden did, and wasn't thrilled at many of the things Kamala would likely have done, but I am genuinely worried from a little-c conservative point of view that Trump might actually kill the goose that lays the Golden Egg.
Many of Trump's actions I have no real issue with. Let him have silly symbolic victories like renaming the Gulf of America and Mt. McKinley. Of course, he should be able to use executive orders to dismantle DEI programs that were created with executive orders in the first place. But I would feel a lot better about him dismantling the Department of Education or USAID if he was doing it with Congress by his side, instead of by giving admin access to the spending system of the Treasury to a random citizen. He certainly had the votes and the momentum to create an actual DOGE and give Elon Musk power the right way.
The United States was not meant to be a "democracy." Benjamin Franklin famously described the government created by the Constitutional Convention as "A republic, if you can keep it."
While there were certainly people in the founding generation who saw a place for a heavy democratic element in the United States, such as Thomas Paine and Thomas Jefferson, I think it is fair to say that most educated gentlemen around the time of the founding were steeped in a tradition going back to Aristotle and Plato where "democracy" was the term for a bad form of government by the many.
Despite Alexander Hamilton advocating for the current Constitution, his original hours-long presentation to the Congress had a much stronger executive, and Hamilton famously told Jefferson, "The greatest man who ever lived was Julius Caesar." There's many ways to interpret this statement, but I think it is obvious that Hamilton hadn't completely shaken off the monarchical thinking of an Englishman, and wanted a strong central authority as the best guarantee of liberty for the people.
Federalist Paper 51, written by Madison, describes how the checks and balances of the United States republic are meant to function. The whole letter is worth a read, but I will focus on one part:
A dependence on the people is, no doubt, the primary control on the government; but experience has taught mankind the necessity of auxiliary precautions. This policy of supplying, by opposite and rival interests, the defect of better motives, might be traced through the whole system of human affairs, private as well as public. We see it particularly displayed in all the subordinate distributions of power, where the constant aim is to divide and arrange the several offices in such a manner as that each may be a check on the other that the private interest of every individual may be a sentinel over the public rights. These inventions of prudence cannot be less requisite in the distribution of the supreme powers of the State. But it is not possible to give to each department an equal power of self-defense. In republican government, the legislative authority necessarily predominates. The remedy for this inconveniency is to divide the legislature into different branches; and to render them, by different modes of election and different principles of action, as little connected with each other as the nature of their common functions and their common dependence on the society will admit. It may even be necessary to guard against dangerous encroachments by still further precautions. As the weight of the legislative authority requires that it should be thus divided, the weakness of the executive may require, on the other hand, that it should be fortified.
An absolute negative on the legislature appears, at first view, to be the natural defense with which the executive magistrate should be armed. But perhaps it would be neither altogether safe nor alone sufficient. On ordinary occasions it might not be exerted with the requisite firmness, and on extraordinary occasions it might be perfidiously abused. May not this defect of an absolute negative be supplied by some qualified connection between this weaker department and the weaker branch of the stronger department, by which the latter may be led to support the constitutional rights of the former, without being too much detached from the rights of its own department? If the principles on which these observations are founded be just, as I persuade myself they are, and they be applied as a criterion to the several State constitutions, and to the federal Constitution it will be found that if the latter does not perfectly correspond with them, the former are infinitely less able to bear such a test.
(Emphasis mine.)
Schlessinger's The Imperial Presidency, and Higgs' Crisis and Leviathan both document how this vision failed from different angles. Schlessinger examines the history of the growth of executive power, and the various techniques presidents used to get their way - from operating secret naval wars without congressional approval and oversight, to the use of impoundment to appropriate funds earmarked by congress (which was eventually eliminated after the Nixon presidency, due to his perceived abuse of the power.) Higgs looks at the way that crises created opportunities for the federal government to seize ever greater power, and while it is not limited to the growth in presidential power, it is impossible to ignore all of the emergency powers Congress ceded to the President across the constant cycle of crises.
Higgs was writing in 1987, and Schlessinger in 1973, and the trends they described have only continued.
And so we come to the present day, where Donald Trump became President on January 20th, and began what some are calling an "autocoup." On a diverse forum like this one, I am sure that there are at least a few monarchists that would be thrilled if that was true. I'm sure I can't convince them that an autocoup would be a bad thing, if that is, in fact, what is happening. But for the classical liberals, libertarians, conservatives and centrist institutionalists, I want to make the case that the way things happen matters as much as what is actually happening.
Some are defending actions like Elon Musk's DOGE dismantling the Department of Education without any apparent legal backing, by saying that this is what Trump supporters voted for.
But this simply isn't true. Or more accurately, that's not how this works.
I repeat: America is not a "democracy." America is a republic with checks and balances and a rule of law.
To the extent that we have democratic elements in our republic, then I certainly think that Trump and his supporters should be able to do what they were elected to do. If they want to pass an actual law that gets rid of USAID or the Department of Education, then let them do it. If they want to pass a law to rename The United States Digital Service, and give it unlimited power to control federal funding, then they should pass a law to do so. And if they can't get the Congress they voted in to make it happen, too bad, that is how a Republic works. The same applies if federal judges or the supreme court strike down a law or action as unconstitutional. One person doesn't just get the power to do whatever they want, without any oversight or pushback from the legislative or judicial branches.
I think the United States seems to be heading for a form of democratic tyranny, with few checks and balances. I don't know if there has actually been an "autocoup", but I do think there are shades of it in what has been happening the last few weeks, and I think any lover of American liberty and prosperity should be a little bit worried as well, even if they like the effects of a lot of these unilateral actions by the Executive.
EDIT: Typos.
vorpa-glavo
5mo ago
I'm actually a little happy to learn that America is still a republic with the rule of law.
As you say, Trump and Congress can work together to realize his goals with DOGE. I think there is a huge difference between Trump doing things entirely on his own, and doing them with the cooperation of Congress. Slash budgets if that's what the voters want, but do it the right way.
I'm pretty onboard with the idea that most liberal democracies massively overreacted to Covid, but where I was in the United States was never as bad as the worst stories I was hearing in Europe and Canada. Like, at any time during the lock down I was legally allowed to drive wherever I wanted (when I heard that the UK was pulling people over and ticketing them for driving during the pandemic), and I was always legally allowed to walk my dog (when I heard that some places in Canada were preventing people from walking outdoors, even after we knew transmission outside wasn't very strong.)
I'm sure many parts of the United States had much worse responses, but I hardly feel like our reaction to Covid was "totalitarian" even if it was a massive overreaction. Maybe liberalism was killed in countries like the UK, but not here. Certainly, our reaction was less totalitarian than the WWI and WWII era war economy, and almost all of the power taken during Covid was ceded back. (Though of course, every crisis in the United States makes the government just that little bit more powerful and unaccountable. Whether it was 9/11 turning the country into a surveillance state, or a thousand other little things.)
I mean, to be fair, the President isn't supposed to have as much power as Trump (or any other president of recent vintage) has exercised.
We're at the end of a long process where every crisis saw Congress adding emergency powers to the presidency, and that, combined with Congresses' current dysfunctions, created a situation where the only source of change is the Executive.
A system will always collapse at its weakest point. In the past that has been the Supreme Court (witness Obergefell), and at various points it has been the Imperial Presidency.
vorpa-glavo
5mo ago
Please expand on the reasons you believe Africans cause issues for humanity. What do you consider the three most solid pieces of evidence for your view that Africans are a net negative for humanity?
vorpa-glavo
5mo ago
Any line of logic that ends with 'the flow of infinite money to foreigners should never stop because of utilitarianism' is stupid and is ultimately a suicidal worldview: or the perspective of a ivory tower bureaucrat who is careless with money that isn't his.
The amount the United States government spent on foreign aid in general, and PEPFAR in particular, was hardly infinite. Foreign aid is less 1% of the federal budget each year.
Stopping foreign aid is giving the budget a haircut, not actually saving all that much money.
I'm not against the various arguments that we shouldn't do any foreign aid, but I think from a pragmatic point of view it is probably a good thing for the United States if the federal government is seen spending pennies on doing high impact good things in various foreign countries, because those are things that are likely to improve the perception of America abroad, and increase national security slightly. It's hard to be angry at "imperialist America" if they're the reason your daughter doesn't have AIDs.
I'd actually be pretty happy with the idea that "1% is what we owe the rest of the world" as a baseline level of morality for individuals and countries. I think that perfectly honors the idea of the "ordo amoris."
Yes, but the trick in the eras where they aren't shoehorned into everything is that they tend not to be introduced for homosupremacist reasons (much like how women are shoehorned into works in certain ways for gynosupremacist reasons).
"Tend to" is doing a lot of work here. Plato's Symposium says that the ultimate love is the love between two men, and it includes the idea that the "offspring" of such heavenly love is art, statecraft and philosophical ideas.
‘Now,’ she said, ‘those who are pregnant in their bodies are more inclined towards women and are affected by love in this way, believing that they will secure immortality, fame and happiness for themselves for all time by begetting children. While as far as soul 209A is concerned,’ said she, ‘those who are pregnant in their souls, even more than in their bodies, conceive and bring forth what belongs to the soul. So, what belongs to the soul? Understanding and excellence in general are indeed begotten by all the poets and by any artificers who are regarded as creative. Yet the most extensive and most beautiful understanding, by far, is the setting in order of our cities and our households, and its name is sound-mindedness and justice.
What is more, when someone is pregnant with these in soul from a young age, 209B being divine, and reaching an age where he develops a desire to bring forth and beget, he then I presume, goes around searching for the beauty in which he may beget, for he will never beget in ugliness. Since the person is pregnant, he welcomes beautiful bodies rather than ugly ones, and should he also encounter a beautiful, noble and well-developed soul, he welcomes the twofold combination all the more. And towards this person he is immediately well-resourced with words about excellence, and what a good man 209C should be like, and how he should behave, and he sets about educating him.
For being in contact with the beautiful one, and consorting therewith, what was conceived in times past is brought forth and begotten when the beautiful one is present, and when he is absent but remembered. And he joins with that person in the shared nurture of what they have begotten, so that such people maintain a much greater communion with one another, and a more constant friendship than children would afford, since their communion involves children who are more beautiful and more immortal. And everyone would prefer to have such children as these rather than the human 209D kind and looking at Homer and Hesiod and the other good poets, they envy the offspring of themselves that these poets leave behind, which furnish the poets with immortal glory and fame, since that is what the offspring itself is like.
Or if you prefer,’ said she, ‘look at the sort of children Lycurgus left behind him in Sparta, saviours of Sparta and, in a sense, of Greece. Solon too is revered among yourselves as the begetter of your laws,[50] as are other men in many other places, 209E among Greeks and barbarians, for their display of so many noble deeds, and for begetting excellence of every kind. Many shrines have already been established for them because they had such children as these, but this has never yet happened because of human children.
(Paragraph breaks mine, mostly because this ended up being a big block of text.)
Homosupremacist thinking has a long history in Western culture.
vorpa-glavo
5mo ago
They could have just kept the books from before 1990; that was safely before LGBTQ stuff started to get shoveled into everything.
You can't just go off of dates though. Lots of ancient Greek books are arguably suitable for children, but also contain LGBT content. Like, I could see a classroom having a copy of Plato's Symposium, which is super gay.
I mean, you could compromise by having the bowdlerized Victorian translations or something. But that doesn't help if you already have a modern translation.
But I remember reading A Rose for Emily in high school which is from 1930, and features a gay character (depicted as a bad or tragic thing though.) Even in eras where it isn't shoehorned in to everything, there will be a trickle of LGBT characters.
vorpa-glavo
5mo ago
But that is these people's game. Malicious compliance, and crying to the media about unnecessary problems they created, which everyone spins to blame the executive who dared to give the bureaucrats a lawful order they didn't agree with. It's ok, you can tune them out. Or shoot them in the streets. I heard that's part of Project 2025.
How are you sure this is malicious compliance, and not just a combination of chilling effects and most people not knowing the limits of new, unfamiliar laws?
For your teacher example, I could easily see a situation where they genuinely don't know whether books in their classroom library violate some part of the law (because, say, LGBT content wasn't among the things they screened for when buying the books in the first place), and thus found it easier to nuke the classroom library than it would be to comb through all of them and make sure they don't run afoul of the law.
And in the case of the doctors and anti-abortion laws, it really feels like you're doing the thing so many people do where they assume they live in the "most convenient world" for their worldview. Like, how convenient that anti-abortion laws would never lead to any negative outcomes ever, if not for malicious compliance on the part of doctors.
Just as police officers are not lawyers, and they deserve a little bit of charity when they misinterpret or misapply a law, doctors are not lawyers and it is not at all surprising to me that a new set of laws whose limits haven't fully been tested in the courts is leading them to fail to treat patients even when it might technically be permissible under the law. I suspect that once the dust is settled and doctors are less spooked by the threat of being charged under the new law, fewer women will die this way, but I don't think chalking it up to a "tantrum" is the most likely reading of the cases that have been making headlines.
vorpa-glavo
5mo ago
I agree. The question was meant to highlight the problems with Originalism and similar positions. The Founding Fathers were wise, but in setting up a government of limited powers, they failed to account for a very obvious case like acquiring new territory. Thomas Jefferson was only the 3rd president of the United States - it didn't take long for the cracks to show.
The Founding Generation were all alive to see how inadequate the Constitution of limited powers they had crafted was. It didn't take long for people like Alexander Hamilton to try to craft a national bank, or for presidents to hide the fact that they were engaging in clandestine naval warfare without congressional approval or oversight, or for the Supreme Court to seize the right of judicial review, or for Jefferson to decide the treaty power includes the ability to acquire more territory. I'm sympathetic to Originalism, and I think in an ideal world it would be how the law was actually interpreted, but the ink had hardly dried on the Constitution when the first violations of its framework happened.
Do you think the Louisiana purchase was a legal act under the Constitution, given that there is no explicit enumerated power for Congress to acquire territory from other countries?
I get wanting to be something like an Originalist, but I think that a lot of people that hold the position do so as a kind of cop out. It is much easier to say, "We can't debate foreign aid, the Constitution doesn't explicitly allow it", than to say, "I am opposed to my tax dollars being spent on foreign aid for reasons X, Y, and Z." But the problem is, sometimes the Constitution does actually seem to allow the thing (and not in a nonsense "Living Constitution" way.)
I think if you're creative, most of the limitations are hardly limitations at all. The Federal government was able to end hotel segregation by using the Interstate Commerce clause to regulate hotels that host people from other states. That seems like a much more justifiable use of the Interstate Commerce clause than that one outrageous case of regulating how much corn a man is allowed to grow on his own property, and which would never cross state lines.
(EDIT: Looking it up, at least one kind of foreign medical aid is done "by the book" in exactly the way I describe. The US Department of Defense will send the military in to foreign disaster areas to set up field hospitals and military medical teams. So, we can ask the object level question - should US tax dollars be spent on such foreign aid? I don't think the "but the Constitution" dodge is really possible here.)
vorpa-glavo
5mo ago
It probably doesn't apply in this case, but would Congress have the ability to make treaties with foreign nations and give them medical aid under those enumerated powers? Or could Congress make use of enumerated powers related to raising armies, and provision the military with extra medical personnel and supplies, and then (with permission of affected countries) send military doctors in to provide substantially similar medical aid to that currently being given?
Like, I'm all for the idea of doing things "the right way" within the legal framework we have, but surely Congress just giving medical aid to foreign nations isn't far off from things they could do with enumerated powers under the Constitution?
vorpa-glavo
5mo ago
The other stuff he can take or leave, although he’s personally relatively socially liberal, areligious and doesn’t have a huge issue with gays, abortion or trans people compared to many on the right.
I agree he doesn't personally have much investment in the issues surrounding gay people, abortion and trans people, but he's happy to throw the right a bone on these issues, and if he's doing that it really doesn't make a difference what he personally believes.
"Kindness" isn't a virtue.
I mean, if you've read Cicero's On Duties it is. According to Cicero (following the Stoic philosopher Panaetius), kindness/beneficence is a component of the cardinal virtue of justice. It is in this mode that the subordinate virtue of generosity is thought to fall under justice.
Now, Cicero's idea of generosity is limited, and he thinks that we should always keep enough to fulfill our obligations to our friends and families, and he also draws the analogy of your obligation to strangers being at about the level of helping a stranger with directions, or lighting someone else's torch when you already have a fire going (e.g. acts that don't require much from you in terms of time or resources.) A person with enough resources can, of course, go above and beyond what is morally required of them, and that is virtuous and good if they do.
vorpa-glavo
5mo ago
If we're talking about ancient political philosophy, I tend to prefer Aristotle's politeia to Plato's aristokratia. A mixed constitution with all the best aspects of aristocracy, monarchy and democracy and with checks and balances to reign in the weaknesses of each of those systems seems like a better way to constitute a society than by trying to cultivate a truly virtuous and wise ruling class. I also feel like Aristotle's methodology (researching the constitutions of 158 Greek city states to see what makes them tick, and then distilling his findings into a book on politics) is more likely to arrive at viable, real world conclusions than Plato's comparatively more limited exposure to different constitutions. (There's also the fact that Plato's efforts to make Syracruse into his ideal republic ended in disaster, and resulted in his later political work "The Laws" being much less ambitious and utopian as a result.)
Plato was undoubtedly a genius, and his systematic approach to philosophy meant that he is often a great starting point, but I definitely don't think he should be taken as the last word on anything. He had a tendency to be lost in the airy heights, and I think a more grounded pragmatic approach can often outdo him.
vorpa-glavo
5mo ago
Maybe we'll get a quick case clarifying the legal question of whether states can legally revoke ratification, and whether Congress is legally allowed to impose ratification deadlines. I think it would be sensible for the Supreme Court to rule that states can revoke ratification before an amendment has been passed (but not after), and that Congress can impose deadlines for ratification.
But it's kind of a pointless battle anyways, isn't it? Under current case law the 14th and 19th amendment already do most of what the ERA would do, and despite people like Hananiah pushing for it, I seriously doubt the majority of Federal statutes that prevent discrimination against women are going anywhere. And even if they did disappear, 23 states already have state constitutional provisions protecting the equality of men and women under law.
I've written a little bit on my views on the Covid response here.
Sometimes, I view it rather differently: A society allowing free speech is often a sign of the ruling coalition's power, and the weakness of its citizens.
China needs to control speech because they are weak. The speech of their people actually poses a threat to them.
The United States doesn't usually need to control speech because the ruling coalition is strong. The speech of its people poses no threat to its overall stability.
COINTELPRO is the kind of thing that happens in the US when a group poses an actual threat to the United States, and has moved from words to actions.
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