Not to disagree with you but it might also nice to nuance that statement. Being a democracy isn't an either/or proposition. It's more of a continuum.
There are some internationally recognized standards what constitutes a democracy, and the USA fits some and not others. For example, the USA wouldn't meet the criteria for democracy to be considered for EU membership, in the unlikely event it would apply for that.
The main sticking point is that it practices capital punishment, together with countries such as People's Republic of China and a handful of African countries. Intralegal execution of minors being especially problematic. Several treaties on international criminal law concerning war crimes is not recognized and its citizens are unlikely to ever be subject to the Geneva convention.
The second important point is the lack of an independent legal system. High ranking judges gets hand picked by politicians, in a very literal way. (Which is something that has also has happened in for example Poland. This is widely regarded as a loop hole in the EU democratic criteria. A country could not have been considered for membership under those conditions, but there is no jurisdictional power against reneging on that policy post membership. Subsidies gets frozen, but that's about it.)
The US is at best an "illiberal democracy"[1]. But it's probably worse than that. Effectively, the US has no opposition party, the ruling party being superficially divided into two nominal parties which agree on 90% of policy and which use their control over the electoral machinery to exclude opposition parties.
Recently, major changes of governmental policy that affect millions of people have been made by an unelected body of officials who have lifetime terms. You may have even seen it in the news.
Arguing otherwise is me not being a functioning democracy?
While I would love to take that on I am genuinely puzzled by what you mean. “No one can question American democracy because they don’t have a better one?” Sorry but if that’s it that’s a dumb take.
A republic is a form of democracy. This strange differentiation came about as a GOP talking point in the early 2000s. I'm amazed that it is still repeated 20 year later. Saying the US is not a democracy but a constitutional republic is like saying a car is not an automobile.
>> This strange differentiation came about as a GOP talking point in the early 2000s.
Actually no, it comes from far earlier in our history that that, GOP may have had it has a talking point not sure, and dont really care, but the GOP is not the origination of this
>Saying the US is not a democracy but a constitutional republic is like saying a car is not an automobile.
No, not all Republics are democratic, and not all Democracy's are republics.
The US has every very very limited elements that are democratic, and at our founding even less so then today. At the founding only the House was democratic everything else was not. IMO we need to go back to that, less democracy would be good
When I was growing up in the 80s, everyone knew the US republic was a form of democracy. Are you arguing that it isn't? I never heard the phrase, "The US isn't a democracy, it's a republic" until around 2000s; the first part being completely wrong, but the second part being right.
>A republic is a form of democracy. This strange differentiation came about as a GOP talking point in the early 2000s.
What? No, this is not a recent talking point, it's the core philosophical difference in this country since day 1. The names of the parties Republican & Democrat aren't just random words, they represent the philosophical differences in where the bulk of the power in government should rest (the republic being the system with input from the people, or the democracy being the direct will of the people).
Republicans generally believe direct democracy is dangerous and instead rely on the framework of the institutions of our Republic to act as guiderails preventing potential mob rule and other acts of capriciousness. The people get their say, within reason.
Democrats generally believe all power and decision making should come directly from the people, and the systems should be more fluid. They don't see them as guiderails they see them as unnecessary constraints on the people. The people get their say, and their will is done.
I would never argue that our politicians of each party believe in this fully, nor the voters for that matter. But this is a huge philosophical difference that predates the early 2000's by a couple hundred years. It's been a talking point since before our Constitution was drafted.
> The names of the parties Republican & Democrat aren't just random words, they represent the philosophical differences in where the bulk of the power in government should rest
No, they don't. Also, the two original parties were the Democratic-Republican Party of Jefferson, Madison, et al., and the Federalist Party of Hamilton, Adams, etc al.
Both, BTW, favored what is, I modern terms, a democratic republic and a representative democracy, though the Federalists initially favored a stronger central seat of power and the Democratic-Republicans favored a weaker central seat of power, though the bigger divide quickly became over foreign policy.
The Republicans weren't a major party until after the Federalist Party collapsed leaving a brief period of unstable one-party domination, then the D-Rs fractured, leaving the Democrats and Whigs in the Second Party system, then the Whigs later collapsed and the Republicans and the Democrats formed the Third Party system with the most critical initial issue being over not abstract form of government but slavery. While the identity of the two major parties has been the same since, their political alignment has changed several times; we’re now in what is generally regarded as the Sixth Party system.
Your post has the tone of disagreeing with what I said, yet never actually does.
The names of the parties change over the years, and the ideologies shift. But we have essentially always had one major party pushing to put more power directly into the hands of voters and another major party wanting to conserve the power in the established governmental frameworks.
The two current parties are no different in that regard. Democrats want to abolish the Electoral College and run government from Ballot propositions (direct democracy in action). Republicans are against those things and want to shift more power to the states of the Republic.
My understanding is that the Democrats want to leverage a strong federal government to various aims (welfare, social security, medicare, medicaid, regulation, etc) while the Republicans want a smaller federal government and give the power to the states. This divide is about power of the federal government vs power of the states, or the Jeffersonian / Hamiltonian divide.
You've shown examples of where the Democrats want more direct democracy, so there's that too. I don't know if this is a recent phenomenon or not. I've never known the Ds to make much about it either way until you mentioned it.
the US is a dictatorship disguised as a democracy..the dictators happen to be those with the most influence and $ which then they hand down generations..no 1 person has ever ruled the world, they are just the main face of the whole...both rep and dem are influenced by the same "shadow" entities..so it doesn't matter who wins from either side they all respond to the same people
>where the bulk of the power in government should rest
You are thinking federalism vs anti-federalism. That was Jefferson and Hamilton. The federalists won a long time ago, mainly through the interpretation of the commerce clause. Recent decisions by the SCOTUS is pulling back on that a little bit.
>Republicans generally believe direct democracy
Nowhere did I say the US was a direct democracy, I think that's what's tripping everyone up. I'm arguing against when people say the US is a republic and not a democracy. That is incorrect. If they had said direct democracy, I would agree with them. To say the US is a republic and not a democracy when every position of power in government was either elected, or appointed by someone who was elected, is incorrect. The democratic process is obvious.
>Democrats generally believe all power and decision making should come directly from the people, and the systems should be more fluid. They don't see them as guiderails they see them as unnecessary constraints on the people. The people get their say, and their will is done.
I don't see any evidence of this in modern politics. Which democrat has mentioned implementing a direct democracy?
Nope. At least not exclusively. The party's change over the years but we have essentially always had one party pushing for more direct democracy, and one party pulling against. A rose by any other name is still rose, but the philosophical idea of Republic government vs Democrat government is always there. And it's the key difference in the two parties.
>I don't see any evidence of this in modern politics. Which democrat has mentioned implementing a direct democracy?
The entire State of California is constantly riddled with ballot propositions, which is direct democracy in many case overturning the work done by their own representative legislature. And California is essentially a one party state so there is no one else to share the blame.
Federally, I can't go a week without reading about yet another proposal to eliminate the Electoral College and use a popular vote for President.
So if you're not seeing any evidence of it, where are you looking?
>The entire State of California is constantly riddled with ballot propositions
Ya, I was thinking federally only. California is its own animal and they do put a lot of things to vote, so you certainly are right with this example.
>Federally, I can't go a week without reading about yet another proposal to eliminate the Electoral College and use a popular vote for President.
That's just people complaining when their candidate doesn't win. If their candidate won the electoral vote but lost the popular vote, they wouldn't let out a peep about it I'll bet. Democrats won't actually remove the electoral college because they use superdelegates to ensure the party can put its thumb on any candidate's scale (see Bernie v Clinton and Bernie v Biden).
>So if you're not seeing any evidence of it, where are you looking?
I'm talking about actual politicians proposing actual legislation and recruiting votes in the senate/house, not just lip service from the stump. They don't do it because it doesn't actually benefit them.
That's not true either though. I can't even count how many Democrats have publicly supported the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact and most blue states have officially passes legislation signing on to it. https://ballotpedia.org/National_Popular_Vote_Interstate_Com...
It will happen the day after Kamala Harris (or another democrat) wins the presidential election despite loosing the popular vote.
Most GOP states will then instantly forget their principled support for the electoral college and join the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact to kill it.
We know this because in 2000 the George W. Bush team thought it was (contrary to what happened) likely to win the popular vote but loose in the electoral college, and had prepared a legal fight against this scenario.
The differences and potential compromises between various democracies and republics were discussed and debated quite at length when the original US governments were iterating toward the Constitution. It's certainly not just a 20 year old GOP talking point.
They were aware that the House of Representatives was modeled to be sole aggregated voice of the people. The House is the totality of US democracic input.
And the senators were appointed by the state governors who were also democratically elected. The president was democratically elected via the electoral college. Justices are appointed by the president who was democratically elected and the senate who were appointed by democratically elected governors.
Again, to say the US is a republic and not a democracy is incorrect. It is both, just like a Civic can both be a car and an automobile.
There's a similar comment here that's dead. People love to complain about the US not being democratic, but when you point out that they're correct and the US is in fact not a democracy and not democratic it gets downvoted.
Because it's a lazy boring way to try to detail a thread. You're arguing something that the other people aren't even saying . Anyone with a half working brain who's gone outside in the last 20 years understands colloquial use of words.
They're saying they want to live in a more democratic place. We're saying the US isn't and won't be that place. It's an actual, incompatible disagreement on how much individual people should affect the government not just a debate about wording.
Colloquial misuse of the word only sets people up for disappointment when they find out that a government they call a democracy isn't one.
This is about as useful as arguing about communism vs socialism, you may be right, in the typical HN pedant way, but all that does it make dumb threads dumber.
I'm not sure it is as black and white as you suggest.
If you were to create a time machine and bring an ancient Athenian to the modern day US, the Athenian would not recognize the US system of government as, democracy. With the exception of jury trials and referendums, the demos do not directly engage in governance.
The US doesn't even allow the majority of the population to select those who perform the actual governing. E.g., a person from Wyoming has much more representation in the Senate than a person from California.
And, for the president, the population votes, but the winner of this election is not the one who got the most votes from the population, it is the one with the most electoral college votes. Again, the Wyoming voter gets more representation with one elector per less than 200K Wyoming residents, and only one elector for over 700K California residents. It is how the US got Bush "W" and Trump even though they both lost the vote of the demos.
With all the money in elections, even if there were majority representation, the US would still have moneyed interests dominating politics.
>how can the United States be a democracy when the “demos” have no say whatsoever in their own governance?
They do have a say. How do they not?
(But keep in mind that 89% of them would disagree with your politics.)
>Where that government puts up roadblock after roadblock protecting itself from the influence of any but the obscenely wealthy?
Compared to where, actual oligarchies like Russia? Your metrics are uncalibrated af.
>I am Gen X. For around five decades now I have voted. It has never affected my life positively.
Congrats, you've apparently been privileged enough to not benefit from Obamacare or the drawdown of the Afghanistan war, or ending "Don't Ask Don't Tell", or the overturn of Trump's transgender service member ban, or the Credit Card Accountability, Responsibility, and Disclosure Act, or the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, or the halt on federal executions, or the recent reductions in unemployment, etc.
To you, these things were unnoticeable blips in an uninteresting history because you were never in the unfortunate positions that apply, like someone on welfare, someone in the military, etc.
>Roe v Wade overturned
You got this because all of the people who voted Republican got it (since the Republicans packed the Supreme Court with three conservative judges). So, for them, the system worked. Also, it gets funnier: Roe v Wade, if you read its Wikipedia article, was considered a pretty bad ruling, and some predicted that how poor it was opened the door for overturn later. Meanwhile, in the decades that the Supreme Court let it languish, like a hazardously-perched kludge giving women everywhere abortion rights, Democrats failed to vote for actual legislation protecting abortion rights as they should have.
That's why "you got" Roe v Wade overturned.
On the plus side, a strong majority of Americans support abortion, so it shouldn't be difficult to vote for legislation. The only thing that could mess that up is silly, entitled, nihilist attitudes like yours.
>But hey, we can get rid of the filibuster to raise the debt ceiling. Just not to investigate cops for being Nazis.
It's terrible because the best solution to escape the two-party system, including all the animosity (where it is always strategically disadvantageous to join any other party thanks to the first-past-the-post voting system) is something like IRV (instant-runoff voting).
> At least in China the majority of people actually trust their government.
Sure, as long as you don't say the wrong thing and get "disappeared", and have no one to turn to (since the one-party government also controls the courts and legal system), what's not to trust?? LOL, GTFO of here, you absolute fool
The Bible uses PI = 3 and that's good enough for me
> And he made a molten sea, ten cubits from the one brim to the other: it was round all about, and his height was five cubits: and a line of thirty cubits did compass it round about.
In the original Hebrew version of I Kings, in that verse the word for 'circumference' is traditionally written differently to how it is read (there are instances of this kind of thing all over the Bible [1])
Each letter in Hebrew has a numeric value [2].
As written: קוה = 111
As read: קו = 106
Ratio between them: 111/106 = 1.04717...
Which is exactly the ratio between the reported value of pi (3) and the real value to 4 decimal places (3.1415)
So maybe they did have a better idea than "3". The 3 in the verse is to keep it simple, but there's a clue there for those who want the real number.
How many significant figures was it to? How accurate was construction and measuring techniques? 9.7 diameter would be reasonable as “10”, as would 30.47 being “30”, with values being well within 5%.
Funny how that's how described in the Pentateuch's tabernacle: God sends detailed instructions about how many buttons (?) the priest's clothing should have but when it comes to PI "yeah, 3 is good enough"
Using a network TV show as the measuring stick is a little silly. That's like saying the only chefs who make a living out of it are the ones that make it to Chopped or Top Chef.
There are plenty of singers that work with bands, operas, theater companies, studios, schools, as performers, as songwriters, as backing singers and on and on. The living they make is every bit similar to the living made by a guy that owns a pest control company or a woman that owns a small bookkeeping firm.
> That's like saying the only chefs who make a living out of it are the ones that make it to Chopped or Top Chef.
Thanks for that comparison! With Top Chefs, most of them make a living as a chef or cook. With The Voice, most of them don't (not even as backing vocals). Why is that you think? To make a living as a chef or cook, you need to be in the top 90%. To make a living singing (even as backing vocals), you need to be in the top 0.1%.
ALL of the chefs on Top Chef are professionals. All of them. That's the point of the show.
NONE of the singers on the Voice are professionals. That's also the point of the show.
The bigger point that clearly wasn't understood is that celebrity and success aren't mutually inclusive when it comes to cooking or music. You can be a successful chef that isn't on Top Chef just as you can be a successful voice that never goes on American Idol. In fact MOST people successful in both realms will never ever be on even a local TV show.
You're right. I don't understand your point so I can't agree or disagree with it.
I think you were suggesting that only the top .1% of singers who want to make a living singing actually do. But the top 90% of chefs who want to make a living being chefs actually do. If that is the point then I completely disagree.
Beyond music it's the same with professional sports, being a 'youtube personality' or influencer, etc. Or even rising the ranks to become a CEO tier employee who can make millions.
General entrepreneurship is severely underrated in our society for upward mobility and it's rarely praised. Not every business needs millions in financing, there's a million opportunities for people with niche skills or who come across niche opportunities from their regular day-to-day work.
Even something as boring as electricians, my uncle started an electrician company and now has 10 employees and is living quite comfortably. He built up a strong skillset, made plenty of contacts, and worked hard in his 30s to start out of his own, and now comfortably in the upper middle class.
I remember reading a book about the myths of entrepreneurship, who studied large groups businesses, and the average 'founder' isn't some child-genius out of college (like the media tries to spin) but a ~40yr old with plenty of domain experience.
So Paul Graham has just developped the perfect classifier
"A Plan For Haters And Fanboys".
I will try to apply to it to myself
---
Well I am clearly an hater, because I think that Paul Graham says a lot of stupid shit on subjects where he lacks the ability to empathize with the real victims, like many people who are male, white, powerful, well-connected and who can basically accomplish whatever the fuck they want to accomplish. Why don't all those poor victims just do the same, right?
This inflated ego leads him to be a jerk more often than necessary, and write things that are obviously wrong (but not for him) on some subjects where he is a like a snowflake who thinks he is the real victim being attacked. A bit like all those Trump voters who think that the problem with racism in the USA is that white people like them are being unfairly critized as being a racist.
At that point, the Paul Grahan classifier has all the necessary signals to classify me as an hater.
----
On the other hand...
I am obviously a fanboy because I genuinely believe that Paul Graham is a very generous, bright mind who has worked a lot and helped thousands of people.
I know for a fact that he has helped me a lot, I've read pretty much everything he wrote and was nodding furiously all of the time. I can tell you my ten favorites articles from him.
Well actually, let's do it. I really liked
- "Lisp for web-based applications"
- "A plan for span"
- "If Lisp is So Great"
- "What You Can't Say"
- "The Python Paradox"
- "The Age of the Essay"
- "How to Start a Startup"
- "What I did this summer?"
- "You weren't meant to have a boss"
- "Ramen Profitable"
- "Startup = Growth""H
- "Do Things That Don't Scale"
- "Default Alive Or Default Dead?"
Oops, I told 13 instead of 10, and I had to force myself to stop here.
That's what fanboys do.
---
In summary, I understand the tentation to have "A Plan For Fanboys/Haters" like he had a "Plan For Spam".
Frankly that would be nice if that was possible, I would buy it, just say your price.
But I'm starting to think that real human beings are more complex than this nice dichotomy.
I think Paul Graham is like a normal human being, with wonderful parts and deep flaws, pretty much like all of us.
That leads him to be right and helpful on a lot of subjects, and also to be wrong and a jerk on other topics.
Since he is a bright guy, he would have no problems to discover why he was wrong, if he applied his own principles to those topics.
And he would apply his own principles if he was interested.
His output being deeply wrong shows that he is not interested right now by those topics.
You can totally run Windows or Linux on a macbook with some effort. Apple even built Bootcamp to make it easy to dual boot...
Or are you saying you should be able to take OSX elsewhere? it's not a "monopoly" that Apple built OSX and only support it on their own hardware. It is not monopolistic to build something supported on one platform and not others.
The thing is, that if you want to run MacOS, you have to buy Apple hardware. There is no choice for MacOS users, so the market cannot decide whether they want more or less repairable laptops. You have to buy whatever Apple is offering.
I'm not sure, I've never tried installing Linux on a Macbook Pro. I know that it is/was possible for certain hardware but also that it was never easy or straight forward. Apple doesn't help but they aren't making their laptops reject unsigned code or anything like they do for the phones.
Given that OSX and Linux are so similar under the hood and that standing up a VM is so easy, I've never really seen the point of installing linux except to say you can.
They both share their roots in Unix. Linux is an open port of Unix whereas OSX is a fork of BSD which is itself also derived from Unix
`ls`, `mv`, `cp` and other command line utility functions work relatively similarly across OSX and Linux. OSX has a package manager (brew) that works similarly to Package Managers found on Linux, etc...
If you learn to use Linux, switching to OSX is relatively painless compared to Windows (although WSL might have changed that)
Ah, I was expecting you to say something lower level than that. Homebrew is however quite unlike package managers I've used on Linux, and even MacPorts is a little different…I've heard that WSL is pretty decent and presumably APT works on it, though I haven't touched it since it first came out and it was broken in some way that I cared about.
You'll find that linuxbrew exists, apart from the AUR being a thing. And yes, apt and other distro package managers work perfectly fine in both wsl and wsl2.
What I need is something that let's me write my docs in markdown and then quickly and easily render them to PDF with nice output, runs on Linux, and doesn't render remotely.
I've used Grip, and I use the Markdown to PDF plugin in VSCodium but none of these really meet the requirements.
Do you have a suggested improved syntax for images and tables? I think Table of Contents exist in some implementations of Markdown but it’s not common.
That is a straw man socialits try to make. Conservatives do not have a common voice. That socialism doesn't work is but one (there are some complex arguments for why it cannot that you are ignoring - though to be fair they are too complex to put into a short post)
Conservatives often point out that we don't have a free market to start with. We have a strictly regulated market (designed by socialists) that cannot help but increase costs because nobody who cares about costs gets a seat at the table. Wanting to get rid of the regulations and allow an actual market is a small point a few conservatives makes.
