Best I could get playing with Bing / DALL-E
ETA:
I take that back. Got a lot better with some more tweaking
ETA: And another decent one
Best I could get playing with Bing / DALL-E
ETA:
I take that back. Got a lot better with some more tweaking
ETA: And another decent one
True, but the house of representatives was also never supposed to be limited in size and instead was supposed to be proportionate, with states getting at least one member. So if the smallest state in the US got one rep, Wyoming, with 581,000 people, California should get 67 representatives instead of 52, and New York should have 37 instead of 26. This would give the total size of the house of representatives at 571 members if it divided perfectly evenly. (Which it wouldn’t, but… this is just an overall estimate.)
I’d wager the founders would , even if it was 67x larger than the smallest, still say only the same number of senators per. (Though, I could also see them moving it to 3 per just to keep the electoral count having that similar balance of power)
At the expense of democracy and civil and human rights? Might be time to evolve a bit beyond “great white dudes are always smarter and more deliberative than the rest of us”… just sayin’.
And you know, much of the founders had no problems with slavery and second class citizenship for women… so…
And also - enslavers, so maybe we don’t treat their word as gospel…
There are Constitutional ways that can be done more fairly in the modern context. For example, the Senate and House could vote as one body on legislation. That would give low-population states some added votes without the grotesque disproportionality that is currently the case.
Also, when the minority is promoting fascism – as is currently the case with the MAGAts – a democracy is under no obligation to entertain their views and bring about its own demise.
I think I got most of the qualifiers in. Probably missed a few. Once those are accounted for, the numbers make a lot more sense, and yeah, they are the voice of “real” America.
Those are pretty good. I wonder if there’s a Kryptonian symbol for racism, or tax avoidance, to show the values they champion.
Betcha General Zod knows.
I’m not sure the first sentence is entirely accurate. Madison and Hamilton, anyway, hated the idea of the equality of the states in the Senate. They felt that Virginia, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, or New York, as the biggest states, shouldn’t have their power diluted by the likes of Rhode Island and Delaware. But they had a product to sell, so they acquiesced. So at least some Founders thought it was horrible. Maybe most. Hamilton rails against equal representation in few of his op-eds. Federalist 22 has the strongest language:
The right of equal suffrage among the States is another exceptionable part of the Confederation. Every idea of proportion and every rule of fair representation conspire to condemn a principle, which gives to Rhode Island an equal weight in the scale of power with Massachusetts, or Connecticut, or New York; and to Delaware an equal voice in the national deliberations with Pennsylvania, or Virginia, or North Carolina. Its operation contradicts the fundamental maxim of republican government, which requires that the sense of the majority should prevail. Sophistry may reply, that sovereigns are equal, and that a majority of the votes of the States will be a majority of confederated America. But this kind of logical legerdemain will never counteract the plain suggestions of justice and common-sense. It may happen that this majority of States is a small minority of the people of America; and two thirds of the people of America could not long be persuaded, upon the credit of artificial distinctions and syllogistic subtleties, to submit their interests to the management and disposal of one third. The larger States would after a while revolt from the idea of receiving the law from the smaller.
He echoed some of this in Federalist 10 as well. So it was less by “design” and more by “had to be included to get the deal done.”
It’s funny about the need to represent minorities. LGBTQ people are constantly fighting for their rights and lives…but there’s no special provision to make sure they get any say. Minority races, minority religions get nothing and nobody has ever proposed giving them otherwise.
It’s just minority regions where suddenly it’s critical not to let the majority have its way, often at the expense of all the other types of minorities. It doesn’t seem at all positive to me.
Which is also by design – those “minority population” states were the ones with a minority of white landowning males not necessarily the smaller populations (on account of all the slaves and also the land being owned by a relatively small group of white males compared to even the rest of the whites). See also the electoral college.
The fact that Joe Biden, an unexciting and flawed but still mostly competent candidate, beat Trump, and would beat Trump again, is all you need to tell your angry MAGA uncle at Thankgsgiving.
The MAGAworld can worship and adore the Donald all they want, but that ridiculous amount of love doesn’t translate into anyone else loving him, it’s not like it overflows and infects the rest of us.
You’re missing “in a fair election”.
So no, I’m not confident he would beat Trump again.
A bit of a tangent but I always love when MAGAts try to invoke the Federalist Papers into arguments around “founder’s intent” as some kind of justification for their extreme views on Constitutional powers. They fail to understand (or more likely don’t care) that these essays were just the op-eds of their time and it’s not like the Constitutional signers had universal agreement on every clause. Compromises had to be made to get the damn thing ratified.
Unfortunately, the Federalist Papers have been successfully used in modern Court rulings giving them undue influence as to recent Constitutional interpretations and “Originalist” arguments even though they were never intended to be used that way.
Bailyn, one of the great historians of America in the past half century, notes that the Federalist Papers were penned amidst a bitter fight over ratification of the Constitution; were hurriedly produced by Hamilton (51 papers), Madison (29) and John Jay (5) who did not coordinate their efforts; were styled as pamphlets to sway opinion, not as records of the secret debates at the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia (Jay wasn’t even there); contained ideas which had not been developed at the Convention in order to defend the basic constitutional structure of “uniting national power and personal liberty” which forceful anti-federalist papers had attacked; and, understandably were not given great deference by the Supreme Court as an expression of founder’s intent until recent decades (both Madison and Chief Justice Marshall warned against reliance on the Papers as an authoritative source of intent).
This.
They can say they disapprove of MAGA and the politicians who champion it in any poll they like. But if, in the only poll that actually matters, they still vote for a MAGA politician, then they might as well be shouting their support for MAGA in the streets.
WRONG, YOU HEATHEN! THEY ARE HOLY WRIT, HANDED DOWN FROM ON HIGH TO THE DEMI-GOD FOUNDING FATHERS.
sqlrob: Cute renderings, but based on rally videos, I think a good percentage of the fiercely MAGA minority are women. Can you portray them? Would your choices be as sexist as your choices for men? I agree that these may represent MAGA men’s self image.
That’s a question from DALL-E, those were simple prompts, starting with “bizarro from superman with a red trucker hat”, eventually adding some adjectives for skin descriptors to get it close to the Bizarro from the comics
This could be that psychological effect which leads people tell pollsters what they think they want to hear, rather than what they actually are going to do.
In the spirit of full disclosure, here’s every single prompt and every single result. Screen cap of all 4 for a given prompt to limit size and scrolling.
“bizarro in a red trucker cap”
“bizarro from superman in a red trucker cap”
“bizarro from superman with crystal skin in a red trucker cap”
“bizarro from superman with diamond skin in a red trucker cap”
“bizarro from superman with large faceted shiny diamond skin in a red trucker cap”
I’d say those renderings are a good example of the concept of “Bizarro in a MAGA hat”. If you think those images are sexist, then you’ll have to take it up with the creators of the character, and perhaps also the creators of Superman, who Bizarro is meant to be an opposite of.