1 Like
And again…you replied to MY post. I would suggest perhaps next time doing a generic reply to the top of the thread perhaps?
When you reply directly to someone, it sort of leaves the impression you are addressing them.
And again you are posting a reply with information to me assuming I do not know this and need the edification. Next time perhaps ask? or maybe just not assume.
1 Like
Are you sure? Here’s a ranking of the 10 most liberal countries that doesn’t even contain the US.
Or take the German constitution, it contains 19 articles dedicated to fundamental rights, the US constitution, as @Avery_Thorn pointer out, has a bit less.
If you think the nature of government is fit for purpose, the relationship between states and the federal government works out well, and it’s ok that a minority can select the president, then you’re right. A look at other constitutions shows that there are other ways that may work slightly better. Just one example: it may not have been the constitution that turned the US in a two-party system, but it sure didn’t prevent it.
Maybe a constitution might contain certain provisions to ensure all people are educated properly?
As I understand it, there are opposing interpretations of the constitution, so more scholars might not help so much here. With clearer and modern language, some of those disputes might not even exist.
But of course it would still help a great deal if politicians hat a deeper understanding of the constitution. Any democratic system should be designed in a way that those people who have an actual clue about things get into positions of power. Another idea for a more useful constitution. 
1 Like
You are correct that the US is not as liberal as it’s constitution mandates.
1 Like
I think it’s a mixup with the thought of politics as a protected class. You’re allowed to fire anyone for their protected class status as long as you fire them with no given reason.
ETA clarification:
Yes, this is still technically illegal, but also just about impossible to prove.
1 Like
This might be better to split off onto a thread but uhh…
I’m not seeing how the senate being selected by the states would’ve helped with that situation.
Is the beer purity amendment in that constitution because it is almost enough for me to desert my country and convert to German!
I may be biased but article 1 of the German constitution is one of the most powerful pieces of legal text I have ever seen.
Human dignity shall be inviolable. To respect and protect it shall be the duty of all state authority.
This is a constitution that was written one and a half centuries after the American one and after a devastating war and genocide precipitated by a government takeover by populists through generally legal elections. It was also very much written under the aegis of the occupying powers, chief among them the US. Of course it is going to be an improvement.
6 Likes
I don’t know for sure that it would have. But being selected by the state legislatures, rather than the state electorate directly, would have made the senate less amenable to, for example, primary challenges–which were among the main fears of moderate Republicans in seats up in 2020.
At least by then they’d figured out that it looks way better if the fundamental rights are part of the actual document itself from the get-go, rather than a bunch of amendments.
1 Like
Just for the record, Hitler didn’t rise to power through a legal election. This is something that those Americans who like to tell us Germans “how could you be so stupid? It could never happen to us” would do well to remember.
3 Likes
Hence the “generally”.
I am all too familiar with the line of thinking that this was something uniquely German. It must be a comforting thought but it leads to dangerous complacency.
(And for the record I’m not saying this to in any way minimise our, i.e. Germans’, culpability.)
3 Likes
Ignoring and accepting may lead to the same outcome, but they are not the same thing. Ignoring in this case is worse: you couldn’t be arsed to do something or even just speak out against it, because it only affects other people.
If you eliminate morons by exposing everyone to proper education (which would help them understand who they are, what they need, what laws and rules exist around them, and which of those can be changed (culture) and which can‘t (e.g. gravity)), you are not flirting with fascism. Quite the contrary.
We must accept nothing of the sort, because ignoring them is dangerous. We must stand up and confront them. This is an individual and a collective responsibility.
Preferably we confront them with enough empathy and compassion so that they can see what harm they are doing to others, and to themselves. If that doesn’t work out, sometimes more force is necessary.
If that changes his views, their despicable stunt was alt least not totally useless.
No, it isn’t. But it still applies to certain types of beer produced in Germany for the German market.
Here‘s a guide that might help you get rid of that crap.
4 Likes
Not really. The Reinheitsgebot in its popular form goes back to the duchy of Bavaria in 1516, but it only became a modern thing in the 1950s, when the German state of Bavaria objected to the import of beer-like low-alcohol beverages with added sugar (“Malzbier”) as “beer”, and referred back to the Bavarian Reinheitsgebot of 1516 which outlawed putting stuff other than hops, barley malt, and water into beer. (It doesn’t mention yeast, mostly because people didn’t know about the details of the role of yeast in making beer, and sets a maximum price of 1 pfennig for a mass – one litre or thereabouts – of beer, a rule that unfortunately no longer holds today). The Reinheitsgebot became an all-German issue in the 1980s, when the beer market was supposed to be opened to foreign beers which contained even more outlandish additions. Today the rules are fairly strict for certain beers (Pils, Export) that are brewed in Germany for domestic consumption, but beer-like beverages can be quite freely imported and sold even if they don’t follow the modern incarnation of the Reinheitsgebot – which doesn’t mean that they’re at all popular compared to the domestic brands produced according to the tradition.
The Bavarian Reinheitsgebot wasn’t the only one of its kind; laws like it were quite necessary because (a) the government generally wanted the more valuable types of cereal such as wheat and rye to be used for bread, not beer, and (b) people would put all sorts of weird, intoxicating, and poisonous plants into beer, which could become a public-health issue. Hops are fairly uncontroversial and harmless in comparison because unlike other common beer additives at the time they act as a mild sedative.
5 Likes
This makes me think of a Jim Jeffries joke: America locks up more of its citizens as a percentage than any other country in the world, so statistically it’s the least free country.
And yeah, that sounds facetious, but then you start to think about what it really means to be free. Why are those people in prison? I’m not doing a detailed study of it right now, but causes seem like they have to be things like: criminalizing a wider range of behaviour, giving longer sentences for the same crimes, and more aggressively pursuing criminal charges.
In every one of those cases it means the government of America sees the freedom of its citizens; you know, like actual freedom to walk around and live their lives, and being worth less than the government of Canada (for instance) sees the freedom of it’s citizens. Like if one country has an average sentence for negligence causing death of two or three years and another has an average sentence for a similar crime of five or six years, since the damage done by the crime has to be regarded as the same, one country is saying that it takes more person-years of freedom to make up for that same crime, that a person-year of freedom is a less “valuable” “commodity” (scare quotes for a reason).
The more I think about Jeffries’ joke the more I think it’s not facetious. America has extremely little regard for freedom, and the prison system is just one way it shows it.
10 Likes
Well, not for some people… others can get away with literal murder and be just as free as they want to do it over and over. And others can literally drive the entire global economy into a ditch and then continue to be free, too.
So it has regard for some people’s freedoms, just not everyone’s.
9 Likes
That’s farm country, not lake country. So not terribly likely. Plus, they were wearing face masks, which people in Florida aren’t doing.
2 Likes
Indeed there are many more examples. Are you free if you have to shoulder massively inflated healthcare costs alone? Are you free while you pay off that student loan, while your employer and their shareholders enjoy the surplus of your higher education and at the same time avoid fair taxation?
Are you free when your wealth, social status, and in many cases even being treated as a human being depends on who your parents were and what the color of your skin is?
In the US you hear a lot about how „free“ everyone is, but when you look a little closer, it‘s mostly propaganda. And the freedom that exists mostly comes at the expense of freedom taken away from others.
BTW: even when you think the constitution didn’t create this state of things, it did fuck all to prevent it.
One aspect I really like about that is that it does apply to everyone, not just citizens. Imagine a sentence like that in the US constitution. There are a few sentences in the DOI that come close to Article 1, but they are of no legal consequence, while Article 1 is the foundation of the German constitution, and it informs the rest of the document, and every other law in Germany.
Of course we - ze Germans - are still in the process of deepening our understanding of the implications of Article 1, and we‘re still doing a lot of things that definitely don’t live up to that aspiration. But it‘s a start.
3 Likes
They would actually agree with that as “freedom.” It comes down to positive and negative liberty.
According to their concept, dumping an infant off in the wilderness is about the perfect example of freedom. The infant won’t be burdened with officious guidance or protection, holding them back in life. No silly stuff like education to lock them into socialist modes of thinking. They are free to face the bears alone, not have things like healthcare pushed on them. Earn their own way, and be a self-made person!
It’s all horseshit. Trust fund babies of the wealthy don’t ever have to endure negative liberty. Even self-made political beasts spend their lives wheeling and dealing for favors and easing their way through the graft and cronyism of others to whom they devote their own graft and cronyism.
Everyone else is bullied and locked out of the system, which is fine with them, because they see it as having not been fit enough to survive.
4 Likes
