Why is a tyranny of the minority more acceptable acceptable? Because as populations get more and more urbanised, systems based on representing total land area rather that the total population gets increasingly less democratic. Because legacy rules that subject an ever growing demographic majority to perpetual disenfranchisement seem to me a far bigger problem than a "tyranny of the majority".
Because at least when it's the farmers calling the shots,
we have fucking food and water. This is NOT the case when it's the big cities calling the shots, as demonstrated well by California routinely fucking over its own agriculture by diverting water to the cities, which then fucks over the non-metropolitan populations as the agricultural sector draws groundwater to avoid a collapse of crop growth.
Furthermore, this is just the top level being talked about when the electoral college is being questioned. Why
should the US
federal government be direct democracy, instead of functioning in a representative fashion, while the States, Counties and Cities pass their own local laws, for their own local needs? Extend this down, why should the individual states function on a direct democracy when concerns of the ENTIRE state come up, as with California's droughts? The layers of government exist because there's conflicting interests between populations that are governed, and the systems are supposed to allocate representation to these interest groups moreso than to actual populations.
Yes, this is very much an argument against direct democracy as a whole. Because direct democracy
is dysfunctional bullshit, as demonstrated well by California, which continues to go for rural-fucking water-rationing and continuing to run down a clock on
agricultural failure instead of desalination plants, because they can't wrangle the thirty-year commitment of political will to build the things. Demagoguery is far too easy to pull off, and assuring a large educated populace far too much a difficulty. A representative government can be structured to keep the reliably-educated elites from fucking over the wider public, at least via government, by having the access to government power rely on the people at least not actively hating the guys in charge.
Keeping a largely-educated public is damn near utopian in its own right, having a political system predicated on that isn't any better than the vast reliance on good-faith acting behind Anarcho-Communism.
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Generally, I feel the ideal state for the politicing "face" is problem-focused campaigning with per-party voting and some ranked vote system, rather than solution-focused with anything approaching a direct candidate vote. Trump would presumably campaign more on the trade war stuff in such a condition, as there's a very definable problem of outsourcing and other sorts of money exiting the country, rather than the difficult-to-gauge immigration issues, which are so opaque that the opponents to immigration are at least more
coherent in their talking points than the supporters. The common
thing there is a lack of distinction between illegal entry, overstayed visitors, legal entry, and the difference between low-skill and high-skill in each case, so arguments about high-skill legal entry end up side by side with ones about low-skilled illegal entries, making for a set of positions that's
really bizarre because of conflating wildly different groups and stating the benefits of each are universal.
Opponents of immigration, meanwhile, focus on low-skilled immigration and the issue of illegal entry, giving them a coherent position that's wildly exaggerated, but references real problems one can point at and say "there exists a problem" without a single lie. Which is... A lot better for winning over those who don't dig through data. The guy against immigration's saying a person's whole town got fucked because of uncontrolled Latino immigrants eating all the labor jobs, and they can actually walk around and
see overwhelmingly Latino construction crews who are, in fact, taking up jobs their friends and family could use. Never mind they're in a small town in Texas and those Latinos have been living there since the border crossed them, that'd take
actual critical thinking. The guy who's pro-immigration, meanwhile, speaks of the far more abstract matter of the cost of factory goods and that you'll
totally be able to get a better job. Something not of concern to a person who barely got a High School Diploma who needs to actively budget to afford
food, who's very much viciously interested in being the person to get that factory job themselves.
Granted, it's more a thing with the Rustbelt, but the point that the Republicans talking about immigration have something real and obvious to point to, even if its relevance in the grand scope of things is ultimately rather minor, while the Democrats talking about immigration are saying things that very quickly follow into "yeah, get fucked some more, Rustbelt" by implying that low-skill jobs will be filled up by them, to benefits that people already digging for scraps of a hollowed-out city's job market won't see, or are "on-high" ideology about diversity and helping the world as a whole. Or mention benefits
utterly irrelevant to them. What's a broke 30-something in Detroit care about R&D positions getting some well-educated Europeans to fill?
...Seriously, how the fuck is the Democrat position on Immigration supposed to be attractive to anyone outside the white-collar world the politicians live in? There's people who are going to be stuck competing with those Latino immigrants for work, and indeed are already feeling the squeeze enough to notice what's currently there, what the
fuck is going to make them want to vote for people who are all but outright calling for them to be fired? Yes, we quite literally don't have enough people in our own country willing to work some of the farms, but that's a reason to
expand the legal limits and get shit set up for when people are stuck entering without clearing the proper channels, not one to say "welp, might as well give up border control" like a lot of the big voices on it are calling for.
That's what "Abolish ICE" actually means. Literally, it's saying "shut down the agency responsible for border control". And those "Concentration Camps" are literally required for
any system of immigration control to work, because there has to be somewhere to put those caught on unusual routes while the paperwork gets filed. There's just... So much of the immigration debate that leaves egg on the face of the Democrats. The drinking out of toilets thing? Grey-water flushing, there's a sink built into the tank the toilet-water goes through
before entering the toilet, with little paper cups and everything. At least after renovations went through. The "tinfoil blankets" is a weird budgeting thing, they're actually
amazing thermal insulation
in the short term. Not exactly comfortable to sleep in and not intended for prolonged use
at all, but the very opposite of freezing by
very painstaking design (they're mostly made for hypothermia patients in desperate need of very quickly increasing their core body temperature).
And, of course, cutting the budget of ICE isn't going to make the system shut down at any plausible level. More facilities were opened specifically to reduce crowding, after all, most you're going to do is make conditions
worse as they desperately race to the bottom operational budget, fuck livability, fuck health, just
flat-pack the people caught crossing the border if need be. The solution to the problem is to
increase the funding and lay down an actual reform of the system, give ICE the money it needs to treat the immigrants humanely and clear out the likely-carefully-designed shitshow that went off with the Trump administration going hardball. There's a very deep rabbit hole of causes, and Mike Pence likely was aware of
all of this stuff when he suggested to start prosecuting every illegal entry. Flick a switch, damn near every kid gets separated for at least a little bit (giving
wonderful leverage to force a confession, just to ratchet up the pointlessness of a trial even further), nothing dubious about the legality and many of the things behind it are to avoid far more obvious abuses.
One of them is a court order that came out of some Hatian kids that got sucked into the foster care system of Florida because of some
interesting choices in what order to handle claims that mandates that the children be kept in licensed facilities if they can't be kept with a relative, such as that relative undergoing a criminal prosecution. ICE has access to very few such facilities, there's huge delays in verifying relations thanks to the suddenly-present backlog in need of it, and many times the parents are put through what's
basically a Kangaroo Court to stick them on record as breaking the law for crossing the border (there actually is such a law being held to proper legal standard, but it's such a forgone conclusion that it doesn't really justify the separation clause being applied, and making the prosecution
is something new under the Trump administration), and it
just so happens that this policy switch and budget crunch have choked ICE's understaffed paper-pushers to the point a lot of the kids get
completely lost in the system.
Spectacular case of numerous layers of malicious compliance, with the people campaigning against it seemingly entirely ignorant of what they'd break in trying to fix it *turns gaze upon The Squad*. It's almost like a guy who knows the ins and outs of the system is trying to make it as painful as possible for the immigrants to warn away further entries. *PEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEENNNNNNNNNNNCCCCCCCEEEEEEEE*