> remember that threats from the US are the only thing that prevents many countries from doing more horrible shit than they already do.
You mean horrible shit like drone strikes that kill innocent civilians, illegally detaining "terrorists" and torturing them, spying on the whole world, and commanding other countries to ground a president's plane? Is that the kind of shit "they" already do?
Suppose a Drone killed 3000 civilians with the intention of killing civilians (like Dresden or Tokyo bombings of WWII) then I'd say yeah, they're siblings but: Nah, civilians are collateral damage for drones, the goal was not to kill as many of them as possible and terrorize them. It was to eliminate particular individuals, so no it's not en masse.
If we take your 100 women and children (heh, nice) and say they were without a doubt killed by a drone and were killed intentionally as a target by the drones I would say: You're still off by an order of cardinality in comparison. So that's a bad comparison too.
Falujah, where there was a battle and there were actual enemy combatants in a stronghold city and you're complaining about the depleted uranium after the fact? Sure you could remove context to everything and you'll get exactly what you're saying: Drivel.
A WHO report? So? That assertion alone is supposed to do what, reinforce how deplorable Falujah is on account of the weapons used?
Tell ya what when you're in charge of arming your soldiers of your nation and someone says: "you can use depleted uranium to penetrate the armor of your enemies but it'll have negative effect on the environment, or you can use just lead with negligible armor piercing and minimal comparative environmental effect." You can pick the environmental choice and tell the dead parents and the dying soldiers you're responsible for that you didn't want to pick armor piercing rounds because you were trying to protect the future flora and fauna of a foreign land you don't have sovereignty over. Or you could tell them that you did everything in your power to do your job and service to the nation and it's people in arming the soldiers under your command and that the integrity of the environment of a city in Iraq was secondary to your concern over American lives.
Are you kidding? First, depleted uranium is not just about the "fauna and flora", it's about children being born with horrible birth defects and other untold human damage.
Secondly, your entire argument attempting to justify what we did in Iraq omits the most salient point: the fact that we shouldn't have been there in the first place. So, nothing we've done there is justified, including the death and maiming of our own soldiers.
Thirdly, you conveniently omit the hundreds of thousands or more of the innocent Iraqi civilians who were killed. I would say that people of Iraq certainly died en masse.
Your ignorance might be forgivable if you weren't so arrogant about it, and not so cavalier about human suffering and death.
The stock market doesn't get hacked? Are you kidding? Did I miss a /sarcasam tag? The stock market is a hack. If the stock market doesn't get technologically "hacked" it's only because it's so easy for the well-connected to hack already. And you want to make our government itself exactly that easy to hack?
The vast majority of Americans don't care about most issues. In fact, I would go so far as to speculate that there is no American who cares deeply about more than a handful of issues. But giving everyone a vote would give everyone the opportunity to sell that vote to the highest bidder, whether literally or figuratively.
You know who will vote on every single solitary proposal? Old people. Old people who think a monitor is a computer and the Internet is a series of tubes that young people use to give each other venereal diseases. As it stands today, we can shine light on corruption, Snowden helped with this. In a HUGE direct democracy, how would we even begin to figure out if someone had usurped control? Would it even be illegal to do so? Instead of writing letters to our representatives we'd all just end up sending daily letters to our grandparents begging them not to blindly do whatever Rupert Murdoch tells them to do.
Also "Don't take away their ability to wrong, lest someone else does the same wrongs or worse" is a strawman. Others are going to try to do bad things no matter what. Giving our government unethical powers to somehow overcome this is not OK.
The US isn't a direct democracy and, if I understand history correctly, that was on purpose and not just a matter of practicality. A direct democracy allows the majority to pass laws that benefit themselves while punishing the minority. We already have politicians passing ridiculous laws just to pander for votes; I can't see how it wouldn't be worse if the people being pandered to made the laws instead.
The internet has given us a front row seat to witness the fact that, regardless of which side of an issue they're on, there are a lot of people who don't arrive at their opinions through any sort of research, discussion, or consideration. This is probably confirmation bias on my part, but there seems to be a lot more people who'd vote how Wil Wheaton or Justin Bieber told them to than those who'd spend ten minutes reading a few different news sources about a particular ballot initiative to form their own opinion.
One would hope, if things were working ideally, that representatives in congress would consider the constitution, existing laws, and their constituents best interests when passing new laws. I'm not so naive to think that things are anywhere close to ideal, but I'm not sure that direct democracy is a better solution.
But which minority? The US founders clearly weren't talking about non-whites and women, who were property. Instead, the minority was the wealthy elites.
During the "Secret Debates of the Federal Convention" (where the windows were shut in the summer heat so those outside couldn't hear what was said), the Father of the Constitution, Madison, discussed the conflicting interests between "the day laborer" and "the man who is possessed of wealth, who lolls on his sofa, or rolls in his carriage":
"In England, at this day, if elections were open to all classes of people, the property of the landed proprietors would be insecure. [...] Landholders ought to have a share in the government, to support these invaluable interests, and to balance and check the other. They ought to be so constituted as to protect the minority of the opulent against the majority." (http://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/yates.asp)
More useful to read than the Federalist Papers, which are propaganda. (BTW, it may help to know that the senate originally wasn't open to popular election. That battle was finally won in 1913, with the 17th amendment.)
This is a straw man. The campaign is not to defund the entire NSA, it is to defund collection of records "that pertain to persons who are not subject to an investigation under Section 215".
Exactly. The NSA can't use their funds however they feel like. They have to account to several governmental entities for their (secret) precise funding, and I doubt they would lie about it and take their resources from their useful tasks in order to reallocate them to spying on non-suspect citizens.
The problem is that ignorant masses can be easily tricked into voting particular way. Some would say that direct democracy simply would not work. But, well, look at Switzerland...
To this day, I don't think he was when he first got elected; but he did not have a real political powerbase in the party, and so didn't really make a difference when nominating members of his administration. He let the Clintonites run the show, and of course they dragged him down in the same way they've done his predecessors. He squandered his star-power in the first year (when powerful people were begging to take pictures with him) and that was it. After that, he pretty much ran things as "Clinton III & IV". In fact, Bill himself is now to Obama's left on various issues, at least going by his public statements.
This is the problem with voting "the New Man who will clear up Washington": it rarely ever happens. Because the difference is made every day, inch by inch, by a political machinery built by a number of cadres, and Obama's machinery was fundamentally the same as Clinton's (and Kerry's, i.e. the people complicit in 8 years of GWB regime). In that I hoped he'd make a difference. When I saw Dean had been pushed out, I knew the gig was up.
Still, even before his first day in office, at least he made a big difference in one particular field (desegregation), which was long overdue.
A direct democracy would probably be even more shortsighted than today's flawed system. It would almost certainly be hell on earth.
No, the answer is NOT direct democracy. For samples of what your average fellow human thinks about the world and whether you think it's a good idea to entrust them with governance, please search a random keyword on Twitter and see what you find. It will not be pretty.
I have no idea how we fix Congress. It is a totally corrupt mess that will viciously defend itself and try to prevent anything being changed that would threaten its self-perpetuation.
Obviously ending the nightmare that is Citizens United would be a start. And enacting other strict rules about campaign financing....
