Kusimulkku

Bold move

I feel like with men's issues it's more consistent, but as a man I probably notice it a lot more so who knows.

Fuck as if Belgium wasn't a mess before, now they've moved Israel there

you look cute

Definitely a compliment

you should smile more

Dunno what the intention was, I read it as "you look cute when you smile" but could be "you would look (even) cuter if you smiled". If it's either of those, that's going to my compliment book.

And yes, men are famine level starved of positive attention. So this "creepy demand" (demand??) defintely would count for me.

Democracy is not binary. That is why democratic scholars consider the United States to be what’s called “a flawed democracy.”

Yes. It just seemed like you considered it as democratic/not democratic, instead of a scale where you could have such a thing as flawed democracy. I might've just misinterpreted your words.

That’s the problem. California and Wyoming are separate, but they are not equal. Wyoming has 1/40th the population. One person in Wyoming has the same voting power as 40 people in California to determine their own laws and taxes. That’s reminiscent of taxation without representation. For all practical purposes, the people of California have been disenfranchised by the US government.

I guess they could've made the original system such that US Senate accounted for population, but it would've been hard to get smaller states to join. It's the reason why we in EU have the equal status.

Lastly, how Ireland, or Star Wars, or anyone else organizes their federal system has no bearing on whether the US Senate is in fact anti-democratic.

It was just an aside I was hoping you'd find interesting.

I mean in 1960 the "non-Hispanic white" population was 85.4%. Not to mention this is probably a single family. Though making one of the people black for diversity would be pretty funny. At least there's some women in there, but they've had to settle for two fifths.

Well grandpa seems to be enjoying it.

You are thinking of democracy as a binary thing instead of as a sliding scale. Not to mention you can have democratic form of government that isn't very democratic or representative in actuality.

Federations often have that sort of two tiered setup where there's general population vote and a level where each state can represent themselves as the states. The idea makes sense when you think of it as a federation of separate and equal units, with the state tier you make sure every state is equally represented. Otherwise they might not want to be part of the whole federation. Of course it can be horribly uneven when you consider the populations. But that's not too different from EU, where amount of MEPs differs but council seats and number of commissioners stays the same. Both Germany with 83 million people and Malta with 0,5 million people have the same number of council seats, commissars and both have veto rights. Unsurprisingly it's a topic that sometimes gets heated, but like i said, without it there'd be outrage because everyone would be worried of core big countries deciding everything. Many countries would probably fuck right off from the Union.

I think there's been some misunderstanding here. None of this is some value take from me or me arguing for or against something. I haven't at least consciously given much of an opinion on this, I've just described the reasoning behind the system and how it makes sense to me from the member state perspective.

Now I want to know the joke

The EU has a representative setup, which is democratic. It is nothing like the US Senate, which was created specifically to undermine democracy.

I'm just saying Council of the European Union and European Council vs. European Parliament is same sort of separation between "popular vote" and member state governments and the reasoning is similar. There's been a lot of discussion about how singular states can stop the will of the rest of the EU and so on. Taking away that veto is a real hot button issue.

Again, governments justify their existence by representing people, full stop, not arbitrary land masses.

Ostensibly the states should represent people, that is specifically their state's people. Whereas congress and president should be more about the whole federation, as I've understood it. How well that works, well, that's another matter.

What’s next, a tertiary chamber in Congress for corporations?

Ireland has something a bit like that:

"Most members of the Seanad Éireann, the upper house of the Oireachtas (parliament) of Ireland, are elected as part of vocational panels nominated partly by current Oireachtas members and partly by vocational and special interest associations. The Seanad also includes two university constituencies. "

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Industrial_and_Commercial_Panel

Where I live 12 beers or a bottle of vodka is the standard payment

For an united states sort of setup having one level of government representing the states particularly makes sense to me. EU has a similar setup (but much more complicated) and a suggestion that it'd just be based on popular vote would cause a civil war.