Posts by Keir Leslie
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You often here that they now feel strangers in their own land. I don't think we should repeat the mistakes of the Anglo-Canadians and the English and allow excessive immigration to wrest control of our destiny from ourselves.
You'd think people would have got over the Conquest by now.
(Seriously, (a) Anglo-Canadians still run Canada as much as they deserve to, and probably quite a bit more, and (b) if you said that in Britain I'd call you a racist tosser; it is possible you don't realise just how shocking that sentence sounds, but basically, it puts you on par with the BNP.)
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Shouldn't that be "fully paid up"?
I read it as a full, paid up, member. (As opposed to a full member who hasn't paid up, or a paid up associate member.)
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In football, shoes are often the player's responsibility & not the club's. Not sure if that's the case here or not.
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Given that that's what money is anyway, that's not too much difference.
Except for the fact that the word of the State of California really isn't worth as much as the word of the United States of America.
Representative democracy and parliamentary law-making are just as binary.
But you can amend bills and so-on, which would be impossible (certainly impracticable) with referenda. So, yes, each part of a bill either passes or fails, but there's more choice.
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Not because they are a direct democracy (they aren't) but because the place is run by silly self serving arseholes.
No, it isn't run by self-serving assholes, that's the whole bloody point. The so called self-serving assholes can't do a damn thing, because of Prop 13, which was instituted by, you guessed it, direct democracy. I mean, for heaven's sake, this is not controversial.
(`California has made some silly choices' is also uselessly vague; please try and be precise here.)
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California being bankrupt is like Donald Trump being bankrupt. A minor setback. But are you seriously blaming it all on 'direct democracy'? They have representative democracy last I heard.
Seriously, wtf? It is just nonsense to say it is a minor setback that CA is going bust during the one of the worst recessions in fifty odd years.
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Um, the State of California is pretty much bankrupt. They're going to have to start paying employees in IOUs. It is utterly dysfunctional. They've got mandatory furloughs for state employees.
(& this is on the back of the largest state economy; that's impressively bad governance.)
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It's been tried? Cool! Where?
California. (Where it has been a disaster.)
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About the best thing we can say about representative democracy is that there have been much worse systems.
Yes, one of which is rule-by-referenda.
And I think privatisation - something where public opinion seems to differ widely from that held by politicians - is a perfect candidate
Which politicians? They aren't a homogeneous mass, after all.
(And why shouldn't the same arguments apply to rates & taxes? Also things which are ours...)
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Well, you can always try and convince people to vote. And if the issue is important enough to them, they will.
This is not what has been found in the past.
(And this concept of the popular will is a bit muddled --- is it the will of the California people that the state go bankrupt? Probably not...)