The wind is, um, really picking up now.
no group kisses up more than the people who already fancy themselves top of the heap.
@louis I stopped today at Clearwater Beach (fetching a car from a parking lot that might flood). It wasn’t raining, but the surf was up and the water was close on what’s usually a very broad beach. The wind — fast, strong, and warm — felt amazing.
@BenRossTransit @kentwillard @Rickperlstein a dark secret of so many social scientific hopes is that representation in a statistical sense requires compulsion, coercion. elements of the random sample can not be permitted to opt out (for nonrandom reasons, but they are all nonrandom reasons). this vexes polling and various approaches to sortition.
Sunny and gusty is not what I’d expected at this point, here in the Tampa Bay area.
“you can call it ‘more art than science.’ Or you can call it ‘intuitive.’ Or you can call it ‘trial and error.’ But you can also call it ‘made up.’” @Rickperlstein on polling https://americanprospect.bluelena.io/index.php?action=social&chash=9752d873fa71c19dc602bf2a0696f9b5.2937&s=ce07d2b5feef04b26a83a61bce292370
time to bring back america's mayor.
when i read “charges under seal” i imagine a taser sat upon by an overplump otter.
@curtosis @mattyglesias Fair enough. I do believe there was a strong tension at the founding between genuine enlightenment idealism and pragmatic fear by the wealthy, of the masses broadly, of slaves and moralists who would pursue abolition or otherwise undermine their right to property in human bodies. My “as designed” pretends there was only the former, but the latter explains a lot of the document’s pathologies, biting as hard now, 250 years later, as ever.
@curtosis @mattyglesias I agree that the reconstruction amendments were an attempt to expunge the slaving in favor of the enlightenment, a second founding it is called, but more in aspiration than in practice. In practice, those amendments did alter the country completely, cementing the supremacy of the Federal government and Constitution and in theory the rights it guarantees to all. But they fell far short of expunging the document’s more subtle poisons.
@duncan_bayne Yes. You need both an electoral system and administrative institutions capable respectively of broad representation and capable deliberation. You’re never going to have those perfectly, but to the degree you fail to approximate them, bad mistakes will be made.
A question is when/whether the role of private litigation as a check on action is net beneficial vs costly. @mattyglesias is arguing it’s net costly, but it would depend on representation and capability.
now it is eerily calm.
@STP @curtosis @mattyglesias I think the US Constitution foresees the Executive being the more active part, but tries to cabin the nature of the activity. Congress is supposed to be slower, but the constraint-setter, the “first mover” in the sense that the Executive colors inside the lines it sets, fills the gaps in a bigger picture it draws. 1/
@STP @curtosis @mattyglesias I don’t think the scale of the Executive is the problem so much as the torpor of the Legislative. The Executive needs all those people. Congress is not tasked with high-frequency work, but it is tasked with work. It has to define those lines, set those directions, each session, and actively push back against usurpations by the Executive and Judicial. 2/
@STP @curtosis @mattyglesias The combination of highly factional Executives and a sclerotic, poorly representative Legislative renders the system unable to function as intended. What emerges is an improvisation pretending to adhere to an institutional structure it must actively undermine in order to function at all, but that then functions factionally and with little legitimacy. /fin
@louis It did seem to poof out of nowhere!
I do think we are now (both!) in the outer bands. from https://www.myfoxhurricane.com/storm1_enhanced_satellite.html
Satellite image of Hurricane Helene, throwing band across the state of Florida, as far north-east as Jacksonville, south almost to the coast of Honduras.
This storm’s closest projected passage is still like 10 hours away and already everything is so ominous.
@STP @curtosis @mattyglesias Yes. In my view, the American Constitutional system remains untried. But the logic of the American Constitutional system has the House as first mover, but with acknowledgment that in some spheres (“Commander-in-Chief”) executive initiative remains necessary. The President has veto power. But his role is to take Care that the laws be faithfully executed, not to make or organizing the making of them.
@STP @curtosis @mattyglesias In practice, this should yield something like a parliamentary system with House leadership becomes “prime minister”, but with the President taking a much more active role in reducing lawmaking into practice (or resisting that) than more ceremonial heads of state in many parliamentary arrangements.
@STP @curtosis @mattyglesias There is an extra check, and extra player, in the American system. Which renders the system dangerous, unstable, incoherent **if that extra player is an oppositional partisan**. Which is why I think Presidential elections should be by something like approval voting, that elevates nobody’s favorite, but someone everyone can live with, ideally “quality” in a nonfactional sense.
@peterbutler indeed. i’ve got to wonder what it feels like, to be ostensibly one of the most powerful people on the planet but sit quietly on the losing end trying to save a quite possibly innocent life.
earlier it was a hot sunny day here in West Central Florida now all of a sudden it’s getting very windy, thundery, rainy.
@curtosis @mattyglesias I’ve read Linz and some of literature that followed. Overall my view is that there’s a good point there (what do you do when two electoral mandates conflict?) and a kind of very course grained empirical regularity, but “presidentialism” is too broad and vague a term to be evaluated as an empirical treatment, and it’s better to think through mechanisms and pathologies than simple prescribe “parliamentarism”. (cf France + Britain!) 1/
@curtosis @mattyglesias I don’t know that I know Lipset, though it’s been a few years since my reading spree on this stuff.
I agree that MMP would be a fantastic system for the US House, nicely reconciling the personalistic representation US-ians expect for constituent services and glad-handling with the proportional representation the logical place of the House in our Constitutional system desperately demands. /fin
@curtosis @mattyglesias France and Britain are both outliers in different ways among parliamentary systems. I mean, sure, they have “parliaments”. But voting in Great Britain is first-past-the-post, not anything that would approximate proportional representation. And France’s system is unusually presidential, as we just saw when Macron supervened any negotiation within parliament to form a new government. 1/
@curtosis @mattyglesias (That said, I don’t think parliamentary vs presidential is the core axis of concern. I think US-style presidentialism could work, if Presidential elections were by a system that elevates the most broadly acceptable candidate rather than any narrow factional squeakers, and if elections for House were made consistent with its Constitutional role as first-mover in US governance, rather than ceding that to the Executive.) /fin