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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   29937 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 12, 2024

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As @2rafa pointed out yesterday, in a Parliamentary system, the party with a one vote advantage in the House of Commons has sweeping power to do what it wants.

The United States has much greater checks on power with, in theory at least, a federal system that devolves many powers to the states. It's also much more difficult to control all three branches of government .

The joke has always been "If not for the Revolutionary War we could have turned out like Canada. The horror".

This is less funny today in light of the widespread abuse of government power in the Commonwealth countries against their people, first during Covid, and now against speech. The elites are well and truly in control there in a way they aren't, quite, in the United States. And without the salutary influence of the United States, who knows what would happen?

There has always been a totalitarian current in the UK that there hasn't been in the US. It's been mitigated over the years by the fact that the elite loved their country and its people. Now that this is no longer true, the totalitarian impulse is taking the UK and Canada to some dark places.

God bless George Washington and the founding fathers.

If Kamala Harris gets to appoint two Supreme Court Justices I suspect the 1st Amendment will be found to have a hate speech exception that coincides with what Big Tech censors you for saying.

I'm actually not sure of that. That would be pretty disappointing if it turns out that Kagan is only pretending to care about free speech.

In theory there are much stronger safeguards in Canada and Australia because of their constitutions, the UK is pretty unique in that sense.

Australia's constitution doesn't provide safeguards of rights*; it has a number of safeguards of the political process (the ban on dual-citizens serving in Parliament, for instance, is constitutional), but not of individual rights. What we've retained, we've retained via not electing parliaments that would take them away.

*There are a few things the federal government can't do due to enumerated powers, some of which (e.g. bills of attainder) would be violations of rights. The state parliaments can do those things, though (they've never done attainder TTBOMK, but they could if they wanted).

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