[dh2022]

Seriously I wish we could split the country. Let the deplorables live by themselves un-vaxxed, with guns, religion and all of their other non-sense. And let us normal people live by ourselves with science and compassion.

(Unfortunately this will not happen. Because two things will have to be split: national debt and the nuclear arsenal. Heavy Sigh…)

[ratelimitsteve]

I think that a fundamental problem with democracy is that as the state indulges its natural tendency to expand and centralize it leads to a state that is the average of an increasingly large pool of citizens' opinions on how their country should work and much like how the average number of fingers on a human hand is very different from the expected number of fingers on a human hand the average of everyone's opinions on how things should work is completely different from any one person's opinion. Thus, the thing that is ostensibly designed to ensure everyone gets at least some of what they want actually ends in no one getting anything they want, and it promotes factionalism that will eventually lead to separate power structures. It's happening right now, whether its southern sheriffs refusing to enforce gun laws or northern mayors declaring their cities to be sanctuaries from federal immigration enforcement, the development of competing power structures has us hurtling toward a constitutional crisis and maybe that's not the most terrible thing? Getting there is gonna suck but maybe there's just a natural boom/bust cycle for democracies where they swing on a pendulum between "growing and consolidating power while watering down voters' intent" and "collapsing back down to a place where voters feel like they're actually part of the society they're governed by". Maybe the antifederalists were right, and this was always supposed to be several independent countries governed by a few overarching laws that should really only ever have been concerned with trade and immigration, and accepting a common currency to further enable both of those goals.