With This Ring (Young Justice SI) (Thread Fourteen)

[Someguy Somewhere]

The Electoral College part has always baffled me, in that your voting to let other people vote, but your vote doesn't actually make THEM vote the way you voted., it just advises them to. It's a bit like the (Canadian) Senate, which is supposed to be a 'sane second look' at legal issues, but ends up being a rather costly club house for appointed political friends.

A lot of modern systems are there to uphold the majority while protecting the minority. But there's always a cost to trying to have it both ways.

 

[Mr Zoat]

The Electoral College part has always baffled me, in that your voting to let other people vote, but your vote doesn't actually make THEM vote the way you voted., it just advises them to. It's a bit like the (Canadian) Senate, which is supposed to be a 'sane second look' at legal issues, but ends up being a rather costly club house for appointed political friends.

A lot of modern systems are there to uphold the majority while protecting the minority. But there's always a cost to trying to have it both ways.

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I tend to assume that originally it existed due to the practical problems of communicating the results of the election to a central point.

 

[Sockmonkey]

Basically yeah: the idea behind the government here is that it's way too big to govern as a single entity:

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It's been said that the US is just a bunch of little countries hiding under a trench coat so they can sit at the table for big countries.

 

[hkim]

"And that lesson wouldn't be anything like as affective if she merely said that she valued honesty but constantly lied.

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Effective.

 

[Mr Zoat]

Effective.

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Thank you, corrected.

 

[RedX]

The Electoral College (and the US Constitution in general) is what happens when a bunch of educated elite guys whose entire history with democratic governance is a mish-mash of English Common Law and half-correct, half-fictionalized histories of Athens and the Roman Republic, all try to put together a democratic republic from scratch. Nobody had done anything like this, on this scale, in something like two millennia- the best they had was literally ancient history, some half-baked enlightenment philosophy, and a few city-state republics of wildly varying outcome.

So, when they sat down to write this whole thing out, they sort of threw everything and the kitchen sink in. Proportional representation, jurisdictional representation, divided powers between national and state, a really vague court system that later ended up defining itself into relevance, etc. etc. They were also quite concerned about their revolution going the way of Oliver Cromwell's, a rather immediate case study that did not turn out particularly well for the revolutionaries.

It's no wonder there was a bunch of stuff in there that later democratic governments decided to skip.

Still, the electoral college does retain one modern function: it's a weighting function on state's votes, giving slightly more power to the less-populous states. In this it serves much like the Senate as a balancing factor against pure majoritarianism.

 

[Mr Zoat]

Still, the electoral college does retain one modern function: it's a weighting function on state's votes, giving slightly more power to the less-populous states. In this it serves much like the Senate as a balancing factor against pure majoritarianism.

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I have been told that answering this last point would definately violate the 'no modern politics' ban, so I won't.

 

[RedX]

I have been told that answering this last point would definately violate the 'no modern politics' ban, so I won't.

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Eh, no worries. The fact that it serves that function is simple knowledge; whether that's a good or bad thing would definitely get into political territory.

Either way, it's definitely a strange critter among modern democracies, like several things the US does. Note that, even when the US advises new foreign governments in "how do you democracy", we usually end up pointing towards a parliamentarian system instead of our own. Always the exception- whether it's because it's exceptional, the exception that proves the rule, or just exceptionally silly is a matter for taste and debate.

 

[PDV]

"You and Socrates, Luna. You and Socrates."

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This is not true. Plato hated democracy because he was butthurt over democracy killing his teacher/crush/idol Socrates. Even then, late in his life he mellowed out and admitted that his Republic was actually a terrible idea.

The one dialogue which definitely represents Socrates's views faithfully rather than using Socrates as a mouthpiece for Plato's opinions is The Trial and Death of Socrates. In it, Socrates refuses to go into exile, which his friends and students can arrange and the government makes no attempt to prevent, because he believes in the legitimacy of Athenian government and in 'taking your lumps', even when the de jure sentence (death by hemlock) was not the de facto sentence that the court assumed it was imposing (exile). Socrates was very strongly pro-democracy.

 

[Zig]

to actually affect change

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to actually effect change

I will never pass up the opportunity to point out when effect sh0uld be used as a verb (or affect as a noun)

 

[Coda]

actually affect change

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Ah, ninja'd.

Not a chance in hell... Maybe it worked well enough when there were only thirteen colonies drawn together into a nation, but as things expanded.. Well.

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It's not about the number, it's about...

I tend to assume that originally it existed due to the practical problems of communicating the results of the election to a central point.

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... this. Needing it to be people instead of just a conclusion was a technical implementation detail to account for how long it would take the answer to get from the state to the seat of government, and one of the hypothetical possibilities under consideration that made the founders not make it a requirement for the electors to be legally bound to their elected stance was the possibility that circumstances would change between the time that the votes were counted in the state and the time that the electors met to cast the deciding vote. Some examples might be if one of the candidates were to suddenly pass away or commit some heinous act in that interim period; the founders wanted the electors to have the flexibility to adapt to represent what their constituents would have wanted in such a circumstance.

To the best of my knowledge, this has never happened, and that motivating factor has been obsolete since it became possible for information to travel across the continent in a reasonable amount of time.

There's still an argument for the same apportionment rules to apply in an information age society, as has been mentioned. Some things are better expressed as weighing the interests of regions against each other instead of weighing the interests of individual people against each other. It's the entire reason the Senate and the House use different apportionment rules. (After all, food producers necessarily represent a smaller fraction of the population than food consumers while needing a proportionally larger amount of land area per capita. A strict population-based apportionment might discriminate against food producers in a way that would be bad for society as a whole.)

 

[l---erddad---l]

I tend to assume that originally it existed due to the practical problems of communicating the results of the election to a central point.

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ORIGINALLY, the idea was that the electoral college would make sure that educated people were the ones making the final decision due to the lack of easy communication and lack of universal education back then. Whether it has its own merits nowadays or not is besides the point as to why it was created.

 

[Cuchulin]

I tend to assume that originally it existed due to the practical problems of communicating the results of the election to a central point.

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That and the USA was set up as a Republic where only White men with enough money to own some land could vote. Also upper class men from the southern colonies like Washington and Jefferson usually fancied them selves landed gentry. Also it was all part of a balancing act to keep anyone state from having to much influence over the central government.

This is not true. Plato hated democracy because he was butthurt over democracy killing his teacher/crush/idol Socrates. Even then, late in his life he mellowed out and admitted that his Republic was actually a terrible idea.
The one dialogue which definitely represents Socrates's views faithfully rather than using Socrates as a mouthpiece for Plato's opinions is The Trial and Death of Socrates. In it, Socrates refuses to go into exile, which his friends and students can arrange and the government makes no attempt to prevent, because he believes in the legitimacy of Athenian government and in 'taking your lumps', even when the de jure sentence (death by hemlock) was not the de facto sentence that the court assumed it was imposing (exile). Socrates was very strongly pro-democracy.

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No, Socrates wasn't pro-Democracy. He was a more or less pro-Spartan conservative as were a lot of his students, it is know that young men of a similar background formed gang the went around dressed up as Spartans (or at least what they thought Spartans dressed) and went around causing trouble. Also we know that at least (i think two) of the Tyrannical Oligarch alliances that took over Athens by force during Socrates adult hood had former students of his and it's well known that he was ordered by those Oligarchs (including a student of his) to go home, stay there and stop causing trouble by "philosophizing" in public. Which he did or at east kept his head down enough that he wasn't executed for being a huge pain in the back side by the Oligarchs.
Also Socrates main shtick (at least in Plato's dialogs) was question things, question the answers you get and keep going until you have made the person you are talking to look like an idiot by twisting their words.

 

[Orabilis]

What was the point of this chapter? I appreciate that not every chapter in a free web serial needs to have a point necessarily. It could just be amusing for the writer to write, however it is quite boring to have the basics of the American electoral system explained in this fic again. And it is skirting pretty close to the no politics rule which seems like an unnecessary risk for a chapter that has no immediate impact on the renegade story.

Are we likely to see Luna make any decisions in the future using this new knowledge? If so what do we think those might be? She thinks that the American government is bad because leaders cannot survive making highly unpopular decisions, fair enough, what was the reason Celestia released what she thought was an undying evil on her own populace, I don't think this fic has brought it up?

 

[Darko]

What was the point of this chapter? I appreciate that not every chapter in a free web serial needs to have a point necessarily. It could just be amusing for the writer to write, however it is quite boring to have the basics of the American electoral system explained in this fic again. And it is skirting pretty close to the no politics rule which seems like an unnecessary risk for a chapter that has no immediate impact on the renegade story.

Are we likely to see Luna make any decisions in the future using this new knowledge? If so what do we think those might be? She thinks that the American government is bad because leaders cannot survive making highly unpopular decisions, fair enough, what was the reason Celestia released what she thought was an undying evil on her own populace, I don't think this fic has brought it up?

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I think Zoat was just baiting people and the mods after he got a warning for that thing in sex ed policies.

Celestia may have decided to release Discord because she wanted to reform him, plus at least then they wouldn't need to lock him up again, which may be extremely difficult, if he escapes again.

They may not be able to kill him and the next time he escaped there may not have been any Element bearers to imprison him.

 

[Orabilis]

I think Zoat was just baiting people and the mods after he got a warning for that thing in sex ed policies.

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I hope that isn't the case. I totally understand rankling at mod interference especially in something that isn't considered politics in England but is elsewhere, we've been through this from SB and SV and everything but to hold the quality of ones work (the prime reason one would care about mod interference in the first place) to hostage would be sad. There are a lot of lurkers who have not interacted beyond reading the fic who would be punished if the fic becomes a pseudo-battlefield for complaining about outside interference to say nothing of the fic having to move again.

I used to love this fic for its ability to maintain pacing over an absurdly long wordcount but I don't know if I would keep reading if tangents become more of the focus. I probably would, the sunk cost fallacy is a hell of a drug as any soap opera writer would tell you, but it would be sad.

 

[Vaermina]

I think Zoat was just baiting people and the mods after he got a warning for that thing in sex ed policies.

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Given that was the exact same thing he did on SV, you probably aren't wrong.

 

[Chaoswind]

What was the point of this chapter? I appreciate that not every chapter in a free web serial needs to have a point necessarily. It could just be amusing for the writer to write, however it is quite boring to have the basics of the American electoral system explained in this fic again. And it is skirting pretty close to the no politics rule which seems like an unnecessary risk for a chapter that has no immediate impact on the renegade story.

Are we likely to see Luna make any decisions in the future using this new knowledge? If so what do we think those might be? She thinks that the American government is bad because leaders cannot survive making highly unpopular decisions, fair enough, what was the reason Celestia released what she thought was an undying evil on her own populace, I don't think this fic has brought it up?

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Are you blind? This is an update om the D plot of the renegade timeline with the incoming US election, the last thing that happened was that Shade high command turned traitor and was trying to replace Horne and Knight with robots... In the renegade timeline this failed... On paragon... Who knows.

 

[PDV]

No, Socrates wasn't pro-Democracy. He was a more or less pro-Spartan conservative as were a lot of his students, it is know that young men of a similar background formed gang the went around dressed up as Spartans (or at least what they thought Spartans dressed) and went around causing trouble. Also we know that at least (i think two) of the Tyrannical Oligarch alliances that took over Athens by force during Socrates adult hood had former students of his and it's well known that he was ordered by those Oligarchs (including a student of his) to go home, stay there and stop causing trouble by "philosophizing" in public. Which he did or at east kept his head down enough that he wasn't executed for being a huge pain in the back side by the Oligarchs.
Also Socrates main shtick (at least in Plato's dialogs) was question things, question the answers you get and keep going until you have made the person you are talking to look like an idiot by twisting their words.

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If he was a pro-Spartan conservative, then why didn't he take the abundant opportunities to leave Athens when he was sentenced to death? Everything you say is circumstantial, and his actions don't match it. He was a gadfly, edgelord, and general little bitch, and if many of his students were as well that wouldn't be surprising and would explain the Spartan costume stuff. Also remember that he primarily defined himself in opposition to the sophists, who were even more closely associated with the Oligarchs.

 

[Pinklestia]

No, politics would be if he was talking about current politics events or if the two fictional candidates were too similar to the two current candidates.

If he was talking about Nixon it would be historical because he is long dead.

Explaining the flaws in the systems can get political but only if you use it to attack politicians.

-Deleted-

 

[Mr Zoat]

No, politics would be if he was talking about current politics events or if the two fictional candidates were too similar to the two current candidates.

If he was talking about Nixon it would be historical because he is long dead.

Explaining the flaws in the systems can get political but only if you use it to attack politicians.

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That's what I though, but it turns out that's wrong.

I'm sorry, I don't understand. How is an electoral system over two hundred years old 'modern' politics?

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To be honest, if it was only that, it would have been alright. But then I see lines like

Congratulations for being a supporter of suppression of minorities~

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That change all the time? Take California for example, it was safely voting Republican until 1988. How about when Bush won in 2000? West Virginia was supposed to be a solid blue state but those 4 votes where crucial and he earned them. Flipping states because your opponent is not supporting their own base.

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Anyways with that argument your saying that congress is depriving us of our rights simply because it exists! Afterall big states have more voters so why should they have equal say in that part of the government as teeny tiny states.

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Oh yeah let's let all 5 or so top cities decide who the president is. Ignore the rest of the people in the country. pure democracy's implode for a reason

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And frankly, it toes the line so hard it had to stop. Some people can't seem to stop sniping about RL.

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Now, I'd think that if some people were acting up in a discussion that didn't otherwise break any rules, the thing to do would be to warn/thread ban those individuals. But clearly whatever dispute happened here prior to my arrival was such a big deal that that approach was abandoned.

 

[Megaolix]

No, politics would be if he was talking about current politics events or if the two fictional candidates were too similar to the two current candidates.

If he was talking about Nixon it would be historical because he is long dead.

Explaining the flaws in the systems can get political but only if you use it to attack politicians.

-Deleted-

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I'm just going to stop you here and quote this.

"The last twenty years" isn't meant to refer to disputes that only existed within the last twenty years, but rather to disputes that have been live controversy within that time.

The electoral college is a matter of modern political debate, even if it's two hundred years old. Likewise sex ed in public schools. The exemption for older topics is for things that were controversial in the past but aren't really under debate now.

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[Cuchulin]

If he was a pro-Spartan conservative, then why didn't he take the abundant opportunities to leave Athens when he was sentenced to death? Everything you say is circumstantial, and his actions don't match it. He was a gadfly, edgelord, and general little bitch, and if many of his students were as well that wouldn't be surprising and would explain the Spartan costume stuff. Also remember that he primarily defined himself in opposition to the sophists, who were even more closely associated with the Oligarchs.

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Because he wanted his death to be a big F you to Athenian Democracy, Athens was his home and also why would he want go else where? It's unlikely that other cities would allow him to be a gadfly and another dialect of Greek could make it harder for him to use his little tricks to twist others words.
Also Sparta as a idea was pretty popular with the Classical Greeks as they were badasses that were seen as being more "Greek" in some ways then most other Greeks. They were seen as up holding traditions and traditional virtues as Greek culture at the time mostly favored their aristocratic traditions, the "Greek bible" and the books everyone read as part of their education were the works of Homer.
Lastly while he may have defined himself in opposition to the sophists, they were a group/school of thought that was more or less popular. Socrates was just one guy that was a pain in the ass and who was closely linked to Alcibiades (A Athenian general who was blamed for a bunch of things including the failure of a attack on Sicilians. He defected to Sparta and later the Persians.) who was not only a leader of the Thirty Tyrants, a group of Oligarchs backed by Sparta that had recently been over thrown when Socrates was put on trial, but he had helped organize a short lived Tyrannical Oligarchy known as the Four Hundred. The Athenian play write and poet Critias, cousin of Plato, was also a member of the Thirty and a former student of Socrates
My sources are what i remember from reading I.F. Stone's book The Trail of Socrates, various other books about Ancient Greece, Ancient history, Documentaries about Sparta and Ancient Greece on Youtube as well as a check of Wikipedia.

 

[protoss16]

How did the discussion on rule 8 start?

 

[LurkingInTheDeceit]

How did the discussion on rule 8 start?

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See the latest chapter, quite a few posters that read it had the immediate reaction of wondering about rule 8. Though it was also an extension of the discussion wondering if sex education ran afoul of the rule a bit back.

 

[zerofarad]

to actually affect change…

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"Effect change" is a more common idiom but both are viable here: are we bringing about change (effect) or altering change which is already underway (affect)?

(Well, in practice presumably both, but which do you prefer to emphasize?)

 

[Darko]

Are you blind? This is an update om the D plot of the renegade timeline with the incoming US election, the last thing that happened was that Shade high command turned traitor and was trying to replace Horne and Knight with robots... In the renegade timeline this failed... On paragon... Who knows.

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I think Zoat could have made an update on that particular plot point without getting close to violating rule 8.

 

[hkim]

"Effect change" is a more common idiom but both are viable here: are we bringing about change (effect) or altering change which is already underway (affect)?

(Well, in practice presumably both, but which do you prefer to emphasize?)

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Yeah, the one in the story is right. "Affect" is a verb, "effect" is a noun in these cases. If you can affect something you can see the effect you had on it after c:

 

[Lord Ernest]

I, personally, don't think that the story post is violating any rule precisely. Grayven, the Renegade and a character in the story, is just sharing information and a bit of his opinion with his magical equine girlfriend, on political matters of the fictional setting which, yes, mimics RL but doesn't specifically references it nor does he advocates for a position one way or the other.

The problem is that then everyone wants to share an opinion and start a debate on it, maybe with good intentions, maybe to expand on the obviously incomplete information that the character has or maybe because they disagree with the opinion on the character. And that almost always gets close to the rules, because the debaters never seem to just take a step back and let it go. We are, after all, in the internet.

I simply advocate for letting the matter go. It is a small sub-plot of the Renegade storyline because he got involved in politics and is helping Luna in political matters in Wilson as well. But do we have to debate on politics just because of that? Can't we just talk about something else instead of getting close to the line? Can't we just let it go?

On my part, I want to see Luna finally try humanoid form, to see how it goes. And I cannot deny that the image that Zoat keeps sharing of her humanoid form is playing a big role in my interest. Besides that, we haven't seen Grayven check on his off planet interests and I want to know what's going on with his Corps and with the Kryptonian clones. Maybe nothing, or maybe there is another storyline there waiting to happen. Stuff more interesting that the latest iteration of With This Ring getting close to sensitive matters, in my opinion.

 

[Mr Zoat]

"Effect change" is a more common idiom but both are viable here: are we bringing about change (effect) or altering change which is already underway (affect)?

(Well, in practice presumably both, but which do you prefer to emphasize?)

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Thank you, corrected.

I think Zoat could have made an update on that particular plot point without getting close to violating rule 8.

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To be fair, literally everything violates rule 8.