• 0 Posts
  • 22 Comments
Joined 13 days ago
cake
Cake day: May 19th, 2025

help-circle
  • I don’t have kids so I dunno if it’s still happening, but my dad had a brief and very awkward conversation with me to tell me that if I had sex to make sure to use a condom but if I ever did get a girl pregnant I could always tell him and it’d be OK, we’d figure it out, etc. Nothing fancy or anything; just the essentials to make sure I wasn’t a dumbass about sex.





  • My limited knowledge of history suggests that it’s always something really random that finally sets off a revolution. Real “straw that broke the camel’s back” stuff. For example, Mohamed Bouazizi sets himself on fire and suddenly the entire Middle East is experiencing the Arab Spring. There was a lot of discontent leading up to it, but in the grand scheme of things, nobody could have predicted that that would be the final straw.

    To borrow some terminology from Criminal Minds, there’s a difference between a stressor and a trigger.







  • That’s a rug pull, though. Both the American and EU states only agreed to join their respective unions in the first place on the promise that these systems of balances would give them this level of input on union policy. Without such assurances, what small nation would ever agree to become inevitably subordinate to the whims of a larger state? It would never happen, and the western world would remain fractured into small nation-states constantly warring with each other, failing to cooperate and probably getting picked off, one by one, by nations like China or Russia which have no such qualms about forcing a union through conquest.

    No, these unions were negotiated in good faith and if we’re unhappy with them now, then the answer should be secession. Brexit proved that nobody is forced to remain in the EU if they don’t like the deal.


  • The EU has a similar system:

    • Each EU member state gets ONE seat at the EU Council, regardless of population. This is comparable to the US Senate.
    • Differences in population size are accounted for by EU Parliament, where the number of MEPs (Members of European Parliament) a member state gets is determined by population. This is comparable to the US House of Representatives.
    • Finally there is the EU Commission which is the executive branch, comparable to the US president and cabinet.

    The point of the EU Council/US Senate is to protect isolated regions from getting steamrolled by urban regions. Farmers are comparatively few relative to city industry workers, but any nation, union or federation is built on the back of farming. However, due to the distance and lack of interaction between city dwellers and rural dwellers, it’s easy for city dwellers to grow disconnected from the reality of just how important the rural dimension is, and vote for laws that only suit the city. It is utterly necessary to create a system which balances the two. Otherwise you’d have, like, three states (New York, California, Texas) making all the decisions, with the other 47 states having to like it or lump it.