President Trump fell asleep at the 9/11 memorial ceremony.
The president dozed off at multiple points during the event Friday, slumped over in his chair with his eyes closed and his head hanging down while everyone else onstage—Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, Melania Trump, and former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice—was clearly awake.
🫂 I voted for someone in jail for wearing black.
Electoralists are really hounding you, when they should have ended First-past-the-post millennia ago.
It’s probably easier to just blame me than look at the absurdity of what Democrats did in 2024 and admit it to themselves.
As far as voting reform goes, the American people have been powerless to do that in any meaningful way for our entire history. The founders only gave wealthy, landowning men the right to vote. There was never any real intention for the poor or working class to be able to select a president. Our only real political power is local, and at least locally, good things are still possible. (For now.)
It’s plenty easy to blame both.
Not for a partisan ideologue.
Millennia ago there was Athenian democracy. Randomly select citizens to fill roles in judiciary, executive council and assembly for a year. Pretty hard to corrupt. Worked well for centuries, they even returned to it after king making coups. Representative democracy was corrupt and serving the rich and powerful about day one. Sure, first past the post is awful, but there’s higher things to aim for than Instant-runoff or whatever. Direct democracy is more viable than ever.
I am intrigued by the roman system of electing two of every position for one year terms. They wouldn’t elect one proconsul (leading an army contingent or something of the like,) but two. Sometimes in a campaign it reached absurd levels as each would take turns leading the army every day.
But what we should do, and this is a moonshot that would take time, is a new constitutional amendment establishing a Tribunate, the tribune with the power to veto acts of government, provide asylum to the accused, whose own safety is invoilable.
The Roman peasants got the tribunes in 500 bc then 350 bc they expanded it in two general strikes, where they encamped to one of their great hills and refused to work until they got reforms, the tribunate being one. It was organized by tribe I think. They also forced a written set of laws in the first one iirc, the twelve tables, as the rich just made shit up as they went prior.