Term Limits Are Stupid

[thenondualtankie]

Your neighborhood social democrat Kyle Kulinski has made a video on term limits.

He says he's mostly against term limits because it can lead to authoritarians like Putin or Erdogan staying in power for too long.

But too long according to whom? Definitely not according to the Russian or Turkish population!

A bigger danger than democratically elected tyrants is undemocratically elected tyrants. And arguably that's exactly what the USA faces today, with undemocratic state apparatus such as the CIA wielding immense power. Many members of the CIA have said that the CIA views Presidents as temporary officers who come and go, while the CIA themselves stay in power. In fact, there have been cases where secrets have been withheld from Presidents: JFK was allegedly not fully briefed on the Bay of Pigs invasion, for instance.

Here is a great video on the so-called 'deep state', which explores the issue of undemocratic power in the United States.

Term limits are stupid because they lead to a lack of proper leadership and vision, since the leadership and vision has to get shuffled around every 8 years. As a result, undemocratic state apparatus fills that gap and provides the missing leadership and vision for us.

[BlueOak]

One man wielding this much power is what's stupid, the entire governing apparatus and narcissism of it all is broken beyond belief.

Now people propose to make the problem worse, by having that one man in power longer. Then all the successes and failures of either the country or sometimes the entire planet combined get tacked on to his name, it's so dumbed down.

As opposed to having a diverse, (yes I know many of you are trained to hate that word), collection of viewpoints in a ruling council where the collective can find some balance. You have a single individual mind, that vastly unbalances every area of society; it doesn't represent itself adequately, and wastes all its energy suppressing or removing parts of itself that are in direct opposition to its values. No, I don't mean democratic and republican, I mean everything that isn't Democrat and Republican, the entire rest of creation, and every possibility in it.

My bias, your bias, Donald Trump's bias, cannot adequately represent tens or hundreds of millions of people in any meaningful or useful way. Making a president replaced, as you say, by something behind the scenes that tries to spread out that top-level institutional governance to a certain degree. Instead of bringing that into plain view, and setting it up in the best way possible at the top of the increasingly small pyramid that the human race operates in and fights to maintain,

Someone will say below we have a parliament, a senate, or a house. Yes you do, increasingly undermined, but you do, and that helps when it's empowered, not whipped along two-party lines. When it's allowed to operate with many viewpoints, it can represent many people.

Ultimately, it's a house with the same problem I am describing. One person represents millions from each region. I would understand if it were a speaker representing a council, but no, its a speaker representing often personal ego, ambition, or goals.

Edited April 3 by BlueOak

[sholomar]

The more checks and balances against the concentration of power and wealth the better. I'd implement lifetime term limits for all politicians, to prevent people from having "career political" positions. I'd place strict limits on being able to donate money to politicians and corporate influence in politics.  I'd imagine each side goes back and forth on this issue depending on who's in power at the time, because any "side" ultimately wants unchecked power. Thankfully they don't get it. Personally I'd abolish "executive order" power in the United States also. Everything that is implemented should have to be through a vote in house and senate.

It's probably human nature that dictates that every great nation has it's "secret service" type institutions where information is compartmentalized to maintain plausible deniability and even presidents aren't aware of everything that goes on.  Really, human nature itself is the issue. We must keep evolving. Whether we genetically engineer the species or simply allow time to pass, our species will change and grow and so will our values. I get that many here believe it's not occurring fast enough for them, but if you look at the entirety of the 5 million years of evolution from apes, the rate of growth the last 100-500 years has been quite frankly insane, especially since the advent of the computer chip, but we are still stuck with primitive hardware/DNA. It's among the reason things like anxiety disorders are so rampant, and people do things that seem to be "evil" by the definition of some.  It's also why I don't trust autocratic types of government... you are left in a position to trust the person in control at any given time isn't going to be a psychopath, given psychopaths have a drive for power and seek it, by diving power you lesson that risk.

 

Edited April 3 by sholomar

[DocWatts]

In regards to the so-called 'Deep State', the difficulty here is that what American fascists (i.e., Trump and the MAGA wing of the Republican Party) call the 'Deep State' is in effect the administrative apparatus that allows government departments to carry out their duties.

The vast majority of these positions aren't political in nature, they are low and mid level professionals with expertise in a given area (such as taxes, law, food safety, education, or environmental science). The reason that Trump and his cohorts at the Heritage Foundation want to dismantle the administrative state is because is serves as a check on their ability to carry out an authoritarian coup (under the guise of populism, no less). Project 2025 is an effort to replace these nonpolitical positions with vetted Trump loyalists who would give him a rubber stamp to skirt the law and weaponize the state against his political opponents.

Edited April 3 by DocWatts

[thenondualtankie]

1 hour ago, sholomar said:

. I get that many here believe it's not occurring fast enough for them, but if you look at the entirety of the 5 million years of evolution from apes, the rate of growth the last 100-500 years has been quite frankly insane, especially since the advent of the computer chip, but we are still stuck with primitive hardware/DNA.

Very interesting point. I think more specifically we'd need to make ourselves 100x more outgoing. Our brains work with tribes of a few hundred people at most - if we scaled this number up to 100,000 we'd end up with a much more cohesive society.

1 hour ago, sholomar said:

The more checks and balances against the concentration of power and wealth the better.

Then why have any concentration of power and wealth in the first place? You need to concentrate power and wealth to do anything meaningful in society. And if it's the case that your society needs some concentration of power, you may as well operate that through democracy - otherwise, as I said, undemocratic institutions will concentrate the power for you.

[Leo Gura]

Term limits are important. Otherwise someone gets in power who rigs the system to forever stay in power.

Edited April 3 by Leo Gura

[Nivsch]

@thenondualtankie I can make you to maybe change a bit your mind just from looking of what is going on in my country during last years and today that doesn't have yet term limits.

Edited April 3 by Nivsch

[r0ckyreed]

1 hour ago, Leo Gura said:

Term limits are important. Otherwise someone gets in power who rigs the system to forever stay in power.

Supreme Court 101

[bebotalk]

His point is confusing. He's against term limits since they allow people to stay in power? then this makes term limits sound, right?