Comments by "" (@RedXlV) on "The Majority Report w/ Sam Seder"
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The caller is completley and utterly worng about everything, and so are you. There was no coup in 2014. Yanukovych was not "neutral", he was an autocrat who sought to become the Lukashenko of Ukraine and fully aligned himself with Russia in pursuit of that goal. Despite the fact that seeking EU membership was overwhelmingly popular in Ukraine and Yanukovych had made a campaign promise to seek EU intergation, he instead refused to sign the assoociation agreement and instead pivoted to Russia.
The elected government of Ukraine never was overthrown. What actually happened was that Yanukovych was was impeached by the elected parliament. No "puppet leader" was ever installed. An acting president took office, as Ukraine's constitution requires, pending an election 3 months later in which a new president was elected.
Russia doesn't get to have "red lines" in other countries. It's quite literally none of their business whether Ukraine joins NATO or not. And the "promise to Gorbachev" you refer to never existed. The notion that a promise was made not to accept Eastern European nations into NATO is a lie that Russia has been telling with increasing frequency for the last 20 years, but repetition of that lie doesn't transform it into truth. The only actual "existential threat to survival here" is that Russian aggression is an existential threat to Ukraine's survival.
As for your disingenuous lament that "the West will use this to justify the existence of NATO in the first place"? Russia's aggression does prove that the continued existence of NATO is justified, and even necessary. Dissolving NATO when the Warsaw Pact dissolved would've been hopelessly naive. NATO is not like the Warsaw Pact. NATO is a willing alliance of democracies. The Warsaw Pact was an "alliance" imposed at gunpoint by a conqueror. And your phony analogy about a completely imaginary "Chinese NATO equivalent being placed in Mexico or Canada" is just nonsense. Nobody was putting missiles in Ukraine pointed at Russia.
It's you who's not just wrong but arrogant about being wrong. Jeffrey Sachs is not a scholar of any kind. He's a tinfoil hat conspiracy theorist. And Mearsheimer's "analysis" is simply a declaration that might makes right, and thus Europe is supposed to bow down to Russia.
Nobody "sabotaged the Istanbul talks", not Boris Johnson and not anyone else. The talks failed because the "peace deal" Putin offered to Ukraine was that Ukraine would have to agree to almost complete demilitarization, with an army of less than 100,000 and not be allowed to have any tanks or missiles. In other words, he was demanding that Ukraine must render itself completely defenseless in the fact of the next Russian invasion. Given that Russia had just invaded Ukraine three times in the previous eight years it was obvious that Ukraine would never agree to such a "deal".
Declaring that it's impossible for Ukraine to defeat Russia is quite a lot like insisting that it was impossible for North Vietnam to defeat America. An invaded nation doesn't just roll over and die without a fight just because the invader is a larger nation.
BTW, Donbas is not an ethnically Russian area. Ethnic Russians are just under 1/3 of the population in Donbas. And the claim that the people of Donbas wanted to join Russia is completely baseless. Nor were the people of Donbas being bombed by Ukraine. The Russian invaders in Donbas were being bombed by Ukraine. And a deal in which Ukraine agrees to "stay out of NATO", again, is a deal under which Russia gets to invade them again with complete impunity.
Putin is an imperialist warmonger who's made it very clear that he does want to conquer Ukraine. He's given (completely unhinged) speeches in which he openly stated that he considers it an aberration for an independent Ukraine to exist outside of Russia. This isn't about "US benevolence", it's about Russian imperialism. If the US government's motivations for opposing Russian imperialism are not actually benevolent, frankly who cares. Actions matter more than intentions, and it's Russia that's making the imperialist actions here.
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@robertjenkins6132 Increasing the size of the House is also something that absolutely needs to be done, though. If you compare it to the other democracies in the world, our legislature is shockingly small relative to our population. The House has been at 435 seats since 1913, when the US population was 97 million. The population as of last year was 327 million. That leaves us with one Representative per 752,000 people. To bring the ratio of House seats to population back to the level that it was in 1913, we'd need nearly 1,500 Representatives.
And that would still be a very small size relative to the total US population. By comparison, for example, Germany has 709 members of its Bundestag to represent a total population of 83 million. And the UK's House of Commons has 650 members to represent 66 million people. For the House of Representatives to have a similar ratio would require around 3,000 seats.
While the electoral college is still an idiotic system, an enlarged House would largely nullify the biggest problem with it, the fact that somebody can easily lose the popular vote but still win the election. Those extra two electoral votes per state for the Senate seats would no longer skew things so much in favor of the small states, if even tiny Wyoming and Vermont would each get 5 House seats.
Currently Wyoming has 3 electoral votes, or one per 192,500 people. With a 3,000 seat House, they'd have 7, or one per 82,500 people. Currently California has 55 electoral votes, or one per 719,200 people. With a 3,000 seat House, they'd have 365 electoral votes, or one per 108,400 people. That's still not actual "one person, one vote" for for a presidential election, but it's a hell of a lot closer than what we have now.
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@gaeron1305 I figure that because I can do basic math. No candidate can get a majority of the popular vote by only paying attention to 10-15 states. While it's true that the 10 largest state contain a majority of the US population, electoral college apologists (deliberately) ignore the fact that no candidate is ever going to get all of the votes in those states. Even in deep-blue California and New York, about 40% of the vote went to Trump (the most hated candidate by Democrats ever). Despite him losing that state in a landslide, California still had more Trump voters than any other state. 6 million Californians voted for him, compared to 5.9 million Texans. And again, that's just about the worst outcome a Republican can get in California. Even if you assume that in a nationwide popular vote election, the Democrat would pay a lot more attention to California and thus pick up more votes there...your argument ignores the fact that the highest-population states are very different from each other. There's not going to be a candidate who can pull of landslide, super-majority wins in California and also have great appeal in Texas and Florida. If you look at the top 10-15 states that you think would be all anybody pays attention to in a popular vote election, you'll see that some of them are deep blue states, some are deep red states, and some are purple states. While the top 15 states are nearly 2/3 of the US population, it's not possible for any candidate to have broad enough appeal to get a majority of the vote out of just those states.
The reality is that if the presidential election were decided by popular vote, candidates would spreading their attention to every state, because they'd need to rack up as many votes as possible. Every vote would be equally valuable, whereas under the electoral college most votes can be taken for granted because we already know which way most states will vote. We have 24 states that always vote Republican and 17+DC that always vote Democratic. So the remaining 9 states are the only ones candidates have to pay attention to. The only reason for them to visit any of the other states are to raise money.
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@chuckm1961 The original Zionists were completely upfront about the fact that they were colonizers. And why wouldn't they be? It wasn't until the 1950s that anybody in Europe thought of colonialism as a bad thing. In the 19th and early 20th century, colonialism was openly celebrated as being the height of civilization.
Theodor Herzl, founder of Zionism and revered in Israel as "the spiritual father of the Jewish State", openly and proudly declared in the 19th century that Jews would colonize Palestine, and that they would do so directly following the British Empire's model of colonizing the Americas and Africa. To support this endeavor, the Zionist movement would establish such companies as the "Jewish Colonisation Association" (1891), "Jewish Colonial Trust" (1899), and "Palestine Jewish Colonization Association" (1924).
Herzl and his World Zionist Organization insisted on using the colonial model because if European Jews asked for permission to immigrate to Palestine, the existing population could say no. By colonizing Palestine, they would take away the existing population's ability to reject their takeover of the land. This was not a secret, it was their openly-declared intention.
It's only now in the 21st century, when the vast majority of the world considers "colonialism" a dirty word, that supporters of Israel started denying that their country was founded by colonization. Israel isn't unique in that regard. Many nations were founded by colonization. Every single nation in the Americas originated out of colonialism, for example. The difference, of course, is that Israeli colonialism is still ongoing.
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@aheroictaxidriver3180 The problem with that idea is that the Constitution absolutely forbids having a different number of Senators per state. That's the one type of amendment that's absolutely forbidden. If we were to have the Senate be population-based, we'd have to scrap the entire Constitution in favor of a new one. And as polarized as America is today, that's impossible. There would be no way to create a new Constitution that would be widely accepted.
If you wanted to make the electoral college be entirely population-based, you'd have to pass an amendment so that states only get one electoral vote per House member and not any for their Senators. That would mean that Wyoming would have 1 electoral vote and California would get 52, compared to their current 3 and 54. And the total electoral votes would be 436 instead of 538. The problem with that would be that you'd have a hard time convincing all of the smaller states to accept such a reduction in their electoral power, and you need the approval of 38 states for a constitutional amendment to pass.
Another fix would be to get Congress to repeal the Permanent Apportionment Act of 1929 and significantly increase the size of the House of Representatives. It's been 435 seats 1913, and over that time, the US population has more than tripled. If instead of 435 House seats we had 1,305 of them, that would greatly diminish the electoral advantage given to the smallest states. It would have the added advantage of making gerrymandering much more difficult. Since House districts are required to have contiguous borders and to be of approximately equal population, the more House districts a state has, the harder gerrymandering becomes. (As an aside, if all 12 of the proposed Bill of Rights amendments had been ratified by the states instead of just 10 of them, the House would have around 6,000 seats now. 1st US Congress had wanted to set it so that each House district would contain about 50,000 people. The average as of the 2020 Census is 761,179 people per district.)
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The original Zionists were completely upfront about the fact that they were colonizers. And why wouldn't they be? It wasn't until the 1950s that anybody in Europe thought of colonialism as a bad thing. In the 19th and early 20th century, colonialism was openly celebrated as being the height of civilization.
Theodor Herzl, founder of Zionism and revered in Israel as "the spiritual father of the Jewish State", openly and proudly declared in the 19th century that Jews would colonize Palestine, and that they would do so directly following the British Empire's model of colonizing the Americas and Africa. To support this endeavor, the Zionist movement would establish such companies as the "Jewish Colonisation Association" (1891), "Jewish Colonial Trust" (1899), and "Palestine Jewish Colonization Association" (1924).
Herzl and his World Zionist Organization insisted on using the colonial model because if European Jews asked for permission to immigrate to Palestine, the existing population could say no. By colonizing Palestine, they would take away the existing population's ability to reject their takeover of the land. This was not a secret, it was their openly-declared intention.
It's only now in the 21st century, when the vast majority of the world considers "colonialism" a dirty word, that supporters of Israel started denying that their country was founded by colonization.
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