Well, the Popeis the absolute sovereign dictator of Church dogma, so if he says tomorrow that Luigi is a saint, then all 1 billion Catholics worldwide must listen

Pope Francis has the opportunity to do the funniest thing here

Look, I’m just engaging in critical thinking here. I don’t believe everything I read on the Internet especially since people love just making up random crap just so they can have a story to tell.

How would this commenter know that?

Thank you for essentially repeating my point

When you make up your own religion you can set the rules to be whatever you want, including refusing to eat pumpkin pie

Slightly related, but apparently people also do this to the testicles of the Charging Bull statue in New York City.

Can someone explain this one to me?

From a formal logic perspective, your statement is true. But in real life, the more important distinction is not between “true” and “false”, but between “purposefully deceptive and ungenuine disinformation” versus “outspoken dissenting viewpoint”. And that is one that people are really bad at telling the difference between, especially if the viewpoint in particular is one that they hold very strongly.

!asklemmy@lemmy.world has over 70 times as many subscribers as the other two asklemmy communities combined.

I’m sure the Democratic Party of the 1960s would surely agree with this graphic.

That feeling when you change the law to force your crush to use the same toilet as yourself

If we allow the least populous state, Wyoming, to have three representatives, then that gives about 192,000 constituents per representative. So the House of Representatives would have about 1,720 members. Some substantial remodelling of the Capitol may have to be done. This would be enough people to fill a concert hall, but that’s not undoable.

Fill the standing body by collecting nominations. Each member can nominate exactly one member to the standing body. A member who collects exactly ten nominations will sit in the standing body. This means the standing body has 172 members.

A praesidium would be elected by the standing body’s political groups consisting of a president and several vice-presidents. In a proposed American system, they would probably have the title “speaker” and “deputy speaker”. In China, the praesidium consists of 178 people which is far too many. Nine is a more manageable number—one speaker and eight deputy speakers. The praesidium is an administrative body responsible for scheduling votes and establishing the rules of debate. It’s likely that the standing body is the only place where legislation can be introduced and debated, and then it is presented to the larger body for ratification.

The speaker is the presiding officer of the entire assembly, but the members of the praesidium can rotate presiding over the standing body. This is intended to ensure the political neutrality of the praesidium (useless in China’s case because everyone is a Communist but probably more effective in a hypothetical American adaptation).

In China, the standing body is plenipotentiary (has full legislative powers) when the entire Congress is not in session. This could also be the case under the American adaptation but the US Congress is almost always in session anyway. The standing body is in permanent session.

In essence, this creates a tricameral legislature.

There are some other powers that China’s Standing Committee has that the American version wouldn’t. Under the Communist principle of unified power, the Standing Committee also has the power to interpret the constitution. This is incompatible with the Western concept of separation of powers so it would be left out.

It isn’t a big concern as none of them represent any constituents in any meaningful way. Their job is to smile, wave, and clap. And wear an ethnic costume if you’re a designated token minority. Each member of the National People’s Congress represents zero citizens.

Why don’t the more populous states, the larger of the two groups, simply eat the small states?

China has a system where you have an obscenely large legislative body (almost 3,000 members) select a standing committee of a more reasonable size which actually does the bulk of the legislative work on a day-to-day basis. I think this is a good system to copy or take ideas from.

Or at least, that is how it is supposed to work on paper. In reality the standing committee is staffed with the most loyal and powerful Government cronies and the National People’s Congress is a rubber-stamping body rather than a venue for genuine political debate and expression.

I never presented this as a dichotomy. You know, people prefer things in a certain order, right? I prefer Flatpaks and native packages over snaps and I prefer snaps to building from source.

Nothing useful for me. Given the choice I will usually pick the flatpak.

Unpopular opinion: snap is not so bad and genuinely useful for many things

I would rather have a snap than building from source or use some tar.gz archive with a sketchy install script

In the context of the Government subscribing to a particular religion, I use the word “religion”, but I guess I really mean “religious belief”, i.e. a belief about religion, in the broadest sense. I would consider deism to be a religious belief under that definition.

So to reiterate my point, if you, the designer of a system of government, allow the state to hold and enforce a religious belief of any kind, eventually a government will take power which holds a different religious belief, and use the state"s ability to deal with religious matters to enforce their different belief upon the people. And this will inevitably happen. So the best protection you can design against this is to withhold this power from the state by explicitly declaring it to be secular.