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from the returning-sovereignty-to-parliament dept.
A controversial motion that will grant the government the power to force through Brexit legislation has been passed.
[...] It means the Conservatives, despite not winning a majority at the general election, will take control of a powerful Commons committee, and grant themselves the power to force through legislation without it being voted on or debated in parliament.
With parliament needing to change, amend or import wholesale thousands of laws and regulation to prepare the UK for its exit from the European Union, the EU Withdrawal Bill has been designed to allow for new laws and regulations to be passed via controversial legislative device called a statutory instrument, which are debated in tiny standing committees.
But the government has now voted to give itself a majority on the little known Committee of Selection, which decides the make up of those committees, and in so doing has seized control of the whole process.
[...] Liberal Democrat Chief Whip Alistair Carmichael commented: "This is a sinister power grab by an increasingly authoritarian Prime Minister.
"The Tories didn't win a majority at the election, but are now hijacking Parliament to try and impose their extreme Brexit on the country.
"It is a bitter irony that Brexiteers who spent their careers championing parliamentary sovereignty have now chosen to sell it down the river.
Source: The Independent
(Score: -1, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 13 2017, @01:59PM (2 children)
Sound like it's similar to the hand-wringing over the electoral college in the USA. The electoral college is how it's always worked. The players knew the rules when the game started.
Proposals that would actually help like Condorcet voting methods did not even come up in the lizard people controlled media. Crazy things like approval voting are just for crazy dorks who read too many books I guess and waste too much time with those funny looking squiggly line maths of theirs. As an average dumbfuck, I can draw squiggly lines too, but those elitists are always telling me my squiggly lines are "wrong" somehow.
There are even reasons for having an electoral college with Condorcet or approval voting in the USA, because it's supposed to be a federalist system that includes states' rights (yep, guns and weed, I see no contradictions between left and right here, though some issues are clearly issues of personal liberty that not even states have the right to infringe upon).
The lizard person media always, always stuffs the obvious solutions, the things we should really be debating, the things that threaten to undermine the power of the red dresses, deep into the back of the closet, never to see the light of day.
I'm in the USA so I've only been able to watch Brexit from the sidelines. It seems to me that the media has completely and utterly failed to present the practical ramifications of a Brexit. The media failed to hold the fire to the Brexiters' feet and demand for them to demonstrate, with numbers (and those squiggly lines that are just a stupid game played by dorks that I, as an average dumbfuck, willfully refuse to engage in).
Of course, there likely are no intelligent lifeforms from the Thuban system (here at least) with a crazy hierarchy that includes a title/rank like "red dress." The failure is entirely this species' own, a good reason why any starfaring civilization would have a prime directive. Who wants to be some other planet's "lizard people" to be blamed for all their own failures?
This species does not value education and critical thought. It might take another 100,000 years of evolution. This species, for the most part, currently enjoys a global information and distributed computing network, which I may use in lieu of building an addition to my house for a private library. Using this global information network, I may read that about 600,000 years ago, Heidelberg man was doing the things that a Heidelberg man can do. About 100,000 years later (500 kya) the neanderthals and denisovans appeared. It took another 300,000 years (200 kya) for modern man to appear. It wasn't until about 460,000 years after neanderthal man arrived on the scene until he was extinct (40 kya).
Perhaps in 100,000 years, a new kind of man will draw breath for the first time. Of course, that's dramatic, because the process is always so gradual at a geological time scale. However, evolution does not strive to achieve any particular goal. This is why it's so difficult to evolve into a starfaring civilization. The idea of filter events may just be the human tendency for the dramatic and human arrogance that his evolution at present is adequate masquerading as science.
(Score: 1, Offtopic) by HiThere on Wednesday September 13 2017, @06:09PM
"None of the above" should be on every ballot, but I agree, that the current voting systems are bad. And I can't think of a good one that isn't too easy to corrupt. So I think that rather than elections we should have a lottery open to all over the age of, say, 15. And if you get chosen you MUST serve, and then may never again accept payment from anyone except the government. (Pensions should be at twice the median income level.) (Banks storing your own money, or even offering you the same interest they offer anyone else, are not to be construed as paying you. Groups offering you a position of power or even just access to facilities that aren't open to everyone else ARE to be construed as paying you. You get a bonus for turning them in to prosecution.)
This, of course, would require restructuring things so that there was no single position with too much authority, as occasionally you'd get some real winners, but that's a good idea anyway.
This proposal accepts the comment "nobody who wants the job should be allowed to have it", and deals with the problem of corruption before achieving office. Also with corruption based on promised benefits after leaving office.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 13 2017, @10:22PM
Spot the reptilians. [theatlantic.com]