The Glade 4.0

Technically, all language is "imagery and symbolism." Words do not have inherent meanings, every sentence you ever say or hear requires interpretation for it to have any meaning at all.

Now, the constitution is not abstract. The drift in language should not change the meanings of the articles that it contains. However, there are an infinite number of possible legal situations to which the constitution can apply. Compounding that, many, perhaps even most, of those situations could not apply at the time the constitution was signed, due to changes in society, scientific understanding and technology. As such, not every article of the constitution or its amendments has a meaning that is obviously clear when applied to a specific situation. This cannot and could not ever be any different. There is no document you could write that would make the intent clear and obvious in every possible situation. Even the original writers would have different ideas in their heads at the time of writing as to how the various articles would have applied at any given time.

Anyone who thinks that courts are not needed to "interpret" the constitution is living in a dream world with an idealized fictionalization of how language and law work.

That doesn't mean that courts have not, on occasion, been so far outside the possible interpretations so as to render decisions completely contrary to the intent of the constitution -- it does happen. But let's not even for a moment pretend that most such situations are cut and dried, with obvious meaning. If they were, supreme court decisions would be rapid and unanimous most of the time.

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Well Ali Baba had them forty thieves, Scheherezade had a thousand tales
But master you in luck 'cause up your sleeves you got a brand of magic never fails...
...Mister Aladdin, sir, What will your pleasure be?
Let me take your order, Jot it down -You ain't never had a friend like me
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Taly, just because the majority is becoming more open-minded does not dispute the fact that we're becoming more and more a tyranny of the majority.

A benevolent tyrant is still a tyrant.

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"Aaaah! Emotions are weird!" - Amdee
"... Mirrorshades prevent the forces of normalcy from realizing that one is crazed and possibly dangerous. They are the symbol of the sun-staring visionary, the biker, the rocker, the policeman, and similar outlaws." - Bruce Sterling, preface to Mirrorshades

That's kinda tangential to my point in the earlier post to DFK!, and neither contradictory nor supportive of it, which was that, despite the laws possibly becoming more conducive to majority tyranny, oppressed minorities and subgroups of society have become less oppressed. Societal attitudes are not responsible for this... the changes in majority opinion seem to come after the initial relief of oppression, not the other way around.


I would, however, argue that "Representative democracy" and your "electoral college," etc. do nothing to prevent "tyranny of the majority." Nothing at all. The constitution is the only check on majority tyranny that you have.

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Well Ali Baba had them forty thieves, Scheherezade had a thousand tales
But master you in luck 'cause up your sleeves you got a brand of magic never fails...
...Mister Aladdin, sir, What will your pleasure be?
Let me take your order, Jot it down -You ain't never had a friend like me
█ ♣ █

Can we call it what is and stop beating around the bush with "tyranny of the majority" and call it what it truly is? "Ruled by the whims of the selfish, stupid and ignorant"

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Well, lots of tyrannies are "rules by the whims of the selfish, stupid, and ignorant." It doesn't need to be the majority.

"Tyranny of the majority" as a term is meant to point out that tyranny need not be a single person or small group oppressing the populace. The populace can oppress itself just as effectively under democracy as a single dictator can in an autocracy.

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Well Ali Baba had them forty thieves, Scheherezade had a thousand tales
But master you in luck 'cause up your sleeves you got a brand of magic never fails...
...Mister Aladdin, sir, What will your pleasure be?
Let me take your order, Jot it down -You ain't never had a friend like me
█ ♣ █

Good point, I take it for granted that the majority of American's are selfish, stupid and ignorant; however, there are no upper or lower bounds on my concept. Perhaps Tyranny of the Ignorant Masses?

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Or we could replace both terms with what they really mean - people complaining that they can't always have their way.

Tyranny of the majority happens when the majority removes the ability of the minority to participate in public debate and policy, not when the majority wins those debates. If we have government by the selfish and stupid, its because we all are. The idea that petty foolish stupid people hold down the wise and benevolent is unbelievably self-serving.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

It also happens when the majority deny or take away rights or privileges from a minority without the same rules being applied to the majority. I.E. Blacks aren't allowed on the bus. It can also happen when principles that are exclusive to the majority religious belief are codified into law.

There's lots of ways a tyranny of the majority can happen. Your constitution was designed to prevent that. The irony is, even the founding fathers didn't realize exactly how far that would go. However, extending the protections of the constitution that they wrote to black people, women, and now homosexuals is a consistent, logical progression that fits with the intent of the law, even if the founding fathers wouldn't have realized it at the time.

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Well Ali Baba had them forty thieves, Scheherezade had a thousand tales
But master you in luck 'cause up your sleeves you got a brand of magic never fails...
...Mister Aladdin, sir, What will your pleasure be?
Let me take your order, Jot it down -You ain't never had a friend like me
█ ♣ █

The people who signed a petition to approve abortions in the fourth trimester(because it is tragically unfair that it is outlawed in all 50 states and DC)? Or maybe the people who signed a petition to eliminate women's suffrage (under the auspices of gender equality)? Definitely not ignorant or stupid.

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Can those of you who think we're moving towards a "tyranny of the majority" give some specific examples?

DFK! listed the push toward more democratic systems as opposed to those of a Republic.

I do not believe that this curtails a tyranny of the majority at all. In fact, it simply allows for additional sources of tyranny.

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Well Ali Baba had them forty thieves, Scheherezade had a thousand tales
But master you in luck 'cause up your sleeves you got a brand of magic never fails...
...Mister Aladdin, sir, What will your pleasure be?
Let me take your order, Jot it down -You ain't never had a friend like me
█ ♣ █

Yeah, but other than the move to direct election of Senators a very long time ago and the as-yet unrealized drive to reform the electoral college, I'm curious whether he has specific institutional changes in mind or just feels there's been a general shift in attitudes. Also, I'm interested in knowing what some of the actual issues are that folks think are being decided on majoritarian grounds that would likely have gone the other way in the presumably more republican past, and why those examples strike them as not only tyrannical in and of themselves but also more tyrannical than the non-majoritarian alternative.

*ETA: Hopefully that doesn't come across like a challenge/interrogation, as it's really not intended as such. I'm just trying to get a clear idea of where folks are coming from.

What you state is an impossibility. You cannot have a system where majority rules change to rules the majority disagrees with and then because of the rule change the majority's opinion changes. It is always society that changes first enough to attain a rules change.

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"...but there exists also in the human heart a depraved taste for equality, which impels the weak to attempt to lower the powerful to their own level and reduces men to prefer equality in slavery to inequality with freedom." - De Tocqueville

That's not true.

This is an example of a case where court interpretations can be a good thing. All it takes is one court decision where they logically take the same rights and protections that apply to a majority/priviledged member of society, and then logically apply them to someone of a different group.

A perfect example, in Canada, back in the 1920's, the supreme court struck down a law that declared that women were “persons in matters of pain and penalties, but are not persons in matters of rights and privileges," thus paving the way for the first female senator. Women were still treated as second-class citizens by the public at large in both Canada and America until after the sexual revolution of the 60's, but the law preceded public opinion.

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Well Ali Baba had them forty thieves, Scheherezade had a thousand tales
But master you in luck 'cause up your sleeves you got a brand of magic never fails...
...Mister Aladdin, sir, What will your pleasure be?
Let me take your order, Jot it down -You ain't never had a friend like me
█ ♣ █

That's an awful lot of questions that I don't really care to take hours to answer.

The biggest examples of institutional changes are the popular election of senators and universal suffrage. Were they "a long time ago"? Sure, but as Talya said, and I agree on a broad general level, societal attitudes often change AFTER legal changes.

It'd take quite a while for me to come up with lots of specific examples, but we can look at some of the net results from the last few presidential primaries as examples.

Additionally, I will say that for me, a lot of the change is in societal attitudes rather than societal processes.

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“The duty of a patriot is to protect his country from its government.” - Thomas Paine

The constitution does not need to be interpreted. It's applicability to the many varied legal situations you reference, does. That is a substantial and significant difference in effect.

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“The duty of a patriot is to protect his country from its government.” - Thomas Paine

I'm waiting for the discussion on "How many angels can dance on the head of a pin?"

Sometimes you folk amuse the heck out of me.

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The U. S. Constitution doesn't guarantee happiness, only the pursuit of it. You have to catch up with it yourself. B. Franklin

"A mind needs books like a sword needs a whetstone." -- Tyrion Lannister, A Game of Thrones

Depends. Are we talking about a straight pin, push pin, safety pin, or what? Presumably you don't mean a bobby pin, as I would argue that isn't a true pin anyway.

Not interpreting the Constitution is just as fundamentally impossible as not interpreting the Bible. The insistence of certain people in either case that they are not interpreting it doesn't change this.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

Bowling pin.

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Holy shitsnacks!

Belaying pin?
Firing pin?

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

Garbage.

Show me a metaphor in the Constitution.

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“The duty of a patriot is to protect his country from its government.” - Thomas Paine

Utterly irrelevant. Taly already explained this perfectly. Your position is totally unsupprtable, and based entirely on simply pretending you are not interpreting yourself. In other words, garbage. Explain what "cruel and unusual" means such that it would be absolutely clear in any relevant situation regardless of personal felings between 1787 and now.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

Cruel and unusual means whatever it meant at the time the document was authored. Shouldn't be too hard to look up, de Tocqueville's work was relatively contemporaneous.

Edit: I'm assuming I should also take this declaration by fiat as acknowledgement that the Constitution does not contain metaphors and is thus, indeed, easier to "interpret" than the Christian Bible.

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“The duty of a patriot is to protect his country from its government.” - Thomas Paine

In other words, you can't answer the question, your position is based on absolutism that can't work in real life and fortunately will never be tested allowing you to just insist on it on the internet safe in the knowledge the consequences will never happen, and you have to appeal to authority.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."