They fought to just leave - and take their slaves with them.

Which, to remind, was 40% of the population of CSA. And over 50% in South Carolina specifically.

How can a government that is not representative of over half of its population, and explicitly denying any and all rights to that population, claim to be a popular government?

And if you believe that the only legitimate government is the one that represents the people, how can a slaver government even be legitimate in the first place?

You make the mistake of assuming that why the North fought the war is relevant to why the South fought the war. It's not.

The North fought to preserve the Union. The South fought to maintain slavery. It's as simple as that.

If you want a supermajority, then how is it any different from the existing rules under which the states can already call for a constitutional convention and pass whatever amendments they want? It requires 3/4 of the states (which, by the way, still translates to just under 50% of popular support, if the smaller states band together).

I don't care what the court or the constitution say on this matter. Fundamental rights are not defined by the constitution, merely documented (or not) by it. That's why they're fundamental.

You've got to be fucking kidding. How does being "part of the traditions" have any relevance to something being a fundamental right? Most fundamental rights that we enjoy these days were never traditional, starting with pretty much all women's rights.

Who even needs judicial review if you can override it by a simple majority (even worse in this case, because securing a majority of states would require, what, something like 20% of popular support, so long as it's all clustered in those states)?

You might as well just say that everything that Senate votes for is law and constitutional by definition, and be done with it.

Please don't burn Confederate flags. Think of the environment!

It's essentially a full retard adoption of judicial deference.

Which is ironic, because it's exactly what Scalia opposed in, say, the Heller case.

He doesn't get to pick and choose. Either SCOTUS gets to decide, or it's unrestricted majority rule.

It's not because there's no technical way for them to do so (if I remember correctly, apt-get at least allows packages to run arbitrary shell code as root). It's because no-one has bothered, which I suspect is largely because the target audience for such things (which in this case is desktop users - there's no point installing Ask toolbar or changing the search engine on the server) is so small, but also, and probably more importantly, because any package that'd do it would be nuked out of the repo right away.

So basically this is an argument in favor of curated software repos.

So basically it's a solved engineering problem, and it's not used universally only because of the extra costs?

Paper can also be composted quite nicely.

Hereabouts (remote outskirts of a large metro area), we do get bin collections, but we are billed for it directly, not through taxes. There does seem to be some regulation in place to encourage recycling - they charge separate fees for bin rental and for service separately on each bin, depending on the size, but they're not allowed to charge for the recycling bin, only for the service (and it does not depend on the size of the bin).

Some places around here are banning plastic bags in stores outright.

As an H1-B who got a mortgage and bought a house, I can confidently state that this is just plain bullshit.

And yes, someone on an H1-B visa is a resident of the country. Just ask the IRS.

My understanding is that the problem with housing in Vancouver predates any Quebec immigration schemes (though they likely contribute to sustaining it), and dates back to Chinese immigration from Hong Kong and Macau peaking right before they were about to be transferred to the PRC - quite a few people there were afraid of living "under the commies" and decided to move, and naturally they picked a reasonably close location in a well-developed country that already had a significant Chinese minority, which was BC in general and Vancouver in particular. Given the prices on property in Hong Kong, those who owned it and sold it for the move were effectively millionaires, and that money flooded the housing market.