Basically: In some countries, the pledge is with the constitution or the people, but in others (like constitutional monarchies), its a pledge to the (constitutional) monarch and their successors.
What is your opinion on this loyalty pledge? Do you believe it’s a reasonable request?
(For context: My mother and older brother had to do the pledge to gain [US] citizenship so the idea of deportation isn’t looming over our heads. I didn’t have do it because I was under 18 and my mother’s citizenship status automatically carried over to me according to the law.)
The phrase that triggered my “completly board talking about” was right after saying a setup i see as awesome you say “which seems ok to me”. This also seems inline with other dutch political takes ive seen, from bikes to red light districts to work place norms, where i see what would be a hotly talked about topic (both support and opposition) here in the US for me, is largely plainly talked about.
I cant say its wrong, as i seem to agree with coorolated polices, but it just seems in stark contrast to the American tendency to make this higher stakes and more exciting.
The closer government is something that makes alot of sense to me too. I find municple, town, county level politics much more grounded then my federal level decisions (which is more like EU scoped politics to me in comparison at about half the population but about the same land mass). State level, which an average of almost 6 million being represented by the goverment vs the 350 million the fed size has to represent, also seems more reasonable though in terms of action very limited.
I know one reform here id like is to expand the number of federal representives here to be scaled with population again. It was orginally scaled at 1 for every 30 thousand (which feels like a human scale of representation), but including our upper house its around 750,000 per elected member of congress.
Thanks, right, that makes sense!
I don’t know that it’s not a coincidence that this wasn’t hotly debated btw. There’s other debates that I don’t hear from elsewhere, like nitrogen emissions. I barely know the words in english but de ‘stikstofcrisis’ has been a thing for about as long as I’m allowed to vote. Someone figured out that it harms nature and so a cap was put in place, then someone else did the math and figured out we’re way over that limit (mainly due to insane cattle numbers for the country’s size, iirc), and now any sector emitting nitrogen has permit issues, such as building living space for the growing population. Why is it growing despite low birth rates? “The foreigners!” See, we can blame everything on immigration :) (sadly I feel the need to clarify that this last sentence is not serious)
Sorry that I’m not responding to basically anything else you said. I don’t have much of an idea about things like representation scales but what you said all sounds sensible. Perhaps I could add that the EU, until this year’s “think of the children” fad (first ubiquitous age verification, then chatcontrol), has made mostly sensible proposals so far as I heard of them, but then it’s not really acting in the same way as the US federal government so it may not be a good comparison. Maybe they were doing alright because they didn’t think of themselves as the parent who’s calling the shots, but rather a collaboration system of sovereign countries? Who knows