Please remove “that’s”

Movie was more accessible, Thick of It series was blacker, crueller humour

*implies

Exaggerated handwringing, they overstated the extent and severity, and this article is probably doing the same

“jk, trolling”

Because on face value it looks like an anti-abortion lyric.

I suspect it’s as ideological as Israel’s actions against Palestinians unfortunately.

Oceania was always at war with Eurasia.

No it isn’t, there’s no implication of that. Just that they won’t reproduce until they see it happening.

It’s just more climate catastrophising. CaCO3 and H2CO3 form a buffer that would minimise the effects of acidification. The idea that all fish would die is dumb. Terrestrial plants produce oxygen by photosynthesis so oxygen won’t disappear from the atmosphere.

All fair points, you win!

I was talking about both, and thinking about federations by population and influence (e.g. India, Russia, Brazil, Germany, Canada, Australia and the US) as well as regional representation which of course is not federalism per se. Thanks for citing your source, I concede to your point, but remonstrate by arguing that <15% of countries by number is not necessarily a useful statistic. I’d argue that the proportion by population, land area and political/cultural influence is a better metric (and I don’t have a source for that but expect by population it’d be closer to 50:50). Fair?

The Wikipedia page on the topic only lists 20 countries that currently have federal systems.

Fair enough - I knew I should have supported that claim. An earlier commenter did, listing many - my claim probably represents a lot of countries with larger populations and/or enough wealth to support regional representative government. It may not be the majority - smaller countries like Tonga and Eswatini are notionally unitary monarchies, but I’d still be surprised if there weren’t chiefs on each island or in each significant town or region in most countries. It’s harder to qualify - my claim probably comes from looking at a world map and seeing 50-50, but it’s probably Mercator projection and recognition bias (I may be able to name all countries and their capitals, but not the ins and outs of their government systems, given it gets murky).

The fact that the US government has basically given itself power that it’s not supposed to have freaks me out a bit whenever I think about it.

Again this is an unsupported gut feeling, but this is what corrupt countries do, and I was going to say the US is nearly the only ‘marble cake’ democracy but I suppose people might be able to say “what about the Democratic Republic of the Congo?” which everyone knows is neither democratic nor a proper republic, but a barely-functioning government representing a large and valuable area of land easily manipulated by richer countries for its wealth. I suppose what I mean is that the US has, at least until recently, been the country most others and commentators sycophantically praise as a true democratic marble cake federation, when it is not truly democratic, it’s just wealthy, and that wealth is held by oligarchs in the same way as federations like Russia or Brazil.

Maybe my point wasn’t valid. Maybe it was a gut feeling. I don’t know any more, I’m just a downtrodden man.

Thanks for explaining this. Your wording has a distinct bias of American exceptionalism, since your first sentence is patently incorrect - federal and unitary governments are roughly evenly represented across the world’s 200-odd governments. Not an attack, just a reasoned criticism, which may help explain the downvotes.

I was interested to learn about dual federalism and Eisenhower’s layer- and marble-cake metaphors. I didn’t realise that dual federalism was distinct, as I’m not a constitutional lawyer and am primarily familiar with Australian federalism and secondarily those of the US and Canada. In retrospect it’s unsurprising that the Australian federal system can be described with the layer cake metaphor, since our federation in 1901 was based on the American model!

It’s an interesting observation about the layer cake system, where states have primacy, becoming a marble cake, where constitutional law has been (probably deliberately) overlooked in the US over the years. It reminds me a bit of the gerrymandering and malapportionment issues, not to mention the electoral college systems affecting fair and open democracy in your country.

Good luck with it all - your insights will help me keep a keener eye on Australian developments to slow Australia’s slide towards the corruption of the fine American model. As seen in the (alarmist and fearful) question posed by the OP, the decay of democracy happens slowly until it becomes utterly obvious to most that the rot has spread throughout.

Neither an American nor knowledgeable about constitutional and amendment law - would you mind elaborating please?

Read the other comments please.

Thanks for this :)

I agree with your last point - and I may be a bit bourgeois (not to mention ignorant) myself. I’d appreciate recommendations if you wouldn’t mind.

Yeah, because I’m a tightarse and only buy the home brand stuff :)

Defund the coppers!