Post #148515
May 18, 2020, 04:41:53 PM
I'm torn between the political opportunism this presents me as a Burner, and the desire to preserve the positive norms of our community.
If we extend terms, it's all gold for me; I get to crow about the obvious attempt to consolidate power and the profoundly ironic moves away from democracy, since the UH is supposed to be the democratic institution of our regional government and yet by reducing the number of elections/year, there are consequently less opportunities for people to exercise their political rights, therefore the UH is a fundamentally corrupt and inherently corruptive institution and thus we should burn it down.
On the other hand, there's a long-held belief that UH membership constitutes the first rung on the 'career ladder' here; that this is where new people come to cut their teeth and prove their mettle before moving on to the actually effectual areas of the government, the various Cabinet positions, and reducing the number of elections per year would be actively detrimental to that goal of integrating fresh blood into our political process. I may not agree with the ethos behind it, since the UH is a fundamentally blah blah see above, but there's certainly a lot to be said for that line of thought, not least of which because I nominally got my start in regional politics by running for UH, as did, like, 90% of the Cabinet (I don't remember Ruguo ever being in the UH, but on the other hand the UH is supremely ineffectual etc. etc. so it's very possible it happened and was just not memorable).
At any rate, I think a phenomenal point to consider here is that this discussion is profoundly limited because so far the only thread on the matter is here, in the UH section, which Citizens can't respond to, and this is a Sufficiently Big Deal that soliciting citizen comment is vital. Thus, please create a Citizens Discussion thread for this, and if there isn't one within the next, oh, 12 hours or so, I'll just make one myself.
(I'd do it myself already but I think it's probably a better look if the topic creator does so themselves, and I don't want to take that feather out of Lau's cap)