How would that work? While admittedly I'm unfamiliar with that aspect of the law, it seems to me that it's easier to throw an 18 year old in jail for banging a 14 year old than it is a 17 year old. Would the law cease to acknowledge the legal distinction between a college sophomore and a middle schooler?
I personally would've been in the range of 17-22 years old when I was part of the site before spam forced a mass (well, fractional) migration to debateart. I believe Lannan was maybe 1-3 years older than me (I remember mistaking him for an old friend of mine who moved away to the same state as Lannan and was born in early 1995, as from his profile pic there was some degree of resemblance), though I'm not sure. Ditto for Ajab but he was probably in his early 20s at the oldest. I think for a lot of the younger userbase online debating was something that their high school/college debate club got them interested in. Ajab was relatively late to join IIRC so he wouldn't have really had a chance to age out of that demographic while a part of the site.
Ajab died from health issues of some sort, and I won't comment on Lannan.
They were both cool guys and generally pleasant people to be around; Ajab in particular had a good sense of humor and was surprisingly open to cracking gay jokes about himself given he was a Pakistani Muslim guy. I only remember one semi-negative experience with Ajab, which is where I brought up conditions in Pakistan (most likely the human rights situation for religious minorities like Christians) in some conversation and he said "you just insulted my country". Then again I don't remember exactly what it was I said, nor how I said it.
Anyways, yeah. I think it's hard to overstate how far what's left of that community has fallen from those days. It was a bustling and predominantly young site outside of the Religion forum, to the point where sometimes the dynamic resembled a high school with all the drama that came with that (not that the drama wasn't fun to watch, albeit somewhat less fun to participate in yourself). And it was an overabundance of extroverted personalities like Ajab, Esocial, Matt, Mikal, Romani, Oneharder, Imabench, etc. who made that scene what it was.
I was never there for the Mafia games, which IIRC was most of Lannan's posting activity by the time I joined, so I think I didn't have as many interactions with him as I did other old guard users. He did open up about his life problems to me once but I had nowhere remotely close to the maturity level to say anything that was genuinely helpful in that regard. Still, though, I think we mostly got along since we were both Republicans.
Did he ever join the army like he planned?
It seems pretty straightforward that, given the difference in the size of our economies, the flow of goods and services across the 49th parallel contributes a bigger chunk of their economy than it does ours (edit: yup, a 15-second Google search confirmed this). I also don't see how the EU market can replace Canada's full volume of trade with the US, given that they're presumably already buying whatever goods Canada has to offer from other suppliers and won't just ditch them (especially if a fellow EU member state actually located in Europe) for Canada.
This thing is like 90% driven by spite rather than practicality. Not that it wouldn't hurt us on some level too but this is a classic case of shooting yourself in the foot to give someone else a migraine from the sound of the gunshot. Or, if Mark Carney has a lick of sense about him, it'll be a largely ceremonial "decoupling" from the Trump-era US that has little practical effect.
In the real world, outside of the romanticized depictions of popular media, "honor" is usually something tied to the concept of an honor culture, which best understood as an interrelational phenomenon as opposed to an individualistic, privately held ethical code. It's a predominantly male idea, and involves maintaining one's social standing ("honor") at all costs. So for example, doing violence to anyone who would insult you or your family; this can extend to killing family members who bring shame upon the household's name, as was practiced by the paterfamilias of Ancient Rome and in the Muslim world today.
Albeit on the positive side honor cultures have a higher than average chance of being hospitality cultures as well. I don't think it's an accident that the birthplace of Bushido also has greeters bowing politely to anyone entering/exiting a store: the store's "honor" is, to a certain extent, tied to its showing of hospitality to customers. Another example is Afghanistan, where I'm sure your average gun-toting Pashtun wouldn't hesitate to put a bullet through your brain if you questioned the chastity of his unmarried sister but also takes the hospitality rules embedded in Pashtunwali very seriously. A third example would be the American South, on one hand famous for its "southern hospitality" and on the other hand a place that's long been far more prone to respond to insults with violence than elsewhere in the country.
Transactional relationships with people can also be altruistic.
For example, paying a poor person 1000$ to wash your car. Surely, thats transactional, but it benefits poor person much more and person pays a lot more than he has to for car washing.
I mean, the crux of any true transaction is getting something you want while not paying more for it than it's worth. Since no one values a car wash at $1,000 and since it's a simple matter to either do it in your yard with a garden hose or to run through a car wash for $10-$15 I would argue this is charity disguised as a transaction.
I would make an exception for an obscenely rich person like Bill Gates or Musk whose time is so valuable that paying someone a thousand bucks is worth the time saved of not doing it / running it through the car wash himself. But presumably that's not what is going on here.
The opinions of people like Bubba are a situation where I can either attack the debater personally on multiple angles and point out both hypocrisy and why people shouldn't ever strive to adhere to his worldview or I just stay quiet.
Bro, re-read the OP. I'm not equivocating exploitation with altruistically helping people. I'm (1). pointing out that in practice most people, instead of being all that altruistic, have either transactional or non-existent relationships with random strangers; and (2). asking which, between cutting deals with sufferers and turning a blind eye to them, is worse.
I mean, is that better than him not offering any help at all? I guess if it was better, woman would not agree at all.
Again, if all the conditions spelled out in the OP were met (re: the man didn't trick or coerce her), then she would accept only if she found the deal preferable to staying outdoors and wasn't confident in her ability to secure alternative lodging in the time that she had before succumbing to the cold.
Obviously the right response in this situation would be to offer shelter (whether the person asking was male or female) with no strings attached. But my question is whether this hypothetical man did her a greater evil than somebody who gave her no choice at all and simply slammed the door in her face, knowing that their actions might result in her freezing to death.
I would say that capitalists who buy bunch of homes to increase home prices are pretty bad to begin with.
While I'd question the ability of any single homebuyer to corner the real estate market and jack up prices, anyone who so qualified would be the cause of the misery they were exploiting, thus outside the scope of this thread.
Exploitation might loosely be defined as taking opportunistic advantage of someone else's unfavorable circumstances, especially in a way that results in some additional harm to the sufferer.
The concept has come to occupy outsized importance in contemporary Western ethics, and has been made to include everything from Walmart paying its greeters minimum wage to Andrew Tate confiscating his immigrant girlfriend's passport and making her shoot naughty webcam videos for him. But for the sake of this discussion I will tender a narrow definition of exploitation:
So this definition would include, say, the owner of a Somalian sweatshop who pays his workers in pennies because he knows a Somali single mother of 5 is desperate enough for work to accept his terms, but not the owner of a sweatshop that uses hired muscle to physically prevent workers from leaving the compound (I.e. modern-day slavery).
Likewise, it would include a man who offered a homeless woman the chance to spend the below-zero winter night inside his warm house in exchange for having sex with him once, but not a kidnapper who kidnapped a woman, locked her in his basement, and made her his sex slave.
For purposes of this discussion I will add two more stipulations:
I don't dispute that, in all these hypotheticals, the morally correct thing to do is to offer help to those who need it without the expectation of reward. But my position is that relatively few people truly choose this option.
You see, there's four possible ways to respond when you know that somebody is in need:
A. Help them and demand nothing in return
B. Exploit them (re: help them in some way, and demand something in return)
C. Offer no help, get nothing in return
D. Offer no help, get something anyway (i.e. robbery, scams, etc).
For the sake of this discussion let's rule out instances of D. Instead let's talk about A, B, and C, starting with A.
The world has over 8 billion people, around 10% of whom live on the US equivalent of $2.15 or less per day, and a very large chunk of whom aren't quite that desperate but are still objectively poor. Though the average Westerner is willing to perform some light charity, like tipping at a restaurant (in the US) or rounding up their retail store purchase to give a couple cents to a children's hospital or whatever, very few people give away the entirety of their disposable income to noble causes. Today it's considered to be a fairly exceptional person who tithes 10% of his/her income whereas, for the average Westerner, well over 10% of their income is disposable. Sure, many of us are willing to move mountains for beloved family members or friends, but charity that hinges on a deep emotional connection generally rules out giving to anonymous adult strangers halfway across the world whose needs are just as real. A steady donation of $1,500 every year, either in cash or in basic goods like food, would be a life-changing break for a poor family in, say, Haiti or the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and the average American has the means to help at least one person/household in this manner, if not multiple. But most of us do not.
Where am I going with this? The default option for most people is C, meaning that discussions of exploitation generally entail Cs sitting in a seat of judgment over Bs and accusing them of a grievous sin against their fellow man.
Now to be clear, I am not levying a charge of hypocrisy against the Cs because their attitudes are consistent with the prevailing values of the West today; most people do genuinely consider exploitation to be more disgusting than apathy, even when, ultimately, the consequences for apathy turn out to be worse - because, again, when no coercion or trickery is involved, rational actors will take the best deal available to them. Those agreeing to be exploited, insofar as it meets all of the above criteria, are making that choice because the only alternatives are even worse. They perceive that the harms that come out of the deal are outweighed by the harms they're getting relief from in the course of accepting the deal.
But anyway, the question up for discussion is this: is exploitation, in fact, worse than taking no action to help in the face of human suffering?
Debby wrote:
Punishment is a quick fix for a crime committed. Rehabilitation is a longer process.
Rehabilitation is completely ineffective unless the subject has a genuine, heartfelt desire to change themselves. Which does happen sometimes but it’s more common that they don’t.
Whatever its frequency, it’s impossible for a disinterested bureaucrat or emotionally manipulable jury to tell whether one’s intentions are genuine when the system rewards pretending with early release.
IMO we should move away from the standard model of springing cutthroats 20 years early just because a lawyer coached them to say they found Jesus and instead define rehabilitation in terms of vocational training programs, getting one’s GED, etc. In other words, things of no tangible benefit unless one actually plans to ply an honest trade and live an honest life post-release. Alternately, if they’re lifers, teaching them how to live a semi-fulfilling life even if spent behind bars. If parole is to be offered to serious offenders, it ought to require years of work rebuilding their reputations as trustworthy, rule-abiding citizens who are doing everything in their power to be reintegrated into society. A cheap, unearned “rehabilitation” that amounts to little more than a get out of jail free card is an insult to the people they harmed and a threat to the safety of everyone else.
SkepticalOne wrote:
Humiliation as a punishment disregards human dignity, causes psychological trauma (emotional distress, deep depression, anxiety, and suicidal ideation), and undermines rehabilitation. This is not less harsh.
I'm not talking a Game of Thrones style walk of shame or anything. Just a much bigger emphasis on things like community service than exists at present.
The Hays Code, which governed what could and could not be depicted in Hollywood films, was enacted in 1934 and lasted until 1968.
One of the Code's biggest no-nos was glamorizing crime and the criminal lifestyle, on the assumption that people, especially impressionable youths, would seek to imitate in real life the behaviors they saw on the screen.
While these assumptions are universally ridiculed by the left today (was it any sillier than other moral panics surrounding new technologies, such as the left's contemporary hatred of AI, self-driving cars, SpaceX, crypto, etcetera?), the underlying logic was, at least, intuitive enough:
Man is a social animal, and people will spend a sizable fraction of their lives trying to win the approval of their peers in one way or another, be that dressing attractively or moving into a higher income bracket they can boast of to a date, or going to church on Sunday, or virtue signaling on the internet. So if those who they do in some respect admire - perhaps even fictional characters - are driving around town riddling their enemies with bullet holes, then it may cause their thought processes to conflate violence with the acquisition of social status.
Almost as if in exploration of this idea, there was an early Hollywood film (I don't recall the name of it) where the gangster antihero, condemned to die soon for his crimes, was asked by a priest to deliberately make a sad spectacle of himself as he was being dragged to the chair since he would be passing by a group of juvenile delinquents.
It was the priest's belief that whether these kids saw the gangster carry himself with dignity - even on an occasion so undignified as public execution - or like a coward would cement a lasting impression in their minds as to whether the hardened criminal's life was "cool" or not. And the gangster, who initially said he wouldn't, did exactly that when the time came, though it was left ambiguous whether he did this to dissuade his younger counterparts from walking the same path as him or whether he was genuinely terrified of death.
Anyway, my point is that if the "cool" criminal breeds copycats then the "uncool" criminal must do the opposite. Or in other words public humiliation is an often overlooked element of deterrence theory.
Merely lock a guy up for three years and his little brother or cousin will be like "yeah, losing your freedom must suck, but at least someone like that has street cred." But let's imagine that, for the next three years, they see him about once a week during their commute to school, picking up cigarette butts on the side of the interstate in an unflattering orange jumpsuit. Or riding on the back of a garbage truck while it's making its daily rounds through suburbia.
In a school setting, this would mean fewer suspensions and more having to wear a lunch lady-style (could be clearly male attire for males; that's beside the point) frumpy outfit while slapping lasagna onto lunch trays. I think it's fair to say that that bully will no longer sit perched at the comfortable top of the pecking order.
This would not, of course, deter people who commit crimes for the sake of the benefit or gratification of the act itself, but those who act up in the pursuit of status would find the whole exercise counterproductive. This would mainly target low-risk offenses, since giving serial killers ample opportunity to escape and/or interact with potential fresh victims doesn't exactly make for sound policy. But I think it matters because most offenders start out small before their crimes gradually escalate; this is a pipeline that, if interrupted early (for both the offender himself and anyone who would be influenced by him), will yield the best results for society.
Thats a good point but even small business owners are relatively well off. And 95 percent of them? Work for me or good luck on your own. When thats 95 percent of employment... the bottom line is work or die.
False dilemma. It's not "work or die". It's "sell your labor, find another source of income/support, or die". Businesses/companies are merely one possible customer of your labor. What about landscapers, who maintain other people's properties and get paid by the homeowners themselves?
If your position is that you ought to be entitled to sell your labor on your own terms even if the other party doesn't agree to buy your labor on said terms, then why stop at business owners? Should a barber who charges an exorbitant price for the worst shave you've ever had in your life be allowed to sue you for avoiding his establishment in favor of a getting your hair cut elsewhere? Since, after all, that's exactly the position employers are in. You sell your labor to them and they are the customer of your labor...which they resell to the public in combination with the labor of others to some synergistic effect. If you object to this, and if you think they bring nothing to the table, then why not sell that same labor to the public directly and cut out the middleman?
And if your labor is useless if not combined with the labor/capital of others, then what's stopping you from forming a work cooperative and pooling your resources? If the answer is that all your prospective partners think they get a better deal (re: more stable work, no personal liabilities, etc.) from conventional employment, then conventional employment does, in fact, have its benefits that justify its existence.
If we cant go pick apples off local trees or plant enough food to feed ourselves at a moments notice we are being deprived of our natural rights.
You're conflating two separate things here (picking fruit from existing trees and planting your own food) so I'll address the first.
How many fruit trees have you come across in your life? Does nature by itself - not counting human agriculture/horticulture/whatever - produce enough food to sustainably feed 8 billion people? No, we've obviously outstripped the carrying capacity of a hunter-gatherer society. Whatever tree you'd pluck an apple from would most likely be stripped bare by the time you got to it, given all the other hungry people in line to do the same thing.
"Now that's just a ridiculous strawman", you might say, "because I'm talking about picking apples for pleasure in the society we have now". But if you take away the private property rights that currently bar you from picking an apple on someone else's land, then you take away the property rights that allow a man to plant, say, a tree farm without fearing that a mob of random people won't come along and chop down all the trees to carry off the wood for kindling or lumber or what have you.
And then why would the tree farm exist at all if he had no reasonable expectation of return on his investment, or so much as the ability to recoup his costs? Wouldn't that land lie fallow? Wouldn't the logging industry be incentivized to practice reckless deforestation as opposed to sustainable tree farming? What would keep them from chopping down the trees in your yard?
Freedom is lack of intrusion by other people upon your freedom of action. If you were born severely crippled and physically unable to leave your house, that fact alone does not make you unfree.
Same with having to work for a living. Scarcity is a natural fact of the world. Value has to be created where it didn't previously exist through productive work. You might say "Well, why can't I raid someone else's pantry?" but the answer is that everything in said pantry is not a low-hanging fruit of nature that they happened to pluck before you had the chance. Rather, the food in said pantry is the physical embodiment of someone else's productive work, which does not belong to you unless you trade it for something that is yours (with their consent). The matter comprising said food is natural but there's no way to disentangle the matter from the work that altered its form without destroying the value created.
The issue, I think, is that this is an obvious example but advanced economies become heavily "abstract" in ways that make it hard for the average person to visualize why X belongs to Y. So you get more people who are inclined to challenge the rightful fact of said ownership.
Dropping bombs doesn't do much against bunkers under mountains which could survive a nuke.
The vast majority of their army is above ground but okay.
All Iran has to do in order to win is to keep retreating and attacking while retreating.
And meanwhile, the average Iranian household is sliding closer with each passing month to Africa-level poverty. But I guess like all dictators, Vahidi would consider it a great victory anyway just as long as he gets to save his own sorry hide.
To be more specific, let's say that each UCC's "campaign plan" will (if it doesn't already) include a detailed inventory of the minimum level of manpower/materiel they've assessed they'll need to carry out their mission. Ideally this figure ought to be a little less than the assets they already have.
This assessed minimum is the aforementioned regulatory minimum; if a UCC's forces dip below this figure then taking more assets - at least so far as concerns types of assets they don't have enough of - out of the UCC and transferring them to a different one will require an act of Congress.
As the Iran War has demonstrated, the Imperium Americae is being stretched too thin.
Contrary to headlines making rounds right now I don't believe that, barring further depletion of our stockpiles at least, there's a major risk of Russia and China exploiting this gap. In the event that the Strait of Hormuz is fully reopened tomorrow it will take possibly as long as 18-21 months for global oil reserves to fully recharge and China (which imports over 70% of its fuel) won't want to be caught in a really bad situation should it turn out they underestimated the Pentagon's remaining capabilities, whereas given current efforts to ramp up munitions production as fast as possible I believe the US will have sufficiently recuperated by the time China does the same. Russia, of course, is losing badly yin Ukraine and the last thing Putin would (or at least should) want to do is open up a second front.
However, what's clear is that, given the long-term decline of US hard power relative to its enemies (evidenced by a mid-intensity bombing campaign having this effect in the first place), to shore up the prevailing global system the US will need its coalition partners to step up to the plate and rebuild their own atrophied capabilities.
This is almost certainly what Trump has been trying to do since his first term, but the obvious dilemma is how to go about this without alienating them as allies. Which brings us to the topic of this post: a reform of the armies to better manage the threats we face on multiple fronts.
The first thing to note is that, like the armies of many historical empires, the Pentagon is divided into various theaters. Specifically it divides the globe into six Unified Combatant Commands, not counting space (which is technically the seventh). Each UCC has a Commander, the most famous of which at this present time is Admiral Brad Cooper of CENTCOM.
The second thing to note is that the Pentagon has broad flexibility to reshuffle forces from one UCC to another, as in the buildup of naval forces in the Middle East from, say, the Indo-Pacific leading up to the start of the Iran War. This has its obvious advantages, but it also leads our allies to assume that, in the event of a conflict, they'll enjoy access to the full scope of American firepower. Which, for them, may skew the old guns vs. butter calculus in favor of more butter and fewer guns.
What I'm proposing is a tightening of the belt. In other words, staggered reforms -which would take a couple of years to take effect - that would make it harder for the US to redeploy assets from one UCC to another. Each UCC has its own strategic plan for defending that theater, which relies on certain assets being present in said theater. I propose that, in the event that said redeployment would leave a given UCC unable to reasonably meet its own security needs per some regulatory definition, it should require an act of Congress before such could go ahead.
Obviously this ought to be coupled with a return to pre-Trump norms of publicly committing to honor our mutual defense treaties, and above all not being so batshit insane as to threaten our allies for no reason. But the main gist of this proposal is to give our allies advance notice that, in coming years, it'll be harder to secure US firepower from outside the given UCC that their country/regional bloc falls under, meaning they'll have to pick up the slack.
Discuss.
Yeah, no, the only realistic way I can see this happening is if either: (a). a video emerges of Trump unambiguously diddling a kid in the White House/the island/wherever; or (b). the midterms are such an absolute, once in a century wipeout for Republicans that the US is effectively a one-party state at that point. Not only has the GOP not turned on him yet but in fact Trump is consolidating his control over the party - for example, people who voted to impeach him his second time are being successfully primaried, most recently of which was Senator Bill Cassidy. The Republican base is signaling loud and clear that they want their elected representatives to stand by Trump, and said representatives are doing just that.
Also, I'm just going to say for the record that 70-80% of the public doesn't actually give a shit about Trump renovating a couple of DC monuments on our 250th national anniversary, or hosting a wrestling match on White House grounds (is it functionally different from, say, screening a movie in the East Room?), and the remaining 20-30% are so deep in propagandistic lala-land that literally anything Trump does is an existential crisis to them.
Huh, it would appear that the "should I be allowed to chain up women in my sex dungeon" issue code must've slipped David's mind when he was programming this.
Though, I guess the algorithm would've weighed your response on this issue equally to how it weighed that on zoning reform or affirmative action and you'd still be called a centrist in the end.
It looks like you added 6-8 questions lol
(Urban) food deserts exist because they reflect the antisocial values of the communities affected.
I don't suppose there's anything morally wrong about trying to rectify this by means that don't constitute a handout of taxpayer money (e.g. the state opening a grocery store with the expectation that it'll recoup its money), but it most likely will fail for the same reason nobody in the private sector tries to open a grocery store there in the first place: rampant theft will quickly turn it unprofitable. There's no way to make this work except insofar as "grocery store" is a euphemism for food stamp pickup center.
being heterosexual means you're attracted to adults of the other gender and strictly/only them.
Not defending pedophilia but I'm pretty sure there's nothing about the definition of hetero that specifies the age of the person you're attracted to.
This proposal would see possession - though not distribution - of small quantities of dangerous hard drugs (such as heroin) decriminalized, or at least changed from a felony to a misdemeanor. The legal threshold (again, for possession) will fall just below the amount that your average user will consume in one day.
At present any degree of possession can result in felony charges in the US. What is the result of this? Your incentives as a user align the most with the goal of not getting caught. Assuming the police don't have a warrant to search your house, the time when you're at most risk of getting caught is when you're making a trade with your dealer.
If, hypothetically, you bought a week's worth of heroin in one go, and you did this every week, you (a daily user) would have to make some 52 trips a year to your local drug den (or spot on the street where you try to make a discrete 3-second exchange; whatever). You will have to risk 1/7th as many trades through this method; while being caught with larger quantities may worsen your sentencing in the event that you are caught, the lesser risk of getting caught in the first place may offset this in the mind of the average user. I would add that the drug-addled brain is less capable of long-term planning; you may perceive that there's no difference between a 15 year and 30 year sentence, whereas getting caught in the first place is a more short-term problem you do have reason to care about.
On the other hand, let's say you the average user wake up tomorrow only to learn that the law has been changed. If you only buy small quantities at a time (again, only for your personal use), then there's nothing illegal about that.
What are you going to do? Hit up your dealer once a day, every day, to purchase exactly one day's worth. You won't be as sneaky about it either, since you yourself are at no risk of arrest (or at least imprisonment).
This is from the average user's standpoint. But for the average dealer, whose activities emphatically are still a felony offense, now he has to make trades with said weekly buyers seven times as often.
This should make it soooooo much easier for the police to catch dealers - or, the chokepoint in the drug trade that, if successfully cut off, would nip the entire drug epidemic in the bud.
They tend to hate porn and prostitution as an industry and be pro erotics and chats.
Not sure if this is true or not, but if it is then it's certainly, uh, curious to say the least, constructing a moral code that lets them be all puritanical and judgmental about men's preferred medium of wanking while their own is a-okay.
Sometimes you just gotta make your own supply.
Yesterday the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) was indicted by a grand jury on charges of misappropriating funds to pay off "field sources"(informants) within white supremacist groups.
While the SPLC had operated a network of informants since the '80s, the illicit payments spanned from 2014 to 2023 and amounted to more than $3 million. It appears that many of the so-called informants were in fact leaders of said white supremacist groups, including at least one organizer of the Charlottesville rally.
In other words, it appears that some racists were effectively under the SPLC's payroll and promoted racism, especially highly public acts of racism, under the SPLC's directive, presumably with the goal of convincing lawmakers of the need to fund organizations like the SPLC.
The indictment can be read here:
https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.almd.90265/gov.uscourts.almd.90265.1.0.pdf
The Vatican is a small town populated by like 700 senior citizens which is de facto under Italy's protection. They don't need a proper army, but also trying to procure one would rub most people the wrong way, as in them having delusions of grandeur as some kind of great secular power. That's not how the modern Vatican wishes to frame itself.
It's also worth noting, of course, that Rome is Italy's capital, and Italy wouldn't exactly appreciate having a foreign army garrisoned within striking distance of where the top leaders of their government work and congregate.
Everything Lincoln did was okayed through Congress, even the suspension of Habeas with a 1963 act.
Retroactively, some two years after he did it without asking permission, but sure.
Does a sitting Prime Minister have the authority to take swift action like a president even during times when Parliament is gridlocked?
The USFG has been undergoing a long-term shift away from three coequal branches to an "imperial" presidency. Notably the White House is a lot smaller than the Capitol building (I should know; I've personally visited both), suggesting an original vision of a very much restrained presidency, but the former has since eclipsed the latter in importance. Like 80-90% of political discourse revolves around the President rather than Congress or the judiciary, or the states, and it can be said that some Presidents have enjoyed de facto cults of personality.
This probably started with Lincoln and the consolidation of Federal power that was perceived as necessary to win the civil war, then accelerated in the 20th century with the massive expansion of the military and welfare state, and finally there's the Second Trump Administration (albeit basically 100% of coverage thereof has a partisan slant to it, which makes an objective understanding of its workings difficult). I predict that even if the next President, be that Vance or a Democrat, makes a show of scaling these powers back, said reforms either won't be very substantial in practice or they won't last very long.
My position is that this present scenario was, in fact, always structurally embedded in the Constitution. Congress is a large body that, via parliamentary procedures, bicameralism, staggered elections, etc., gives its minority faction an effective veto. Likewise, polarization has broken down the longstanding mutual arrangements that for centuries have kept said gridlock to a manageable minimum.
The Presidency, in contrast, rests in the hands of a single individual. The President will never be gridlocked arguing with himself (not unless he happens to be schizophrenic, anyway), but is always in a position to make swift, decisive use of the authority legally available to him.
This both gives the President a long term advantage in consolidating power (re: he's fast and they're slow) and boosts the perceived legitimacy of him holding onto it. Because legitimacy, in practice, is a funny thing. Generally speaking people care about serious problems getting taken care of, and then they care about whether it was done lawfully. If they run into a scenario that the former cannot be had without dispensing with the latter, they will be tempted to accept that bargain. Polarization in Congress causes said unchecked problems to increasingly pile up, which makes the public increasingly willing to accept a more powerful Presidency to take care of them.
Is there a realistic solution to this? Probably not. Congress could clean up its act but in practice there's too much bad blood between the two parties to expect this. Nor is it realistic to expect that they'll vote to substantially curb the President's powers when both parties labor under the perennial delusion that they're one "great" presidency away from realizing every item on their longstanding ideological bucket list by four or five dozen acts of executive fiat.
If, in the 1780s, the Framers of the Constitution had designed a Bosnian-style presidency with multiple officeholders sharing power, a balanced government might've survived much longer but at the expense of a much slower response to wars or other national crises or disasters. Which would have the side effect of making for more powerful governors, who commanded state militias with a faster response rate, and by extension less of a need for a strong national army. Which, granted, may well have had the butterfly effect of "slavery was never abolished" or whatever.
