I named 1 cable news station and you named 2. You then pulled in ABC and NBC, newspapers, and websites. I didn't bother going into newspapers and internet sites, because it really doesn't matter how many of each there are at this point.
Furthermore, my point was that the number of different channels or newspapers or internet sites or radio shows doesn't matter of each political bias. There are plenty of both.
There are *LOTS* of people that watch Fox News and listen to Rush Limbaugh and Alex Jones, etc.
If there were 100 right wing cable news channels, it wouldn't make the MSM 100 times more biased to the right, because there would be the same number of right wing people watching the same amount of right wing propaganda, it would just be spread out among more channels.
I reject your premise that the level of bias in the media can be measured by numbers of TV channels, newspapers, internet sites, radio shows, etc. If you are going to do this, you need to also consider viewership. Having less numbers of shows that are more popular just means that right wingers have a more monolithic point of view and can be served by the same sources.
So I claim that there is plenty of right wing media, and your counter is that there is plenty of left wing media? Of course there is. There is plenty of media for every point of view. There is enough media of every type for everyone is able to live in an echo chamber.
Also, am talk radio is dominated by right wing people.
Nobody is prevented from presenting their opinion, other than the willingness of their potential consumers to listen.
I don't think the difference in ratios of left vs. right bias in various formats (TV, radio, print, internet, etc), is anythign but a reflection of the people that want to consume those things in those ways.
and the best you can produce is that you *think* Bernie would have got more votes under another system.
I don;t have an agenda. I'm not trying to push an agenda, so I don't need to do my *best* to convince you of anything. I don't know for sure what would have happened in a hypothetical national election between Hillary and Bernie. Nobody does. But I don't think it is so far fetched to to say that Hillary won the democratic nomination because she was more popular among the people voting in the democratic primaries. Bernie has a higher popularity rating nationally. I don't think there will ever be more convincing evidence that someone would win an election, than polling on the favorability of candidates.
The reason why Hillary is beating Trump right now is because her favorability is higher than Trump's
Is this "little" evidence? That's subjective. I'm saying this is the *only* evidence their could be short of an actual election.
Fox News is the MSM, and we have a whole channel dedicated to taking Hillary down. Literally anyone who wants to watch anti-Hillary propaganda has plenty of avenues to do that. They have Fox News, all of talk radio, the internet, etc. There is so much fucking anti-hillary shit out there, it's hard to even verify it all.
The left wing media is left. And the right wing media is right. It's all MSM. It's all biased. It's all bullshit.
I guess it depends on your definition of rigged. For many people the definition of rigged would fit right into your own sentence "The Democrats have a system *rigged* explicitly to prevent people like Sanders from winning".
I personally don't think it makes a difference whether you break the fair rules in a fair election, or follow the unfair rules in an unfair election.
I don't even think it is Hillary's fault that the election wasn't fair, and I'm not mad at her for winning. I am more mad at her for being a liar, and a bad person. Maybe most politicians are liars and bad people and she's not any worse than them. Ok fine. I don't think Bernie was like that.
I actually think there were more people who prefer Bernie to Hillary, but the democratic primaries only allow a subset of those people to participate. I'm not saying this is Hillary's fault. I'm saying that she benefited from closed primaries and people being prevented from voting, and this runs counter to the narrative that "she got more votes"
Trump is clean in the sense that his dirt is out in the open. I think we know enough about Trump to know who he is, and now he is going to lose the election. We don't really even need to dig up any more dirt on him. The last thing we need is for people to forget what an awful person Hillary is once she is in office. I don't want everyone to be in the mindset of "we won" on November 9th. I want everyone to be thinking "OK now we dodged the trump catastrophe, let's work on shutting down Clinton". I hope all her dirt comes out and we get a primary challenge from the left in addition to a decent republican opponent, and maybe even a serious 3rd party opponent(s).
I don't have a problem with people trying to manipulate our election with the truth. Were the people who leaked the Donald Trump pussy tape manipulating our election also? Elections are supposed to be manipulated, that's why we have debates. Since Hillary is already going to win, I think it's probably a good thing to start her off with as little of a mandate as possible. I would want the same thing if it looked like Trump was going to win. Fuck both these candidates and both these parties.
Verifying stolen information would prove the stolen information is legitimate.
Refusing to verify the stolen information proves that they are legitimate and also reinforces the perception that she can not be trusted to be honest.
Maybe a person with more integrity could pull the "I'm not going to dignify these accusations with a response", except that everybody knows that she would immediately call them out as fake if they were indeed fake, and use that incident to associate that false accusation with all other accusations against her.
Yes, maybe keeping quiet is the best legal strategy (she is a lawyer afterall). But she is a politician running for president that most people fucking hate because of how dishonest she comes off. The only reason she is winning is because she is running against the only other person more disliked than she is.
Honestly? What would be the downside to just being honest? She is going to win anyway. Maybe she could try to foster some good will for once. Even if she is just going to be calculating, she is presumably going to want to win re-election in 2020, and she won't be running against Trump then.
I'm aware of that. Although I don't think that means that I am necessarily benefiting. The blu-ray laser on my PS3 has broken twice while out of warranty. So I've paid hundreds of dollars for a linux computer with a blu-ray player, lost it's ability to be a linux computer, and that I had to spend an additional $150, plus hours of my time to replace broken parts. I certainly don't think I got more than what I paid for. I think I paid way to much for what I ultimately ended up getting.
I think this was a bad deal for all parties involved. It was bad for Sony and bad for me. It's not a zero sum game. If I could go back in time and tell myself not to buy that PS3, I think everyone would be better off.
Our legal system is basically garbage. $9 wouldn't even pay for the lunch I ate today. Luckily, free societies/markets have an inherent justice system, whereby consumers can vote on the level of culpability of companies with their dollars.
Sometimes it can be hard to stick to your principles in this way when a company comes out with something you think you really want, but luckily, it seems like consoles are basically dying, and there is not really anything you need a PS4 for.
I actually bought a PS3 for it's blu-ray capability. I think I may have only bought about 4 games for my PS3 over it's entire life (most of which I didn't play more than a few hours). I play games on PC.
A system where some parties are "experimenting" with primaries is different than a system where primaries are a standard part of every election.
The UK has American football too. I think the NFL played a few games there. If you are going to nitpick stuff like this in a desperate attempt to save face, I am not going to bother continuing this discussion.
That most western democracies including the U.S accept and encourage governmental financing of primaries clearly shows that we all have considered the matter and consider it a good enough idea that we all have implemented it.
Of the 3 "western democracies" you mentioned. None of them have a similar election system to the U.S., and Great Britain doesn't even have primaries. And from what I can tell France doesn't either. So of your examples 2/3 don't publicly fund primary elections, because they don't even have primary elections.
What exactly is it that makes you think that your minority opinion deserves any weight whatsoever? I accept that you can reason in circles but "I have a problem with it" is useless beyond your opinion and I suspect "my preferred candidate lost so I want to make everyone pay" is your primary motivation for holding it.
Sometimes the people in the majority only hold that position because they are intellectually lazy. And one of the benefits of a free society, is the opportunity to of the minority to convince others to agree with them and become the majority. And in actuality, both our positions are minority positions because most voters/legislators probably don't even have an informed opinion on this topic. Your "position" only has the benefit of being the status quo.
There are more reasons for continuing primaries as they (generally) eliminate the defective candidates and there is merit in electing a candidate that has the support of Congress so the support of a political party is also a valid prerequisite.
The fact that you said this, just shows me that you don't actually have any knowledge of the alternate election systems I cited, which actually do a much better job of accomplishing these goals than primaries or political parties.
That we have been unfortunate in this cycle does not make the system irredeemably broken.
I never even mentioned this cycle. I have been studying election systems since 2003. Everything I have been talking about has nothing to do with Trump vs. Hillary specifically. What I am talking about is addressing things that are problems every single election cycle.
And in fact, many local elections are starting to fix these problems. For instance in California we started doing 2 round runoff elections for non-presidential elections (eliminating party primaries). Not as good as IRV (instant runoff voting), but it's better than what we used to have. SO at least in California (as well as a few other states and cities), the majority position was that our current system was broken enough to change it.
The TPP enjoys broadbased opposition for very good reason. It will make the poor of the world poorer, so the progressives are opposed to it (including Sanders)
I think this is a good reason to oppose something. I was a Sanders supporter, and I'm pretty sure that's why he supported it. But I'm not yet convinced that this criticism is true. I haven't seen any evidence that the TPP specifically would increase poverty beyond the claim that all trade agreements increase poverty (e.g. arguments like NAFTA created poverty, and TPP is like NAFTA)
Honestly I don't feel like I understand the nuances of the economics of trade agreements enough to make an informed judgement over something like this.
It is mostly a list of things preventing local governments from governing democratically on a bunch of trade and "intellectual property" issues, so the "states rights" types are opposed to it.
I feel a bit more entitled to an opinion over the normative aspects of a trade agreement like this, as they don't really depend on the truth of various claims of causal economic relationships (e.g. this poverty is *because of* NAFTA/TPP etc), rather than simply correlations.
I definitely think IP laws in this country and around the world are problematic. I honestly don't know if TPP will/can make them worse. I suspect it probably does, but I am not aware of any specifics.
And it will enable the outflow of jobs, so the civic nationalists are opposed to it.
I would think that this is one of the goals of free trade, is to allow the outflow and inflow of goods and labor. My intuition is that it's probably pointless to try to hang on to the sorts of low skilled jobs that are flowing out of our country. If we ignore the good/evil of wealth redistribution, I think it's probably more efficient to spend money to re-educate people to do skilled jobs than it is to have people doing low skilled labor for artificially inflated wages (e.g. minimum wage). We have the infrastructure to do this that other poorer countries do not. Let's let them have those low skilled jobs and we can spend money we have investing in our own people.
Anyway, it certainly seems messy to me. It's probably a bunch of good ideas mixed with a bunch of bad ideas and everything in between. It's not clear to me if it will be a net good or a net bad compared with other trade agreements or compared to nothing.
This is why this is a low priority for me. I feel like there are so many issues that have relatively clear good answers, and I'd rather spend my time and effort advocating for those things.
I have done my own research. None of that stuff really jumps out at me as being really good or really bad. I was asking why it was important to you. I don't need to hear a giant list of reasons. What is the single most egregious thing about TPP for you personally?
Recap:
Afghanistan: I was thinking of Karzai, which is now wrong since Ashraf Ghani took over in 2014.
Great Britain: There is a new PM Theresa May just recently
Saudi Arabia: King Abdulluh's son is now King Salman
Iraq: al-Malaki was succeeded by al-Abadi in 2015.
Australia: Abbott was succeeded by Turnbull in 2015
I don't think I did to bad for having not studied at all.
I think I might have even done better than Gary, at the name foreign leaders pop quiz. But I think I would have failed equally hard to name one that I admired. I can't bullshit very well. I don't really know any of these people, and even if I did, I don't think I would admire many of them. Many of them are obviously assholes without even really knowing them.
I can name lots of world leaders. When I first heard this, I could not honestly say that I admired any of them. The people I admire are not typically politicians.
Let's see just off the top of my head, I swear:
I might get some spellings wrong, and I might get some ex-leaders rather than current leaders (because I'm not cheating)
U.S.A. - Obama (I guess I admire him, but I don't think this counts)
GB - Cameron? But he just resigned after brexit or something....
Germany - Merkel
France - Holland
China - Shi jin ping?
Syria - Asad
Iran - Ahmadinajad / Khamanei
Iraq - Malaki
Afghanistan - Starts wth a K... damnit I know this one.
Venezuela - Maduro
Mexico - Pena Nieto
Russia - Putin
Itlay - Burlesconi
Egypt - Al Sisi
Turkey - Erdogan
North Korea - Kim Jong un
Saudi Arabia - fomrelry king Abdulluh? But he died and now his son is in charge I think.
Canada - Trudeaux (Seems like a nice guy, don;t know if I admire him yet, he just started)
India - Modi
Pakistan - Formerly Bhutto (maybe I admire her for her courage, but she's not a *current* world leader), don;t know who took over.
Australia - was Abott last time I checked (don;t know if they had a new election yet).
I think I probably would have done better on this pop quiz than most US congressman and governors. I can't name any I admire, except maybe Obama, and that answer would just make me look like I don't know any foreign leaders. It turns out that most notable foreign leaders are assholes.
I normally roll my eyes when I hear someone call a question from the media a "gotcha question", but I kind of think this one. There aren't really any good answers that aren't bullshit. Maybe someone like Hillary can give a good answer because she's actually already met a lot of these people in person. This isn't even a foreign policy question. Although maybe giving a bullshit answer is a test of ones diplomatic abilities.
In 2012 he's had a better showing than any previous libertarian candidate, nearly doubling the next best showing. And this year current polling suggests he will do about 8 times better than his 2012 showing.
I don't know how much of this is due to Johnson himself. It might have more to do with the increasing popularity of the Libertarian party itself, or decreasing popularity of the 2 major parties, but the claim that he's doing worse than his predecessors is about as factually wrong as anything can be.
I don't agree with Johnson on a lot of issues, but I think he's the best choice this year. Jill Stein might be a good person, but she seems like a total cook to me. That's why I have her ranked all the way down at #2, just above the 2 corrupt sociopaths that are also running.
What's wrong with TPP? As someone whose priority list has TPP way at the bottom, I don't really see why this is such an important issue. I'm not saying it's not important, I'm just saying I don't see why it is. Why is it important to you?
Simply saying "lot's of western democracies have primaries funded by the public" is not in itself, a good argument that they are a good thing. The other countries you mentioned have completely different political systems. England (i.e. Great Britain) doesn't even have primaries at all. And even in the United States, primary elections are a relatively new thing.
(some) Public funding of political parties is common and generally deemed to be in everyone's best interest.
I think I need to once again point out that I am criticizing the public funding of primary elections and not political parties in general. Furthermore, your claim, is not true. Wikipedia would call this kind of claim as using "weasel words". It is not generally deemed to be in everyone's best interest to using public funding for private political parties. Whether it is good or not is debatable. The fact that there is disagreement is factual. If you want to claim percentages of Harvard educated political scientists that support public funding of political parties, that would at least be somewhat objective.
Here are some other things that are debatable:
1. It is debatable that we even need primaries. We can have alternate voting systems like IRV (instant runoff voting) and condorcet voting systems that mitigate the spoiler effect and therefore the need for primaries.
2. It is debatable whether we need political parties at all. They seem to be an unintended (though probably inevitable) consequence of optimal strategy for winning in our current FPP/plurality voting system.
You use other countries as examples of why it is a good idea to publicly fund political parties. When they were coming up with the rules for their political process they used us as a starting point and took what they thought worked and changed the parts that they didn't think work working well for us. That's why their systems are different than ours.
If there is something we should be copying from the Europeans, it's that we should be open minded to change and be willing to fix things that are broken rather than simply doing things the way they have always been done.
It was impossible for the United States to have a national popular vote that used a Condorcet voting system when our country was founded. Now it's 2016 and you could accomplish do this with the computing power of a 10 year old cell phone.
I don't know if you realize this yet. I am talking specifically about primary elections (i.e. the elections whose rules are decided by private political parties), not the actual elections (whose rules and outcomes are part of our public political process).
Not unless you consider primary elections of private political parties to be "the entire political process". I don't see why tax payers should be paying to facilitate the process by which these political parties decide who they nominate for the actual election. This is a process that the taxpayer has no say over, and should therefore have no obligation to pay for.
Slashdot Mirror
I named 1 cable news station and you named 2. You then pulled in ABC and NBC, newspapers, and websites. I didn't bother going into newspapers and internet sites, because it really doesn't matter how many of each there are at this point.
Furthermore, my point was that the number of different channels or newspapers or internet sites or radio shows doesn't matter of each political bias. There are plenty of both.
There are *LOTS* of people that watch Fox News and listen to Rush Limbaugh and Alex Jones, etc.
If there were 100 right wing cable news channels, it wouldn't make the MSM 100 times more biased to the right, because there would be the same number of right wing people watching the same amount of right wing propaganda, it would just be spread out among more channels.
I reject your premise that the level of bias in the media can be measured by numbers of TV channels, newspapers, internet sites, radio shows, etc. If you are going to do this, you need to also consider viewership. Having less numbers of shows that are more popular just means that right wingers have a more monolithic point of view and can be served by the same sources.
So I claim that there is plenty of right wing media, and your counter is that there is plenty of left wing media? Of course there is. There is plenty of media for every point of view. There is enough media of every type for everyone is able to live in an echo chamber.
Also, am talk radio is dominated by right wing people.
Nobody is prevented from presenting their opinion, other than the willingness of their potential consumers to listen.
I don't think the difference in ratios of left vs. right bias in various formats (TV, radio, print, internet, etc), is anythign but a reflection of the people that want to consume those things in those ways.
But she did get more votes
I didn't dispute this.
and the best you can produce is that you *think* Bernie would have got more votes under another system.
I don;t have an agenda. I'm not trying to push an agenda, so I don't need to do my *best* to convince you of anything. I don't know for sure what would have happened in a hypothetical national election between Hillary and Bernie. Nobody does. But I don't think it is so far fetched to to say that Hillary won the democratic nomination because she was more popular among the people voting in the democratic primaries. Bernie has a higher popularity rating nationally. I don't think there will ever be more convincing evidence that someone would win an election, than polling on the favorability of candidates.
The reason why Hillary is beating Trump right now is because her favorability is higher than Trump's
Is this "little" evidence? That's subjective. I'm saying this is the *only* evidence their could be short of an actual election.
Fox News is the MSM, and we have a whole channel dedicated to taking Hillary down. Literally anyone who wants to watch anti-Hillary propaganda has plenty of avenues to do that. They have Fox News, all of talk radio, the internet, etc. There is so much fucking anti-hillary shit out there, it's hard to even verify it all.
The left wing media is left. And the right wing media is right. It's all MSM. It's all biased. It's all bullshit.
I guess it depends on your definition of rigged. For many people the definition of rigged would fit right into your own sentence "The Democrats have a system *rigged* explicitly to prevent people like Sanders from winning".
I personally don't think it makes a difference whether you break the fair rules in a fair election, or follow the unfair rules in an unfair election.
I don't even think it is Hillary's fault that the election wasn't fair, and I'm not mad at her for winning. I am more mad at her for being a liar, and a bad person. Maybe most politicians are liars and bad people and she's not any worse than them. Ok fine. I don't think Bernie was like that.
I actually think there were more people who prefer Bernie to Hillary, but the democratic primaries only allow a subset of those people to participate. I'm not saying this is Hillary's fault. I'm saying that she benefited from closed primaries and people being prevented from voting, and this runs counter to the narrative that "she got more votes"
Trump is clean in the sense that his dirt is out in the open. I think we know enough about Trump to know who he is, and now he is going to lose the election. We don't really even need to dig up any more dirt on him. The last thing we need is for people to forget what an awful person Hillary is once she is in office. I don't want everyone to be in the mindset of "we won" on November 9th. I want everyone to be thinking "OK now we dodged the trump catastrophe, let's work on shutting down Clinton". I hope all her dirt comes out and we get a primary challenge from the left in addition to a decent republican opponent, and maybe even a serious 3rd party opponent(s).
I don't have a problem with people trying to manipulate our election with the truth. Were the people who leaked the Donald Trump pussy tape manipulating our election also? Elections are supposed to be manipulated, that's why we have debates. Since Hillary is already going to win, I think it's probably a good thing to start her off with as little of a mandate as possible. I would want the same thing if it looked like Trump was going to win. Fuck both these candidates and both these parties.
Verifying stolen information would prove the stolen information is legitimate. Refusing to verify the stolen information proves that they are legitimate and also reinforces the perception that she can not be trusted to be honest.
Maybe a person with more integrity could pull the "I'm not going to dignify these accusations with a response", except that everybody knows that she would immediately call them out as fake if they were indeed fake, and use that incident to associate that false accusation with all other accusations against her.
Yes, maybe keeping quiet is the best legal strategy (she is a lawyer afterall). But she is a politician running for president that most people fucking hate because of how dishonest she comes off. The only reason she is winning is because she is running against the only other person more disliked than she is.
Honestly? What would be the downside to just being honest? She is going to win anyway. Maybe she could try to foster some good will for once. Even if she is just going to be calculating, she is presumably going to want to win re-election in 2020, and she won't be running against Trump then.
I'm aware of that. Although I don't think that means that I am necessarily benefiting. The blu-ray laser on my PS3 has broken twice while out of warranty. So I've paid hundreds of dollars for a linux computer with a blu-ray player, lost it's ability to be a linux computer, and that I had to spend an additional $150, plus hours of my time to replace broken parts. I certainly don't think I got more than what I paid for. I think I paid way to much for what I ultimately ended up getting.
I think this was a bad deal for all parties involved. It was bad for Sony and bad for me. It's not a zero sum game. If I could go back in time and tell myself not to buy that PS3, I think everyone would be better off.
Don't buy a PS4, or a PS5, or a PS6, etc.
Our legal system is basically garbage. $9 wouldn't even pay for the lunch I ate today. Luckily, free societies/markets have an inherent justice system, whereby consumers can vote on the level of culpability of companies with their dollars.
Sometimes it can be hard to stick to your principles in this way when a company comes out with something you think you really want, but luckily, it seems like consoles are basically dying, and there is not really anything you need a PS4 for.
I actually bought a PS3 for it's blu-ray capability. I think I may have only bought about 4 games for my PS3 over it's entire life (most of which I didn't play more than a few hours). I play games on PC.
Message(translate("English", "Mandarin", "go fuck yourself")).sendTo("China");
A system where some parties are "experimenting" with primaries is different than a system where primaries are a standard part of every election.
The UK has American football too. I think the NFL played a few games there. If you are going to nitpick stuff like this in a desperate attempt to save face, I am not going to bother continuing this discussion.
That most western democracies including the U.S accept and encourage governmental financing of primaries clearly shows that we all have considered the matter and consider it a good enough idea that we all have implemented it.
Of the 3 "western democracies" you mentioned. None of them have a similar election system to the U.S., and Great Britain doesn't even have primaries. And from what I can tell France doesn't either. So of your examples 2/3 don't publicly fund primary elections, because they don't even have primary elections.
What exactly is it that makes you think that your minority opinion deserves any weight whatsoever? I accept that you can reason in circles but "I have a problem with it" is useless beyond your opinion and I suspect "my preferred candidate lost so I want to make everyone pay" is your primary motivation for holding it.
Sometimes the people in the majority only hold that position because they are intellectually lazy. And one of the benefits of a free society, is the opportunity to of the minority to convince others to agree with them and become the majority. And in actuality, both our positions are minority positions because most voters/legislators probably don't even have an informed opinion on this topic. Your "position" only has the benefit of being the status quo.
There are more reasons for continuing primaries as they (generally) eliminate the defective candidates and there is merit in electing a candidate that has the support of Congress so the support of a political party is also a valid prerequisite.
The fact that you said this, just shows me that you don't actually have any knowledge of the alternate election systems I cited, which actually do a much better job of accomplishing these goals than primaries or political parties.
That we have been unfortunate in this cycle does not make the system irredeemably broken.
I never even mentioned this cycle. I have been studying election systems since 2003. Everything I have been talking about has nothing to do with Trump vs. Hillary specifically. What I am talking about is addressing things that are problems every single election cycle.
And in fact, many local elections are starting to fix these problems. For instance in California we started doing 2 round runoff elections for non-presidential elections (eliminating party primaries). Not as good as IRV (instant runoff voting), but it's better than what we used to have. SO at least in California (as well as a few other states and cities), the majority position was that our current system was broken enough to change it.
The TPP enjoys broadbased opposition for very good reason. It will make the poor of the world poorer, so the progressives are opposed to it (including Sanders)
I think this is a good reason to oppose something. I was a Sanders supporter, and I'm pretty sure that's why he supported it. But I'm not yet convinced that this criticism is true. I haven't seen any evidence that the TPP specifically would increase poverty beyond the claim that all trade agreements increase poverty (e.g. arguments like NAFTA created poverty, and TPP is like NAFTA)
Honestly I don't feel like I understand the nuances of the economics of trade agreements enough to make an informed judgement over something like this.
It is mostly a list of things preventing local governments from governing democratically on a bunch of trade and "intellectual property" issues, so the "states rights" types are opposed to it.
I feel a bit more entitled to an opinion over the normative aspects of a trade agreement like this, as they don't really depend on the truth of various claims of causal economic relationships (e.g. this poverty is *because of* NAFTA/TPP etc), rather than simply correlations.
I definitely think IP laws in this country and around the world are problematic. I honestly don't know if TPP will/can make them worse. I suspect it probably does, but I am not aware of any specifics.
And it will enable the outflow of jobs, so the civic nationalists are opposed to it.
I would think that this is one of the goals of free trade, is to allow the outflow and inflow of goods and labor. My intuition is that it's probably pointless to try to hang on to the sorts of low skilled jobs that are flowing out of our country. If we ignore the good/evil of wealth redistribution, I think it's probably more efficient to spend money to re-educate people to do skilled jobs than it is to have people doing low skilled labor for artificially inflated wages (e.g. minimum wage). We have the infrastructure to do this that other poorer countries do not. Let's let them have those low skilled jobs and we can spend money we have investing in our own people.
Anyway, it certainly seems messy to me. It's probably a bunch of good ideas mixed with a bunch of bad ideas and everything in between. It's not clear to me if it will be a net good or a net bad compared with other trade agreements or compared to nothing.
This is why this is a low priority for me. I feel like there are so many issues that have relatively clear good answers, and I'd rather spend my time and effort advocating for those things.
Thanks for the corrections. Part of learning is learning how wrong you are about stuff :)
I have done my own research. None of that stuff really jumps out at me as being really good or really bad. I was asking why it was important to you. I don't need to hear a giant list of reasons. What is the single most egregious thing about TPP for you personally?
Recap:
Afghanistan: I was thinking of Karzai, which is now wrong since Ashraf Ghani took over in 2014.
Great Britain: There is a new PM Theresa May just recently
Saudi Arabia: King Abdulluh's son is now King Salman
Iraq: al-Malaki was succeeded by al-Abadi in 2015.
Australia: Abbott was succeeded by Turnbull in 2015
I don't think I did to bad for having not studied at all.
I think I might have even done better than Gary, at the name foreign leaders pop quiz. But I think I would have failed equally hard to name one that I admired. I can't bullshit very well. I don't really know any of these people, and even if I did, I don't think I would admire many of them. Many of them are obviously assholes without even really knowing them.
I can name lots of world leaders. When I first heard this, I could not honestly say that I admired any of them. The people I admire are not typically politicians.
Let's see just off the top of my head, I swear:
I might get some spellings wrong, and I might get some ex-leaders rather than current leaders (because I'm not cheating)
U.S.A. - Obama (I guess I admire him, but I don't think this counts)
GB - Cameron? But he just resigned after brexit or something....
Germany - Merkel
France - Holland
China - Shi jin ping?
Syria - Asad
Iran - Ahmadinajad / Khamanei
Iraq - Malaki
Afghanistan - Starts wth a K... damnit I know this one.
Venezuela - Maduro
Mexico - Pena Nieto
Russia - Putin
Itlay - Burlesconi
Egypt - Al Sisi
Turkey - Erdogan
North Korea - Kim Jong un
Saudi Arabia - fomrelry king Abdulluh? But he died and now his son is in charge I think.
Canada - Trudeaux (Seems like a nice guy, don;t know if I admire him yet, he just started)
India - Modi
Pakistan - Formerly Bhutto (maybe I admire her for her courage, but she's not a *current* world leader), don;t know who took over.
Australia - was Abott last time I checked (don;t know if they had a new election yet).
I think I probably would have done better on this pop quiz than most US congressman and governors. I can't name any I admire, except maybe Obama, and that answer would just make me look like I don't know any foreign leaders. It turns out that most notable foreign leaders are assholes.
I normally roll my eyes when I hear someone call a question from the media a "gotcha question", but I kind of think this one. There aren't really any good answers that aren't bullshit. Maybe someone like Hillary can give a good answer because she's actually already met a lot of these people in person. This isn't even a foreign policy question. Although maybe giving a bullshit answer is a test of ones diplomatic abilities.
In 2012 he's had a better showing than any previous libertarian candidate, nearly doubling the next best showing. And this year current polling suggests he will do about 8 times better than his 2012 showing.
I don't know how much of this is due to Johnson himself. It might have more to do with the increasing popularity of the Libertarian party itself, or decreasing popularity of the 2 major parties, but the claim that he's doing worse than his predecessors is about as factually wrong as anything can be.
I don't agree with Johnson on a lot of issues, but I think he's the best choice this year. Jill Stein might be a good person, but she seems like a total cook to me. That's why I have her ranked all the way down at #2, just above the 2 corrupt sociopaths that are also running.
What's wrong with TPP? As someone whose priority list has TPP way at the bottom, I don't really see why this is such an important issue. I'm not saying it's not important, I'm just saying I don't see why it is. Why is it important to you?
Would you feel better if he had memorized a list of foreign leaders?
Simply saying "lot's of western democracies have primaries funded by the public" is not in itself, a good argument that they are a good thing. The other countries you mentioned have completely different political systems. England (i.e. Great Britain) doesn't even have primaries at all. And even in the United States, primary elections are a relatively new thing.
(some) Public funding of political parties is common and generally deemed to be in everyone's best interest.
I think I need to once again point out that I am criticizing the public funding of primary elections and not political parties in general. Furthermore, your claim, is not true. Wikipedia would call this kind of claim as using "weasel words". It is not generally deemed to be in everyone's best interest to using public funding for private political parties. Whether it is good or not is debatable. The fact that there is disagreement is factual. If you want to claim percentages of Harvard educated political scientists that support public funding of political parties, that would at least be somewhat objective.
Here are some other things that are debatable:
1. It is debatable that we even need primaries. We can have alternate voting systems like IRV (instant runoff voting) and condorcet voting systems that mitigate the spoiler effect and therefore the need for primaries. 2. It is debatable whether we need political parties at all. They seem to be an unintended (though probably inevitable) consequence of optimal strategy for winning in our current FPP/plurality voting system.
You use other countries as examples of why it is a good idea to publicly fund political parties. When they were coming up with the rules for their political process they used us as a starting point and took what they thought worked and changed the parts that they didn't think work working well for us. That's why their systems are different than ours.
If there is something we should be copying from the Europeans, it's that we should be open minded to change and be willing to fix things that are broken rather than simply doing things the way they have always been done.
It was impossible for the United States to have a national popular vote that used a Condorcet voting system when our country was founded. Now it's 2016 and you could accomplish do this with the computing power of a 10 year old cell phone.
I don't know if you realize this yet. I am talking specifically about primary elections (i.e. the elections whose rules are decided by private political parties), not the actual elections (whose rules and outcomes are part of our public political process).
Not unless you consider primary elections of private political parties to be "the entire political process". I don't see why tax payers should be paying to facilitate the process by which these political parties decide who they nominate for the actual election. This is a process that the taxpayer has no say over, and should therefore have no obligation to pay for.