The generals said the impacts of climate change were already factors in the conflicts driving a current crisis of migration into Europe, having been linked to the Arab Spring, the war in Syria and the Boko Haram terrorist insurgency.
This sort of donkey shit is part of the reason why the anti-climate change movement has so much steam behind it. Even blaming stuff like Hurricane Katrina on climate change was pretty bad, but this? It shouldn't be mentioned. It's senselessly injecting tangential politics into an already senselessly politicized issue. I'm sure someone has a very clever conjecture-heavy explanation for these claims, but I highly, highly, highly doubt that global warming was remotely significant in the genesis of any of those things.
I mean, correct me if I'm wrong, but Syria didn't suddenly erupt in chaos because the banana harvest was a bit low this year.
That's my entire point. I knew the correct figure was somewhere between 1/2 and 1/3 in America, but since my circle of friends and family is mostly a mixture of Apple-hating geeks and relatively poor people (and also I told my family early on that they are getting zero tech support from me if they choose to buy Apple products), my own personal experience is skewed.
So, if the binary guy (10010110 whatever) wants to smugly pretend that the world revolves around his own personal life experience instead of looking for sales figures for the Surface or Echo, that's his prerogative, but he should be called out on it.
As I said in other comments, it's so funny that there is so much uproar over how the system is broken and needs to be fixed now that Trump has won, but there was no such thing after Obama won.
Uh, Obama didn't lose the popular vote either time (the last president who was elected despite losing the popular vote was Bush in 2000.) In fact, he won an absolute majority (not merely plurality) of the popular vote both times. Not sure what you expected people to complain about there?
Also, whatever his flaws, he wasn't a highly incendiary personality who said over the top things, changed his mind, and then lied about changing his mind. Which is not to say I agree with every criticism of Trump (far from it; I think that the left's focus on irrational hyperbole was one of several decisive factors in Trump's election), but he is clearly a much more idealized "you see, this is why the electoral college is bullshit" example than George W. Bush ever was.
The whole system is broken. Fixing it with a law about the EC is like fixing a plane that's falling into pieces in mid-air with some duct tape and pretending everything is fine.
One thing at a time. I would agree that this isn't the most important conceivable electoral reform (demolishing party and donor power by instituting campaign finance and advertising reform, discouraging the use of public resources for primaries, anti-gerrymandering amendments, changing how ballots are formatted and presented so that being "on the ballot" vs. being a write-in isn't a huge difference, etc. would be much nicer), but it is the topic at hand, and a lot of people are being unduly smug with their implications that 1. This was a fair race and the existence of the EC merely changed candidate focus (as opposed to changing the outcome) and 2. That discussion of the popular vote is irrelevant and/or that it would be unfair to attempt to change electors' minds. If that isn't where you stand then so be it, but I'll close with a recap of your first post:
Both candidates went into the race knowing the rules. Crying baby over the "popular vote" is like saying you should've gotten the 100m dash gold medal because your running style was more beautiful. Might be true, but you knew that it's a race for speed when you started.
As I said above, the confusion is they were saying "the same as Ubuntu installs other paravirt-enabled VM/container platforms", not "the same as a bare metal Ubuntu install." OP switched to explaining the difference between these two things towards the end of his post, perhaps a little confusingly.
The claim as I understand it is it's the same as other paravirt Ubuntu installs, not that it's the same as the bare metal ISOs you see on Ubuntu's website. If it's true that MS basically just created a paravirt driver for Linux (not to be confused with creating a user mode kernel for Windows)... I suppose that could be handy for anyone who really, really needs full native Windows speeds for certain tasks, but everyone else is surely better off doing the opposite running Linux as the host and Windows virtualized for the odds and ends that require Windows.
Maybe worth noting there are third party PV drivers for Windows for better performance, at least for the Xen / Qubes platforms.
First thing's first: Pretending that Trump sending more fliers to CA and NY would have resulted in over 2M more people voting for him instead of Hillary is ludicrous. Advertising matters, particularly with two bland candidates (2000 and 2004 in come to mind), but this election was the least advertising-driven we've ever seen.
The popular vote matters because state legislators think it matters, and electors can choose to pay attention to it as well. The contest is over the votes of the electors. Electors CAN vote for other candidates and have done so in the past (just not enough to swing the outcome.) Trump hasn't won a goddamn thing yet. He'll very likely win, of course, because of the way electors are selected and the extreme hesitancy the GOP has in tipping over the Trump Train, but it's utter nonsense to claim it doesn't matter. Did you click the link in my previous post? Electors from multiple states are already legally *required* to vote for the popular vote winner as soon as they can get enough additional states on board for it to count. They're over halfway there in terms of EC representation necessary for that law to come into effect, and in the meantime electors are already still free to respond to a campaign to get them to vote with the majority.
Is there a law against bribing electors to change their vote? I've no idea, but if not let's do that. Smash the system to force people to pay attention and commit to a reform. Sure, I'd be more or less fine with that. What I'm not fine with is people pretending that this was a fair or reasonable competition that Trump has already won. That's not a valid summary of the way the system works or the way matters currently stand.
As a side note, the catering to rural folks is of course entirely anachronistic (there's no longer any good argument that one rural vote should count more than one city vote), nor is their tendency to swing conservative (at least in this country) an eternal truth. Their lives would get much shittier if their party ever truly implemented the broad principles they claim to stand for, hence my previous post outlining the importance of suddenly "helping" the Republicans do just that.
The odds may be against it happening in this election cycle[1], but it's a plausible attack vector moving forward if/when 1. Democrats consolidate power again (at least at the state level) 2. Democrats get over their cowardly nice-guy persona and finally decide to play hardball against the Republicans.
One strategy I particularly favor is to suddenly adopt Republicans' anti-welfare and small-government rhetoric en-masse... with a focus on federal goverment spending more (per-capita, and relative to revenue) in red states than blue states. This tool, among others, should be used relentlessly as a sledgehammer against the Republicans until red states begin to sign up for the Popular Vote Interstate Compact[2], agree to federal reform to hold all elections on weekends, agree to anti-gerrymandering reform (something the Democrats have done in the past as well, to be sure), etc.
Or, if they refuse such reasonable measures just keep at it, hold short-duration high-profile protests where state authorities refuse to cooperate with the feds for a few weeks, etc. until either federal spending in red states is brought in line with blue states or the Republicans are forced to drop their small government platform entirely. (And either one would likely shatter the Republican party establishment entirely.)
Excessive? No, not really. Not when we have so many people around here implicitly trumpeting the virtues of these concessions made to agrarian slave states hundreds of years ago as if it were a good thing. This is the height of cynicism, and one can only hope that some day the Democrats will grow up and realize that sometimes you need to fight fire with fire. This generation might be beyond hope, but I suspect the younger generation of leftists who feel the bern might not grow up so meek.
1. It's not completely inconceivable. Trump has demonstrated a cluelessness and laziness in this campaign such that, if the Republican party really wanted to, I suspect they could have easily "helped" him select electors that were under their control. It's not inconceivable, although it doesn't seem likely due to the massive backlash they'd face and the fact that having a crazy renegade in the white house offers them some level of plausible deniability if/when things go badly in the country.
2. Which gets to the heart of your OP: of course the popular vote matters, and if people refuse to reform the system directly then states can exploit the fact that electors have always been free vote for whomever they want to reform the system indirectly. (They just need a little... encouragement to get enough red states to sign up as well.) If you want to argue "thems the rules" and hand-wave away calls for federal electoral college reform, you have to be willing to accept this possibility as well. Electors are allowed to vote for whomever they want, both in this election and in future elections, and states are apparently allowed to do whatever they want to compel the electors to vote in a certain way.
That means that in a random group of 20,000 people in the USA you would expect 2-3 of them to try to (successfully) commit suicide in a given year
Even if we're going to stick to the actuarial, I'd say you should probably correct that for a few factors first before declaring "nothing to see here." Unemployed people are more likely to commit suicide, for instance. And how many people choose to do it at work in an explicit attempt to make a statement against their employers?
(Not that I'm anti-Amazon here; I tend to think the demonization of specific corporations is a red herring that never solves anything and distracts us from real structural reforms we could be implementing.)
The problem is that experience can do one of two things to developers. Open your mind or close your mind. Many programmers refuse to open the Pandora's box and they stick to a tool, paradigm or coding style they know even though its not the best thing to solve the problem at hand. It's like a carpenter trying to cut down a tree with a circular saw because that's what he spends 99% of his time using.
That is true enough, although if we got into specifics I think everyone would be guilty of this to some degree. C++ / Java style OO, for instance, appears to have irreversibly poisoned the minds of at least two generations of coders because it's "good enough" and very familiar. They even celebrate the fact that they have to repeat certain familiar patterns of code over and over in a noninuitive way to accomplish some commonplace task, calling such kludges "design patterns."
On another note entirely, I simply can't resist mentioning that when I was three years old I actually saw my father cutting down a small dead tree in our back yard with a hacksaw... and I asked him why he wasn't using his portable circular saw. He paused, muttered "that's actually not a half bad...", went to the garage and used his circular saw to finish the job. (He didn't have a chainsaw.)
I'm not sure what that tends to argue for except, perhaps, for the fact that I was apparently a hacker from a fairly early age.
Oh, we have people like you down here. (I didn't say you personally.) And despite popular reports, enough right wingers (in addition to a few left wingers like myself) down here are aware enough of Europe's existence to view it as a cautionary tale as to what happens when the left is allowed to get too smugly self-absorbed in imagined grievances that they forget the real ones.
How is your Human Rights Commission doing these days? And did minister Mitchell ever lose his job over the way he treated Tarek Fatah, or is it still considered kosher (a word I use advisedly) to imply that only West- and women-haters are permitted to be the official voice for the Islamic community?
So you're taking these already laughable anachronisms and making them explicit now. Right. Ok. Do I need to explain the agricultural revolution to you? I'm starting to think I might need to. If need be, blue states could grow enough food to feed themselves, easily. (It wouldn't be that "organic" scam shit but that's a rant for another day.) It's really, really easy to grow food now. It has been for the better part of a century. Irrigation, then the Haber process and then modern pesticides have completely destroyed the food supply risk that human civilization previously had to live in constant fear of. The world has had global food surpluses for decades now, regardless of droughts or locusts or whathaveyou.
Furthermore, the number of people actually involved in growing the food, be it in blue or red states, has greatly decreased. The number of actual owners (not just workers who don't have a stake in the farm) is quite small indeed smaller, and we have plenty of both state-level and federal-level programs to take care of them. Maybe some of them need reform... whatever. That's a side issue. The fact is the demise of the small farmer is a natural result of *Republican* business policies (many of which I happen to agree with, though definitely not all) and technological improvements. We are not an agrarian society, period. Your attempt to claim that farmers need to be coddled is simply laughable. Anyone can farm and be fairly confident of high yields. The equipment and seeds and fertilizer and pesticides and techniques are widely available.
If you still believe that farming is some crucial civilizational issue and for that reason we have to appease the red states... psh. I'm just about out of words here. There's only so many different ways I can say "this isn't the 1700s any more." You might as well be arguing that we should still consider aluminum to be a precious metal more valuable than platinum for all the sense you're making.
Pretty much the entire US nuclear arsenal is stored in a flyover state.
Is it now? Pretty sure we have a few subs left.
The red states are not going to nuke the blue states, particularly not for supporting tax cuts (cognitive dissonance only get you so far before people begin to question, or at least shrug.) Furthermore, the feds have security devices to prevent unauthorized local launches, and I guarantee they will notice if someone tries to disassemble the whole thing to hotwire it. At a fairly short notice, the military could choose to relocate the nukes if they deemed it prudent. The American federal military is the most powerful force on the planet; while red states do possess a decent ability to wage guerrilla warfare, they are not able to resist invasion or take or defend specific immobile targets.
The left has been playing this carrotlike "incentive" game for decades now, but the Republicans have repeatedly indicated they want to play rough. I say we give it to them. I highly, highly doubt they will escalate it to military force, but they wouldn't last long if they did. They wouldn't last very long if we allowed them to secede, either. I would actually love to see a modern, at least semi-rational right wing, but it's clear at this point that we need to had them their asses a few times before they'll consider evolving. (Obama unfortunately was not such a humiliation for several reasons: he never had a strong congress backing him, and he was never willing to play hardball.)
And this McCarthyist definition of "racism" doesn't bother you at all?
Nope.
Fair enough. But it's people like you who are responsible for the waning left and the rise of the alt-right. Just so you know.
Fortunately this is one of those problems that will eventually take care of itself, one case of untreated influenza at a time. The new generation, though they are (fortunately) left-leaning, has by and large lost patience for hysteria-based and witch-hunt politics.
It's not overturning an election. The electors have always had the right to vote for whomever they wished. They retain this right at the federal level even though 29 states so far have tried to unilaterally remove that right with state law.
If you want to support the reformation of the electoral college then you should do so, but you should stop pretending that only the quirks of the system that work in your favor (resulting in a technical Trump victory even though he lost the election) should be respected, while the quirks that might give Hillary the victory (faithless electors exercising their right to vote for whomever they choose) are invalid. It makes you look weak and self-serving.
And this McCarthyist definition of "racism" doesn't bother you at all? Despite evidence that this attitude is alienating huge swathes of swing voters and young independents?
How about this: when it comes to politicians, "proposing policies that would discriminate based on race" is racism. Nothing more, nothing less.
The really, really sad part of this election is Trump's policies (such as they were) re: police brutality and Mexican immigration had a ton of holes. The left could have easily torn them to pieces; instead, they choose to howl and howl not just "Trump is racist" but also "Why aren't you leaping up and down and frothing at the mouth like we are?? We said TRUMP IS RACIST!!!!!" and now "It's not ok. It's not normal. A RACIST is soon going to be in the White House!!!!"
Replace racist with Communist if you cannot see how dumb this strategy appears from the outside. It makes you look weak and unable to engage in actual policy debate.
I do find the retort "Am I stupid? Once I answer you'd take a screengrab," rather humorous though.
It sounds rather as if they do support a toppling of the Communist party, doesn't it? I, for one, would love to see that show trial, with a little text-to-speech enabled laptop sitting there on the defendant's seat and the executioner standing by with defibrillator paddles. Or an Ubuntu installation disc.
By the way, the endgame here wouldn't be some permanent state of warfare, but rather a reformation of both political parties and a shakeup of the electoral map. The Republican party has been a weird, unnatural construct for decades now... trying to convince poor, rural folks to vote for less welfare, more corruption, and more corporate subsidy was always an unstable state of affairs. The war would be against the Republican establishment, not the citizens of red states, although they are obviously necessary players here and would first need to be shown just how cynical and hypocritical their party and their party's policies were.
I don't believe that it is just a leftover compromise, though. I believe that the unity of the nation depends on the "flyover states" having more power in presidential elections to compensate for their lesser power in the house of representatives.
Why? This is an astonishing claim to make in the 21st century. We are not an agrarian society any more, let alone an agrarian society with slave states to humor. A very, very small number of people own the farms and they're already fairly well taken care of at the federal and state levels. One city vote should equal one rural vote.
Plus, they already have two senators for that express reason... and a state legislature/governor/etc.
So why should the midwest and other less populous states give up their extra power in appointing the executive branch?
Because the Democrats can, and IMO at this point probably should, fuck them up pretty bad if they ever chose to play hardball. Obviously, this would have to happen after the Democrats consolidate some power again, at least at the state level. We may even need to wait for the next generation of leftists to ascend to power first, but I do think it's coming. First off, they need to mention "state welfare" and "insolvent states" constantly, maybe even incite some minor revolts where major blue states briefly refuse to cooperate with the feds for a week or two, just to draw issue to the fact that these anti-welfare jackasses are (for the most part, excepting oil-rich states like TX and AK) actually parasites leeching off of the revenues of blue states. Never stop mentioning this; literally steal all of the Republicans' talking points about taxes and big government and hard work. The Dems shouldn't shut up about it, it should be mentioned in every single speech until enough programs have been canceled to bring the red states into parity with the blue in terms of per-capita spending. There are some other fun directions to go from there, but stealing the Republicans' thunder whilst simultaneously beggaring most red states is an extremely powerful political weapon that the Democrats have been too nice (and too cowardly) to touch up until now... but I think younger voters in particular are getting pretty goddamn sick of watching the Democrats responding to Republicans' dirty tricks with mild rebukes all day long.
If you want a more direct response, passing state laws or inter-state compacts to intentionally mess with the EC seems straightforward enough. They could either fix it directly (compelling a vote for popular vote winner), or they might be able to "break" it even further or tilt it towards the left, thus compelling debate and talk of reform from both sides of the aisle.
the electors were put in place in a time when they literally selected the president, and the popular votes weren't even counted, the popular vote was a suggestion. now the electors are a formality. we've progressed to that point.
No we haven't "progressed" anywhere. Some states have passed laws in an attempt to unilaterally change the rules, but no federal level changes have been made, and only federal level changes could affect the validity of votes cast.
how the game is played, that, is a violation of our rights.
This is not a violation of your rights. The game has always, explicitly granted the electors free will. Don't like it? Then you should be in favor of electoral college reform at the federal level as I am.
This entire tangent of mine has been about pointing out hypocrisy and your post illustrates this very, very, nicely. You want us to say "rules are rules" as long as your candidate is elected, even if the other candidate got two million more votes, but you stick your head in the sand and scream about rights being violated if I point out that the electors are free to elect whomever they wish. And always have been.
1. This is mainly an in-principle argument with people who are trying to have it both ways, insisting that the EC is perfect whilst denying one of its fundamental properties.
2. The states can criminalize whatever they want (note that 21 have done nothing whatsoever), but they cannot unilaterally change the validity of electors' votes. If you want to fundamentally change the system, it needs to be done at the federal level. Frankly, I think states interested in seeing EC reform should go the other way and past amnesty laws for rebel electors from other states and take other steps to encourage free-thinking electors. This isn't a bug of the system; it's a feature. I am for reform; I simply think the best way to get it, at this point, is to fully utilize the quirks of the system and not let anyone get away with the hypocrisy of claiming that they're for the EC whilst condemning the very core of the EC.
3. Electors have voted for other candidates in the past, just not in sufficient numbers to make a difference. (Note they don't necessarily have to raise another candidate's total high enough; simply decreasing someone's total below 270 would be sufficient to nullify the vote and kick the matter to congress, as I recall.)
Slashdot Mirror
Die internet, die.
The Internet, the.
Pretty sure that would be ungrammatical regardless of one's opinion in the wider debate.
(Or possibly that's the joke, in which case my response must be: Die "the Internet", die.)
The generals said the impacts of climate change were already factors in the conflicts driving a current crisis of migration into Europe, having been linked to the Arab Spring, the war in Syria and the Boko Haram terrorist insurgency.
This sort of donkey shit is part of the reason why the anti-climate change movement has so much steam behind it. Even blaming stuff like Hurricane Katrina on climate change was pretty bad, but this? It shouldn't be mentioned. It's senselessly injecting tangential politics into an already senselessly politicized issue. I'm sure someone has a very clever conjecture-heavy explanation for these claims, but I highly, highly, highly doubt that global warming was remotely significant in the genesis of any of those things.
I mean, correct me if I'm wrong, but Syria didn't suddenly erupt in chaos because the banana harvest was a bit low this year.
That's my entire point. I knew the correct figure was somewhere between 1/2 and 1/3 in America, but since my circle of friends and family is mostly a mixture of Apple-hating geeks and relatively poor people (and also I told my family early on that they are getting zero tech support from me if they choose to buy Apple products), my own personal experience is skewed.
So, if the binary guy (10010110 whatever) wants to smugly pretend that the world revolves around his own personal life experience instead of looking for sales figures for the Surface or Echo, that's his prerogative, but he should be called out on it.
As I said in other comments, it's so funny that there is so much uproar over how the system is broken and needs to be fixed now that Trump has won, but there was no such thing after Obama won.
Uh, Obama didn't lose the popular vote either time (the last president who was elected despite losing the popular vote was Bush in 2000.) In fact, he won an absolute majority (not merely plurality) of the popular vote both times. Not sure what you expected people to complain about there?
Also, whatever his flaws, he wasn't a highly incendiary personality who said over the top things, changed his mind, and then lied about changing his mind. Which is not to say I agree with every criticism of Trump (far from it; I think that the left's focus on irrational hyperbole was one of several decisive factors in Trump's election), but he is clearly a much more idealized "you see, this is why the electoral college is bullshit" example than George W. Bush ever was.
The whole system is broken. Fixing it with a law about the EC is like fixing a plane that's falling into pieces in mid-air with some duct tape and pretending everything is fine.
One thing at a time. I would agree that this isn't the most important conceivable electoral reform (demolishing party and donor power by instituting campaign finance and advertising reform, discouraging the use of public resources for primaries, anti-gerrymandering amendments, changing how ballots are formatted and presented so that being "on the ballot" vs. being a write-in isn't a huge difference, etc. would be much nicer), but it is the topic at hand, and a lot of people are being unduly smug with their implications that 1. This was a fair race and the existence of the EC merely changed candidate focus (as opposed to changing the outcome) and 2. That discussion of the popular vote is irrelevant and/or that it would be unfair to attempt to change electors' minds. If that isn't where you stand then so be it, but I'll close with a recap of your first post:
Both candidates went into the race knowing the rules. Crying baby over the "popular vote" is like saying you should've gotten the 100m dash gold medal because your running style was more beautiful. Might be true, but you knew that it's a race for speed when you started.
As I said above, the confusion is they were saying "the same as Ubuntu installs other paravirt-enabled VM/container platforms", not "the same as a bare metal Ubuntu install." OP switched to explaining the difference between these two things towards the end of his post, perhaps a little confusingly.
The claim as I understand it is it's the same as other paravirt Ubuntu installs, not that it's the same as the bare metal ISOs you see on Ubuntu's website. If it's true that MS basically just created a paravirt driver for Linux (not to be confused with creating a user mode kernel for Windows)... I suppose that could be handy for anyone who really, really needs full native Windows speeds for certain tasks, but everyone else is surely better off doing the opposite running Linux as the host and Windows virtualized for the odds and ends that require Windows.
Maybe worth noting there are third party PV drivers for Windows for better performance, at least for the Xen / Qubes platforms.
First thing's first: Pretending that Trump sending more fliers to CA and NY would have resulted in over 2M more people voting for him instead of Hillary is ludicrous. Advertising matters, particularly with two bland candidates (2000 and 2004 in come to mind), but this election was the least advertising-driven we've ever seen.
The popular vote matters because state legislators think it matters, and electors can choose to pay attention to it as well. The contest is over the votes of the electors. Electors CAN vote for other candidates and have done so in the past (just not enough to swing the outcome.) Trump hasn't won a goddamn thing yet. He'll very likely win, of course, because of the way electors are selected and the extreme hesitancy the GOP has in tipping over the Trump Train, but it's utter nonsense to claim it doesn't matter. Did you click the link in my previous post? Electors from multiple states are already legally *required* to vote for the popular vote winner as soon as they can get enough additional states on board for it to count. They're over halfway there in terms of EC representation necessary for that law to come into effect, and in the meantime electors are already still free to respond to a campaign to get them to vote with the majority.
Is there a law against bribing electors to change their vote? I've no idea, but if not let's do that. Smash the system to force people to pay attention and commit to a reform. Sure, I'd be more or less fine with that. What I'm not fine with is people pretending that this was a fair or reasonable competition that Trump has already won. That's not a valid summary of the way the system works or the way matters currently stand.
As a side note, the catering to rural folks is of course entirely anachronistic (there's no longer any good argument that one rural vote should count more than one city vote), nor is their tendency to swing conservative (at least in this country) an eternal truth. Their lives would get much shittier if their party ever truly implemented the broad principles they claim to stand for, hence my previous post outlining the importance of suddenly "helping" the Republicans do just that.
The odds may be against it happening in this election cycle[1], but it's a plausible attack vector moving forward if/when 1. Democrats consolidate power again (at least at the state level) 2. Democrats get over their cowardly nice-guy persona and finally decide to play hardball against the Republicans.
One strategy I particularly favor is to suddenly adopt Republicans' anti-welfare and small-government rhetoric en-masse... with a focus on federal goverment spending more (per-capita, and relative to revenue) in red states than blue states. This tool, among others, should be used relentlessly as a sledgehammer against the Republicans until red states begin to sign up for the Popular Vote Interstate Compact[2], agree to federal reform to hold all elections on weekends, agree to anti-gerrymandering reform (something the Democrats have done in the past as well, to be sure), etc.
Or, if they refuse such reasonable measures just keep at it, hold short-duration high-profile protests where state authorities refuse to cooperate with the feds for a few weeks, etc. until either federal spending in red states is brought in line with blue states or the Republicans are forced to drop their small government platform entirely. (And either one would likely shatter the Republican party establishment entirely.)
Excessive? No, not really. Not when we have so many people around here implicitly trumpeting the virtues of these concessions made to agrarian slave states hundreds of years ago as if it were a good thing. This is the height of cynicism, and one can only hope that some day the Democrats will grow up and realize that sometimes you need to fight fire with fire. This generation might be beyond hope, but I suspect the younger generation of leftists who feel the bern might not grow up so meek.
1. It's not completely inconceivable. Trump has demonstrated a cluelessness and laziness in this campaign such that, if the Republican party really wanted to, I suspect they could have easily "helped" him select electors that were under their control. It's not inconceivable, although it doesn't seem likely due to the massive backlash they'd face and the fact that having a crazy renegade in the white house offers them some level of plausible deniability if/when things go badly in the country.
2. Which gets to the heart of your OP: of course the popular vote matters, and if people refuse to reform the system directly then states can exploit the fact that electors have always been free vote for whomever they want to reform the system indirectly. (They just need a little... encouragement to get enough red states to sign up as well.) If you want to argue "thems the rules" and hand-wave away calls for federal electoral college reform, you have to be willing to accept this possibility as well. Electors are allowed to vote for whomever they want, both in this election and in future elections, and states are apparently allowed to do whatever they want to compel the electors to vote in a certain way.
... at least until they legalize mass-less surveillance too.
Neutrinos have mass. Best be a photon. This has the additional benefit that no one will ever see you coming.
That means that in a random group of 20,000 people in the USA you would expect 2-3 of them to try to (successfully) commit suicide in a given year
Even if we're going to stick to the actuarial, I'd say you should probably correct that for a few factors first before declaring "nothing to see here." Unemployed people are more likely to commit suicide, for instance. And how many people choose to do it at work in an explicit attempt to make a statement against their employers?
(Not that I'm anti-Amazon here; I tend to think the demonization of specific corporations is a red herring that never solves anything and distracts us from real structural reforms we could be implementing.)
Uh, well, from what I've seen iPhone is not popular, Android users outnumbering em at least 15:1.
Or maybe anecdotal, personal samples are not representative? I've seen a Surface and an Echo up close outside a store.
He said he had a Dot, which can connect to external speakers.
And that's a not-so-subtle attempt to deflect criticism of your in-principle point by appealing to the pragmatic.
The problem is that experience can do one of two things to developers. Open your mind or close your mind. Many programmers refuse to open the Pandora's box and they stick to a tool, paradigm or coding style they know even though its not the best thing to solve the problem at hand. It's like a carpenter trying to cut down a tree with a circular saw because that's what he spends 99% of his time using.
That is true enough, although if we got into specifics I think everyone would be guilty of this to some degree. C++ / Java style OO, for instance, appears to have irreversibly poisoned the minds of at least two generations of coders because it's "good enough" and very familiar. They even celebrate the fact that they have to repeat certain familiar patterns of code over and over in a noninuitive way to accomplish some commonplace task, calling such kludges "design patterns."
On another note entirely, I simply can't resist mentioning that when I was three years old I actually saw my father cutting down a small dead tree in our back yard with a hacksaw... and I asked him why he wasn't using his portable circular saw. He paused, muttered "that's actually not a half bad...", went to the garage and used his circular saw to finish the job. (He didn't have a chainsaw.)
I'm not sure what that tends to argue for except, perhaps, for the fact that I was apparently a hacker from a fairly early age.
Oh, we have people like you down here. (I didn't say you personally.) And despite popular reports, enough right wingers (in addition to a few left wingers like myself) down here are aware enough of Europe's existence to view it as a cautionary tale as to what happens when the left is allowed to get too smugly self-absorbed in imagined grievances that they forget the real ones.
How is your Human Rights Commission doing these days? And did minister Mitchell ever lose his job over the way he treated Tarek Fatah, or is it still considered kosher (a word I use advisedly) to imply that only West- and women-haters are permitted to be the official voice for the Islamic community?
Furthermore, the number of people actually involved in growing the food, be it in blue or red states, has greatly decreased. The number of actual owners (not just workers who don't have a stake in the farm) is quite small indeed smaller, and we have plenty of both state-level and federal-level programs to take care of them. Maybe some of them need reform... whatever. That's a side issue. The fact is the demise of the small farmer is a natural result of *Republican* business policies (many of which I happen to agree with, though definitely not all) and technological improvements. We are not an agrarian society, period. Your attempt to claim that farmers need to be coddled is simply laughable. Anyone can farm and be fairly confident of high yields. The equipment and seeds and fertilizer and pesticides and techniques are widely available.
If you still believe that farming is some crucial civilizational issue and for that reason we have to appease the red states... psh. I'm just about out of words here. There's only so many different ways I can say "this isn't the 1700s any more." You might as well be arguing that we should still consider aluminum to be a precious metal more valuable than platinum for all the sense you're making.
Pretty much the entire US nuclear arsenal is stored in a flyover state.
Is it now? Pretty sure we have a few subs left.
The red states are not going to nuke the blue states, particularly not for supporting tax cuts (cognitive dissonance only get you so far before people begin to question, or at least shrug.) Furthermore, the feds have security devices to prevent unauthorized local launches, and I guarantee they will notice if someone tries to disassemble the whole thing to hotwire it. At a fairly short notice, the military could choose to relocate the nukes if they deemed it prudent. The American federal military is the most powerful force on the planet; while red states do possess a decent ability to wage guerrilla warfare, they are not able to resist invasion or take or defend specific immobile targets.
The left has been playing this carrotlike "incentive" game for decades now, but the Republicans have repeatedly indicated they want to play rough. I say we give it to them. I highly, highly doubt they will escalate it to military force, but they wouldn't last long if they did. They wouldn't last very long if we allowed them to secede, either. I would actually love to see a modern, at least semi-rational right wing, but it's clear at this point that we need to had them their asses a few times before they'll consider evolving. (Obama unfortunately was not such a humiliation for several reasons: he never had a strong congress backing him, and he was never willing to play hardball.)
And this McCarthyist definition of "racism" doesn't bother you at all?
Nope.
Fair enough. But it's people like you who are responsible for the waning left and the rise of the alt-right. Just so you know.
Fortunately this is one of those problems that will eventually take care of itself, one case of untreated influenza at a time. The new generation, though they are (fortunately) left-leaning, has by and large lost patience for hysteria-based and witch-hunt politics.
It's not overturning an election. The electors have always had the right to vote for whomever they wished. They retain this right at the federal level even though 29 states so far have tried to unilaterally remove that right with state law.
If you want to support the reformation of the electoral college then you should do so, but you should stop pretending that only the quirks of the system that work in your favor (resulting in a technical Trump victory even though he lost the election) should be respected, while the quirks that might give Hillary the victory (faithless electors exercising their right to vote for whomever they choose) are invalid. It makes you look weak and self-serving.
Let's just say the whole Birther thing is a bit of a tell, then the not renting to black folks in NYC is kind of a give-away as well.
And this McCarthyist definition of "racism" doesn't bother you at all? Despite evidence that this attitude is alienating huge swathes of swing voters and young independents?
How about this: when it comes to politicians, "proposing policies that would discriminate based on race" is racism. Nothing more, nothing less.
The really, really sad part of this election is Trump's policies (such as they were) re: police brutality and Mexican immigration had a ton of holes. The left could have easily torn them to pieces; instead, they choose to howl and howl not just "Trump is racist" but also "Why aren't you leaping up and down and frothing at the mouth like we are?? We said TRUMP IS RACIST!!!!!" and now "It's not ok. It's not normal. A RACIST is soon going to be in the White House!!!!"
Replace racist with Communist if you cannot see how dumb this strategy appears from the outside. It makes you look weak and unable to engage in actual policy debate.
I do find the retort "Am I stupid? Once I answer you'd take a screengrab," rather humorous though.
It sounds rather as if they do support a toppling of the Communist party, doesn't it? I, for one, would love to see that show trial, with a little text-to-speech enabled laptop sitting there on the defendant's seat and the executioner standing by with defibrillator paddles. Or an Ubuntu installation disc.
By the way, the endgame here wouldn't be some permanent state of warfare, but rather a reformation of both political parties and a shakeup of the electoral map. The Republican party has been a weird, unnatural construct for decades now... trying to convince poor, rural folks to vote for less welfare, more corruption, and more corporate subsidy was always an unstable state of affairs. The war would be against the Republican establishment, not the citizens of red states, although they are obviously necessary players here and would first need to be shown just how cynical and hypocritical their party and their party's policies were.
I don't believe that it is just a leftover compromise, though. I believe that the unity of the nation depends on the "flyover states" having more power in presidential elections to compensate for their lesser power in the house of representatives.
Why? This is an astonishing claim to make in the 21st century. We are not an agrarian society any more, let alone an agrarian society with slave states to humor. A very, very small number of people own the farms and they're already fairly well taken care of at the federal and state levels. One city vote should equal one rural vote.
Plus, they already have two senators for that express reason... and a state legislature/governor/etc.
So why should the midwest and other less populous states give up their extra power in appointing the executive branch?
Because the Democrats can, and IMO at this point probably should, fuck them up pretty bad if they ever chose to play hardball. Obviously, this would have to happen after the Democrats consolidate some power again, at least at the state level. We may even need to wait for the next generation of leftists to ascend to power first, but I do think it's coming. First off, they need to mention "state welfare" and "insolvent states" constantly, maybe even incite some minor revolts where major blue states briefly refuse to cooperate with the feds for a week or two, just to draw issue to the fact that these anti-welfare jackasses are (for the most part, excepting oil-rich states like TX and AK) actually parasites leeching off of the revenues of blue states. Never stop mentioning this; literally steal all of the Republicans' talking points about taxes and big government and hard work. The Dems shouldn't shut up about it, it should be mentioned in every single speech until enough programs have been canceled to bring the red states into parity with the blue in terms of per-capita spending. There are some other fun directions to go from there, but stealing the Republicans' thunder whilst simultaneously beggaring most red states is an extremely powerful political weapon that the Democrats have been too nice (and too cowardly) to touch up until now... but I think younger voters in particular are getting pretty goddamn sick of watching the Democrats responding to Republicans' dirty tricks with mild rebukes all day long.
If you want a more direct response, passing state laws or inter-state compacts to intentionally mess with the EC seems straightforward enough. They could either fix it directly (compelling a vote for popular vote winner), or they might be able to "break" it even further or tilt it towards the left, thus compelling debate and talk of reform from both sides of the aisle.
the electors were put in place in a time when they literally selected the president, and the popular votes weren't even counted, the popular vote was a suggestion. now the electors are a formality. we've progressed to that point.
No we haven't "progressed" anywhere. Some states have passed laws in an attempt to unilaterally change the rules, but no federal level changes have been made, and only federal level changes could affect the validity of votes cast.
how the game is played, that, is a violation of our rights.
This is not a violation of your rights. The game has always, explicitly granted the electors free will. Don't like it? Then you should be in favor of electoral college reform at the federal level as I am.
This entire tangent of mine has been about pointing out hypocrisy and your post illustrates this very, very, nicely. You want us to say "rules are rules" as long as your candidate is elected, even if the other candidate got two million more votes, but you stick your head in the sand and scream about rights being violated if I point out that the electors are free to elect whomever they wish. And always have been.
1. This is mainly an in-principle argument with people who are trying to have it both ways, insisting that the EC is perfect whilst denying one of its fundamental properties.
2. The states can criminalize whatever they want (note that 21 have done nothing whatsoever), but they cannot unilaterally change the validity of electors' votes. If you want to fundamentally change the system, it needs to be done at the federal level. Frankly, I think states interested in seeing EC reform should go the other way and past amnesty laws for rebel electors from other states and take other steps to encourage free-thinking electors. This isn't a bug of the system; it's a feature. I am for reform; I simply think the best way to get it, at this point, is to fully utilize the quirks of the system and not let anyone get away with the hypocrisy of claiming that they're for the EC whilst condemning the very core of the EC.
3. Electors have voted for other candidates in the past, just not in sufficient numbers to make a difference. (Note they don't necessarily have to raise another candidate's total high enough; simply decreasing someone's total below 270 would be sufficient to nullify the vote and kick the matter to congress, as I recall.)
(Whomever they vote for assuming they get the minimum required number of electoral votes.)