Trump voters and Clinton voters still bowl together. The Dude abides.


PairTheBoard

Funny how the total count of votes has stopped advancing for some time now (still 2-3 mil left in California that she has like 60-40 at worse) . I guess it helps to avoid offering the impression the win is not at all legitimate in the eyes of the people because a difference like 1 mil votes is suddenly a big problem in image but 300k is something we can see as a fluctuation lol. So lets freeze it and go there very slowly.

As for bowling with Democrats... I wouldn't be very happy to bowl next to people carrying heavy balls that can "mislaunch" who can suddenly realize that there will be some Guiliani or Gingrich in the new administration, all brands of legislative power in the hands of usual earth is 6k years old morons and some bs supreme court mix soon all while the majority of people that voted are not republicans and the previous president was over 50% in popularity. Yeah this is what happens when you cant put forward a strong candidate that can destroy the moronic alternatives on the other side. You can get mad at the realization of what just happened and how easy you made it right during an innocent game and find other targets around you that offer better scoring possibilities lol.

Masque, you're normally a great poster but this analysis is not thoughtful. Given that both candidates were perfectly aware of the electoral college, neither put effort into states they knew were decided. If trump got zero votes in all of California, he wouldn't care; if the popular vote mattered, both candidates would have run a very different election, and there is no fair analysis that says the popular vote comes out the same.

There are plenty of reasonable trump voters out there. And neither Gingrich nor Giuliani are morons. You may not like them, which is fine, but both are highly intelligent individuals.

Meale,

Youth 40 years ago were much more liberal than 60 year olds now. Think Vietnam protests, which included e.g. Kent State. Predicting the future is necessarily difficult, but there is no real reason to suppose that 60 year olds 40 years from now won't develop similarly.

No i simply reject the current system as weak because it has twice in recent 20 years produced a win that was questionable. The first time it cost the country and the planet the entire breakdown of middle east and rise in terrorism by poor treatment of the situation and half measures in poorly designed (badly conceived to begin with but after it started do it right damn it) war campaigns, a monumental financial crisis and 20 trillion $ debt, a decade of high oil prices and lost opportunities and passing (effectively) the game to China to keep happy some companies that never cared for their own country. There were ways to protect your industry with legislation and better internal development choices in the country without substantial loss of profitability of most corporations (and eventual recovery of more profits even later due to stronger internal innovation) . If you have to create a 20 tril $ dept create it so that you develop higher technology and industry and do not yield to the easy choice to send everything overseas keeping only non productive jobs here (like most of the financial or other non tangible productivity services sector is basically sucking the rest of society's blood and created the big financial crisis worldwide by not investing in tangible progress only easy going profits for few).

Now the second time it is early to know if we ever saw the true Trump so far (but his life and celebrity is not to be admired if you examine all his deals and how he made his money and how he treated people) and i am not simplistic to judge a man only by his poor ethical behavior around women that are not exactly (maybe not all) protecting their own integrity always either and other garbage statements he made that might have been for consumption of the deplorables. Yes they are deplorables by the way, a great fraction of republicans are exactly that. See what they say in interviews and how simplistically they think etc. I will give you the democrats have their own too but nothing like that and you can probably reason with them more with the exception of a small fraction of social warrior overkill maniacs. It is true even if you shouldn't tell them this in their face (call them these names) and treat them with friendship instead to unchain them from the miserable state they are finding themselves in terms of countless of issues mostly misguided and poorly thinking the way things work in the world.

But this second time so far has felt indeed like the Jerry Springer show is now taking the Presidency. So lets hope i am wrong here and Trump can become serious (prove a double agent) and use the opportunity more responsibly than he did the rest of his life in so many other topics while exploiting and not assisting/improving the world that made him rich.


Guiliani and Gingrich are horrible people. Ok they are not morons as in stupid, they are malicious intelligent morons but i call morons generally many that are not at all well thought in the way they behave and yet they are superconfident and intolerable in their aggression towards others (notice i am not similarly aggressive towards others in the way i criticize so this is not hypocrisy on my part, i direct it only at those specific individuals i can easily spot and most would agree with me that are pathological malicious people).

Guiliani and Gingrich have horrible personal lives and this tells a lot about their characters given how they then behave towards others. They are hypocrites of amazing depth and have malicious nature. They are low class people with their examples of conduct. You didnt see me say anything like that for say Christie or Pence just to give you a brief idea of the kind of republicans i still disagree with but i would not call such names.


Of course there are plenty of reasonable Trump voters out there. Are they more than the unreasonable? Probably not. And i argue even those that are reasonable are wrong. Yes bright people in this forum here that will hate what i say are wrong to be republicans that way. Their party deserved to be a lot better and a real constructive force for conservative ideas in this country not a backwards marching club of angry people.

Being conservative is not a bad thing. Being pro responsibility and family values is great to a point (but without enforcing your views on others or simplistically thinking your family ideas must be the rule for all by force eg look at treatment of non heterosexuals or early abortion issues, stem cell research in the past, ignorance about science etc). Wanting to protect the cultural heritage/character of your place is important provided you do not become racist in that task and find better ways to protect your system from irresponsible or poor outsiders (plus recognize not all outsiders/foreigners/ recent immigrants are irresponsible and most aren't and deserve your friendship and cooperation so that both sides can improve and produce an even better culture than the original ones).

Republicans deserved a better party than this bs i have lived for 2 decades here of my life in this country. This is from someone that is not a socialist or communist in his voting history coming from Europe by the way. And if you need to force your own party to lose presidency and senate at least so that they change and reconsider their intolerant obstructive ways it is the right thing to do. So i accuse all those rational people that voted for Trump that they caved on important principles and gave the youth of this country the horrible message that you can be a nasty person and it is ok if you can get away and win with it. I dont think Clinton is a great alternative either but she is a centrist and a lot safer choice on many issues and she would be able to cooperate with republicans and get more done and was horribly crucified over a bs unimportant thing (private server etc in the days of daily hacking everywhere what a joke to be so critical of "national security risks" when you allow Russia and Assange to dictate your election direction and the previous recent republican leaders to have essentially created all the facking reasons national security is at risk).

For 2 decades now pathological behavior by republicans has destroyed a lot in this country. It has divided the population beyond control over unimportant principle things, it has failed to focus on legitimate issues that concern all of us and has produced endless examples of immoral poor behavior and horrible choices when they were leaders. It has failed sensible international foreign policy (poor wars chosen and executed horribly), immigration, internal energy policy, protecting better the environment, focusing more seriously on education and development of sensible high technology jobs (poor promotion or discovery across all society of local talent in schools towards productive careers not jobs that destroy society in endless infighting in other less productive sectors of the economy or sectors that effectively send jobs overseas even more) and allowed the top companies to exploit the society as much as they could. It is so easy to think that Clinton caused globalization and not to see how all the companies with their choices and republican blessings loopholes do that. The companies, their leadership, the naive capitalism itself is what destroyed the US middle class fraction that now voted for Trump. So they reward the same people and culture that caused their demise. Trump is one of them through his life. Why cant his rational supporters see the hypocrisy?

I think what you mean is that the millennials will end up as conservative as the baby boomers turned out to be, which may be so, but at least in that case the millennials will have been less hypocritical.

We are staring the antithesis in the face right now. Waiting for the synthesis.

I'm very concerned about the new reports of local violence, hate crimes, racist and bigoted cruelty, and incidences of bullying- much in the name of Trump. The people who believed this was the normal "pretend it's just sport" type of election have never been more mistaken.

I bet the politics forum is in flames just based on all the post reports. I would rather reread Suetonius than get near that steaming pile of refuse. About the only thing of interest is: who are worse, the self-righteous gloaters or the whiny self-righteous losers.

Now I understand. They wanted to give support to the loser.

Hegel?

A System that in principle can award the presidency to the guy that will win with 1 vote a few critical states and lose the others with 80-20 edge say in some extreme analogy is a pathological system that needs to be destroyed and recreated better even if it takes a revolution.

At what point do you draw the line to insanity? Its ok at 100k loss? Its ok at 1 mil loss? Its ok at 5 mil loss? Where does it stop being ok?

As long as the possibility exists for such outcome the system is reckless and must be terminated.

It is that simple.


Hillary Clinton 60,467,245 votes > Donald Trump 60,071,650 votes Projected Winner

It will top 1 mil difference eventually. That is 0.8% difference. Such divergence in outcome is unprecedented in US elections.


This is a joke 100%. US#1 at celebrating irrational things and the impossible (from stupid celebrity magazines to the white house - whatever).

If the reverse had happened i would still be making the same argument by the way. This is a real problem the system has in place that of course is the result of being an ancient system (from times that such outcomes would be highly unlikely) that requires adaptation to modern realities like everything important in society does. It is completely irrational to focus campaigns on key states for example and play the game there and ignore the rest of the country in campaigns. It opens the door to various manipulations and essential designs that hijack the popular will.

I want to argue it's unconstitutional actually as in there will be self conflicting things/consequences in the constitution that are enabled by such system. Lets discuss this argument from a proper ethical perspective of violating some higher principles in place that the constitutions may have above this regulation that the regulation undermines in principle.

when it started it was like;

"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness."

Having the presidency depend on key critical voters only is a clear violation of this principle.

Hillary pushed the "unfit" button until it was as worn out as my crappy Time Warner TV remote. I guess she can console herself that at least she had the best website.


PairTheBoard

masque,

If the battle is for the popular vote, then score it on the popular vote.
If the battle is for the electoral college, then score it on the electoral college.

To fight it on the electoral college and then whine when you win some other metric doesn't make much sense. It's like playing chess using chess rules then whining that you lost despite having more pieces left than the other person. It's nonsense. You weren't playing for piece count, you were playing for checkmate.

The electoral college is like it is because America isn't some homogeneous monolith. States gave up some of their rights to self governance in return for the power to send representatives from their area. This representation is roughly equated to their population. There's nothing wrong here. All abstractions of the will of individuals being represented by the will of one person are flawed.

Trump will be good for science and investment in science. He'll be a disaster for the corrupt corporate and personal cronyism in the climate change industry. Both are fantastic things.

So which is righteous? Obviously one can't say either the left or right is the sovereign but if you look at the election in terms of simply two people, Trump and Clinton, I think it's possible to say that there was a righteous option which sadly the people didn't pick.

Guess she is the moral winner then.

But will he push the button?

Sitting with his daughter safely 500 meters down, while I will have to be content (no offence) with the bunker Zeno has to offer?

One more:

I predict that the risk of a nuclear conflict during Trump's reign, because of inexperience and incompetence, is about 10%, while it would have been about 1% if choosing Clinton.

Viva Las Vegas!

An instant improvement in this bs election system would be to award in each state the electors (electorates) according to vote % so 5 to 4 in some 10 electorates state say if it was 51% to 44% and the last left as remnant for later to add to the remnants from other states and distribute in the end (using the remainder of each candidates from all states).

That way you still have almost the current system that is not perfect but at least now all people in all states count somewhat similarly, especially if you keep adjusting number of electorates by the population of each state to keep current. I can even recognize the necessity to overrepresent some lower density in population but large geographical areas by giving them there a bit more electorates per million of population say. So i can see some value to that geographical argument also. So instead of a complete no state matters only the total vote system, keep the current system with some of its logic but apply it much fairly at least.

As it is right now eg Texas, California, Alaska or Hawaii are for example written off people that will always vote one way and so the relative wisdom of people in each state and their change over time is irrelevant to the process. For example a candidate can take it to 55-45 vs 70-30 for another and there will be no difference between the two, the state wont be able to reflect that difference between candidates' appeal to the public. The people in these states become irrelevant.

Think how f*cking pathetic it is to make irrelevant close to 100 mil people in some major fixed direction states. That is bs. It is half of the population that decides nothing really!!!

Its superpathetic as a system. Why is it so hard to award electorates by the % in each state and even keep the non-integer parts and award them in the total country as left overs to have an ever more correct system. Because of course it serves well republicans that's why!!! Another moronic system of cheating in place exploiting the fact that rural America is super conservative.

That way all states now matter. To not want such a better system is an eternal recognition that you want to have a divided backwards marching hillbilly manipulated country that all the campaign war is taking place in a few states and the others are worthless in terms of their trends there between elections.

Fix it damn it! Why is this country so backwards in almost everything given how much good it has going for it anyway in terms or natural resources, technology, culture and people???

It is a banana republic the way the system chooses the president!

Agree, but usually things will go on as they used to. Choosing just one person as a leader is too risky, generally. USA is screwed because the president can choose government. Think the Congress+Senate should. They should collectively be able to FIRE the leader, as usually is the case in Western democracies.

Trump doesnt have a higher chance to go to nuclear war by the way i dont think so. He is just a snake oilman talking trash and hot air that would never behave as he talks or be allowed by the people around him. But he can go wrong in so many other war related ways for sure by not being rational and more egocentric.

The truth needs to be told that Obama was weaker than the ideal on eg ISIS/Syria and islamic origin terrorism bs overall and could have acted faster and stronger and eg by having united more countries earlier to form a coalition to take out ISIS faster before it could train and export so many people to Europe or cause such humanitarian crisis or allowing Russia to get involved so heavily.

He basically was afraid of moving it into a religious war but this is bs because it is not so easy to go there if you do it properly. He behaved that way to remain faithful to not risking American soldiers as much because of the failure of Bush 2 Iraq war before with so much sacrifices from military families. He also behaved that way because he is patient and believes in a more measured approach that is less emotional and more rational. However his "rational" was not perfect either. But see how much they fought him in his own country. Give me a break! He was one of the best presidents of the past 50 years and any failures are mostly the result of the previous administrations errors that put him on a tough spot and the eternal republican opposition in everything.

By the way using nuclear weapons on countries that cannot retaliate or even those that can somewhat retaliate but are not superpowers is not something that shouldn't be at the table. Everyone out there must realize that the US can always use nuclear option if you give it too much bs. Of course you shouldn't want to go there but it is a true overestimation of nuclear war that drives people to be so afraid of nuclear weapons. It is also exaggerated by movies etc.

The main reason you do not want to use nuclear weapons other than some small tactical ones is because you don't want to have big civilian population losses or destroy longer term areas and because the enemy is not usually having big, isolated from population, armies that you can wipe out at once or has infrastructure that you cannot take out differently more surgically. But it has to always be there on the table so that people can get their butt working instead of horsing around and maintaining endless wars that lead nowhere.

The world is too much of a pussy to be honest regarding nuclear weapons. They think of North Korea and are afraid if it can strike one city here in the west coast its going to be the end of the world. Bring it. Hundreds of thousands of people die each year from cancer related to industrial bs we do and nobody cares to improve it but of course we are all so super-sensitive not to have a once a century strike or a terrorist hit. Japan is just fine today. Nuclear accidents are worse actually than nuclear strikes (if you add up the long tern effects on people) . Only a total nuclear war is a big problem. It is totally moronic to go there though.

A big nuclear weapon can do as much damage as say 10 world trade center strikes. It is terrible but it can never defeat you. You on the other hand can eliminate them form the map entirely.

Obama was good. But 8 years is all a President gets, time passes by fast. Now we have Trump at our hands.

Just think we would have had an even worse conservative alternative waiting 8 years (they always get re-elected) from now.

I still think having as stupid a guy as Trump is will give us the 10% chance of a nuclear conflict. Irrational, but anyhow. Trying to play tough in the wrong places, etc. Places where a more experienced, and generally smarter and compassionate, would play it right.

Hope my city will not be bombed. Not for saving myself, but for seeing if I maybe, just maybe, did the right prediction.

A few points. First, there is a legislative agenda to move to a simple majority system in picking the president. It is called the National Vote Compact - essentially, a number of states have passed bills saying that if 270+ electoral college votes agree, then they will all instruct their electors to vote, not for who won their state, but for whoever won the national vote.

Second, I don't agree that the electoral college is obviously irrational. It is common for democratic systems to put intermediate bodies of representatives between the direct vote and the selection of the head of government (eg parliamentary systems where the prime minister is selected by parliament). The idea here is not that hard to understand: the people are (so it is claimed) more susceptible to demagoguery than are the leaders of society such as in Congress or the Electors. Thus, those leaders can avoid some of the worst impulses of the popular vote in selecting a leader (eg blocking a popular but unacceptable pick like Donald Trump).

Third, I would argue that the problem with the Electoral College is not that it diverges from the popular vote sometimes, but rather the bias towards rural votes. One of the biggest changes between now and the founding of America is the decline in significance of agricultural and rural life. Many more people live in cities and towns now, agriculture is a much smaller part of the economy, and so on. Thus, this bias has become an increasing distortion of national priorities. I would also expect this trend to continue, so we should be if anything placing the thumb on the scale for urban voters as there will be more of them in the future.

I think Obama did a pretty good job as president in actually running the country, but has been disastrous as party leader. The Democratic Party is in almost complete retreat, not holding power in more than a few statehouses and kind of a tie in the Supreme Court. You can argue about how much of this is his fault, but it did happen during his time as party leader (8 years ago the Democrats controlled most of government) and so he bears ultimate responsibility for it.