GOP Official: Voters don't choose the nominee, we do - Polidicks

[QUOTE=DaMastez;49967678]Americans aren't "too scared", Americans are fucked by having FPTP instead of a sane system.[/QUOTE] What would be considered 'sane' though? Two round voting? Two candidates out of say five with the most votes continue onto the next round and the people vote for those two? Or the Australian method with the 'preference' voting? I watched a video on it but my memory is vague.

If Trump doesn't take North Dakota, I'll be fucking shocked, tbh. While I was working, no one would shut up about how much they couldn't wait for him to become president.

[QUOTE=Govna;49967579]No, it isn't. It's perfectly applicable. The man was a politician at the time, he had been spouting hateful and violent rhetoric for years, he tried to launch a revolution in Bavaria with intentions to spread it throughout Germany (an act of treason that could have gotten him the death penalty)... punishing him harshly either with life imprisonment or death [i]would[/i] have made sense, and it would have stopped him from doing what he did later on.[/QUOTE] Except without Hitler, a lot of things would have remained the same regardless. Germany would still be in a great depression, pressure from the Allies would still be on their backs, political turmoil between radical communists and the ultra-nationalists would still occur, ending with the Nazi Party on top and all others destroyed. And yet you still have the Soviet Union to the East, yet another expansionist power run by a strict dictator. The exact order of things may be a bit different, but rest assured: World War II was going to happen with or without Hitler. The stage was set during the closing days of World War I and instability and hatred throughout Europe only guaranteed the inevitable.

[QUOTE=Helix Snake;49966831]Find me one scenario in the history of the entire planet where torture has prevented a terrorist attack.[/QUOTE] [quote]In 1995, the police in the Philippines tortured Abdul Hakim Murad after finding a bomb-making factory in his apartment in Manila. They broke his ribs, burned him with cigarettes, forced water down his throat, then threatened to turn him over to the Israelis. Finally, from this withered and broken man came secrets of a terror plot to blow up 11 airliners, crash another into the headquarters of the Central Intelligence Agency and to assassinate the pope.[/quote] However, that's still beside the point if you've taken even [I]baby's-first-ethics[/I] course. Allowing torture, even in perceived emergency cases, is a spiral into legitimizing it. And even in many of the best arguments, they completely ignore that the modern world has accepted that torture often leads to wild and erroneous information. And specifically in that case, they had very little tangible information that he was even connected to any of those plots. That speaks volumes of the times people with extremely legitimate connections to terrorist and similar organizations have been tortured and we've gotten the informational equivalent of jack shit. In short: It's not worth it.

Curly is a joy to behold. The guy who called Obama a nigger in 2008 is appalled at Trump's implied racism. Sure.

[QUOTE=Mr. Someguy;49968180]Except without Hitler, a lot of things would have remained the same regardless. Germany would still be in a great depression, pressure from the Allies would still be on their backs, political turmoil between radical communists and the ultra-nationalists would still occur, ending with the Nazi Party on top and all others destroyed. And yet you still have the Soviet Union to the East, yet another expansionist power run by a strict dictator. The exact order of things may be a bit different, but rest assured: World War II was going to happen with or without Hitler. The stage was set during the closing days of World War I and instability and hatred throughout Europe only guaranteed the inevitable.[/QUOTE] This is all speculation about alternate history. We don't know what would have happened one way or the other. And we can't know, so that's that. It's pointless to think about. We do however know that there were plenty of opportunities to stop Hitler early on, that he could have been stopped, and that plenty of people who had the opportunities to stop him later regretted not taking them before he came to power. And we at least know that if he'd been killed, then any future timelines would not have included him and his particular orders and plans. He could have been stopped, and he should have been stopped. But he wasn't, and the consequences were devastating. Maybe things would have worked out the same way, maybe they wouldn't have; maybe they would have been better without Hitler, maybe they would have been worse. Either way, the man announced himself as a clear threat to peace and stability in Europe, it was perfectly evident that he was dangerous and was going to cause trouble, and still nobody did anything about it when they had the chance to. People don't learn apparently. We see a problem looming on the horizon, or we recognize some kind of impending threat... we're made well aware of it well before it hits us and while there's still time to do something about it, yet we don't do a fucking thing. We don't try to stop it, we don't even usually do so much as try to prepare for it. We shrug it off, joke about it to try and trivialize its damaging effects (optimistically stating, "Well maybe it won't be all that bad. Maybe it'll work out somehow."), act like our apathy isn't a big deal when it's actually enabling everything to take place as it is in the first place, etc. Doesn't matter if we're talking about crooked/evil politicians here, or something like climate change. Time and time again, this has been a recurrent behavioral pattern among humans. That's pathetic.

[QUOTE=LtKyle2;49967873]What would be considered 'sane' though? Two round voting? Two candidates out of say five with the most votes continue onto the next round and the people vote for those two? Or the Australian method with the 'preference' voting? I watched a video on it but my memory is vague.[/QUOTE] Alternative vote (aka preferential voting). This video explains it quite well (and why FPTP is terrible): [url]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Y3jE3B8HsE[/url] The net result is people could express their preference for certain candidates and thus make their voice heard, while still also being able to put a vote towards the lesser of evils in the end. It also makes "electability" pointless because there's no issue of "throwing away your vote".

[QUOTE=Doom14;49968241]However, that's still beside the point if you've taken even [I]baby's-first-ethics[/I] course. Allowing torture, even in perceived emergency cases, is a spiral into legitimizing it. And even in many of the best arguments, they completely ignore that the modern world has accepted that torture often leads to wild and erroneous information. And specifically in that case, they had very little tangible information that he was even connected to any of those plots. That speaks volumes of the times people with extremely legitimate connections to terrorist and similar organizations have been tortured and we've gotten the informational equivalent of jack shit. In short: It's not worth it.[/QUOTE] It wasn't even worth it in Abdul's case. [img]http://i.imgur.com/02fQp1f.png[/img]

[QUOTE=DaMastez;49963604]Banning Trump is an extremely slippery slope which will just be used to ban anyone anti-establishment or who doesn't fall in line behind the corporations who run the government. The will of the people is massively flawed, I fully agree. The problem is, until a super-intelligent impartial AI is created, it's still far better than basically the only other option of vesting all of the power in some group of people who will be corrupted by money.[/QUOTE] Um no, both political parties have banned certain candidates in the past, it's just they did it with backroom dealings before the votes, or they mobilized voters under threat of layoffs, the parties have used levers of power before, they may change form over the years but they still exist. The Republicans are hoping to use a rule change before the convention to ensure kascih and Cruz qualify, then they're going to ensure trough negotiations that Trump can't win a 2nd vote, and then when the delegates are freed up, they'll make backroom deals to come up with a ticket, like cruz-kasich and throw Trump out. The Democrats have superdelegates for the same reason, it's a lever of power