Wikileaks releases 9Gb of Macron emails - currently being analyzed
141 replies, posted
[QUOTE=Mr. Sarcastic;52195113]Exactly what I thought when I saw it on Netflix last year.
It's a shame the Twilight Zone episode you talked about (and the rest of that particular season, I want to say it's season 4) isn't included with the rest of the series on Netflix.[/QUOTE]
It's up on Daily Motion.
[url]http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x54920i_the-twilight-zone-1959-1964-he-s-alive-4-sezon-4-bolum_tv[/url]
[QUOTE=BlackMageMari;52191544]And we're supposed to believe that Wikileaks are non-partisan?[/QUOTE]
They cant release information they do not have....???????
[QUOTE=Mr. Someguy;52194468]Because it was established so that cities wouldn't dominate every election and completely nullify votes from rural areas. The founding fathers were concerned that cities like Boston and Philadelphia would completely drown out the votes from rural townspeople and farmers, leaving half the population without a voice in the new country. The concerns of a farmer would never be heard, while the concerns of a worker would be prominant. In a way, the EC kind of worked as intended this election. One candidate went and campaigned in forgotten areas and got a lot of votes from rural Americans, while the other did nothing because she knew she had the liberal city vote locked down from Day 1. That's Hillary's fault for not campaigning properly, instead thinking she can coast her way to victory on her past successes and friendly media.[/QUOTE]
so now the votes from cities are completely nullified instead!!!
what a great system
[QUOTE=zupadupazupadude;52198934]so now the votes from cities are completely nullified instead!!!
what a great system[/QUOTE]
Bullshit, cities swing entire states. Hillary lost because she was stupid and didn't bother to campaign in the months leading up to the election.
[QUOTE=Mr. Someguy;52200053]Bullshit, cities swing entire states. Hillary lost because she was stupid and didn't bother to campaign in the months leading up to the election.[/QUOTE]
[I]Enough[/I] of that crap.
[QUOTE=_Axel;51486714][QUOTE=catbarf;51485386]It's called 'tyranny of the majority'. Culturally, most of the geographic United States is very different from the major cities, but under a straight one-person-one-vote system, less-populated states have little political representation. It might be directly representative, but it's not going to feel fair to the inhabitants of Kansas that their collective voice is completely drowned out by that of New Yorkers who have no idea what their issues are. This is exactly the sort of situation that leads to rebellions, and it's what the unequal electoral votes were meant to address.
Not that I mean to imply that the electoral college is a good thing, but in a country as huge and diverse as the US, direct democracy does have some issues.[/QUOTE]
I'm a bit tired of people still bringing up "tyranny of the majority" after it's been exposed as a bogus argument in 10+ EC related threads already, so I'll just dig up an old post of mine:
[QUOTE=_Axel;51442510]I'll only tackle this part since it's what the bulk of your argument is based on, and it's the main argument of people who defend the electoral college in general.
What you're saying in essence is that since the rural population is a minority, they need their voting power to be inflated to compensate for that fact and avoid a 'tyranny of the majority'.
Alright, fair enough. At first glance this seems like a good way to ensure nobody gets their rights trampled on because they're a minority.
But for that point to be valid [I]you need to apply the same logic to all other minorities.[/I] And that's not what the electoral college does. At all.
Do racial minorities get inflated votes? Does the unemployed? Does the handicapped? Do LGTB people get those? All of those are minorities with specific interests that are just as deserving of having their views taken into account as people from the countryside. But that's not what happens at all. In fact, some of those minorities are mainly located within cities, so the electoral college actually does the [I]opposite[/I] of what you think it does well by squashing those minorities' views to make way for the rural population's.
So basically, it grants a privilege to country people that devalues the voice of every other minorities for no valid reason. If what you want is to give a voice to the small people and avoid a 'tyranny of the majority', then the electoral college is even worse than the popular vote since it enables a tyranny of a specific minority over all the others...[/QUOTE]
[QUOTE]You've got the perfect example in this election. In the debates and policy statements leading up to the election, nobody on the Left gave a shit about degrading economic conditions in the Rust Belt. Those states flexed their electoral muscles and voted Trump, and suddenly Democrats are starting to recognize that there are serious economic problems that shouldn't be taking a backseat to identity politics.[/QUOTE]
And for every such "perfect example", you have dozens more minorities whose voices are squashed by the very system you claim give a voice to minorities.
The idea of "giving more power to the little man" may seem valorous and romantic, but in the end it's just a mathematical impossibility.
Direct democracy doesn't have any issue that the EC system solves, save perhaps for safeguarding against populists (and that still remains to be seen).[/quote]
[editline]8th May 2017[/editline]
Oh wait, you were among the ones I was arguing with, and you haven't even learned your lesson. Why am I wasting my time?
[QUOTE=Mr. Someguy;52194468]Because it was established so that cities wouldn't dominate every election and completely nullify votes from rural areas. [/QUOTE]
This is nonsense. A national popular vote doesn't "nullify" votes from rural areas just because urban areas have more votes per square mile. The rural vote still counts. During statewide elections for governor (the head of the executive branch for states, mirroring the presidents role in the federal government) candidates don't ignore rural areas, why would they start after adopting a system where every vote counts the same, instead of some arbitrarily different amounts based on population?
[QUOTE=Mr. Someguy;52194468]The founding fathers were concerned that cities like Boston and Philadelphia would completely drown out the votes from rural townspeople and farmers, leaving half the population without a voice in the new country. The concerns of a farmer would never be heard, while the concerns of a worker would be prominant. [/QUOTE]
I've never heard this as a reason for why the EC was put into place and I'd love a source.
[QUOTE=Mr. Someguy;52194468]In a way, the EC kind of worked as intended this election. One candidate went and campaigned in forgotten areas and got a lot of votes from rural Americans, while the other did nothing because she knew she had the liberal city vote locked down from Day 1. That's Hillary's fault for not campaigning properly, instead thinking she can coast her way to victory on her past successes and friendly media.[/QUOTE]
I will completely agree with this point, this election definitely proved how undemocratic the electoral college system actually is and has proven to be the surest catalyst for its downfall yet.
[editline]8th May 2017[/editline]
[QUOTE=_Axel;52200775][I]Enough[/I] of that crap.
[/QUOTE]
The mind boggles at the idea of people supporting a system where a vote in one state counts as 3.6 votes in another. If you aren't personally benefiting from such a system, why on earth do you insist it remain imposed?
[QUOTE=Mr. Someguy;52200053]Bullshit, cities swing entire states. Hillary lost because she was stupid and didn't bother to campaign in the months leading up to the election.[/QUOTE]
Bullshit. Cities don't vote homogeneously. The fact of the matter is that this is how voting works: one person = one vote, candidate with the most votes wins. The current electoral system DOES actually completely undermine all of that. It says that some people's votes are worth more than others (which is ridiculous when it comes to voting for president, because it's a national election and something that shouldn't be a state-by-state matter; every citizen should have a say, and every vote should be equal in value), and it also allows a backdoor for candidates who clearly lost to still win-- thereby completely undermining how the people voted in the first place.
"Well sure, Candidate X did decisively beat Candidate Y by almost 3 million votes and is clearly the preferred one between the two of them... but fuck that, we say Candidate Y gets it because reasons."
Under that sort of system, voting is meaningless; you can vote for a specific candidate, that candidate can win, yet the EC can step in and fuck them over entirely by handing the election to someone else. The only reason it hasn't been abolished is because the Republicans have been the primary benefactors of it in recent years. Gore beat Bush in 2000, Clinton of course beat Trump in 2016-- yet both Bush and Trump still managed to become president only because of it...
I'm not saying the EC is a good system, but it did allow one candidate to strategically outmaneuver another who wasn't even trying anymore. I can't blame the system for Trump's victory because Hillary knows damn well how the US election system works, but did not take advantage of it like he did. She relied on her the blue wall to take her to victory, despite not hearing their concerns. Trump took full advantage of people's concerns in the blue wall and turned several key states red.
Getting rid of the EC wouldn't help us much anyway because we still rely on winner takes all, which silences more voices than the EC does imo.
[QUOTE=Mr. Someguy;52202588]I'm not saying the EC is a good system, but it did allow one candidate to strategically outmaneuver another who wasn't even trying anymore. I can't blame the system for Trump's victory because Hillary knows damn well how the US election system works, but did not take advantage of it like he did. She relied on her the blue wall to take her to victory, despite not hearing their concerns. Trump took full advantage of people's concerns in the blue wall and turned several key states red.
Getting rid of the EC wouldn't help us much anyway because we still rely on winner takes all, which silences more voices than the EC does imo.[/QUOTE]
Who cares about Trump and Clinton, people were bitching about the EC long before the election. Bush v Al Gore anyone???
All you are doing is giving in to the dumb rhetoric from the right that "no one cared about the EC until their favorite candidate lost liberul tears xD". We have been over the "strategic outmanuevering" that Trump did and the weaknesses of Clintons campaign over and over and over and over and over again. Push the entire 2016 election aside and the electoral college is still [B]demonstrably[/B] less democratic than a popular vote and [I]zero [/I]arguments for it hold any water.
[QUOTE=Raidyr;52202859]Who cares about Trump and Clinton, people were bitching about the EC long before the election. Bush v Al Gore anyone???
All you are doing is giving in to the dumb rhetoric from the right that "no one cared about the EC until their favorite candidate lost liberul tears xD"..[/QUOTE]
I never said anything even close to that.
[QUOTE=Mr. Someguy;52202863]I never said anything even close to that.[/QUOTE]
Of course you aren't saying that, other people are saying that, but by sidetracking the conversation about weaknesses of the EC into a conversation about the strengths or weaknesses of Trumps or Clintons campaigns respectively you are encouraging that rhetoric.
[I]Obviously[/I] Clinton knows how the EC works, [I]obviously[/I] she didn't campaign as well as Trump did. What does the fact that one knows how to leverage a poorly made system better than the other have to do with the fixing the system?
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