edwardmurphy wrote: ↑Thu Aug 15, 2019 9:45 am
PaulSacramento wrote: ↑Thu Aug 15, 2019 6:20 am
I still believe in my country, our democracy, and the innate goodness and rationality of our people, and I think that we'll overcome people like you and excise Trump and a lot of his minions come November 2020.
So, IF he wins, again, democracy and rationality will have spoken, correct?
Democracy has already spoken on Trump. Democracy's answer was a resounding no. He lost the popular vote badly and I don't recall his popular support ever topping 45% since the election. To be clear, I'm talking about the average across all polls. He's been much higher in some polls and much lower in others, but he's always been well underwater when it's all averaged out. The current rules say that the winner of the EC wins, so Trump's presidency would be legitimate if he hadn't colluded with a hostile foreign power to rig the election, but that's not democracy.
BTW, it went like this -
Cambridge Analytica used personality tests on Facebook to collect tons of data about American voters. They used that data to identify voters whose minds didn't appear to be made up. They then bombarded those voters with targeted ads, either in support of Trump or attacking Clinton. Some of their best material for said ads came from emails that were illegally hacked by a hostile foreign power (that'd be Russia), then released via Wikileaks. The extent to which swing voters were swayed or Bernie supporters were suppressed (as in convinced that there was no point bothering to vote) is impossible to quantify, but the difference in the election was about 70,000 votes spread across 3 swing states. That's 70,000 votes out of a total of 128,000,000. That's 0.0005% of the total. And he still lost the popular vote by nearly 3,000,000 votes.
I'm sorry, but I don't think that any honest person could seriously argue that a massive, targeted propaganda campaign directed by big data and fueled by damaging information stolen by the Russians and dribbled out over the last month of the campaign could possibly have had
no effect whatsoever. That's me trying to be diplomatic. I'm not arguing that Clinton was the best candidate (although she was one of the smartest, most knowledgeable, most qualified people ever to run), or that she ran the best campaign (she was overconfident and her campaign sucked), or that she wouldn't have used stolen data to support her own candidacy (she very well might have have), but none of that is relevant. One candidate definitely, indisputably benefited from illegal acts by a hostile foreign power (and then tried to obstruct the investigation into said illegal intervention) and that was Donald Trump. The 2016 election was illegitimate.
And now I'm moving on...
I don't care for the EC because it creates a situation in which the only votes that matter are the ones cast in a handful of swing states. Big state versus small state isn't a major issue. California and Texas don't matter, and neither do Rhode Island and Wyoming. Every single Democrat in Texas or Wyoming is disenfranchised, as is every single Republican in California and Rhode Island. I'm in New Hampshire, so my vote counts. Ditto for Rick in Florida, and Phil in Ohio (iirc), but if you happen to be in, say, Arkansas or Massachusetts then you'll be taken for granted if you support the majority party and disenfranchised if you don't.
PaulSacramento wrote: ↑Thu Aug 15, 2019 7:27 amWe do it here VIA percentage of population, example is that if a province has 40% of the population, they have 40% of the representation in terms of seats in parliament.
God, I envy Canadians. There seem to be so many areas where you guys do it logically and we do it in the stupidest, most convoluted, most easily corruptible way possible.
Take healthcare. You have a system where everybody gets healthcare. We have a system where a bunch of people have no healthcare, a bunch more have it but can't afford to use it because their deductibles are so high, losing your job costs you your health insurance, and the government only steps in to provide care for the absolute poorest of the poor. People who pull themselves up by their bootstraps lose their benefits they get a job, even if they don't make anywhere near enough to insure themselves. And your whole system, which isn't perfect but beats the hell out of ours, and actually costs
less per person than ours does.
Or the way you deal with partisan gridlock. If the ruling coalition can't get it done the whole thing comes down and you hold new elections. We, by comparison, have opted for permanent partisan gridlock.
Or the way you elect your leaders. If there are 10 seats to be distributed the party that gets 60% of the vote gets 6 and the party that gets 40% gets 4. Seems like a reasonable plan. Alas, we prefer a system of extreme partisan gerrymandering which allows whichever party controls the statehouse when the lines are drawn to use computer models to pack and crack until a 52% majority can securely hold 8 of those 10 seats. I mean, what's more democratic than allowing the ruling party to disenfranchise 48% of voters for a decade at a time, or for a politician to pick his voters, rather than the other way around? Nothing, according to the new SCOTUS majority.
Or voting rights. You guys allow people to vote even while they're incarcerated, I assume because they're still citizens. We, by comparison, still enforce Jim Crow era laws designed to criminalize anything that a poor black person might opt to do, and then permanently disenfranchise them. (Seriously. Look it up.) Anyway, great system. Screw up once and the State will never, ever forgive you, no matter what. And when Florida voters overwhelmingly chose to give felons their votes back after they'd served their terms the state GOP nullified it by adding additional stipulations. Yay, democracy?
And on and on and on...
I know Canada isn't some utopia, but at least you guys seem to have an ounce of sense.