2020 Presidential Primaries

Which is NOT what we have.

That's what you'll get if you keep letting low population rural areas have the same number of representatives as highly populated cities.

Sure, if the organization is a compact among households. My HOA doesn't let me have two votes just because two adults live in my house.

Since the United STATES of America is a compact among STATES...

So if New York and California broke themselves down into 100 separate states, you'd be cool with each state having appropriate representation, right?

Yes, in that extremely fantastic, thoroughly made up and not even remotely plausible scenario, I'd expect each of the 100 separate states to have appropriate representation.

So let me get this straight.

If every person's vote counted equally, we would have a system where 51% of the people could take away 100% of your rights.

But now, when a minority can do what would take a majority in a one-person-one-vote scenario, we don't have a system where 40% of the people (roughly) can take away 100% of your rights.

Even though the only difference is what percentage of the population it takes to elect a president and a majority in the Senate.

Explain?

Oregon's Primary was today. Voted.

I think people are sorely mistaken if they think that getting rid of the electoral college will change the outcome in their favor. All it will change is the campaign strategy of the campaigns. Instead of Republicans skipping California and Democrats skipping Texas, they'll shift the time that they normally would have spent in Iowa or Arkansas over to those more populous states.

From 2016 article by the Washington Post
Donald Trump says he would have won a popular-vote election. And he could be right.

Sometimes it's not about outcomes, but principles.

I would probably be happier to have an election decided in favor of a traditional Republican like W, McCain or Romney (i.e., baseline competent, public-service minded, respectful, honest for a politician, and reasonably respectful of the office, other parties, experts, and points of view) because that is the way the popular vote went than to win the Electoral College with a traditional centrist Democratic candidate (Gore, H. Clinton or Biden).

Are non-traditional candidates a product of the electoral college?

I think they're a product of the information age. (see async's signature).

Ah, someone noticed!

That quote has become 1000 times more important now than it was in 1995 when it was originally made, in an address to the American Association of Broadcast Journalists.

A lot of the madness these days is a product of the information age.

In days of yore, back in prehistory when Soviets roamed the Earth, we had three television networks, but pretty much the only TV news everyone watched was Walter Cronkite on CBS. On any given issue, there would be a Body of Distinguished Experts who would soberly debate and reach a consensus. Cronkite would duly report this consensus, everyone would nod sagely and move along with their lives.

Then teh intarwebz came along. Suddenly that whole process was out in the open. Public Schmuck could look up references easily and it was seen that the "Body of Distinguished Experts" was as often as not a pack of squabbling children, with often substantial disagreements before a consensus was reached. Instead of one trusted news outlet, suddenly every idiot with a keyboard had a voice. Biases were clearly revealed. Opinion pieces replaced actual news reporting, spawning the God-awful phenomenon of "infotainment." As more and more information flooded the public consciousness, "consensus" became a forgotten dream and the public fractured into echo chambers. Only a few select elites knew "the truth" and they would share it with their True Believers if only you'd like and subscribe to their Youtube channel.

And here we are, watching our society dissolve into polarized groups of retards screaming at each other to no effect. Ain't it great?

You are right that the non-traditional candidates have nothing to do, as such, with the Electoral College.

I was only trying to say (probably unclearly), while I would prefer even a popular vote defeat to a Romney-esque conservative centrist over a typical Democratic candidate, the outcome of a problematic candidate like Trump winning or a particularly inspiring Democrat losing would give me pause,

Weren't you making dumb remarks about "leftist groupthink" like five minutes ago?

Yeah, back when most people had implicit trust in the U.S. government. When McCarthyism's effects were still being felt. When the United Fruit Company was hiring the U.S. military to slaughter workers in Guatemala because they tried to unionize and demand better pay. How many people really knew about it? Those media outlets told you only what they wanted you to hear, and those nodding heads just went right along with it because that hand picked panel of experts was going to fully endorse the narrative being pushed.

Why would you wax nostalgic for propaganda?

Why would you assume I'm "waxing nostalgic" for such a time? As always, your assumptions are entertaining.

So you weren't holding up Walter Cronkite as an example of better days gone by?

His rant kinda left me thinking he's liking the current state of affairs.

No, I'm holding up Cronkite as an example of when the public discourse was a lot more straitjacketed. We are actually better off now, all evidence to the contrary, because it's useful to know who's a credulous imbecile.

This passage doesn't really support that:

Even reading it with a heavy dose of sarcasm doesn't indicate you like the situation, or find it preferable to the days of Cronkite and the general consensus agreeing and moving on.

Your issues with reading comprehension actually explain much of your worldview.

It sure didn't seem like that to me.

it seemed like you were channeling dayton doing tererun.

Infotainment predates the internet by at least a couple of decades.

The web has exacerbated the hell out of it, but shallow/fluff reporting has been around for a very long time.

Knowing is small comfort when the imbeciles win. See, 2016 to present.

We've found out Paladin's a cunt. Whilst the US is regressing. So he's a cunt who got what he wanted.

Not anything we need be happy about.

People were making the same complaints after the invention of the printing press.

Speaking of: the idea of an "unbiased" press is a relatively new one. From the beginning until just a few decades ago, it was common for a newspaper to lean one way or the other politically and have that reflected in the stories they printed.

Funny, I just read this last night. It's in reference to the dueling system and in particular Hamilton's duel and the convoluted reasons for it.

"During the 1790s this politics of reputation and individual character was rapidly being eroded in a number of ways, especially through the growth of political parties and the proliferation of scandal-mongering newspapers that were reaching out to a new popular readership...Under these changing circumstances newspapers became weapons of new political parties , to be used to discredit and demolish the characters of the opposing leaders in the eyes of unprecedented numbers of new readers." Empire of Liberty, Gordon S. Wood.

Didn't say that, just pointing out you were misrepresenting their argument.