Beermat1. That does not answer my question. There are many ways I could explain the fallacy of your position but I can’t be bothered any more. You will not absorb any of it and others have worked it out as much as I have.
2. I am not saying it is being done. I am saying that a change in the law that makes it more likely to happen than it was before is a bad change.
3. Now, in this you plainly do not know what you are talking about. Technicalites are things used by legal people to prevent a conviction that would otherwise happen by finding fault with the process leading to it. In the real world this usually means a failure of bureaocratic process, and the defendant is plainly guilty.
And you have lost your own thread. A rule being absolute does not preclude a law, including those put in place, replaced, removed or altered by executive order, from being a set of such rules.
BeermatOh, and the law applies to everyone in the country. It currently affects 75,000.
BeermatRpR – That ‘.coming for you’ comment is in pretty poor taste when you think about it. Not that you will.
If federal law is redundant in this case why is the genius wasting everyone’s time changing it?
It doesn’t matter whether it’s one or 75,000 unstable people. Giving them guns is a stupid idea. Shouty capitals don’t change that.
The BBC were factually correct. A law may contain many elements, rules and regulations. So often ‘law’ and ‘rules’ are used interchangeably.
Look, my point is you always seem to be reduced to arguing these technicalities (and I know I shouldn’t rise to it) rather than ever stopping to question your own basic premise.
BeermatTo ‘narcissistic’ I would add ‘hyperbole’. It is often misused – ironically most often by journalists – to mean misleading exageration. It doesn’t. If a writer uses deliberate exageration that is not meant to be taken literally, that is ‘Hyperbole’, whether noticeably ludicrous like ‘I could eat a horse’ or generally un-noticed like ‘He always says something irrelevant’.
We are aware of State law and how it might apply. You and I both know that is not what we are discussing here.
BeermatNot wearing panties – it’s Friday!
I think you will find the medical concept of ‘mental defective’ as covered by Federal law refers quite specifically to reduced brain function, does not even mention schitzophrenia, and “does not include deviant behavior or disturbances that are essentially conflicts between the individual and society”.
In other words, nut job behaviour.
BeermatI am sure RpR will be along to explain the brilliant logic behind it, and how it’s all thanks to the foresight of ‘The Founders’.
BeermatLet’s hope so, eh?
You can see how I arrived at my ‘popular vote would be more appropriate for a president’ thing – it would be like your ‘four towns in one constituency, returning one MP’ scenario with the President as MP to represent them. At the moment, that MP is Red while most of his constituents are Blue, because each of the four towns has arbitrarily been given different weighting when compiling the constituency result.
To give some idea of how wildly the weightings differ, the extremes are 519,075 people per college vote in New York State, and 142,741 in Wyoming. Wyoming voters have 3.6 times the power to elect a president than those who happen to live in New York State (and yes, they went Trump).
A funny thing I have just noticed in the way the maths works – This imbalance, if random, actually tends towards producing minority rule.
In my fictional constituency, imagine every citizen of one of my four towns had three votes to the other three’s one. Which town is thus blessed is randomly chosen each time. Three times out of four, on average, the overall victory would go to the smaller overall popular vote!
BeermatI happen to agree that an election won by all the voters in two states voting for the winning candidate, but who lost every other state would not be representative democracy.
I am not really so sure, Bruce. I will take it not being entirely representative, but it’s the least worst outcome from a strictly democratic point of view, if the alternative is the minority of people gaining representation over the majority.
What you are suggesting is a geocracy more than a democracy (I think I invented that)*.
This isn’t what happened, by the way – it was not 2 states to 48, that is another alternative fact.
But that aside, let’s say all the voters in ‘Pinkoleftyville’ voted Blue, and there were 400 of them. Let’s say all the voters in Biggoton, Nutjob-cum-Nazi and Fucwitticombe voted Red, and there were 100 in each. What would be the overall representative democratic outcome across the four? Would it really be Red, because there are three of them against one Pinkoleftyville? I would contend it would be more representative (or ‘least unrepresentative’, as neither actually are, and neither is purple) for it to be blue – because that was the choice of more people.
* OK, maybe I didn’t – this is from 1884 (the year, not the prequel): http://archive.spectator.co.uk/article/27th-december-1884/14/democracy-or-geocracy
Beermati have escaped the clutches of my Baronial overlords, as I have thought of a better way to explain it.
We have just had a vote on leaving the European Union. A direct vote – a referendum. It has dictated national policy, and yet no one is claiming that it has given Hull ‘control’ over York just because (if you were to retrospectively count up votes within boundaries) the Hull constituency voted with the majority and York didn’t.
Yes, I am sure some York ‘remain’ voters think it’s somehow unfair because ‘Everybody they know voted remain’.. but that’s national democracy for you. I must admit to a moment of that myself, but I soon got over it as an instinctive democrat. You of course are in a different position. Spared, by the systems workings, the indignity of recognising the fact of your minority you now won’t hear of anyone pointing it out.
BeermatThanks. It is interesting to hear this stuff. I do read all of your post, can you do me the honour of reading all of mine before telling me my thought processes are narrow?
Still not seeing how the 62 mllion are the ‘majority’ not catered for by Clinton’s policy intentions. Surely they are still, nationally, when all is said and done, the minority? Compared to the 65 million?
“48 STATES would be controlled by 2, even a simpleton should be able to understand that”
Trouble is, a simpleton understands that. Anybody who isn’t a simpleton goes on to understand that in this scenario state boundaries are by definition irrelevant in a national direct vote on a federal presidency, and the people will be ‘controlled’ (as you like to term it) on matters federal and international by a Federal government that is much closer to representing the national majority will. State government remains state government, and what power states have over each other (none?) would remain unchanged, as this is a vote for a national presidency that has nothing to do with either a)states or b)the power of states – just the people in them, who have got to be somewhere. This is the bit I wanted you to read, before skipping to the end.
While Trump said “We are transferring power from Washington, D.C. and giving it back to you the people” the very manner of his election was a demonstration of the opposite principle. Our ‘more than a simpleton’ might also go on to see that you are invoking a ‘big government’ principle in saying that the way lines on a map are drawn and the vagaries of a complicated system of representative electors – an administrative concept – should have more power to decide America’s future than the combined will of the people across all of them, totally contrary to the very principles espoused by Trump?
The fact that this people-elected (literally ‘popular’) hypothetical government would be further left than you personally, or even the majorities in a majority of states, would like is irrelevant on a national scale. States might not have the ‘right government’ – but it’s not meant to be government of localities or states – you have local/state government for that – it is, I thought, ultimately a government of the people. The majority of American people would have the ‘right government’, both locally and nationally. It is not a narrow thought process to understand that concept.
I know it’s not how it actually works, and that E Pluribus Unum is all about a plurality of states, not people. But this is a facet of a perhaps necessarily imperfect system – see Bruce’s comments – and not down to dodgy maths as 62>65 (if you divide it into unequal sets and add up the sets) is.
Can you at least accept the thoughtcrime that 65 is more than 62? I know it doesn’t feature P*ss-Poor Herman or whatever he is called, but ‘1984’ is a very useful read. At least it helps me to understand why you think 62 million is more than 65 million. Also, ““War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.”
“THAT is why the founders of this country did not allow a direct vote for president”
The ‘founding fathers’ set up an indirect democratic system just to save a minority of non-liberal voters from a popular-majority liberal government in a couple of hundred years time? Because that would somehow be like being ‘controlled’ by a royal family?
I’d better go. The Queen has told me to go to back to work.
Edit:
“You are a slow learner, Winston.”
“How can I help it? How can I help but see what is in front of my eyes? Two and two are four.”
“Sometimes, Winston. Sometimes they are five. Sometimes they are three. Sometimes they are all of them at once. You must try harder”
BeermatOk, I get that. But how does that alter the fact of the popular vote? By which I mean how does that make 62 more than 65 – apart from Drumpf math.
And can you explain how Mrs. Clinton winning the presidency under a direct vote system would suddenly make two states ‘control’ the other Forty-eight any more than they might or might not now? Look, she might have done things that pleased the sort of people who are supposed to live in the coastal cities. I imagine she might, it’s what she presumed they would be voting for. That’s democracy. But what control would they have? Look, I lived in Cambridge (a cosmopolitan and liberal-minded city full of smart people. You would hate it) until recently. A Labour seat. It had no more influence on what happened in neighbouring, rural, geographically larger and Conservative South Cambridgeshire under Blair than under Cameron or May. South Cambridgeshire were less happy or more happy depending on whether the majority thought the ‘right’ Government were in, but no-one thought they were being ‘controlled’ by other constituencies. Why is the USA different – is it structural, or just parochial distrust of the ‘other’?
I really am listening, stop being so unpleasant. Just because your new boss is a nasty induvidual doesn’t mean you have to be.
BeermatIt started out interesting and real, and I had hope. But then you said ‘The electors elected Mr. Trump’ and only ‘in my odd thought process the democrats had the popular vote nationwide’.
Can you compare two numbers and tell which is the greater? If you can’t then there’s no point me even starting on the history of British parliamentary democracy.
Look, it might be an odd thought process to you, to accept a basic fact you don’t like as a fact nevertheless – but that is, I guess, just a blindness that you have. I have realised that when someone just keeps saying ‘black is white, black is white, black is white’ there is no point arguing. So OK. You win. Trump won the popular vote.
BeermatYes. Not what we operate in the UK.
I am not claming it is! It’s only by having more than two parties returning candidates that we avoid the stark laying bare of the faults in a representational rather than a direct voting system as has happened in the US. As it is, we very often have PMs who’s party has been returned by a minority of the vote, but usually because the choice is more than binary.
I was just trying to explain something to RpR using this hypothetical. He has some idea that the US system has returned a properly democratic result contrary to the absolute figures because red states are often bigger geographically. I was using extremes to demonstrate the logical fallacy in this or any argument against votes counting equally which brings in arbitrary geographical divisions.
I was kind of explaining it backwards as I had tried forwards – votes are meant to represent people not landmass – and it wasn’t getting across the Atlantic
Having said all that – a US President would be a very suitable position to apply a direct vote to. Certainly more appropriate than a PM, who is just meant to be the leader of the party with the most seats, not a commander in chief elected personally into the role.
BeermatRpR, I think we are all aware that you don’t have a monarchy.
I don’t have a parrot. Your point is?
If you wish to talk of it, minority rule is exactly what you do have.
BeermatYes, I get that (Paul). And I personally support action to leave the EU promptly as it is undeniably the will of the people.
But I am not sure anyone is denying anything about the US situation (apart from a lunatic fringe). We are where we are with that, surely?
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