We are on the threshold...

[BustaMike]

I never really thought how ridiculous it could potentially get. If only one person voted in Califonia, whomever he/she voted for would get all the electoral votes. Let's say this happened in a few states, or enough to get over 50% of the electoral. 100% of the people in all the other states vote for the opposite candidate. Even with only 2 candidates it is possible for someone to win with a ridiculously small % of the votes. The US is about 270 million people. Half of them make up the states needed to win the electoral college vote. So, someone could win with 15 votes vs. 135 million for the loser. That's .0000011% of the popular vote and still able to win. With more candidates the % can be even less.

[Sikander]

A point or two regarding the Electoral College:

Each State has a number of Electors equal to it's Congressmen (Congresspeople?) which roughly corresponds to it's proportion of the U.S. population divided by 435. Additionally, each State also receives 2 Electoral votes for it's Senators. I believe that there are a few more Electoral votes divied out on a per capita percentage basis for Washington D.C. and U.S. possessions.
This system theoretically gives candidates a little more reason to care about States with small populations, as States like Wyoming have 3+ times the electoral power per capita of States like California. In practice politicians still ignore Wyoming.

Electors are chosen by the parties or candidates from amongst their loyalists. There is no Federal law which forces them to vote for the candidate which they are supposed to represent, because they are representatives of the states. They are subject to state laws on the matter however.

In order to win election as President, a candidate must receive a majority of the votes of the electors. If no candidate receives a majority, then the election is thrown into the House of Representatives. It is conceivable that a tight three way race where no candidate receives an absolute majority could be decided by a political deal between two of the candidates, where one candidate instructs his electors to vote for another candidate (and give him a majority) in exchange for some favor or another.

Another amusing possibility exists regarding the popular vote vs. the electoral vote. Each state's electors are awarded on a winner (plurality) take all basis. Theoretically, a candidate could beat another even though he received only 1% as much of the popular vote as the other candidate. By winning a few large states by a bare plurality, and losing all the others by huge margins, a candidate could win the election with a tiny fraction of the popular vote. Assuming thousands of candidates in the large vote states, he could theoretically win each one with only two votes!

[Alinestra Covelia]

Hmmm... just looking at this thread, I wonder sometimes how well Julius Caesar would do in modern day American politics.

I imagine that his propensity for shaving his legs for cosmetic reasons would probably stand him in particularly poor stead.

Aristotle's passion for young men might also scupper his chances for a Presidential shot.

Archimedes would begin his campaign heavily burdened with allegations of nudity and unseemly shouting in public.

And as for Mao Ze Dong... well, some arguments aren't worth starting

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"In all creation, there can be no task more onerous or tedious than that of playing God." - Stephen Fry, 'The Liar'.

[lemur866]

The last president to without getting a majority of the popular vote was Benjamin Harrison in the 1880s. Samuel Tilden won, but the votes in four states were challanged on technical grounds. Tilden would have won if any of those disputed states went to him, but the Republican congress appointed a commision to decide who would get the votes...with 8 Dems, and 9 Rep. All disputed states were awarded to Harrison on a party-line vote. Southern Democrats agreed to look the other way in return for Harrison's promise to completely end the Reconstruction era.

Tilden was essentially swindled out of the Presidency. A weaker case can be made for the 1960 election and voter fraud in Illinois (Daley) and Texas (Johnson). If either state had gone for Nixon, he would have won in 1960....

[BustaMike]

That's right... Harrison, not Harding. One of those H guys. Thanks lemur.

[Master Marcus]

Definitely Off-topic. Come on, guys, we're in AC-general.

Just want to say here that MMI (cyborgs) should logically be reached AFTER Self-Aware Machines...

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The art of mastering:"la Maîtrise des caprices du subconscient avant tout".

[Vi Vicdi]

I realize that my voting has virtually no impact; however, I'm too big a fan of Melville not to do it anyway:

From hell's heart, I stab at thee. For hate's sake, I spit my last breath at thee.

This is my motivation to vote: revenge against people who think they're better than me who take my money and tell me I should feel good about it.

From hell's heart, I stab at thee.

My dislike of Liberals is admittedly inexplicable in its depth, and must I imagine stem from their ability to take my money despite my having decoded and discarded their slick sales pitch. Do I look like I was born yesterday? Irrelevant. Enough people apparently were born yesterday that I get jacked just the same.

I imagine myself free from the influence of televangelists (this is not a difficult thing for an atheist to believe). I occasionally drive by a billboard, or hear a joke about Tammy Faye, but as far as I know no actual transfer of funds takes place. Televangelists are empowered to prey only on the weak-minded.

Liberals, on the other hand, have honed this skill, refined it, and added a new and sinister twist -- by ensnaring the weak-minded they prey on us all. They fool some of the people, some of the time, but leverage this gullibility so that all are made to pay. The Liberals' marks are afflicted with a most insidious strain of the Helsinki Syndrome, and I bear the cost -- I, whose eyes are opened, must pay for wont of freedom from those who cannot see.

If some book of angry poetry or some artist's denuded backside or some excrement-defiled religious symbol is so transcendant that it justifies forcing me to pay for it, then it is Art that should be burned, not me. I have never fancied myself a censor, yet if there does exist "art" such as would justify the use of force against me I would gladly burn it, like the firemen of Farenheit 451, burn it to harmless ash and through this act of defiance win back my freedom.

The Truth, the kind the religious people say will set you free but in reality only infuriates, is that your tax dollars are not at work -- they are at play. That's the joke. Artists, lawyers, welfare cases, owners of sports teams [we buy the stadiums; they reap the return], the subsidized, the endowed, the whole incurable epidemic of pigs at the trough throughout all walks of life, they're all in on the joke -- they speak in great earnestness about their need to play ... and our need, of course, to work.

Have you ever seen those "save-the-whales" people (cetaphiles?) try to roll a beached whale back into the ocean? Such awesome futility! Imagine instead Captain Ahab furiously poking at it, struggling in vain to kill what cannot die but which neither can move to kill him, until at last exhaustion overwhelms fury and he shrugs his shoulders, drops his harpoon, and promises to come back to fight another Tuesday, and you have some inkling of the hopeless irony of my political philosophy: harpooning a beached whale. It should also be obvious by now why I continue to do it -- why every chance I get to vote I do take my stab at the White Whale -- because if I didn't, I would become that much more like the White Whale -- beached.

[BustaMike]

Wow. That's some pessimism. Do you really believe that so many liberals are actually evil and only working to take your money, much the same way a televangelist would? It's a very poetic speech you made, but ridiculous nevertheless. I (admitting this at fear of being shunned by every other poster on this thread) am a liberal at heart. Let me give you my take on present day politics. The liberal basically tries to give the less fortunate more help. This would translate to more public programs to help homeless or needy people and more taxes for rich people. Today it could almost be likened in some ways to socialism (even more taxes and more public programs). Say what you will about socialism, but in England and much of Europe college is basically free and health care doesn't suck like it does here. The liberal tries to help out society by taking an active role with government and legislation. Good or bad it usually means more taxes, more education, less defense, and more public programs.
The present day Republican stance is much different. I can truthfully say I like what the Republican party stood for before the 80's, but after that it's pretty sad. Many present day Republicans seem preoccupied with making sure every one is a good Christian. The idea of forced prayer in schools makes me sick. Not everyone Republican shares this view thankfully. The more I think about it, I guess my disillusionment of the conservativism comes directly from Ronald Reagan. Vi Vicdi, you wanna talk about being swindled, then this guys is your prime target. Reagan essentially destroyed any chance America had at getting rid of its debt any time soon by quadrupling it. Before Reagan there was no such thing as a trillion dollar debt. At the same time he made tax breaks for everyone and the economy was great from all the money America was borrowing, so people loved him. Then we get to trickle down economics. Hey, lets give more money to the rich and maybe it will trickle down to everyone. Not a chance. Reagan just made rich people richer.
I guess this is my main gripe with conservatives. Conservatives usually are upper middle-class white families who are against any kind of law that would have them paying more tax than they already do, even to help others. Liberals are usually lower middle-class or worse, and vote the way they do because the liberal platform and legislation will benefit them directly in the same way a conservative vote benefits the wealthy.
A perfect example of conservative legislation is the school voucher issue. School vouchers would allow wealthy kids to have private school paid for if the parents feel the public school isn't good enough. This will supposedly force the public school to work harder and teach better to keep its students and money, when in fact it is allowing only wealthy students to make this decision of where to go to school, and potentially harming the education of many other students by cutting funding from the public school in the form of a voucher to be paid to the private school.
Liberals are not trying to jack anybody. They are simply trying to do what they think is best for society. If this means the wealthy person has to pay an extra couple hundred dollars in taxes, big f_cking deal. I'm not trying to say that everything liberal is great. There are many liberal ideas that I totally disagree with. The truth is though that liberals are not trying to steal peoples money as Vi Vicdi so elegantly put it. It may just look that way to a wealthy conservative who doesn't feel it necessary to help those less fortunate than he.

[Vi Vicdi]

First a brief correction: what busted the budget in the 80's was not tax cuts, which actually resulted in higher revenues, but increased spending. You need only look at the numbers to see that income was not the problem. You will, in fact, find that to be an almost universal truth: financial security comes not from increasing income but from controlling spending.

"We must pay a high price for peace."
-- Vassily P. Aksyonov, Russian Literature Professor and former Soviet dissident

Reagan had a liberal Congress, and they made a "Devil's Bargain" if you will: Reagan would get his military buildup in exchange for liberals getting their social programs. The real question one must ask oneself about Reagan is, "Was expediting the end of the Cold War worth the cost?" The Cold War's outcome seems, in hindsight, to have been inevitable, so perhaps Reagan could have vetoed all the social spending, let the military languish, and simply waited for the Soviets to collapse. The Mujahadeen would likely have fought on forever. Castro was contained. Most of the industrialized free world had a nuclear deterrent. Maybe instead of buying the win we should have simply bunkered down and waited for it. Who can say?

"Follow the money."
-- Anonymous source "Deep Throat", All the President's Men, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein

Now do you really believe that liberals are out to "help" us with all thier grants and endowments? Does Luciano Pavoratti really need another Opera Hall? He probably spends more on food in a day than I do in a month, and yet there he was at the National Press Club, surrounded by his adoring political friends, furious that those uptight conservatives won't "Support the Arts" -- with the powers vested in the IRS! I am neither uptight nor conservative, but I know a scam when I see one, and forcibly transferring funds from my broke-ass-po' self to his fatass wallet is a scam. Only by actually seeing an opera, voluntarily I might add, should I be obligated to pay for it: is that not the fundamental principle of the Universal Commercial Code? But of course crass Commercial Codes don't apply to "artists": con artists.

"It is enlightening to see how well people in other countries get along with a lot less."
-- Peter Coyote

That brings us finally to "helping the poor". First, who could be so arrogant as to declare that because a certain person makes below a certain income that that person is "impoverished" and therefore needs "help"? War refugees need help. The severely mentally impaired need help. Victims of flood and famine need help. Most of the rest of us do not. (It should also be obvious that wanting help is not the same as needing it.)

"Each of us is responsible for his own destiny."
-- Rayden, Mortal Kombat

A recovered alcoholic I once knew told me that a person cannot be helped; help has to come from within. "Until you hit rock bottom, and realize if you don't change you're going to die," he said, "you will never change."

I had a girlfriend once who had a friend who was on welfare. This young woman lived in absolute luxury. She had more food than a grocery store, and she threw away whatever got too old to be eaten -- during a time in my life when I was thankful to be living off of frozen burritos and sardines. She was, in the glorious liberal tradition, "free from want." At the time it made me profoundly angry, but as I pondered the ex-alcoholic's words I understood what welfare was doing to her and felt pity, because she has no impetus to grow; no reason to evolve; no motive to expand her horizons. She has no honor, because she has no apparent need of it, and that is profoundly pathetic. She will never hit bottom, because she's already there and feeling fine. As a bottom-feeder it has become her natural state. I can't be angry at her; what she takes she takes for granted, like a child.

Anger should be left to the politicians who set the system up, a system that rewards failure and hooks people on money like it were drugs -- in exchange for votes. You could actually see the addicts in the streets, banging their symbolically empty lunch trays to protest welfare reform in 1994. There they were, feeling perhaps the first pangs of withdrawal, "fired up" as their chant went, to claim what is rightfully not theirs, without shame, without remorse, without even an acknowledgement of those who pay. Full grown adults, in other words, acting like teenagers, the drug stunting their growth. Did I liken liberals to thieves? Perhaps I was wrong; are they not more like pushers?


Some of you no doubt are teenagers, and if you're more the paper route type than the demand-money-from-parents type my sincerest apologies. You are well ahead of most of your peers.

[Sikander]

Busta,

Your sentiment to help those who are less fortunate is laudable. My problem with your argument lies with the means you use to achieve your goal. Helping someone with your money does you credit. Taking money from others at gunpoint makes you a robber. Do you think that my extrapolation of taxation to robbery is a little extreme? Perhaps, but don't kid yourself. Every law is enforced by a man or woman (or a whole army) who are empowered to force you to comply by a series of steps, which may start with confiscation of your property, move to denial of your liberty, and at the end (if you still resist) always end up with violence, and fatal violence if you still would resist.

Somehow I find this a good deal less compassionate than digging into your own (larger due to less taxation) purse and doing what you feel is right. If you want to help the poor, by all means help them. Your personal participation will have at least two important benefits over a governmental transfer of wealth. The first benefit will be for the person who decides to give of his own free will. That person (you perhaps) will have to take some sort of interest in the process, even if it is only deciding which charity to make the check out to. This sense of ownership and responsibility will likely result in a more efficient use of the money, labor etc. given. It will also yield a greater feeling of self worth for the person who gives of himself, and may bring him into closer contact with those who he decides to help. I don't feel particularly proud of the taxes I pay to help the poor. How does this seperate me from any other taxpayer? I have no ownership of the process, I haven't done anything but what I would do in any case, work. Not having a choice in the matter tends to breed resentment in people who might otherwise give of their own free will. In fact there are a good many of us who resent being taxed, and nonetheless give of ourselves to help people in addition to what is mandated by our masters in Washington.

The second benefit to voluntary contribution falls to those who receive the money / help. They make no connection between a government entitlement and the sacrifice made to pay for it. Those of us on the giving side of the equation can calculate exactly how many hours of toil and boredom we endured to pay our taxes. Those who receive the benefits (after all of the waste and fraud) only see an often incompetent and uncaring bureacracy, and the temptation to feel contempt for it is mighty indeed. A priest or a volunteer at a soup kitchen etc. often meets with a much different response than a state employee at the welfare office. The reason for this is that even desperate people appreciate what is freely given. This appreciation can be an important step in breaking the cycle of poverty. Instead of a Hollywood limousine liberal 'bravely' calling for more taxes to be disseminated by middle class state bureacrats, here is a real person giving of themselves. They are not throwing their wealth in our face from afar, but humbly serving those who are less fortunate while serving as role models. Role modeling is the most effective form of leadership, and it essentially breaks down to a single concept. Getting the target audience to ask 'How can I be like you?'. In this case that means how can I be self sufficient enough to take care of myself, and still have something left over to give to others. Role modeling takes something that merely rendering unto Ceasar cannot provide. Humility. Fake humility can be obtained by threat of force, but real humility comes from strength. It has to be freely given. This is in essence the Moral Achilles Heal of government aid. It is not freely given, but is obviously taken by the threat of force. Some may happily pay up, but they are disconnected from the process. Others resist, either from selfishness or enlightenment. All are tainted by the method.

[BustaMike]

Vi Vicdi... you are of course correct. It was the increased spending that caused the deficit. I had intended to say that but for whatever reason neglected to.

After reading both your and Sikander's comments I can find no fault with your reasoning. No Pavarotti doesn't need another Opera Hall, and anyone who is content to live off of wealfare at the expense of the state should not be aloud to. I am reminded of a Chris Rock monologue. "A black man going to 2 jobs every day hates a nigga on welfare. B_tch I got 2 jobs you can't get one."

I'm also definately not for more taxes. Taxes were the downfall of the Roman empire. More taxes meant less profits for the people and more tax collectors to do the job which in turn required more taxes to pay for them and then the people had even less and so on and so on. What I would like to see is a more efficient use of our taxes. The defense budget right now is ridiculous.

Lets say that instead of building another stupid opera hall (I hate opera), we use that money to fund more music programs in elementary schools. It is a proven fact that children learn better if exposed to music, especially at an early age. This is the kind of funding for the arts that should be happening.

When I said I was a liberal at heart I meant it. However, I would never support anyone that would support what you guys have written about here. The intentions are good, but the process needs changing.

[Sikander]

Busta,

Thanks for your comments. I think there is so much common ground out there for people willing to look beyond labels. Your use of the Roman Empire as an example is an astute one. Roman integrity propelled Rome from a small city-state to a world power in a short time. As Rome became more worldly and abolished it's old way of life in order to make room for new classes of scum, from bloated aristocrats to the urban poor dependant upon the government. When the government endured a crisis, the whole empire shook, and eventually fell. The moral is strong individuals make a strong nation. (Or good individuals make a good nation etc.) This is why I tend to be a bit of a missionary for the concept of individual responsibility. Your integrity is yours no matter what your government does, and a people with integrity will eventually get a government with integrity. Very few things in life are best done from the top down. Even boxers need strong legs.

[Vi Vicdi]

If you think devolving power to the local level will produce better results (game theory indicates this may be true) then you're probably more conservative than you think.

I personally think people are much more capable of fending for themselves than most liberals seem to believe. But to harken back to the addiction analogy, withdrawal symptoms are always painful and sometimes fatal, so similarly some kind of accomodation would have to be made for people who really don't know any life other than the kind where money falls out of the sky -- sort of like Russians want a free economy but they don't quite know how to do it yet. Finally, at long last, those who fail to avail themselves of the opportunity to come down gently require the cold turkey treatment. Like the alcoholic who hits rock bottom, sometimes that's what it takes. No one should interfere with a necessary stage of personal growth.

The two year deadline popular with most welfare reform programs seems realistic, but I wouldn't mind seeing some dough spent on career counseling in the interim. Whatever deadline is set, though, must be adhered to, regardless of the consequences, or it has no credibility and thus will be doomed to fail (another lesson from game theory).

I think if you compare the voting records of various politicians with your own ideas on the matter you will find yourself very surprised by the results.

I never "fit in" and never really knew why until I learned at age 20 what a "Libertarian" was. I had barely heard of Ayn Rand before the age of 22.

In public school, being both poor and a genius -- something liberals secretly believe can't happen -- I noticed that my peers regardless of their parents' balance sheets respected me, while it was conversely a pretty safe bet that the older and more liberal a faculty member was [especially in college], the more obsessed they were with money, and the more likely they were to assume I was wealthy and priveliged. It was insulting. Then there were the student-assitant positions, where the amount of your paycheck was determined not by how good a job you did but by how poor you were. It was infuriating.

On the conservative side back in the 80's there was this obsession with "Secular Humanism", as fictitious a bogeyman as ever there was. Attacking the presumably spiritually bankrupt Machiavellian modus operandi of power-hungry politicians is one thing, but a witch-hunt against "Secular Humanists" hit too close for comfort. You can't be a conservative if you don't believe in God -- you're just another Enemy.

Soon after I discovered that I was a "Libertarian" came the retroactive tax and I locked into the mode I've been in ever since. It occurred to me to ask the question, "Who's got the guns?" The IRS has real power; religion [at present] does not. They can pack the school boards and fill textbooks with creationism, but serious students of science are predisposed to decrypting religious propaganda. When liberals get a dumb idea, on the other hand, they get up in your face and whip out their guns and take your money. Now that's downright rude.

That's my "big epiphany", really, that I can protect myself from religious bigots more easily than from the IRS, and I've voted Republican ever since. I have shared my story with you to encourage you to find your own way as I have. And while I believe my calculations are correct [thusfar], they are not very aesthetically pleasing; I hope that yours end up more to your liking.

P.S. I also find excessive interest in politics to be a weakness akin to vice, like drinking too much or spending too much time surfing the web. I'm not a hypocrite; I've just "fallen off the wagon." *slap*

[Alinestra Covelia]

I remember when I first tried to make sense of the American bipartite system. From somewhere I'd gotten this strange idea that all Democrats were Protestants and all Republicans were Catholics.

Imagine my prepubescent dismay at finding out there was rather more to it than that.

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"In all creation, there can be no task more onerous or tedious than that of playing God." - Stephen Fry, 'The Liar'.

[gnome]

Just for the record, I wanted to note that if you actually look up the figures, the tax cuts in the Reagan years led to a /decrease/ in tax revenue, as much as they would like to pretend it didn't.

The last time I got into an argument over this I had to go to the library to find the figures, but I won a $5 bet over it.

If anyone wants to directly contradict me on this, I'll gladly head back there to get the figures again, but before you do, ask yourself, have /you/ ever looked up the numbers, instead of just believing what you're told?