The Trump Presidency - how I stopped worrying and learned to love the Hair

When it comes to the founding fathers, I think the results speak for themselves. America is a bit of a success story. Not perfect, by any measure, but a fair bit more successful than pretty much any other country in human history. I think our founders knew what they were doing.

You should indeed be thankful of those who built your country, those the founders thought worth three fifth of The White Man.
 
Do you actually know how that came about or are you just spouting stuff?

If Ronaldo scores a goal by throwing the ball like a basketball, would you say that's unfair or would you need some explanation why the rule "no touching the ball with your hands" is fair/unfair? We have a system set up by the constitution - as long as we follow the rules of the game, it's fair.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artic...3:_Apportionment_of_Representatives_and_taxes
 
NO! Absolutely not!!! That's how you get mob rule and the Founders specifically wanted to avoid that. That's the entire reason why we aren't a pure democracy.

That's simply your opinion, I find it unfair that EC is winner take all in most states. My vote in NY truly doesn't matter because it will always trend blue and has enough population to simply dwarf rest of the state, same problem with LA and SF. Obama won PA by winning Philly metro, how's that fair?

Also current system will always trend towards two party rule, because a third party stands no chance. That's also not fair, Republicrats don't represent all the people.
 
That's simply your opinion, I find it unfair that EC is winner take all in most states. My vote in NY truly doesn't matter because it will always trend blue and has enough population to simply dwarf rest of the state, same problem with LA and SF. Obama won PA by winning Philly metro, how's that fair?

Also current system will always trend towards two party rule, because a third party stands no chance. That's also not fair, Republicrats don't represent all the people.

This one gets it.

History note, the founders didn't father winner-takes-all.
 
You should indeed be thankful of those who built your country, those the founders thought worth three fifth of The White Man.

Despite their faults, they were liberals and established a liberal foundation for the county. Several founding fathers were also anti-slavery. Liberalism is inherently incompatible with slavery, hence the US was forced to confront the dichotomy in 1860. Judging what the US is now based on slavery, is akin to saying all Germans are Nazis. Both the US and Germany have moved past their dark pasts and gone on to be great countries.

I will add, slavery was not evenly dispersed throughout the US, even when it was founded. The industrial revolution (which most propelled the early US industry) happened in the North (at a time when slavery was outlawed there).
 
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I'm not disagreeing with any of that. My point "just because the founding fathers wrote it into the constitution doesn't mean it's necessarily the right thing to do" still stands.

Women's suffrage would be another point, the founding fathers had nothing to do with that.
 
When it comes to the founding fathers, I think the results speak for themselves. America is a bit of a success story. Not perfect, by any measure, but a fair bit more successful than pretty much any other country in human history. I think our founders knew what they were doing. I look at the idiots we have in charge today and I have zero faith that we would have survived 5 minutes under their leadership back in the day. Now all we have are partisan hacks and corporate shills who only care about their account balance.

With Trump now in charge, I think some of you might be a bit more sympathetic to the conservative desire to see government size and power reduced and kept in check. It's all well and good when it's a leader you agree with, but the moment someone gets into the oval office that you don't approve of... well, now you know how we've been feeling. It's not good, is it?

It's not about not respecting the Founding Fathers or saying they did a bad job, but they were after all, human. EC has not worked the way it was meant to work in a very long time now, there is also the fact that alternative forms of election, such as STV would have been too cumbersome in a pre-IT society. Between instant run off and EC's winner take all nature there is no other possible outcome than two party system, a system that we all know doesn't represent all citizens very fairly.
 
No argument here. I'm totally open to the idea of returning to splitting the electoral votes within each state, but that would require some new laws limiting state rights. Which in this case I would support.

The only thing about the discussion that has bothered me is that we can't pretend Trump is "illegitimate" because he wouldn't have won under a completely different electoral system. I've mentioned this before, but a lot of people in America make very different decisions on voting day simply because of the electoral college. I know Republicans in California that didn't bother voting at all, for example, because it wouldn't matter in such a dark blue state. And I'm sure the opposite is true with some Democrats in dark red states. A member of this very forum voted 3rd party simply because he thought his state was a shoe-in for Clinton, only to see it swing to Trump by a narrow margin. In my opinion this makes the popular vote stats inherently flawed. If we actually elected our presidents based on the popular vote, the stats would look very different. The end result may be the same, but the numbers wouldn't be.
 
No argument here. I'm totally open to the idea of returning to splitting the electoral votes within each state, but that would require some new laws limiting state rights. Which in this case I would support.

The only thing about the discussion that has bothered me is that we can't pretend Trump is "illegitimate" because he wouldn't have won under a completely different electoral system. I've mentioned this before, but a lot of people in America make very different decisions on voting day simply because of the electoral college. I know Republicans in California that didn't bother voting at all, for example, because it wouldn't matter in such a dark blue state. And I'm sure the opposite is true with some Democrats in dark red states. A member of this very forum voted 3rd party simply because he thought his state was a shoe-in for Clinton, only to see it swing to Trump by a narrow margin. In my opinion this makes the popular vote stats inherently flawed. If we actually elected our presidents based on the popular vote, the stats would look very different. The end result may be the same, but the numbers wouldn't be.

Agree with all of that
 
NO! Absolutely not!!! That's how you get mob rule and the Founders specifically wanted to avoid that. That's the entire reason why we aren't a pure democracy.

There are countries with direct democracy which run pretty smoothly. It's less power to the politicians and more power to the people. Although you kind of have to trust the people to be competent and informed enough to make decisions on their own without falling for populist propaganda. If you don't, then that says a lot about your fellow countrymen.
 
Size matters?

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-38707722
President Donald Trump has accused the media of dishonesty over the number of people attending his inauguration.
Mr Trump was speaking after photographs were published appearing to show more people attended the inauguration of his predecessor Barack Obama in 2009.
Mr Trump's press secretary said it had been "the largest audience to ever see an inauguration" even though figures he cited add up to under 750,000 people.[...]
Mr Trump said "it looked like a million and a half people" there on Friday - with the crowd extending all the way back to the Washington Monument.
He provided no evidence.
To support the argument, his press secretary Sean Spicer outlined figures amounting to 720,000 people in the Mall.
He also said that the number of people taking Washington's subway system on the day had been higher than during Mr Obama's second inauguration in 2013.
In fact, there were 782,000 tickets that year, but 571,000 this year, the Washington-area transit authority says.[...]

Now, I consider this discussion as a whole rather silly. It does not matter whether a president draws in 750000 or 1.5 Million at his swearing in. But it seems to matter to President Trump and it once again shows his and also his administration's view towards facts. In his mind he won the popular vote, he got the biggest crowd at the inauguration ... how is someone going to govern a country that does not accept numbers that he dislikes? What's the Budget going to look like these next years?
 
I can't believe the agenda of Spicer. The crowd was tiny. Get over it. Trying to slander every piece of news that you don't agree with as "fake news" and inventing your own factual reality probably works on those who believes in your bs propaganda, but everyone else sees right through it.
 
We just had an election between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton and you're telling me to trust people to be competent and informed? :lol:

It's what the EC would have been for if the founders hadn't allowed the states to fuck it up.
 
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