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Author | Topic: The Trump Presidency | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
caffeine Member (Idle past 1045 days) Posts: 1800 From: Prague, Czech Republic Joined: |
That wouldn't work. If one party fields 5 candidates while the other party fields 1 candidate then the party with 1 candidate will have a much better chance of winning. If you take the top 2 candidates and then a run off you can have a situation where 2 candidates from the same party are running which favors running just 2 candidates in the initial election. If you take the top vote getters in each party and then have them go head to head you have the primary system. I think you're missing the point by fixating on the concept of two parties. You couldn't have two candidates from the same party in the top two spots because each party would only field one candidate. Bernie Sanders is not a Democrat, but he ran for the Democratic nomination because the system currently works such that you need the nomination of one of the two main parties to have a credible chance of winning. This would not be necessary in an electoral system which didn't allow all the spoils to go to a candidate with only a plurality of votes. The parties could choose their candidate however they liked, of course. In the last French Presidential election, the Republicans and the Socialists both used open primary systems modelled on the American approach to try to create a unified, popular candidate of the right and of the left. In the actual election, they finished third and fifth, respectively. I am unsure why you think an individual candidate from one party would have an advantage over five of the other (where I'm assuming by 'party' you actually mean some broad left and right blocs). The one party candidate could not win on a plurality; they could only win if most of the electorate voted for them. If the majority of the electorate prefers the one Republican to any of the five Democrats, why would one Democrat fare better? Now, what could theoretically happen with a runoff system as they use in France or Brazil would be where you have two candidates representing the right and 5 representing the left. If the two right candidates get 20% each and the five left candidates get 12% each, for example, you end up with a majority left-leaning electorate choosing between two right-wing candidates. This is a simplified idea that doesn't really happen, but it's not relevant to RAZD's proposal anyway. He wasn't arguing for a second round style of election, but for instant runoff voting. You don't need to choose between the top two. In an IRV system, the two right wing candidates cannot be elected unless those for voted for the left wing candidates prefer one of them to the other left-wing candidates. This would not be a flaw in the system, but would simply show that the left/right dichotomy I'd imposed on things is a poor reflection of the actual ideological divisions in the electorate.
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caffeine Member (Idle past 1045 days) Posts: 1800 From: Prague, Czech Republic Joined:
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According to Le Monde, when Trump met the Presidents of Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia last April, he opened their meeting by discussing their respective countries' responsibility for the Yugoslav wars.
The three Presidents were briefly confused, before coming to the realisation that Trump had mixed up the Baltics and the Balkans. Now, it may be risible enough that Trump obviously does not do even the slightest bit of preparation before meeting foreign leaders (he criticised them for not meeting NATO defence spending requirements; while all three countries do; and for their participation in the NordStream 2 pipeline; in which none of them are participating); but his wife is from Slovenia! You'd think he'd at least know where Yugoslavia is.
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caffeine Member (Idle past 1045 days) Posts: 1800 From: Prague, Czech Republic Joined: |
The US Constitution grants the presidency to the winner of the Electoral College. The winner does not require a majority, only a plurality. Well, yes - we already know the problem. We were discussing better systems to replace this.
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caffeine Member (Idle past 1045 days) Posts: 1800 From: Prague, Czech Republic Joined: |
Details about how international waters became temporary Russian waters because Russia had closed an area of water were not in any article I read, but my guess is that does have some sort of legal basis that references treaties and/or international law. These aren't international waters. Who they do belong to is a matter of dispute - Russia and Ukraine never came to any formal agreement on the exact borderlines; and obviously with recent events this is looking unlikely. The issue was mostly avoided by a treaty guaranteeing free navigation through the Kerch strait and throughout the Sea of Azov for Russian and Ukrainian vessels. The official Russian explanation is that the strait was blocked for security reasons; because the Ukrainian ships had not followed proper procedures for notifying the port authorities in Kerch, and had carried out 'dangerous manoeuvres'. Edited by caffeine, : No reason given.
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caffeine Member (Idle past 1045 days) Posts: 1800 From: Prague, Czech Republic Joined: |
But I wouldn't discount the possibility of Trump's idiocy. I think it's possible he's so dumb he could just be a fan-boy of Putin. So into personal financial improvement that he would do anything for Putin's approval because he thinks Putin is some sort of person to be idolized. I would bet that your proposed reasoning is more likely.Just sayin'... Trump's a bit of a dumbass and it's possible his idiocy could extend to such ridiculous levels... I don't think any of this is necessary to explain Trump's pro-Putin behaviour. It makes ideological sense. First off, Trump's leanings are decidedly isolationist. He has no interest in getting involved in scuffles about other countries' sovereignty, and is therefore happy to ignore what Russia is doing in neighbouring countries. He is decidedly hostile to collective action and cooperation on the international stage; including the traditional security cooperation with Western Europe, and so from this side is quite happy to be seen striking a different tone to European allies in their relationship to Russia. Secondly, Putin and his team have spent the last two decades working on how to gain supporters in European countries with large degrees of residual hostility to Russia thanks to the Soviet legacy; while simultaneously trying to restore Russia's role as a great superpower - exactly the sort of thing that should be expected to increase that hostility. In his old KGB days, they sought to sow dissension and gain support in the west through Communist ideology. They've now hit on the brilliant tactic of simply appropriating a new ideology for a new era. Putin has been positioning himself as the champion of right-wing European nationalism; standing as a bulwark against Soros' and Merkel's evil liberal democratic plot to turn all white Christian children into transexual Muslims. Propaganda wings like RT have tried to promote this kind of thinking in the West, and the whole plan has been pretty successful. Thing is, this is the ideology that speaks to Trump and his supporters. He doesn't need an ulterior motive to cozy up to Putin - he looks across and sees a fellow traveller. ABE: Plus he doesn't want to get tough on Russia for election interference because he doesn't like facing the fact that his own election was promoted by foreign propaganda. Edited by caffeine, : No reason given.
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caffeine Member (Idle past 1045 days) Posts: 1800 From: Prague, Czech Republic Joined: |
(Speaking of Wikileaks, I wonder if Julian Assange, holed up now in the Bolivian Embassy in London for six years, realizes that he could have faced the music, served his time, and been out of jail by now. Same for Edward Snowden, he of the leaking of classified information about NSA surveillance programs, including domestic ones. He's been holed up in Moscow since 2013. If he'd faced the music he'd possibly be getting out of jail around now or the next few years. I wonder how he likes life in Moscow. Of course it must be much better than Assange's situation, who is restricted to a single room with his cat.) I think I'd rather live in Moscow than North Carolina (provided I had money - it's well expensive).
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caffeine Member (Idle past 1045 days) Posts: 1800 From: Prague, Czech Republic Joined:
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The Prime Minister of India is from a right-wing nationalist party with ties to extremist fanatic organisations. They have used communal tensions and stoked nationalist discontent to help them gain power. These are his tweets in response to his party's significant defeats in recent legislative elections in several states:
quote: See, Donald? Having vile political opinions doesn't mean you have to abandon basic civility in discourse and coherent sentences that look like they were written by an adult. Edited by caffeine, : No reason given.
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caffeine Member (Idle past 1045 days) Posts: 1800 From: Prague, Czech Republic Joined: |
quote: So I can't figure it out. Is Trump simply incapable of explaining concepts in a coherent way, or is the above an accurate representation of his level of understanding?
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caffeine Member (Idle past 1045 days) Posts: 1800 From: Prague, Czech Republic Joined: |
third option: that's russia's official line, therefore it is his I wasn't thinking about the specific view of history he's presenting, so much as the incoherent way he presents it. It's difficult to fathom what kind of understanding lies behind such a phrase as 'they went into being called Russia again instead of the Soviet Union.' It's like listening to someone who's heard of something called Russia but doesn't really know what it is, and are trying to hide their ignorance.
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caffeine Member (Idle past 1045 days) Posts: 1800 From: Prague, Czech Republic Joined: |
Old topic, but I only just stumbled across it.
Citizens of a country are allowed to vote in their country's elections even when they live abroad. That seems so obvious to me I can't imagine what the objections are. It's also not true, or at least, not universally so. My right to vote expires in 2021 as I will have been a non-resident too long (though of course I'd be able to vote if I ever moved back to the country of my birth). This seems like so obviously sensible to me that I'm astonished how many countries allow their citizens to vote decades after they emigrated.
What does this have to do with the issue of the constitutional requirement that the US census must count all persons? I think censuses are a fools errand, but that's another topic. However, I think it's definitely a bad idea to base congressional apportionment on census population. I know it's constitutionally required, but it's a bad idea. In today's age international mobility is very high, and this means that the number of non-citizen residents in certain places is high. I am not a citizen of country of residence. Non-citizens are generally concentrated in certain areas; usually for economic reasons. An extreme example should demonstrate why this causes a problem. Region A's population are all citizens. Region B's population are 50% citizens, 50% non-citizens. Both regions get to elect the same number of representatives, even though there are twice as many voters in A. The vote of a resident in B is weighted more favourably than A. Real examples are of course less exagerrated, but votes in areas with a high proportion of residents who can't vote do indeed count for more. It's not only foreign residents that demonstrate this flaw in the US system of apportioning representation - prison populations have the same effect of weighting the votes of non-inmates in the same area. It's not like this is some golden rule that all democracies must abide by. In the UK, redistricting is done to try and equalise the number of electors in a constituency - not the census count of residents. So non-citizens do not count for districting, and nor do children. Here in Czech Republic the regional distribution of seats in the lower house is not even known in advance of the election. The number of seats granted to a region is decided based on the number of votes cast.
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caffeine Member (Idle past 1045 days) Posts: 1800 From: Prague, Czech Republic Joined:
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Surprise, surprise there are differing stories about his exit. The funniest thing about this, is that his own White House staff announced this morning that John Bolton would be appearing at a press conference with Mike Pompeo and Steven Mnuchin. This was a last minute addition to the day's schedule. Half an hour later Trump announces that he'd asked for Bolton's resignation the day before. I've had similar managers.
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