for certain a good thing, and we can expect the white house to announce this news as if Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, or Egypt were the country in question, rather than a small nation across the wide deserts of Saudi Arabia.

hopefully tho this signals the shipping nations in the region will continue to soften as they modernize, and that regional Islam can follow. for too long Islam has only been given the choice of violent or more violent in the region.

*your

This part shows that you're still not entirely grasping what I'm saying. In my example, I have explained how 350k Republican voters in Alaska may matter more than 10 million gay voters spread across the country. The system protects one type of minorities (people in sparsely populated states) and does nothing to protect any others. As you put it: thousands matter more than millions. It doesn't make sense.

I do agree with you when it comes to how realistic all of this is. I suppose that a lot of our PaRD banter is philosophical and hypothetical; I know just as well as you do that the EC will not be abolished until the day the USA falls apart. I do find it interesting to discuss whether, if we could go 250 years back in time, a better system could be conjured up with the knowledge we have now.

that's faulty math tho. you're comparing the gays nationwide to the non gays in one state, and ignoring the non gays nationwide. a minority is still a minority. i dont want to suppress minorities, and politics generally aren't doing that in the modern times. we've made great strides, gay marriage was something Obama and HRC were against a mere decade ago, because that was the safe position, and now it's legal nationwide. protections for sexual orientation are growing all the time, even with some setbacks at the state level that take a while to get fixed by the SCOTUS. what i do not want to see is an entire state become a new minority group, that's expansion of the minority not regression of it. overall tho this speaks to the SCOTUS as a better check on abuse of minorities than the govt voted in by the EC.

as to the system, i tend to think not. at the time of the drafting of the constitution if a compromise was not met in the form of the EC we'd likely not have lasted as a country at all. the civil war would have been moved up, and likely would have resulted in so many fractures we'd have 10+ nations today, not 1 nation of 50 states. when bodies want to pull apart if you use tape it will only hold so long, we needed a strong glue. we're just now at a stage that people are questioning if glue was the right choice, ignorant to the reality that we wouldnt even by in a position to question the glue if glue was never used.

at the core of the constitution was a battle of a authoritarian federal govt and autonomous states, the EC is the middle ground. i dont see another viable middle ground, and either alternative would have been worse IMO. state's rights are easy to see as a completely negative thing, but it allowed the nation to start letting go of slavery, it allowed pot to become legal in over half the states, etc.

This post was edited by thesnipa on Sep 15 2020 01:47pm

you cant make that comparison. we are a union of states, not a single entity. states will not give up their own rights.

If the math is faulty, point out the fault. You say minorities are not being oppressed, so why does the "people living in sparsely populated states" minority require extra favors? My point is that the system favors one type of minorities and does nothing to favor other types of minorities, and this is now your fifth post in which you've danced around that topic.

I suppose the bottom line is that it's all due to historic reasons. You say the USA could not have established itself as a stable country if it weren't for the EC, and I can agree with that. This is not the only problem in the USA which is manifested by the fact that there is no practical way to change the constitution, so you're stuck with things that worked 250 years ago but don't work today.



I agree, and that's why I've said that you should not have such a powerful president.

what specific part of any of my posts implied minorities are not being oppressed? my entire point is that elimination of the EC would create new minority groups as entire states, and i said that the general direction of politics/government is already seeking to right wrongs against minorities and give them protections, generally by the SCOTUS.

my point is that politics in general already seeks to protect minorities, this hasnt always been the case but is in modern times and seems to be accelerating, for the good in general. but elimination of the EC is regression and expands minority groups by not protecting the norms of an entire sparsely populated region. further, what would the justification for this regression be? because minorities are too oppressed in a meta where their oppresion is already being addressed? aka impatience. or because a tiny number of elections overall have the electoral champion getting 48% of votes while the loser gets 49% even tho both knew the rules? aka a swansong for HRC who has only her faulty plan of pandering and visiting only urban areas she was already set to win? if not that it's purely philosophical, but also purely impossible, so why bother?

This post was edited by thesnipa on Sep 16 2020 06:02am

Insanely ignorant.

Trump upped Obamas drone campaign by a factor of 4, killed a general of an adversarial state, and has done nothing but yoyo troop levels in the middle east.

Literally none of what he said is true.

Australian professor of law or Thor79iq

Easy choice for who’d if consider a better authority