Donald Trump and US politics

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CanHasPants wrote:

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Kellog wrote:

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Jennik wrote:

Tyranny of the majority bad! Tyranny of the minority good!

Anyone who brings up the phrase "tyranny of the majority" in the context of the electoral college is demonstrating a shameful lack of critical thinking and reasoning skills. If you believe the choice of the majority being selected is a problem because they're only a subset of the population, how could allowing an even smaller subset of the population to make the choice possibly be better? All you're doing is representing even fewer people.

Didn't the GOP try to ban Critical Thinking in schools a while ago...

GOP Opposes Critical Thinking
Party platform paints original ideas as a liberal conspiracy

If this is your idea of critical thinking, I’d try to ban it too.

I’ll outline what just transpired:
1) Fail to understand the meaning of a statement
2) Use vitriol to substantiate the misunderstanding
3) Pretend the failure is now somebody else’s responsibility.

Actual meaning of the statement: Any democratically elected decision, whether it is who should lead, or what brand of milk to buy, means somebody has to inflict their will upon somebody else. This is generally an okay idea—it is how our society has decided to resolve conflicts of direction, and it sure as hell beats how some other cultures handle their differences. Tyranny of the many, however, describes how a smaller region can inflict its will upon a larger region. Our system is a compromise between the significance of a population and the significance of a region—because yes, “arbitrary lines” are significant. Why? The dumb answer is because the problems of New York + California ( sum population 56,631,000) do not equal the problems of Louisiana + Kentucky + Oregon + Oklahoma + Connecticut + Iowa + Mississippi + Arkansas + Kansas + Utah + Nevada + New Mexico + West Virginia + Nebraska + Idaho + Hawaii + Maine + New Hampshire + Rhode Island + Montana + Delaware + South Dakota + Alaska + North Dakota + Vermont + Washington, D. C. + Wyoming (sum population 55,503,000).

Spoiler

Source: http://www.ipl.org/div/stateknow/popchart.html
Out of date, but whatever, re-crunch the numbers, same result.

I feel you're primarily responding to Jennik here. Kellog's post seems to be of the pattern "IF keyword THEN meme," so from an argumentation standpoint his post was roughly equivalent to "hey, someone said 'critical thinking.'"

Ah, yeah. I scrubbed Jennik’s name from my post, because the vitriol is contagious.

My bad, Kellog, the majority of that post was not directed towards you. Only the first line.

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CanHasPants wrote:

I’ll outline what just transpired:
1) Fail to understand the meaning of a statement

[and]

Tyranny of the many, however, describes how a smaller region can inflict its will upon a larger region.

You using an unusual personal definition of a term doesn't mean that someone else using the common definition of the term is wrong. "Tyranny of the majority" is commonly understood to mean exactly what I said in my post. Your personal definition is so unusual that I couldn't actually find another example of anyone else using it that way. Stop blaming others for your own failings.

Regardless, everything you've said still highlights a complete lack of critical thinking and reasoning ability when it comes to this topic. You're still focusing on arbitrary lines in the dirt and ignoring the actual sentient beings who live within those lines while being completely oblivious to how one-sided your arguments are by your blind partisanship.

If 100 people live in an apartment complex while 80 other people live in homes spread out over a hundred miles, should the voices of the people in the apartment complex be silenced? Of course not. That's nonsensical. It doesn't suddenly become less nonsensical simply because you increase the scale. Those are still actual sentient beings who live in this country and are affected by its laws. Punishing them for not living in the boonies is outrageously unfair.

Every one of your perceived problems is revealed to be ridiculous if you simply step back and look at the situation from the other side. You fear the people in rural areas won't be represented if the majority of people in urban areas are fairly and equally represented? What about the reverse? How is it suddenly okay for the majority of people in urban areas to be left in the cold? The only difference in your hypothetical examples of persecution is who is getting persecuted, which, again, in your preferred version, is the majority group which you just happen to not belong to (what a lucky coincidence!).

Stop lying to yourself and to everyone else and admit that you love the electoral college because it keeps shitting Republicans straight into the presidency. It's a horribly unfair system with literally zero redeeming qualities. Every argument you can offer is blatantly intellectually bankrupt.

Yeesh. I’ll just stop at “blind partisanship.” Sure. Ya got me. Shucks.

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Jennik wrote:

Stop lying to yourself and to everyone else and admit that you love the electoral college because it keeps shitting Republicans straight into the presidency. It's a horribly unfair system with literally zero redeeming qualities. Every argument you can offer is blatantly intellectually bankrupt.

I disagree with the first sentence but I agree with the other two. As I've explained in a previous post,
1. It is not the EC alone that has recently propelled Republicans into presidential victories, so much as winner-take-all (WTA) assignment of those electors.
2. The two-Senator-per-state rule, upon which the EC is based, was originally designed to pretty blatantly give small New England states disproportionate representation in Congress, and it still does this. If you take away WTA, the EC favors Democrats more than it favors Republicans.

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CanHasPants wrote:

Yeesh. I’ll just stop at “blind partisanship.”

And there's the willful ignorance. Why learn why you're wrong when you can simply bury your head in the sand and continue to believe you're right anyway? It's not like facts and demonstrations of your unsound logic and overly simplistic thinking would have changed your mind anyway, but that's still a damn shameful response.

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Jennik wrote:

And there's the willful ignorance.

You ignored every single argument and made up some weird analogy. So yeah.

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Jennik wrote:

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CanHasPants wrote:

Yeesh. I’ll just stop at “blind partisanship.”

And there's the willful ignorance. Why learn why you're wrong when you can simply bury your head in the sand and continue to believe you're right anyway? It's not like facts and demonstrations of your unsound logic and overly simplistic thinking would have changed your mind anyway, but that's still a damn shameful response.

Yeah, no. You wield ad hominem like a cudgel. There is nothing for you to convince me of, because you seem to want to rant at people rather than discus with them. I say, good for you, rant away. No malice. But I’m not going to rant back, I have more productive things to do right now.

<3

When you want to be a feminist spearhead but you go full "she's a Republican and a slut so who cares?" because you suffer from TDS:

http://archive.is/zrdg1

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Jennik wrote:

Tyranny of the majority bad! Tyranny of the minority good!

Anyone who brings up the phrase "tyranny of the majority" in the context of the electoral college is demonstrating a shameful lack of critical thinking and reasoning skills. If you believe the choice of the majority being selected is a problem because they're only a subset of the population, how could allowing an even smaller subset of the population to make the choice possibly be better? All you're doing is representing even fewer people.

SO the USA should eliminate the senate, because 2 senators per state is not fair, eliminate the house, because gerrymandering is not fair, and just have a dictator President chosen by 51% popular vote?

It is not our fault you do not understand history, do not understand why this is a bad idea, and do not understand why the legendary founders of the USA set up the government the way they did.

I should make some comment to disparage public schools, but it just seems like a waste of time at this point.