orange808 wrote:Nah. Common trash like us don't matter. Doesn't matter what we think or care about.
By the principle of solipsism I'm the only mind I can be certain actually exists. If I'm really the only conscious simulant in this simulation, I'm the most important being here.
As I said,
superstitious as hell. I much prefer thinking of myself as garbage.
According to what data?
Crosstabs of 2nd preferred candidates. Bloomberg helped Sanders much more than Warren hurt him.
Our staggered election primaries work similar to the sort of systems you and CGP Grey endorse. They sound great to people who like facts and logic, but a staggeringly huge portion of the electorate does not function on reason or logic. It's clear we love aristocracy, personality, and whoever the TV tells us to vote for. (The owners of TV will never tell us to vote for someone that would decrease their wealth or power.)
If there's any overarching ideology in the current electorate, it's that the bulk of republicans care about guns and cruelty to scapegoats, while democrats care about having a calm placating voice on their tv telling them everything is fine and they have nothing to worry about.
Whatever I "am" is not relevant to the discussion. All I'm doing is attempting to make people aware of the broad work of Warren D. Smith and co. who have amassed a huge amount of test data mathematically showing that the current electoral system in use in the United States is fundamentally broken.
If folks are going to take the pessimistic attitude of "I refuse to believe changing things will fix anything, therefore we should keep using a system known to be fundamentally broken even when a far better alternative that's mathematically demonstrable to be superior exists", then I can't be of any further help.
We already had this discussion. If we had the power to "fix" the system, the system wouldn't need fixing.
I'll provide a rebuttal to this first line in one of your links: "Gore lost the 2000 presidential election to Bush (at least according to official vote totals) because of the spoiler effect of the 97488 Nader voters in Florida."
Much like Hillary's loss in 2016, the total was so close that nearly anything could have changed the outcome. Outside of matters of strategy, such as Gore supporting decriminalization of weed or anything remotely leftist, mechanical issues:
* The palm beach butterfly ballot cost a ton of Gore votes. (This was similar but worse than Sanders getting put on a second page in some Texas ballots.)
* Florida law dictates that any ballot where voter intent is clear still counts. There were punch cards in more impoverished areas with machines unable to cleanly cut through them - these were the infamous "dimpled chad" fiasco. Overwhelmingly black and gore-leaning communities were impacted by this. A full count of the votes would have resulted in a president Gore, but the Gore campaign didn't ask for one in their lawsuit and the supreme court put an end to it before it could come up.
So the process elected Gore president, even with the dirty tricks, but the people with
power selected a different outcome. This is all publicly known information.
I would like to be exposed to real-world examples of electorates not being beholden to party loyalty and such however.