Quote from Typho0nn »
*Daily mail is now "crap"... LOL!*
I take issue with only one word "now". It always has been and unless it has a radical restructuring it always will be a badly disguised propaganda rag designed to inflame a certain viewpoint. Back in the Thirtys they were unapologetic supporters of the Nazi's both in Germany and at home in Mosley's blackshirts. Not much has changed now with them hanging on the coat tails of both the Chinese and the Russians. They have earned there nickname of the Daily Fail several times over!
Reagan would be spinning in his grave if he knew that the Republican Party just sold out to Russia to win an election. Or even worse, if they got legit played.
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(Assuming you mean "Gorsuch")
In less crazy times, Gorsuch would have been confirmed easily. (In 1986, Scalia was confirmed 98-0.) He is from everything I've seen an excellent judge and near-ideal candidate for the position in terms of qualifications, intelligence, and temperament -- honestly not the sort of person I expected Trump to nominate. Does he hold conservative political views? Yes. Of course. But that's how our democracy works. The American people decided that they wanted a conservative to be the guy picking the judges. So if the Democrats were trying to block Gorsuch simply on ideological grounds, I'd be... well, filled with a frustration of a weary and familiar sort, because it's the same thing that they tried to do to Roberts and Alito, and that the GOP tried to do to Sotomayor and Kagan, in this increasingly dysfunctional government of ours.
The stolen seat complicates matters, though. I have a lot more sympathy for Dems blocking a nominee who -- whatever his qualifications -- should never have been appointed. You never want to just let your opponent get away with a dirty trick like that. But on the other hand, that dirty trick represents yet another escalation in the dysfunction, and responding in kind makes it the new normal. I want that even less. And on practical grounds this does not seem like a smart battle to fight. What outcome do the Democrats expect here if they block Gorsuch? To see Trump re-nominate Garland, or nominate a pro-choice judge? That's never going to happen. It'd be hard for any plausible future nominee to be any better than Gorsuch, and they could easily be a lot worse. To keep the seat empty for another four years until a Democrat is in the White House? One year was outrageous enough; four would be a frank admission that the system is broken (and, of course, the Republicans could just do it back to them again). So in the end, galling as it is under the circumstances to give the Republicans what they wanted, I think the best move here is to confirm Gorsuch, take a baby step towards returning the judicial confirmation process to business as usual, and look for some less self-destructive way to make the GOP pay for their stunt.
Absolutely not. The President is the President until 12:00 PM ET on January 20th. He has all the powers of his office, including the power to appoint Supreme Court justices, and the Senate has the responsibility to review and vote on those appointments. What next? The President can't issue vetos during the last six months of a term? No executive orders in the last thirty days? No pardons for the last year and a half? If we say the President can't do something because at some point in the future there might be some other President who would do it differently, why even have a President at all?
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So maybe take a step back and take an examination of your own reasoning here. Because, bluntly, all I see is sour grapes.
Walk me through the logic behind saying that big tent parties are worse echo chambers than small special-interest parties. Certainly the Communists I know who are willing to work with the Democrats are not nearly as batty as the Communists who only hang out with other Communists. Ditto Libertarians et al.
Yes, small parties have to form coalitions. Big parties are coalitions. And lest you complain that the coalitions are calcified by the two-party system, remember that Trump won by flipping traditionally Democratic states and demographics. It is as if, in a multiparty system, the Blue Collar White Guy Party defected from their traditional left-leaning coalition to form a government with the rightists. Only the decision was made at the individual level rather than the party level. Which actually seems more democratic to me.
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You've pointed out that our senses and reason aren't 100% accurate. Okay. It does not follow from this that they are useless. An instrument with a 99% reliability rating is still a hell of a lot better than nothing. Especially if we act scientifically: make repeated observations and compare notes with other observers. The results of this can absolutely be called knowledge. Knowledge is not the same thing as total certainty. We may not be correct about everything, but we're correct about enough things to, e.g., build airplanes that fly. So why on earth should we just sit on our hands and gaze at our navels while we wait for perfect information to come along? We have mountains of evidence that we don't need perfect information to get things done. In the face of that evidence, how is indecision rational?
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One simple question deserves another: when slaves can't vote, does counting them (wholly or fractionally) for the purpose of apportioning political power to those who own them give them any justice, or does it compound the injustice? And another: after slavery has been abolished, does any citizen not count as one whole person for apportionment? And another: if every citizen today does count as one whole person for apportionment, then what the hell were you talking about when you said that "skipping the electoral college" would "finally give people whole votes"?
If you want to have a meaningful discussion about this aspect of the American political system, then you need to make a coherent point. But if you just want to make nonsensical leaps so that you can feel smug about your outstanding moral bravery in denouncing slavery as a bad thing, then you need to do that somewhere else.
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So it does not make any sense to call the House-Senate split "a dumb relic of institutionalized slavery": it was not prompted by the institution of slavery, it was not adopted as a compromise with slavery, and functions just as intended without slavery. And in no way would getting rid of it "give people whole votes" as opposed to the three-fifths of a vote, because the Three-Fifths Compromise is already long gone, and even when it was still in force, at no point did anyone get three-fifths of a vote -- free people always got one, slaves always got zero, and the Three-Fifths Compromise never had anything to do with enfranchisement fractional or otherwise. Remember, for the purpose of seat apportionment, the slaveholders wanted slaves to count as whole persons, and the free states didn't.
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And even then, only in base 10.
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Redraw district borders through a special bipartisan committee rather than through the legislating body.
For Californians and New Yorkers. Not so much for South Dakotans and Alaskans.
Are you watching what's happening in the UK right now between England and Scotland? Scotland's less populous so it's getting dragged out of the EU against its will? That's an extreme example of the situation that the makeup of the United States Congress (which is what's being reflected in the Electoral College) was constituted to avoid. The interests of the diverse states carry a certain weight irrespective of their population, plus additional weight dependent on their population.
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2: Every voting system has its mathematical upsides and downsides.
3: No. Australia, I hate to break it to you, but you are violating your citizens' civil rights by making voting mandatory.
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But enough geopolitics. What is Pi Day in other bases?
In binary (base 2) pi is 11.0010..., and Pi Day is therefore celebrated on March 0th (or January 10th, if you care nothing for accuracy and also kick puppies).
In octal (base 8) pi is 3.1103..., and Pi Day was last Thursday.
In dozenal or duodecimal (base 12), pi is 3.1848... and Pi Day is next Monday.
And in hexadecimal (base 16), pi is 3.243F..., and Pi Day is going to require that March annex the first week of April (but let's face it, April has it coming).
So what is the best base? When is the true Pi Day? Are we going to settle for the inadequacy of base 10 and the metric system? Are we going to cling to binary or hex because it's what our computers tell us to do? Are we going to embrace the factorizing possibilities of dozenal? Are we going to go way back to the sexagesimal system of fallen Babylon? Or are we going to go really crazy and say, "No, it's heptary, Pi Day is on the 6th!"?