Hahahaaaa, ya i was that kid in the bus beating people at tic tac toe. fuckin hardcore nerd playah days. all down hill from there.

"Nobody ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American people"

And this year, you fuckin' proved it....

Everybody just gotta keep fuckin' everybody til they're all the same color.

Fuckin A.

The tension was so thick I could cut it with a spoon.

Inspiring stuff.

*promote

Reasonably good fun until the end: "Just what I want for Christmas. My fuckin' vagina on de interneh." Brilliant.

I'm as surprised as most everyone at how the election turned out. In the week or so leading up to election night, I considered the possibility that Trump might win the popular vote but lose the electoral college, but not the other way around.

Still, as someone who thinks the electoral college is bullshit, consider this thing from all angles:

Hypothetical Possibility 1: At first, when I thought that Trump might win the popular vote but lose the electoral college, I thought that would be a good thing going forward. Both sides would have been screwed out of a victory by the idiotic system in recent memory, which might push for bipartisan support to scrap it.

But thinking further ... I don't think that would have actually panned out. The GOP establishment wouldn't have seen that as "their" candidate getting screwed, they would have been happy. They might have had to pay lip service to the idea of reconsidering the electoral college to pander to angry Republican voters who felt cheated out of a Trump presidency, but they could easily have just left it at that and sat on the issue until apathy took over again.


Possibility 2: The likely reality. Trump will win by electoral votes but lose the popular vote, and that will stand. The Senate and House are both Republican controlled, and the Supreme Court will very likely swing further in that direction. Possibly a LOT.

That sounds terrible. And it definitely means that in the short term, there will be absolutely zero traction for anyone wanting to push the idea of getting rid of the electoral college. BUT -- it also sets up a gold-plated opportunity to see real, actual movement on that front in 2 years. Think Trump is going to be horrendous? Think GOP-controlled Legislature will be abysmal? Look on the bright side -- if those expectations are correct, the blowback in midterm elections won't be a "wave". It'll be a fuckin' tsunami. And that's what we need to have a shot at killing the electoral college.


Possibility 3: Faithless Elector rampage. You can argue, with some merit, that the electoral college was intended to prevent or safeguard against exactly the kind of situation that we are in now. And I'd love to see President Bernie myself. But what would actually result if enough electors swapped to make that happen?

First, NYTimes projects Trump getting 306 electoral votes. That would mean that 37 faithless electors would have to happen to flip the election. You have to go back more than 100 years to find an election where there has been more than 1 faithless elector. There has only been 1 election with more than 37 faithless electors, and that was in 1872 because the candidate died. So realistically, it would be close to impossible to pull this off. (all info from wikipedia)

But forget the odds and just assume that it did happen. I think that would be a strategically terrible idea for Democrats, liberals, etc. Trump won because enough people didn't like the prospect of President Hillary and/or actually wanted to see what Trump himself could do. In either case, his voters generally aren't going to give him a whole lot of leash to screw things up or fail to deliver on their expectations. It will be next to impossible for him to keep those swing people happy. If Trump is 1/10th as terrible as the average Democrat expects him to be, he will alienate all of those people in very short order.

But if faithless electors "stole" the presidency from him (and you know that's how it would be perceived)? Oh, man ... he'd effectively be a political martyr. The anger and backlash would likely be apocalyptic and/or lead to revolt. Worse than almost any realistic way that Trump himself might fuck things up as the President. Even if that was somehow avoided, which I tend to think would be impossible, whoever got installed as President would have the shortest leash of all time, and a massively hostile and motivated Legislature that they would be forced to attempt to work with. Better have some sacrificial lamb to put in there that has zero political future, and even then they would probably cause massive damage to their party by association when they inevitably fall.

No, I think the clear best option is to let Trump (and the GOP) dig his own grave over the next year or two, and then graciously ride the wave of comeuppance.

These things are normally terrible, but that was actually pretty fuckin' funny.

*promote

Dude's a fuckin genuis.

My concern is this : Imagine a global extinction event , lets say a repeat of the event that killed off the dinosaurs : a massive asteroid direct hit , instantly killing everything on roughly the same continent or general planetside , such an impact would punch a hole in the very tectonic plate it lands on and cause massive waves not just in water , but in the ground itself , waves of rock and earth surface taveling around the globe meeting on the far side of the impact and ricocheting back again . We are talking GLOBAL earthquakes off the scales, for YEARS after the impact as the tectonic plates are slowliy settling in, all this is followed by a thick cloud of ash from the impact, refueled by frequent vulcanic eruptions , this will block out most sunlight , so after the initial toasting , the few lucky survives of this pandemonium can look forward to hundreds of years of atomic winter. Sounds pretty fuckin bad.

But guess what : thats still better conditions for life than Mars. And Mars is goddamn paradise compared to the other planets around us. Anything outside our immediate neighbourhood ? Forget it , they are ATLEAST thousands of years travel away, making moving anything of note there unfeasable. We ARE a one planet species. Get used to it , take good care of this one , its all we got.

Really fuckin' good.

"There are refugees who are suffering in a way that history will not be kind to us for ignoring" gave me chills.

Dave Fuckin' Grohl man ....

"put your shit down and get out of the fuckin' car" says a woman's voice.
Like those people who become intent on taking their carry out baggage with from burning aircraft.

Well, first off, the part about sterilising and killing was pretty obviously tongue in cheek, although I take your point that some Trump supporters might make the same point seriously.

That said, I have an expectation that the people on this site are smart enough to read what I said as comic hyperbole. As for it being in poor taste, that's up to the listener. I certainly found it in much better taste than Jim Jeffries bit on Bill Cosby, but as you quoted Reginald D Hunter "take it from the rest of us who did laugh--it was fuckin' funny."

All comedy aside, I was being 100% serious when I said that if you really believe in something so much that no evidence will change your mind, then you shouldn't be voting let alone running for office.

As for getting the same response at the DNC.... you're almost certainly right. It would be about different issues (probably vaccines, GMOs and the like), but they would be just as wrong as the Republicans.

That anger is real and not at all misguided. Woolly thinking has held the human race back for millennia and caused untold suffering and horror: racism/slavery, sexism, homophobia, the "war on drugs", climate change, alternative medicine.... do I need to go on?

I'm not saying you can't have a firmly held belief, and I'm not even saying that everything you believe must be fully supported by evidence, but everyone (myself included) should be willing to at least question their own dogma.

"Would you reconsider in the face of new evidence?" should be the simplest question to answer for anyone.

How did we fuckin' get here? What a nightmare. *quality