US 2024 Presidential Election

Silvanus

Elite Member
Legacy
Jan 15, 2013
11,976
6,303
118
Country
United Kingdom
Opportunity, yes. Likelihood, absolutely not. There is no moral difference between a Republican or a Democrat voting Green. It's the same action in both cases. And they have the same choices.
The same action, performed by people with vastly different inclinations and situations, have alternatives with vastly different probabilities. Probability is simply a reality of existence I'm afraid.

That's just saying the same thing with words that don't make you feel as bad about it.
Well, if you just don't want to comprehend the thought processes of people voting differently to you, I can't force you.
 

BrawlMan

Lover of beat'em ups.
Legacy
Mar 10, 2016
29,195
12,171
118
Detroit, Michigan
Country
United States of America
Gender
Male

Good. Keep these Nazi facists from doing more harm.

 
  • Like
Reactions: XsjadoBlayde

XsjadoBlayde

~it ends here~
Apr 29, 2020
3,331
3,458
118
Supreme court picks not only plain partisan hacks from Leanord Leo riding the battering ram of trump, but also included fake, probably-illegal claims of FBI investigation that just funneled all "tips" and requests straight to white house to die instead


 
  • Like
Reactions: BrawlMan

Seanchaidh

Elite Member
Legacy
Mar 21, 2009
5,715
3,443
118
Country
United States of America
The same action, performed by people with vastly different inclinations and situations, have alternatives with vastly different probabilities. Probability is simply a reality of existence I'm afraid.
And those probabilities are utterly irrelevant. Trying to be an actuary about voting choice is, once again, utterly asinine.

Well, if you just don't want to comprehend the thought processes of people voting differently to you, I can't force you.
Doesn't matter what your thought process is: if you vote for Harris, then you do not hate genocide enough to not vote for a genocide-complicit candidate. That is simply a fact.
 
  • Like
Reactions: tippy2k2

BrawlMan

Lover of beat'em ups.
Legacy
Mar 10, 2016
29,195
12,171
118
Detroit, Michigan
Country
United States of America
Gender
Male
I doubt it will be violent in Saginaw (it wasn't last time), but stay on the alert.

No shit, Kelly.


Keep telling yourself that.
 

Asita

Answer Hazy, Ask Again Later
Legacy
Jun 15, 2011
3,218
1,071
118
Country
USA
Gender
Male
And how does a legal precedent exist in the first place?
What you're failing to understand is that precedence doesn't always exist. Once again, that's literally what defines a landmark decision: The court's decision creates a new precedent.

The fact that the Supreme Court can, in theory, act like a fail-safe against some ridiculous constitutional amendment passed by the legislature is somehow makes my point invalid?
The point you were trying to make was that the Court not overturning the 13th Amendment evidenced that they lacked the power. What I was invoked there was showing that the Supreme Court does indeed have the power, and that they didn't overturn the 13th Amendment due to a lack of desire to do so rather than a lack of ability. And as shown to you repeatedly, how they fall on an a given case often involves a considerable amount of subjective judgement and even spin. See once again the contradictory rulings on whether or not anti-miscegenation legislation was a violation of the Equal Protection Clause.

RBG said it was based on the wrong argument which is all I quoted and said. I didn't say she agrees with my whole take on Roe. On basic logic, how is right to privacy a legit argument for abortion? The argument doesn't make any logical or legal sense. I am pro-abortion but I'm not just gonna agree with something that doesn't make sense if it aligns with my stance.
And we call that "quote mining", aka a "contextomy": the removal of a quote from the context necessary to understand it, and then claiming that it holds a different meaning than it does within that context. Once again:

The actual argument was that the laws banning abortion as a matter of course without regard for circumstance violated the Due Process Clause. It concluded that while the State cannot override that right entirely, it has its own interest in protecting both the pregnant woman's health and the potentiality of human life represented by the fetus, with that interest overriding the woman's right to Due Process later in the pregnancy when abortion procedures (at least at the time of ruling) posed a much greater risk to her own health (ie, the increasing risk hit a point where it outweighed the benefit).

While privacy was an element of this, the case gets bastardized by ideologues as claiming that the case was wholly "based on a right to privacy" which they - and you - pretend was conjured out of the aether (when in fact Griswold v. Connecticut that first explicitly claimed that it was a constitutional right a few years earlier, the case law officially establishing it as precedent dates back to the 1920s for Federal Law and 1900s at the State level, and had been explicitly opined on in the Harvard Law Review in the 1890s), and further bastardize it by pretending that the case declared it to be some unalienable right, which the plain text of the case shows - in no uncertain terms - was not actually the case. Roe v. Wade was explicitly a compromise position.

Once again, you failing to understand the case because you have gotten its basic facts wrong is not the same thing as it not making sense. Perhaps it would make more sense to you if you actually took the time to read up on it rather than simply parroting editorials whose writers had an axe to grind.

I never said they didn't argue that, I said most of the arguments were baseless because they were. And I said the Supreme Court won't overturn Obergefell because it has far too much constitutional backing.
No, what you do is alternate between saying that it's ridiculous to believe that Obergefell will be overturned, characterizing the arguments on which Obergefell is predicated as ridiculous ("Read the arguments for Roe and most of Obergefell and tell me those arguments aren't shit with a straight face"), and that it doesn't matter one way or another if Obergefell is overturned. Because at the end of the day you care more about going "nuh-uh!" whenever somebody tells you that you're wrong about something than you do about creating and maintaining an internally consistent position. And you're too proud to ever consider that the many, many people calling you out on your erroneous claims might just be right about you speaking in ignorance, especially considering that you consistently show that you're also too lazy to actually read up on the subjects you're opining on.

I was talking about the hypothetical of cat declawing and animal abuse. You can substitute out cat declawing for something else that would be some newly argued type of animal abuse. My point is in many things like animal abuse, you give criteria for what is animal abuse and then argue that XYZ does indeed meet the criteria because you can't list everything type of abuse in the law. Same thing with child abuse as well.
Again: We were not talking about a hypothetical. That's a fiction that you conjured up purely to pretend that the points explaining why your position didn't hold up to scrutiny didn't matter.

I invoked declawing cats as a contemporary example to illustrate how changing attitudes result in the laws changing to reflect those attitudes. Never mind that you're once again missing the forest for the trees. The point you're ignoring (seemingly deliberately at this point) is that this example reflects a fundamental priciple of the legal system.

Under our legal system, the law has an obligation to be clear and unambiguous. It is a binary. The only answers to whether or not something is protected are "yes" or "no". Not "maybe", not "in theory". If you cannot say - affirmatively and with certainty that the answer is "yes", then it is "no" until such time that the law and/or courts declare otherwise. Because to do otherwise would violate one the central tenets of our legal system: A law can bind only when it is reasonably possible for those to whom it applies to acquire knowledge of it in order to observe it. If the law is not clear on an issue, then it cannot bind because it allows for reasonable people to come to contradictory conclusions, creating good faith violations of the law even with proper knowledge. If there cannot be a reasonable expectation that you should know better, the law is not binding in that respect. Hence, once again, the Vagueness Doctrine.

If you successfully argue in court that something that has not historically been recognized as protected should be, that establishes a new precedent that is used from that point forward. This is why changes to legal definitions are a big deal, because that directly impacts what the law does and does not cover.

To repeat:

This is not a debatable point nor is it difficult to understand. Bluntly, your failure to understand as much is exactly that: your failure to understand. These are extremely basic and uncontested principles. In fact, they're premises that our legal system is built around. You're simply refusing to even try to understand them, and then confusing your willful lack of personal knowledge on the subject (and apparent lack of interest in learning about it) for its content being ambiguous. It's not ambiguous or "up in the air," you're just being obtuse.

Here, let me give you a little fable to try to get this through to you: There once was a man who never got any education to speak of, going into the job market as soon as he had the strength in order to support his family. He grew up to be very hard working, but obviously not the most knowledgeable sort. He eventually had a daughter, and was very determined that she'd get a proper schooling. His hard work paid off, and he was able to fund her education, and she ended up not only graduating high school but getting a scholarship to a decent college.

He was very proud of her, and had a bad habit of trying to get her to show off her 'fancy learning' in front of his friends. So one day, he was talking his friends on the porch and his daughter - home for the weekend - came by. True to form, he shouted, "Hey hun! Speak some geometry to me!" Exasperated, she relented and responded "Alright! The area of a circle is equal to Pi R square."

At first he was speechless. Then he was furious. He shouted back: "What are they teaching you in that cockamamie school? 'Pie are square'? That's ridiculous! Any idiot knows that pies aren't square! They're round!"

What I want you to understand is that that this entire conversation is centered on the functional equivalent of you insisting that "pi r squared" must be wrong because "pies are round". You're making ridiculous objections to basic principles, rooted in nothing but your own preconception and misconceptions about a subject that those same objections make clear that you have no knowledge of. The arguments you're making aren't clever, they're painfully stupid. And the fact that you can't even see that is a testament both to how far out of your depth you are and how determined you are not to learn. You keep demanding that people prove things to you, but you ignore everything cited to you, and even your own sources once it's pointed out that they don't support your conclusions. It's not about knowledge for you, just your ego.

And you know what? I'm done wasting my time on you. It is not worth my time to keep on trying to educate you, including re-checking sources, thinking up applicable examples and analogies to facilitate that education, finding applicable case law, quoting definitions, and both invoking and explaining relevant concepts if all you're ever going to do is go "nuh-uh! That doesn't make sense to me! Therefore it must be wrong!" before turning to "well that doesn't count because I'm not actually talking about reality!" when it finally does make sense to you. Rather than learning from your mistakes you simply dig your heels in and stonewall to the point of literally and explicitly declaring that reality doesn't have any bearing on an argument about how your presumptions don't match reality. And when you show that you're willing to dig your heels in that far out of sheer stubborn pride, that makes it clear that any attempt at discussion with you is an exercise in futility.

So good day to you.
 
  • Like
Reactions: BrawlMan

Silvanus

Elite Member
Legacy
Jan 15, 2013
11,976
6,303
118
Country
United Kingdom
And those probabilities are utterly irrelevant.
You can declare them irrelevant if you like. They may indeed be irrelevant to any given voter's decision-making process. But they're undeniably a factor in the outcome of the election and thus which policies will actually be followed. That's enough for me to consider them pretty damn relevant.

Doesn't matter what your thought process is: if you vote for Harris, then you do not hate genocide enough to not vote for a genocide-complicit candidate. That is simply a fact.
I'm afraid that's not what a fact is. That's just you attributing motivations to people whose thought processes you're unwilling or unable to understand. "You don't hate genocide enough to not vote for X" can be reformulated to apply to any candidate, if one just ignores the target's actual thought process and imposes their own. Tis always moralising bunk, though.
 
Last edited:

Dirty Hipsters

This is how we praise the sun!
Legacy
Feb 7, 2011
8,542
3,054
118
Country
'Merica
Gender
3 children in a trench coat
You can declare them irrelevant if you like. They may indeed be irrelevant to any given voter's decision-making process. But they're undeniably a factor in the outcome of the election and thus which policies will actually be followed. That's enough for me to consider them pretty damn relevant.
They are relevant to politicians when estimating trends.

You are telling people who they are "likely" to cast their vote for and arguing with them when they disagree.

Who Tippy or Crimson, or Seanshaidh is going to vote for isn't a matter of probability, they've already told you who they're voting for.
 
  • Like
Reactions: crimson5pheonix

Gergar12

Elite Member
Legacy
Apr 24, 2020
3,879
859
118
Country
United States
Gambling on who will win the presidency by default is stupid so 100% of the people on there are morons (and this is coming from a degenerate gambler that is Tippy betting on his fantasy football team!).
It's not stupid, it may or may not be a bad idea morally to commodify everything. But Democrats have won 7/8 elections in terms of the popular vote. Also this has nothing to do with who will win the electoral college/the election.

You could literally win with 23 Percent Of The Popular Vote if you win the states needed to win the electoral college in theory.

 

Seanchaidh

Elite Member
Legacy
Mar 21, 2009
5,715
3,443
118
Country
United States of America
You can declare them irrelevant if you like. They may indeed be irrelevant to any given voter's decision-making process. But they're undeniably a factor in the outcome of the election and thus which policies will actually be followed. That's enough for me to consider them pretty damn relevant.
No, they are not a factor in the outcome of the election. If I vote Green, then no other candidate gains or loses a vote. "Likelihood" to have voted in some other way or not at all (in circumstances which did not occur and were thus irrelevant) does nothing whatsoever to change that. They don't speak to the morality of voting Green. They don't speak to the effect of voting Green. You can compare potentialities if you wish (e.g. voting Stein instead of Trump). Their probabilities-- in some other reality in which they might have happened-- are irrelevant.
 

Kwak

Elite Member
Sep 11, 2014
2,311
1,844
118
Country
4
Nazi cultists being weird. Imagine thinking this is a sane and normal thing to do.
1729754297238.png
 
  • Like
Reactions: BrawlMan

Silvanus

Elite Member
Legacy
Jan 15, 2013
11,976
6,303
118
Country
United Kingdom
They are relevant to politicians when estimating trends.

You are telling people who they are "likely" to cast their vote for and arguing with them when they disagree.
I'm not telling anyone who they're likely to vote for. I made an assumption about it purely for the initial mathematical workout, but also invited people to correct that assumption if it didn't hold for them.

Who Tippy or Crimson, or Seanshaidh is going to vote for isn't a matter of probability, they've already told you who they're voting for.
In order to see the impact of a voteshare, it's necessary to compare to hypotheticals in which the options are different.
 
  • Like
Reactions: BrawlMan

Silvanus

Elite Member
Legacy
Jan 15, 2013
11,976
6,303
118
Country
United Kingdom
No, they are not a factor in the outcome of the election. If I vote Green, then no other candidate gains or loses a vote. "Likelihood" to have voted in some other way or not at all (in circumstances which did not occur and were thus irrelevant) does nothing whatsoever to change that. They don't speak to the morality of voting Green. They don't speak to the effect of voting Green. You can compare potentialities if you wish (e.g. voting Stein instead of Trump). Their probabilities-- in some other reality in which they might have happened-- are irrelevant.
Let's try another situation-- not as a direct analogy but as a separate thought experiment.

Say we're aware that someone is bleeding out in a remote location, and we estimate their chances of survival are approximately 50/50. We also know there are two other people nearby the victim who haven't spotted him yet: a regular average guy with a basic medical kit, and a homicidal maniac.

We then find out, separately, how each of these bystanders act. We find out the maniac fails to spot him and leaves? My relief increases! I'd estimate his chances have increased. We find out the regular guy fails to spot him and leaves? My despair increases! I'd estimate his chances have decreased.

Very different recalculations in response to the exact same act being observed from two different people. Because of their inclinations, we've inferred likelihoods about how they otherwise may have acted.
 
Last edited:

tippy2k2

Beloved Tyrant
Legacy
Mar 15, 2008
14,583
1,938
118

I'm old enough to remember when "not another foot" was The Democrats position on immigration.
 

BrawlMan

Lover of beat'em ups.
Legacy
Mar 10, 2016
29,195
12,171
118
Detroit, Michigan
Country
United States of America
Gender
Male
Nazi cultists being weird. Imagine thinking this is a sane and normal thing to do.
View attachment 12083
They shall meet Fleming in hell for praising a false God.

 

tstorm823

Elite Member
Legacy
Aug 4, 2011
7,113
964
118
Country
USA

I'm old enough to remember when "not another foot" was The Democrats position on immigration.
It never should have been their position, and Kamala's flip-flopping and all that, whatever.

The thing that makes me chuckle here is the pettiness of the math. That 2% isn't a random low number pulled out to mock Trump, it's a calculated number, but calculated in such an unflattering way as to be self-contradictory.

The US-Mexico Border is 1954 miles long. 654 miles of it have some form of barrier.
Trump's Administration built 452 miles of wall.
- 372 miles were replacing or supplement existing barriers
- 80 total miles of wall were in previously open spaces
- 47 total miles of previously open spaces were walled
- 33 miles of secondary wall were built to reinforce the 47 new

So there are a lot of different ways to chop this up, depending on how you want to count replacements and upgrades vs new construction, and most of them can be used to construct a reasonable argument. They worked on 419 miles of border, 21.4% of a 1954 miles border. Alternatively, they only had new construction on 47 miles of border, which is 3.5% of the previously open 1347 miles of border. You could say Trump's administration worked on 64% of the border wall, but as far as new additions was only responsible for 7.2% of what is there now. Like, lots of different ways to cut it, but there are 2 ways to put this data together that are invalid arguments. The Trumpiest way is taking total wall built and dividing by the border, and saying they built 452 miles of wall which is 23.1% of the border. That's a meaningless number, since a lot of what they built was stacked behind other barriers. This sort of logic would let you build 200 10-mile walls in one area, and say "we walled 100% of the border". No, that's just lying with math. The opposite nonsense number would be dividing only the newly covered distance by the total length of the border, saying 47 miles out of 1954 were added, so 2.4% of the wall was added. This calculation demands that the previously blocked areas need to be walled to get to 100% while simultaneously refusing to count rebuilding those sections toward that 100%.

Harris not only summarized Trump's wall construction using that second nonsense metric, the one that says "you can't wall the whole border (cause we already walled over 600 miles of it)", she also rounded down. That's where the 2% comes from. And I'll say that she almost certainly didn't do that math personally, she was probably repeating something that she had read or was told to her by someone else, there's no reason to pin it onto her as a person, but the pettiness of the math itself is funny.
 

tippy2k2

Beloved Tyrant
Legacy
Mar 15, 2008
14,583
1,938
118
It never should have been their position, and Kamala's flip-flopping and all that, whatever.

The thing that makes me chuckle here is the pettiness of the math. That 2% isn't a random low number pulled out to mock Trump, it's a calculated number, but calculated in such an unflattering way as to be self-contradictory.

The US-Mexico Border is 1954 miles long. 654 miles of it have some form of barrier.
Trump's Administration built 452 miles of wall.
- 372 miles were replacing or supplement existing barriers
- 80 total miles of wall were in previously open spaces
- 47 total miles of previously open spaces were walled
- 33 miles of secondary wall were built to reinforce the 47 new

So there are a lot of different ways to chop this up, depending on how you want to count replacements and upgrades vs new construction, and most of them can be used to construct a reasonable argument. They worked on 419 miles of border, 21.4% of a 1954 miles border. Alternatively, they only had new construction on 47 miles of border, which is 3.5% of the previously open 1347 miles of border. You could say Trump's administration worked on 64% of the border wall, but as far as new additions was only responsible for 7.2% of what is there now. Like, lots of different ways to cut it, but there are 2 ways to put this data together that are invalid arguments. The Trumpiest way is taking total wall built and dividing by the border, and saying they built 452 miles of wall which is 23.1% of the border. That's a meaningless number, since a lot of what they built was stacked behind other barriers. This sort of logic would let you build 200 10-mile walls in one area, and say "we walled 100% of the border". No, that's just lying with math. The opposite nonsense number would be dividing only the newly covered distance by the total length of the border, saying 47 miles out of 1954 were added, so 2.4% of the wall was added. This calculation demands that the previously blocked areas need to be walled to get to 100% while simultaneously refusing to count rebuilding those sections toward that 100%.

Harris not only summarized Trump's wall construction using that second nonsense metric, the one that says "you can't wall the whole border (cause we already walled over 600 miles of it)", she also rounded down. That's where the 2% comes from. And I'll say that she almost certainly didn't do that math personally, she was probably repeating something that she had read or was told to her by someone else, there's no reason to pin it onto her as a person, but the pettiness of the math itself is funny.
TLDR don't care + didn't ask + the wall is stupid + Democrats are Republicans now for immigration + the wall is still stupid
 
  • Like
Reactions: crimson5pheonix

tippy2k2

Beloved Tyrant
Legacy
Mar 15, 2008
14,583
1,938
118

Why is this the choice Harris? To the best of my knowledge at least, there isn't some Justice Scale that when you put balls into the "lower grocery prices" bucket that the "genocide a people" bucket is the only possible counter balance...

We can actually have both!
 
  • Like
Reactions: crimson5pheonix

tstorm823

Elite Member
Legacy
Aug 4, 2011
7,113
964
118
Country
USA
TLDR don't care + didn't ask + the wall is stupid + Democrats are Republicans now for immigration + the wall is still stupid
Walls aren't stupid, nor are the bad for immigrants. You can't offer anyone shelter if you tear the buildings down. Democrats were stupid to demonize the wall, it was all optics and partisan politics, it was never good policy.