willhud9 wrote:

Animavore wrote:

willhud9 wrote:

Animavore wrote:He's only a president to the extent you recognise him as such. If an American citizen were to state they don't recognise and refuse to address someone as or take orders from someone they don't recognise there's not much anyone can do about it. If a person makes a stand, protests, civil disobedience; it doesn't matter. No one can force someone to salute and acknowledge anyone as their president. Hell some citizens even seem to get away with rejecting the government altogether and making armed stands against them.
Not the brown ones, obviously.

The American South tried to do this too. You know they didn't recognize Lincoln, and decided to form their own system of government. Worked out for them in the end, huh?

I don't believe they went through the proper channels. As far as I'm aware there's nothing, in theory, preventing any states from seceding.

Except Texas v White which was the Supreme Court ruling that secession is Unconstitutional.

Based on what exactly?

Animavore wrote:

purplerat wrote:

Animavore wrote:

purplerat wrote:As far as I'm concerned this "he's not the president" nonsense is just as idiotic as those talking heads who declared he became president after some speech or when he dropped some bomb. As I said, it's nothing more than political-woo.

What the fuck even is "political woo"? Politics isn't something which stands on rigorous and evidential grounds the denial of which can be classed as "woo". Might as well talk of philosophical woo, as if there's some philosophical beliefs which fall off the philosophical wagon.

It's making shit up purely to serve a political purpose. Like conservatives getting all pissy because somebody didn't wear a flag pin or put their hand over their heart during the national anthem. I wouldn't go as far as saying it's the same as outright lying about something like say Obama being born in Kenya, but it's on the spectrum.

Whatever, it still remains if I ever met him in person (unlikely) I'll be calling him Trump or Donnie out of disrespect, even if one of his heavies tells me to address him properly.

There have always been people who've refused to recognise authority whether refusing medals, knighthood, even conscripted war service. It's not new.

Could be wrong, but I don't think it's a legal obligation to call him by his title anyway.
I wouldn't adress our king by his title, so I certainly would not do so with people like Trump who I actually despise.

Thomas Eshuis wrote:

Animavore wrote:

purplerat wrote:

Animavore wrote:
What the fuck even is "political woo"? Politics isn't something which stands on rigorous and evidential grounds the denial of which can be classed as "woo". Might as well talk of philosophical woo, as if there's some philosophical beliefs which fall off the philosophical wagon.

It's making shit up purely to serve a political purpose. Like conservatives getting all pissy because somebody didn't wear a flag pin or put their hand over their heart during the national anthem. I wouldn't go as far as saying it's the same as outright lying about something like say Obama being born in Kenya, but it's on the spectrum.

Whatever, it still remains if I ever met him in person (unlikely) I'll be calling him Trump or Donnie out of disrespect, even if one of his heavies tells me to address him properly.

There have always been people who've refused to recognise authority whether refusing medals, knighthood, even conscripted war service. It's not new.

Could be wrong, but I don't think it's a legal obligation to call him by his title anyway.
I wouldn't adress our king by his title, so I certainly would not do so with people like Trump who I actually despise.

It's not a legal obligation. Folks on news and TV shows call him Trump all the time.

Thomas Eshuis wrote:

purplerat wrote:

Thomas Eshuis wrote:Except that in this case there's a valid argument to be made: Trump was not elected democratically. He was elected through a non-representative system.

That's how the US elects presidents.

And? I fail to see how people think this is a valid counter argument.

Just because you don't agree with the system of the US government does not negate its results. That is special pleading. It doesn't matter if he was not elected democratically. He was elected through our electoral college system which is how the US elects its presidents via our constiution. There is a way to change that. It is called amendments. Until that happens the argument you present is not valid.

purplerat wrote: The argument is as valid in regards to him as it would be the 44 who came before him.

Of which only 4 were elected undemocratically, ie with a minority of the votes.

Of which those 4 were still considered presidents, valid and legitimate. Also you are using way too broad a stroke there for calling something undemocratic. You can have a democratic system that is not based on majority vote or the sole will of the people. The reality of politics. You can have a democratic system, for example, where the president is elected not by the people but by a representative council.

purplerat wrote:You might as well say the US has never had a president.

How do you figure that non-sequitur?

Because you are essentially saying: The way the US conducts elections is undemocratic therefore the results of the election are invalid. Your premise of your argument is a non-sequitur.

purplerat wrote:That would of course require the assumption that presidents by definition must be democratically elected.

If only that was my point. Alas it isn't and thus this is nothing but a straw-man.[/quote]

No, no. It was pretty clear what your point was. Your wiggle here is pretty strange. You said, "There is a valid argument to be made because Trump was not elected democratically."

Well, that's a pretty clear point. So what was the other meaning behind?

eta: spelling corrections

Thomas Eshuis wrote:

purplerat wrote:

Thomas Eshuis wrote:Except that in this case there's a valid argument to be made: Trump was not elected democratically. He was elected through a non-representative system.

That's how the US elects presidents.

And? I fail to see how people think this is a valid counter argument.

purplerat wrote: The argument is as valid in regards to him as it would be the 44 who came before him.

Of which only 4 were elected undemocratically, ie with a minority of the votes.

purplerat wrote:You might as well say the US has never had a president.

How do you figure that non-sequitur?

purplerat wrote:That would of course require the assumption that presidents by definition must be democratically elected.

If only that was my point. Alas it isn't and thus this is nothing but a straw-man.

No US President has ever been elected by popular vote. The system is specifically set up to not be democratic by nature. It just so happens that most who've won the electoral college also nominally won the popular vote.

But even the popular vote within the EC system is not really all that democratic as the EC heavily influences the popular vote. For a whole plethora of reasons it's extremely faulty to assume that the results of the popular vote within the EC system would hold true in a truly democratic vote. Even thinking the campaign and the candidates themselves would bear a rough approximate between the two systems is pretty faulty in my opinion.

The long and short of it is, and I suspect you know this, that assuming the results under one set of variables would be the same under a completely different set of variables is a complete logic fail.

I don't think "simple majority" and "democratic" are interchangeable.

All electoral systems have flaws and areas in which they are imperfectly representative (although since the views of "the people" tend to be inherently self-contradictory that's a feature and not a bug).

Are all those EU countries where a majority of the people when polled indicate they would leave the EU undemocratic if they stay? Or is the issue of whether a country is democratic perhaps something different - like whether power ultimately rests with the people or not.

The way the US elects Presidents is not democratic. So to say one non-democratically elected POTUS is not really president because he wasn't elected democratically is to say the same of all the rest who similar were not.

Your fault seems to be in thinking that the popular vote for POTUS has any meaning whatsoever. It doesn't.

The popular vote is meaningully decisive in neither stating whether a system is democratic, nor in deciding who becomes president.

It is of course false to say that it has no meaning whatsoever, because it's intimately tied up with the result of the electoral college, and imposes all sorts of soft and hard mathematical constraints on the outcome.

Even the best PR systems in the world today can result in a minority group in terms of the popular vote being in power. If we rely on such simple majority criteria to say what is and is not democratic then there are no democracies, which strikes me as being as unhelpful as it is silly.

Thommo wrote:The popular vote is meaningully decisive in neither stating whether a system is democratic, nor in deciding who becomes president.

...

Pardon the intrusion. That's a goddamned well built sentence.



Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk

The_Metatron wrote:

Thommo wrote:The popular vote is meaningully decisive in neither stating whether a system is democratic, nor in deciding who becomes president.

...

Pardon the intrusion. That's a goddamned well built sentence.

[pedant]
No, it isn't. The "in neither" should be "neither in", or else the second "in" should be removed.
[/pedant]

Edited to remove inevitable grammatical error (missing comma).

OlivierK wrote:

The_Metatron wrote:

Thommo wrote:The popular vote is meaningully decisive in neither stating whether a system is democratic, nor in deciding who becomes president.

...

Pardon the intrusion. That's a goddamned well built sentence.

[pedant]
No it isn't. The "in neither" should be "neither in", or else the second "in" should be removed.
[/pedant]

Goddamned well edited.


Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk

Thommo wrote:The popular vote is meaningully decisive in neither stating whether a system is democratic, nor in deciding who becomes president.

It is of course false to say that it has no meaning whatsoever, because it's intimately tied up with the result of the electoral college, and imposes all sorts of soft and hard mathematical constraints on the outcome.

I'd question the use of the word "intimately" there. As the 2016 election showed, its possible for the Electoral College vote to go against the popular vote result even when the popular vote margin is quite large, and indeed the mathematical constraints you talk of are so soft as to be meaningless. (For example with five candidates it's impossible to win with 1% of the vote, but not mathematically impossible with 10%. Even with just two candidates it's mathematically possible to win the EC with under 25% of the popular vote.)

It's not unlike popular vote tallies in a seat-based system like the UK or Australia. In safe seats it's less important to turn out (other than to avoid a fine in Australia) and this affects the popular vote tallies. Similarly, in the US it's pretty much pointless turning out to vote for the President in Hawaii, California, Oklahoma or Utah. Turnout there is driven by downticket races or other ballot measures as much as anything, and is always below the national average. If the national popular vote were introduced as the deciding measure of the presidential race, then it's reasonable to assume turnout numbers would rise in safe states, which is one of the factors purplerat was alluding to when cautioning against assuming results under one system would carry over to another.

Rather than an intimate relationship, the percentage of the popular vote and the percentage of the EC vote received by a candidate are in fact more or less accidentally related. In the case of small third parties, for example, they're not correlated at all.

Thommo wrote:The popular vote is meaningully decisive in neither stating whether a system is democratic, nor in deciding who becomes president.

It is of course false to say that it has no meaning whatsoever, because it's intimately tied up with the result of the electoral college, and imposes all sorts of soft and hard mathematical constraints on the outcome.

Even the best PR systems in the world today can result in a minority group in terms of the popular vote being in power. If we rely on such simple majority criteria to say what is and is not democratic then there are no democracies, which strikes me as being as unhelpful as it is silly.

First off the popular vote is not intimately tied up with the result of the electoral college (see the above post).

Secondly, and more to the point, the primary reason the Electoral College is not democratic is because the system violates the "one person, one vote" principal. The current structure of the Electoral College inherently gives more weight to some people's votes and less weight to others.

That said the argument here really isn't whether the Electoral College is democratic or not. It's whether it was somehow undemocratic in Trump's election but democratic in others. Since he was elected under the same system as other presidents I'm not sure how that parses. As you state above a minority party in coming into power is not unheard of in western democracies. So is it always the case that it's undemocratic when such happens or is this just a special case because Trump is so particularly distastful?

purplerat wrote:That said the argument here really isn't whether the Electoral College is democratic or not. It's whether it was somehow undemocratic in Trump's election but democratic in others. Since he was elected under the same system as other presidents I'm not sure how that parses. As you state above a minority party in coming into power is not unheard of in western democracies. So is it always the case that it's undemocratic when such happens or is this just a special case because Trump is so particularly distastful?

Indeed, it's not a special case, I wasn't disagreeing with you, quite the reverse in fact.

I was agreeing with you and against those who think something has changed between Obama and Trump. Trump won a (broadly, as far as I know) fair victory under a democratic system. He is legitimately president, as little as I like that. If you're in the civil service and ignore his instructions you can be fired, if you're in the armed forces and refuse his orders worse penalties apply.

Happily ordinary members of the public can resort to protest or civil disobedience, but there's no getting around the reality - he's president, and this is likely to mean bad things for lots of people.

purplerat wrote:

Thommo wrote:The popular vote is meaningully decisive in neither stating whether a system is democratic, nor in deciding who becomes president.

It is of course false to say that it has no meaning whatsoever, because it's intimately tied up with the result of the electoral college, and imposes all sorts of soft and hard mathematical constraints on the outcome.

Even the best PR systems in the world today can result in a minority group in terms of the popular vote being in power. If we rely on such simple majority criteria to say what is and is not democratic then there are no democracies, which strikes me as being as unhelpful as it is silly.

First off the popular vote is not intimately tied up with the result of the electoral college (see the above post).

It's a comparable correlation to smoking and cancer and has a direct causative link. Plus it has absolute limits. That's intimate, if one uses English, whether technical or not.

purplerat wrote:Secondly, and more to the point, the primary reason the Electoral College is not democratic is because the system violates the "one person, one vote" principal. The current structure of the Electoral College inherently gives more weight to some people's votes and less weight to others.

Every single democracy which has wards/constituencies has the same property. Last time I checked, this was all of them.

There might well be a question of degree, and there may be questions over whether the minorities represented by states are the kind of minorities the tweaks to democratic systems usually accommodate - and in that sense the electoral college itself can be seen in some ways as an undemocratic feature of a democratic election process, but these are pretty tangential points that I don't think need to be made here.

willhud9 wrote:

Thomas Eshuis wrote:

purplerat wrote:

Thomas Eshuis wrote:Except that in this case there's a valid argument to be made: Trump was not elected democratically. He was elected through a non-representative system.

That's how the US elects presidents.

And? I fail to see how people think this is a valid counter argument.

Just because you don't agree with the system of the US government does not negate its results. That is special pleading.

It would be, if that's my argument. It isn't.
My argument is that is perfectly valid to not acknowledge a president as your president, if you did not vote for him and especially not if he was also elected with a minority of votes.

willhud9 wrote:
It doesn't matter if he was not elected democratically.

It does to the point I was making.

willhud9 wrote: He was elected through our electoral college system which is how the US elects its presidents via our constiution. There is a way to change that. It is called amendments. Until that happens the argument you present is not valid.

Except it is, my argument that is, not the straw-man you're adressing.

willhud9 wrote:

purplerat wrote: The argument is as valid in regards to him as it would be the 44 who came before him.

Of which only 4 were elected undemocratically, ie with a minority of the votes.

Of which those 4 were still considered presidents, valid and legitimate. Also you are using way too broad a stroke there for calling something undemocratic. You can have a democratic system that is not based on majority vote or the sole will of the people. The reality of politics. You can have a democratic system, for example, where the president is elected not by the people but by a representative council.

And if that council is not elected by a majority, representative vote, it'd still be undemocratic.

willhud9 wrote:

purplerat wrote:You might as well say the US has never had a president.

How do you figure that non-sequitur?

Because you are essentially saying: The way the US conducts elections is undemocratic therefore the results of the election are invalid. Your premise of your argument is a non-sequitur.

Except that isn't my argument. I'd appreciate it if you adress what I actually post, not infer things I haven't actually said.

willhud9 wrote:

purplerat wrote:That would of course require the assumption that presidents by definition must be democratically elected.

If only that was my point. Alas it isn't and thus this is nothing but a straw-man.

No, no.

Yes, yes.

willhud9 wrote: It was pretty clear what your point was. Your wiggle here is pretty strange.

There is no wiggle.

willhud9 wrote: You said, "There is a valid argument to be made because Trump was not elected democratically."

Well, that's a pretty clear point. So what was the other meaning behind?

eta: spelling corrections

My statement was a response to the ongoing discussion between Ani and purple. In other words, it was made in a larger context.
That context being Ani's claim that people were justified in not recognising Trump as their president.

OlivierK wrote:

Thommo wrote:The popular vote is meaningully decisive in neither stating whether a system is democratic, nor in deciding who becomes president.

It is of course false to say that it has no meaning whatsoever, because it's intimately tied up with the result of the electoral college, and imposes all sorts of soft and hard mathematical constraints on the outcome.

I'd question the use of the word "intimately" there. As the 2016 election showed, its possible for the Electoral College vote to go against the popular vote result even when the popular vote margin is quite large, and indeed the mathematical constraints you talk of are so soft as to be meaningless. (For example with five candidates it's impossible to win with 1% of the vote, but not mathematically impossible with 10%. Even with just two candidates it's mathematically possible to win the EC with under 25% of the popular vote.)

Couldn't it be even lower, considering most EC members are not obligated to vote for the candidate they campaigned for?

Thommo wrote:I don't think "simple majority" and "democratic" are interchangeable.

All electoral systems have flaws and areas in which they are imperfectly representative (although since the views of "the people" tend to be inherently self-contradictory that's a feature and not a bug).

They're not all equally unrepresentative though.

purplerat wrote:

Thomas Eshuis wrote:

purplerat wrote:

Thomas Eshuis wrote:Except that in this case there's a valid argument to be made: Trump was not elected democratically. He was elected through a non-representative system.

That's how the US elects presidents.

And? I fail to see how people think this is a valid counter argument.

purplerat wrote: The argument is as valid in regards to him as it would be the 44 who came before him.

Of which only 4 were elected undemocratically, ie with a minority of the votes.

purplerat wrote:You might as well say the US has never had a president.

How do you figure that non-sequitur?

purplerat wrote:That would of course require the assumption that presidents by definition must be democratically elected.

If only that was my point. Alas it isn't and thus this is nothing but a straw-man.

No US President has ever been elected by popular vote.

Most were elected in a way that reflected the popular vote though.

purplerat wrote: The system is specifically set up to not be democratic by nature. It just so happens that most who've won the electoral college also nominally won the popular vote.

But even the popular vote within the EC system is not really all that democratic as the EC heavily influences the popular vote. For a whole plethora of reasons it's extremely faulty to assume that the results of the popular vote within the EC system would hold true in a truly democratic vote. Even thinking the campaign and the candidates themselves would bear a rough approximate between the two systems is pretty faulty in my opinion.

I know how the EC works.

purplerat wrote:The long and short of it is, and I suspect you know this, that assuming the results under one set of variables would be the same under a completely different set of variables is a complete logic fail.

I know this, but his exactly nothing to do with my point.

Thomas Eshuis wrote:

purplerat wrote:

Thomas Eshuis wrote:

purplerat wrote:
That's how the US elects presidents.

And? I fail to see how people think this is a valid counter argument.

purplerat wrote: The argument is as valid in regards to him as it would be the 44 who came before him.

Of which only 4 were elected undemocratically, ie with a minority of the votes.

purplerat wrote:You might as well say the US has never had a president.

How do you figure that non-sequitur?

purplerat wrote:That would of course require the assumption that presidents by definition must be democratically elected.

If only that was my point. Alas it isn't and thus this is nothing but a straw-man.

No US President has ever been elected by popular vote.

Most were elected in a way that reflected the popular vote though.

This is a faulty assumption. What we are referring to as "the popular vote" is actually a component of the electoral college and is heavily influenced by the EC. If hypothetically there had been a straight popular vote it's reasonable to think the results may have been different for any given election and for a wide variety of reasons.

Pointing to the results of the popular vote as a component of the EC and assuming it accurately reflects a true popular vote is wrong. Which is why I said:

purplerat wrote:The long and short of it is, and I suspect you know this, that assuming the results under one set of variables would be the same under a completely different set of variables is a complete logic fail.

Aside from all that I still fail to see how you could argue that a legitimate outcome of an electoral system is somehow less legitimate simply because it's not a common outcome.

Thommo wrote:

purplerat wrote:That said the argument here really isn't whether the Electoral College is democratic or not. It's whether it was somehow undemocratic in Trump's election but democratic in others. Since he was elected under the same system as other presidents I'm not sure how that parses. As you state above a minority party in coming into power is not unheard of in western democracies. So is it always the case that it's undemocratic when such happens or is this just a special case because Trump is so particularly distastful?

Indeed, it's not a special case, I wasn't disagreeing with you, quite the reverse in fact.

I was agreeing with you and against those who think something has changed between Obama and Trump. Trump won a (broadly, as far as I know) fair victory under a democratic system. He is legitimately president, as little as I like that. If you're in the civil service and ignore his instructions you can be fired, if you're in the armed forces and refuse his orders worse penalties apply.

Happily ordinary members of the public can resort to protest or civil disobedience, but there's no getting around the reality - he's president, and this is likely to mean bad things for lots of people.

My apologies Thommo (and Thomas Eshuis), I was replying late last night and had the two of you and your arguments confused. I replied to you Thommo thinking I was replying to Thomas. So yes, there's no disagreement between in the points above.

Thommo wrote:

purplerat wrote:Secondly, and more to the point, the primary reason the Electoral College is not democratic is because the system violates the "one person, one vote" principal. The current structure of the Electoral College inherently gives more weight to some people's votes and less weight to others.

Every single democracy which has wards/constituencies has the same property. Last time I checked, this was all of them.

There might well be a question of degree, and there may be questions over whether the minorities represented by states are the kind of minorities the tweaks to democratic systems usually accommodate - and in that sense the electoral college itself can be seen in some ways as an undemocratic feature of a democratic election process, but these are pretty tangential points that I don't think need to be made here.

The problem with the EC, insofar as why I think it's correct to call it undemocratic, is that it's not equal representation based on wards/constituencies. The inclusion of US Senate seats in the allotment of EC votes means voters in smaller states have an outsized portion of the vote in selecting POTUS and those in larger states less so.

For example, I live in NY not far from Vermont. When I cast my vote for president my effective share of the vote is my 1 congressional district plus 2/27 of the Senate seats from NY (2 Senators for 27 congressional districts). Somebody living a few miles from me in Vermont, on the other hand, gets representation for 1 congressional district but also 2 full senate seats as Vermont only has 1 congressional district but still receives 2 Senate seats. The result is one voter having a vote worth nearly 3 times as much as some other voters. I'm not sure how that can be squared away as being democratic.