zoogs

Is that the case, though? Like, if you're going to say the President is meant to represent the states then it seems fair enough to me to say, "OK, we have California going 60% Democrat; a sizable majority. CA is a very Democrat state, and CA is going blue. Texas is 60% Republican; it's similarly a quite red state, and it's going to go red." Each state throws in its lot, and they are weighted by state representation in federal government. If you want to approximate the popular vote by proportional allocation but still keep the state weighing, it's an odd in-between. California has 65 times the population of Wyoming, and 18 times the electors. A state like California dividing its electors tilts the scales much more than a state like Wyoming. There are competing effects and consequences but I don't think we could say this is a means of approximating the popular vote better -- it seems more like a way of, on balance, slightly expanding Republican influence from the status quo in Presidential elections (because the biggest states by population, and therefore the most under-weighted states, are more blue or swing to begin than red).

Ah, I see. Even then, it's not clear to me that it is a strictly better system at all -- just a different one. It could even be worse. There are lots of ways this might just benefit Republicans. It all goes again to the weird, kinda arbitrary way states filter the national result.

Does proportional distribution actually have any less of a barrier? I kind of treat these as all pretty far-fetched scenarios (which leaves me free to muse about what would be ideal )... Because you'd need all states to do the exact same thing. It doesn't work if California chooses to do this and Texas says, yeah, no thanks. We'll take your split up electoral votes and keep ours; enjoy your losses. The dynamics and changing strategic calculations are all so convoluted. I don't see a way to do this without some way of having not even 3/4th, but 100% of states agreeing to implement the same change at the same time.

Right, it's not subject to gerrymandering in the sense that they can't be changed. They're still somewhat arbitrary, somewhat not borders that happen to introduce certain, inscrutable effects that can moderate or reverse the result of a sizable popular vote margin. We happen to have a lot of pretty red states and some of the big blue states are also really large and include their fair share of reddish areas. But we function as a single country and not as merely a union of states, so it seems valuable to have some form of nationally elected representation not subject to the filtering of fixed state lines. The White House is out there setting foreign policy, national participation in treaties such as the Paris Climate deal and the TPP, etc. WH priorities have enormous national impact. The closest the EC is going to come to being dismantled is more states signing on to commit their electoral votes to the winner of the popular vote. I really think the solution that gets at the heart of the problem is best. What we want is the popular vote to decide things, so make the popular vote decide things. (And RD, you're correct also that the vote is influenced by the rules, and so are the campaigns. Nonetheless, the issue there is that we observe a case of a 3M popular vote margin being turned into an electoral deficit. What are we solving there? Maybe it's better than the status quo, but why not just go all the way? As much trouble as any change is going to be.)

^An issue with that is states are gerrymandered units to begin with. Clinton won by 3M votes in 2016, and if every state proportionally allocated its electoral votes she still would have come in behind Trump: https://www.270towin.com/alternative-electoral-college-allocation-methods/?year=2016 There's something odd about a system where this can happen. Straightforward, up-and-down popular vote. It doesn't need to be complicated.

If we aren't tired of it by now, in 2018, we will never be tired of it. If it's up to favorable maps and pre-existing partisan lines, we're in bad shape as a country. This is a time to rise up, cross lines, and vote to change the landscape of our government. That's what democracy is! That's what elections are for.

I really think we should just have a popular vote determine the Presidency. The federal government has become so strong -- yes, we have elements of federalism but we're much more than a band of independent states. There's considerable latitude given to local governance and different states can pursue very different agendas. But the office of the executive has for a long time set the tone for national-level politics. There currently exists no other means for the will of the people of America as a whole to be expressed. Why not through the Presidency? It would be the best check we have against the state-controlled gerrymandering of the House. And it would reflect the reality of what our Presidential campaigns are.

So, I do appreciate having policy goals that don't align with the mainstream. However to me it seems like the number one goal is "get a third party federal funding", against which the differences between the parties on, let's say, the environment, or immigration, or healthcare and social spending, reduce to insignificance. Of course there is a way to vote for a party and change. Parties are dynamic; they are constantly changing. They're responding to internal activism; for example, the kind which led to the shutdown over DACA. I must disagree with "my state is voting Democrat anyway". We're all part of the national polity, and the dampened enthusiasm was global. This was the atmosphere in which every minute non-scandal was blown out of proportion, in which the "reasonable" position for nonpartisans felt like acknowledging that both candidates were quite awful, and so on. It's not only one's vote that matters, but one's advocacy. This matters a great deal. Look, if we're going to sit here and wait for perfection, we'll never get it. If we will only support ideal candidates and not flawed ones against terrible candidates, then we'll continue to risk this unfortunate reality of ours where the terrible ones are in power...but at least we can complain about all the ways the opposition is still not ideal. There are fights we are now faced with, by nobody's choosing really, and to win them requires organization. --- To the rest: OK, the EC miiiiiight go. And maybe that's good! But the parliamentary system (which I think would be necessary to decentralize parties) is not in the offing, at least not without a Constitutional Convention. In any case, I have two arguments here: any alternative is going to have its own flaws and trade-offs. So it's not a top issue for me. But even if it were, there's a clear difference in the long term. When we get mindless, self-serving autocrats in power, they will undermine all the democratic tools we have. The Republicans want to curb minority enfranchisement, shut down activism, and Trump wants to convince his fawning fans that only the Supreme Leader speaks truth against a sea of Fake News. Reverence for the police and the military is the only thing this government will promote. Authoritarians will break democracy to concentrate power in their own hands, and in the hands of the already powerful. You talk about systemic changes in our economy, for example. On the one hand, mainstream Democratic Party platforms aren't quite socialism, and on the other, the Trump-tilted NLRB is crushing unions and discouraging the formation of new ones. Under Trump's priorities we will accelerate towards a world where systemic change of this kind is not only unimaginable, but not possible -- and, perhaps even portrayed as radical, extremist, and unpatriotic. Progress is designed to happen very slowly in the American system, which is simultaneously a flaw and a benefit. To the extent that this mold might be broken, though, it will be autocrats laying waste to all our democratic foundations and causing long-term, irreversible damage.

I think the issue here is just that it's RSo, RFr, TFr, plus the program/offensive philosophy change. Something is going to give here. Frost is therefore going to continue to bring in more QBs, and soon.

The case for 'exponentially': the increase is larger and larger the more threats there are on the field, rather than a constant scale factor. Three threats is better than two threats by more than two threats is better than one threat.

Wow. Good reporting here.

I know, it wasn't as bad as it sounds. Still...like, all the arguments for Frost are that he might actually be a real star in CFB, right? That we should have higher ambitions and standards? C'mon. Let's not shy away from optimism. And I'm not actually arguing for holding him to it, because I don't believe in caring that much about winning. But you have to think there's a possibility that he is going to take the B1G by storm, and soon. I've moderated my Frost excitement for a long time but goodness, he actually went 13-0 last year at UCF. Guy is not messing around.

I don't know. I think it's doable. In 2016 all I saw was how unfavorable the map was in the Senate, and as for the House, well, the gap was so large. But Democrats are running so well right now. Unfavorable is not impossible, and I feel like right now the target is actually to win. There's a sense that it is possible, and Trump is so bad that opposing him should be bipartisan enough. At the very least, I think we have to try. Make a major, major push. Want to deliver a statement? There is no better way than rising up, going to the ballots, and delivering a stunning defeat to Republicans in 2018. Further, there are serious consequences if we fail to do this, because we already know how Trump will behave, and how a Republican majority will behave under him. If we fail, let's at least get close and build momentum for 2020.

From Sarah Zhang in The Atlantic: https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2018/02/gun-violence-public-health/553430/ Before he died, Dickey himself co-authored an op-ed arguing for more gun violence research -- with Mark Rosenberg, the CDC official who fought his original rider in the mid-90s. Here it is, from 2012, in WaPo: https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/we-wont-know-the-cause-of-gun-violence-until-we-look-for-it/2012/07/27/gJQAPfenEX_story.html?utm_term=.887cf9e976e3 Pretty sure we (as in, Democrats in Congress) have tried this before and it's failed because of the sheer political costs of going against the NRA. Most recently it was in 2015. Republicans are staunch and even red state Democrats feel the pressure to be "moderate". We're not going to get anywhere with accommodation. Take the fight right to the NRA. A 100% NRA rating should be a badge of shame.

@RedDenver, I hate when that happens! Look forward to it. I suspect we agree on some of the points where we just wish the whole thing worked differently. -- In other news: hecks yeah, turn Texas blue!

The venn diagram of those calling for significant patience for Frost and those who said Riley had enough talent that he needed to win a B1G by year 3 is a circle. It's fine, I'm all about patience. I like Frost and we may as well keep him forever. But he turned around a 0-12 team. The cupboard isn't bare here. The team is ready for new leadership. If he's everything we're hoping he is, then he's going to waste little time righting the ship. If he isn't that, well, that's fine, too -- so long as he's running a clean program and repping well.

Offer more women's sports! Or maybe don't expand CFB rosters, which are already extremely large.

I posted before I saw yours and it's exactly what I wanted to say. He should have been impeached long, long, long ago. Trump will fire FBI directors or intimate that he will fire FBI directors (or other high-ranking officials) until they get the hint: fall more in line and don't do things that will catch his ire. When everyone in power takes a pro-Trump but arguably still valid perspective, it adds up, and everyone individually gets to still think they're in the clear. The way to prevent autocrats from capturing our institutions is to not elect them in the first place. Even the GOP is an institution and it's been captured almost totally now. I hope Congress flips completely in 2018, and then that Trump is forced out of office in disgrace.

I mean, I think there is something to be said about a well-armed citizenry being much, much harder to pacify than an unarmed one, and you can point to our costly occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan as examples. There are guns everywhere, and when the Iraqi guard was disbanded... But on balance the fact that guns are everywhere is just a huge public health hazard. Mass shootings are just a slice of the casualties and the incidences of gun violence which we choose to tolerate by not confronting this. And there are still state-level national guards. I can kind of see the "don't disarm the entire populace" argument, but as you all have mentioned, it's a pretty different day and age now.

Trump will do all of those things anyway. Why? Because he is an authoritarian who believes the Justice Dept and the FBI are instruments at his disposal, to be used at his pleasure and only at his pleasure. This is, needless to say, horrifying. He will succeed in bringing them to heel if he tries. Are those people so different from Romney, Mitt? At the rate we are going, Paul Ryan and Congress is not going to step up to block Trump from doing so.

Well, you know, that's just the "price of freedom" (Bill O'Reilly, 2017, about the Las Vegas shootings). Freedom.

Thread that offers an important reminder of what it means when people like Trump talk about "we need to [do something] about mental health." All their impulses are authoritarian. Arm teachers. "Offensive capability" needed in schools. Catch and lock up the mentally ill. So disgustingly un-American it's hard to believe.

(oops, meant for the gun thread)

Yes, agreed.

Right, so I think my perspective is just that I'm skeptical of all of these control measures. We can counter by education, but I don't know how effectively we can ever clamp down. Some of it seems necessary but the answer shouldn't be to clamp down more and more. We've always had to deal with misinformation, though maybe not at this scale. Learning how to navigate the social media world in the face of this reality is another thing we'll have to do.