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PoliGAF 2015 |OT2| Pls print

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E

eBay Huckster

Member
Teggy said:
I get the primary polls, but this is a general election poll. Why are Democrats or independents picking Carson over Hillary, and by a large margin? She's beating Trump at least.
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they aren't - they're just being undersampled to nearly absurd levels due to all the ~*excitement*~ being on the R side
 
M

Makai

Member
brainchild said:
This will be my last response to this because I've made it clear that the testing is not as important as the classes. I'm fine with not having the tests.

If your question is about how to prevent misinformation, I would say that while it's certainly possible for misinformation to occur, the claims would be so easy to invalidate that opening the tests/classes up to public scrutiny and validation would completely mitigate this issue. A fact-checking committee could be elected by the people and keep the claims in check. Sure the committee could be bias, but they'd be held accountable by their sources, and if the general populace disagrees with the committee's practices, they could always elect a new committee.
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Or better yet, they just elect a new government directly. If you're gonna let everyone vote, just cut out the middle man.
 
P

pigeon

Banned
brainchild said:
If a representative democracy serves as a means to take the place of a direct democracy due to the size of the population, then the ultimate goal remains the same between the two: the people decide on policy and legislation. The only real difference is one of logistics.

So basically, just like voters in a direct democracy should understand the policies that they're voting for or against (as best as possible), voters in a representative democracy should understand the policies that their representatives are voting for or against (as best as possible).
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I don't really agree that a representative democracy is necessarily a substitute for a direct democracy, but let that pass for now. This is not wrong except in your use of the word "should" to mean "have a responsibility to."

You're putting the responsibility for education on the voters and suggesting direct coercion to force them to do it. That's simply undemocratic. The right thing to do is to put that responsibility on the people who want specific policies. If I want, for example, an increase in the minimum wage, it's my responsibility to educate as many people as I can as to why an increase in the minimum wage would be a good idea and how they can use their votes to try to make that policy happen. If I can't convince enough people to vote for it, then we shouldn't do it, regardless of why they won't vote for it.

This is true for both a direct and representative democracy. If you're a policy seeker, you have the power and the responsibility to educate others.
 
O

Oblivion

Fetishing muscular manly men in skintight hosery
12070989_1693613837520866_1803327903_n.jpg
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.
 
O

Oblivion

Fetishing muscular manly men in skintight hosery
icarus-daedelus said:
The link I posted was not a primary poll; it was a general election poll conducted in late 2011 that showed every front-running Republican candidate (Perry, Romney, Cain) beating Obama for re-election, and handily in the case of the former two.

I'm hardly a statistician, but I wouldn't sweat it at all at this point.
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The thing is, Carson shouldn't be leading in ANY general election polls at all. It's not like he's still a newcomer who just came onto the scene in 2013. Dude's been around for months, saying progressively more idiotic things and is well known enough to be parodied on SNL. His numbers should not in any way be this good.
 
S

shinra-bansho

Member
Given my glorious philosophy would triumph over all with an electorate educated to my satisfaction, they should really implement a global test. I have exacting standards of knowledge though so I'd probably be the only one allowed to elect myself Emperor Lord President Fuhrer of Earth
NeoXChaos said:
David Plouffe for Hillary.

https://medium.com/hillary-for-america/why-i-m-endorsing-hillary-clinton-for-president-1d15ad738c65#.y4qnnucla
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So this is basically a tacit Obama endorsement.
 
O

Oblivion

Fetishing muscular manly men in skintight hosery
icarus-daedelus said:
I tuned out for most of the last presidential election, but what you describe is not substantially different behavior from what I remember of the raging nutjobs like Cain in the last election.
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Except that I don't recall Cain leading in any polls once he became a known quantity.
 
I

ItWasMeantToBe19

Banned
Hopfrog said:
I can understand the appeal of Trump to a degree, and I can rationalize it. Carson, on the other hand, is befuddling to me. I get that he comes off as a "nice guy," and I get the evangelical thing too, but almost everything that comes out of his mouth on almost every issue is ridiculous. Some of his stances make no political sense at all - attacking Medicare? What are you doing?

But he is succeeding regardless.
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-Read through this thread: http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showthread.php?t=887204
-Recognize that the people that post these things on Facebook make up 20% or more of the GOP voting base and are just never talked about because no one wants to write stories about their aunt being distant from reality.

Now you understand.
 
I

ivysaur12

Banned
http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/j...ck-fil-a/article/2574851#.ViwL-N7i-6M.twitter

"Universities ought to have skin in the game," the former Florida governor said at a South Carolina town hall with Sen. Tim Scott and Rep. Trey Gowdy. "When a student shows up, they ought to say 'Hey, that psych major deal, that philosophy major thing, that's great, it's important to have liberal arts … but realize, you're going to be working a Chick-fil-A.'"
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#ShouldveGoneSTEM

Also going to go cry at my dream job on Monday. Fuckin' liberal arts.
 
H

Hopfrog

Member
ItWasMeantToBe19 said:
-Read through this thread: http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showthread.php?t=887204
-Recognize that the people that post these things on Facebook make up 20% or more of the GOP voting base and are just never talked about because no one wants to write stories about their aunt being distant from reality.

Now you understand.
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Yeah, I have peaked at that thread a couple of times, and I unfortunately see some of it showing up on my own feed from time to time. I know it is out there. Carson still seems like such an odd figure to rally behind.
 
H

HylianTom

Banned
Plouffe's endorsement doesn't shock me in the least; I actually was under the impression that he'd made it official earlier, given how the tone and content of his twitter feed is so high on Hillary.

Seriously.. if there's a scale from Diablosing to Aaroning, he's sitting right next to Aaron, shaking hands and laughing about The Math™. He seems metaphysically certain of Hillary's victory next year (*excepting for external black swan events, of course).

--

And Bill coming back as First Gentleman? Thanksgiving 2016 might be the best one in years. My Dad's four Rush Limbaugh-listening brothers all tried their damndest to turn me against Bill in the 90s.

--

Turnout in Lafayette? Around 25%. That's Angelle's stronghold. Ouch.
 
I

ItWasMeantToBe19

Banned
Hopfrog said:
Yeah, I have peaked at that thread a couple of times, and I unfortunately see some of it showing up on my own feed from time to time. I know it is out there. Carson still seems like such an odd figure to rally behind.
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Carson is the only politician that gets his information from paranoid Facebook memes, he's much closer to these people than any other politician.
 
I

ItWasMeantToBe19

Banned
Plinko said:
He just called Carson "super low-energy."
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He also is questioning the Seventh Day Adventist church as a whole to attack Carson. This is a very good attack strategy if Trump can get it right (since I think most hard-right religious types would think that church is very strange), but he's bad at framing somewhat complex issues so I don't know if it will work. Regardless, this is going to be an even nastier moment in this nomination process.
 
B

brainchild

Banned
Brawndo Addict said:
I know that's why I literally said that already in the post you quoted:





What are you talking about? Representatives serve on behalf of citizens by virtue of being elected by them. If voters don't like their representatives they can vote them out at the next election. We don't kick out congressmen preemptively or say their election is invalid because they changed their mind about an issue, decision, vote, etc after being elected, nor do we say that such actions are undemocratic and should be made illegal.

If our democratic system involved voters choosing between different issue statements or policy guidelines and then a representative was chosen by lottery to act on behalf of that list then maybe you would have a point. But that's now how any of this works. I don't choose a representative who must do what I want, I choose a representative who best reflects what I want. The only representative who can perfectly represent my individual interests is myself and since I'm not running I have to choose someone else who will be an imperfect representative of my desires.

A variety of individuals voluntarily offer themselves up to represent a larger group of citizens. Citizens then vote for the representative they prefer. Their vote is not accompanied by an extensive list of terms and conditions detailing all the positions of the representative that they agree or disagree with, or what their value system is. All the representative knows is how many votes they got and what they told voters about themselves. They don't get a line-by-line breakdown of how many people support each individual policy position they hold.

Even if I conceded that representatives should be strictly regulated in such a way as to always follow the "will of the people", there's no way to understand or know what that actually means because it's just an abstract phrase. What does will of the people mean when all elections tell us is who got the most votes? What is the will of the people when a candidate only wins by one vote, i.e., 51 to 49? What about pluralities where votes are evenly spread among representatives of differing political philosophies? Are they supposed to represent the unstated interests of everyone or just the people who voted for them? What if the people who voted for them still disagree with their policy positions and just voted for them because they disagreed with the other candidates even more? Is it not simpler and truer that the will of the people as it relates to their vote is merely an expression of their willingness to be represented by the candidate they voted for?



Representatives are a proxy for voter's personal interests, they are not equivalent with it. They do not determine their policy positions or political beliefs based on a survey of their district nor are they legally bound to follow such polling. They put forward a platform and voters pick and choose among them to find the one they like best, not because it represents their interests perfectly, but because they prefer it to the alternatives.

A candidate may support marijuana legalization even though polling shows a majority of his district opposes it. He may win the election (for unrelated reasons) by a wide margin against an opponent who was against legalization. What is the will of the people in this situation and how should it impact/determine what choices the representative can make on marijuana legalization? If the polling is all that matters then it is not voting that is irrelevant it is representation. Why bother having a human in office if we're going to say they have to mechanically follow whatever receives a majority of support in the polls?



The idea that we should get to tell certain people that their vote isn't proper or informed enough is elitist and undemocratic, especially when we're just talking about hypotheticals and not any actual information or evidence. What constitutes a significant portion of 'improper or uninformed' votes anyway? One percent, three percent, five percent? How do we determine the difference between informed votes and uninformed votes? What about people who freely choose not to go out of their way to get more information or knowledge? Do we get to bar their vote because they don't know what's good for them?

This is the logical chain that leads to democracy being irrelevant because the priority isn't about self-determination it's about elites telling people what they would want if only they knew better. Why even bother trying to inform them at that point if we're arguing the elite already know what the will of the people is in the first place? Just let the elites benevolently make the decisions for us since it's more efficient and accurate. And if they don't know then why are we presuming that too many people are voting 'wrong' in the first place?



Yeah, so stop acting like you know what that reason is or that it's even a problem. Lots of people don't vote and lots of people vote. What gives you the right to speak for the millions of voters as to what their intentions and motivations are and whether they have sufficient knowledge and objectivity to be trusted to make informed decisions? Maybe they're as informed as they need to be and it just so happens they still disagree with you about whether they're intelligent enough to know what's good for them. You don't improve democracy top down through voting restrictions. You improve it bottom up by making society better.



Are you sure you don't want to be arguing for a technocracy? Cause it seems like that would be a better fit given what you're talking about. Why not cut out the middle man of voters and let scientific experts run the show since they're apparently the only ones capable of being able to determine who should be able to vote in the first place.
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What you've demonstrated here is that representative democracy isn't perfect. It does not perfectly represent the will of the people, but that doesn't mean that it wasn't designed to get close to the idea of the people deciding on the policies of their country through the use of representatives. After all, a direct democracy demonstrates the will of the people (well, the majority of them) pretty well, and a representative democracy is just an indirect form of that.

At any rate, the problem here is that we're arguing two sides of the same coin of Political Representation: Delegate Representative vs. Trustee Representative.

Here's an excerpt about the paradox from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy said:
Historically, the theoretical literature on political representation has focused on whether representatives should act as delegates or as trustees. Representatives who are delegates simply follow the expressed preferences of their constituents. James Madison (1787–8) is one of the leading historical figures who articulated a delegate conception of representation. Trustees are representatives who follow their own understanding of the best action to pursue. Edmund Burke (1790) is famous for arguing that

Parliament is not a congress of ambassadors from different and hostile interests, which interest each must maintain, as an agent and advocate, against other agents and advocates; but Parliament is a deliberative assembly of one nation, with one interest, that of the whole… You choose a member, indeed; but when you have chosen him he is not a member of Bristol, but he is a member of Parliament (115).

Both the delegate and the trustee conception of political representation place competing and contradictory demands on the behavior of representatives. Delegate conceptions of representation require representatives to follow their constituent's preferences, while trustee conceptions require representatives to follow their own judgment about the proper course of action. Any adequate theory of representation must grapple with these contradictory demands.
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There's no clear cut definition of political representation, and there are whole theories detailing the many facets of it, so I suppose it shouldn't really be a surprise that there's disagreement on what it means to be a representative.

All the more reason to put the idea of a mandatory class up to a vote, I suppose.

And no, I don't want a technocracy because I still support democracy.


Makai said:
Or better yet, they just elect a new government directly. If you're gonna let everyone vote, just cut out the middle man.
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Nah, I believe the mandatory classes would end up being a net positive in keeping more people politically engaged and without it we'd just have what we have now, which is unsatisfactory, IMO.

pigeon said:
I don't really agree that a representative democracy is necessarily a substitute for a direct democracy, but let that pass for now. This is not wrong except in your use of the word "should" to mean "have a responsibility to."

You're putting the responsibility for education on the voters and suggesting direct coercion to force them to do it. That's simply undemocratic. The right thing to do is to put that responsibility on the people who want specific policies. If I want, for example, an increase in the minimum wage, it's my responsibility to educate as many people as I can as to why an increase in the minimum wage would be a good idea and how they can use their votes to try to make that policy happen. If I can't convince enough people to vote for it, then we shouldn't do it, regardless of why they won't vote for it.

This is true for both a direct and representative democracy. If you're a policy seeker, you have the power and the responsibility to educate others.
Click to expand...

I've always been under the impression that representative democracy was a substitute for direct democracy and that the only reason that we don't have direct democracy is because of logistics.

I've even tried to find evidence contrary to this, but every single encyclopedia that I've checked regarding the history of representative democracy says roughly the same thing: it was born out of a necessity to solve the logistical problem of direct democracy. Here's an example

Lalor's Encyclopedia said:
—II. The Principle and the Institutions of Representative Democracy.

Democracy always means self-government of the people; and by the people it means the people as an aggregation, i.e., the majority of free and equal citizens as having part in the state. "The majority stands for the whole." (Herodotus, iv., 80.) This pure and direct democracy, however, is possible only in the case of a small nation which is not obliged to worry over the wants of the day, and has leisure to meet frequently for political deliberation. But as modern states almost always cover a wide extent of territory, and since the great masses, even the working classes, have acquired personal freedom and civil rights, but have neither the leisure nor the culture to govern the state, this form is not possible; and the nobler form of representative democracy has taken its place as the modern form of democracy.
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Anyway, I've said before that I'd settle for putting the classes up to a vote, so if the people don't want it, so be it (as unfortunate as I'd think that would be).
 
A

Averon

Member
ItWasMeantToBe19 said:
He also is questioning the Seventh Day Adventist church as a whole to attack Carson. This is a very good attack strategy if Trump can get it right (since I think most hard-right religious types would think that church is very strange), but he's bad at framing somewhat complex issues so I don't know if it will work. Regardless, this is going to be an even nastier moment in this nomination process.
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Will the religious right support Trump if he goes hard after Carson? I have to imagine they have doubts about Trump's religious view.
 
M

Makai

Member
Konka said:
Haha, nah, it's a liberal art. But then again so is Math, so go figure.
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Academic areas that can be associated with the term liberal arts include:

Arts (fine arts, music, performing arts)
Languages
Linguistics
Literature
Mathematics
Natural science (biology, chemistry, physics, astronomy, earth science)
Philosophy
Psychology
Religious studies
Social science (economics, geography, political science, sociology, history)
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What the shit. What's even left? Computer Science?
 
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