npts2020

One of the problems in the US is that there are 50+ systems for voting (every state and territory controls its own elections and some states even allow precincts to make up their own rules). I live in Pennsylvania and a recount wouldn't have helped anything in 2000 because there was no paper ballot, just the voting machine which presumably would give the same result every time. The Green Party sued the state over the issue and actually won so now there are paper ballots that are counted by machine, including mail-in ballots. Pa. is one of something like 7 states to not allow any processing of mail-in ballots before polls open on Election Day which can sometimes lead to substantial delays in calling the outcomes of close votes.

Depends on how you write and approach things. Look at science, for example, there is more written than any current human could ever hope to absorb but I don't see by what criteria you could ever call science "static" or unable to "evolve".

Me either but I watch C-Span almost every day and the amount of ignorance and hatred (pretty astounding IMO) on display by callers is not encouraging when one would think these are people who actually bother to follow Congress.

That was "The Prisoner" in the US, great show with a lot of social commentary. The Lotus he drove was pretty nice, too, if you like cars.

Is this guy the best guitarist ever?

If you can think of any way of making the above statement in bold any clearer, I am all for that clarification, so help me out. Apparently, the "/" means something other than the and-or I always thought it meant. I don't know if there is a realistic solution to give advice about. It all comes down to education and access to factual information. Maybe make education more like entertainment? I don't expect that. This is why there might not be a realistic solution. The rest exactly describes a sector of the lazy/inept people to which I am referring. Everyone on Earth is given 164 hours every week and the struggle to "succeed" is real but I have noticed little difference in the political awareness between friends who work all the time and those who seemingly don't work at all. If anything, the busier ones seem to have better knowledge of the candidates and issues so lack of time probably isn't the reason. IMO it has more to do with interests and seemingly few people are interested in politics until they can see it directly affects them. The problem is, voting is politics and when you do it without bothering to make yourself informed, you are entering an auto race without first having learned to drive. I wholeheartedly agree that process of educating ones self is not easy or necessarily exciting but it is something that every voter needs to do. I am not claiming that all or even a majority of voters fit into the lazy/inept category I mention but will assert it is a large enough plurality to have significant effects on elections. Agreed, except I am pretty sure I stated that the lazy/inept was a generalization and why. I assure you that I am not wealthy and wasn't aware that there was an ongoing narrative from the upper class about people being lazy/inept about educating themselves for voting. If you are talking about something other than that, you are bringing up subjects I have never mentioned in this thread.

I am the one who claimed those voters are too lazy/inept to educate themselves about the issues (and candidates) prior to voting and have not seen anything written here to change my mind. My interest is mostly academic but also practical as I have advised a couple different local campaigns about voter registration, ballot access etc. The topic of most interest for me is why the above seems to be true and if there is any practical way to change things to have a better informed electorate. If I have "hammered down" on anyone, I apologize, but I will push back against mischaracterization of what I have written.

Call it whatever you like but unlike your meme I never claimed it had anything to do with being smarter or less smart than anyone. Do you think that someday you can debate without twisting my words or claiming I wrote or inferred things never written explicitly? Here I had thought the discussion was about voters being lazy/inept about finding out about the issues the are voting on and had nothing to do with work habits or social grace...

Believe whatever you like but I have not seen a single shred of evidence that contradicts anything I have written, whereas I have explained why I view a plurality of the electorate as being inept/lazy.

When the highest rated demographic in the study has substantially less than a 50-50 chance of knowing about common news stories, I would find it highly surprising if those same people were any better informed about relevant issues.

Ok, besides my personal experience, check this study out. from the article "The study found the most conversant voters tend to fall into the 50-70 age group, with wealthy, educated white men over the age of 47 being the best informed. The least-informed voters were young, low-income minority women. The average minority female voter age 47 or less with a below-median income had a 30% probability of knowing a typical news story. By contrast, the average white male voter age 48 or older with an above-median income had a 44% probability of knowing the same story."

I am not sure where one would go to get such "facts". What I do know is that almost nobody I talk with knows much factually correct about any of the topics under discussion by the candidates. Don't think I claimed this was applicable only to Trump voters... See above where the generalization comes from.

Maybe but I haven't noticed much empathy on this forum for Trump supporters either. I have not claimed to be more deserving than anyone of anything. What I would claim is to be better informed about most of the current political issues than the average person.

True, and they matter to me but it seems pretty obvious to me that the people here are a minority of those bothering to cast ballots in this most recent election.

I don't believe I have ever made any statements about "ALL people", especially in relation to how they think. The statement about being lazy/inept was a generalization (If you don't know, generalizations are necessary when making sociological statements about large groups of people) made to explain the apparent contradiction between what we all seem to agree being logical action and the actual action of voters in the recent electoral competition.

Allow me to put the words in context of the ongoing discussion, then.

Facts don't matter when people are too lazy/inept to distinguish fact from fiction or don't really care about them. So you don't think the well over 40 years of being an elected official prior to being President should have any bearing on how I might predict him to act in the future? Protections for unions began being eroded from the beginning of any such protections and took a quantum leap during the Reagan administration, beginning with the firing of all of the air traffic controllers. The Intercept/Common Dreams talks about PATCO in relation to several of the strikes happening near the beginning of the Biden Administration here. Can you find me a single instance prior to running for re-election to President where Mr Biden has supported a striking union? I think we will have to just disagree about how much Biden (and Democratic leadership) support unions. I say it is mostly lip service for votes when the actions (NAFTA, the Biden Administration not allowing rail workers to strike etc) have frequently run directly counter to the interests of the unions they expect to support them. This isn't just my opinion but that of the vast majority of the pro-union people I talk with who have any knowledge whatsoever about the subject. Here is an article more friendly to your point of view that gives Biden an A- on support of unions in relation to Presidents since FDR but it notes that the record generally since the 1940's has mostly been pretty abysmal. (It also mentions the rail strike I cited above)

That seems like it would be logical but what in this election have you noticed to be logical? Personally, I would choose a third party but Americans don't realize there are third parties any more than they can tell you what the real record of any party or candidate is. If you remember the "Jay Walking" segments Leno used to do on the Tonight Show or Jordan Klepper's "Fingering the Pulse" on the Daily Show, the idiocy being made fun of is all too commonplace. It's kind of like a person drowning 50 meters offshore and a would-be rescuer having two ropes, one 20 meters long and another 10 meters long. Which rope do they use? Or should they spend time looking for a rope actually adequate for the task? Joe Biden has only been President for less than 4 years of an almost 50 year political career. If you like I can compile a list of some Senators and Representatives who have done so. The fact that he is the first President to do so (and only after being in the middle of a close election campaign) indicates (to me, anyway) just how strongly Democrats in leadership support unions... I can find articles chronicling how great Donald Trump is, too. Can you give me an example or two in your opinion of how Biden has supported unions?

He is talking about current Democratic Party leadership. What have Democrats done to promote unions? AFAIK the auto workers strike during the most recent election was the first time Joe Biden ever showed up on a picket line. In addition, he supported NAFTA (even though people like Ross Perot described exactly what would happen) and the failed Trans Pacific Partnership. I am only using Biden as an example because his record is far from unique amongst Democrats. Then you have the mass media, who constantly tells voters there is only 2 choices for President regardless of their qualifications or policy positions so where are voters going when they feel like one party hasn't been helping them?

And living in Pennsylvania, I saw more tv ads telling me Harris is going to raise my taxes. Why people believe one source over another seems to have more to do with repetition than it does substantiation. Digging into matters deep enough to separate reality from projection takes actual time and energy, something a large percentage of the voting population appears unwilling/unable to do. One example (of many I could cite), is that none of the Trump supporters I talk with about "energy independence" realize the US is producing more oil than any country in the history of the planet or that we are one of the biggest exporters of oil (#4 actually) in the world (OTOH only China imports more oil than the US but the US is still a net exporter). Also, few of them seem to give any weight to the argument that we need to stop using fossil fuels ASAP (for reasons anyone frequenting this forum already know about; climate change, finite supply, environmentally destructive to obtain, etc) rather than increasing the use of them. That brings me to the denizens of this forum, some of the most intelligent and grounded individuals I get to interact with, who don't seem to understand that we are not a majority (maybe not even a plurality) of Americans. There is a reason why a great (award winning) series like "Cosmos" never reaches 2,000,000 viewers but "American Idle" can get over 38,000,000 viewers on a good night. I would bet the majority of people here reading this would rather spend their time watching the former than the latter but that is just the impression I get from the short 15 years of being a member here. In general, I think we would rather talk about the state of the world or the latest scientific discovery than who is dating who or yesterday's football game. That's why we bother participating in this forum instead of spending the time watching the latest viral Tik-Tok video. Unfortunately, when I leave my closest circle of friends or this forum, unless I specifically bring up a topic, the conversations seem to be mere politeness and rarely increase my understanding of the world around me and I would expect (but could be wrong) this to be commonplace among not only our members but all people. If true, it means most of the information considered by many (if not most) individual to be "factual" comes from mass media, especially tv. Because of the problems with mass media, enumerated (not pushing for real answers, unequal treatment of candidates, etc) by others in this thread, is why I thought Trump would win (even though I still thought he would lose the popular vote). Ms. Harris sealed the deal when a dissatisfied electorate is told that she wouldn't have done anything different from the actions that caused (in the minds of many of those voters, anyway) that dissatisfaction.

Printing money only increases inflation if the money supply grows faster than the pool of goods and services.

Caucuses are actual party meetings of party members to choose a candidate and articulate a platform rather than just voting at a polling place. Until about 50 years ago, caucuses were how virtually every state picked their preferred candidate and even now some states still use it. https://www.worldatlas.com/articles/what-states-have-caucuses.html US elections are notoriously complicated because every state and territory has its own rules about running them.

Evolution only describes a process of change. Why do you think it has/should have any goal or aim? What is the goal or aim of fusion and fission? Or plate tectonics and glaciation? Or thermodynamics and physics? Or any other physical event(s) and explanation(s) thereof.

Most of the Amish I know fit into this category

Because the evidence has shown that rape isn't wrong. What do you suppose the likelihood is of anyone ever coming up with such evidence, however? Sometimes? When in the past several centuries has any religion been at the forefront of innovation of any kind? Not sure what scienceism is.