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Let's make America smart again

LSSBB said:
Yes, the cynical way could be to blame the outside world for your cynicism.

Attitude is mutable.

Pendulums swing. Setbacks with the world could be a symbol of defeat, or an opportunity to identify the weaknesses in your own position and address them. And they can be an opportunity to identify your strengths, and find a way to leverage them.

Even the pendulum itself should be analyzed at this time. Such a focus in American political debate, on one party or the other. It is an artificial binary construct, and itself a failure in collective critical thinking. The Foucalt's Pendulum I witnessed swings not to and fro, but in arcs within a circle. There are multiple paths, multiple choices.
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I have to admit, I have no idea what you're talking about here. Could you rephrase that?
 
Argumemnon said:
Well I think he got fewer votes than Romney did
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Not according to the numbers I've seen. Wikipedia lists Romney at 60,933,504 votes, and Trump at 61,201,031. So Trump did get about 0.4% more votes than Romney.

so he didn't really energise the voters or anything.
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True enough. I haven't crunched the numbers, but I suspect that if one takes into account population growth this might be a small decrease in votes as a percentage of eligible voters. But the raw number of votes is up a little bit over Romney.

It's just that Clinton energised them even less.
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Obama 2012: 65,915,795
Clinton 2016: 62,523,126

So a decrees of more than 5% in absolute terms, and a little more than that in relative terms if population increase is accounted for. So yeah, the drop in Democratic support was much more significant than the change (whichever way you want to measure it) in Republican support.
 
Ziggurat said:
A claim was made. I pointed out that the evidence used to support this claim was fundamentally flawed. Isn't critical examination of evidence the hallmark of skepticism? But rather than addressing the merits of that evidence or my criticism of it, you now resort to straw men and an ad hominem based on my presumed motives. That's basically the antithesis of skepticism.
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Of course your views are the antithesis of skepticism as your views on Hillary Clinton were not arrived at through reason nor evidence.
 
1. I'm skeptical of any attempt to define "smarter" as "agrees with me more."
2. Yeah I am so over the "cynicism" as "Lookit at me I'm too cool for school smarter than you" routine. Cynicism is childish and counter productive and has little place in a world that is getting better in almost every way.
 
JoeBentley said:
1. I'm skeptical of any attempt to define "smarter" as "agrees with me more."
2. Yeah I am so over the "cynicism" as "Lookit at me I'm too cool for school smarter than you" routine. Cynicism is childish and counter productive and has little place in a world that is getting better in almost every way.
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I usually don't like cynicism, but I have to admit that it's hard to have a positive outlook as time goes on. The world inches forward, of course, but people keep dissapointing about as much as they pleasantly surprise.
 
JoeBentley said:
1. I'm skeptical of any attempt to define "smarter" as "agrees with me more."
2. Yeah I am so over the "cynicism" as "Lookit at me I'm too cool for school smarter than you" routine. Cynicism is childish and counter productive and has little place in a world that is getting better in almost every way.
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It is those things to which it is not getting better which need to be seriously addressed, and because they are not, never historical have been and don't appear to on any agenda to be seriously looked into and made better any time soon, cynicism is warranted as a necessary reaction to that state of things.

America has never been "Smart" except maybe in Her own estimate. If she was really smart, she would seriously look into her own affairs regarding all those things that are not getting any better and figure out a way in which to change that.

Wanting to start again on the Moon or Mars etc is simply impractical and thus not very smart at all.
 
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Darat said:
Of course your views are the antithesis of skepticism as your views on Hillary Clinton were not arrived at through reason nor evidence.
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I doubt you actually know my views on Hillary Clinton. But that doesn't even matter, because you have made an even more fundamental error of logic here. My views on Hillary Clinton are irrelevant, since I have not made any claims about her here. My argument was a narrow one, about the merits (or more accurately the lack thereof) of one specific piece of evidence. You have continually failed to address that argument in any way, shape, or form, but instead resort consistently to ad hominems. Why such hostility?
 
The Big Dog said:
Flatly wrong.
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Ziggurat said:
I doubt you actually know my views on Hillary Clinton. But that doesn't even matter, because you have made an even more fundamental error of logic here. My views on Hillary Clinton are irrelevant, since I have not made any claims about her here. My argument was a narrow one, about the merits (or more accurately the lack thereof) of one specific piece of evidence. You have continually failed to address that argument in any way, shape, or form, but instead resort consistently to ad hominems. Why such hostility?
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You see, just because The Big Dog and Ziggurat have made a career of cheering every single conservative and denigrating every single progressive they mention, that gives no one any idea what their opinion of Clinton (or any other progressive) actually is. Further, a long history of ignoring conservative errors while screaming about progressive errors is not at all meant to imply that conservative errors are acceptable. Gosh, what would give anyone the idea that such a long and consistent track record of only promoting a conservative viewpoint implies a conservative ideology on behalf of the promoter?


Oh, and if anyone buys that, would you be interested in the Brooklyn Bridge? Oceanfront property in Arizona?
 
wareyin said:
You see, just because The Big Dog and Ziggurat have made a career of cheering every single conservative and denigrating every single progressive they mention, that gives no one any idea what their opinion of Clinton (or any other progressive) actually is. Further, a long history of ignoring conservative errors while screaming about progressive errors is not at all meant to imply that conservative errors are acceptable. Gosh, what would give anyone the idea that such a long and consistent track record of only promoting a conservative viewpoint implies a conservative ideology on behalf of the promoter?

Oh, and if anyone buys that, would you be interested in the Brooklyn Bridge? Oceanfront property in Arizona?
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Completely substance free ad hominem?

Just like zig called it.

Fantastic
 
psionl0 said:
That got my attention!

However, when I click on the link I see the results as Trump-47% and Clinton-48%. So Hillary got slightly LESS than half the votes.
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Yes I see I discounted third party voters, my bad. It is all about even Steven though, isn't it? A statistical wash?
 
psionl0 said:
So Hillary got slightly LESS than half the votes.
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Depends on what you mean by 'the' votes. If you include all the votes that could have been cast but weren't, nobody got anywhere near half.

The truth is, more people didn't vote for either candidate than did, by a wide margin. Therefore according to democratic principles neither Trump nor Hillary deserve to be president.
 
The Big Dog said:
Lol!
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Let me try to put it in a way that you can understand. Let's say one of your favorite alt-right news sources, say Bizpac Review, claims that despite their skewed and misleading content, you don't know their feelings regarding Clinton. Now, first of all, because of their skewed and misleading content, you pretty much do know their feelings. Second, and more important, their feelings don't matter as much as their actual skewed and misleading content, which is simply not accurate.
 
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