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Why do they have to choose? I mean democracy transcends religion. It transcends all differences, be they of gender, sexuality, race, or religion.

Is it probable to accuse the current regime of greifing? Because it's starting to feel that way.

I really feel like it's unfair what we've been doing to Israel recently. I mean everyone else in the middle east completely hate them and want them dead. We should be helping them more, not letting the UN instigate sanctions against them.

I'll tell you. Judaism is unique in the sense that it is an ethnicity, and a religion, it can be both, but the ethnicity takes precedence over the religion. You can be born Jewish, raised Jewish, but be an Atheist and still be considered Jewish.

Zionism was founded on the realization that the Jew will always be subject to the will, and the generosity of the host-country they live in. This has been a result of over millenia old oppression, pogroms, massacres, etc. The conclusion was that the only hope that the Jews had was to have a national state and home for the Jewish people, one that will be identified as uniquely Jewish. It is the sanctuary, the dream, and the hope of millions of Jews.

To Israel, Democracy transcends faith, and thus, Israel is mostly secular. However, the IDENTITY of Israel must remain Jewish.

This is why the "Single state" solution is out of the question for Israel – because demographics would alter the identity of the country. Yet, the two state solution requires two-to-tango. Which means, that the Palestinians have a say in the matter.

I'm glad that Israel has decided to snub the UN, and the Obama administration for clearly wanting to do one last big shot at Netanyahu, which the administration has strong distaste for.

I'm glad that the Israelis have come to look the UN square in the face and defy them. I want them to defy them.

Honestly.

Fuck. The. UN. And all it's hypocrisy, all it's self-righteousness, and all it's pretentiousness.

The reality is that this is a political game played by the very same people that have historically been the greatest oppressors of the Jewish people.

So you know what. Fukkit. Build those 600 homes. Send the UN a clear message: they are powerless, meaningless, and utterly hypocritical in how t hey deal with this issue.

Obama's foreign policy legacy is going to be looked historically as disastrous, all around. He wants to get personal in this late stage of his presidency? Fine. Entertain your European progressives all you want.

Russia assures there will be retaliation as Obama prepares executive order response, including sanctions, to the election hacking.

{ Russia responded angrily in anticipation of the announcement and suggested it might retaliate against American diplomats. Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova called it a last blow by President Barack Obama to U.S.-Russia relations and added, "We are tired of lies about Russian hackers that continue to be spread in the United States from the very top."

"If Washington takes new hostile steps, it will receive an answer," Zakharova said in a statement. "This applies to any actions against Russian diplomatic missions in the United States, which will immediately backfire at U.S. diplomats in Russia."

Russian officials have denied the Obama administration's accusation that the Russian government was involved at the highest levels in trying to influence the U.S. presidential election. U.S. intelligence agencies concluded that Russia's goal was to help Trump win -- an assessment Trump has dismissed as ridiculous.

The Obama administration is expected to announce action by the White House and the State and Treasury departments in response to Russian meddling in the presidential campaign, a U.S. official said.

Additional sanctions are expected against Russian individuals or entities suspected of playing a role in Russia's alleged effort to sow discord in the U.S. election, according to the official, who did not have the authority to disclose the information and spoke on condition of anonymity. }

Russia's diplomats have been expelled, they have 72 hours to leave the country, two Russian-owned compounds in New York and Maryland will be shuttered after Friday. Also imposes sanctions on 9 entities and 2 Russian intelligence services. More to come in further announcements.

A pointless gesture, anything obama does will be undone by trump next month, all that is accomplished is making the soon to be ex president seem petulant.

It may not be so simple for Trump to "fix" by undoing.

Russia may see it as something to be addressed by not just restoring but with additional reparations as well. How Trump handles that should Russia feel that way will be telling.

That'd be a historically unprecedented request.

The expulsions were independent of the hacking charge, those are enacted at the request of the State Department, who has been alleging for years that Russia is intimidating and harassing our own diplomats in their country. So that's likely to stand regardless, I recall Trump giving very non-answer answers when asked about rolling back any non-hacking punishment given out before his inauguration, which is a stark contrast to his immediate denial that Russia intended to help him specifically.

The sanctions are our response to the "hacking". The two intelligence agencies are the GRU and FSB, and this is because some third-party investigation hired by the DNC deemed the group "Fancy Bear" responsible for its breaches, which allegedly has ties to the GRU. Obama Admin is due to release an incriminating report of evidence at some point soon, but pundits across the spectrum are considerably wary about how much it can actually prove beyond doubt. These actions are what Trump is most likely to attempt to roll back. Actions enforced by executive order can be easily dismissed by another executive order.

Kremlin press-secretary response:

{ “In our point of view such actions of the US current administration are a manifestation of an unpredictable and even aggressive foreign policy,” Peskov told the journalists.

"We regret the fact that this decision was taken by the US administration and President Obama personally," he stressed.

"As it said before, we consider this decision and these sanctions unjustified and illegal under international law," the presidential spokesman added. }

So they're essentially telling Obama and Trump as clearly as possible that they consider the former responsible for this SNAFU, and that they expect the latter to "fix" the problem. Signposting like this is probably a good thing, if they understand us well enough.

Honastly the worst thing that happened in this election was how it hijacked various political terms.
For example, no longer is "liberal" say:
"I believe that people should be free to share ideas and to be able to believe what they want/do what they want provided they arent hurting themselves or anybody else."
Now its been hijacked to be:
"We must kill white men to create diversity and we must get rid of the american flag because it offends some foreigners thus ots a hate symbol also fuck white people."
Globalism used to be:
"I believe that being able to spread ideas and communicate different ideas with various across the
world is a good thing and will not only help with solving conflicts and fighting off ignorance and hate but will also benefit humanity in the long run"
Now its:
"We must destroy all cultures. All languages. All religions. And make everybody look, talk and act the same"

lisalombs said:

Russia’s diplomats have been expelled, they have 72 hours to leave the country, two Russian-owned compounds in New York and Maryland will be shuttered after Friday. Also imposes sanctions on 9 entities and 2 Russian intelligence services.

Is it just me, or does that seem really limpwristed compared to Russia's alleged actions? Hack into our political parties, disrupt the election, help elect a President and we'll… shut down two resorts, impose some sanctions, and kick less then fifty people out of the country. That'll show you. Maybe there's some NSA stuff they're not revealing, but it comes across as being pretty weak.

Then again, Russia's not our greatest threat so maybe he wanted to go easy on them.

It's Obama, of course it'll be a weak response. The man seems incapable of competent strong response in foreign policy.

Well like Team America says, "p*****s may think they can deal with a******s their way, but the only thing that can f*** an a*****e, is a d**k. With some b***s". XD

Also, old topic, but some are still insistent that the popular vote should count more than the electoral vote because, and I quote:

"If you honestly believe it's acceptable for a man to become president despite the majority of the country voting for someone else, you should drop all Western values ASAP. Come to think of it, if you think there is such thing as "Western values", you should re-evaluate your thought processes ASAP.

Fortunately we live in an era now where women and minorities can vote, and information isn't transmitted via horseback.

Sure, we get it, "but durhrhr without the electoral college, small states won't have any representation, elections will be decided only by big states like Texas, California, and New York!" And they already are. Electoral college or not. The thing is, I'd rather the leader of my country, one that is supposed to have a government "of the people", be chosen by the people instead of just a handful of people preselected by a specific group."

How would you respond?

^okay, i heard things like:

"Well, if 4-5 states have 1/3 of the country's population, it's 100% fair to give them 1/3 of the power."

"Thanks to population in relation to congress/senate/electoral college/etc representation, a vote in one of the center states is worth like 6 times more than one of either coast".

"With the override of the winner-takes-all system, this doesn't only mean that democrats have a say after losing 40-60 in center states, but also republicans on democratic-led states, e.g. California"

And a personal one i created. Basically, one of the pro-electoral college arguments is "Imagine that there are 2 wolves and a sheep. The three shall democratically vote to see if the sheep is to be eaten". The usual answer is: "This analogy is created to present that the minority as the most virtuous faction that's always right". Well i add: "What if that puny sheep turns out to not be a sheep, but a kind of hyper-wolf that is really aggressive that only wants what's worse for everybody, including itself?". Just a counter for that one specific analogy, though.

I would tell them that nobody got the majority, and then I'd give an exasperated sigh because I'm tired of this rhetoric.

Clinton got more votes than Trump. However, Clinton did not get more votes than Trump+Johnson+Stein+Misc. So, she didn't get a majority of the vote-- she got a plurality. In fact, ~5% of the vote went to neither Clinton nor Trump.

A situation like this is what cost Jackson during his first presidential run-- he actually got the most electoral votes but he didn't get a majority, so it had to go to the House of Representatives, who chose John Q. Adams.

Now, if we strictly only had two parties, this wouldn't be a problem and they'd be right. But we had four parties running and then other independent candidates, so they're wrong. Because nobody got a majority vote, someone else would still have to decide the result in a situation where we used raw votes. Like a government body. Like the House.

Does this person realize that? With the electors, while the system isn't perfect, each state has a more proportional vote and (since it works specifically for a two-party system) there's less of a chance to get the messy situation where you get the plurality vote rather than the majority. I don't discuss the electors because in their own right, they almost certainly vote the will of their state (or are forced to).

And I don't know what this person is talking about when they say that the elections are decided by Texas, California, and New York. Those three states account for only 122 out of the 538 electoral votes.

I find it funny how a majority of people nowadays are now bitching about the electoral college now since Trump won when back in 2012 no one gave a shit when Obama won the exact same way. If we go by the logic that the popular vote decides the president, then it should've been Mitt Romney that ran the country for the last 4 years.

Just quit lying to yourselves, just say that you're only mad about this because Trump won this way. I know if it was the other way around, and the election was decided by popular vote instead of electoral vote and Trump won, you'd all still be complaining that "we can't let these idiots make stupid decisions on who should be president. We need a small group of people to decided it instead." (Which was one of the original arguments for the electoral college back during the founding of America.)

I honestly still support the electoral college no matter who is elected. When Obama won last time that way, I didn't start burning flags in the streets and saying we should abolish the electoral college. I also wouldn't have done that if Hillary won the same way either.

Also, you should realize that it wasn't clear cut that "Oh a majority of the country wanted Hillary to be president, it's not fair!" That's not the case. Both candidates were extremely unpopular. Trump because of people seeing him as sexist and racist and a symbol for the alt-right, and Hillary because she would've put people's livelihoods in danger (especially near where I live, she wasn't very well liked here) and people couldn't trust her to keep secrets safe because of the email scandal. If I remember correctly, I believe Trump got 46.1% of the vote and Hillary got 48.2%. That's not an incredibly large margin at all.

I honestly feel like that if we're to make any more progress at all in the coming years, then we all need to forget about our hatreds for a moment and see how we can make the best out of a bad situation, because for fuck's sake, it's been over a month since the election happened and people (such as the president himself) are still acting like spoiled children who didn't get their way and are now breaking expensive stuff in the living room during a temper tantrum. It's fucking ridiculous and shows me how childish a majority of the country really is.

I find it funny how a majority of people nowadays are now bitching about the electoral college now since Trump won when back in 2012 no one gave a shit when Obama won the exact same way. If we go by the logic that the popular vote decides the president, then it should’ve been Mitt Romney that ran the country for the last 4 years.

Excuse us what?

If Obama had won "the exact same way", he would have lost popular vote and won electoral college, which wasn't the case (332 to 206 EC votes, 26 states + DC to 24, 51.1% of votes to 47.2% with 54.9% turnout ).

I don't get what you're saying.

^ Uhh, what?

Every source I checked said Obama won a majority of the popular vote and the electoral vote. More than Romney. I'm on mobile so linking is a pain, but just search for, say, the major outlets election trackers for 2012, or David Wasserman's spreadsheet on it. Obama won a majority of all votes! If I'm not misunderstanding you, you should probably try to back your claims. If I am, well, my bad.

Edit: Damn, my fact checking got me ninja'd.

Probably meant the primary, I think Hillary was technically the winner in their 08 primaries but superdelegates wanted Obama or something like that. Might have been 12. Just had my wisdom teeth out so heavily medicated atm, sry if this post is gibberish and I can't tell.

e: it was 08

I don't know why we keep track of the "popular" vote anyway. The reality is, the States vote for the President, you vote for how the State should vote. It's a brilliant system to make the appeal of the President country-wide rather than regional. Furthermore it protects the interest of less populated states, that, although have a smaller population, are critical in the economy, infrastructure, and the country as a whole. For example, major trade policies in regards to raw materials and food are done on federal levels. States that have a vested interest in trading their raw materials and food want to have a voice in how that is going to be handled. If the President only was elected on a popular vote, they'd invest their election resources on major urban areas, and outright ignoring the interests of less populated states.

We are, after all, representative republic, and the state represents our interests in voting for t he President.

You can make the argument that States should have a proportional system, that's fine. But don't give me the whole let's do away with electoral college system. It's a stupid argument, that shows the clear ignorance about how this country works.

And if you truly believe that we ought to do away with the electoral college system, then act on it. Go convince people in those fly-over states that they should vote against their own interests, that they should vote to get rid of the political power they have, so you feel less butthurt about an election result. Because it's going to take 2/3rds of the States to agree to getting rid of the Electoral College for that to work. So go ahead. Go try it. Go convince them.

Secularism is a Western Value. So is the belief in a representative government. So are things like Human Rights, Impartial Trials, Equality for everyone and Egalitarianism, Feminism, Peer Review, Freedom of Information, Universal Literacy, I could go on and on, but these are ideas that were founded or refined in "The west", that being, Europe and the United States, where these ideas were developed, studied, debated, spread, and eventually embraced, and fought over, for many centuries. The reason we even have these as universal concepts is that Europe spread out itself and its cultural ideas to the rest of the world, which included these teachings.

It kinda infuriates me that a person whose entire point rests of the accomplishments of people who pushed these ideas to be "western values" in the first place is claiming there are no such things, without even giving credit to where credit is due. They probably think Egalitarianism was invented by some Middle Eastern Woman in 1954, or that Suffrage was a concept we stole from Abyssinia in 1890, or that only black people believed in everyone learning to read and white and that the illiterate white man stole their knowledge or some other BS.

It's tiresome that good things are disregarded because people on one side of a political compass can't stand the thought that they don't by default win, that their morality isn't the 100% standard norm of all people. Left wing or Right wing its goddamn obnoxious and I really hate it.

And as for the electoral college point, ask them how the election came down to Pennsylvania if only Texas, California, and New York mattered?

If they really, really, want to fix the system and make it "more representative", why not champion for it to not have a Winner Take All system? Becuase if you switch it to a popular vote, but keep the winner take all system, what exactly do you accomplish, but make the same BS you're mad about, but just with a different face. To me it seems more people are angry that we have a winner take all system, where whoever gets a state gets all the votes of the state.

So shouldn't fixing that be a higher priority then removing a part of our constitution? Because the constitution doesn't lay out that this needs to be a winner take all system. It can be changed easliy at a state level if people campaigned and made it an issue worth debating.

{ or that only black people believed in everyone learning to read and write and that the illiterate white man stole their knowledge or some other BS. }

unsure if that was the most ludicrous example you could think of, or if you already know about Yakob.

Britain edges closer to Trump as PM May delivers an 'unusually sharp rebuke' in response to Kerry's public speech specifically lambasting Isreal, which she said made her deeply uncomfortable as an ally.

Kerry followed up by pointedly thanking Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Qatar, and the UAE for their support.

Obama's foreign policy legacy: rock bottom relations with Israel, rock bottom relations with "reset" Russia, and the USA left out of the latest Syrian ceasefire negotiations as Iran and Russia take the lead :|

Putin announces he won't tit for tat the diplomatic persona non grata, Trump says he 'knew [Putin] was very smart.'

New drinking game: take a drink every time someone in the comments says Trump's committed treason (the only crime that has a strict constitutional definition) for tweeting something about a foreign leader.

LightDragonman1 said:

How would you respond?

I'd suggest taking all that moral outrage they have and redirecting it toward passing a constitutional amendment that abolishes the electoral college and elects the President by nationwide popular vote, because ranting online about how backward and racist and unfair the electoral college is will do jack shit toward actually changing it.

Glacier said:

The usual answer is: “This analogy is created to present that the minority as the most virtuous faction that’s always right

Actually, the "message" of the analogy is more: the will of the majority is not always good for the minority. Gay rights, ethnic sentiments during war, etc. The majority isn't always sensible or rational--hence why there has to be checks on it.

…only wants what’s worse for everybody, including itself?

Ah, the age old "voting against your self interests." Weird that people who say this don't get checked out by a doctor. Their psychic ability to read minds and know what a person's self interests are would be revolutionary to the fields of science and marketing.

lisalombs said:

Probably meant the primary…

No one really can know who won the popular vote in primaries because of the caucuses (remember all the Bernie folks who claimed Clinton's popular vote lead was bogus because of how many Bernie supporters there were at the caucuses?). No one keeps track of the voting in those so they just use estimates for them. For instance, RCP has Clinton winning one popular vote estimate and Obama winning another.

Actually, the “message” of the analogy is more: the will of the majority is not always good for the minority. Gay rights, ethnic sentiments during war, etc. The majority isn’t always sensible or rational--hence why there has to be checks on it.

Ah, i expressed myself wrong there, what i was trying to say was that it was to generate sympathy, to see them as an underdog to people to cheer for, and thus here presented as the one being oppressed by an, uh, oppresive majority.

Now on the second part, i can accept that, but really it becomes a discussion of seeing things in hindsight and predictions of what people would do, etc.

{ No one really can know who won the popular vote in primaries because of the caucuses }

Caucuses record a popular vote for turnout stats, it just has nothing to do with how they eventually hand out the delegates. Here's MN as an example:

RCP puts too much significance on their own admitted guesstimates. We also eventually got official results for the states that didn't initially report (NV being one of those) which RCP never updated.

New year, new thread!

It's been a good year and a half, but the election is now over and this thread has been going a bit off topic here and there, so let's go into this year with the shackles off, free to discuss any political stuff we want instead of just those related to the election.

Locking and memeory laning.