Clicky Poll: The Electoral CollegeFollow

Well the top 50 cities by pop equate to about 57 million people. Add some suburbs and you'd still have a very large minority or majority of urban non-metropolis areas.

The issues in question would be based on income levels, professions, social views, and other such that could vary independent of region. The strictly regional issues can certainly be covered by candidates by visiting those regions; a candidate can just as easily give his stance on management of the crab fishery, Tongass forest, ANWR, and other federally-managed BLM/EPA/Farm service things from Juneau as from those places specifically.



Yeah. But "******** over" means "levelling the power of votes", which in my mind is hardly ******** over. I DO think 100,000 urban voters should have more voting power than 99,000 rural voters. Catering to minorities doesn't seem democratic to me. If the problem becomes candidates ignoring rural areas in favor of urban, then either the rural voters need to mobilize better, or accept that as a minority they should indeed be less favored or catered to.



Smash correctly spun into some crazy picky tangent due to my not including footnotes explaining my entire reasoning, which was concerned with the Electoral College federally. As I pointed out, a) most states do currently allocate votes by winner-takes-all, and b) I support a federal mandate to force them to allocate votes one-for-one. I seriously could care less about individual state EC crap. Currently only a federal change to the EC, OR every state allocating one-for-one would satisfy my problems with the EC. The thread is about whether to ban the EC, not about whether the EC is okay because there's a 0.0001% that it could be "virtually banned" if every state did so.



Sure it's a state issue, yes I'd like to do away with state freedoms in this case. And for god's sake how states choose to do ******* with the EC is irrelevant. I don't want them to have a choice.



Well, I disagree, I'm thinking fair as an entire population, not as states.



Because you disagree? Sorry. I don't say so.

I say abolish the EC. The quicker the better. Once it happens we will be so totally fixed on the road to the fundamental breakdown of the American economy that the opportunity to use the firearm collection in my basement will be imminent.

Mob rule is not a good thing. Talk about equality and fairness and proportional distribution of influence all you want, giving the majority unchecked power to make any decision is a recipe for disenfranchising the minority. The electoral college wasn't about how long it took to get from Boston to Philly. It took no longer to get make the trip and say "4 for Jefferson" than it did to make the trip and say "4,254 for Jefferson, 3,782 for the other guy."

The electoral college was meant more to insure that everyone's vote counted, regardless of where you lived. For all of the blind misconstruing being done by some of our contributors given more to histrionics than intelligent arguments, a television is no way to communicate with your audience, regardless of how much it has come to be leaned on of late. Pressing the flesh, looking a man or woman in the eye and, yes, Bob damnit, kissing babies, is still the most effective way to make friends and influence people. It does a good job at getting votes, too.

Eliminate the electoral college and going to a popular vote will bring us to Rome in the 3rd century. I hate to tell you this, but the only way to pay for the social programs poor people vote for is to over tax wage earners. Not rich people, who pay little tax to begin with, but the middle class, the workers. When you take their money from them to give it to ghetto people who do nothing but buy sneakers and Cadillacs, how long do you think it will take before they realize life would be better without the sh;tty job they keep going to every day?

When you get right down to it, the right to vote for every American, with few exceptions, is a **** poor idea to begin with. Its **** poor because, inherently, responsibility accompanies right and most Americans today refuse to accept the responsibility of educating themselves in order to make an informed decision as to who to vote for. At least the electoral college keeps a layer between the masses and the decision. For my money, more are needed.

It's been a good while since I was in high school, but general history covered Columbus and the opening of the New World for Europe and contact with the native tribes. "American History" gave brief lip-service to early settlements such as Jamestown and really started with the pilgrims and Plymouth Rock and all that jazz.

"American History" is really "History of the nation called the United States" and the native populations didn't play a role in that until there were colonists here to push them around.

Thanks

It's intresting. We start "French History" when Rome invaded us, what historians call the "Asterix Era".

I guess it's a bit tricky for the US. It would makes sense for the Natives and the Latinos to learn the History of the North American Continent, but not so much for the whites, or the blacks, or the Asians. Hard to please everyone.

Yeah, they are. I spent 3 months teaching Enlish in a school in Guadalajara, and the kids leanrt about Mayans and Aztecs quite a bit.

They also learnt about US History. I remember helping the teacher to correct the students test, based on multiple choice questions. One of the question was "Which US President freed the slaves?" and about 1/3rd chose Bill Clinton. I'm sure he'll be glad he's remembered for that in some parts of the world.

It's funny cos I still have quite a thick French accent, so if you ever see a Mexican speaking English with a French accent, you'll know why!

True that.

I don't fault the schools on it. You only have so long per year to teach history and the simple fact is that Fertile Crescent civilizations -> Greco-Roman -> Western European -> Colonial American histories played the primary roles in making modern America. Time spent getting deep into the pre-contact Americas, sub-Sahara Africa, India, Asia, Slavic Europe, etc is time not spent getting through the core materials. Even as it is, we always seemed to run out of time around the Civil War and skimmed until WWII before calling it done. As a kid, I had no clue what happened between Hiroshima and my birthday because we just never got that far.

My first French teacher was Cuban, so I have a decidedly odd accent in French, I'm sure.

Additionally Native (north) American culture was relative crap. No large settlements except for a couple of adobe villages, no mathematics, no astronomy, no ornate works of art, and fairly uninteresting societies. I took a college course on Maya/Inca/Aztec and they and the Olmec, Toltec, Moche, etc. all seemed more advanced, even though the northern indians had a head start of thousands of years. Not to mention much better areas to live in.

Anyone know why they were relatively stagnant while their southern counterparts had much richer cultures?

Yeah. Lack of challenge can do it. This historical pattern around the world is that cultures tend to start as hunter-gatherers, then move to nomadism, then what's called "enclosed nomadism" (a single culture with both settled and nomadic components), and then fully settled.

Those shifts almost always are a matter of necessity, not intent. As long as the land has sufficient resources for simple gathering and hunting, the people will stay hunter-gatherers. When the resources become used up (population increases such as to require moving), nomadism results. As long as there are fewer total nomadic tribes wandering an area then the land can support, they'll stay nomadic. But if again resources become scarce, this time it typically leads to conflict (cause there's nowhere else to go). If the conflict alone keeps the population down (which it tended to do in the plains regions of North America), then nomadism remains.

Depending on the specifics of the situation, enclosed nomadism may result. The thinking is that the culture with some settled components will have benefits against those that don't. There are raw materials that are best collected by a settled group (fishing, mining/smelting, etc). If you can maintain your nomadic elements in your "territory", while gaining the benefits of settlements in terms of resources and trade, your culture will tend to do better over time. We tended to see this in the Eastern sections of North America, where some complex interrelationships between tribes and nations of tribes existed, complete with regularly inhabited settlements, some migrating populations, and lots of trading (both internally between the settled and nomadic components, and between tribes). But there was still a heck of a lot of conflict between those groups.

Fully settled populations only tend to occur when the population needs still outstrip the resource benefits gained by casting about via nomadism. Typically, it requires adopting agrarian ideas (farming in addition to fishing). There's usually a long period of overlap between this and the previous stage, but once farming starts, a culture will tend to eventually end up settled (assuming it isn't wiped out somehow). Interestingly enough, some North American tribes were practicing basic farming when the Europeans arrived. It's quite possible that in another few hundred years, they may have developed fully settled societies and been completely different the the tribes that were encountered (and much more like the Aztec and Incas).


As to the lands to the south being "worse", I'm not sure that's really true. There's more rivers and lakes in terms of density in the south. Given that settlements typically start via fishing (it's the first reason to settle down in a location really), it's not surprising that settled societies formed here first. Also, there's some evidence that there was a climate shift around between 1000-1400AD or so. The same shift that started closing off Greenland to the Vikings is believed to have also caused a severe dry up in South America, perhaps causing the Maya's to fall, and severely weakening the Inca and Aztec civilizations just prior to the arrival of the Spanish.


Lots of theories abound on that though...

It was cheaper than buying Guns, Germs & Steel, anyway.