I can understand this, but Valve have dropped the ball horribly on MM which has left us a bit short on options for growth. FaceIt is a really good chance to establish a strong base on a high profile platform with devs that might be more responsive, and as a community it could be huge to work through the growing pains and establish it as a viable system.

I find Bannon interesting because he's a power-behind-the-throne type guy. Bloomberg did an interesting piece on his operations at Breitbart and his background last year

https://www.bloomberg.com/politics/graphics/2015-steve-bannon/

I felt like I got a good understanding of his motivations and it made some things about the campaign much clearer

The potential for someone like Gaffney to be used as a battering ram to attack civil liberties and basic freedoms through incredible paranoid rhetoric is certainly there, but my feeling is that they want someone who can reliably keep the Islamaphobic narrative going to ensure they have their bogeyman front and center when they need it for political and media purposes. The potential to do both at the same time is the scariest part.

Having done a bit of reading on Steven Bannon over the last couple of days I was interested to see that he'd done a trial run with Dave Brat (now championing Bannon's appointment by Trump obviously) in 2015 in Virgina, outflanking the incumbent and Leader of the Majority in Congress Eric Cantor. He did this by pushing exactly the same message as Trump: anti immigrant, anti corruption, etc, and took the Republican selection then won the general election. Presumably we can expect more of the same elsewhere, why stop now?

Also much of Bannon's wealth stems from getting a share in Seinfeld syndication rights when he ran a media investment company. If his views on race really do match the accusations of his wife then it could be an irony up there with MGM releasing Birth of a Nation.

How can the majority in a popular vote be marginalised? They are going to win the vote. This argument means that New York and California right now should be about to face disaster because their candidate lost. But that's not going to happen is it?

What I don't understand is why people insist on framing the idea of one man one vote in terms of states. They simply cease to be the issue. Individuals will vote. They won't all continue to vote for the same party, the idea that just because a state has always solidly voted one way means that entire the populace of it would continue to do so is wrong.

Take California for example, solidly Democrat but in a popular vote system the Republican party would be highly motivated to start appealing to those voters. There are definitely already Republicans in California, and there will definitely be non-voters and Democrat voters that they can win. Party loyalties aren't absolute and voter loyalty is highly elastic. Republicans will start to target those voters, and it works vice versa in other places. It won't hurt either party, California is a highly populous state so there are huge numbers of Republican votes to gain and vice versa elsewhere.

Political parties don't target voters on the basis of left or right, they haven't done for decades. Right now parties completely ignore huge numbers of concerns of voters in states they can't win so they end up in highly polarised positions. The popular vote would change that, they would have to address the concerns that matter to every voter. They wouldn't be able to say things that piss off huge swathes of the population and expect to win so incredibly divisive campaigning would be much more difficult.

If in your example there is 70% of the population that one party ignores they are dead in the water, the competition will sweep them up and win. I also don't recognise the idea that people in cities have a set of interests that involves screwing both the rest of the country and it's economy. There isn't a massive urban/rural split, on the contrary politicians would be highly motivated to find policies that are beneficial to as many people as possible.

There is no reason to believe that some kind of demagogue will arise who will wreak havoc along those lines, we're talking about a bedtime story monster at this point.

ESA. Ain't no ESEA stage lan for TF2

They don't cease to matter, they just matter approximately as much as they should do instead of having virtually no value because they are in a safe state or having importance completely out of proportion to their value because they are in a swing state and belong to an undecided voter.

There are also significant numbers of Republican voters in California and New York whose votes went up in a puff of smoke, along with the Wyoming Democrats, for no reason. They are unrepresented in the election regardless of who won and whether they would have supported them. That isn't democracy.

Political parties don't target people based on state, they target them on the value of their vote. People in safe states have practically no vote, people in swing states, particularly undecided voters, have massively more powerful votes. As such they are targeted heavily by political parties to the detriment of literally everyone else in the country.

One man one vote simply erases these unfair distinctions. It activates all those Republican votes that are erased in New York and California and gives the Republicans in those places a reason to actually vote when there is current none and vice versa (Presidentially speaking anyway).

"A state" means nothing, it's the people that live there that matters, it's the people who vote, and people who are affected by the outcome of the vote. Currently huge swathes of the population are of no account to political parties. The popular vote would change that.

I have read it, I don't find it remotely convincing either. He's indulging in the same kinds of oversimplification that those saying "the union won" do. Of course you don't win by just appealing to 10 cities, it's ridiculous, if for no other reason than you would never get one candidate idiotic enough to let the other one do it. It also totally fails to consider how political campaigns select their target voters which I suspect Elliot well knows.

I didn't say it was the ultimate example of fairness, but it's fairer than simply discounting millions of votes and it's a far truer representation of democracy than your current system. Both the House of Representatives and the Senate have geographical links which is more than enough. The other primary mechanism through which people in marginal areas are protected is the rights system, which is very well established in the US to say the least.

The possible moderate rebalancing of the US democratic system to pay slightly more attention to heavily populated urban areas versus the literal disenfranchisement of millions of voters (both rural and urban) seems like an extraordinarily small concern to me when next to each other side by side.

edit: it's worth considering whether your concerns are actually that you are voting a single person into such an incredibly powerful position, and that there is no balance against them taking an incredibly divisive position or being utterly objectionable on a number of other grounds, both examples of which we've just seen.

Having such a black and white result to a democratic process might be the symptom that needs to be addressed, rather than the mechanism through which the decision is reached.

I can only assume that this is the result of some kind of anchoring effect where your current perception is so focused on the idea that states elect presidents that this would continue to be the case.

In a true democracy the President would be selected by millions of equally weighted individual votes regardless of location. Pieces of land or lines on a map would have no votes. The millions of currently arbitrarily disenfranchised voters, democrat or republican, would be empowered.

If a state currently has disproportionate influence due to it's status as a swing state, and it's swing voters have disproportionate influence, that is bad for democracy and a failure of representational politics. Turnouts would improve, voters who have been ignored their entire lives would suddenly find themselves relevant and localised complacency would be exposed.

I can't think of a rational reason for continuing with the current system, but then again I have no idea why the UK persists with our system either other than vested interests and fear of change. Still, the US is at least making progress towards sanity http://www.nationalpopularvote.com/

To get the in game announcement you only have to enter into email dialog with them and give them dates and times. I don't think it means Valve rate it above anything else, they're just cooperating with someone who asked.

Would never have been allowed in Perm's day

Various spokespeople, Gingrich, etc seem to be rowing back on some of the more fantastical promises already. "Campaign device", "campaign talk" are the phrases being thrown out. Be interesting to see whether this is official Trump positioning, or whether these are attempts to pre-emptively dampen down his promises and there will be friction with the party.

I'm fully aware of the disingenuous nature of the discussion in the vast majority of the thread on various topics, I regard most of it (to borrow a phrase from many a US military misadventure) as a quagmire which is why I try to stick to relatively simple objectively provable points of fact and trimming the hyperbole here and there.

It's a fascinating topic for in depth discussion but I'm not sure the atmosphere here is conducive to a genuinely neutral and constructive exchange of viewpoints.

If it was all of them being violent then I'd say that all of them were not protesting peacefully. If it was a handful being violent I'd say that a handful were spoiling peaceful protests. If the police reported that they were arresting mostly members of fringe groups that had exploited the situation I'd accept their statements at face value until they were proved false.

Don't make the mistake of thinking I have some kind of Democrat/Republican bias in this. Both candidates were horrifying car crashes in a country where Obama showed that it's possible to have a unifying President by winning easily just a few years ago.

I'm not in the media, objectively by any standard these are overwhelmingly peaceful protests. I just don't see the point pretending they are something they are not.

I'm having difficulty understanding the thought process. The majority are peaceful, a minority are not peaceful, therefore nobody is protesting peacefully? You'll have to indulge my simple minded logic here