It’s official Joe Biden becomes the 46 President of the United States.

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Very boring and pointless discussion. Trump is not as good a person as his supporters on this site and across the US believe. And nor are his policies. Equally, he is not as bad a person, nor are his policies as bad, as his opponents believe. Similarly, the arguments about 2016: none of you are correct. The truth is in the middle: but each of us only look at the subset of facts that adds up to the point of view that our tribal allegiance (or other predetermining factor) wants to be correct. If we could all look at all the facts, we would all soften our views and find we are much closer than we realize.

(Why we feel the need to convince complete strangers to see our 50% subset of the facts I don't know. But I guess I am playing the same game by posting, so that makes me part of the problem.)


I almost see your point, but "facts" don't go one way or the other. For instance, I could say the Yankees or the Astros suck, and fans of those teams could say that the Dodgers suck. But those are perspectives, not facts. It's a fact that the Dodgers won the World Series in 2020. There isn't a 50% possibility of that not being true. This is because the team that wins the best out of 7 games is always the winner. Same with the outcome of the election. The candidate with the most electoral votes always wins.

It's one thing to be salty about the outcome, but its another to argue that the outcome is different from what it is. A square always has four sides, and when it doesn't, it's not a square.
 
Which is why, when the electoral college meets, the election will be decided. At the moment, therefore, it is a fact that nobody has won the election.

That's a technicality. The election has been decided, all it needs is the Electoral college formal ratification.

Most States award all their electoral college votes to whoever won the poll of ordinary voters in the state - 50.01% is enough. Only Maine and Nebraska divide up their electoral college votes according to the proportion of votes each candidate got.
 
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Which is why, when the electoral college meets, the election will be decided. At the moment, therefore, it is a fact that nobody has won the election.

There is the formality, and there is reality.
The reality is not only that in modern US history, never has the US government - or anyone else for that matter - waited until the electoral college to meet before assuming who the next president will be, but that the law explicitly endorses this practice.

The Presidential Transition Act of 1963 dictates that the GSA Administrator ascertains the “apparent successful candidate” of the election, and then the transition kicks into full gear, per the law. “Apparent” is very clearly a different standard than “declared”, “confirmed”, or any other such term that conveys absolute certainty. So moving ahead with declaring the winner of an election is not just long-established tradition, it is also the law.

How is “apparent” winner defined? Well, until now, media projections - as often as not the AP - were taken as the real deal. So does, by the way, the Trump campaign - as long as he wins. When the AP projected Trump won Alaska - several days after the election, and after the claims of “the media doesn’t decide the election” and the “PRESIDENT GORE” silliness had long since begun, what did Ivanka Trump tweet out? The AP call, that’s what.

The GSA Administrator is a Trump appointee who appears to take her boss’ disposition more seriously than she does the law. There is no real controversy about who won the election: in court, Trump has won 1 case out of 25. He has lost by 5-digit margins in 5 states without which he cannot get to 270. The GSA Administrator sees this as plainly as anyone: per media reports, she is sending her resume around, a move that does not exactly imply confidence in Trump being the winner.

At the outset, the Trump line was that “the media doesn’t decide the winner”. They even plastered across their HQ, and tweeted out a front page of the Washington Times that referred to “PRESIDENT GORE”, as “a reminder that the media doesn’t select the President”. (The only problem? That front page was fake, the latest in a long string of fake front pages and magazine covers). As that has started to wear thin, they have resorted to ever-more desperate measures, like having the GOP commissioners refuse to certify the results from Detroit because that city voted overwhelmingly for Biden (after an outcry, they backtracked 2 hours later).

None of this will succeed, but the very fact that someone dares attempt it is both a symptom of a diseased political system as well as incredibly corrosive to that system. They are willing to burn down the very democracy if it helps Trump.
 
That's a technicality. The election has been decided, all it needs is the Electoral college formal ratification.

Most States award all their electoral college votes to whoever won the poll of ordinary voters in the state - 50.01% is enough. Only Maine and Nebraska divide up their electoral college votes according to the proportion of votes each candidate got.
Well now I am confused. According to Renzi, facts are don't go one way or the other. They are, or they are not. But now you are saying that some facts can be facts before they are yet facts. This is one of the reasons everything is so polarized. We can't actually agree on the facts, or even on the definition of a fact. This is the point I am making.

(I am neutral in this thread. I am a curious onlooker, trying to understand how two such lousy candidates both got such massive, and record-breaking vote numbers).
 
Biden won however does Joe Public outside the US really care? I certainly don't nor does anyone else I know.
 
I almost see your point, but "facts" don't go one way or the other. For instance, I could say the Yankees or the Astros suck, and fans of those teams could say that the Dodgers suck. But those are perspectives, not facts. It's a fact that the Dodgers won the World Series in 2020. There isn't a 50% possibility of that not being true. This is because the team that wins the best out of 7 games is always the winner. Same with the outcome of the election. The candidate with the most electoral votes always wins.

It's one thing to be salty about the outcome, but its another to argue that the outcome is different from what it is. A square always has four sides, and when it doesn't, it's not a square.
And try telling that to Michael Moore. Unfortunately, I can't find it now, but trust me, there is a video on YouTube where he is speaking to a British news reporter after the 2016 election and using a very similar analogy to say that some facts are not facts: he points out that in premier league soccer, if Chelsea score two goals against one for Tottenham, Chelsea is the winner and the reverse (Tottenham is the winner) is a fact that makes no sense--alluding to what he regarded as the nonsensical fact that Clinton got more votes than Trump, but Trump won. This business of facts is more complicated that we are comfortable to admit. They can be in the eye of the beholder, it seems.
 
We should all care. We share the same planet, and Trumps's GOP is toxic for the environment.

No....Trump, Biden and the rest in the US are just puppets getting their turn at being in the spotlight. They're controlled by more powerful beings especially in areas that really matter.
 
No....Trump, Biden and the rest in the US are just puppets getting their turn at being in the spotlight. They're controlled by more powerful beings especially in areas that really matter.
Do you mean Qanon's shape-shifting lizards?
 
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