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[Aqizzar]

I do find it a little interesting that you're so quick to rail against Equal Opportunity as an unfair and imbalanced practice, while promoting that rural voters should have greater proportional representation than urban voters.  I'm certainly not going to say that race and living area are comparable, or that racism in employment is comparable to the urban/rural divide in issues politics, but they're both mechanisms in the same effort - preventing a tyranny of the majority.  If it's up to people to get ahead by the their own merits individually, shouldn't it be up to voting blocks to get what the want out of politics by making their own case on their own ground, without tipping the scales in their favor?

[Starver]

Even the vote of trust system.  If all the farmers decided to give their vote of trust to one person, that person would have to travel much further to represent their constituent and the farmer will likely choose someone more local with more face time.  In large cities, this isn't as much of an issue.

I think this one kinda lost face around the invention of the train.  Besides, rural or urban, no representative could ever hope to meet more than a fraction of the people he represents.

Not really the point.  Farmers in an area VoT for a local rep who can do the face-time, but rather than standing themselves VoTs in turn for a person that covers a wider area who makes overtures that best match the demands of those who gave him their own VoT, and can give this intermediary some upwards-facing face-time to distil everything being asked.  Even that person might not (probably won't) be the top-dog, but is chosen as the one who works mostly with such twice-removed representatives to garner their block-votes in return for Doing Something About It.  ("It" being a consolidation of the general consensus of needs and demands as filtered upwards.)  Etc, until a power-block becomes important enough for the person that holds it (probably with a mix of direct, indirect and multiply-indirect VoTs to their name) to say "I'm not going to pass on my grievances.  In lieu of someone else who can handle them all, I'm going to try and do something about it myself!".

The full-flavoured voice of the little-person gets diluted, along the way but mostly within the voices of similarly-opinionated little-people so it actually concentrates consensus[1] while throwing out minority opinions[2].


(Also "Not Really The Point" because I can't see it working IRL.  The act of winning the likes of American Idol while still exhibiting igns of benign intelligence not too dissonant with the general population could get someone into office, or become a power-block VoTer with a not necessarily well-judged onward VoT step.  Though it's a system I've used (only mildly abstracted) to represent various "mob-opinions" from across a large population of individual agents in a 'nation' of such agents within a simulation exercise.  The thing with that, which doesn't apply to RL, is that it's relatively easy to adjust matters when small drifts of agent opinion change, without having to recalculate the whole thing from scratch.)


[1] Not necessarily a good thing, when you think about what kind of consensuses exist in certain (perhaps disparate) blocks of the population, but that's progress!

[2] Noting also the possibility of the polar reverse of what the first footnote notes.  i.e. it's "For good or ill".

[Tilla]

So Jon Huntsman does not make me vomit at the mention of his name. An actual pragmatic Republican candidate? Gasp.

[Andir]

I'm certainly not going to say that race and living area are comparable, or that racism in employment is comparable to the urban/rural divide in issues politics, but they're both mechanisms in the same effort - preventing a tyranny of the majority.

I'm not even sure how to respond to that.  The sentence sounds self defeating while trying to equate something that perpetuates racism as if it's a "good thing" to something that is designed to protect a person's career choice from laws of ignorance.  We've already discussed your position on this type of thing in another thread and I'm not even going to get into it here.

[Aqizzar]

I'm not sure how you're reading it that gets you there, but that's not the point.  You rail about the need for greater education and observance of consequences, and self-reliance and the importance of merit in all things.  But rural voters deserve to have the scale of representation turned in their favor, to prevent their needs and concerns being trampled on by weight of the weight of numbers in other economic lifestyles, but you don't extend that need for a systematic bias to other groups whose legitimate concerns are threatened by a preponderance of people who aren't effected by their problems.

There's nothing wrong or even inherently contradictory with any position you've taken.  I'd just like to hear a more detailed explanation for why rural farmers require and deserve special privilege in politics out of proportion to their numbers, and any other particular group explicitly does not.

[Andir]

Because I don't feel that one of those is a legitimate reason.  Society requires food and resources and it requires that people create said food and resources.  It's a legitimate reason to protect said resources.  Society does not require that someone be denied a job/position because of their color.  Jobs come and go, are replaceable and moveable easily.  Packing up the farm and moving to another state is not as simple.

[Leafsnail]

Surely if it does turn out that not enough food is being produced (which seems unlikely given the need for dirt farming and controlling of prices to stop them from plummeting, but whatever) that'd drive up the price of food and make it profitable to plant again?  I mean... supply and demand?

[Andir]

This is not about profit.  If you grant people in the city more power over a resource, they will only want more, for less and complain when it's not.  Look at oil.  People are willing to go to extremes to get oil without caring about if it's polluting the groundwater where it's being pumped as long as they have their oil.  You want the same thing to happen to food?

[Aqizzar]

There just has to be a mechanism other than over-representation of the rural population in national politics.  Because guess what, forcing urban populations to protect farms from market pressure by giving themselves tax money (it's actually a pretty small amount of federal money overall, but there is a heavy wealth-redistribution effect there I'm surprised you're so comfortable with) is not the only thing they do with that over-representation.  There's plenty of cities who have to obey state laws placed on them by their rural districts, and national law as a whole distinctly represents the ideological leanings of rural states over where most of the population lives, having absolutely nothing to do with agriculture.

By giving any one portion of the population greater say over lawmaking, they are going to use it every way they want to, not just the ways you can make a case that they would need it for.

[RedKing]

This argument also ignores the fact that US agriculture is grossly skewed, with only about 10% of US farms owned by corporations, but those 10% producing over 75% of all agricultural output in the US. We don't need to subsidy rural population so much as we need to stop subsidying agribusiness and allow local farms to compete. There's a growing trend of people trying to buy local meat and produce, but it gets tough when the local farmer can't compete with ConAgra because of efficiency of scale coupled with billions in US agricultural subsidies. The only thing the local farmer has to offer is that their food is actually...y'know, food instead of "food-based food-like product".


Getting back to the Presidential season...I'm mildly intrigued by Huntsman for a handful of reasons:

1. Speaks Mandarin and Hokkien ("...whatever that is.") 
2. He's spent time in Taipei and in Beijing, so he should have a balanced and nuanced understanding of the Taiwan Straits issue, unlike most GOP pols.
3. He's been described as a "conservative technocrat-optimist with moderate positions who was willing to work substantively with President Barack Obama".
4. Seems to be already hated by the far-right of the GOP and is only polling in single digits. Obviously too sane.
5. Has supported same-sex civil unions and controlling greenhouse gas emissions. Moderately supportive of healthcare reform, including a universal mandate.
6. Likes prog rock/prog metal and signed an official proclamation making June 30, 2007 "Dream Theater Day" in the State of Utah. Granted, governors sign all kinds of proclamations like that all the time, but even so that's pretty cool. Doubly so in that he was actually at a Dream Theater concert at the time.

Negatives:
1. He's a Mormon. Sorry folks, this isn't religious discrimination, because I don't consider Mormonism a religion. It's the 19th-century version of Scientology--a con game that got taken way too seriously and developed a life of its own. Plus he's not just a Mormon, his parents are part and parcel of the Church's aristocracy.
2. Strong supporter of Israel. Although this probably applies to virtually every candidate for the last 50 years, I would like to see somebody with a bit more balanced position on the Middle East. I would hope that his experience in China/Taiwan would help foster a mindset that realizes that in complex situations like the Taiwan Straits or the West Bank/Gaza Strip, it's never so clear-cut as "these are the good guys, those are the bad guys".
3. Has a snowball's chance in Hell of winning the Republican nomination at this point. As pointed out above, the right-wing of the party hates the guy, hates that he can speak a foreign language, hates that he's Mormon (for different reasons than mine), hates that he has an ideologically "impure" track record, and hates that he's purposefully comparing himself to Our Lord and Savior Ronald Reagan (PBUH), down to announcing his candidacy in the same location that Reagan first announced his.

[Leafsnail]

was willing to work substantively with President Barack Obama

Pretty sure that kills his chances (he also made some positive comments about him in the leaked embassy emails, which isn't gonna help).

[Realmfighter]

was willing to work substantively with President Barack Obama

Pretty sure that kills his chances (he also made some positive comments about him in the leaked embassy emails, which isn't gonna help).

No kidding. I watched some of the GOP Debates, and the intro phase was essentially "I'm a Morally acceptable choice for president, and Obama is a asshole!".

And then everyone clapped.

[nenjin]

This argument also ignores the fact that US agriculture is grossly skewed, with only about 10% of US farms owned by corporations, but those 10% producing over 75% of all agricultural output in the US. We don't need to subsidy rural population so much as we need to stop subsidying agribusiness and allow local farms to compete. There's a growing trend of people trying to buy local meat and produce, but it gets tough when the local farmer can't compete with ConAgra because of efficiency of scale coupled with billions in US agricultural subsidies. The only thing the local farmer has to offer is that their food is actually...y'know, food instead of "food-based food-like product".

Yalp. To be fair, farmers do get their share of subsidies (Corn, Sugar, anyone?), but the vast majority of output comes from people like ConAgra, who have basically put most "family" farms out of business. When you're competing with someone who can outproduce you several thousand times over, the cost of doing business at the level of individual commercial farming buries them. Combines, fertilizer, ect... all to increase yield to try and compete with ConAgra, and it ends up bankrupting most.

[Nikov]

Charles Krauthammer prophetically declares Newt Gingrich 'Done'.

I love this guy.

[Aqizzar]

I think everyone was declaring Gingrich done after that Meet The Press spot, especially when he started to say he was "ambushed" or whatever, when that was his thirty-fifth appearance on the program.

It's not exactly impossible to come back from major staff disintegration and weird personal stuff.  Around this time in 2007, the professional media was ready to declare John McCain's candidacy over, and preemptively inaugurate President Rudy Giuliani's defeat of Hillary Clinton.  In other words, trust no prediction.  But Gingrich in particular, yeah, he's gone.  As one of the top staffers who quit on him said, it was even so much that he fled the country in the middle of his self-explanatory media blitz because his wife wanted to go on a cruise, it was that it took about four days before any reporters started wondering where the heck Gingrich was.  More grave-dancing prognostication makes the point that, if you have the money and name recognition of Newt Gingrich, and you can't find twelve qualified people who believe in you out of the million man professional campaigning industry, you're probably toast.