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James Quinn's avatar

On the Electoral College - It seems to me that the major problem with the Electoral College is that it was created before the advent of major political parties and thus without the understanding of what that would do to the College. The original idea was that each state would select a group of responsible citizens (the electors) who would then look at the candidates and vote on which one they felt to be the best choice. The idea was that the electors would be independent, each one able to vote his (since at the time no women would become electors) conscience. Clearly that is no longer the case. Our ossified binary party system has resulted in party loyalty becoming superior to independent thought. If we could find a way to return the Electoral College system to its original design and function, it might actually strengthen our presidential elections by removing from them excesses of passion, prejudice, and parochialism. I must admit that I’m unsure how that could be accomplished; electors would have to be chosen outside partisan political influence. What that conundrum makes clear is that our real problem is that ossified binary party system. Indeed, the Founders recognized that danger, publicly eschewing the idea of ‘factionalism’. But of course they then succumbed to it, creating the initial system themselves although it did not become the divisive juggernaut it has until the 1830’s. Having done so, it has now trapped us into and ‘us and them’ mode that has increasingly polarized us.

The Electoral College is not the problem. We are.

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myrna loy's lazy twin's avatar

I spent about 10 years working in microbiology and immunology research and I find the shadow banning around Covid very concerning. Many of the ideas that were suppressed were either within the scientific mainstream or likely the majority opinion among scientists. In some cases, a claim that was labeled misinformation in the US was the official position of other rich countries’ ministries of health. Trying to suppress scientific evidence and debate during a public health crisis is very dangerous.

I am very angry that in many cases these decisions about what is misinformation and what is accurate information is being made by people who don’t have a background in science. In some cases these errors were obvious to someone with only a basic understanding of the subject. It’s possible that in some cases (remember when natural immunity was a dangerous idea), misinformation experts knew that the so-called misinformation was truw but said it was false because they thought saying it was false would make people more likely to follow public health guidelines, but that’s even worse. The last thing we need is for accurate scientific information To be suppressed to get people to follow government recommendations.

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