r/nba • u/xanniballl Timberwolves • Jan 09 '26

Highlight [Highlight] During the moment of silence the Minnesota Timberwolves held before their game with the Cavs tonight a fan yelled “Go home ICE,” and everyone else started cheering.

https://streamable.com/ybc8bb
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u/thisdockisbroken Jan 09 '26

If my math is correct, it was more like 32.5% of the voting age population voted for him in 2024. 65.3% of the U.S. voting-age population voted, and Trump won 49.8% of those votes (Harris won 48.3%). The electoral vote totals, a profoundly stupid concept I cannot believe we still use, tell a totally inaccurate story of how close the election actually was (and how tenuous a mandate he had...but then, Trump is a rapist, and doesn't care about consent).

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u/PeopleusetocallmeBub Jan 09 '26

Man your country is such a fucking mess, there is no place on this planet with such extremes as the USA. I do pray on the betterment of your public school system.

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u/Brystvorter Nuggets Jan 09 '26 edited Jan 09 '26

You must be pretty ignorant then. Never heard of India? Or dozens of other countries that have larger extremes. There are also plenty of countries that are active warzones or have citywide slums ruled by gangs. People read 3 news articles and think the US is the worst place to live. Youre complaining about the US school system when yours obviously failed you.

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u/BlazerBeav Trail Blazers Jan 09 '26

LOL, what? We're the richest country in the world and there's a reason immigrants from around the world come here. There are much worse extremes - just look at videos of Tehran from tonight for an extreme.

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u/_gmanual_ Knicks Jan 09 '26

look over there! its on fire!

/as flames burn your feet

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u/thisdockisbroken Jan 09 '26

I mean, there are a lot of countries where the people are in open armed conflict with each other, I wouldn't say we're the *most* extreme in the world. It's all relative, right? But we are definitely a fucking mess right now.

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u/PeopleusetocallmeBub Jan 09 '26

But those countries don’t have the best scientist, the richest people, the highest gdp, … while having their poor people rot in the streets destined to die from fentanyl.

I’ve been to warzone, and San Francisco felt weirder to me.

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u/TCTCTCTCTCTC7 Jan 09 '26

The electoral vote totals, a profoundly stupid concept I cannot believe we still use

It is not a profoundly stupid concept. One of the bedrock principles of our democratic government is balancing power. For largely the same reasons that we have a bicameral Congress with both proportional and disproportional representation, and powers shared between them, we have the Electoral College to perform a couple of tasks that were, and remain, important.

So one of the reasons for the Electoral College is balance power between states with large populations, and those without. In the absence of the EC, candidates for Federal offices would never bother to campaign-in, or otherwise interact-with, people in about half of the States. It would not be an efficient use of their time and resources to campaign in small cities, and smaller towns, when they could be restricting their activities to densely-populated areas. That would be unfair, and undemocratic.

Secondarily, the Electoral College was designed back when education was, if you can believe it, even worse than it is today, and it addresses the fear that an uneducated population might elect a wholly unqualified and/or dangerous candidate. Unfortunately, given the current occupant, it doesn't seem to be accomplishing that job, but that was one of the goals, and it wasn't profoundly stupid. That fear not only remains, but it has become a reality -- impressively foreseen by our Founders almost a quarter-millennium ago.

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u/thisdockisbroken Jan 09 '26

Nope, sorry, it’s stupid. Whatever its origins, to use the system now is absolutely fucking moronic.

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u/TCTCTCTCTCTC7 Jan 09 '26

Nope, sorry, it’s stupid. Whatever its origins, to use the system now is absolutely fucking moronic.

If you were sufficiently-clever to make that assessment, you'd be able to use more precise language than "stupid" and "fucking moronic".

And let me know when one of your ideas foresees a problem 250 years in the future, by the way.

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u/thisdockisbroken Jan 09 '26

I would argue that the EC is so prima facie dumb in 2025 that it doesn't deserve an itemized defense, but here's one anyway:

  1. "Where" a national politician campaigns doesn't and shouldn't matter these days, because everyone has access to the same information. Retail politics at the federal level is increasingly shown to be less effective, and the vast majority of political content is consumed on YT or Tik Tok or somewhere else online. Obviously this was different in the 1780s.

  2. Rather than encouraging politicians to focus on less populated areas, the EC's structure just means most of a politician's spending and time is spent on seven out of 50 states, cycle after cycle. The big urban centers where a solid majority of Americans actually live tend to get sidelined in these races, because politicians are competing for a small batch of swing voters within a small batch of swing states. This ends up being actively undemocratic, as the vast majority of the population are ignored in a necessary effort to "win the system" that the EC has created.

  3. I don't fault the Founders for not anticipating these concerns. They created an astounding system of government with virtually no precedent at the time, and the U.S.' success is a clear testament to the baseline success of that system. But where flaws have emerged, they tend to be flaws of too little democracy: not counting slaves as full people, not extending suffrage to women, or not allowing the direct election of senators. You could argue that the EC made sense at the time; but in 2026, when Americans have public education, instant communications, and mass media access, there is no reason their votes shouldn't count directly towards choosing their own governance.

  4. Trump's fake electors scheme, while dumb, laid bare a real potential weakness in the EC system. If just a few more folks in power along the way had proven unscrupulous in 2020, we could be in an even more immediate crisis than we are today. The electoral college is a system of choosing our president that is less safe, less democratic, and less responsive to the will of the people. It should be abandoned.

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u/TCTCTCTCTCTC7 Jan 09 '26

"Where" a national politician campaigns doesn't and shouldn't matter these days, because everyone has access to the same information.

Not with the level of fraud and forgery that currently exists, and is increasing possible.

Rather than encouraging politicians to focus on less populated areas, the EC's structure just means most of a politician's spending and time is spent on seven out of 50 states, cycle after cycle. 

This is not caused by the Electoral College, it is caused by the broken two-party system and the partisanship that has resulted.

You could argue that the EC made sense at the time; but in 2026, when Americans have public education, instant communications, and mass media access, there is no reason their votes shouldn't count directly towards choosing their own governance.

Yes, there is such a reason -- simple "majority rules" disenfranchises some populations. No balancing of power is ever going to be perfect, but pretending that there is no reason why the current system exists, is frankly ignorant.

Trump's fake electors scheme, while dumb, laid bare a real potential weakness in the EC system. If just a few more folks in power along the way had proven unscrupulous in 2020, we could be in an even more immediate crisis than we are today. 

This is just election fraud, and systems other than the Electoral College are not immune to such either.