Dantius

Originally Posted By: Vortical integration If there were no romance, some fans would have legitimate complaints about the absence of it. High pressure situation, likable brothers and sisters in arms (unfortunate choice of words, there!), facing death. Romance, or at least hormones, often blossom under those circumstances. i don't see people complaining about call of duty's lack of romances

Originally Posted By: Captain TrEnToN. It does? How did you test this? There's a little button somewhere on the outer ridge of the door. Press it, and the light goes out. It's like magic.

Originally Posted By: Upon Mars. You mean Austrian School of economics? Is it not already dead yet? Nnnope. It's actually experiencing a resurgence in many ways, most notably do to the effect Ron Paul is having (cf. GOP platform item about investigating a return to the gold standard, which is pretty much the Worst Economic Idea Ever).

Originally Posted By: Student of Trinity Old photos are sepia, or at best black and white. Just because the media of the 1800s had low bandwidth, it's hard not to imagine that reality in the 1800s had the same look and feel as those old pictures. But here is an exhibit that really changed how I thought about the past: color photographs from Tsarist Russia. That is probably the coolest thing I have seen in a long time. What an incredibly inventive idea for how to get around the limitations of black and white.

Originally Posted By: Ex- -X- . . . You can't romance Dawn Star at all as a female. You can have either Dawn Star, Silk Fox, or Sky as a male, or either Silk Fox or Sky as a female. You have to pick. ...Nnno, you don't. My point was not that "You can romance Dawn Star OR Silk Fox, but that you can romance DS AND SF. As in, threesome. As in, pointless fantasy that serves no purpose beyond fanservice and detracts from the game and characters. I mean, I'm not arguing that this outweighs all the other excellent parts of the game (People who know me are aware I am of the opinion it is Bioware's best game), but it certainly detracts from the rest in a noticeable way, and the game would have been better had it not been included, which is what I am starting to think about Bioware romances in general.

Originally Posted By: Bane Ihrno I dunno. This is what happens when you leave me, see? I wrote to you! Every day! For a month!

Originally Posted By: Ex- -X- That's never been a legitimate complaint for Bioware's games. You spend the vaaaaast majority of your time murdering people and things, you can only pick one, and all possible lone harem members are optional. In Jade Empire, it's possible to romance both Silk Fox and Dawn Star as a female. I don't know about you, but that seems pretty close to a "virtual harem" to me. I mean, generally speaking, Bioware doesn't even do a particularly good job with their romances from a storytelling point of view, at least not relative to other parts of their stories/characters. It's all either blatant fanservice or an attempt to shovel as much tragedy as possible in to make it seem meaningful. The best relationship in Mass Effect from a character standpoint was probably Samara's (Jack's being a close second), and that consists of her standing you up and leaving.

Originally Posted By: Bane Ihrno Well, I may as well kill myself several months ago then. Darling, I'm like 95% confident you were there, in the chat, when Tyran gave it to me. How can you not remember that?

Hmm. Although it's mainly died down now, 9/11 truthers seriously annoyed me back when they were a thing. I think one showed up here once a few years back, but you have to look to find them now. Some of the other things that are blatantly wrong that annoy me that remain topical to this day are vaccine denial, YEC, Austrian economics, people displaying ignorance of statistics and/or basic arithmetic, historical revisionism (more specifically the whole "America is a Christian nation" thing that's showing up now, but others are guilty of this, too), and any sort of anti-science and anti-reason attitudes and ideologies in general. Of course, there are other things that I view as blatantly false and a useless waste of time, but I know when to keep quiet about those, given their predilection for starting flame wars (especially here).

Originally Posted By: Bane Ihrno 3/10. Just kidding, good work, Dikiyoba! (Just kidding. Where's Dantius when you need him? ) You have spoken my name three times, and I have appeared.

I have been gone for like a month due to a vacation than had a very nasty overlap with a RL crisis (Don't get too excited, I am personally fine, you haven't gotten rid of me yet), and I really don't feel like browsing through the ~800 posts in General that have occurred in my absence. Would some kind person care to give me the rundown of anything important that has happened in the past few weeks?

Originally Posted By: Dikiyoba (Also, dogs aren't very big, but they were used as beasts of burden, especially by Great Plains tribes. Edit: And in the Arctic, duh.) Well, that may be true, but I'd imagine it's significantly easier to plow a field with horses than it is with dogs, which is the most critical function they would have provided. Plus you can't ride dogs. Or milk them. I guess you could eat them, though they would seem to be more useful to be bred for hunting purposes than to be bred for food. Still, the general point stands.

Originally Posted By: Dikiyoba No definition of technological progress that relies on horses as a milestone can possibly be valid. They're a resource, not a technology. What, did the people of Europe and Asia go out and evolve the horse out of thin air? It's actualy very valid. SoT would be more correct to state that the people of the Americas did not have large beasts of burden that they could domesticate- a point that Diamond makes to great effect. While the people of Eurasia and Africa had things like horses, cows, oxen, donkeys, camels, and so on, the only large, domesticated animals that the Americas had were the llama the alpaca, and that was only in a small region of South America. And while this may seem like a small thing, it really isn't. While you can still get meat and such from wild animals (like bison), with domesticated animals you can use them for farming purposes like plowing, heavy work and excavation, transportation of people and goods over long distances, rapid communication, easy milk, a steadier supply of meat and other animal byproducts than could be provided by wild animals, and a bunch of other things that really help civilization not only get started, but continue to function smoothly. And of course they didn't evolve them out of thin air. One of the points that Diamond makes is that the people of Eurasia didn't get civilization because they were so much smarter than everybody else, but because they got lucky and got beasts of burden, crops, climates not hospitable to disease, and natural barriers. Any people that got those resources would have hit the world-historical jackpot and wound up ruling the place.

Originally Posted By: Goldenking All that I'm trying to say is that the last time Americans rushed off to settle the frontier, we committed (arguably) genocide or (inarguably) conquest of widespread cultures and peoples, as well as causing long term ecological disasters. Thus, space is something that needs to be approached with more caution than that, lest we in some form recreate the mistakes of the past or aggravate current issues. And we're all trying to point out that it is physically impossible to repeat those mistakes. There are no people, noble savages or not, in space period. Therefor, genocide is impossible. Space not only has no environment, being mostly hard vacuum, but the parts that do have "environments" are already so hostile to life that they can't be made any worse, therefore ecological disasters are impossible. Originally Posted By: BMA While it's a fact that the colonists did bring with them some technological advancements, it would be unfair to assume that the colonies would otherwise, even now, be backward and leaf-clad. I dunno, it seems fair to me. Progress in the technological sense is by no means a sure thing, and almost all of the time it requires a civilization to latch onto. Considering that a.) most North American natives were migrant, and therefore did not have the prerequisite stability to form one, and b.) with the noticeable exception of the Inca, most civilizations in South America tended towards spectacular self-destruction in a manner that Eurasian civilizations didn't, cf. things like mass human sacrifice on the scale of hundreds of thousands for the Aztec. It seems perfectly possible to me that they could stumble along for another 500 years to the present day with no significant technological advancements- after all, even Eurasian civilizations had long dead periods with little or no advancement- Europe had one for a millennia, and China often had periods of centuries of stagnation in the middle of dynasties, and they had all the benefits that made such advancement possible. I mean, there certainly would have been technological development and advancement had peaceful interaction with colonists occurred, that's practically indisputable. But if colonization never happened in the first place, I see no reason why thousands of years of essentially no major development whatsoever would somehow explode into a technological renaissance that would bring them up to the standards of the rest of the world.

How sad To see The ancient and distinguished game that used to be A model of decorum and tranquility Become like any other sport A battleground for rival Spiderwebbers to spam it out with... glee.

Originally Posted By: Randomizer Originally Posted By: Harehunter "The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress" Robert Heinlein. The next Australia or Georgia, US. Psh. Sending convicts and criminals to a nice cushy life on the moon? Why not just stick them mining rare earth minerals in the asteroid belt for the rest of their lives? I mean, then they're far enough away they can't just wipe out cities and military bases by tossing rocks down the gravity well </spoiler>, AND you get something more useful than just grain out of the deal.

Originally Posted By: Goldenking The exclusion of non-living nature from considerations of space exploration is my main concern. Just as sodbusting by US colonists on the frontier later contributed to the Dust Bowl that magnified the effects of the Great Depression, so too could reckless mining of rare earth minerals from asteroids, Helium-3 from the Moon, whatever resources from Mars, etc. have unforeseen consequences. As was mentioned, Mars does not even have a hospitable environment currently for terrestrial inhabitants. We should try not to aggravate that situation. Again, why does that matter? Mars is a planet with a third of Earth's gravity, no oxygen to speak of, less than 1% of an atmosphere of pressure, no liquid water, -50 C surface temperatures, and sunlight intensities between a quarter and half that of Earth. From a human perspective, it can't get any worse- there's no danger in "aggravating" damage to an ecosystem that cannot support life in the first place. Originally Posted By: Goldenking Another concern with imperial ventures is the possibility for conflict between nations. We've already seen this to some degree a few years ago with the saber-rattling between the United States and China concerning anti-satellite technology. If expansion into space is for exploitative purposes, conflicting interests could escalate - it wouldn't be the first time nations expanding into terra nullius space have fought over resources. The only difference is that this time, it actually is terra nullius, to the best of our knowledge. Yes, and if nation states stayed on earth, they would never possibly get into conflict over anything and we'd all join hands and sing Kumbaya. The fact that conflict "might" occur if we do something that is in our interests is relevant, yes, but conflict over resources is endemic to all life everywhere, and is hardly a reason in and of itself to discourage exploration. And, actually, there is a good deal of empirical evidence to suggest that competition in space would be less brutal than competitions for resources on Earth- I don't recall Columbus placing a plaque that read "We came in peace for all mankind" when he landed in the Dominican Republic in 1492, nor do I recall a bunch of European nations banding together and spending billions of dollars on a big ship to collectively investigate the Spice Islands in the 1600's. Originally Posted By: Goldenking My statement there was a lot more literal than you're interpreting - they literally do not have the same colonial history as the United States. I'm fully aware of Chinese, Russian, Indian, and Arabian imperialism and experiences being the objects of imperial subjugation, as well as many of the individual nations within the European Union. However, the United States' specific experience with settler colonialism is different than the overseas empires that Britain or France set up, which are different than the Russian expansion eastward into Siberia or westward into Europe, which is different than the interplay of Muslim-Hindu politics during the various Indian empires, etc. Although I don't have my copy of Colossus handy, there is one interesting part where Ferguson list a sort of "menu" for imperialism- for each empire you would select the type of domestic rule, the type of control over colonies, the reasons given for imperial rule, the reasons why imperial rule actually happened, etc. One of the things he mentions is that, although the social and political reasons for imperialism are superficially different, they really boil down to a few key reasons- desire for resources/markets and conquering/missionary zeal being the chief two, with desire for security running fairly close behind. So while yes, specificity in history can be useful, it's not as if the US bears some sort of unique burden brought on by the nature of our imperial past that makes us specifically disqualified or specifically needing to be extra-cautious for space exploration, when the fundamental reasons why imperialism happens are so constant over time. Originally Posted By: Goldenking My point was more fundamentally that since each of these empires emerged in different cultural contexts and with different rhetoric behind them, I cannot make the analysis transfer as easily for how space relates to their colonizing, imperialist pasts(/presents). Have you considered the fact that perhaps this is possibly because colonizing, imperialist pasts, which spring mainly out of desires for resources/security/expansion, and have negative effects characterized by indigenous oppression and environmental degradation currently have exactly zero bearing on space exploration, which places an emphasis on multinational cooperation and bring economic benefits to its investors not in the form of resources or raw materials but in technological tools and knowledge in general; and which is not an inherently exploitative effort due to the fact that there are neither indigenous people nor environments up in space?

Originally Posted By: Goldenking *snip* Um, what? Your point makes no sense at all. The reason that westward expansion is considered "bad" is that it killed a bunch of people and degraded the environment. It was only able to kill people that were already on the land - hence the "indigenous" bit. You seem to be a pretty smart guy, so I'm not quite sure what you don't get about the whole "there are no indigenous people living in space because there are no people living in space period" point. By definition, it is impossible to run roughshod over people's rights and murder them if there are no people there! At absolute most, there might... might be a few microbes under ice sheets out past the Asteroid belt, which, despite being a fascinating insight into the origins of life and evolution, also happen to be nonsentient and therefore not genocide-able. Furthermore, basic Physics 101 prevents us from colonizing anywhere outside the solar system, so even if there are other sentient life forms out there in the neighborhood of Betelgeuse, they are so far away as to be impossible to reach. And environmental degradation? Really? There's no environment to degrade! Strip-mining the asteroid belt is not morally equivalent to strip-mining Yellowstone- it's literally nothing but a field of rocks filled with valuable minerals floating in space! It cannot get any worse that is already is, and I can think of a lot better uses for them than floating a quarter billion miles away doing nothing. We destroy literally nothing- there is no risk of causing a species to go extinct, polluting the atmosphere, poisoning the groundwater, or all the other things that are bad that are associated with environmental degradation. (Oh, and claiming that Europe lacks the same colonial history as the US is a claim that demonstrates stunning lack of knowledge of even the most fundamental basics of history. I can let ignorance of Chinese, Russian, Indian, or Arabian imperialism (which did all exist and were quite brutal) slide a little bit, but does the phrase "The sun never sets on the British Empire" not mean anything to you?)

Originally Posted By: ξ You said that the U.S. "is better of [sic] than just about any other government on the planet." You have now admitted that it "ranks towards the bottom of the list" among a group of countries. That was my point. Yeah, it ranks towards the bottom of a list of OECD countries in ONE metric, countries which are orders of magnitude more advanced and developed than most countries around the planet. Hell, "OECD members" is practically the definition of modern, first-world advanced economies, all of which are vastly better off than the non-OECD member states. The US ranking towards the bottom of a list of the most developed economist does not mean it's bad in general- that would be like claiming that a person scoring in the 20th percentile of an exam administered only to those scoring above the 95th percentile on another exam is stupid- yeah, they did poorly relative to the competition, but the competition was pretty fierce. Originally Posted By: ξ Your statement was that the U.S. "is better of [sic] than just about any other government on the planet" in terms of crime, and you just linked to a graph that shows that the crime rate in the U.S. (while going down) is higher than the crime rate elsewhere in the world. Again, that proves my point. Again, those are OECD countries (see above point), and as the graph shows, the US's crime rates are not terribly higher (our assault frequency is 0.00003 higher per person than in other OECD countries, and is trending heavily downward) than they would be expected to be, especially given the vastly larger population and correspondingly higher urban populations (The US has 250,000,000 people living in or around cities. That's a lot of opportunities for violent crime). Originally Posted By: ξ I like how you pretend that there's one agreed-upon definition of democracy. That's cute. Look, it's not my fault other professions can't be bothered to stringently define their terms. If polsci people can't even agree on what the basic definition of democracy or liberal democracy is, then that's a failing on their part and not an excuse to invoke the courtier's defense in order to dismiss my point. Also, it does make rather more sense to use a neutral, third-party definition of terms, rather than you define them in such a manner as to automatically win the argument and vice versa. Wikipedia certainly seems like an acceptable source for what the general scholarly consensus is, if only because since it's on such a high-visibility article the sources will have been ruthlessly vetted. Originally Posted By: ξ Your exact words were that the U.S. "is better of than just about any other government on the planet" in those categories. You appear now to have amended that statement to something more accurate, so I have no further beef with that post. You are getting really hung up on my exact wording, and again fail to see the point. "Just about" can mean a lot of different things, and in this circumstance I used it to mean better than 80-90% of the alternatives. The number of governments that can seriously compete with the US across the board on most or all metrics is probably only around a dozen or two, and out of the two hundred-ish nation states on the planet, placing in the top 10% does, in fact, put you better off than "just about" everybody else, especially when the vast majority of the world's population is not contained within the US's competitors. Originally Posted By: ξ The U.S. is a great place to live. We have vast economic resources, incredible opportunities (though not distributed as evenly as they should be), and lots of other great things. Our ideals, while not always lived up to, are worth striving for. But it's important to bear in mind what does actually make us great and where we lag behind. If we don't know where we're failing, we stand no chance of improving. And there are a bunch of places where we're failing. I agree with you totally. We are only discussing this in the first place because I was trying to make this exact statement to Dikiyoba. Yes, the US has its fair share of problems; and it is certainly better that they be dealt with in a effective and timely manner than that we stick our heads in the sands. But, it is still important to recognize that our problems tend to be rather small compared to the problems faced elsewhere (healthcare management vs. obtaining clean water to not die), and the US government is basically competent and effective in delivering all of the things specified in the US's social contract.

On a scale of 0 to 10, that's maybe a nine and a quarter. I especially like the subtle fade effect.

Originally Posted By: ξ Income more equitably distributed? You're nuts. Our Gini coefficient is middling at best. Um, no, you're wrong? Among OECD counties, the US Gini coefficient ranks towards the bottom of the list, sure, but it's only 0.003 higher than France, and it's lower than both Israel and Germany, both of which are usually thought of as countries with pretty good income distributions. I mean, it seems to me that the real issue with income inequality is that, although averages wages have tracked productivity growth, median wages have not, because the bulk of profits due to these increases have gone to the top 5% or so- implying that the median wage should be somewhere around 40% higher, IIRC. That's a big gap, but it's certainly not at the level of, say, India, where a few people are billionaires and hundreds of millions starve. Originally Posted By: ξ More peaceful? If you mean that we haven't had a war on our territory since the 1860's, sure, but we just got out of one prolonged war of aggression and are winding down another. There are a lot of other countries that have done better. That was exactly what I mean. A US citizen who does not enlist in the military has pretty much a zero chance of being killed in a war, and even members of the military have pretty low odds, too. There's no chance whatsoever that the US will be invaded, ad the odds of US citizens dying in military action will remain astonishingly small far into the future, which is more than can be said for lots of people. Originally Posted By: ξ Less corrupt? Maybe, but it depends on your definition. I think that a lot of what is legal in the U.S. is corruption, even though it's not officially so. I'm not able to bribe judges or police officers to get off criminal charges. I don't pay protection money to the state or else risk being attacked. I don't have to bribe regulatory officers or governmental officials to run a business. It's not expected that I fear so much for my personal safety that I hire mercenaries as bodyguards for myself or my property. Originally Posted By: ξ Less criminal? I think not, unless you have a weird definition of it. Quick Googling yields that our intentional homicide rate is lower than in a fair number of countries, but it's many times typical rates in Europe. I rather suspect that most other crimes follow the same pattern. Ahem. Originally Posted By: ξ More democratic? This, too, depends on your definition, but I think it's fair to say that democracy could be viewed as equality of political power, and again there we lag behind a variety of other countries. Oooor instead of using that definition, we could use the actual one, which according to Wikipedia is "Liberal democracy is a form of government in which representative democracy operates under the principles of liberalism. It is characterized by fair, free, and competitive elections between multiple distinct political parties, the rule of law in everyday life as part of an open society, and the protection of human rights and civil liberties for all persons.", which I'd say is a pretty fair descriptor of the US. ... I think you may be misinterpreting my points, though. I am not claiming "Here is a list of categories, the US is the best in the world in all of them."; but rather "Here is a list of categories in which the US does quite well, and it's impressive that we're able to do so well across the board if our country apparently sucks so much due to being [racist/classist/politically oligarchical/economically immobile/generally unfair], so maybe we aren't those things." Oh, and there are still other things I could add to the list, which is by no means exhaustive- stuff like women's rights, literacy, life expectancy, general quality of life indices, and so on.

Originally Posted By: Dikiyoba Honestly, I'm not even sure what Dantius' point is (except that parents in the US who don't vaccinate their children against deadly diseases are shamefully ignorant and misguided). Just because there are people hungry and sick in other countries isn't magically going to make the people hungry and sick in the US feel any better. Heck, we're a first world country. We can help ourselves and other countries at the exact same time. My point was, you created a fictitious idealized government that matched you ideologically to a perfect degree, and then proceeded to compare that government to the US (For instance, presumably your government would have universal healthcare and not incarcerate people for their skin color. Also Paul Ryan would apparently not be welcome). Obviously, it was found lacking- the real government was neither as competent nor as honest as your idealized government would be. You then proceeded to declare the government that actually exists neither competent nor honest, based exclusively on your comparison to a government that does not exist. I compared the existing US government to the other existing governments of the world. By almost all metrics, it is better of than just about any other government on the planet- fairer, richer, income more equitable distributed, more peaceful, less corrupt, less criminal, more democratic, etc. Therefore, I concluded that the US government is both more competent and more honest than the existing alternatives, and that complaining that it does not march in lockstep to your ideology or desires is, indeed, a "first world problem" and you were wrong to deride SOT for suggesting that it was.

Originally Posted By: Dikiyoba Originally Posted By: Student of Trinity First World Problem: "My competent and honest government might not be the one I should have had!" Let's see... the United States has the highest incarceration rate in the world, no universal healthcare, and one of the presidential candidates just chose a VP candidate famous for wanting to decimate Medicare and food stamps. Yep. That's the hallmark of a competent and honest government. No problems there. Wealthy first world countries should always lock people up at the slightest provocation (usually for having too much melanin) and want their poorer citizens to suffer by forcing them to go without basic necessities. That's right. After all, we're not one of those commies or corrupt third world countries, so we must be fine. It's not a sense of "We're fine! No problems here!" so much as it is "Our problems are so much smaller compared to the problems facing people around the world as to be almost insignificant!" To borrow your examples, you claim that Ryan wants to cut Medicare/aid and food stamps. There are millions countries around the world that not only have no such programs whatsoever, but are so desperately poor that they make the US definition of poverty look like a joke. For instance: A family in the 25th percentile in the US makes around $20,000 a year. A family in India at the 25th percentile makes $272, or around 1/75th of what their American counterparts receive. Oh, you mentioned healthcare. Well, it certainly is a massive problem in society that people are forced to spend vast quantities of money purchasing insurance, or else run the risk of taking on crippling debt that will quite possible ruin your life and force you into bankruptcy (IIRC medical debt is the leading cause of Chapter 7 in the US, correct me if I'm wrong). Fortunately, I am quite sure that the US will have a single-payer system in my lifetime, so that's good news. But you know what's worse than crippling debt that ruins your life? A preventable and treatable medical problem that kills you because there is no health infrastructure in your country at all, which is what happens to billions of people around the world who lack the option of taking on debt in exchange for living. In fact, there are many people across the globe that are even so poor that they are denied the most incredible triumph of Western medicine in history, vaccines- they are still getting diseases that even some of the most disadvantaged Americans don't even have to worry about. (Ironically, in the US it's upper-middle class people, or more specifically their children, who are dying of preventable causes because of refusal to vaccinate. But that's a whole other kettle of fish). Or take the incarceration example. (Also, a quick aside: Racism is pretty much endemic in every human society- even progressive and liberal Europe has levels of anti-Muslim and anti-immigrant xenophobia that the US doesn't. The goal of policy should not be something impossible like "Stop people from thinking like racists!", because that's probably evolutionarily hardwired into us, but rather "Stop people from acting like racists!"- how you think is irrelevant, but how you act matters a great deal.) Black and Hispanic ethnic minorities are statistically over represented in US prisons, true*. But let's travel to Darfur now or back the the not-so-distant 1990's to Kosovo or Rwanda and see how they treat ethnic minorities there! Oh wait. We know how that went. So, we see again, there is a suboptimal point in US policy- but compared to vast swaths of the rest of the world, it's still so obviously better than some of the alternatives it's remarkable. Plus, of course, the US still has things like a functioning economy at a decent percent of full capacity, rule of law including nifty things like habeas corpus, price stability, domestic tranquility, defense from invasion, free public education, infrastructure, elected democratic institutions, religious freedom, a constitution, a decently structured and regulated capitalist system, and all the sorts of stuff that we tend to take for granted that in reality are anything but. tl;dr: Focusing on US domestic issues, which are in bad shape relative to the past/other first world countries now, does tend to lead to a worldview that exaggerates the US's flaws out of all proportion. While in many respects the US is far behind other "first world" countries, the gap between the first world and the worst off is so incredibly vast that it's stupid to pretend that the US is in some kind of primitive backwards exploitative racist oligarchy like people sometimes make it out to be, when the vast majority of people in the US are much better off than 90% of the world's population. One study I read fairly recently stated that a person in the bottom decile in the US would be at around the seventieth percentile worldwide- which certainly goes to show just how much better off we are than just about everybody else. tltl;dr;dr: SOT is absolutely, 100% right here, and people should recognize that fact.

Originally Posted By: Nikki Look at me, I can't even be bothered to write my own message! I am truly the more optimal spammer!

Originally Posted By: Dikiyoba Originally Posted By: Randomizer Republicans are counting on... low voter turn out [...] I'm still trying to decide if it's worth the effort to vote Um, yes? Dikiyoba. Due to the nature of the electoral college, Diki, there are vast swathes of the country where voting for national office is an exercise in futility. There's no more chance of Wyoming or Utah going for Obama than there is of Vermont or Illinois swinging for Romney, so if you're heading out to vote there, it's only for the purpose of state or local offices- and if you don't care about those, why bother? It is, of course, a tragedy that by and large the leader of the most powerful republic on the face of the planet will be picked by a million or so largely politically apathetic voters in a half-dozen swing states, but eliminating the Electoral College is something that everyone likes to talk about and nobody likes to do, since each party is terrified that doing it will permanently tip the balance in favor of the other guys.