Just in case, I want to be the first to celebrate.
:party: ♫♫

Once there was a wicked witch in the lovely land of Oz
And a wickeder, wickeder, wickeder witch there never, never was
He filled the folks in Munchkin land with terror and with dread
'Till one fine day from Kansas way a cyclone caught a house
That brought the wicked, wicked witch his doom
As he was flying on his broom
For the house fell on his head and the coroner pronounced him dead
And thru the town the joyous news was spread
Ding-dong, the witch is dead! Which old witch? The wicked witch
Ding-dong, the wicked witch is dead

If Trump wins the popular vote but loses the electoral college, I will declare the result invalid and whine about it the next 4 years.

From here.

:rofl:

Election night. I do not get it, and it is more than a little disheartening that so that people are voting for Trump. What am I missing? Or are that many Americans that stupid? (And if Streetlight finds in this a T-ball question, he is welcome to swing away.) At the moment it appears that Trump will receive at least forty percent of the vote nationwide, and in some communities a majority.

I cannot help wondering what acceptable behavior is in communities that vote for Trump. Is his behavior their standard? As it happens, I have never met a Trump supporter, nor had a discussion with one, nor ever knowingly set eyes on one. In a sense he has already won, in that he has exposed a disgusting aspect of America; not the presumed mistake of 2016, but a raging and dangerous ugliness that is both poison and disease. America the beautiful, disfigured by a cancerous tumor that is everything Trump and Trump-like and the truth that he is just a large supporating pustule on that tumor.

People vote for Trump because people like you are unable to fathom the fact that people can and will vote for Trump.

In any case America has been a tumor for the last 100 years, it's a shitty country filled with shitty people who have made the world a worse place to be for everyone. Trump is an every sense an exemplary American and if he loses this vote, it'd be because Americans would prefer not to recognize themselves in the mirror.

The injustice in this is layered and borders on or is pathological. But I accept the kernel of truth in it because tens of millions of Americans themselves both evidence it and proclaim it. Your brush is too wide, though, in that it paints all, including that and those that should not be so painted - and renders you a Diogenes in a barrel. I had hoped for something a little wiser and more enlightening.

Nah you just want a little self-aggrandizing comfort, that you're 'one of the good ones' among 'bad apples' or some crap. Well no, everything about your country is wrapped in shit, including you, and faster you accept that the faster you might be able to extricate yourself from it. The first step to recovery...

People vote for Trump because people like you are unable to fathom the fact that people can and will vote for Trump. — StreetlightX

Lol!

Fun times!

Tomorrow will be doubly hilarious.

Gee. Maybe I should emigrate. Where do you live?

Nowhere good. And getting worse precisely because of our aping Americanisms.

Incredible country

In any case America has been a tumor for the last 100 years, it's a shitty country filled with shitty people who have made the world a worse place to be for everyone. — StreetlightX

The good points you often make about American politics are entirely undermined by this vile bigotry. Just stop.

Election night. I do not get it, and it is more than a little disheartening that so that people are voting for Trump. What am I missing? Or are that many Americans that stupid? (And if Streetlight finds in this a T-ball question, he is welcome to swing away.) At the moment it appears that Trump will receive at least forty percent of the vote nationwide, and in some communities a majority. — tim wood

Whether or not Biden or Trump wins, the result is gonna be alot closer than people expected and that's a bad sign for the US as a country going forward. As it turns out you can get away with just about anything, even killing hundreds of thousands of your own people through sheer negligence, and still win reelection just as long as you play divisive politics. Hopefully this means the end of the US as the leader of the free world because it is clear that it is not a country that deserves to have as much influence as it does.

The US doesn't have so much influence on the world because of our solid gold virtues; it's because of our extensive inventory of armaments and very large GDP. That is true for all other leading nations, past, present, and future. "Nice" is nice, but having nuclear subs and hellfire missiles launched from drones are features to think twice about. So is being one of the world's biggest consumers of the stuff everybody makes.

getting worse precisely because of our aping Americanisms — StreetlightX

So you must live in "a shitty country filled with shitty people who have made the world a worse place to be for everyone". How are you not one of the shitty people?

Agree. It’s incredibly dissappointing after all the mendacity, the incompetence, the malevolence, so many people will still vote for him. Something is really wrong that this can happen.

:sweat:

To be honest, I think typical conservatives are better at divorcing people from subjects and will happily vote for a douche if that means they get what they want. So Trump's behaviour is totally irrelevant to them as it should be. It should've been irrelevant to Democrats as well.

I have been reading 1877: OUR YEAR OF LIVING VIOLENTLY. Rutherford B. Hayes [some people called him Rutherfraud...] had just been elected in a very dubious electoral process, and the country was awash in far more violence than we currently have to put up with. Much more. Corruption was rife. Capitalist exploitation of the workers was remorseless, and the robber barons of the gilded age reigned supreme. Strikes were suppressed by the arms of the state. Blacks, Hispanics, Chinese, and Native Americans were being ruthlessly oppressed and abused. The country was also in a severe depression, without any succor coming from Washington (or anywhere else).

From a distance of 140 years, we are likely to look back on the the last two decades of the 19th century as "the good old days". But as Otto Bettmann, the famous archivist said, "The good old days were TERRIBLE". Life sucked a lot more in 1877 than in 1977 or 2020.

Do you speak from experience?

Yes, but, as a rule, no one is grateful for what they've inherited. And this does throw into question just how quality of life is measured. Quality has improved, but expectations have also (improved?)/changed, as quality of life has gone up. It does beg the question of whether there's a metric of how to measure quality of life.

It’s just really disappointing. It shows that facts don’t matter, or principles don’t matter mediocrity wins, lies win. What is wrong with America?

Biden winning is disappointing?

Yeah was gonna say, I'm not too depressed (beyond the basic threshold) at the moment?

Am I the only one who knows Biden is going to win?

[Cross posted]

My all-powerful spidey sense was twitching this way and that, but it's twitching pretty blue at the moment.

Biden is more likely than not to win since he's favored in the rust belt, but it's close which just shows how much the American people are willing to put up with.