2) He didn't get half the country to vote for him. It looks like around 55-60% of voters turned out this year (the whole tally isn't calculated yet). Of those, he got less than 50% (as Clinton got more votes than him). So at best he seems to have gotten around 30% of the voters to vote for him. Not everyone is a voter (age, other disqualifying factors). So even if he had somehow gotten 50% of voters (which, again, he didn't), he'd still have less than half the country voting for him.

Trump could never be elected into office here in Canada, even with a low voter count because his views are far outside of the norm of how many Canadians think. America is different with a different culture, and the only evidence we have (polling data) suggests that the views of a great many Americans in 2016 line up pretty closely with the views of Mr. Trump.

An election is basically a poll of whose views the population supports. So any person elected by that population must be a person with views that said population does not find extreme.

I think this is a problem with modern liberalism in that "extreme" has become synonymous with "people who disagree with me" or "people who don't share my right kind of opinions"

  a person who holds extreme or fanatical political or
  religious views, especially one who resorts to or advocates
  extreme action.

Nothing about this requires viewing them only through a local and not a global lens, either.

And just because people voted for Trump doesn't mean they agree with all or even any of his positions. (Anecdata) I've spent the last several days speaking with numerous people who voted for him despite disagreement on many of his policy positions, strictly because they were voting against Clinton.

However this was not considered an extreme position in the 1800s because, unforutnately, it was the majority position.

The problem you are having is you are defining extreme with reference to what you and the people around you believe to be extreme and fanatical rather than defining it based on what the majority consider extreme and fanatical, and the best evidence we have for the majority view in America is a very recent poll.

In particular, though, that view is demonstrably false. Anyone holding it can be considered an "extremist" just on the grounds of holding onto false beliefs (though falsification still has to occur).

A modern example is (not a majority view) the anti-vaxxer crowd.

Another one which is closer to a majority view (certainly a significant minority), is the anti-climate change crowd.

How about the anti-evolution crowd (which has a lot of overlap with the above two), a significant minority in the US as evidenced by our K-12 biology textbooks.

Obviously these people have a very different interpretation of the evidence and the conclusions that can be drawn from it. To suggest they are crazy because they disagree with you or find your evidence unconvincing is the same kind of smugness that cost Ms. Clinton and the democratic party this election.

People who believe vaccines cause autism (today) are fanatics.

People who deny climate change is happening (today) are fanatics.

1 The climate record started in 1800 which was one of the coldest periods in history - 1816 is popularly called the year without a summer and there had been a little ice age that started in the 1600s and ended during the 1800s (of course it's been rapidly warming since then)

2. Recent NASA observations show glacial retreat and warming on Mars that happened exactly at the same time as global warming on earth suggesting possible solar origion of climate change rather than human caused.

3. I have yet to see a single piece of evidence that conclusively links a warming climate with human released CO2. All we are told is that CO2 makes things warmer and that humans are releasing more CO2 than before. That's not enough, for climate change to be plausable they have to show that human released CO2 is enough to make a meaningful impact on atmospheric composition such that it makes the earth warmer. I don't think we have enough understanding of how atmosphere behaves or even of how much gases we are releasing to make those kinds of conclusions.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_Without_a_Summer

2 http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2016/may/31/mars-also-un...

now my purpose isn't to get into a debate on climate change here, all I want to demonstrate is that the people who deny man made climate change aren't crazy or fanatical, they are ordinary rational people that for whatever reason have reached a different conclusion and we should not be so quick to dismiss them. The hallmark of rationality is willing to inquire and debate for the validity of opinions, not dismiss opinions outright as fanatical or crazy without at least looking at the other side's evidence.

Many are, until recently the most common talking point was "it's cooled since 1998".

1. We have temperature data going back lot further than that, just not direct measurements.

2. Mars has an extremely different atmosphere than ours, Our only commonality is the sun which is actually in a cool period.

3. Can you propose a better explanation for the observed warming? It's a massive amount of energy that has to come from somewhere. When there is a theory that fits the data and you want to challenge that then you need a better theory. Galileo faced the same problem.

Now, I don't know much about climate change either, so I googled it. The IPCC 2007 report outlined how the last 20,000 years of glacial record show a warm period very similar to the four warm periods in the 600,000 years prior. However, the CO₂, CH₄, and N₂O levels in the last 250 years have continued to rise beyond the normal peak, currently exceeding previous records by over a full range. So it's evident that something has been releasing unprecedented levels of greenhouse gases in the remarkably short time since the industrial revolution.

As for CO₂ in particular, it's merely the most direct byproduct of burning wood, coal, and oil. It's not the strongest greenhouse gas, it is the simplest causal link between the massive sustained burning of carbon and vast quantities of CO₂ spontaneously appearing. If you want to know more about how CO₂ is a greenhouse gas, I'll be happy to google that, too.

What is a full range? does that have a number, is it a million kg per year? 5 million? And how does that compare to the actual atmosphere composition given that the atmosphere forms a 300 mile thick radius around the entire planet. Is the amount of greenhouse gases released by humans enough to make a dent in something large enough to form a 300 mile thick layer around the planet? Lets face it - you and climate science doesn't have the answers to these questions and until it does it will remain a hypothesis.

The six gases in the atmosphere that appear above 60 ppm have a combined mass of about 14.85 g/mol. Removing 100 ppm of CO₂ would reduce the mass of the atmosphere by 1.23 g/mol, or 8%. To convert that to kg/year, we have to take 8% of the mass of the atmosphere, roughly 5.14E18 kg, and divide by 100 years.

So a range is 4 thousand million million kg per year, or 4000 short scale gigatons per year, and is absolutely able to make a bulge in the atmosphere.

edit: I re-calculated the mass of the atmosphere. assuming that CO₂=C+O₂. This time I got 14.3790 g/mol, where replacing 100 PPM of CO₂ with O₂ reduces the mass by 0.0012 g/mol or 0.008%. That would correspond to 4 gigatons per year, whereas current estimates are 40 gigatons per year.

A more likely reason for holding the extremist position of an anti-vaxxer or climate change denier is the usual cognitive biases against incorporating new information inconsistent with one's current mental model.

Oh the irony. Political correctness played a large part in this election especially for the youth vote.

The left says: here is a list of things you can't say. Here are the punishments for saying them (public shaming, etc.).

The right says: say anything you like.

Unless it's in reference to a certain political candidate's hair, that is:

http://www.thewrap.com/gawker-says-peter-thiels-lawyer-threa...

What do you mean by this exactly? Trump lost the popular election with 47.5% support to Clinton's 47.7%. How did you come up with the "around 30%" figure?

http://heavy.com/news/2016/11/eligible-voter-turnout-for-201...

231,556,622 eligible voters

59,791,135 for Trump (25.8%)

60,071,781 for Clinton (25.9%)

I just grabbed the first website in the search results that had numbers, which are based on projections. I'm not standing behind their accuracy (I don't even recognize the site), but I have no reason to suspect they'd be purposefully wrong. And we're talking ballpark figures anyway.

Mrs. Clinton also got less than 50% of the votes. Neither one won a clear majority of the popular vote.

EDIT: Out of curiosity I looked some numbers up, going just by the ones that did turn out to vote, she has 47.52% of the cast votes, he has 47.19%. The difference in votes is around 400k.

Well, you wrote, 'he got less than 50% (as Clinton got more votes than him),' which means that the reason Mr. Trump received less than half the votes is that Mrs. Clinton received more than half the votes, which isn't true: both of them received less than half the votes because some voters voted for neither.

It's interesting that I'm being downvoted because folks think I'm a Trump partisan (I'm not!) I'm just pointing out facts, not opinion.

This does not, strictly speaking, imply that the winning (by plurality rules, not majority rules) candidate has over 50%, it merely sets the bounds on what all other candidates can have.

Clinton has more votes (popular vote) than Trump, ergo, he cannot have had 50% of the vote. That was my statement, and it's a factual statement. You interpreted it to imply that she, then, must have had over 50% of the vote. That was not my statement nor my intended implication.