The General US Politics Thread

I'm not surprised. The cracks started showing at least six months ago.:/

Do you think there's a way to rehabilitate Batman's image? Because while I understand why people don't like the guy, I personally do, and I'd hate for him to become inextricably linked to right wing politics and capitalism.

Edit: Unless, of course, this is too off-topic, in which case, don't worry about it.

edited 2nd Dec '16 5:38:05 PM by KarkatTheDalek

I mean, I know that happened, but when Trump actually won, and a lot of people assuming the party would fall in line with Trump, I'm very surprised it's officially happening so early. I knew we'd get one or two "rogue" Party members, but not "important" Conservatives shooting him down immediately. Especially when two of the most "important" Conservative Women in the United States, Ann Coulter and Sarah Palin, do so. Say what you will, these women do hold some sway over Conservatives, and even if their popularity and "influence" wane, some Conservatives will listen to them. (I should know, most of my family, especially my Parents, are die hard Conservatives/Trumpicans.)

edited 2nd Dec '16 5:40:24 PM by DingoWalley1

We also had "I'm going to vote for Trump, but I'm not endorsing him," Ted Cruz.

That's something we need to talk about how Donald Trump inspired a lot of popular culture from the 80s to 2000s, right before his current phase.

It's an interesting thing because Trump is the first man who used popular culture and mass media as his platform to success. Ronald Reagan for instance was never a popular actor or appeared in any good movies, and he had a bigger political career as President of the SAG (where he was a pro-corporate strike-breaking tool) and Governor Of California. Trump never had any of that. He's not even a great businessman, his whole strategy as a businessman was simply put his face, his name everywhere to give an image of success...

edited 2nd Dec '16 6:21:26 PM by JulianLapostat

The Michigan recount will begin on Tuesday

x4The discussion could be moved to the comic book subforum, I guess.

edited 2nd Dec '16 5:45:42 PM by IFwanderer

He inspired Lex Luthor's Businessman Transformation◊. He loves Citizen Kane and spoke about it here. He even said he is Batman.

There is room to discuss popular culture so long as it ties into the candidate in question, and what kind of influence it had. I mean Ronald Reagan's movies had no impact on his presidency and his campaign. But Trump came entirely from that world of mass media.

edited 2nd Dec '16 6:21:46 PM by JulianLapostat

Eh, that's alright. I'm not really feeling the whole discussion at the moment.

edited 2nd Dec '16 5:51:44 PM by KarkatTheDalek

something tells me Trump kinda missed the point of Citizen Kane.

I don't know about that. This is a political conversation in general about how comic books and pop culture have led to Trump's rise. That's relevant.

Oh wait, the moderators told us to stay on topic. So yeah, Trump seems to be speaking with Taiwan's president. I really hope he doesn't end up starting Cold War 2.0 with China, because if that happens, Fallout starts looking dangerously close to becoming Truth in Television without the Raygun Gothic technology.

edited 2nd Dec '16 5:57:20 PM by CaptainCapsase

I will say that in regards to "post-fact" politics, because we're in that environment it can become difficult to find out and evaluate what facts ARE, especially if you are a person without any real political or academic opinions to begin with and are even somewhat interested in becoming informed. When you are raised in an environment that promotes false equivalency and a distrust of academia, you aren't necessarily going to know who to trust.

...that only goes so far though, because some things like evolution, the Civil War being about slavery, and climate change are pretty much a unanimous consensus among credentialed experts so denying those based on you not wanting it to be true is pretty much the definition of post-fact. People are willing to trust experts only on subjects they have no real emotional investment in.

edited 2nd Dec '16 5:59:08 PM by Draghinazzo

It feels weird knowing your country is about to become the bad guy in general in global politics.

In international politics, "[t]here are, always and only, bad people, but some of them are on opposite sides."

We are going wrong in discussing the content too much, for that I apologize.

But basically the mass media has become about entertainment and not information. It's about promoting a view of good and evil, and that's a kind of comic book morality.And that flattened media landscape, which uncritically makes no issues with real problems about wealth and power contributed to that.

And its good that some people notice that. Like Ethan Coen of The Coen Brothers, and WGA President Howard Rodman. Rodman said something brilliant I thought about the election of Trump:

Howard Rodman: "In 2016 networks devoted more minutes of coverage to an email server than to climate change, jobs, education, healthcare, poverty, infrastructure, all other issues combined...We’ve so blurred the lines between reality and reality television that our nation can scarcely discern the difference. There is blood on our hands."

It is scary because you kind of have to find a way to become your own fact-checker. Especially because this election made the facts-folks bad because everyone predicted a Trump defeat by a landslide while he won by a narrow margin by using the Electoral College. The polls all predicted that and many are wondering about the data and stuff. And of course Trump-voters will use that as ammunition about the eggheads :"Them city-folks said President Trump was going to lose...and now they want us to accept climate change".

All that matters to them is power, winning the argument and not understand how messy, unpredictable the world is. The nuanced and difficult balance between educated guesses, intellectual responsibility, skepticism and the eternal uncertainty that everyone has to navigate, the smart and the dumb, the good and the bad.

Yeah...that's sad. But as I said Anti-Intellectualism has had a long history in America, elites have always been equated to intellectuals and artists here, and not those who are true elites, owners of capital and the super-rich.

In international politics, "[t]here are, always and only, bad people, but some of them are on opposite sides."

I don't think Taiwan's president Tsai Ing-Wen is a bad person. But then Terry Pratchett was always a Little Englander.

edited 2nd Dec '16 6:13:34 PM by JulianLapostat

x11

Reading that article about the Michigan recount is interesting.

So, the only person who'll be able to request a recount in future will the opposition presidential candidate, with all the easy targeting of motive and reputation that entails.

I suppose it also raises the spectre of saying that if even the opposition presidential candidate can be said to have 'no chance of winning in a recount' that even they won't be permitted to call one. I'm just thinking of the comments being made by many different people in the know (including Clinton's team) that it's extremely unlikely that a recount will change who has won the state.

edited 2nd Dec '16 6:13:47 PM by Wyldchyld

Well the Republicans want a One-Party State Oligarchy. They made that clear when they refused to nominate Merrick Garland and then said they won't nominate anyone even if Hillary wins...they will only accept a Republican-friendly justice.

The Republicans are not a popular party. Their policies are atrocious and they hold power by entirey anti-democratic means and they now have a candidate who is entirely unrepresentative of the interests of the majority of America's population who are also its biggest taxpayers I might add.

Honestly I don't understand why people say things like "Nate Silver gave Clinton a 75% chance and Trump won, therefore he was wrong and no one will trust his predictions anymore." That seems like a basic misunderstanding of what probabilities are. 25% means it can happen.

edited 2nd Dec '16 6:21:01 PM by Clarste

It's also similar logic to what the Leave supporters have used in the UK to discredit experts. Economists modelled a range of short, medium and long-term scenarios, and the media only reported the scenarios that fit their particular agendas. The Leave campaigners reinforce the idea that the experts were 'wrong' and only the experts try and explain what really happened - but no-one wants to listen to them.

And now (again media-driven) the blame is being put on the experts themselves for not getting their message to the public, or not challenging false claims and misrepresentations enough (of course, neither of which they could do because the media control the flow of information and know it).

I've noticed this happening in the US regarding the Trump election, too.

edited 2nd Dec '16 6:26:21 PM by Wyldchyld

Well that's not how the optics are playing out. There were all these talks of "liberal bubble" and so on, which I don't get and now everyone is feeling bad for the Trump voters and wanting to understand them, and to me its exactly like the end of Reconstruction and "the Redemption of the South", being suckered into a trap of falsehood.

Professor Allan Lichtman predicted a Trump victory but he predicted a Popular Vote victory, which is almost too terrifying to fathom.

Link

WHY?

GOD WHY?!!

HOW DID NO ONE NOT TELL THEM THIS WAS A BAD IDEA?!

edited 2nd Dec '16 6:32:47 PM by TacticalFox88

Incoming Cold War 2 in 3... 2... 1...

I think the thing is that why you would not expect there to be a "bubble" of some kind anyways? Depending on where you live popular opinion is gonna be heavily skewed in one direction over another and it could be difficult to find alternate views, at least as far as your real life acquaintances are concerned.

Many of the Trump voters are undeniably living in an even worse bubble.