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Edited by Mrph1 on Nov 30th 2023 at 11:03:59 AM
A lot of negative stats about the world's opinion of America focuses on its global influence, not on the nation or the population (to say nothing of individual Americans). In normal conditions, even countries that are hostile or have tense relations with the US still consume its media and like the country for other reasons. Reagan and Bush weren't popular, but they didn't depress the US tourist industry or threaten alliances. Trump...well we'll see.
Politics is the skilled use of blunt objects.Understood, though Trump has helped advance the narrative that the population itself is rotten—or at least irredeemable racists.
Election News at, well, its noon Somewhere in Spacetime!:
Will suburban mayor pay political price for backing Trump?
In Roger Claar's 31 years as mayor, Bolingbrook has grown from a sleepy town surrounded by farm fields to a diverse Chicago suburb nearly twice as large, with its own airport and even an IKEA. And every four years, Claar has easily won re-election, facing little if any opposition.
But then the mayor invited Donald Trump to town, hosting a September fundraiser for the future president at a city-owned golf club.
Now the 71-year-old, who was a Trump delegate to last summer's Republican National Convention, faces the fight of his career Tuesday against a union organizer and county board member who was a Bernie Sanders delegate at the Democratic National Convention.
Claar calls the situation "a bunch of B.S." and says Democrats "are trying to take over Bolingbrook."
"They want to take out a Trump mayor," said Claar, who is backed by a super PAC led by Ron Gidwitz, a top GOP donor who served as Trump's Illinois campaign chairman. "It's payback. That's all it is."
Claar also says personal politics are no reason to cast a ballot for or against someone in a mayoral race.
"There's no such thing as a Republican or Democratic pothole," he said in a campaign video posted on Facebook.
Traynere says the mayor could have avoided the challenge if he had listened to his constituents. The town that has a large immigrant and minority population is home to two mosques and backed Hillary Clinton for president with more than 60 percent of the vote.
More than 1,000 people signed a petition that was delivered to Claar asking him not to hold the fundraiser, she said, noting Trump made derogatory statements during the campaign about Mexican immigrants, Muslims and women.
But Claar went ahead with the event, which featured Trump and one of his top campaign surrogates, former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani. Tickets ranged from $1,000 to $250,000, and Claar said it raised "millions" for Trump's campaign.
As a group of about 150 protesters — Traynere among them — gathered across the street from the fundraiser they hatched a plan to run a serious candidate against Claar come April. Traynere was later drafted for the job.
"The mayor's inviting Trump here opened a door that wouldn't have been opened otherwise," she said. "He should have never done it."
In her talks with voters, Traynere said she's heard from Muslims fearful their children will be attacked and teachers who had children of immigrants crying in their classrooms because they were afraid their parents would be deported because Trump is in office. Knowing their mayor supported Trump has been a huge mobilizer.
"This is the person our mayor supported for president — somebody our community is afraid of," Traynere said. "He sent a real clear message. He said: 'Screw you.'"
And while the Trump visit may have provided the spark, there are plenty of other issues on voters' minds, many of them far more parochial than the presidency. Garbage cans, for example.
Bolingbrook doesn't use them, requiring residents instead to lug bags of trash to the curb for pick-up. Animals inevitably get into the bags, spreading garbage across streets and attracting coyotes.
Voter Deepti Suri says her children sometimes see coyotes as they wait for the school bus. She has tried to get the mayor and other officials to begin using the large plastic carts with wheels and lids common in other communities since her family moved to town two years ago but never got a response from anyone at the town hall.
She cast an early ballot this week for Traynere and said watching garbage collectors pick up trash by hand is a big part of the reason.
"It's so dehumanizing," she said before adding: "And he brought Trump. I can't support anyone that supported Trump."
Claar and his supporters, meanwhile, call Traynere a "jobs killer," noting she wants a graduated state income tax in which higher earners pay a higher tax rate. They argue the tax would especially harm small businesses.
An April Fool’s hoax: Gray falsely claims Handel endorsed him in Georgia Sixth
The former Johns Creek councilman sent out an official campaign release declaring Karen Handel, the leading Republican in the nationally-watched race, had dropped out of the April 18 contest and endorsed him. He echoed it with a tweet from his official account.
It was a hoax, of course. We saw both of them at Saturday morning’s Cobb GOP breakfast and they hardly spared each other a glance. Handel declared she’s the candidate to “kick some Ossoff” – a reference to the surging Democrat – and Gray talked about restoring the American dream.
They are the bitterest of bitter rivals, and this prank probably did no favors to mend strained GOP ties. Conservatives hope to rally around whichever Republican emerges this month to wage a June 20 runoff that will likely feature Jon Ossoff, who has become a face of the national movement to resist Donald Trump.
“The only people who think this dirty trick was funny are Jon Ossoff and the Democrats who stand to gain by a confused and divided Republican electorate,” said Sue Everhart, a former Georgia GOP chair backing Handel. “The Democrats are serious about flipping this seat and these games only help their cause.”
Brian Kemp launches ‘Georgia First’ campaign for governor
The Athens Republican pledged to impose an adjustable spending cap on Georgia’s growing state budget and return the rest to taxpayers, and drew applause from hundreds at a Cobb GOP breakfast with broadsides against “fake news” and the well-connected political status quo.
He promised his administration would “treat rural Georgia the same way we treat metro Atlanta” and emphasized his background as the owner of stone and construction firms – jobs he continues to hold as a statewide elected official.
“It helped that unlike many, I never ever became a full-time politician,” he said.
Kemp repeatedly highlighted the need to boost rural Georgia’s economy and put agriculture and manufacturing at the forefront of his campaign. It appeared to be a reflection of rural Georgia’s importance in the Trump era: The president lost Cobb and the rest of core metro Atlanta, but still won the state by running up huge margins in rural Georgia.
And he talked in tough terms about Georgia’s efforts to block those in the country illegally from voting or receiving state benefits.
“This is Georgia,” he said. “We will be putting Georgia first.”
In an interview after his remarks, Kemp said he did not plan to step down from his role as Georgia’s top elections officer through the campaign. That would give him a statewide platform through November 2018, but also would deny him about three months of fundraising during next year’s legislative session.
See, I've been raised in such a climate that my knee-jerk racial reaction is the opposite of most people: I'm a little more suspicious and untrusting of white people than I am of black or Mexican people. Obviously this isn't a good trait either, and I am making an effort to stop, but I guess it's relevant to the conversation.
I'm a asexual white male Gibraltarian immigrant to California of mostly Scottish and Italian descent, and a lot of military too, with my father training to be in the military and reading a lot of books on special forces before I was born, my late grandfather being in the navy, both my great grandfathers being in the military, and my ancestors being in the Scottish Black Watch. I was homeschooled with Connections Academy for most of my life in the US (Though I did go to regular school in Gibraltar), but am very intelligent. I used to be a Catholic, but have become an Atheist in recent years. I'm kind of a spoiled rich kid and very socially awkward, sticking to the internet and playing video games for most of my time. While I am very pasty and look much younger than I actually am, my father looks Arabic with brown skin, similar eye shape and facial features including a long beard, despite as far as we know not being blood related to any Arabic country.
I'm into very nerdy and obscure stuff, and have a obsession with Far-East Asian (Siberian/Far-East Russian, East Asian and Southeast Asian) culture and media, especially Japanese (And my father really liked samurai, getting several Japanese swords (Which I have hung up on my wall now) and occasionally tying his hair into a knot and practicing with them in the back yard), generally preferring Japanese video games over Western ones. I had a obsession with firearms, but started to lose it over the years. I usually didn't give a crap about politics until recently, but when I did, I always leaned center-left. I have always had a grudge towards Americans due to them always believing they are better than the rest of the world, always painting themselves as the unambiguous good guys in most of their media, creating the garbage that is social media and getting sick of seeing AR-15s all over the place instead of other rifles, but believed America was a better place to live than Gibraltar.
edited 2nd Apr '17 2:28:23 PM by Bat178
While we're giving personal information, I'm white, straight, and on the autism spectrum. I was never at risk of going full alt-right, but I'm an ex-Communist and I spent some time as a Bro-gressive member of the Unicorn Brigade, with all that entails (let's stop talking about identity politics and just, like, help everyone man). Then I woke up.
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We weren't expecting Brexit or Trump before we moved, mind you. It's more that there is not much to do or see around Gibraltar, with the country being very small, and I have acrophobia, so all the heights freak me out. It also tends to have a blackout every 2 or so weeks, which is incredibly frustrating with how much I like to use the internet and play video games (and the tendency of Europe to get games later or not even at all that North America gets irritated me, along with us having to pay higher prices for quite a few of them), gets almost Arizona-level hot in summer, and the storms sound like bombs being dropped on your head. On my last visit, we didn't have a router anymore as my dad took it to his house (We live in separate houses now) and we couldn't get one from Gibtelecom (The ISP of Gibraltar) while we were there, so I had to use one of those portable drives with limited internet data usage, which was a pain in the ass. California is actually also cleaner than Gibraltar, believe it or not.
On the other hand, we have Takeshi's Castle which is one of the funniest game shows out there, you can generally walk wherever you wanted as the place was small, the snacks are much better than America's, the food is cheaper and generally better quality, the people are generally nicer, and there are tons of great Indian restaurants, including one just beside my house there.
edited 2nd Apr '17 2:53:57 PM by Bat178
Straight, white, raised kinda/sorta deist. Neither of my parents were ever practicing Lutherans, but like most Danes I grew up with the Danish Lutheran Church. I've since run the gamut from atheist (until I realized the modern atheist 'movements' is Dickholes Galore) and since started mostly ascribing to agnosticism. My family's kind of odd in that one half of the family is an upper-middle class family with Conservative leanings (that's German style conservatism rather than US-style), while the other half has been working-class pretty much until my dad got an engineering degree, and voted overwhelmingly socialist/social democrat, which continues to this day.
I've pretty much always leaned left in some fashion or another, though it's run the gamut from social liberal to quasi-socialist to where I am now, which is sorta left—wing-of-the-Social-Democrats sorta thing.
Still not embarrassing enough to stan billionaires or tech companies.Well, I may as well introduce myself here as well. I am a nerdy, white, possibly Asexual, Autustic female. My parents and I are pretty liberal, although my dad fiscally leans more to the right (you know, the type of fiscally conservative, socially liberal, person that usally votes for moderate Republicans, until they went off the deep end.)
I'm honestly surprised to see that a few people here identify as social democrats. I was under the impression that this thread was pretty much exclusively centrists and moderate liberals. Personally, I'd consider myself a socialist, although I think social democracy is cool too.
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BTW, what exactly do you mean by "German style conservatism"? Would that be CDU-style Christian democracy?
edited 2nd Apr '17 3:03:53 PM by henry42
One does not shake the box containing the sticky notes of doom!I'm old enough to remember when Reagan ran for president. I and everyone I knew were appalled by the prospect. Reagan may seem at least semi-respectable now, compared to who we have, but at the time it seemed like a con-man had won the White House. To get a feel for the political climate on the left, read some Doonesbury strips from that era. I've been a leftie ever since.
I grew up in rural Ohio, and one of my earliest political memories comes from my teen years, when someone I knew explained that they like owning guns because they could protect themselves from the police (who, presumably, were coming to take their guns). I thought he was insane at the time.
Some years ago I had a friend who belonged to what used to be called the "Michigan Militia" (google them). I remember sitting around a campfire with half a dozen of these guys, armed of course, miles from anywhere, and speaking up for the liberal side. I distinctly remember the appalling racism of these people. Nearly all of them grew up in a particular neighborhood, and then watched as their neighborhood decayed away while black people moved in (at least, according to them). Thing is, they were tribalists to the core- there is "us", and then there is everyone else, and everyone else better watch it.
I think my progressive views are mostly a result of my experience growing up in a school that made you feel you were an outsider if you were from the suburbs and not a farm. I remember looking at a map of my local area circa the early 1800's, and marveling that so many last names on that map, from the early 1800's, were still attending my school (although they had long ago lost that farm). I know these people, know them well, but I have never been one of them. They are neither stupid nor evil, just desperate and afraid of a world they no longer recognize.
I'm done trying to sound smart. "Clear" is the new smart.As long as we're at it, white straight (barring the occasional random thought about Idris Elba or David Bowie) working class male over 50, in other words the stereotypical Trump voter. Except I ain't. I was raised in a house with a Deist/Objectivist father, a nominally Congregationalist mother and three older relatives who were reflexively Catholic. I've actually become more liberal as I've aged as I've realized that "reality has a liberal bias". My own philosophical/religious views are a mélange of Discordianism, gnostic Christianity, Buddhism, Jungian psychology and shamanism.
Trump delenda estI lurk on this thread more often than I post but I am a white, cis-gendered heterosexual Brazilian. My closest brush with the alt-right was in my youth when I was anti-identity politics and strong supporter of capital punishment as well as somewhat homophobic. I mellowed it out when my brother revealed himself to be gay, which changed my perspective on the world (not just regarding LGBT rights) and made me realize my mistakes.
"All you Fascists bound to lose."Trump claims that he will sneak attack NK if China doesn't help on NK
A sneak attack...
That he just told the world about...
Okay.
New Survey coming this weekend!EDIT: Sorry, didn't see the "off-topic" warning.
While I kind of started the conversation, I didn't get to say my own demographics: I am straight, male, in my early twenties, raised Jewish but not religious, probably fitting in the middle-class and I've recently (as in: at the beginning of march) learned I have Asperger. On race, well, building from Angelus Nox said, race gets awkward for us Latin Americans since the US has stricter "boundaries" for who's each race, so I guess I fit either as white or latino (if we talk about Argentina in a vacuum, I'm white). Politically, I first liked communism (because "'everyone should be equal?' that's a good goal, I like it", so it's not like I had any understanding of what communism is), then stopped giving a fuck about politics in my early teens and when I started frequenting English language websites I started leaning towards what the US calls libertarian (liberal here in Argentina), then almost fall to the alt-right and nowadays I generally support Social democrat positions, with some margin to lean further center or further left depending on the context and what my country's politics offer at the moment.
edited 2nd Apr '17 3:31:21 PM by IFwanderer
1 2 We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be. -KVWhite, cisgender female, poor and stuck in a dying town in a not-so-great state for poor people, had attraction to women early on in puberty until I forced myself into the straight closet, only to realize I'm bi in 2011. Since then, I don't fear letting others know I'm bi... on the Internet. I'm not out IRL.
My life was ruined by the Drug War, so yeah, screw that noise.
I have a fatalistic view of what passes for neo-conservatism. I think that most of the right-wing politicians have ruined the world to line their own pockets. And the sad thing is, they convince several Americans to hang themselves and tell them it's good for them (or bad for the kinds of people that some of them don't like). You can only imagine my opinion on Faux News and the even farther-right news outlets, at least as far as punditry is concerned.
However, I respect those on the right who are standing up to Trump in that regard.
I took a questionnaire on an app and apparently, I'm a social Democrat, but I don't like labels TBH. The more labels you apply to yourself, the less they seem to mean after a while.
I've always been leftist (pretty much because I thought I had to be to fit in), but I have become more liberal over time. Ready your eye rolls: Once I discovered Tumblr, I finally began to really listen to people and the bigotry they are confronted with. I began to recognize and confront my internalized bigotry and aggressions.
So yes, I'm annoying. I care about identity politics. I'm trying to care about and have empathy for as many people as possible.
It's interesting to hear from people who almost fell into the far-right abyss but stopped.
Do not obey in advance.

edited 2nd Apr '17 1:18:31 PM by CenturyEye
Look with century eyes... With our backs to the arch And the wreck of our kind We will stare straight ahead For the rest of our lives