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MarqFJA The Cosmopolitan Fictioneer from Deserts of the Middle East (Before Recorded History) Relationship Status: Anime is my true love
The Cosmopolitan Fictioneer
#137776: Sep 9th 2016 at 5:36:45 AM

Hell with the food chain. Every species of mosquito that bites humans needs to be EX-TER-MIN-ATED. Personal issue with how tasty they find me.
Genetic manipulation could be used to make mosquitoes find us untasy, though.

Fiat iustitia, et pereat mundus.
CaptainCapsase from Orbiting Sagittarius A* Since: Jan, 2015
#137777: Sep 9th 2016 at 6:02:47 AM

@Tacticsl: Honestly, the "Russia connection" never really did anything to Trump's numbers. In part I suspect because a fair number of people in the electorate are jaded to the Red Scare more than twenty years after the end of the Cold War.

Kostya (Unlucky Thirteen)
#137778: Sep 9th 2016 at 6:04:05 AM

[up][up]They might wind up attacking something else.

megarockman from The Sixth Borough (Experienced Trainee)
#137779: Sep 9th 2016 at 6:48:17 AM

New York Times op-ed by David Brooks: Party Realignment Is Looming (posted here for free article limit)

Time for a Realignment

David Brooks SEPT. 9, 2016

There's a good chance many of you will be switching political parties over the next 15 years. You may be a corporate executive who's voted rock-solid Republican for decades, but you may be a consistent Democrat by 2024. You may be an African-American community activist in Cleveland, but don't be surprised if you someday call the Republican Party home.

The fact is that political parties can swap constituencies in unexpected and dramatic ways. Over American history there's been a general pattern: a period of party stability; then some new issue comes to the fore that divides the country in new ways; old party coalitions fall apart and new ones emerge.

African-Americans were once Republican, but the Great Depression brought economics to the center and F.D.R. lured them the other way. New England professionals were once Republican, too, but the rise of Barry Goldwater-Ronald Reagan Sun Belt conservatism turned them Democratic.

We seem to be at one of those transformational moments now. Something bigger is afoot this year than the relative deficiencies of Trump and Clinton.

In the first place, many of the existing partisan mentalities are dying out. This is the last presidential election in which two baby boomers will be running against each other. In the years ahead, politics will no longer be defined by the hidden animosities of the Vietnam era, by the sexual revolution/culture war issues of the 1970s.

Future candidates will not be nostalgic for some white America of ancient memory or the union-heavy labor markets of the 1950s. They're not going to be fired up by the "paradise lost" hot buttons that excite the old guys who watch Fox News.

Politics is catching up to social reality. The crucial social divide today is between those who feel the core trends of the global, information-age economy as tailwinds at their backs and those who feel them as headwinds in their face.

That is to say, the most important social divide today is between a well-educated America that is marked by economic openness, traditional family structures, high social capital and high trust in institutions, and a less-educated America that is marked by economic insecurity, anarchic family structures, fraying community bonds and a pervasive sense of betrayal and distrust.

These two groups live in entirely different universes. Right now each party has a foot in each universe, but those coalitions won't last. Before too long the politics will break down into openness versus closedness, dynamism versus stability, what Ronald Brownstein of The Atlantic described in 2012 as the Coalition of Transformation versus the Coalition of Restoration.

The Republican Party is now a coalition of globalization-loving business executives and globalization-hating white workers. That's untenable. At its molten core, the Republican Party has become the party of the dispossessed, not the party of cosmopolitan business. The blunderers at the Chamber of Commerce and the Business Roundtable bet all their chips on the G.O.P. at the exact instant it stopped being their party.

Now imagine a Republican Party after Donald Trump, led by a younger candidate without his bigotry and culture war tropes. That party will begin to attract disaffected Sanders people who detest the Trans-Pacific Partnership and possibly some minority voters highly suspicious of the political elite.

The Democratic Party is currently a coalition of the upscale urban professionals who make up the ruling class and less-affluent members of minorities who feel betrayed by it. That's untenable, too. At its molten core the Democratic Party is the party of the coastal professional class, the 2016 presidential ticket of Yale Law and Harvard Law. It's possible that this year the Democrats will carry every state that touches ocean.

Just as the Trump G.O.P. is crushing the Chamber G.O.P., the Clinton Democrats will eventually repel the Sanders Democrats. Their economic interests are just different. Moreover, their levels of social trust are vastly different.

We don't normally think that politics is divided along trust lines. But this year we’re seeing huge chasms depending upon how much trust you feel toward your neighbors and your national institutions. Disaffected low-trust millennials see things differently than the Hollywood, tech, media and academic professionals who actually run the party.

This sort of divide is being replicated all around the world. The distinctly American feature is race. If the Republicans can drop the racial wedges — which admittedly may be a big ask — and become more the party designed to succor those who are disaffected from the globalizing information age, then it might win over some minority voters, and the existing party alignments will unravel in short order.

Polls suggest Democrats will win among college-educated voters and Republicans among whites without college degrees. The social, mental and emotional gap between those two groups is getting wider and wider. That's the future of American politics. Republicans are town. Democrats are gown. Could get ugly.


Somewhat separately, assume for the moment Clinton does win this year - is it plausible Clinton would voluntarily not run in 2020 (e.g., not because of horrifically low ratings) knowing that she pretty much won because she got lucky in who she had to compete with?

The damned queen and the relentless knight.
Fighteer Lost in Space from The Time Vortex (Time Abyss) Relationship Status: TV Tropes ruined my love life
Lost in Space
#137780: Sep 9th 2016 at 6:52:53 AM

I don't think that Clinton would voluntarily abstain from the 2020 election unless her administration's performance is abysmal. Doing something like that is almost always a guaranteed loss for your party regardless. This election cycle is an aberration not just because of the craziness of the Trump side, but because of the truly extraordinary level of media skepticism directed at the Clinton side. It's as if the news agencies had secret meetings in which they decided that it had to be a close election so they could get good ratings, so they'd play the "both sides are equally bad" card to absurdity.

Maybe not, though... the election seems much easier to understand if you paint Clinton as the candidate to vote for if you trust in our nation and its institutions; while Trump is the candidate if you do not.

As for the cultural division between those who trust and those who do not — I'm seeing that very much myself. It's certainly a plausible narrative.

edited 9th Sep '16 6:54:23 AM by Fighteer

"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"
CaptainCapsase from Orbiting Sagittarius A* Since: Jan, 2015
#137781: Sep 9th 2016 at 7:01:54 AM

I don't trust this nation or it's institutions. I'm voting for Clinton, and really can't fathom myself voting for a Trump successor. Unfortunately, I feel as if soon enough I'll just be skipping out on voting entirely because one party consists of rabid nativists and the other of warmongering corporatists.

Like, imagine a 2024 coalition where the democrats have inherited the GOP's jingoism and fully embraced neoliberal economics (presumably due to the GOP's corporate backers jumping ship) and where the GOP is the one advocating for expanding social welfare and progressive economics in addition to hardline nationalism.

Who the fuck am I supposed to vote for then?

edited 9th Sep '16 7:03:01 AM by CaptainCapsase

Kostya (Unlucky Thirteen)
#137782: Sep 9th 2016 at 7:04:48 AM

Why are you so convinced that the Democrats are itching to start another war?

CaptainCapsase from Orbiting Sagittarius A* Since: Jan, 2015
#137783: Sep 9th 2016 at 7:06:20 AM

[up] I'm not (not in the short term beyond the undeclared war in Syria we are already fighting). I'm just worried about the direction electoral coalitions may be shifting.

edited 9th Sep '16 7:07:04 AM by CaptainCapsase

TheHandle United Earth from Stockholm Since: Jan, 2012 Relationship Status: YOU'RE TEARING ME APART LISA
United Earth
#137784: Sep 9th 2016 at 7:09:36 AM

No, it's dumb. Opposition to TTPIP and TPP is not a matter of lack of openness. Quite the opposite.

Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.
Zendervai Since: Oct, 2009
#137785: Sep 9th 2016 at 7:11:42 AM

Keep in mind, while the GOP loves the Military-Industrial Complex and really are kind of jingoistic, they don't really like the actual military. This is most obvious from the treatment of the veterans.

CaptainCapsase from Orbiting Sagittarius A* Since: Jan, 2015
#137786: Sep 9th 2016 at 7:14:10 AM

[up] Veterans across history have been mistreated by the empires they bled and died for, and it's obvious why. They're a liability, collectively being a major breeding ground for armed uprisings, and other annoyances to the powerful. Hence why I view the common soldier as a victim, not a villain.

[up][up] For you perhaps.

edited 9th Sep '16 7:28:34 AM by CaptainCapsase

TheHandle United Earth from Stockholm Since: Jan, 2012 Relationship Status: YOU'RE TEARING ME APART LISA
United Earth
#137787: Sep 9th 2016 at 7:30:09 AM

[up]The Roman Empire used to reward them with land. Then shit happened.

[up][up]When you actually love someone, you don't send them to die except as a last resort.

Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.
Fighteer Lost in Space from The Time Vortex (Time Abyss) Relationship Status: TV Tropes ruined my love life
Lost in Space
#137788: Sep 9th 2016 at 7:31:22 AM

[up] The world is a dangerous place. Sometimes people have to volunteer (or be conscripted) to go die so that the remainder can be safe. This is a constant throughout history.

"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"
nervmeister Since: Oct, 2010
#137789: Sep 9th 2016 at 7:39:50 AM

[up]Though they may never fully replace trained soldiers tempered by experience and intuition, advanced weapons and tools like UA Vs, bomb robots, and accurate, long range targeting systems will put them in harm's way less.

CaptainCapsase from Orbiting Sagittarius A* Since: Jan, 2015
#137790: Sep 9th 2016 at 7:42:44 AM

[up] Which also comes with the unfortunate consequences of insulating the populace from the costs of war, and tearing down one of the major bulwarks against despotism.

edited 9th Sep '16 7:43:22 AM by CaptainCapsase

Ogodei Fuck you, Fascist sympathizers from The front lines Since: Jan, 2011
Fuck you, Fascist sympathizers
#137791: Sep 9th 2016 at 7:47:54 AM

I doubt it, unless we get to a situation like the Clone Wars, and even there a lot of actual people suffered even if it was manufactured soldiers who were the vast majority of combat casualties.

Wars these days are significantly less deadly than they were once, but troubles from them can still be felt worldwide. Has Syria even breached into the 5-digits of confirmed war-dead? But it breeds millions of refugees and creates literal worldwide problems despite that.

TheHandle United Earth from Stockholm Since: Jan, 2012 Relationship Status: YOU'RE TEARING ME APART LISA
United Earth
#137792: Sep 9th 2016 at 7:48:52 AM

Fighteer, the troops haven't been keeping the US safe from any immediate danger since 1945. That argument rings hollow. Furthermore, I did say last resort. Jingoism is when violence and threats are the first resort.

[up]At least its cities will provide excellent model fodder for the next Fallout. And so will it's stories, if someone bothers to tell them.

Joking aside, I'm not sure I'll ever be comfortable playing those games again.

edited 9th Sep '16 7:51:07 AM by TheHandle

Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.
nervmeister Since: Oct, 2010
#137793: Sep 9th 2016 at 7:56:37 AM

[up][up][up]That's where good and gritty journalism comes in. Keep the populace sufficiently uncomfortable with war - whether it's called for or not - by showing the grizzly aftermath, interviewing survivors, and informing of the economic and diplomatic backlash for all parties involved.

TheHandle United Earth from Stockholm Since: Jan, 2012 Relationship Status: YOU'RE TEARING ME APART LISA
United Earth
#137794: Sep 9th 2016 at 7:57:28 AM

Do you know how many journalists died in Iraq?

Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.
Matues Since: Sep, 2011
#137795: Sep 9th 2016 at 7:58:40 AM

Yeah, I don't see any minority group voting Republician unless the GOP completely guts itself.

They'd have to utterly alienate their white base in order to get anyone else to flock to them- but admittedly if they dropped racial issues but kept socially conservative issues, they could very well attract some minority voters who vote Democratic because the republican platform is outright hostile to them.

Fighteer Lost in Space from The Time Vortex (Time Abyss) Relationship Status: TV Tropes ruined my love life
Lost in Space
#137796: Sep 9th 2016 at 7:59:05 AM

[up][up][up][up] The United States has not been under territorial threat since 1898. If you are suggesting that war is never justified except in self-defense, then... well, let's just say that I acknowledge your opinion and do not accept it.

edited 9th Sep '16 7:59:32 AM by Fighteer

"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"
nervmeister Since: Oct, 2010
TheHandle United Earth from Stockholm Since: Jan, 2012 Relationship Status: YOU'RE TEARING ME APART LISA
United Earth
#137798: Sep 9th 2016 at 8:14:28 AM

[up][up] Always in a hurry to confuse me with an idiot. What did I ever do, that you always assume the stupidest position extrapolable from my words?

But let's assume that I am as much of a moral moron as you think. Educate me: what are the good reasons to kill and die in war, besides self-defense?

Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.
AmbarSonofDeshar Since: Jan, 2010
nervmeister Since: Oct, 2010
#137800: Sep 9th 2016 at 8:21:32 AM

[up][up]Other than a massively risky way to test one's psychological limits, I can't think of many.

edited 9th Sep '16 8:22:26 AM by nervmeister


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