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Edited by Mrph1 on Nov 30th 2023 at 11:03:59 AM
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Out negotiating, manipulating, etc.
edited 17th Nov '16 8:08:27 AM by TheWanderer
| Wandering, but not lost. | If people bring so much courage to this world...◊ |We free-spirited Americans want to watch football, wave our guns around, drink beer, and talk down about women and minorities. We don't like being told we need to be responsible for our lives or the future of our country. Economics, the environment, foreign policy — it's all boring nerdy stuff. Who's going to prop up our egos so we can ignore the persistent gnawings of guilt and depression?
edited 17th Nov '16 8:11:43 AM by Fighteer
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"Probably not, the hardcore guys would follow Trump anywhere. The Rust belt swing voters who gave him the election will learn how badly they fucked up when the economy doesn't recover (especially locally) and/or gets worse.
Trump hasn't built up a winning coalition or a base, he won a few key states by a razor thin margin. And his name is attached to a bunch of promises that he can't keep. And unless he pulls off a miracle his support base will be limited to the high 40% range, lower if his economic platform doesn't deliver.
edited 17th Nov '16 8:12:16 AM by Rationalinsanity
Politics is the skilled use of blunt objects.The fact that a large amount of Trump supporters voted for him because they were tired of being called racist indicates that as stupid and counterproductive as what they did is, they do see racism as wrong on some level. As opposed to the people who support him because they see racism or "race realism" as a virtue.
edited 17th Nov '16 8:14:33 AM by AlleyOop
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That's a big if regarding the economy. Trump might very well pursue a Bread and Circuses economic policy, and the GOP, perfectly happy to explode the deficit if the democrats are the ones left holding the bill and the economic elites get their tax breaks, may very well go along with it.
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Blaming voters doesn't really accomplish anything other than stroking your own ego. If you can't suffer their ignorance, educate them. If you can't (or won't) educate them, learn to live with the consequences.
edited 17th Nov '16 8:15:15 AM by CaptainCapsase
One thing that really pisses me off is how the conspiracy sites are reacting to Trump's win and Trump's behavior.
They love his win, and are okay with his behavior!
Back around the time of the Sept 11 attacks, my thirst for information about wtf happened led me to a conspiracy site called What Really Happened. It was very anti-Bush, and it said that the US government's screwing around in Islamic countries led them to finally fight back and attack us, and that our media didn't want to talk about that, nor did our corrupt officials.
I eventually grew out of conspiracy sites, as more and more, they turned out to be wrong about many things, or they made predictions that turned out not to be true. Their mixture of obscure truths and total bullshit got me trusting them and believing the bullshit. (Fun irony: What Really Happened claimed that people who try to bury obscure truths do the exact stunt - mix bullshit with the truth they want to bury. Well, it works the other way, is the conclusion I came to!)
So I checked the site a few days ago to see what it was saying. And it's basically pro-Trump propaganda. George Soros is secretly funding anti-Trump riots, and the bad things you hear about Trump aren't true, etc.
For a so-called "truth seeker", the founder of What Really Happened sure is a huge fucking tool. He apparently thinks government is inherently corrupt until we get a total moron who's totally corrupt in charge, and then suddenly this man is our hero. It's pathetic.
Nothing sustainable, but you can create the appearance of a good, or at least improving economy for a time if you don't give a shit about the next generation.
Then there's the Russian option, creating crises abroad in order to distract from internal issues.
edited 17th Nov '16 8:20:55 AM by CaptainCapsase
Facebook fake news writer: "I think Donald Trump is in the White House Because of Me"
This guy was interviewed by the WaPo because he's in the community of fake-news writers that social media sites like Facebook and Twitter are cracking down on due to their role in swinging the election. Now, he's not one of the bad ones, necessarily; he says that he hates Trump and was deliberately writing blatantly false and/or satirical pieces in the hopes that Trump's folks would pick them up and then be embarrassed when they turned out to be bullshit.
Well, the first part happened but the second didn't. And that, folks, is what's destroying our national discourse. There is no penalty whatsoever for lying, and the idea of fact checking is basically dead in the national media. We live in a world of Poe's Law.
edited 17th Nov '16 8:22:53 AM by Fighteer
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"This is what happens when you live in a post-fact world. Feels > Reals.
The media definitely takes a huge blame for this, For two decades, the cult of centralism is everything. Fact-checking and calling out someone as a liar is partisanship. Constantly selling the "both sides are the same, equal and valid" narrative. When poison and wine is presented as the same, who cares what you drink.
edited 17th Nov '16 8:31:12 AM by nightwyrm_zero
I don't know. The phrase "post-fact" strikes me as simply a term coined by modern generations who have experienced emotion-driven politics for the first time. Otherwise, appealing to the citizens' base instincts and desire has always been the go-to method of getting popular support since antiquity. Julius Caesar was popular because of his public reputation as a philanthropist for example.
Clinton's words at her first public speech since the election.
Reading that article made me tear up a little. She was well within her rights to ragequit politics after the clusterf*ck of an election this was, but I'm so glad she's not. Neither Obama nor Clinton will be leaving us to the wolves and that feels like a weight off my shoulders.
We're going to need both Best President and Rightful President if we're to get through this.
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Problem is we're on defense. Only 8 Republican seats are being contested in 2018 versus 23 of ours, and two of those opportunities are Texas and Utah.
We have a better chance of losing seats in 2018 than gaining them.
Yep. There is no such thing as a clean slate. Everyone has something that can be drudged up against them. Sanders would undoubtedly have fared far worse than Clinton did in the election. Based on just the samples of opposition research we saw there, he would be painted as an environmental racist and societal parasite who condones sex crimes against women and children while near-treasonously despising America and plotting to sell us out to Communist states.
No minority vote. No female vote. And even worse false equivalency than Clinton had. All while undermining the blue economical strategy for years to come by becoming the face of accusations that Welfare programs are for the lazy. "Sanders supports welfare. Sanders lived on it until his mid-thirties. Sanders is everything wrong with welfare programs. How do you feel about paying your hard-earned money so people like Sanders don't have to work? Vote red."
I still maintain that a Clinton/Sanders ticket would have steamrolled Trump, however. On his own, Sanders would have lost pretty hard, but true to Hillary's campaign slogan, the two would have been Stronger Together than either were apart.
We should make it a policy going forward that if a primary ends in anything but a landslide victory, the runner-up should be selected as running mate in order to combine their voters rather than pit them against each other. Despite his support in her campaign, the decision to snub him from running-mate and consequentially alienate his voter-base ultimately cost us the election.
Choosing Clinton was not a mistake, but choosing Tim Kaine was. Nothing against the guy, he's a cool dude, but the campaign really needed to put its money where its mouth was with its demands for unity. Nothing says "Unify the party" like combining the two most popular candidates onto a single ticket.
My Tumblr. Currently side-by-side liveblogging Digimon Adventure, sub vs dub.@Bonsai: There is actually a kernel of truth in there. Iran, Iraq and Afghanistan were the way they were in 2001 because of the meddling we did over there in the 70s and 80s in the name of fighting Communisim. We put Sadam in power. We backed the Shah of Iran who was corrupt and brutal to the point where the iranians revolted and established the theocracy. We funneled money to the Taliban in the 80s in a bit to oppose the communist government in Afghanistan. All those are pretty well documented.
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I'm not even thinking specifically about just this election. When the opinion of a single or small number of laypersons is considered to have the same weight and given the same amount of air time as the opinion of almost all of the world's experts, that's the post-fact world. "All opinions about the state of the world are equal and valid" is to deny there is an actual objective reality out there.
edited 17th Nov '16 8:39:18 AM by nightwyrm_zero
This is also why it's important for the Dems to have a good, charismatic public speaker with an appealing economic policy.
In an ideal world people would sit down for like half an hour and pay attention to the candidates' policies, to make an informed decision.
That's not the world we live in though.
People care more about feelings and "inspiration" than making a pragmatic or intelligent decision. So the democrats have to work within that, as depressing as it is. We can't risk another Hillary situation.
We need catchy soundbites, good slogans, and hope that enough bad things happen to turn SOME of the public opinion against Trump but not enough that things become apocalyptic.
edited 17th Nov '16 8:42:18 AM by Draghinazzo

Wow, the turnover rate in the Trump House is already insane, you can't run an executive branch like that.
And it looks like Trump is handling discussions with world leaders like he handled the debates, go in unprepared against people who are pretty good at their jobs (or at least listen to their goddamn staffers) and get your ass handed to you. Only now its his country that's suffering.
Putin nothing, the US's allies are going to run circles around Trump if they feel the need to.
Politics is the skilled use of blunt objects.