It is possible to view this as an isolated event or a trend. Coming on the heels of BREXIT this is a trend.
The attempts at building an interconnected globalised world are beginning to fail. A bunch of elites decided to create their own trans-national utopia unchecked by borders and dismissed all criticism as racist or bigoted. The globalisation project has been rejected by a majority of the population. Whether it is for economic reasons or just plain bigotry is something for the sociologists to study and not something I can pontificate on.
Also people seem to care a LOT about immigration and preserving their culture. Instead of patronising these people it's time we tried to understand their concerns and try to assuage them.
There is no genuine leftist alternative. It's a choice between center-right "left" that's sold out to the establishment and the far right.Economists need to stop acting like priests in the medieval ages who justified the existing order . The rural voter who lost his job doesn't care about the theory of comparitive advantage.
If this trend holds this will soon take hold in France and other European nations. This is a return to the world of the 1920s. Not gloom and doom but a much more unstable global order with every country for itself. Not what we need when we face planet scale threats like global warming.
Get out of your bubble.
Hang out more on subreddits you don't agree with.
The divide is bridged one person at a time.
PS - Reposted my comment from another thread as it got flagged. Hope its OK with the mods.
EDIT:
His concession speech seems to indicate that he's beginning to appreciate what he's been entrusted with.
We're seeing this pattern where the coasts of many countries are cosmopolitan and well-integrated into the world economy, but the interiors are very conservative and nationalistic. Scotland & London vs. Wales & the rest of Britain. The U.S. West Coast & Northeast vs. the Farm Belt, Rust Belt, and Mountain states. Croatia & Slovenia vs. the rest of Yugoslavia. The Baltic Republics vs. the rest of the USSR. Even in a Red State like Texas, Houston (on the coast) has gone democratic.
What happens if economic ties between coastal regions of major trading partners become greater than cultural ties within nations?
Here in California, some of the proposals about sending all the immigrants back to where they came from seem absurd. The economy would cease to function. On one of my teams of 10 people at Google, we had immigrants from Iceland, England, Vietnam, China, Taiwan, and India, and I was the only native-born American citizen. California would sooner secede than deport all of its immigrants.
What if it actually came to that? If push came to shove and the interior decided to push a nativist, nationalist agenda, what if the coastal regions that benefit significantly from trade were to say "Okay, you guys can play with yourself, we're going to play with the rest of the world." Scotland has threatened to do exactly that, and is planning on holding another referendum on independence if Britain actually follows through on Brexit.
What sort of organizing principle would the world have then? I haven't seen anything historically like that - the closest would be the Roman Empire that rimmed the Mediterranean. For most of recorded history, the primary means of production has been land and so fights have been over land, but over the last 150 years or so (contemporaneous with the nation-state as a social organizing principle, BTW), the primary means of production shifted to capital, and now it's shifting to information. What kind of social organizing principle does that imply?
> On one of my teams of 10 people at Google, we had immigrants from Iceland, England, Vietnam, China, Taiwan, and India, and I was the only native-born American citizen. California would sooner secede than deport all of its immigrants.
If you think the immigration debate is about Google employees, I think you don't understand the immigration debate.
> If push came to shove and the interior decided to push a nativist, nationalist agenda, what if the coastal regions that benefit significantly from trade were to say "Okay, you guys can play with yourself, we're going to play with the rest of the world."
The interior (culturally and geographically) is massively over-represented in the security forces and military. So good luck with that.
He didn't say that the debate was about Google employees. He said that Google is affected by the debate. This is a big difference and is increasingly relevant.
And what defen is saying is that the actual debate is about "illegal" immigrants. Not all immigrants. I have absolutely no idea where the idea that Trump doesn't want legal immigrants in the country came from; as that's certainly not true.
It's more than just immigration, it's trade too, as mentioned in the OP.
I work for a multinational contract manufacturing company; we currently have plants and employees in (among many other nations) Mexico (full of the Mexicans Donald Trump threatened to build a wall around) and Malaysia (which is majority Islam, of whom Donald Trump threatened to ban from the USA). So, yes, this result is quite... interesting... to me. Hopefully Trump is more bluster than action here.
I'll be honest, the problem with the current wave of anti-globalization (eg Brexit and Trump, also count France's Le Pen among others) is that I can't see the solutions being advocated doing any good economically for those who are advocating it. If anything, it may make things worse. Of course, a lot of what is driving these movements is more cultural anxiety and has less to do with pure economic factors, which in my opinion makes this a lot more challenging to resolve.
> I work for a multinational contract manufacturing company; we currently have plants and employees in (among many other nations) Mexico (full of the Mexicans Donald Trump threatened to build a wall around) and Malaysia (which is majority Islam, of whom Donald Trump threatened to ban from the USA). So, yes, this result is quite... interesting... to me. Hopefully Trump is more bluster than action here.
Those are certainly valid concerns, but can you explain to me how legal work visas don't address that? (Serious question.)
Legal work visas don't address the trade angle. It's unclear to me how Trump as president will affect both our global suppliers and our global customers, particularly the trade across borders.
It may end up being nothing, but to me it is an uncertainy. Businesses generally don't like uncertainty.
Plus, if we took Trump's primary bluster 100% literally (that "ban all the Muslims" talk), no one from our Malaysia plant who is Islam could visit corporate headquarters for any reason, work visa or not.
Such of course could end up being complete bluster, it probably is to be honest. Again, though, there's the uncertainty.
> I have absolutely no idea where the idea that Trump doesn't want legal immigrants in the country came from; as that's certainly not true.
He probably got it from Trump himself on one of the many occasions when Trump has talked about it. It seems plausible that he wants a c. 30% drop in net legal immigration.[1]
This is also a cornerstone of the Brexit "movement" (if you can really call a loose coalition of people without degrees in low income areas a movement). They want to cap or limit immigration, despite not being exposed to it in any meaningful way. (40% of inner-London's population is "foreign born", which suggests that a disproportionately high number of the UK's migrants live here -- a city which almost unanimously voted to stay in the EU.)
As a highly educated physician who voted for Brexit, I find your interpretation of the "Brexit movement" woefully incorrect. There are plenty of well informed, well read and intelligent people who feel that the concept of the European Union no longer provides a net benefit to Britain. No doubt there are plenty of well educated Americans who voted for Trump too.
> As a highly educated physician who voted for Brexit, I find your interpretation of the "Brexit movement" woefully incorrect.
It's interesting that a "highly educated physician" can't draw a distinction between one potentially anomalous datapoint -- their own characteristics -- and the data drawn from the characteristics of 15 million people. I had thought the makeup of the two respective movements were well-known.
Remain voters are more likely to be degree educated, and to live in a large metropolitan area which experiences significant immigration. Leave voters are more likely to be older, have tertiary college or a GCSE as their highest form of education, and live in a smaller cities, towns, and villages.
> There are plenty of well informed, well read and intelligent people who feel that the concept of the European Union no longer provides a net benefit to Britain.
By and large they're shuffling about with their tails between their legs at the moment as every single fiscal institution's observations about what a disaster a "leave" vote would be comes true, but you're right and I don't dispute this. The point I made is that the aggregate view of the leave movement -- and you can find this as galling as you like -- is of an uneducated, parochial, and ageing demographic.
> No doubt there are plenty of well educated Americans who voted for Trump too.
This is true, and is entirely unrelated to my original post. Amongst the college-educated, Trump won men and women by the bucketload (I think the only category he didn't win was college-educated white women but it was still a close-run thing).
Actually there's quite a body of evidence to suggest that when GDP is growing and income disparity is not significant, culture/sovereignty/immigration are not used as political footballs. When income disparity grows and GDP growth slows (or there's a recession), extremist politics -- usually centred around some sort of binary opposition -- rise. I.e. economics is everything, and people only kick up a fuss about other things when times are bad.
> Sovereignty
In purely semantic terms we are a sovereign nation irrespective of our EU membership. So it would be useful for you to unpack exactly what you mean by sovereignty. (IIRC the only way to violate one's sovereignty are: harbouring terrorists, invading a neighbouring country, violating the genocide convention, breaking nuclear non-proliferation.)
> Population density
Population density is fascinating to me because when you look at the 6m or so foreign-born workers in the UK, only 1.9m of them come from the EU. Bans on India, China, and Pakistan would be better ways to reduce population density. And, of course, if you removed all of the foreign born workers in the UK, you would see a massive reduction of… 24 people per km2.
I always thought people really cared about immigration's perceived drain on welfare. Which is why it's so funny that EEA migrants either a) overwhelmingly pay for themselves (pro-Remain numbers) or b) almost pay for themselves and certainly do a better job of it than the average UK national (pro-Leave numbers). Of the 7% of non-UK nationals who take up the welfare budget, Pakistanis are more likely to receive benefits than any other nation, and in the top 10 there's only three or four EEA nations.
> Culture
Left this one until last. The culture of Britain hasn't changed for the worse since Enoch Powell in the 1960s, Paki bashing in the 1970s, monkey chants from the football terraces in the 1980s, has it?
The "uneducated" argument is beyond played out now. One does not become "enlightened" and align some common set of views by simply getting a degree. If this is true then it's not called education, it's called brainwashing.
> The "uneducated" argument is beyond played out now.
You cannot equivocate on this point. When considered in the aggregate, leave voters are less educated than remainers. You can read whatever you want into that, but to say it's "played out" sounds like you're disputing it.
> One does not become "enlightened" and align some common set of views by simply getting a degree.
Nobody said anything about enlightenment or aligning around a common set of views simply by getting a degree.
> If this is true then it's not called education, it's called brainwashing.
Actually, no, it's probably called education. It's impossible to quantify, but it's axiomatic that traversing through to most classical forms of higher education has the effect of opening one's eyes to a broader range of viewpoints and beliefs than one might have previously been exposed to.
Education isn't about specific points of view or pieces of information, but about philosophy, critical thinking, and communication. For the many thousands of Brexit voters who feel duped by the economic aftermath and winding-back on promises made by the leave side, a little education on critical thinking and the outright, literal lies of the media they consume would probably have led to them voting differently, and feeling happier about it.
Regardless, nostrademons' point still stands. Over 50% of US farm workers are undocumented immigrants[1], and 1 in 10 farm workers in California are undocumented migrant workers[2]. That's a very sizable chunk of the labor pool.
Ann Coulter is the defacto Trump advisor on immigration and she can't hide her preference for either only or predominantly white immigration and if that untenable for some reason, just limit it to absolute minimum.
So, it is not just about illegal immigration, this is just a red herring for what it really is at stake here.
> What if it actually came to that? If push came to shove and the interior decided to push a nativist, nationalist agenda, what if the coastal regions that benefit significantly from trade were to say "Okay, you guys can play with yourself, we're going to play with the rest of the world."
I think if it actually came to that, it would eventually mean war. The interior economy falls apart, coastal regions secede, the poor countries would inevitably be driven to war against the coastal regions out of desperation. Extreme nationalism would just make this more likely. No one should think this is a good idea.
Also, saying coasts are "well-integrated into the world economy", implying the rest of the country is not, is just a horribly myopic view of the world. They are only "well-integrated" because the government chose and planned that explicitly - globalization and free trade as an economic policy, removal of protectionism (e.g. NAFTA, etc) and heavy subsidies of the industries involved (especially tech, via military spending).
It didn't have to be that way - it isn't because tech, finance, whatever is more meritocratic or anything. With more sensible protectionism you could have international trade while still preserving your country's manufacturing base, allowing the rest of the country's economy to also be "well-integrated". But labor is expensive in developed countries, corporations want more profit, and our government doesn't particularly prioritize the working class.
I'm explicitly avoiding the question of whether this is a good idea and considering only whether it's a plausible idea. In other words, predictions, not plans. I actually think a major war in the next decade is very likely, and no, I'm certainly not looking forward to it, but I'm very curious as to what it would look like if it did.
So leaving morality and emotions out of it - why does globalization seem to disproportionately benefit the coasts? I don't buy the "because the government chose and planned that explicitly" - the laws and treaties they write affect all citizens equally. Obviously there are going to be some winners and some losers, but how did it come to be that the winners are disproportionately concentrated in certain geographic locations? There's plenty of military spending and military bases that go into Montana and Wyoming, and much of it is quite high-tech (that's where the nuclear arsenal, is after all), but you haven't seen Silicon Mountain spring up. What's different?
And if we answer that, how can we replicate that in many places so that we don't see so much political blowback because a large segment of America is left out of the prosperity that globalization has brought elsewhere?
I question even the assumption that Silicon Valley is a success. I don't think many bay area locals would agree. Economic output isn't really success, in my mind. Providing everyone with a middle class quality of life would be a success.
S.F. has one of the largest homeless populations of any city in the U.S.. By any sensible definition, most cities in the U.S. are doing pretty terrible at providing quality of life, or "success", to their occupants.
I think the only way to improve things is the government would have to make policies that actually benefit the majority of the population. That would mean taking a look at all industries in the country, figure out what kind of economic policies would benefit most people (not military spending), curb the excesses of capitalism (prevent monopolies, ensure competition), and fund basic social policies like health care. The U.S. has gone so entirely bonkers, giving in to the natural progression of capitalism, it's hard to see if there is any possible hope left.
Another path forward that seems reasonable is to let capitalism mostly flourish as it may (after all by many accounts, the US is doing pretty well, creating lots of jobs, output is up but in automated factories, wages finally starting to rise a bit, etc), but tax the upper and upper middle class a little heavier and create a new New Deal for the "post blue collar" age.
Expand the Americorps program for instance. Investments in commuter transit seem like a particularly good idea because would be construction jobs building it, and then it could make commuting from rural areas to cities faster and easier which means that more people could participate in the growth of the cities.
I'm sure it wouldn't be perfect, and maybe I'm just biased as one of the liberal elites or whatever. But this seems like a much better world to live in then one where we just start curbing technological advances further and further to preserve the 19th century ideal of working class jobs when they are less and less needed.
Rebuilding failing infrastructure seems like an obvious path, but it means people must leave places like WV and MI. That is a tough thing for many.
Even though I lean libertarian, I think we are quickly approaching a time where a basic income will be needed. The pace of technology moves so fast, that jobs literally disappear overnight.
Coasts have historically been good for trade, which is good for city development. Your question isn't about coasts, specifically, it's about urbanites.
Cities have much more freedom of labour, and fewer single industry employers. They're more agile, more resilient, to changes in the world economy. They're less dependent on industry that can reasonably expected to be aided by a nationalist industrial policy. They have more people who weren't born there; people who are used to moving to where work is, finding a community where they go, rather than identifying with an area and a community they inherited and will bequeath. They are literally less tied to the land that makes up a nation.
So leaving morality and emotions out of it - why does globalization seem to disproportionately benefit the coasts?
Coasts are where most of the cities are. As for where globalization benefits? This question is somewhat oversimplified. There are two factors: the culture/demographic side and the economic side. That is, globalization has economic winners and losers AND cultural consequences.
Obviously there are going to be some winners and some losers, but how did it come to be that the winners are disproportionately concentrated in certain geographic locations?
You might better ask, why did certain geographic locations win? The people have changed. One of the key requirements of globalization is the free movement of labor. Jobs move to where the labor is and labor goes to where the jobs are. A small town has no future when it loses its only factory to Mexico while all its brightest youths go to Silicon Valley and New York City to work in IT, Media, and big Finance and spend lots of time getting drunk and having sex. Once that happens, the small towns left behind either manage to pivot into tourism or an exburban haven for telecommuters, or they just die a long, slow death; kept on life support by Wal Mart while Meth labs and Mexican heroin ravage their communities.
One other important thing to look at, as far as people's attitudes go, is the pace of change and the nature of the change. If a local factory failed because they failed to compete with foreign competition, that would inspire people to figure out a better way to compete. Everyone fails together or succeeds together. But when a local factory is shut down because the owners have decided to cash in on globalization, people are more likely to be upset and feel betrayed and look to government for help.
> I think if it actually came to that, it would eventually mean war. The interior economy falls apart, coastal regions secede, the poor countries would inevitably be driven to war against the coastal regions out of desperation. Extreme nationalism would just make this more likely. No one should think this is a good idea.
There is also a matter of food supply. There is a sentiment among rural people in my area (not US) that it's them who are doing actually important work for little pay while the cities waste time and money on bureaucracy and pursuit of fads.
Don't we give them massive subsidies? I ask since I know my family back east in Iowa does get a ton of federal money for farming, which was what inevitably ended up destroying farming in Mexico, where it isn't heavily subsidized and thus can't hit anywhere near the same price point per bushel.
> my family back east in Iowa does get a ton of federal money for farming, which was what inevitably ended up destroying farming in Mexico
And this is why liberal- and capitalistic-minded farmers despise EU subsidies. You have to take them to be competitive, but in order to get them you have to do what Brussels wants you to do. They set quotas on how much of particular goods particular countries are allowed to produce, subsidize regions they think are "important" or "disprivileged" or whatever. And if they feel like funding something else instead of you today, you are uncompetitive and screwed.
Don't get me wrong, some funding is neccesary like paying farmers to let their land lay fallow for a year so it may regain nitrogen & nutrients, and quotas have helped us avoid food insecurity, but the current system needs broad reform, to make a run of it as a farmer in the US today you need at least 500+ acres, which wasn't the case 50 years ago.
I remember back in the day when Mexican president Carlos Salinas promoted the NAFTA deal as a solution to our problems. I started to disagree when reason came to me (I was too young when it happened), few reasons:
- I believed in a more protectionist system that encouraged internal growth. I still do to a point.
- Trading is good as long as you don't compromise internal production and employment. NAFTA is way too aggressive in this sense.
- It will triggered this bad "us-american?" behavior of consumerism and materialism.
Well, here we are 22 years after and it's evident the system got exhausted, even for US-Americans who were supposed to be the strong link in this chain.
Is killing NAFTA a good idea? maybe. I don't know. We are so deep into these waters that it has to be a small "chunk by chunk" change, and even so, it'll be chaos.
What I am sure we need, is to find a new balance, going all protectionist will be a huge mistake, just like this crazy aggressive neoliberalism that allowed companies behave irresponsible. Believe me, the consequences of this 20+ years trade system in Mexico are massive.
Wait, I'm not a pro-Trump crazy Mexican, keep reading.
As I said, we need a new balance. To my eyes, Trump is an extremist and a dangerous man, he doesn't sound or act like a guy that could bring this balance. I think USA voters made a huge mistake on electing him. But, at the same time, they had 2 very poor choices. They just chose the worst one.
The years to come will be interesting ones... that is given.
London isn't on the coast. What you're looking at here is not coasts vs non-coasts even if American maps might make it look that way. It's cities vs everywhere else. It just so happens that in America most of the biggest/best known cities are on the coasts.
In Britain, at least, I'm not even sure it's cities vs everywhere else. The large cities of the Midlands and North (Birmingham, Manchester, Leeds, Newcastle) went for Brexit much more than anyone expected. It's more a case of new economy vs old economy. That's not really a surprise is it? People in places that benefit from globalization vote in favour of globalization; people in places that have seen manufacturing or rural jobs vanish in the face of globalization are reacting against these changes. In this light, both Brexit and Trump, which both promise quick fixes, are not really a surprise. Unfortunately there are no quick fixes - as technology increases, so must specialization. There's no going back - that ship has sailed.
I suspect what we're seeing here isn't actually even cities vs everywhere else. I suspect this correlation is obfuscating the real connecting variable which is age.
Young people live in cities. As they get married, buy houses and have children they move out into the suburbs.
Young people tend to vote left wing and be more supportive of the 'elite'. Older people tend to be more conservative and, apparently, more willing to give the 'elite' a good kicking.
I'm fairly left wing and I couldn't care less about the 'elite' (as long as they pay taxes at a rate that is fair given their net worth like everyone else).
This "if you are left you support the elite" thing at least in the UK was a way of conjoining the left and the elite into a single entity so that you could say to Joe Bloggs "these people don't care about you" and it needs addressing by the left.
The lefts biggest problem (here) is they simply aren't addressing the concerns of their traditional voting block at all, they seem to be more concerned about in-fighting and political correctness, I'm all for political correctness but you can only focus on so many issues and some issues are simply more important (particularly if you want to win elections and if you aren't focused on that you are a debate society not a political party).
A simple reading of what the left has traditionally stood for should make it obvious that the left and the 'elites' are opposed purely on simple economic grounds, We want them to pay more taxes, they don't want to pay more taxes (which is to be expected, who does?).
Frankly the biggest issue in regards to politics in the UK is the media (and I don't just mean the majority of the print media that is hilariously and obviously biased towards whatever Murdoch wants) but the media as a whole, the drop in revenue from the move to internet news has meant that they have to sell click bait and "agendas" to get traffic so we end up with these horrible echo chambers of bias-confirmation.
Frankly I think we are heading into a really dark period of politics here and I don't see any way to stop it.
I completely agree with your assessment that the media selling "agendas" is the problem. Not just traditional media, but social media too. Dialogue and democracy aren't attractive anymore, we've been basically coerced into fear and put into boxes.
From my point of view, the lefts biggest problem is that the "left" of today is pretty much the center. I find it extremely hard to take any left-of-center (think Bernie Sanders) position today. Anyone not in the center or in the right and you'll have both the liberal (as in economically liberal) and the conservative media against you. I don't live in the US/UK, but I live in an increasingly anti-leftist country. I can't even complain that Uber eroding worker's rights without being called a commie here. I honestly feared for my life one time when I was wearing a red t-shirt and accidentally bumped into a right-wing rally when I was visiting another town.
But the thing is, it doesn't take a lot of empathy to see that a lot of conservatives are feeling the same way: they complain that the media has a liberal-bias, they complain about not having the right to speak (because of political correctness), they complain about persecution because of their religion, they had their jobs taken away and the establishment (which they perceive as being completely on the left) failed them... they have liberal media against them. I can completely sympathize with all that.
Funny thing is that from reading comments of Trump voters, I feel as if the more radical left and Trump voters have a lot of fears in common: automation taking jobs, globalism taking jobs, elites raking it, the center-left liberals being too worried about what they call "political correctness" but saying fuck-off to workers, religious and rural people... Not to mention I can totally sympathize with how they crave for more radicalism in politics, just like I, as a leftist, do.
As I wrote that last paragraph, I wondered if what we're actually witnessing is the end of that brand of centrist/moderate liberalism. I'm biased but I think that the demise of liberalism will be that cause "dark times ahead", unless we find a viable left to strike a balance with the current right.
I think your observation that the "harder left" and "harder right" have a lot in common is a valid one, I suspect a lot of people who would have voted for Sanders voted for Trump.
In a way I think the values of "left" and "right" don't really apply like they did (if they ever did) anymore.
On some issues I hold views that the left would call me a right for and the right would call me a left for (e.g. Some things the the state runs should be private, some things that are private the state should run, not all defense spending is bad, fairer taxes can mean higher taxes on the rich, regressive taxes hit the poorer harder, religion has zero place in the bedroom or in reproductive rights, equal rights does not mean positive discrimination, the right to free speech doesn't mean the right to no consequences, single payer healthcare is not the devil (I'm British, the NHS is one of the better things we did), a social safety net is part of the social contract, immigration is broadly a good thing and rarely a very bad thing etc etc), corporations should pay their taxes and those found to be avoiding them should be punished in a way that actually makes it easier for them to just pay, we need to spend a lot on infrastructure (our national audit office found that there is between a 3 to 1 and 7 to 1 RoI on infrastructure spending).
I'm all over the spectrum when it comes to left/right, what I don't like (near universally) is the crop of politicians on either side of the old left/right.
What I'd really like is a party that addresses the tough issues with evidence led policy and the honesty to say "That's a tough problem, We don't have a total solution but we are going to try <foo> because we think it'll work better than <bar> because <fizz>".
There isn't enough nuance in politics anymore, everything is absolutist "This good, you bad", I want smart, articulate thinking politicians who are thinking about the big problems (where the problems aren't how do I benefit myself).
The actual city centres buck the trend, as you point out, by attracting young, mobile, educated, affluent people who are more likely to be open minded and engage easily with people from other backgrounds.
But get out of the cities in the north of England and you find a place not dissimilar to America's Rust Belt: forcibly de-industrialised, full of lingering resentment. When I go back to my hometown in the north it sometimes feels as though time has stood still since the 1980s, and the steelworkers and miners who Thatcher put out of work now have children and grandchildren who have been brought up feeling hard done by, apathetic and with few aspirations, despite having access to free education, welfare and healthcare that other countries would kill for.
This is the white working class problem incarnate.
> despite having access to free education, welfare and healthcare
That's the rub. I think they'd prefer to work. There are few places left in the modern world to find meaning. Supporting one's self through productive work used to be a great one. Living off the largesse of the state is demoralizing.
The jobs their looking for are not coming back, and its not just trade and immigration, but technology as well. While poverty can be mitigated through the welfare state, it isn't an ideal solution in the long term.
> That's the rub. I think they'd prefer to work. There are few places left in the modern world to find meaning.
Yes. That's why I'm critical of Universal Income. I believe that UI would only push those people further down, making them completely unnecessary, without purpose at all, their tasks in society being relegated to merely being a consumer.
I'm totally in favor of having free education, welfare and healthcare, though. I do think we need a balance here.
The pr(o|e)mise of UI is that, since you no longer need to sit at a desk retyping TPS reports in order to put food on the table, you are freed to raise horses, or sell homemade candles and jellies, or study poetry, or teach gardening, or sail off to the Canary Islands and research birds, or even do freelance accountancy if that suits you. Or just devote all your time to raising your kids.
In other words, to pick your own purpose: to be able to contribute to society (and the economy) in a way that you actually might enjoy instead of whatever stupid job you can manage to find where you live.
I don't know that this vision of every mom-and-pop becoming an entrepreneur would actually work out that way -- few things work out the way they sound on paper -- but it sounds better than people getting so upset they just want to burn it all down.
> Young people tend to vote left wing and be more supportive of the 'elite'.
I think we need to unpack that a bit more and deal with this "left wing elite" myth.
If I remember rightly, people have been digging for correlating variables and found that the best one for Brexit is .. support for the death penalty. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-36803544
tbh the "support for the death penalty" correlation is pretty consistent with the view of young social liberals vs older social conservatives. It's a pretty good proxy variable for those groups.
(I doubt many Leave voters even realised they needed to vote leave the EU to allow for the possibility of peacetime death penalties; it certainly wasn't a campaign issue!)
Yes, but what I should have expressed more clearly is that it's a better predictive variable than mere age.
Not the death penalty specifically, but anti-ECHR campaigning has been going on for years. (Yes, I know that's not quite the same as the EU). And I do feel that there is a big, vague punitive component to both Brexit and Trumpism.
Ok, my mistake, I live in those areas and have never heard it used in a derogative manner - I'll check it out though and change if needed.
I would have said suburbs but that wasn't quite right as there are decent sized towns and cities encompassed in the area I am talking about but whom OP was using to claim that Newcastle voted leave when it didn't - it was the surrounding towns and cities that did.
OK. IN this case it might be just my ear - I'm not a native English speaker - but I've recognized the tendency of urbanites to dismiss suburban areas as "hinterland" or something similar. At their peril.
Scotland also isn't cosmopolitan, certainly not on the scale of London. It hasn't had anything close to the scale of immigration that other parts of the UK have had. It has deep seated issues with sectarianism rather than race.
There are parallels with Brexit, though I don't think many of the underlying causes are the same. I very much agree that those who play identity politics and deal in absolutes - "you must agree with me or you are an X" - are being burned an electorate who have heard that line a few times too often.
The election in France with Marine La Pen does have the potential for another Trump like upset - the next one to watch.
Remember that the UK is 80% white and London is 50% white; it's really striking how and probably relevant that the nonwhite population of the UK is concentrated in a few metropolitan areas.
But remember that "white" and "foreign" are not the same thing! Edinburgh has a substantial Polish community. I have coworkers from Ukraine and Romania.
"How cosmopolitan is Scotland, really" is a complex question. It's official policy of the very popular SNP, and there's little toehold for UKIP or xenophobic politics. I think they've quite successfully attached the free-floating blame to Westminster. While in the rest of the country blaming foreigners is more popular.
Having different press (including separate editions of the Mail and Sun) probably also makes a difference. Brexit is very much a long-term press project.
Edit: I didn't mean to imply that it's not a problem now - but it's no means as big a problem as it used to be (and I have direct experience through family members of horrific bigotry towards and to Catholics in Scotland).
Funny thing about the "people still get knifed at Old Firm games" comment itself is that it raises something that isn't really a problem so much anymore (Rangers/Celtic hadn't met in four years until September, where there was one arrest out of ~60,000 fans) and misses the stuff that really is an issue - areas which are still deeply segregated + gang violence split along these lines, provocative/offensive songs, flags and banners used by both sides at the football
But as you said - it's nothing like what our grandparents' generation would have experienced, or what went on in Northern Ireland during the Troubles.
I remember having a rather surreal experience a few years back, sitting at a bar on the Meadows during the festival with the Lady Boys of Bangkok on one side and an Orange Walk on the other.
I'd have said it went all the way back to the Civil War and the Jacobite insurgencies. Certainly NI's sectarianism is explicit about the Battle of the Boyne 1688.
It definitely is big cities versus rural areas rather than coast vs not coast.
It just so happens that most big cities are on or closer to the coast (or along large rivers in earlier history). It made travel and trade much easier.
If the London city-state's boundaries are determined by the Brexit vote, remember that Hillingdon (Heathrow), Uttlesford (Stanstead), Crawley (Gatwick) all voted to leave. Only Newham (London City Airport) was majority Remain.
Instead of correlating voting trends with coast vs non-coasts, it's more correct to correlate them with newbies vs non-newbies. Newbies just happen to gather on places with more opportunities and these places often happen near the coast.
Simplifying: non-newbies feel that newbies are hurting them more than helping.
That's right, it's town vs country. Election maps that drill into districts will show you the same in any country. Basically anywhere with a sports team (they play in cities) tends to be "leftie" and everywhere else not.
You're misunderstanding the proposal about immigrants. The proposal is to send all immigrants that are here illegally back to where they came from.
Yes, I agree it would hurt the California economy if that happened. But are you saying that on your team of 10 people at Google, all of them were here illegally? I can't comprehend the fact that Google would hire immigrants without proper visas or background checks. If they're legal immigrants or they have the required visas, they would be just fine.
edit: the proposal is also just that...a proposal. It's not guaranteed this will happen.
I am (somewhat deliberately, since this thread was initially about Brexit + Trump being part of a more general trend) conflating what Trump said about immigration with what his supporters have said about immigration. Trump's proposal was about illegal immigration. I actually think that as president he's going to be a lot more moderate than many on the left fear.
I'm also pretty sure that there are supporters of his that actually want to send all immigrants back to where they came from. "America for Americans", right? And most of the hypotheticals in this thread are about what happens if that wing of the party gets its way and pushes through rather extremist legislation.
No sir, its not 2 or 3 people, its far too many to count now. I've seen many of these cases where Trump supporters just want to send (legal or not) immigrants to their countries. And yes, not all Trump supporters are the same, but people are using his ill messages as an excuse to express their xenophobia to critical levels.
This is actually a great example of the current phenomena where left-wing elites draw out the caricatures they want to see from their out-group (lower class or rural whites) and then reinforce it through their echo chambers.
No one at This American Life has any insight into what it means to be a blue collar worker worker.
Please don't hold me to a standard that was not requested. I don't believe there is any evidence that this was drawn out; as far as I can tell, many of the statements are simply recordings of town hall meetings.
I think that what people are trying to explain is that that kind of shaming, accusatory, intentional, mischaracterization of the 'right' is what caused us to now have Trump as our president. You are alienating them.
The kind of people that I know that actually voted for Trump could not care less about the color/religion of a person so long as they had a basic desire to assimilate. In other words; come to America to become an American not to make America like place you left.
Now we have an obligation to understand these Trump voters as generously as possible; or we can berate, belittle, and battle-harden them and get another Trump (or worse) in 8 years.
I think the question is what it means to be American. To me, it means living and let living, and to accept others no matter who or what they are. To others, it means to be white and Christian.
That's exactly the current, default, ungenerous, belittling view held by democrats. How did that work out?
If you cannot understand them you cannot help them see why Trump is a bad idea.
It seems to me that you've dismissed them, having never thought to put yourself in their shoes; the shoes of the factory worker.
Michael Moore has friends that he likes, that he thinks are good people--not ignorant racists--that voted for Trump and instead of closing his mind to them he's tried to understand >> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YY-CiPVo_NQ
I mean, as a (legal) immigrant it's hard to believe that that's not the case, when I've been shouted at in the streets and told to go home to my country. Or when my (American born and bred) wife has been heckled for daring to show up wearing a hijab at an Indiana primary by white folks wearing Trump gear. I'm sure there are a lot of good people who voted Trump, but a whole lot of wicked people who threaten me and mine's existence in this country did too.
Nothing I said should leave you believing that some of Trump's supporters aren't xenophobic assholes.
But to now extrapolate from that to imagining that 47% of Americans voted for Trump because they are xenophobic assholes is not going to be a winning strategy.
Right, and I didn't say you said that, nor did I say that all 47% of those Americans are xenophobes. I just said that there are enough who are to make living here uncomfortable for us, even though in all other respects we love this country and would love to spend our lives here.
Stop talking about racism/xenophobia in relation to Trump's being elected. You cannot win the ~90% of Trump supporters by linking them with the ~10% of his supporters that are disgusting low lifes. You are distracting people from solving the problem.
It's a legitimate concern that I have that needs to be solved - the fact is that a whole lot of those people who are low-lives have found validation for their perspective with the Trump election. That is a concern for me and my family; I don't feel happy about the fact that my kids will go to school with other kids bullying them and echoing racist crap because the Commander in Chief does so, or because he implies that people from my part of the world are bad. I can't just not bring these concerns up because you think that detracts from the grander scheme of fixing the Trump supporters' problems.
Seems to me like you are disregarding my concerns in the same way you're accusing me of disregarding Trump supporters' concerns.
I am going beyond what I agree with. My statement is a strict super-set of your's.
Yes, Trump is a morally repugnant person. Yes, he has supporters that are as well. Yes, you should be concerned about both of those issues.
Now, while remaining concerned, let's talk; do you think lambasting 47% of voters--some of whom are (by your own admission) not intrinsically, categorically, irrecoverably, lost--is a good or bad strategy towards avoiding another Trump?
I also agree that lambasting all 47% is a bad idea. I never said that it was good; I just made a statement that a portion of those 47% are horrible people who are emboldened by Trump's demagoguery and will make life difficult for minorities like me (which, as you described is a subset of your statement). I made no comment describing the rest of your statement (perhaps you misread my initial reply to you as a blanket statement when it wasn't meant as such?) and I don't disagree with you on it. I would be very happy if we could find a way to make America work for everyone, rich or poor, white or coloured.
Not sure how to say this in a way that doesn't sound smug or self-righteous but...that's the price you pay for empathy and at least attempting to take the high road.
There will always be people who don't have the ability, capacity, wherewithal, or life experiences needed to see the bigger picture or recognize the need to put themselves in the shoes of others.
That leaves you with two options: fight "dirty" right back or deal with the reality and accept that you face an uphill battle.
Considering that urban liberals have control over almost all American mass culture/media outlets, yes, we are well aware of how you think what your ideas are.
Talk to more Republicans in more demographics. They want to severely restrict what is considered legal immigration, because they have a problem with certain types of people being here legally.
In my experience, the biggest issue many Republicans have with legal immigrants is that they tend to fervently support anything and everything that could benefit illegal immigrants. The friend of my enemy, etc.
That sounds exactly the opposite of everything I've heard. Legal immigrants are proud of their achievement and tend to negatively view those who circumvent the system that they participated in.
In the "Five actions to restore security and the constitutional rule of law" section is this:
> FIFTH, suspend immigration from terror-prone regions
where vetting cannot safely occur. All vetting of people
coming into our country will be considered “extreme vetting.”
My fear with Trump lies exactly in the unknown. He hasn't given very many policy specifics. Traditional Republicans are likely to step in to fill that vacuum. Will Trump push back and force policy to the center, or will he allow Congress to do as they please so long as he comes out with the credit? Hard to say at this point.
I'm also pretty sure that there are supporters of his that actually want to send all immigrants back to where they came from.
They want to protect their culture and values from the effects of mass immigration from people with very different heritage and values who are discouraged from assimilating and encouraged to join in the culture of grievance and victimhood preached by the progressive left. Repatriate everyone is definitely the most extreme position I have seen. A moratorium on all immigration is the next most extreme. Then there's the White Nationalist contingent, they are OK with immigration so long as it is from Europe but not anywhere else. Regardless, there's a general sense that the inflow of illegals must be stopped before any plan for amnesty should be allowed on the table and that the prevailing dogma that the entire world has a fundamental human right to immigrate to the US needs to be rejected completely.
Repealing NAFTA gets rid of the bulk of your legal Canadians and Mexicans on TN status, which is I'd imagine how the bulk of them are there given the low cost, ease and lack of caps of the program.
Go back far enough, sure. Most people go back to one or two generations after when their ancestors first came to America to set the bar for who's an immigrant.
It's like Ann Coulter's tweet last night where she said nobody should be able to vote unless all 4 of their grandparents were born in America - and then had to put her foot in her mouth when people pointed out that this would disqualify Donald Trump.
The dangerous thing is not about policy or specific proposals but who is empowered. Ann Coulter will be treated as a serious policy voice now because she stood with Trump. See Brexit with Farage, Boris et al.
That's like saying isn't the world made up mostly of Africans? Since it's said that we're all descended from individuals that lived in Africa before anywhere else.
So yeah, as the other poster mentioned, "if you go back far enough". If you go back far enough, we're all relatives, too. But that doesn't necessarily have meaning by itself. It's the individuals that choose to, or choose not to, apply meaning from such a technicality.
It's no more of a "technicality" than the fact that some people happened to be born within the somewhat arbitrary borders of a particular nation, through no effort of their own, and thus happen to be considered citizens of that nation.
You're misunderstanding the proposal about immigrants. The proposal is to send all immigrants that are here illegally back to where they came from.
For what it's worth, while I don't think Trump is likely to be even close to as draconian as his early rhetoric made it seem, it's worth noting that many of his supporters really are opposed to immigration in a much broader sense than merely legal or illegal. There's a very strong sense that the current philosophy of immigration + multiculturalism is out of control. Too many immigrants are coming in who do not share traditional American values and then are being encouraged NOT to assimilate by the progressive left; but to instead complain about oppression and racism.
My impression is that people just want this insane trend to STOP. Most don't want to see mass deportations. Most don't care about the finer points of what's illegal and what's not. They want someone to address the obvious threat to their culture and values.
> On one of my teams of 10 people at Google, we had immigrants from Iceland, England, Vietnam, China, Taiwan, and India, and I was the only native-born American citizen. California would sooner secede than deport all of its immigrants.
No one wants to send legal immigrants on your team back their countries of origin. Blue collar, unskilled laborers want to stop the influx of unskilled laborers and illegal immigrants who 1) take their jobs and depress their wages and 2) take up resources from social programs.
I don't understand why the Professional class struggles with this simple concept so much. Just look at the angst on HN about H1B IT workers undercutting US IT workers (and those are legal!). I would imagine this group's priorities would dramatically change if boatloads of Eastern European software engineers were arriving illegally in Silicon Valley and accepting salaries at half of their own. Then try to be concerned with lofty concepts such as "inclusiveness!" "stronger together!" "immigration!" when you're out of work due to ongoing violations of the law that half the country seems perfectly okay with. And on top of that, they call you racist for pointing it out!
As a socialist, I also don't understand why the professional caste has a hard time with this. "Free" exploitation by the sleaziest employers in the country, facilitated by commercial trafficking in humans, is not the internationalist dream any prospective uniter of mankind has proposed.
If someone walked in to my office, pointed at me and said "I'll do that guys job for half the price" I would wonder two things: 1) Can he do this job as well as I can? 2) If he can, why would he accept half of what I am under-payed?
because 1) Subjective answer either way. and 2) because he (potentially) gets to have a better quality of life than he currently has, with more opportunities to boot.
Sure, it isn't as easily measurable as stamping holes in license plates. But it is not impossible to evaluate performance.
It may take some time to evaluate, but I honestly feel my manager is good enough at his job to evaluate his worker's performance.
So, maybe initially, he pulls himself out of destitution with the job he 'stole' from me. Now he is just forever grateful that he doesn't have it much worse so he never wants more?
If the company gets a company man who does the job, never complains, and never asks for a raise, why would they ever hire me? The american who wants more money for the same job.
If they want to come in legally and can be properly vetted for ties with Islamic terrorist groups there's no issue and they can come in legally like everyone else.
Keeping Muslims out of the US (banning Muslim immigration to the US) != deportation. You may disagree with Trump, but please don't put words in his mouth.
> some of the proposals about sending all the immigrants back to where they came from seem absurd
Oh come on. Nobody is calling for sending all immigrants back. Trump's wife is an immigrant... The questions are:
* Big one: What to do about illegal immigration.
* Smaller one: What to do about the widespread abuse of the h1b program. For example, FY 2015, Infosys [outsourcing Indian company] leads the h1b pack with 23k visas, whereas Google has 3k visas.
I'm kind of curious why the down-votes so let me explain a bit further. Free trade isn't just about free movement of goods, it's also about free movement of labor. They're not the same thing but they are often lumped together, certainly for the purposes of Trump rhetoric and often in trade agreements.
One of Trump's signature campaign promises was to repeal NAFTA, which defines a class of skilled laborer status called TN status, which allows Canadians to show up at the border with $50, an offer letter and a diploma (in a skilled labor category) and work in the US. Mexican nationals are afforded similar status though require consular processing. This is cheap, flexible and un-capped. I'd wager the bulk of legal Canadians and Mexicans are in the US on TN status, so they would have to go were NAFTA repealed.
I have a hard time seeing a world where isolationist/protectionist policies increase free movement of labor so almost by definitions legal immigration will be restricted, IMO.
I'm not sure it's "coastal vs interior" as much as "urban vs rural".
I think we're past the time period where water transport was hugely superior to land transport (and air didn't yet exist). It's not that much harder or more expensive to get a plane ticket or UPS package to the Midwest compared to California.
I think the election results by county support this. Even in red states, urban centers are blue, and in blue states, rural areas are red.
I'm not sure there's a sufficient segregating force to change this. Aside from election time and resulting legal frameworks that apply to both areas, the ease of transportation and also of moving information mean that there's little friction in being next door to or embedded within the other groups.
I think the rural vs urban dichotomy definitely needs to be talked about. In reality these are 2 completely different worlds.
This is a little hyperbolic, but by the time the rural factory worker has finished killing the chicken and plucking its feathers for dinner, the attorney at New York's finest law firm has just settled a class action lawsuit for $100,000,000.00
There is no question rural areas are getting the short end of the stick, but I have a hard time believing it's primarily because of any intervention on the part of special interests (though they almost certainly are not innocent). It's because on a global scale the smartest, most connected people in the world can literally move mountains relative to their blue collar counter parts.
It's an interesting question. But doesn't the fact that coastal regions are pro-trade and interior lands are against it tell us that people are pro-trade when they engage in it and against it when they don't?
So a response may be to get more people engage in trade and globalization instead of only seeing the bad sides, the closed factories, etc.
How does one do that I don't know. Maybe Google should move its campus to Iowa.
I think that's both an accurate assessment and a useful prescription.
I don't know how to get more people to engage in trade either. Better education, probably. Even though I live in the Bay Area, used to work for a multinational corporation, know plenty of immigrants (including a parent), and have entrepreneurial friends that basically employ an army of international contractors through UpWork, I still find myself reluctant to take the plunge and take advantage of globalization.
> For most of recorded history, the primary means of production has been land and so fights have been over land, but over the last 150 years or so (contemporaneous with the nation-state as a social organizing principle, BTW), the primary means of production shifted to capital, and now it's shifting to information.
I don't expect wars over land to be done anytime soon. We might be doing most of our work on computers rather than on land, but the resources for these computers gotta come from somewhere. This is why esp. China has been going around and buying huge troves of land in Africa: not only to feed their growing population, but also to call dibs on the minerals in the ground.
That doesn't mean that information wars are not happening as well. (Though not nearly as prominent since these need way less personnel and happen less openly.)
> these need way less personnel and happen less openly.
(Nationalistic media and propaganda are just as much an information war as attacks on computer systems. Even if it does sound more like a "misinformation war".)
That's just more capital, though. They aren't invading the land itself by force because they need to be able to sell their stuff to other countries and an invasion can cause trade sanctions.
one of main reasons of Turkey intervening anywhere ISIS is (and stepping back from their former covert support) is to grab more land, in case Iraq or Syria will stay in turmoil. Both valid representatives of the states expressed that Turkey is not welcomed on their territory and should move back, but they couldn't care less.
Land is apparently good, even if arid desert or useless very high mountains (ie Chinese invasion of India and land grab for 0 purposes)
> On one of my teams of 10 people at Google, we had immigrants from Iceland, England, Vietnam, China, Taiwan, and India, and I was the only native-born American citizen.
How is this an argument? I'm not from the US and I'm not very well read on the issue, but isn't it illegal immigrants they want to deport?
Who said that people from those countries couldn't be well educated and be fully functional Americans?
Also, I live in Malmö Sweden (coastal city) and the right-wing party here is strong, and we have lots of problem with immigrants, both legal and illegal.
The Trump campaign has only promised to enforce the existing US law.
However, the tenor of the campaign in the american press and social media has such that the left is convinced that they are going to be sent to robot death camps constructed for people who vote democrat. The right was concerned about the opposite until they won.
For many of the young and educated democrats this is the first time they have lost an election. The hysteria will pass. And then we will see where it all goes
Not good example. They were not voluntarily part of USSR (see Molotov-Ribentrop pact), Stalin sent a lot of them to Siberia. They have huge Russian minority too (remember Putin's policy for "protecting" russians in foreign countries). It it not easy for them to survive, they have to be as independent on russia as possible, so they have no other choice than integrate into international organizations.
It's basically urban vs rural, the cities are just on the coasts for historical reasons related to trade and shipping I think. Global trade means that the economy has centred more and more around highly-skilled jobs that require the network effects of being in a major city. Rural residents can't afford to move there and probably wouldn't be able to get jobs anyway.
Also, being dependent on imports to feed the population would have major national security implications.
> What sort of organizing principle would the world have then? I haven't seen anything historically like that
The Hanseatic League was a federation of free-trading market towns along the North Sea and Baltic Sea coastlines. [1]
A number of people have suggested that cities (and federations of cities) may become more of a focus as a political unit in the medium term over the nation state.
Actually, yeah, it has a lot in common with city states.
It differs from historical city-states in that the primary factor of production in the classical/medieval era was land, and so city states negotiated from a position of weakness and remained confined to the city because they lacked the resources to capture more territory. Now, food is abundant, and actually requires fossil fuels and genetic engineering for its production. That changes the negotiating position of a port city without a lot of land significantly.
(It does make me wonder what would happen if we got a nationalist heartland ringed by a number of small city states, and then the heartland would refuse to sell food. Massive famine and political collapse? Peaceful trade with overseas nations to supply an alternate source? A large army streaming out of the city states to capture the heartland by force? Mutually assured destruction where everyone dies, since modern crops don't actually grow by themselves without fresh inputs of chemical fertilizers, pesticides, antibiotics, and genetically-modified seeds?)
Food is abundant but still grows outside of cities. There's no particular reason to assume that genetic engineering companies are all based in cities. A city state arrangement is one I was thinking about a lot lately but it seems very hard to make it stable.
Yup. I actually think the world is ripe for the return of city-states. The advantages of nation-states have fallen in importance, while their disadvantages have become increasingly clear.
Just look at the success of Singapore to see how effective a modern city-state can be. London, New York, San Francisco, etc. would all be better off as independent self-governing city-states.
Isn't that a fairly concise description of the Republican platform? They usually want to limit the size of the federal government, moving power to the individual states. States are larger than cities, but it's the same idea.
I'm actually a little confused why liberals want to push everything up to the federal level. They have total control over many states like New York and California, and it seems like they could accomplish their goals more efficiently if they weren't sharing senate seats with Alabama on key issues.
You get less federal funding for programs if the federal taxes are cut, but given California's salaries and population you're probably paying more than your fair share anyways.
That might be the traditional Republican platform, but sadly the Republican party is looking anything but traditional these days.
Also, I think the whole "states rights" thing is bullshit. Republicans only favor states rights when those rights run in favor of their positions. Otherwise you wouldn't have things like the Defense of Marriage Act—why should Republicans in Georgia get to decide who Californians can marry?
The other big problem is that certain policies are inherently handled at the federal level. Disregarding foreign policy, immigration and trade are both hot-button issues this cycle and the policies which the heartland voted for are likely to be destructive for coastal cities.
There are definitely some people who've appealed way too strongly to evangelicals in the past. 12 years ago I'd be solid Democrat for their stances on important social issues. And the traditional Republicans don't go nearly as far as they should. I think that tax revenue is a good proxy for comparing relative power. In this sense, Madison gave us a concrete measurement for his vision of how big of a role the federal government should play:
It is true, that the Confederacy is to possess, and may exercise, the power of collecting internal as well as external taxes throughout the States; but it is probable that this power will not be resorted to, except for supplemental purposes of revenue; that an option will then be given to the States to supply their quotas by previous collections of their own; and that the eventual collection, under the immediate authority of the Union, will generally be made by the officers, and according to the rules, appointed by the several States. Indeed it is extremely probable, that in other instances, particularly in the organization of the judicial power, the officers of the States will be clothed with the correspondent authority of the Union. Should it happen, however, that separate collectors of internal revenue should be appointed under the federal government, the influence of the whole number would not bear a comparison with that of the multitude of State officers in the opposite scale. Within every district to which a federal collector would be allotted, there would not be less than thirty or forty, or even more, officers of different descriptions, and many of them persons of character and weight, whose influence would lie on the side of the State. The powers delegated by the proposed Constitution to the federal government are few and defined. Those which are to remain in the State governments are numerous and indefinite. The former will be exercised principally on external objects, as war, peace, negotiation, and foreign commerce; with which last the power of taxation will, for the most part, be connected.
A glance at Wikipedia shows the IRS collects 7.7 times as much income tax revenue as the sum of all state income tax revenue. So to a first approximation, a Madison federal government would be 308 times smaller than our current one. That's crazy-talk to any traditional Republican, no matter how much they pretend to talk about states' rights and limited government.
Ron Paul, his son Rand Paul, and Ted Cruz have all expressed thoughts along these lines, and they seem to be gaining support compared to the evangelicals. Assuming Trump wins again in 2020, we'll see if the trend continues for truly limited federal government in 2024.
I'd happily vote for a Ron Paul Republican (I wouldn't vote for Cruz; he's far too close to religious people for my liking), but I think the party is moving far away from that. Donald Trump just won on a platform of more government intervention in the economy, not less. Not to mention that he apparently has zero respect for important foundational ideas like religious liberty and freedom of the press.
Of the choices on the ballot, Johnson was a lot closer to being a traditional Republican than Trump.
I think Johnson was closer to me in policy, according to those online political polls. Though, even if you disagree with Trump on nearly every issue and think he has terrible character, you're still forced to vote for Trump if you ever want a non-Democrat to have a chance at the federal level again. This video from Stefan Molyneux sums it up for me:
Though I think Trump is not just the lesser of two evils, but a great candidate for President. I'm not sure I could convince you of that in a HN comment, though.
Seems like having the interior pay its own way by selling food and other resources would be quite a lot more efficient. It would also allow people to govern themselves how they see fit. It's a more humane solution IMO.
Sure, and most of those imports would come from the surrounding farmland. It would likely be somewhat more expensive than the current system, but primarily because urban taxes would not be providing agricultural subsidies.
Tokyo already does this and food there is not substantially expensive than it is in other alpha cities.
Also there are plenty of big cities not surrounded by farmland. Hong Kong and Singapore, for example.
Locally-grown food is generally more expensive in these areas because smaller local farms do not enjoy the same advantage of economy of scale that global distributors do.
interesting you missed Tokyo there. Japan imports 100% of food consumed regularly except for rice, which is expensive compared to overseas (about $5/kg). Other locally grown meats fruits etc are generally premium items.
> Here in California, some of the proposals about sending all the immigrants back to where they came from seem absurd.
FYI, I'm not aware of anyone proposing to send all immigrants back, only undocumented (also known as "illegal") immigrants. Like it or not, the current laws are such that people in that category are not here legally, so if we truly are a nation of laws, those laws should be upheld, no?
If you don't agree with the law, vote to change it rather than act as if the law just doesn't exist.
To single out a certain group of people and act as if laws don't apply to them in a country that is otherwise built on laws is to deprive them (and all of us) of one of the most fundamental American virtues. Whether we agree with the laws or not, if we don't uphold them, we cease to be a free country (it's the laws that keep us free, after all). It's absurd to believe otherwise.
Or, you know, we can keep going down the rabbit hole of selectively enforcing laws, and we can ignore your vote too because some people don't agree with it; the voting laws are just words on paper.
OK, when you catch them, write them a ticket and make them show up with their Mexican ID and fill out the paperwork to be documented again. It's false to conclude that deportation is the only possible redress. There's no reason to turn one person's or a whole family's life upside down for a victimless crime of not filling out a paper form that takes 7 years to complete. The RIAA tried this with suing MP3 purveyors in the 00's, once an efficient legal market existed infringement plummeted.
Would that be fair to all the people playing by the rules and going through the process of legal immigration now?
I do agree that the process can and should be streamlined in many ways, but it should begin with those seeking to follow the law rather than essentially giving a free pass to everyone who knowingly broke the law as their first deed on American soil.
For the record, I know several Mexican families (in Mexico and in the US) affected by this, and I firmly believe that a strong border is better in the long run - both for the US and Mexico. Legal immigration should be an option and it should be a more straightforward process, but blanket amnesty doesn't really do any favors for anyone.
Fair ? No, and why should it ? The law is there to apply the nebulous concept of "justice", but has never been fair. You know what's unfair ? the fact that wealthy people can afford legal defenses that give them a fraction of the prison time / punishment for serious offenses. Thats a much more egregious unfairness than someone not filling out paperwork.
"What sort of organizing principle would the world have then?"
I don't know if this is what is likely to happen, but I've been pondering this: The Westphalian order for the world, which we currently live under, involves drawing borders for countries, and then basically insisting that the governments within those borders must have some sort of unity, regardless of what those borders are, do, or come from.
Do you have a group of people that are geographically localized but have borders going right through the middle of them, like the Kurds? Then they are not a country, not countrymen, and regardless of their affiliations they are subject to their country's policies for dealing with each other. The split of East and West Germany was an extreme case of this, where a national border was drawn, and you had families cut in half.
Do you have bunches of people that basically loathe each other with the fire of a thousand suns, but there's a border drawn around them on the world map? Then they live together, until the most pathological cases like Yugoslavia finally just blow apart.
And where did these borders come from? Did some bureaucrats in Europe in the 1700s or 1800s draw some conveniently straight lines in Africa? You're a country now in the 21st century, regardless of how anyone local feels about that. Pretty much anywhere in the world you see a straight line border you see something very artificial that took no account of conditions on the ground.
In the 1990s, the cyber utopians thought that technology would lead to more decentralization. With improved technology, you don't need industrial-era practices to deal with cities and counties and states and countries. You can have very sophisticated government and government services now at much smaller polities; even the small local cities take online payments now, for instance, and have online billing.
Perhaps the future looks like the Westphalian system cracking up, and polities being more willing to secede, easily join together in arrangements of convenience as needed, and easily break apart again as their interests diverge. There are certainly a lot of practical issues involved in that transition, but as diversity increases all around the world, there's increasingly a lot of practical issues involved in forcibly jamming people together because of borders drawn 200+ years ago. It wouldn't solve war; that's not on the table. But it might just prevent World War III.
I'm not sure how this will solve the problem. You'll still get artificial lines and physical and economic barriers. They'll just be drawn between cities and rural areas instead of between countries.
The reality is that there are now three populations - one connected, educated, cosmopolitan, and international. Another made of globalisation's cast-offs, who tend to be poorly educated, rural, reactionary, and reliant almost entirely on right-wing propaganda outlets for its world view. And a third, which is an indentured working class in the emerging economies which build things for the other two, but has very limited personal and economic freedoms.
Connected people are - ironically - more similar than different the world over. Allowing for local colour, you'll hear the same conversations in Barcelona, Berlin, Berkeley, Bankgkok, and Beijing. These people often see nation states as a distraction - something that gets in the way of getting cool shit done.
The cast-offs are also more similar than different, but they still identify strongly with nation states and nationalist politics because they have no other identity they can call their own. National pride is literally the only thing that allows them to feel any agency in their lives.
The Brexit and Trump votes are Luddite machine riots, where the machine is the globalised order.
Technology can't fix this. Globalisation has to decide what it wants to do with them.
The sensible humane option is to work out some way to re-enfranchise them.
The inhumane option - historically popular, and looking more and more likely - is to cull them in a major war and hope nothing else gets broken.
It's a bigger problem than it looks. In fact we have a is a kind of reinvention of medieval feudalism, with a plutocratic nobility who can move around freely, a supportive caste of technological and financial aspirants who can move with permissions, and an indentured worker caste who can't move, and sometimes don't want to.
There is no sense in which this is a functioning, inclusive popular democracy. It has some of the trappings - popular votes, etc. But absolutely none of the substance.
"I'm not sure how this will solve the problem. You'll still get artificial lines and physical and economic barriers. They'll just be drawn between cities and rural areas instead of between countries."
The point is that they don't have to be so immutable. We don't have to tie together two populations that don't want to be together if it's less of a Major World Shift to draw a new line between them and declare a new polity, or merge two polities that have no great need to be separate anymore.
A lot of the conflict in the US right now is in some sense artificial, imposed by the lines that exist. The truth is, what does it matter to San Francisco if the heartland is "racist homophobic bigots" and what does it matter to the heartland if San Francisco are "globalists engaged in foolish social policies and crazy obsessions with things that don't matter", if they weren't bound together by centuries-old lines? Obviously economic ties continue either way, because trade is flowing regardless and neither of the two are, in practice, all that concerned about the other places in the world that have the same description. It's only the people you're locked in the room with that bother you. Maybe we should unlock the door instead of having increasingly bitter and violent fights about who gets the couch tonight.
I don't think it will happen within my lifetime, but I think the future has to be something like the "phyles"[1] from the Diamond Age, by Neal Stephenson.
Many of these problems you mention are due to empires past imposing borders that don't correspond to natural nations. Most of Europe's borders are pretty natural equilibriums settled after centuries of wars. They are not perfect though so we are now seeing secessionist movements across the continent. Demographic changes and migrations flows threaten to upset these equilibriums. Africa and Middle East have different problems since their borders are more artificial and imposed from the outside. Most of these regions of the world can barely hold together a cohesive government without outside help.
Even before the Roman Empire, there were trade focused sea faring groups with significant influence, as seen on a map of Greek & Phoenician colonies[1]. The Carthaginians even sailed around West Africa and reached as far as Gulf of Guinea to search for precious metals[2].
I would expect the largest, most successful cities to be located on the coast, or in extremely fertile regions like the Nile Delta or Mesopotamia. Couldn't find any pretty visualisations that would show that though, so I might be wrong.
CA has the advantage of geography - any invading army would have to cross the steep side of the Sierras. These have relatively few passes, most at high altitude and all easily defended against an invading army. It's actually easier to invade CA via Tijuana than overland through the U.S.
They also have the advantage of being exceptionally technically advanced - perhaps moreso than the U.S. military, given that Lockheed has a large presence in the Bay Area and all the Predator drones are made in San Diego. And they're a nuclear power - Livermore is one of two sites that actually develops atomic bombs.
This'd be fun to wargame out as a board game or computer simulation, although the subject matter is a little macabre.
If this little wargame is to be played it would likely be a battle of attrition US warships deploy to restrain trade and cut off the CA economy... assuming the leadership isn't removed somehow by assassination or coup attempts.
CA is a big part of the US economy and culture, but in no way would I imagine that it could resist the rest of the 49 states.
You have to consider that it's highly unlikely that everyone in CA would be in favor of secession. I can imagine that many people in the Central Valley, who tend to be far more conservative than their coastal counterparts and rely extensively on Federal farm subsidies as well as out of state water resources would be less than thrilled at the idea. These people also tend to have high rates of firearms ownership so I could see a nice little insurgency springing up.
Certainly there is a lot of high tech industry in CA but I doubt that Lockheed and the other defense corps are disproportionately reliant on CA, they have plants and R&D centers spread throughout the country.
It actually might now. The Right is in full control of the country, and it had been generally very sympathetic to the idea of just splitting up the country and each going their own way lately. It was never really seriously looked at by the Left - sure, there are semi-joking proposals like Cascadia, but nothing as serious as, say, Texas secessionists. But right now Cascadia might sound like a very good idea for a lot of people.
The better more workable suggestion for these times is for the Federal Government to give the states back more of their individual powers. The Republican party is certainly more open to that vs. the Democrats.
It would have been workable, if not for one thing that Republicans have consistently promised their electorate for a long time now: a federal abortion ban. Liberals will not see anything including that as a legitimate "states rights" solution for themselves. Secession resolves this issue, and can even score points with the electorate on the right.
They will leave the US before they start a war or try to force a california sucession. Ireland could become the next Silicon Valley it may change from Silicon Valley to Technology Island. It would be cheaper for them to pay for their diverse workforce to move to a different country rather than go to war for sucession.
No, but way too many people are now using this as an excuse to express their xenophobia, and it really sucks because this country's good qualities are enriched by immigrants.
I think the situation in Wales is that the South and East are more cosmopolitan, lots of immigrants going back many years. The West and North less so.
Similarly in Scotland I think the major urban areas dominate, where populations are more diverse. But rural populations away from communications and conurbations seem far less accepting of [large groups of] migrants.
Similarly in the UK poorer populations that might feel threatened by incomers seeking low-skilled jobs (eg due to poor language skills) seem less welcoming of migrants.
Personally I think the whole "culture" aspect is a red herring and what people really care about is their own wealth. I mean the UK's history is epitomised by outside influences either due to invasion of Britain or British invasion and Empire.
Personally I think to survive and meet the needs of everyone the West will need give up some of its luxuries, get rid of our need to own everything we use, move away from the disposable lifestyle.
In short my analysis is it's liberal just greed that drives this whole thing - 'I deserve wealth but other people don't'.
>Here in California, some of the proposals about sending all the immigrants back to where they came from seem absurd. The economy would cease to function. On one of my teams of 10 people at Google, we had immigrants from Iceland, England, Vietnam, China, Taiwan, and India, and I was the only native-born American citizen. California would sooner secede than deport all of its immigrants.
>What if it actually came to that? If push came to shove and the interior decided to push a nativist, nationalist agenda, what if the coastal regions that benefit significantly from trade were to say "Okay, you guys can play with yourself, we're going to play with the rest of the world." Scotland has threatened to do exactly that, and is planning on holding another referendum on independence if Britain actually follows through on Brexit.
It's a decent idea for large parts of America to be devolved into separate nation-states. Texas, California, and Massachusetts are looking not to be governable as a unified country.
Different cultures have such dramatically different ideas about what laws they should be governed under, throwing them all into one set of rules is tyranny of the majority. California gets to feel that strongly right now, with Republicans owning 2/3, and soon 3/3 branches of the government.
More people get what they want when you have a larger number of smaller countries. California could have a democratic president and Texas could have a republican one. They don't need to hate how the other votes.
If the concept of States' Rights had been more faithfully adhered to, more states would enjoy a greater feeling of autonomy. Instead, collectivism was embraced.
California Democrats were loving it when Obama and the Democrats were in control in 2008. Couldn't they realize that sooner or later the pendulum would swing the other way?
We're about to witness an object lesson on why you enforce the rules even on your own party - even when the ends seem to justify the means. Think about the overreach of executive orders and the suspension of the filibuster as tools in the hands of the opposing party.
What if, people vote with their feet?
Would it be possible that sites like https://teleport.org or others, make moving as simple as booking a holiday trip? People will find their likeminded peers in the cloud and meet up physically at a place that fits best their needs? Not just to meet up for conferences but for longterm stays? Countries, cities, governments would have to compete for talent? Would this change the dynamic how governments act overall? Being in competition for people, for talent on a complete new level?
What happens if economic ties between coastal regions of major trading partners become greater than cultural ties within nations?
Then those regions might form their own government, see for example the Hanseatic League [1]. These cities answered directly to the Emperor, instead of some local nobility or government.
Kind of reminds me of the medieval Hanseatic League - city-states and merchant guilds around the Baltic Sea trading goods and culture (and providing for the defence of all that shipping) while the interior regions were more isolated.
>"We're seeing this pattern where the coasts of many countries are cosmopolitan and well-integrated into the world economy, but the interiors are very conservative and nationalistic. Scotland & London vs. Wales & the rest of Britain"
London is the interior, it is not on the coast. Wales and and Scotland are both coastal.
>"Croatia & Slovenia vs. the rest of Yugoslavia."
I assume you mean the former Yugoslavia? Bosnia and Herzegovina and Montenegro are also on the coast. So what does that leave for non-coastal fomer Yugoslavia? Macedonia?
>"The Baltic Republics vs. the rest of the USSR"
There hasn't been a USSR since 1991. Do you mean the former USSR?
> so (contemporaneous with the nation-state as a social organizing principle, BTW), the primary means of production shifted to capital, and now it's shifting to information. What kind of social organizing principle does that imply?
Agggressive, negotiators with awareness of cognitive biases like base-rate fallacy, asymmetry of information advantage, etc.... will form or create the organizing principles most likely.. I think of it and it becomes a pain thinking about the asymmentry of information. Hopefully, if it happens, we'll build a better deterrant against withholding information.
In Heinlien's Friday the US has split up into competing and fractious rival states, like a late 19th century Europe. The heroine is from a persecuted minority (namely genetically engineered people).
> What happens if economic ties between coastal regions of major trading partners become greater than cultural ties within nations?
Until you can fix your toilet, repair your house, teach your kids, pave your roads, and have your meals cooked for you remotely, I don't think this is a valid concern. The upper "coastal" class depends on local, blue collar labor that can't be outsourced (with current technology).
Rich folk can move to the suburbs but everyone will need to coexist within contiguous geographic states for the foreseeable future.
Honestly, I'd quite like to have a world with a few large 'nation-states' in charge of 'the global scene'. I am not an economic liberal by any means, but I am a proponent of forming ties between nations and having democracy applied to smaller communities.
Global city-states need to become independent with open immigration, separate from the Nations which should enforce strong immigration controls to maintain the native population & culture.
Those cultural ties practically already are stronger. Living on the west coast of Canada I really feel that - to the south we have Washington, Oregon, California.
No one is proposing sending all the immigrants back to where they came from, and if they did the economy would not cease to function. Maybe part of the problem is that companies like Google hire teams of 90% immigrants while Americans can't find good jobs.
As a brown Indian dude, it seems to me that the western world is caught in some self-hating loop.
It simultaneously trivializes my culture while hating its own culture.
I watched Justin Trudeau dance the bhangra and people claim "oh what beautiful Indian culture". I've seen people eat butter chicken to partake in "Indian culture" experiences.
That's just wrong. Indian culture - any culture - is far, far more than a dance or some dish.
At the same time, I see white people negate their culture altogether. It might have been built on colonialism and imperialism, but what, say, Renaissance artists pulled off is significant, very significant.
Everyone needs to back off and think about this for a bit
> That's just wrong. Indian culture - and culture - is far, far more than a dance or some dish.
I think there's a key concept missing from every discussion about culture, and that concept is that "X immigrant culture" is a completely different culture from "X culture." Indians in India have one culture, while Indians in e.g. Britain have a related, but divergent culture.
Two places this matters:
• Frequently, the people of "X immigrant culture" care a lot about 'preserving their heritage', because it's a constant struggle for them—while the people of "X culture" couldn't give a damn, because they're constantly steeped in their own culture and it's not going away. "Cultural appropriation" is an invention almost entirely of immigrant cultures.
• People "exploring a culture" frequently have the implicit goal of exploring the domestic-immigrant offshoot of a culture, not the native one. Because of the lack of connection and cultural touchstone organizations that immigrants face, things like dances and dishes are seen as far more relevant in immigrant cultures, similar to their role in itinerant cultures.
This is something that's been on my mind quite a bit. As an Indian who grew up mostly in the Middle East watching American TV shows (where I got much of my "culture"), I have some thoughts on this.
When I speak to American friends (especially as part of a larger group), I get many of the pop culture and other references which my Indian friends sometimes miss. I however, feel left out when I speak to some Indians because I don't get or appreciate many local idioms since I was never exposed to them. This can be isolating at times and I'm trying to make amends but that can be harder as you grow older.
I think that the best way to do it is to have deep roots in ones own culture (which is why they - especially the fragile ones - should be preserved) and then have a liberal education which opens your mind to external ideas. This comes from reading literatures of other peoples, languages, poetry, history etc. much more than a more "scientific" education that emphasises logic, problem solving, analytical skills etc. One of the reasons I bemoan the lack of emphasis on the humanities in primary education and am trying to compensate for this with my own children.
Having a deep understanding of ones own culture keeps one relaxed with it. No insecurity and resistant to attempts to appropriate it for political mileage. It also creates a sense of "being" and a "home" to come back to when you've had a bad day rather than lashing out.
Being open minded about others makes you receptive to people's ideas drastically different from your own and gives you the tools to assimilate them or parts of them into your own world view.
My own background has made me a cultural nomad of sorts. I don't feel any pride when I talk about any facet of my identity but I do miss having a deep historical well to draw inspiration and ideas from. A desire to be a link in a longer chain.
> Frequently, the people of "X immigrant culture" care a lot about 'preserving their heritage', because it's a constant struggle for them
A friend of mine who is a first generation Indian immigrant observed exactly same thing. He noticed his conservative Indian parents had become more extreme in their beliefs over time, as a sort of reaction against American culture. His parents feel a bit closed off from the rest of American society since they never fully integrated. However, simultaneously, he noticed that when he went to India, people there were actually becoming more liberal and tolerant over time, as compared to his parents who were becoming more traditional.
Yes, this has been observed many times here in Europe. People that come to a new culture they hated suddenly find themselves in a spot where the food and culture from the homecountry is more important than it ever was when they lived back home. Even germans start importing stuff to Sweden because that sausage they always hated back home is so much better than anything they can buy here in Sweden. And people that never cooked before start searching for ways to recreate the tastes from grandmas cooking.
People from cultures that wear something over the head does so much more in the new country while the home country is starting to loosen up. Even though this is exactly why they moved away in the first place.
(We have friends from Somalia, Germany, Turkey, Russia, Egypt and then some, that describe this for us)
Should probably add that this is typical for swedish people moving out of country too. Just look at the spanish walled gardens that swedes build up around them when they move to Spain after retirement :-)
Same happens with many immigrants in USA and Germany who came from Russia. They tend to become more conservative and have very different views from citizens of Moscow or St.Petersburg.
I'm fairly certain all they meant to communicate was that Indians in India have different types of Indian culture to Indians in Britain, and that they weren't trying to reduce all of India to a singular culture.
Often your culture isn't apparent and to you at all until you have extended exposure to another one.
And even then, it's hard to pin down.
I, for one, notice that Australians are quite different from Americans and Brits. And of course even more so from the multitude of Asian, South American and European cultures.
I think you have the wrong take-away from that sentence. The point was not to imply a singular origin country culture, but that the source culture and the immigrant culture end up diverging to some degree.
Whether the origin country has a singular culture of many subcultures is really irrelevant to that point. It's just a matter of whether the immigrant culture diverges from the source subculture.
This is the most concise explanation for what many on the left fail to grasp, and one of the many reasons why I and many are Trump supporters.
We are on one hand supposed to respect and honor other cultures, but are not allowed to cultivate, maintain and respect our own (American) culture.
Which is absurd for many reasons... one being it denies a very real reason for many wanting to come to our country, or fails to identify the characteristics that made western culture generally preferable to many others.
I feel like this is exactly what is happening in France too...
The media tries so hard to stay "politically correct" at all times that it is absurdely biased some times.
An exagerated example: if an immigrant commit a crime, the medias talk about him as a victim of modern society instead of an actual criminal.
I've completely stopped watching TV a long time ago, so it might have changed since then, but then again I would like to see the French values put forward instead of everyone else adapting to the few people that don't want to change (and, to some extent, don't really want to be French).
But American culture is not homogeneous. The platform on which Trump ran seemed to elevate certain parts of American culture while dismissing others.
More important to his success - it seems to me as an outside observer - were his promises to do things that are not possible but sound appealing to voters. Reopen mines, open factories that will offer many jobs to low skilled workers, and so on, to build a symbolically protectionist wall without paying for its construction.
American culture is in many aspects very homogenous. Take for example the fact that there's 50% of the population that wants to cut down on government even if it means that social services are to be cut.
Or the business culture which is very unique, at least I've seen nothing similar anywhere in the world.
Then there's a degree of freedom of speech that nowhere else exists, and rights like being allowed to carry a gun in public which is vigorously defended by large parts of the population.
And yes, there is an American brand of Christianity. Even if you don't see it in population centres it's still there everywhere else and it is more important than Christianity in most other Christian cultures.
There's a kind of attitude among US citizens leaning towards some Classical Liberal or Libertarian principles that can't be found anywhere else in the world. Where ever else you go the majority expects the government to take care of every member of the society from cradle to grave.
>rights like being allowed to carry a gun in public which is vigorously defended by large parts of the population.
Just FYI that's actually different depending on local laws. I don't live in an open carry state so I very much don't have the right to carry a gun in public. Not unless I went through the rigorous process to get a carry permit.
Yes I know that many regulations are done on the state level and then there's gun free areas and so on, but I'd still say that this is something very unique about the US.
I can't name even a single example where societies, even if it is only at a state level, generally allow citizens to carry a gun in public (without having to acquire some special permission that only very few people have access to)
If there is some other society that allows this then it's probably an Anglophone country.
Pakistan is much different from the US. Most of Pakistan's gun culture is in remote and rural areas where its not the most safe and therefore, guns are more of a necessity than a love.
The US has a gun-culture where collection of guns is done without any overt reason. In Urban areas, guns are basically never really owned, much less carried openly.
What Trump supporters fail to grasp is that many on the left agree but don't think Trump is the man for the job. He doesn't care about culture. You've been duped.
But that was never the conversation. It was always about how only bigots and deplorables could support him. The concerns powering Trump's rise were shooed away as small-minded. Well, Brexit and Trump are two black eyes.
I really hope the Left tune in to the grievances of the majority now, because I'm fearful of what comes next if they don't.
You've quoted the word deplorable, yet ignored the entire point of the statement that it came from, that it's not just bigots that are supporting Trump. How does that happen?
You're on here emploring the left to pay attention to something, while (intentionally?) ignoring the fact that they did, and it got spun against them as one of their biggest gaffes of the campaign.
That's not paying attention to the "basket of deplorables," it's dismissing them.
This election has shown me how out of touch most Americans are with each other. The media doesn't care about whole swathes of the country and our political systems write off rural inhabitants all the time.
Yes she's dismissing the basked of deplorables, it's the other voters who don't fit that description she's reaching out to:
"And unfortunately there are people like that. And he has lifted them up. He has given voice to their websites that used to only have 11,000 people — now how 11 million. He tweets and retweets their offensive hateful mean-spirited rhetoric. Now, some of those folks — they are irredeemable, but thankfully they are not America. But the other basket — and I know this because I see friends from all over America here — I see friends from Florida and Georgia and South Carolina and Texas — as well as, you know, New York and California — but that other basket of people are people who feel that the government has let them down, the economy has let them down, nobody cares about them, nobody worries about what happens to their lives and their futures, and they’re just desperate for change. It doesn’t really even matter where it comes from. They don’t buy everything he says, but he seems to hold out some hope that their lives will be different. They won’t wake up and see their jobs disappear, lose a kid to heroine, feel like they’re in a dead-end. Those are people we have to understand and empathize with as well. "
The left has almost no political power. It is also the popular majority. There are more registered democrats in the us than republicans. Clinton is likely to win the popular vote. The system is physically designed, by districting and the electoral college, to support the political minority. You are conflating the actual demographics with the electoral system, which is lending more power to an oppressive point of view that is precisely what the political elite cultivates.
Just because he's leading in the popular vote now doesn't mean he won the popular vote. The New York Times projects that Clinton will win the popular vote once all the ballots have been counted.
Right now it's projecting a margin of 0.7% It's pretty hard to call that a mandate from a clear majority. I think we've got to accept that what we have is a deeply divided country, not a highly vocal minority.
There are many people such as myself in places like NY or California that don't vote because we know our votes don't matter, so it may be that in a popular vote election we'd see a greater margin for Clinton.
I wonder what it would look like if you took the percentages that voted for each candidate and scaled it to the population of the state, and then used that to total the scaled popular vote?
Of course, there's many problems with that, foremost being that you can't assume that those that didn't vote did so in the same relative percentages of support that those that did vote. For example, I imagine there's a higher percentage of Democrats/Clinton supporters in CA and NY that didn't vote compared to the alternatives, and the opposite is likely true of predominantly red states.
When will people learn that polls and "projections" from mainstream media etc are ridiculously wrong on this.
They were wrong on Brexit. They were wrong on Trump. Maybe once more countries have results like this the polsters and media will start actually engaging with real people.
I don't mean to sound offensive but you do understand how the US election system works, right?
It is possible to win the popular vote but lose the election. I don't think anyone is spinning the fact she won the popular vote to mean she should've won.
The President is elected by the electoral college who aren't directed by popular vote but by electorates.
Given current tallies, Trump will probably lose the popular vote by over a million. And he won't break 300 in the Electoral College. This is a very, very narrow win.
This is the third-closest result in the electoral college since 1960 (first that included AK and HI). The next two were G. W. Bush's two wins. It's the second-tightest in the popular vote since then (the results I see have Clinton ahead by about 200K; JFK beat Nixon by ~100K).
Our most recent president, Obama, absolutely destroyed Trump's results as far as having a "mandate", if that's what winning is considered. He got twice as many electoral votes as McCain and a margin of 7% in the popular. The win over Romney was tighter but still in a different order than this election.
Reagan got a mandate in 1984. The talk of "mandate" this year is utter, complete, uncontestable political horse puckey.
True, but you could say that about nearly every politician that's been elected recently. At some point you have to vote for the person you agree with and just hope they will hold up at least some part of what they've promised.
Many supporters might agree that Trump isn't the man for the job. But you really think Hillary can serve as a symbol of our culture? She's a integral part of the politically correct movement that Trump supporters hate.
They weren't duped - they got what they ordered - but liberals might want to re-examine their mission statement.
How are you not allowed to cultivate your culture?
EDIT: A number of people are asking you this question, I don't want to make it feel like you are being ganged up on or in for a trick. I myself am asking due to curiosity.
I'm a white male in a very predominantly white European country. The argument you make sounds familiar to me. When I hear people lament the cultural oppression of the white male, what I really hear is: "Here's what white males think and do in this country, why won't you let us be what we are?"
This gives me the creeps something awful, because I'd rather not have some traditionalist's concept of white male identity imposed upon me simply because I belong to the same demographics, in many ways, as they do.
Trying to cultivate, maintain and respect a culture seems to me to usually come with a healthy dose of thou-shalt-not-do. I prefer to think for myself, so I'm not really very sympathetic.
Then you should consider that there are plenty of non-traditionalists who feel the same way. Associating white and male pride with traditionalism is exactly the party line that's been pushed, and that created this situation.
Until the humiliating defeats with Brexit and Trump, the progressive left was so high on its own supply, they wouldn't hear it. Some still won't hear it, they're just covering their ears and panicking, because they think the media's image of Trump and his supporters - the same media that predicted a 93% chance of Clinton presidency - was actually an accurate representation of reality.
Think men aren't horrible oppressors? You're a misogynist, sexist MRA who wants to bring women back into the kitchen. Think "white people" are just a convenient but wrong proxy for class, and that blindly inviting uneducated and illiberal refugees into a service-based economy and libertarian culture is a recipe for disaster? You're a racist islamophobe who thinks black lives don't matter.
Respecting white culture means respecting the values that built western society, and that includes rationality, impartiality, and evidence-based inquiry. Valuing male culture means acknowledging meritocracy, understanding that respect is earned - not given - and encouraging confidence to accomplish by yourself.
There is really a stunning amount of projection stemming from the left these days, and it's left otherwise sympathetic people out in the cold. The progressive left repeats the right words, but they don't seem to understand what they mean or where they came from, incapable of self-reflection.
The progressive Left supported Bernie Sanders. The moderate Left and Right and the Establishment forced the exactly perfect candidate for Trump to beat.
One example would be the adoption of European, and "ethnic" literature in lieu of the American literary canon -- even in American Literature courses! There's a comment about this by the late Andrew Breitbart, you can google it. (He studied American Literature.)
That's just one example, there are literally millions. Here's another way of looking at it:
- if a African American outwardly expresses his cultural origins and identity, this is called "affirmative" -- a word with positive connotations;
- if an Italian American expresses ties to his cultural origins, it's considered less inspiring, but still ok
- if an white European American expresses pride at his cultural heritage, then he's usually derided as nativist, racist, xenophobic, or, worst of all -- an old fogey.
This seems to me, as a Swede, as the same rhetoric used by nationalists here in Sweden as well as nationalists in other countries.
But it's more a feeling than a fact.
" - if an white European American expresses pride at his cultural heritage, then he's usually derided as nativist, racist, xenophobic, or, worst of all -- an old fogey."
This is also just your words and feelings, not an example of where a white European American expresses pride at his cultural heritage and is derived as something negative.
> if an white European American expresses pride at his cultural heritage
As a white guy who was raised in Upstate NY, and had festivals throughout the year for Italian (a Columbus Day Parade + multiple social clubs), Greek, & Ukrainian festivals, a huge St Patty's Day parade, etc, this doesn't ring true.
We didn't have a single festival for brown people or native people. There were no Women's parades.
Yes waving a Confederate flag will bring a little judgement from me, but that feels like the exception.
Exactly. It makes no sense. The story is similar with regard to Irish cultural heritage.
Actually, it does make sense if you look at it through the right lens.
"Oppressed" => affirmative
"Hegemonic" => racist, bad
AFAICT, this is how the calculation works. And to be fair, it's not entirely without merit. It just seems to me the pendulum -- which was too far in the pro-European heritage direction before -- has now swung too far in the "European/White bad, everything else good" direction.
Well kind of, in the last century 1900-2000 in Australia, Greek and Italian immigrants weren't considered "white". The only immigrants that were considered white were from the UK (and maybe France, Germany, and the Nordic countries).
There is a semi-derogotary slang term used for people of that descent in Australia, but it escapes my mind at the moment. Nevertheless the people immigrated from Greece and Italy and made a significant impact on Australian culture.
I've driven across the US three times. American culture is largely gone, coopted by cookie cutter homes, strip malls and wal-marts. It's a beautiful country though.
I disagree. American culture is still very much there, it just doesn't exist within the corporate/commercial realm.
I think something people always seem to overlook is that there never really was a singular American culture. The different regions have had very distinct cultures. I've been to Polish festivals across the Midwest, large bbq/cookouts in the south, and plenty of bluegrass festivals around appalachia.
There's plenty of culture around. It's just not at the surface anymore now that mass media and other interests have sort of taken control of that arena.
And in California, music festivals and underground parties, all the swimming holes around Yuba, Tahoe (not the touristy stuff), countless other hippie hang-outs...
And that's just a specific sub-culture in NorCal. I'm sure tons of similar things exist around the US, but the California one is pretty awesome and does reach to other places in the world (Hawaii, Costa Rica, Bali, etc)
Very much disagree. Check out a small town in the South, some fishing village in the North East, go to Alaska or Hawaii, watch a high school Football game on a nice Friday night in Texas. Enjoy some Jazz in New Orleans...I think the USA is dripping with culture(s). Even the mega cities are very rich. NYC has a very distinct feel, LA has movie culture which is very much a US thing.
But the USA is also a country of immigrants and natives. It seems silly to toss out immigrants who have actually enriched the culture of the country. I think it's fantastic that you feel the German influence in Pennsylvanian, there are Chinatowns in most cities, I've heard rumors that there might be some Irish influence in Boston etc. etc.
I am a little sad that the native culture isn't a bit stronger.
No, the interstates are a bigger joke. You'll see nothing, but make great time. What I've seen as someone originally from Ohio that's lived in NYC and Seattle the last 10 years is much of the culture is diluted because people move around and communities receive more outside influence than they did pre-WW2. I've seen too much to list here. The rural areas like where I grew up and the farm I was raised on are familiar. It's the faces of people and culture are familiar to me. And people do cling to religion and sometimes guns.
I've also lived in the wealthiest zip code on the upper east side and listened in on elitist ramblings as people discuss international finance in the corner Starbucks. Oblivious of the wider social impacts such topics have.
My day today is spent working in a technocracy that unfortunately over estimates merits and the ability of anyone to simply advance beyond their circumstance.
The culture exists, but it has Americanized over the years. Polish, Irish, German, Swiss, etc it all gets diluted from the European versions after 5 or 6 generations.
You could argue that interstates are actually a very specific part of "American culture". Certainly they had a large impact on the way of life for many Americans over the past 60 some odd years (or however many it's been). Motels, those clusters of shops around the interchanges, certain kinds of diners and truck-stops, not to mention the ubiquity of semi-trucks ("18 wheelers"), etc., are tightly tied to the emergence of the interstates and are iconic in American culture.
For those interested in this, check out Travels with Charley in Search of America by John Steinbeck. It was written in 1962, but I think it holds up well.
An aged Steinbeck feels out of touch with a country he is famous for writing about. To aid this, he travels across the country with his dog to see the America and it's people he has grown away from. He specifically avoids major highways and roads for the reasons people list here.
No, they aren't; though culture grows through them and around them. They're the result of government policies. Soviet apartment blocks aren't culture either.
Well if you just drive around on the main roads it can feel that way. Talk to the locals and participate in local culture and you'll feel very different.
> Most of the things written in past few years about
> diversity. The western culture is evil, because it
> was built by white men.
As a white man, I'm yet to read anything I've taken seriously suggesting that "western culture" is evil. I've read plenty to suggest that my experience isn't always the most important one though, and I think the whole idea of privilege is very very useful. I found the whole GitHub meritocracy debate to be genuinely mind-expanding.
> Regardless of the merit, when you have actual white
> men talking like that, it seems a tad
> self-destructive.
I wonder what we'd make today of the discussions about Southern Culture around the time of abolition. Self-destructive?
> As a white man, I'm yet to read anything I've taken seriously suggesting that "western culture" is evil.
Try "colonialism", "white man's burden", etc. I've seen a lot of those being thrown around lately, with the implication that the current western culture is still imperialistic and oppressive, and therefore all of us - stereotypical westerners - should ask the world for judgement and forgiveness. My point is - well, sure, imperialism happened, lot of bad things were done. Let's resolve particular claims of particular peoples in a mature and legal way. But beyond that, I don't feel any personal responsibility for what happened 100+ years ago, and I don't see why I now - as suggested - should hate myself, hate my culture, or bow down and voluntarily make place for the "oppressed" to step up.
> I wonder what we'd make today of the discussions about Southern Culture around the time of abolition. Self-destructive?
Discussions about slavery != discussions about the whole culture of people. Again, I'm fine with discussing a specific issue on merits - but the current media situation is that one has to be wary of saying anything "too white" or "too patriarchy", lest he be chastised by his own fellow white men - that feels like a pretty self-destructive phenomenon.
Genuine question lost in the blizzard on this thread... but why would a citation add to this? It would just indicate that someone else agreed; what does this add?
Presumably, citation is requesting some factual evidence that this is true, not that people feel it is true.
Though both are important, if there's not actually a "War on Christmas" and Obama didn't actually rename the White House christmas tree the winter tree, but the new President has been cited by his son as running because those things did happen, then both these facts are interesting.
edit to add: something to look forward to, when Trump announces he's renamed the tree to the Christmas tree, even though it never got called anything else. I'm trying to imagine how they'll spin that without actually telling a blatant lie, probably just by making a big fuss about it and letting other people online lie about it.
Somehow it feels "frowned upon" to celebrate that you're a white male. It's something we can't be proud of. Patriarchy and the fact that white males dominate the corporate world is apparently something that should be "changed". I hope Trump changes that.
If a black man says "I'm proud to be a black man" it seems reasonable to most people. If a white man says "I'm proud to be a white man" people think he's part of a prison gang.
I agree that that is unacceptable. Neither stance makes sense to me, but you can be proud of a heritage or culture, but having a particular color of skin doesn't make you automatically part of any culture...it has to do with upbringing or adoption may be, but birth race really has nothing to do with what is a social phenomenon.
If you are proud of being part of a culture, that seems completely reasonable. May be we don't call white culture "white culture," some refer to it as "American culture." Perhaps that's what you want?
I think you are oversimplifying. Look at Black Lives Matter. It is an example of, If a black person says "Black Lives Matter", many white people say "you're racist."
Being white and male is pretty awesome, though, so maybe it's better not to get the rest of the human race jealous? /s
Seriously, people seem to make the mistake of assuming that because we need to change the fact that the corporate world is dominated by white men, that makes being a white man in the corporate world bad. It doesn't, and there's absolutely nothing wrong with that - it's the fact that there are not enough other members of the human race represented i.e. restating the thing we need to change as a negative statement, we see what it is that is bad about the situation.
Being a white male isn't a culture. I'm a white male myself, and there's a lot of cultural differences between me and white men in Russia; white men in different social classes; in different workplaces; in different hobbies and so forth.
Patriarchy is frowned upon because it's inherently unfair. You're complaining that people frown on you because you celebrate your social superiority over them?
> Patriarchy and the fact that white males dominate the corporate world is apparently something that should be "changed"
It seems to me that social superiority was part of the conversation to begin with. The OP wants to celebrate being a white male and apparently doesn't believe that the social superiority of white males is something that needs to be changed.
There's more similarity between you and white men in Russia than you might think.
The trajectory of both cultures were at times parallel. Industrialization. Space race. Higher education accessible for middle class. Having to figure out womens and minorities rights, freedom of religion and abortion.
The bashing of white male culture obscures the fact that it's the culture that made universal human rights possible. Not done by Indians, Chinese or Arabs. We invented this idea that women and men, black and white should be viewed from same angle. Was universally unthinkable before.
Firstly, I'm not American, so no, 'space race' is not part of my culture. Similarly, just because you can draw parallels, does not mean the cultures are the same. American men like to drink to excess? So do Russian men. Ergo the cultures are the same? But wait, Japanese men also like to drink to excess.
As for "white men figuring out women's rights"... are you serious? Women have had to fight for their rights every step of the way. And as for universal human rights, that wasn't a "white male" thing either. It came from certain parts of Europe, not "white males".
You can't simply take everything that came from any white country and just claim that it's a monoculture.
It's sad that 'space race' is not part of your culture. You've missed out on one of Top 5 Things To Do In XX Century.
WRT women had to fight every step: In Soviet Russia, which by the way I don't really like, women got quite a few rights over a range of time without big struggle, and that in part encouraged other white women in the world, and then all other women too, to go for what's theirs.
The white European male culture is what made fight for human rights possible. It's where it all happened, just like Jesus happened in Jerusalem and not in Ohio.
You're not even being internally consistent. Apparently I get to share in the culture of human rights because I'm a white male and white males were in Europe doing human rights things, but I don't get to share in the culture of the space race, which was done predominantly by white males? Why do I get to culturally associate with one and not the other?
> In Soviet Russia, which by the way I don't really like, women got quite a few rights over a range of time
The primary example of women's rights, the Suffragette movement, well predates the existence of the USSR. Women had gained the ability to vote in several countries before the start of WWI, let alone the USSR.
> The white European male culture is what made fight for human rights possible
No it didn't, because there isn't one culture like that. It's like saying that there's only one black culture, only one yellow culture, only one arab culture.
It's a question to you whether you get to shate the culture of the space race. You rejected it in your parent comment.
Suffrage is not everything. The right of doing your finances is another one. The right to abortion is yet other. Entering higher education a different one.
You make it sound like culture is a rigid thing like a barcode, it's either same on two individuals or different, end of story. It is not so. You share more with your peers, a bit less with other compatriots, a bit less with people from neighboring countries, a bit less, but still significant amount, with all white Europeans, and then you share some with the rest of the world.
But on the 'white European' level quite some interesting things do happen.
As a white male you are the wealthiest, healthiest, most celebrated segment in modern society.
If you feel otherwise it's likely something going on in your own head.
EDIT my point is that you're complaining you can't celebrate your white privilege, when in fact every day is a celebration of that. Not that because you are white you necessarily are any of those things - just that it is easier to be.
EDIT2
> All it leads to is an endless loop of arguments
Or, if you step back and don't get so "offended" it's also known as a "discussion".
There's a huge amount of people who really, really don't know how good they have it. Talk about how they need more. Then get offended when you point out there are people worse off.
Inequality is a serious issue, and yes we do need to have a discussion around "privilege", who is or isn't "privileged", and comparison of levels of "privilege".
Telling people to "check their privilege" is pretty close to the worst way to advance any kind of meaningful dialogue, from what I've seen. Speaking that way manages to be simultaneously presumptuous, condescending and demeaning. I'll go out on a limb and posit that we should drop use of the term "privilege" altogether. All it leads to is an endless loop of arguments about: the nature (or existence) of "privilege", who is or isn't "privileged", and comparison of levels of "privilege". I have yet to see one of these discussions change anyone's mind, or lead to any increased understanding.
> Telling people to "check their privilege" is pretty close to the worst way to advance any kind of meaningful dialogue, from what I've seen. Speaking that way manages to be simultaneously presumptuous, condescending and demeaning.
Given the closeness of the election result, it may well have been the straw that tipped it over into a Trump victory.
People who have spread the "check your privilege" meme should reflect on that. But I bet most of them won't.
Congratulations, you've just perfectly proven the GP's point.
This kind of reaction is what makes it forbidden for white westerners "to cultivate, maintain, and respect" their own culture. This kind of reaction, multiplied milionfold via media - both social and traditional alike - which can sometimes lead you to lose your job, or home.
I get it - mistakes were made, some people in the past got trampled in order for the West to get where it is. We can, and should, absolutely talk about it[0]. But living our lives in despair over the "privilege"? Feeling constantly guilty for being born? That's an overreaction.
Frankly, all that privilege talk seems to be just an attempt to guilt-trip the west into self-destructing.
--
[0] - I'm talking pretty recent times; if you want to go back to the beginnings, then each culture has humongous amounts of blood on its hands.
- A Nobel Prize laureate made a joke at a conference lunch, it costed him and his wife their jobs. [0]
- Rosetta comet landing twisted from success into abusing one of the lead scientists. [1]
- There was someone about to or after losing his/her home over a Twitter shitstorm, but I can't for life remember who he or she was now :/.
There are many more stories if you read reports on abuse of Twitter, which has turned into the literal "Internet hate machine". Whether or not these stories are completely innocent or maybe the victims lacked taste in their initial deed is a different discussion; my point is, social media became weaponized and used to strike people at random, and the people wielding the weapon are the same who scream evils of west culture patriarchy at you.
Americans don't like to sing Happy Birthday, wear blue jeans, and bbq things on sunny days? Are any of these negative stereotypes? Who would be offended by saying that it's common in the US for people to do these things? Where did I pass judgment on wearing blue jeans? Denigrate people for singing Happy Birthday? Defend the humble sausage?
My 'list of stereotypes' before that bit was intentionally culture free, apart perhaps from 'birthday songs'. Every (major) culture has all of those aspects. How is it bigoted to say that cultures have religious holidays or sporting events?
--
I can't believe that I just got called a bigot for saying that in American culture, people sing Happy Birthday. In a thread that came from a guy whining that he can't celebrate patriarchy and white men holding all the positions of power, no less. How ridiculously over-sensitive are you?
>"No matter what you have, you will never be happy. All your blessings are curses to you."
That makes no sense. Most would be happy to be just left alone and not be vilified for being white, male, of a western-culture, non-liberal, having cultural/national pride, etc.
Just leave people alone, that's what people are failing to grasp.
The worst we have to worry about is that this "progressive" non-sense is being washed-into our children at public schools and elsewhere. Through the pervasive hate-men and hate-western privilege media that makes such a narrative pervasive to an extent that the teachers themselves can't help but push it onto their pupils.
> Just leave people alone, that's what people are failing to grasp.
Exactly this. Why even bring up the topic of "privilege"? If someone brings it up, they're trying to illicit some sort of reaction from the other party. Ok I fit the definition of what you use the word "privilege" to refer to. I don't feel like I need to be moved to any sort of action because of this. No apologies, no feeling of shame, no feeling of I need to be charitable, respect someone else's position more or less, no need to gloat about it, etc. Nothing. It's like making the observation that the sky is blue. I can look, agree with you, and that is exactly where it should end. If you expect anything more than that, I outright reject it.
> Through the pervasive hate-men and hate-western privilege media
Have a look at the demographic makeup of your country, then have a look at the demographic makeup of TV hosts. Compare also how many times male vs female anchors have their appearance commented on.
Have a listen to some talkback radio.
Read a variety of local papers.
I thoroughly agree that people want to be left alone, but people also want life to be fair. For example, life is not fair when black people get sentenced to significantly longer terms than whites, for identical crimes.
> Are these the worst things you have to worry about?
What else? What other issue are you going to conflate with this one in order to derail it? The "There are starving children in Africa, so all your problems are trivial" argument?
> Your culture is imprinted right across the face of the world
As previously mentioned, "white" isn't really a simple culture, there are many white cultures. If you can be specific by what you mean by culture in this instance?
> woebetide anybody that dares point that out to you.
generalization. You don't know anything about that poster, other than their interactions with you specifically. Your dismissing specific problems in your own arguments as just being general disagree-ability in you opponents.
This ignores the many white men for whom there is no economic hope, because their towns and regions are dying. Many of these white men are living off of disability because their jobs left and aren't going to be coming back. Many are addicted to pain killers and other drugs to help distract them from the reality of their situation. That is an existence without much hope, a slow, depressive sinking into despair.
With that in mind, I think you can imagine why the drum telling them about how privileged they are and have no right to complain might inspire more than a little anger.
Have the same empathy towards poor white men as you would to anyone else, and encourage your friends to, for everyone's sake.
Can we stop this tired meme? The median income for Trump voter at least in the primaries was higher than the nation's median and higher than Clinton's or Sanders'[0].
That article has very suspect figures. It says that all the major candidates had supporters with median incomes above the national median income. Which tells me that the population they're polling isn't representative.
That's not cause to suspect the analysis. Yes, the sampled population may not be congruent with the nationwide population. There's a reason for that: these are exit polls at the primaries. Only those who showed up to vote in those primaries can be polled.
The VA results there, for example, also show that the majority of respondents for both Republican and Democratic primaries are over the median state (and national) _age_.
Right, that was my point - primary voters are not representative of general election voters, and so conclusions about general election voters should not be drawn from primary voter data.
Maybe you should start to see people as individuals instead of treating them as members of a group and putting all of them into a box labeled "privileged".
Not every white male is part of the "wealthiest, healthiest, most celebrated segment in modern society".
Society does not treat individuals as individuals. People are put into boxes every day, and it's really only now that people are saying, "hey you know that being white means you probably get put in less boxes, and boxes of less negative importance, let's just acknowledge that", that people are suddenly imploring people to not put people in boxes.
> As a white male you are the ..., healthiest, ... in modern society.
Not true, Asians are healthier than whites and females are healthier than males. White males have some privileges but they certainly don't have all of them.
You need to compare within countries or it doesn't matter. Asians in the US lives a lot longer than whites in the US. Also if you want to find poor whites you just have to look at Russia where they live shorter than even China. Therefore we can conclude that being born in the US is a privilege in terms of life span, but being white is not.
Everywhere around you. You have a indoor plumbing and electricity and always-on internet, correct? You eat three squares a day, right? In global terms, you are likely to be quite wealthy. Most software developers easily make it into the world's top 5%, if not the top 1%.
>Most software developers easily make it into the world's top 5%, if not the top 1%.
You do realise they are what they are because they made it so? Or at least becasuse their parents grandparents did. They weren't born pro developets, not a single one of them had any guaratees of being succesful or fairly paid.
And no - not all of them were born into a wealthy family of the 1% of the first world countries. You can check some noatable bios and see for yourself just how many of the so called 'world's top 5%, if not the top 1%' started at the bottom of the world.
You seem to be attacking me for stating a fact. Who cares about why they are wealthy — people in the computer industry are astonishingly wealthy in historic or global terms.
>astonishingly wealthy in historic or global terms
Like if we compare a junior sys.admin to some kid of the similar age from an african village that has problems with drinkable water? Yes, well, no shit.
This is the essence of white privilege. A belief that you got there through your own hard work, smarts and gumption.
Stand back a second. Many third world countries have this in spades, but just never had your opportunities.
There is a possibility, that maybe you failed to consider, that maybe you are just "lucky". The gaping chasm of inequality that faces you is insurmountable, so you justify your privilege by telling yourself you're better.
I know that's a hard pill to swallow, because it calls into question a belief that you are in control of your life which is a scary thought. Especially for 'murca.
And the opposite belief is that because someone has privilege they should "do something about it". White males are at the top of the ladder. It doesn't matter why. They have no need to apologize or feel guilty about it. Even if it is an indirect result of exploiting slave labor at some point in the distant past, so be it.
The current pre-Trump political zeitgeist is completely antithetical towards this. It downright seeks to eradicate patriarchy. I like Trump because he gives me the impression that if someone were to give me shit about my so-called "white privilege" and I said to them "So what, go fuck yourself" he'd have my back all the way.
>This is the essence of white privilege. A belief that you got there through your own hard work, smarts and gumption.
Oh really? Lend me a minute of your time then, if you can be so kind.
My family (half russian half ukrainian) comes from Tajikistan (both parents and their parents were living and working there before USSR went down). At the time I was born (1988) Tajikistan was still part of the USSR, obviously.
When the shit hit the fan in the late 80s (civil war began in 1991) we had to move from there. While father was trying to start up his business in Cheboksary (capital of Chuvash republic in Russia) - my mother and I were living in Poltava, Ukraine. So, while Ukraine and Russia were our respective homelands - we were refugees, formally. Yet, in a matter of 4 or 5 year my father and his friends, who also made it out from Tajikistan torn by a war, were able to establish a company, which was successful enough to provide these families with homes, food etc. They made it with their knowledge, will, effort and hard work. Despite being refugees in their own country (which is a paradox, right?). Not because they were white, not because they had more money (they had not) or any other "privileges".
So - my 'privileges', did not just appeared out of the blue, because I'm white. They are the result if my father's and mother's efforts. Had they thrown this chance away - I wouldn't have any of this. No matter how white I am.
And this is just one, not very well telling example.
Yes, living in the more or less modern environment has it's benefits, but this has nothing to do with 'white privilege'.
>You have a indoor plumbing and electricity and always-on internet, correct? You eat three squares a day, right?
So does everyone in America, regardless of race or class.
> Most software developers easily make it into the world's top 5%, if not the top 1%.
I am the only upper middle-class member of my entire extended family. The rest are all lower-middle, blue collar workers - the kind people like you want to kick to the curb with open borders.
>Everywhere around you. You have a indoor plumbing and electricity and always-on internet, correct? You eat three squares a day, right? In global terms, you are likely to be quite wealthy
These things are true of every black male, white woman, hispanic woman, asian male, etc... I've ever met. So do all of those demographics also have white male privilege?
Then you need to meet more people, for sure. You're so wealthy that you don't even know what poverty looks like.
No comment on whether any demographics enjoy white male privilege. It was just a comment on the fact that the wealth of hackers are literally everywhere around us, but we apparently can't have a discussion about it without descending into who has privilege.
>You're so wealthy that you don't even know what poverty looks like.
I mean, knowing what poverty is and experiencing it are two different things. Of course, I've lived out of my car, so it's possible both apply to me... And even then I had access to all the things you talk about by stepping into a goddamned McDonald's. I would have gone to a shelter of some kind, but none of them let me in because I am a white male.
> but we apparently can't have a discussion about it without descending into who has privilege.
"You disputed my claim about privilege, therefore we can't have a discussion about privilege."
Every one around me gets those advantages, regardless of skin color.
The real lesson to take away from Trump's win is that there are a lot of people finding it increasingly hard to keep that water running and electricity on. Job security has disappeared and underemployment is a huge problem.
> As a white male you are the wealthiest, healthiest, most celebrated segment in modern society.
Yes. I don't want to feel that I need to apologize for this or be treated in a negative way. I get that we're at the top of the ladder, now leave us alone.
I'm not sure you need to apologize and it doesn't look like you have been treated in a negative way.
I hope you don't consider this thread as "being treated in a negative way", it's a just discussion. EDIT: I really appreciate you replying. We are supposed to talk to you about it all, apparently, and it's good to have that discussion.
> you are the wealthiest, healthiest, most celebrated segment in modern society.
individuals experience reality as individuals, not in aggregate. Also, you can slice the cake as you wish - you can specify a group as "the wealthiest/celebrated" group directly, without conflating this with race or sex, whatever correlations might exist.
The wealthiest white males live on the liberal coasts of CA and in NY, mean FA to rust belt white men who are being told to stfu because they are so wealthy/powerful/celebrated... in aggregate at least. White men can reject the establishment too - there is no contradiction in the fact that the "establishment" consists mainly of white males, so long as you understand that race/sex/etc aren't the only way to group the world.
Here in Spain the 12th of October is remembered as the day Chris Columbus found the new continent but somehow the left is disgusted by the fact that there were some degree of imperialism and colonialism.
FFS its our history and we should not deny it. We should learn from it, see what was good, what was bad, and celebrate the date because it was a important mark in this world.
- Scott Fitzgerald
- Mark Twain
- Herman Melville
- John Steinbeck
- Wall Whitman
- E. Allan Poe
- Ginsbert
- Bukowski
- Charlie Chaplin
- Miles Davis
- Bob Dylan
- (countless others)
Depends on where/what you choose to look. I understand that the average American is not all that knowledgeable but neither is the average European, Australian, Japanese or Nigerian...
Just nitpicking, but Chaplin was born in the UK and was already a vaudeville star when he was signed up by Karno and went to Hollywood. His status as an immigrant led to calls for him to be deported when he protested against HUAC. In the end, when he left for the premier of Limelight in London in 1952, the AG revoked his re-entry permit, and he didn't return to the US for twenty years.
Which is not to deny that his silent movie career isn't American culture; just that Chaplin's relationship with America was complicated.
On a more serious note, it's interesting to reread his poem _America_, which was certainly written more as an aspiration than a description at the time. However, this election makes you wonder whether the aspiration is even there anymore (from either side, if we're being honest).
| Centre of equal daughters, equal sons,
| All, all alike endear’d, grown, ungrown, young or old,
| Strong, ample, fair, enduring, capable, rich,
| Perennial with the Earth, with Freedom, Law and Love,
| A grand, sane, towering, seated Mother,
| Chair’d in the adamant of Time.
"respect for American culture" always comes in the form of trashing and stereotyping other cultures and enumerating the reasons why "they" should leave. Maybe if you tried an affirmative approach, instead of saying all kinds of racist and bigoted things about other cultures, fewer people would call you a bigot or a racist.
I've thought lately that the cosmopolitan outlook, which I do hold and generally enjoy, is also a rootless one. In accepting the ever-present change, respecting the multitude of outlooks, it often denies connecting with traditions in favor of a single "modern, rational, progressive" view that buries its internal contradictions beneath fleeting surface treasures.
At the same time, it supports the imperial concept of misappropriating original traditions as a convenient fancy, a reference to the exotic, or a belittling of the other, which you give a great example of - with the pretext that this is somehow contributing to progress. Appropriation can be "done right" and produce great new works, but it can't be done easily. It's so much easier to simply loot the past without thinking.
One of the books I like that considers similar thoughts at various points is Melzer's Philosophy Between the Lines: The Lost History of Esoteric Philosophy. [0]
> That's just wrong. Indian culture - and culture - is far, far more than a dance or some dish.
Maybe now you start to see the "damned if you do damned if you don't" nature of political correctness, and why it has been rejected in this election cycle with great success.
There are right wing versions of political correctness.
Try saying that immigrants aren't a problem at a Republican rally. Or saying that women have a right to choose. Or that homosexuals should be able to marry.
Then watch how quickly right wingers jumps down your throat for not being politically correct.
Gonna have to disagree with you here. Some "right wingers" might, but not all. There's an awful lot of gradient on the right side of the spectrum (just as there is on the left).
Immigrants aren't the problem for most "right wingers." Illegal immigrants are.
Women having the right to choose is only a problem if you expect a woman's right to choose to extend to extinguishing the life of a fetus at any stage of pregnancy. Many "right wingers" are liberal on this up to a point (say the first trimester).
Many "right wingers" (probably not extreme right wing, but still) are socially quite liberal and support gay marriage.
So... I disagree with all your points. But I can see that this election, especially, has polarized people to the extreme. Rather than seeing the gradient on either side, everyone is seeing every person who votes for Trump as an evil person; and likewise, every person who votes for Clinton as corrupt.
In order to move forward we need to come to terms with this gradient in our individual values again. We need to realize that there are fiscally conservative Democrats, and socially liberal Republicans. When we can do that then we can get back to compromising to mutually beneficial outcomes.
And if we cannot do that then we, as a country, are in deep s--t no matter who is running the country.
That's a good point, and I was wrong to paint all right wingers with the same brush. They are in fact quite varied, as you point out.
My larger point still stands, however. I still maintain that you'd get in trouble saying the kinds of things I said at a Republican rally because of political correctness that many (though not all) right wingers adhere to.
Even if those particular examples weren't the best, there are plenty more where those came from. Try saying you don't support the military. Try saying that burning the American flag is a form of free speech. Try saying that Clinton is a better candidate than Trump, and so on.
Okay, I'll grant your extended argument here. But I'll counter by saying that the same reasoning applies to Democrat rallies. This particular election there was violence and intolerance of opposing views at rallies for both parties. I recall Obama (in one of his best moments, in my opinion) cooling people off when they were getting heated with some lone old guy who was a Trump supporter. That was admirable. We need more of that.
But yes, the truth is that saying the reverse of most of your statements would get you in a lot of hot water at a Democrat rally. You see that right? If you went to a Democrat rally and said Trump was a better candidate than Hillary? That's not gonna fly. Or if you said that corporations should be allowed to contribute financially to political parties?
My main argument, I suppose, still stands. There's just an awful lot of intolerance going around these days. A truck load of it. We need to all own our individual intolerances and biases and still respect each other. We don't have to agree, but perhaps we could start with at least agreeing to hear each other out. Then we could discover where we're all coming from and why we want what we want, and how we can perhaps collaborate on building something mutually acceptable together.
Yes, I definitely see that there is something like "political correctness" on the Democratic or liberal side. But my point is merely that it's not limited to the Democrats or liberals, as right wing media would have everyone believe. The right wing (in general, though maybe not to a man) are just as guilty of it.
In broader terms, there's always the party line, no matter what party you're part of -- and saying things against the party line will get you in trouble with the true believers (or those that would paint themselves as such). That goes equally for most Republicans and Democrats, most liberal and conservatives, communists and fascists, etc.
To maintain that "political correctness" is just a liberal or Democratic phenomenon is simply disingenuous.
The main problem with having graduated opinions is that you can only express them with one shade of candidate: it's either the Republican or the Democrat candidate. You can not nuance your view of them, and so, shortcuts are taken, since by voting for one or the other, you endorse them, whether you fully or only partially agree with them.
If the political system allowed for a more nuanced voting (Such as grading candidates for example), then people wouldn't have this dual view of the other party's supporters.
That's totally not true. The WSJ, one of the leading conservative papers/voices, is very pro-immigration. Senators like McCain and Rubio almost got an immigration bill though Obama. There are pro-choice republican senators (Collins, Murkowski). And there are some that support gay marriage, include Rob Portman, and the reviled Dick Cheney. These are minority opinions, but the discussion is allowed.
An important part of Clinton's campaign strategy and that of the Democrat establishment in general is to try and discredit and marginalise Republicans like Rubio. We know this from documents obtained by Wikileaks that talk about tactics like bringing into question Rubio's Republican credentials and support amongst Latinos while building up Trump and other joke candidates as credible opponents. We all know how well that turned out.
And how is the WSJ's pro-immigration stance seen in the Republican party as a whole? Do pro-choice Republicans actually speak out and get much of a hearing on their pro-choice views at major Republican rallies? If so, what kind of reception do they get?
Or how climate change is borne out by the facts, or how blacks were enslaved for hundreds of years by whites, or the crusades happened, on and on and on.
Everyone has their own little safe-space and their own desire to stifle others speech (voter suppression?). Just some hard statements follow from fact and some do not.
It's a fact that makes people uncomfortable. Similar to facts like "women on average have less muscle mass than men." And I think you'd agree that people from the right would jump on someone who disputed the muscle mass fact as "out-of-control political correctness."
There are facts and there are non-facts. That women have less muscle mass on average is a fact. "Mexico sends their rapists" is not a fact.
"When Mexico sends its people, they're not sending their best. They're not sending you. They're not sending you. They're sending people that have lots of problems, and they're bringing those problems with us. They're bringing drugs. They're bringing crime. They're rapists. And some, I assume, are good people."
What is your vision of the wrongness of the crusades? It's certainly not that the religion which had spread itself with the wars across the outer lands of the East Roman Empire on the promises of 72 virgins for its fighters and the war until the whole world submits to their rules (the name of the religion means "the submission") was morally right.
I think the difference is that if you say those things at a Republican rally you know what you're getting into. The thing that I think is really off-putting about a certain brand of political correctness (which include the post by puranjay) is when well-meaning people with no ill-intention are chastised as ignorant at best, bigots at worst. For example the post by puranjay, what exactly does he want? It's not reasonable to expect everyone to know everything about every other culture. It's just going to make people resentful.
You are confusing shared ideology with PC. The point of PC is that it's bipartisan (or "hegemon", in a vocabulary we should rediscover). Every group will have its taboos and shared beliefs, that's not PC.
You do realize that what the great renaissance intellectuals created, the right wing in the united stated looks down upon and scoffs at, right? They hate anything to do with art or culture unless it's their version of Christianity.
This is the same attitude of Boko Haram.
The left wing doesn't dismiss the great cultural achievements the west has created, but we try to create space for them within a nation known for accepting immigrants, rather than forcefully imposing our culture on them, which seems to have failed so brilliantly in places like France.
The politicians trivialize this shit, because they pander to the voters. The left embraces other cultures because we're sick of getting Christianity shoved down our throats.
The left doesn't embrace freedom of speech for those that think differently from them though.
The left is inclusive of all sorts of groups of people so long as they agree and ultimately vote their way. We have a major homeless problem but they are quick to offer taking in refugees because they're more enlightened. It's all for making themselves feel better. And the politicians so it for votes... All the while ignoring groups of people they supposedly champion for.
Not sure how Christianity is shoved down your throat. Sounds like you don't like Christians because their beliefs don't line up with yours and are upset a primarily Christian nation is Christian in practice. That's not very tolerant. What are you afraid of? Christmas? Accidentally going to mass?
And can we judge an entire political opinion on the actions a of a tiny minority of people? If we are going to play that game, there are lots of great examples of similar nonsense from the Left.
Do we judge black people on the statements of Louis Farrakhan's anti-Jewish rhetoric? Or Jeramiah Wright's sermons? Or Jesse Jackson's corruption? Or even Hilary Clinton's corruption?
I'm not judging anyone. I'm not anti-religion, but I do think his point that religion is harmless and "what is there to be afraid of" is naive at best.
Yep, shutting down speech because of "security concerns" is not banning, like what happened to many conservative speakers (Ben Shapiro at DePaul for example).
Sure, because then people will just stop having abortions. People never had abortions back before they had a legal right to it, right?
If abortions are banned, the only thing it will cause is that abortions will be done in non-medical settings with dangerous methods. Just like they were for hundreds of years.
Let's not even consider the number of orphans and abandoned children which would skyrocket.
Where to begin.. Milos Yiannopolous is a great example. Lauren Southern, Ben Shapiro at DePaul University. Roger Williams University banned a conservative student group, Condi Rice was disinvited from speaking at Rutgers commencement, Islam critic Ayaan Hirsi Ali was disinvited from a commencement speech, Ari Fleisher was disinvited from Middlebury in 2002, Ann Coulter was disinvited by Cornell, John Brennan was disinvited by U Penn in 2016, Charles Murray disinvited by Virginia Tech in 2016, Peter Theil disinvited by Berkeley in 2014z
It goes on and on. See thefire.org/resources/disinvitation-database for a complete database of disinvitation attempts. The vast majority in the past several years have been from the Left.
So true. He's a great example of a vacuous unprincipled opportunist whose main desire is his own glorification. A really good example, thanks for bringing it up.
You just won the election. I wonder when the right is going to stop playing the victim. I'm sure President Trump will be very accommodating to those who think differently from him.
I didn't win anything lol. I'm third party and voted so but my wife and almost of my friends where I live are on the left. I was hoping for a 5% Libertarian victory for access to public funds (Presidential Election Campaign Fund’s grant). Competition is good.
Anyway, from my group of primarily left friends:
- I've heard some are moving out of the country.
- Many are removing friends that voted Trump or were Anti-Hillary. This has been happening for some time. Some are even removing family members.
- Even my wife told me she lost respect for me for voting third party.
The left and the right from the major parties are both full of shit.
But saying you are progressive when you don't tolerate other views and even lose respect for others that differ is on a whole other level of bullshit. And getting emotional and raging when you discover an opposing point is not progressive at all either. It probably just means you didn't learn to play in the sandbox with others.
It's all sad but the worst part is how the majority of citizens treat others with different views.
Gonna have to disagree with that one. The left is very pro social programs to help the poor which includes the homeless, the right wants them to pull themselves up by their bootstraps. The ACLU fight in court for the free speech rights of racist organizations[1].
Being forced by my government to adhere to a religion I don't want to adhere to. Things like forcing my children prey in school. Being a second class citizen.
>Christmas?
I'm not afraid of Christmas but I don't personally celebrate Christmas (not even in a secular way) and I'd like to keep it that way. I'd also like anyone to celebrate any holiday they would like to celebrate, including Christmas if they want.
> Accidentally going to mass?
Being forced to go to mass.
I think Christianity is harmful but I don't wish to tell other people what to do with their lives and I respect their right to practice whatever VooDoo they want to practice.
The left is more than the ACLU. I think the ACLU is generally pretty consistent.
You're afraid of a prayer hanging up? A student, who does not even believe in God, finds it offensive? Should the Bible not be in a library either? That's hardly "shoving it down your throat".
Nobody has the right to force children to pray in school or stand for the national anthem either. You'll never be forced to go to mass. The US has 280 M Christians, that would have happened a long time ago.
It sounds like your fears are more that your children will see things differently from you. I get that, but in this current world, I don't see how you can objectively think that your children becoming practicing Christians is a top concern for their health and well-being.
I went to a private Catholic school for high school and we had non Christians there. One of my friends was Pagan and one was Muslim. We had religion class. One teacher did Hail Marys. They weren't forced to do anything Christian. They had to learn about Christianity but nobody was trying to convert anyone by any means. Their parents weren't concerned they would jump to the other side because that's the whole point of parenting. You mold them a bit but ideally let them think for themselves as they'll be on their own someday.
I've been to different religious services: Greek Orthodox, Native American rituals, and also to Bat Mitzvahs and other events outside my sphere. It's good to learn about other people's beliefs and cultures. We shouldn't be afraid of it.
Except the left pulls their classic double standard with stuff like being incredibly accepting of Muslim immigrants/refugees and their ideologies, yet not being anywhere near as tolerant of Christianity, when likely the two religions have more in common than the left wing does with the former.
And as it turns out, people like being surrounded by others that share their values, speak their language, look like them, and enjoy the same activities as they do. There's no shame in wanting a group identity. The christian right wing is just tired of everybody else's identity being legitimized except for theirs.
It's more visceral than being tired of being left out. Christians are mapping the trajectory of the cosmopolitan left culture, see things like the Brendan Eich incident, and are genuinely afraid that there's a leftist fascism developing. Maybe they're jumping to conclusions, but that's what they think.
Also, abortion is a really big deal. To some degree, the evangelical/conservative Christian vote was split this time around because Trump had a loud but not very reputable position against abortion. It's remarkable that Trump won despite that shortcoming.
This is exactly the kind of thought terminating cliché that makes people despise the Left and vote Trump. Of course Muslims are people. So are Buddhists, murderers, mothers, Nazis, and so on. In fact, literally all people are people. A kindergartner can tell you as much, so how is this anything other than dismissive, empty rhetoric?
The real issue is obviously not their humanity, but their beliefs. It makes total sense to see them foremost as Muslims given the importance of Islam to their identity. Acknowledging this doesn't mean you're dehumanizing these people, it simply means that you're not willfully blind to the fact that beliefs substantially influence how people behave.
The real questions that should be asked and addressed revolve around the compatibility of that identity with the US society. Do US citizens like living among Muslims (i.e. people that are culturally quite distant from themselves)? Does it introduce ideological and social friction? Does it enhance society or not?
Those are the questions that the liberal Left doesn't even attempt to answer, because they're completely fixated on abstract moral dogmas (-isms like racism, sexism), which coincidentally is a privilege often afforded by not having to suffer the actual social consequences of those dogmas.
When you don't apply the same "people" standard to Muslim and Christians, when you want to strip one of those classes from free speech, from free entry into their country or their religious freedom, do not be surprised if "the left" ( but really, anyone) gathers that they are not being seen as people.
The reasonable questions you are asking are not the questions your (I'm assuming) party is asking. The answers to those questions are also extremely different to the answers that same party is coming up with. You don't solve a cultural difference problem by removing the culturally different, that's just making it worse.
How do you define muslim? Is it someone going from muslim country who is not religious? Someone who goes to mosque once a week? Or someone who is praying all the time and tries to convert other people to his believes? Are all those groups really causing problems for you or society?
A Muslim is a follower and believer of Islam. A non-Muslim from a Muslim country is not a Muslim, while a Muslim is. I really don't get why you're asking this. I assume the answer would be obvious if we were talking about Christianity or libertarianism or any other distinct set of beliefs: if you believe in them, you are a believer.
Whether any belief system has the potential to cause problems for a society depends on the content of that belief system and the content of the belief systems already present in that society. In the case of Islam in particular, there are two facts worth noting:
First, a strong case can be made for major compatibility problems of mainstream Sunni Islam (MAI) with Western societies. I won't go into details here, but very generally speaking, MAI has a theocratic component: Muslims should, in theory, strive towards the implementation of sharia law. As a body of laws and in terms of its axioms, sharia is simply incompatible with the Western legal tradition. I'm sure that what I'm saying here is not controversial among MAI Muslims. Your average Muslim (assuming he's honest) will corroborate this.
Second, Muslims come from a culture that is very unlike that of the US. Even if there were no incompatibilities, the bare fact that they're so culturally distant poses a barrier to the formation of the social bonds that are necessary for high trust, high cohesion communities and societies. In case that's not obvious: people generally bond more with others with whom they share the same cultural reference frame and state of mind.
Supposing you grant me these two arguments, then the potential for causing problems for a society is established. Whether that potential is actualized depends on the demographic weight a group has and the extent to which it is willing to compromise.
Speaking as a Dutchman (and realizing that the demographics of our Muslim population differ substantial from that of the US), it is clear to me that Muslims as a group cause problems in both senses. For example, in areas where there is a substantial Muslim demographic, there are now local political parties that explicitly cater to them. We never asked for this and we don't want it, but now we're stuck having to deal with it and with the social friction that comes with it. Another example: schools with substantial numbers of Muslim pupils are subject to great social pressures by this group, with some not being able to discuss certain topics anymore (Holocaust, criticism of Islam, cheering Muslim pupils during the aftermath of the Charlie Hebdo shootings) and concessions being made at the cost of native students such as defaulting to halal food. If you want sources for any of these claims, let me know.
> I assume the answer would be obvious if we were talking about Christianity
Not at all. Would you stay Christians want creationism to be taught in schools and not evolution? Would you say Christians are anti-abortion and anti Gay marriage?
Sociology isn't maths. Social groups almost always have some internal diversity. That doesn't mean they aren't meaningful categories. Christianity shares a common core of beliefs. It has a common narrative. It has a large set of overlapping beliefs. The same goes for Muslims (and Buddhists, libertarians, you get it).
There are sweet apples, sour apples and everything in between. That doesn't mean it would make sense to start pondering on which of those really are apples, nor whether you should try to sell them in a neighborhood known not to like apples.
Sure, you can subset Muslims into different groups and branches, and some of those will be more compatible with Western society than others. The net impact with zero filtering however is negative.
I completely see the point of wanting to maintain and evolve the current set of social norms, rules and values in a society, and wanting immigrants to integrate well. But I do think that 'Muslim' as a category is too broad, not useful and in fact detrimental to smooth integration where it is possible.
You might as well use a different broad category - say 'foreigner' and whatever you say (erosion of society's values etc.) would hold true in general. Then you could draw the conclusion that foreigners are causing the social disruption and so any immigration is to be resisted.
Basically what I'm saying is, if you point to specific values that you respect and that are being eroded (e.g. 'I dont like immigrants that dont support womens rights') it may be better received than if you transfer the blame to a generic broad category, specially along religion or race, because then you might appear to be a racist.
I think it's about 400 years late to be asking if Muslims are a good fit for US society. Some estimates put the first Muslim in America on the Mayflower, others say 17th century slavery. Either way, Muslims have been in America for a long, long time.
I believe that the left is focused on a wider context and trying to ensure that the worst moments of human nature are not repeated.
(preface: not saying this is going to occur or repeat etc but-) I believe everyone here would not want genocide, rape camps, slavery or other atrocities to exist (they may very well do so today, but we can also hopefully agree this is something that is to be avoided as much as possible).
"The left" is fixated on this. The context of "how did I get here?". How is it that I am having dumplings delivered to my door while there is starvation still rampant in the world? These questions lead to the thread pulling of context and it's interplay with the current circumstances of the (left-leaning) individual.
From here this leads to history, oppressive and forceful spreading of Christianity throughout the world through often violent and culturally dismissive means, exploitation, and the above atrocities.
The left is predominantly concerned with not repeating these same mistakes. While they do suffer from some of the issues that affect "the right" voters - I would vouch on a general scale globally not really as much:
The right usually work highly volatile positions which they are sold as (and rightfully so) adding to the prosperity of their nation and fulfilling of a duty, they feel (also rightfully so) like fodder used by their nation for economic gain and prosperity. The right voter base will react against any entity that is destabilizing this - it is unfortunate that they are treated as such with no opportunity for transition when the industries predominantly aligned with these groups are by their nature bound for a temporary life time.
While the left does often experience the same hardships of economic immobility, job loss, they can abstract themselves from this with the often larger city centres offering alterntives to these downturns. The right is unable to do the same.
I am of the opinion (emphasis on opinion in these very volatile areas that we have to apply utilitarian laws to) that Christianity/left-values are - as you said - group identifiers that allow a sense of belonging.
I personally am left leaning so disagree with the assessment of "legitimization" of Christianity when there are several open cases of heinous instances where it hasn't afforded the same - and has resulted in a highlight reel of the worst humanity has to offer (not isolated of course to Christianity, but it is a hard case to sell that solidifying this group will result in net positives, especially when blatantly used as a tool by politicians to consolidate their own power). Along with this, certain issues regarding race, gender, and other imagined hostilities seem to be purported by 'the right' as concerns, when in reality we are simply serving to undermine the countries we all wish to be their best. We should be openly encouraging performance from skill and shaking our heads at those who would lower another's potential by a bizarre rubric. While there is much to be said for the benefits of community, there is simply too much castigation from the right to misdirected or non-existent perceived threats. As you said "there is no shame in wanting a group identity", I believe that this metric should then be used to not demonise females wanting to belong to "feminism", Latinos wanting to belong to a Latino identity, or the many other groups who have been - throughout history - actively suppressed either through violence, genocide, or structures in place that do not afford them the same opportunities being demanded now. To ask for legitimacy whilst ignoring past (extreme) grievances when the same was requested and then crying foul is remiss.
However I believe that across the globe that left-leaning parties need to do much much more work at re-training, re-educating, and emphasising just what tremendous effort the blue collar - and often right-voting - people of their countries have sacrificed so that the left get their opportunity to learn and mobilize upwards. There is a need to bring them along as well or the country is just as doomed and suffering of citizens just as bad.
We need to work together, support each other, and not be drawn in to crude openly-acknowledged-as-broken party systems.
That being said - if Trump does not destabilize this system in the US and push the country toward a preferential system, he isn't worth the square inch of a used toilet paper. (one final left-leaning comment in there!)
P.S. I genuinely hope he tries to "shake things up", however all rhetoric points to him being more fascinated with self-service - even above those issues of the hard workers in the centre of the US that supported him with their hopes on the line.
I disagree - there is nothing complicated or difficult in Pollock's art; he himself states his vision clearly: "I am nature." Likewise, there's nothing complicated or difficult in Hirst's work either because, quite simply, he has nothing complicated, interesting, or difficult to say. To quote the late Bob Hughes:
"his work is both simple-minded and sensationalist, just the ticket for newbie collectors who are, to put it mildly, connoisseurship-challenged and resonance-free. "
If we pause for a moment to contemplate how well educated, loving people end up building IEDs, blowing themselves up or operating large gas chambers, we realise this is not outside the realm of the possible.
We are all human and we are all subject to the same primal forces. It's our job to fight it.
White guilt is a large reason why white people are afraid to assert themselves and their racial identity. You're basically labeled a bigot if you don't support the cause of nihilistic globalism and moral leveling.
Nonsense. White guilt is of the genus that is the best guilt to have. You are guilty about something you didn't do, you feel good about your guilt, and you can push off the penance on the community at large. I'll take it any day over guilt for running over a neighbor's dog.
(Particularly since a) I'm white, and b) I haven't yet injured any of my neighbors' dogs.)
Geez us, man. Get a grip. People like you who are blinded by rage are a big part of what's wrong with this country. You scream at someone for being a "fucking racist" and believe you hold the moral high ground? Are you kidding me? In my book your behavior is every bit as bad as the worst kind of bigotry and racism I've ever been exposed to. After reading your rant I need to go wash my eyes out with soap.
I'm wondering how many people will continue to commit the mistake of not differentiating between individuals and groups.
On average the group X might have property Y but that doesn't mean every individual has property Y.
It doesn't make sense to differentiate individuals by the group they belong to. It makes sense to differentiate individuals by their properties directly.
In my experience as an immigrant liberals are the only ones who have ever shown racism towards me in the West.
Usually it's the type of patronising racism where someone subtly implies that immigrants are basically stupid children at best who don't know what's best for themselves. So we need liberals like yourself as our teacher so you can tell us what to do.
This kind of aggression towards people who are different isn't only shown towards immigrants but also towards all who are religious, are not college educated, are conservative, are not politically correct, listen to certain type of music and so on
Depending on which group you belong to the aggression can be anything between treating someone as a subhuman to actual physical violence.
You comment is a great display for a liberal viewing all who dared voting against the second of two options as subhumans. You can be proud of yourself
On the other hand a conservative will just not engage with me more than necessary if he doesn't like me for some reason. I'm fine with that, who am I to tell that person what he should do?
Voter ID is a good example of what you shared. The left pretends to champion minorities with their stance, but it's really a disdain and underlying racism against those groups:
Of course culture is more than food or dance, but what's wrong with trying those as a way to have a glimpse into the Indian culture? I don't think anyone claimed to be expert on Indian culture after having a butter chicken. What would you propose instead?
Because this perspective looks at all the positive aspects of my culture while assuming there are no negatives (there are MANY).
It sacrifices objectivity for political correctness.
I'd rather hear people tell me "yeah, your food might be amazing, but you guys need to treat your women better", instead of saying "wow! I love Indian culture!" at some Holi event
When I go to a Spanish festival, there is paella and salsa dancing. There aren't broadcasts that censorship is rife and the right to protest the government is being eliminated.
When I go to a Polish festival, there is sausages and beer. It isn't broadcast that the government has gone extreme right wing, that womens right to abortion is being removed and criminalised.
When I go to an Indian festival, there is curry and mendhi. It isn't broadcast that women have few rights, and (gang) rape is more common than it should be.
The point of these festivals are to celebrate the positives, not to focus on the negatives. They're celebrations not protests.
> When I go to a Polish festival, there is sausages and beer. It isn't broadcast that the government has gone extreme right wing, that womens right to abortion is being removed and criminalised.
That's old news, the civic proposal to harden the laws on abrotion was later overthrown in the parliament by the "extreme rightwing" ruling party. I wonder if BBC reported on that.
I suspect that you're in a minority of Indians that think comments from white guys who's understanding of Indian culture(s) doesn't go much beyond butter chicken and arranged marriages opining on Indian cultural problems with women would be helpful though. Even if we're focusing on Indians that agree that India has unique cultural problems with the treatment of women.
And one of the driving forces behind Trump's success is a whole lot of foreign/liberal/establishment/non-insider figures pontificating about how that sort of person's culture must be pretty messed up if Trump is expected to pick up votes from them. (Just because a point of view is justified doesn't mean it doesn't provoke a backlash)
Most people would rather not have have their culture attacked. You might be different. Applying this in person could lead to ugly American syndrome or persistent imperialism.
Which is too bad because you sound like a great person. The world would be a better place if we could be hear honest opinions without taking personal offense. But if I go to India and talk to them about the way they treat women, they might recall the last time some white people showed up and started telling them how they should run things.
You could literally say that about any culture. No one is trying to fully emulate your culture. To be honest, when people are curious about me, I am flattered.
My family is Bangladeshi. The food is amazing and the people are generally kind. But we came to the U.S. for a reason. It's worth remembering: 30% of Latinos in Florida voted for Trump. The left is not doing a good job walking that fine line between "we welcome those who want to become American" and "we are willing to give up the aspects of American culture that make people want to come here."
erm bro... seriously? if i meet you at a random festival and wanted to have a casual conversation to be friendly with you, you want me to bring up your treatment of women?
She was out of touch with the hardships of Middle America. Globalization has been good to America in aggregate, but has hollowed out the rust belt (which went very much for Trump).
The emails did not help; it made her appear above the law.
Government in the US has been extremely dysfunctional for a while now, and Clinton is the embodiment of the establishment politician. This may explain why so many people were willing to vote for an outsider candidate, despite his obvious flaws.
for me it was the way she talked. like the umpteenth "career politician" who is trying to spoon feed me exactly what baby-food formula her focus groups think I want to hear. We've heard that so many times from so many candidates, that you stop believing it.
What I believe is she is funded by wealthy corporate donors and will always put their needs first.
I voted for trump because "I'm not falling for that again". I'm sick of hearing it, the boilerplate speeches about making things "better" while they go off and do whatever they want once they're elected. When trump spoke, he didn't have that "mask" on, he talks like a real, genuine human being who's speaking from his mind/heart. His crude statements were unfortunate, but those also reinforce that he's genuine, speaking whats inside. Not through a triple-stage reverse-osmosis speech filter scripted by his handlers.
Actually the same happened in my country. I was thinking if this is a property of voting system. I like this one https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instant-runoff_voting which theoretically helps to choose compromise candidate for most of the voters. But it is just my opinion I don't know how this works in reality.
Except, as per usual, nobody can back these assertions up with actual evidence. Meanwhile, you're happy to elect the pro-war, pro-key-escrow candidate. What the hell has happened to "hacker" news?
You're welcome for forestalling mandatory backdoored crypto for four years.
Sexist - ... Not going to link it - I'm yet to hear Hillary's version of "I can walk right up to men and grab them on the cock". This is a one way street. I actually would struggle to think of any prominent female who would act in the same manner of openly stating they can abuse a person such (and even to try and recant this later)
Do you acknowledge any of these? Dispute video evidence? The sources?
I am genuinely perplexed you seem to believe there is no evidence, however it seems you have a shifted-goalposts view of what constitutes "sexism" "racism"or "vengeful narcissism".
If you disagree with my post - which is a high probability - can we try a thought exercise?
Describe a scenario that you believe would be scandalous sexism if Trump mete out that act. I am interested to see the threshold that needs to be met to constitute as "sexism" under your rubric.
Can you explain how you arrive at your labels from these edited-together quotes? Here's Trump's first quote, in its entirety:
> “When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best. They’re not sending you. They’re not sending you. They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.”
I don't see who this is racist towards. Illegal immigrants from Mexico are a pretty specific group, and do not represent a race.
> I actually would struggle to think of any prominent female who would act in the same manner of openly stating they can abuse a person such (and even to try and recant this later)
> Vengeful narcissism - Despite being cleared of any charges, he openly alludes to the imprisonment of his opposition
I don't understand how the article supports your point at all. His statements follow Comey's remark to the Senate. This kind of statement is very common. I can point to many situations off the top of my head, where people, after being cleared of charges, are still considered guilty for something and hounded by their opposition - Zimmerman, Ghomeshi, the Duke lacrosse team... I just don't see the connection to "vengeful narcissism", I think it's an understandable emotional reaction when you don't get the expected outcome of the wrongly-labeled "justice" system.
The Mexican example isn't racism. If you turn it around and look at US citizens that are fleeing the US to Mexico, it wouldn't surprise me if they also were more likely to be criminals. If you're running from the police - on either side - you'd want to hop the border, and not because either Mexicans or US citizens are genetically prone to being rapists.
Stefan Molyneux had a great video on this subject, with some actual facts:
Living in a foreign country is pretty tough. It's also pretty tough to try to do so illegally. It's not the sort of thing one undertakes lightly. As a criminal, moving to a country where you don't speak the language, where you face discrimination, where you have no social network, and an extremely well funded police force, would be a stupid move.
I was an illegal immigrant at one point. I couldn't make it work. Restricting people who want to come to a country to improve their lives is indefensible. If the word for that isn't "racism" it must be "stupidity".
> Restricting people who want to come to a country to improve their lives is indefensible
Pretty much all the countries in the world do that. Mexico is extremely lucky to have a physical border with the US that you can walk/climb over. How could a Burmese or Nigerian citizen emigrate to US (or any other Western country) illegaly?
> I'm yet to hear Hillary's version of "I can walk right up to men and grab them on the cock".
"Keep your mouth shut about my husband raping you, or you'll be sorry." I mean yeah, I know she was savvy enough not to let herself be caught on tape saying it, so it never happened, and the multiple women attesting it are liars and they're bought and they're liars. Clearly some barnyard language is the really reprehensible thing here.
And he's far from the only one to suggest she merits indictment. Do you remember Comey's first final statement on the email investigation? The one in which he said, boiled down, that while he'd absolutely recommend anyone else who'd done the same be indicted, this was, for reasons
left as an exercise to the reader, a special case?
>I'm yet to hear Hillary's version of "I can walk right up to men and grab them on the cock"
"Women have always been the primary victims of war. Women lose their husbands, their fathers, their sons in combat." --Hilary Clinton
Not that this quote is anywhere near equivalent. It's far more egregious. Trump made a lame comment, in a private situation, about how he picks up women. Clinton, in an official capacity as First Lady of the United States, said she view men as so unimportant that they are not the primary victims in their own deaths.
Um, it has all been recorded and/or videotaped? Why do Trump supporters keep denying the horrible things he has said when there is solid recorded evidence?
There is a difference between attacking people because of their sex or by insulting them based on their sex. First is definitively sexist, the latter is arguable.
He was suggesting that Megyn Kelly was asking him though questions and that the reason for this was that she is on her period. There is a very subtle but important difference.
He attacked her for asking supposedly though questions, not for being on her period. First was the reason of his attack. Latter was the means of his attack.
As with the other reply, I don't see how this is any better. It's still openly sexist. (Megan Kelley isn't able to do her job properly because she has a uterus.)
"Blood coming out of her eyes" seems to imply she's "bloodthirsty", out to "get him" or something like that. I don't see any sexism there.
People usually omit that first part, and falsly quite him as saying "blood coming out of her whatever", which sure does sound very sexist. But if you quote the whole thing, "blood coming out of her eyes, or whatever" sounds like he's basically backtracking on his (too) offensive comment.
I've been thinking about this... I still don't think he was referring to her vagina, but I admit that I could be wrong.
However, even if he was, or let's make it clearer, even if he directly said "she was so mean because she had PMS/her period", that would still not make it sexism. Sexism is discrimination on the basis of sex. Trump wasn't discriminating against her, he was insulting her because he disliked her (which he's free to do, of course).
For insults to be effective, they have to be tailored. You won't call "gay" an obviously gay guy, because that's not an insult, that's the truth! The insult "gay" would only be effective towards someone who's masculine and exaggerates a bit, making you believe that he's actually insecure of his masculinity and would be hurt and offended when being called "gay". That doesn't mean you're homophobic, it just means you're good at insulting people.
Trump was simply tailoring his insults to her, and if he meant something in connection with her sex, that's no worse than insulting any other part of her. He's obviously not discriminating - he's been insulting pretty much everyone, and his insults are always highly tailored ("low energy" Jeb, "crooked" Hillary, ...).
Slightly because Modi comes from a centrist-right party but people voted for his party because there was no other viable option and he had done good work before.
Russia and Turkey have always been (rampantly) nationalist. Russia had a short failed episode of opening up with Yeltsin while Turkey has been letting Ataturk (and the few reforming sultans in the late period of the Ottoman empire) down ever since he died.
Even the USSR was extremely nationalistic, albeit thinly veiled behind "internationalism".
Modi's election was comprehensive and with no competition, but it was also a legitimate voice of the nation.
I'm not sure I could say the same for Putin, but his approval ratings remain high.
Nope I am not. You could vote against Brexit - an equal proposition. You did not have equal propositions against Putin, it was him against spoiler candidates, him versus straw men.
Yeah, plus his party BJP has been pretty imstrumental in the rise of fundamentalist hindu-right in india.
But to be fair, he's not carried out anything stupid as Prime minister. His election was based on the promise of development, and he seems to be intent on that.
One cannot say the same for BJP unfortunately, Hindu nationalism has risen and is trying to make it's voice felt. I hope Modi is wise enough to shut that down.
There were riots in 2002 in Gujarat and Modi was the Chief Minister of Gujarat at the time. He has been accused of initiating and condoning the violence, as have police and government officials who allegedly directed the rioters and gave lists of Muslim-owned properties to them.
The "riots" weren't really riots per se or protests but rather acts of genocide and ethnic cleansing from both Muslims and Hindus in the area due to earlier incidents.
The Majority of victims were Muslims. It is estimated that at least 250 girls and women had been gang raped and then burned to death. Children were killed by being burnt alive and those digging mass graves described the bodies as "burned and butchered beyond recognition". Children were force fed petrol and then set on fire, pregnant women were gutted and their unborn child's body then shown to the women.
In the Naroda Patiya mass grave of 96 bodies 46 were women. The murderers also flooded homes and electrocuted entire families inside.
Violence against women also included their being stripped naked, objects being forced into their bodies and then their being killed. According to Kalpana Kannabiran the rapes were part of a well organized, deliberate and pre-planned strategy, and that this puts the violence in the area of a political pogrom and genocide. Other acts of violence against women were acid attacks, beatings and the killing of women who were pregnant. Children were also killed in front of their parents.
Children and infants were speared and held aloft before being thrown into fires. Describing the sexual violence perpetrated against Muslim women and girls, Renu Khanna writes that the survivors reported "that sexual violence consisted of forced nudity, mass rapes, gang-rapes, mutilation, insertion of objects into bodies, cutting of breasts, slitting the stomach and reproductive organs, and carving of Hindu religious symbols on women's body parts."
Testimony heard by the committee stated that:
A chilling technique, absent in pogroms unleashed hitherto but very much in evidence this time in a large number of cases, was the deliberate destruction of evidence. Barring a few, in most instances of sexual violence, the women victims were stripped and paraded naked, then gang-raped, and thereafter quartered and burnt beyond recognition ... The leaders of the mobs even raped young girls, some as young as 11 years old ... before burning them alive ... Even a 20-day-old infant, or a fetus in the womb of its mother, was not spared.
Frontline magazine reported that in Ahmedabad of the 249 bodies recovered by 5 March, 30 were of Hindus. Of the Hindus that had been killed, 13 had died as a result of police action and several others had died while attacking Muslim owned properties. Despite the relatively few attacks by Muslim mobs on Hindu neighbourhoods, 24 Muslims were reported to have died in police shootings
According to official figures, the riots resulted in the deaths of 790 Muslims and 254 Hindus; 2,500 people were injured non-fatally, and 223 more were reported missing. Other sources estimate that up to 2,500 Muslims died.
The US State Department's International Religious Freedom Report quoted the NHRC as concluding that the attacks had been premeditated, that state ( Gujarat ) government officials were complicit, and that there was evidence of police not acting during the assaults on Muslims. The US state department also found that Gujarat's high school textbooks described Hitler's 'charismatic personality' and the 'achievements of Nazism'. US Congressmen John Conyers and Joe Pitts subsequently introduced a resolution in the House condemning the conduct of Modi in inciting religious persection in Gujarat. They stated that Modi's government had a role in "promoting the attitudes of racial supremacy, racial hatred and the legacy of Nazism through his governments support of school textbooks in which Nazism is glorified". They also wrote a letter to the US State Department asking it deny Modi a visa to the United States.
It's not about culture, people are still fine with their culture, it's about economics. Globalisation and corruption has caused a lot more instability for the working class. If you look at polls about what the number one issue was you'll see it's the economy, that's the main thing people are concerned about.
That's the thing that confused me; it seems to me that introducing a radical to politics would cause more instability; It also seems to me like the economy has been improving by just about all measures for nearly all of Obama's term; especially if you measure improvement in terms of unemployment and the like.
Most of the economic problems we have now are problems that the left would complain about. The rich make a lot more than the poor... and the GOP is promising more of that, not less, and the GOP won, so the 'it's the economy' model doesn't really fit.
> "The rich make a lot more than the poor... and the GOP is promising more of that, not less, and the GOP won, so the 'it's the economy' model doesn't really fit."
Here's the thing with Trump, he held so many conflicting policy positions over the course of the election, and was held to account so little by the mainstream media, that Trump supporters could basically line up with whichever of his policies they liked the most. People can ignore promises like tax breaks for the rich when he's promising to bring jobs back to the US.
Also, as I said in another comment, this wasn't a pro-Trump victory, it was an anti-Clinton victory, and Clinton has been disastrous with the US economy. She had no compelling rebuttal regarding her support for NAFTA and TPP, the huge (political and economic) disasters of the Iraq war, and had very close ties to Wall Street deregulation that was at the core of the 2008 recession. Clearly business as usual was not going to cut it, and Trump was boosted by that discontent.
>Clearly business as usual was not going to cut it,
This is clearly the real disconnect. I think things are going just fine, and the statistics I read say that, well, things are getting better, mostly, for most other people, too.
But then, I think free trade is great, and have no problem with NAFTA, just like almost everyone in the political establishment. I thought that protectionism was kind of a fringe thing. Clearly it's not, but that is what I thought before this election.
"I think things are going just fine, and the statistics I read say that, well, things are getting better, mostly, for most other people, too."
Statistics are wonderfully malleable to express any desired value.
My opinion & observations differ from yours, however we do agree there is a disconnect. I rent and grocery close to a large enclave of .1%ers(I am broke but useful) and hear plenry of conversations of unsold multi-million dollar homes on the market for years, many being rented until they sell. At the other end of the spectrum, have Katrina & Sandy cleanup/rebuild finished yet? As of 2013(last I was in the areas) both still had extensive areas of damaged, abandoned neighborhoods waiting to be renovated or bulldozed. Ever been to Detroit or any of the not-tech-hotspot cities in Cali? It's looking a lot like the 3rd world in many towns. My observations and conversations from working on nationwide locations and with the retail employees/managers suggest the 'Great Recovery' has been neither for most of the US. My hope is the ad-selling, opinionated infotainers are as wrong about Trump as they were about Obama.
If you travel to some rural areas in the Midwest you'll see that the economy has not been improving for everyone recently. Most of their wages have stagnated while the price of most goods/services has risen. And there isn't much opportunity unless they move to a major urban area. Not everyone wants that. They love where they live, but they've watched their small farming and factory towns crumble.
We all know that the majority of the gains in our economic rebound have gone to the wealthy. Stability in an economic sense just means more safe consistent returns for those who own the capital, pushing inequality ever higher. Is it rational to try to disrupt the whole system to spite the few winners? Probably not. But I understand how these people feel. I grew up in a small town in Michigan. Now I live on the East Coast because I need to work. I don't personally mind being displaced, and I'm lucky/skilled enough to find good employment. But not everyone is like me.
I don't find that too plausible. Sure there was anti-Clinton sentiment, but opinion polls showed far more anti-Trump sentiment. Iraq is seemingly forgotten by the electorate, it wasn't a hot button. He supports far less regulation than she does. The data that always jumped out at me was just how many conservative voters believe unequivocal myths like creationism or Obama is a Muslim. I think at some point you just have to acknowledge a huge swath of voters are utterly ill-informed and there's very little you can do about it.
Its also culture. Some Americans are fed up with having to be apologetic for supporting their own culture, wanting to maintain it, not wanting it to change drastically. They see hypocrisy in being told to respect other cultures, while being labeled racist and bigot for wanting to maintain their own.
> while being labeled racist and bigot for wanting to maintain their own.
Could you give a specific example here, as others have asked?
I don't doubt that you feel this way. As an immigrant into the US I initially felt there is too much political correctness going on, which prevented some people from expressing their thoughts clearly, which is never good.
But in terms of culture, I am surrounded by, and happily participate in the celebration of American culture. For instance, just to name a few things:
- trick or treating in costume with my kids on Halloween
- pumpkin carving
- lots of bbq-ing in the summer
- incredible amount of decoration, shopping and eating during the holidays, Christmas trees
- meeting extended family in thanksgiving, eating turkey
- wearing green on St Patty's day (not sure if that counts)
I also don't meet any Americans who are apologetic about any of these types of cultural expressions. I could argue that diversity and celebration of foreign culture is also a distinctively American trait, but that is a separate point.
So my question again would be - can you give an example of a cultural expression or tradition which you would like to see continued, but is disappearing, perhaps due to media pressure from the left?
It depends on how broad a view you want to take of culture. If you look at music, films, food and sport, I see no evidence that American people are enjoying US music, US films, US food and US sport any less than before, regardless of what's happening politically. However, if you include the economy as part of culture, then people certainly were disillusioned, and I don't blame them, kind of hard to enjoy life to the full if you're having to work multiple jobs just to have a decent quality of life.
White people in the US have a common identity that people around the world who would be classified as white if they moved here (and lost their origin accent) don't have. It was largely formed by dehumanizing natives, black slaves and Chinese immigrants. Until recently, it didn't include Catholics (Irish, Italians, Spanish) or Slavs, and was deeply suspicious of Germans and other Central Europeans until after WWII.
Europe's cultures are based on shared myths, traditions, practices, and values. "White" culture in the US is based on shared myths about race, shared traditions of racial exclusion of minorities (and guilt over it), and their practices and values are not distributed any differently than any other group that has been in the US for 3-4 generations (a large proportion of US whites are descended from fairly recent European immigrants.)
Germany is not afraid of their culture though. I'd say that they are the only country in the world who had the guts to look back and understand what went wrong.
There's a part of their history that they are not proud of, but on the other hand there's so much that they can take pride in.
> Indian culture - any culture - is far, far more than a dance or some dish.
I think most people understand that. What do you think would be an improvement? Surely not that they fail even to appreciate the dance or the dish. It's not likely that they'll embark on a years-long quest to understand the deeper history, religion etc. of a dozen different cultures. What, really, would you have them do? Without a suggestion, you're just bashing.
You know, this is kind of inspiring. I know where my blood comes from (Sicily and WASP), and I know where I grew up and got my ideas (Berkeley), but, it's not like I've really tried to turn into some kind of culture; I've participating in a thing that's been made into a culture (festivals), but that's not the same, is it?
I feel that the US will now, finally, focus on the US. It's time for that. Instead of their usual imperialistic attitude that involves enticing Europe to boycott Russia, taking out stability providing leaders in the middle east without much (after)thought (or the wrong kind of thought), providing weapons the the Free Syrian Army mercenaries that now fight for the better paying ISIS side (this is not stupidity, it's rubbelization with economic motives imo). Etc. Let the US focus on the US for the next 4 years, the US has enough problems to solve within their borders. Clinton would just intensify the Syria situation, alienate Russia even further, make secret deals with Wall Street and keep things just as they are. And things are not fine as they are.
Yeah yeah, I think Snowden is a hero and I hate Trump for calling him a traitor. Also his abortions views are medieval. But hey, a more balanced anti-imperialist would simply never win in the corrupt, house-of-cards like US.
Whenever I hear those arguments, I have to bring up a point:
There is a very good reason why big, powerful empires always have a big military, meddle and stick their noses into everyone's affairs.
Economic power doesn't come from thin air. It has a lot to do with political power, influence and domination.
Those are two sides of the same coin, they support and nurture each other.
You reach limits of growth when you just trade and build up your own economy.
Almost all foreign policy is dedicated to furthering self-serving goals. Often medium and long term, so not apparently visible. Often related to things the public know very little about. Just as often, completely misguided.
Great point; there is also an additional dimension to this. It is impossible to emphasize just how important security is to the blooming of creative financial institutions and highly specialized & sophisticated economies. Its because the US and Europe have created a system where, say, a legal framework exists to get retribution in case of genuine foul play in either country, that we can have sophisticated trading channels. Without the security and stability provided by an overwhelmingly powerful, but mostly reasonable military, we don't have to worry about our trading networks being taken apart at will (basically, eliminate that risk). If that security apparatus ceases to exist, so will the advanced economy that the west has created (which has been slowly expanding, to other nations as well).
This long perspective is hard to ignore. It feels like we are walking the same historical path now. Let's hope things move slowly enough with respect to security that the trading networks stay intact.
And of course, one major power refraining from blundering into situations tends to create the opportunity for another to replace them
The US has been less militarily active in Syria than in other recent Middle Eastern conflicts, partly as a result of fairly unambiguous policy mistakes in that region over the past decade and a half.
Their place has been filled by Russia. I've yet to see a remotely persuasive argument that Syria is less badly off as a result.
> Economic power doesn't come from thin air. It has a lot to do with political power, influence and domination. Those are two sides of the same coin.
The US managed to create the world's largest economy by 1890, through trade and domestic industry, while almost entirely staying out of major foreign affairs. It wasn't until WW2 that the US emerged fully onto the global stage by necessity due mostly to Europe's disastrous politics and ideologies at the time.
Clearly you can in fact have a massive economy without behaving the way the US has post WW2. Japan for some time had the world's second largest economy, they still have the third largest, and they've managed to mostly stay out of foreign affairs in the aggressive way the US has intervened.
History is complex. And interesting. And often we (and I) get it wrong. So I always enjoy a good discussion. :)
The US profited hugely from slave trade and labor. (Which most Americans usually conveniently ignore) Which helped it build up. So colonialization and domination was a factor for the US before they became a superpower.
It's true that in the earlier 19hundres the US were more reclusive and isolated.
The US economy wasn't in a good state before and after WW2... The war gave a huge boost to the economy and lifted the US out of the Great Depression. That probably laid the groundwork for the huge military-industrial complex today.
The Marshall plan wasn't just good will and benevolence either. A major goal was to create an export market to trade with. The US economy really took off after WW2! ( I can dig up a paper on that). Of course, building up a power base in western Europe to oppose Russia was also important.
Also, the falling apart of the old, Europe based empires from the late 18th century to 1930 and then the WW2 left a power vacuum, which the US filled, together with Russia.
And the world got a lot smaller then, thanks to airplanes, better technology. Nuclear weapons.
The US economy was embarrassing the major powers of Europe post civil war, when it came to almost all forms of industrial output. It was not after WW2 that the US economy really took off, it had been growing at an extreme pace from 1870-1930 - in fact that was the fastest period of growth in US history by far. The great depression was not just a US specific event.
The US ("west offshoots" in the graph, but south america can be mostly ignored until the later 20th century) grew faster then western Europe, but they only really diverged before WW1.
Europe never really recovered from the devastation that was WW1 until the 50ies.
And because of WW2 America accelerated out of the Great Depression and into an even larger and more dominant global economic superpower - an economic superpower that fueled the middle class and all the working blue collar jobs that Trump voters pine for.
The US has about the same share of global GDP today as it did in 1910-1920, before the US emerged onto the global stage. Your premise is wrong. The US was more powerful economically before WW2, than it is today. The particularly robust and brief post WW2 bubble was just that, courtesy of the rest of the developed world being blown up. In about ten years the US will approach $30 trillion in national debt, a sum so great nobody even seriously talks about attempting to pay it off any longer, and interest rates can no longer rise above perhaps 2% or 3% because the US Government would go bankrupt.
We're talking about 1980, not 2016. I didn't say they're the same relative economic superpower today than they were decades ago.
If I wanted to be facetious (this is obviously ridiculous), I would say that the solution to your complaint that America's economy is in decline is to start another war.
Japan gets to claim the US as a major ally though. They get to stay out of foreign affairs in the aggressive way because their friend carries a big stick, protecting them against China (I say this as a non-American by the way.)
>The US managed to create the world's largest economy by 1890, through trade and domestic industry, while almost entirely staying out of major foreign affairs. It wasn't until WW2 that the US emerged fully onto the global stage by necessity due mostly to Europe's disastrous politics and ideologies at the time.
All what this explains is that the potential of the domestic trade in large country such a the US is enormous. Duh.
Japan just like Germany relied on a post-war recovery, the Cold War, the US and invested back into their own growth instead of the military.
In short, no one denied that domestic trade has a lot of growth potential but that isn't an argument that international trade doesn't rely on one's influence and level of defense.
Also, regarding other comments, you always need to properly consider the full context when comparing the past to the present. For instance, until WW2 wars were consider much more of a political tool rather than a disaster. That is a vital point of view the culture of the West only slowly is developing and still in danger to get overthrown.
I wonder if over time (and I'm talking many decades here) there is a shift from the military following the needs of trade to the military being used in a bigger power play that is actually unrelated to trade.
It's important to realize that no voter imagines how US military actions do or don't coordinate or synchronize with US big corp action. That kind of stuff never shows up in the political discourse. Politicians aren't riling up Americans with talk of how military boosts economy. Nobody makes that connection on TV.
From my understanding, some industries depend tightly on the military, and not bolstering your own national industries would be a mistake as all the big global players cheat with nationalistic help.
People aren't going to get more or less imperialism. From George Bush Sr, to Bill Clinton, to George Bush Jr, to Barack Obama, when has the US military + international big corp coordination ever stopped, much less shown variability between presidents? When a president is elected, is there a sweep through the US armed forces command structure? No. Is there a sweep through industry? No. Is there a sweep through the CIA? No. National bureaucracies make plans longer than 4 years, and their programs don't stop executing in-between elections.
What I'm really worried about is what happens in a winner-takes all branches of government scenario, especially when conceivably the majority of the population supports different policies. It makes sense for the ruling party to do a makeover of power, as the GOP has tended toward redistricting as a strategy, and I think that's exactly what's going to happen.
Donald Trump cannot be an independent leader because no ruler manages bureaucracy alone. You must always listen to the bureaucracy machine because it has too many aspects that you don't understand but is someone else's little kingdom. And that's why Donald Trump is nominating all Washington insiders. It's not like Donald Trump decided, "Why not try for business elites through my network, instead of classical Washington?" Nope, didn't happen.
It's never the President that runs the country, it's always the administration. The administration that is never voted in by the people, it is just someone's job. The leadership may enact laws, but it always comes down to ordinary people performing their job at the lowest levels to apply and administer them.
It would be nice if that were true. Maybe Bernie could've pushed the focus back on improving the US instead of picking international fights, but Trump's rhetoric is far more Hawkish than Obama or Clinton.
I remember reading him being quoted as wanting to get out of Syria and to stop antagonizing the Russians. That seems less confrontational than Obama and certainly Clinton's position.
Syria has been Russias client state for decades. We wouldn't have had Brexit, the flooding of the EU with migrants and now Trump if the US didn't decide at some point to try and flip Syria by supporting the most radical Syrian psychopaths it could find.
Well that one failed spectacularly. At least with Trump you can be quite sure that when he finds out who exactly gave the order to support these terrorist groups in Syria, and he will get access to that information soon, then he will lock these people up for life or they might even face charges for treason.
I agree. My impression was that Clinton was at least equally as hawkish as Trump, if not more so. She was (is?) certainly more in bed with defense contractors and the whole military machine--as any lifetime politician really probably is.
Clinton threatened Russia with a military response to a cyber attack. There are reasons to like Clinton over Trump, but a dove-ish foreign policy isn't one of them.
You can clearly tell the extent Trump's isolationist attitude by having John Bolton on as an advisor. Also, the Iran deal? He promised to shred it. The Iranians might finally obtain nukes.
And you believe any agreement will block a foreign power from obtaining nukes? That sounds naive to me--especially when it comes to an exceptionally motivated foreign power like Iran.
An agreement is better than no agreement, and it certainly has worked this far. You're right though, whether it works or not remains to be seen, I am making a judgement on its success so far.
I hear so many educated Trump supporters projecting their own largely sensible wishes and plans onto him since he has no coherent plan and essentially promised nothing, except to build a wall.
I hear so many more educated Trump supporters projecting their own largely sensible wishes and plans onto him since he has no coherent plan and essentially promised nothing, except to build a wall.
You can't sacrifice large swaths of the population for the so called "greater" good. Globalisation, as it stands now, is neo-colonialism. It offshores blue collar jobs and concentrates white collar jobs in rich countries. It disenfranchises blue collar workers in the west, and causes brain drain in the developing world. All it's done is benefit the elite. Read progressive economists like Piketty, and combine it with visits to places like Detroit. The current model hasn't been working. I don't think Trump has all the solutions, but he diagnosed the problem better than the smug elites. Same goes for Brexit. This isn't xenophobia, working class jobs are disappearing from the west. It's a real economic phenomena. Maybe one day the world will be united, but its too soon.
You could argue that globalization has pulled millions of chinese peasants out of poverty, and helped creating a middle class in China, which is already increasing the pressure on the regime to transition to a democracy.
In any case, as some pointed out here, outsourcing to China is only the first step in the destruction of these jobs. Robotics is likely going to replace many of these jobs in the next 20y, which might bring back some industry into the West, ie more jobs but more sophisticated jobs.
> Robotics is likely going to replace many of these jobs in the next 20y, which might bring back some industry into the West, ie more jobs but more sophisticated jobs.
US manufacturing output is trending upwards, while employment is going downwards[1]. If anything, robotics is going to eliminate many more jobs than it creates, at least in manufacturing. Look at the tech giants today- huge companies, revenue in the billions, and they employ much fewer workers to achieve that output than giant companies of past decades. This is a major driver of economic inequality, and hence populism. But a government or laws or a president cannot hold back technological progress.
If anything, in 20 years, we could witness the end of capitalism as we know it because we can produce more with less employment, assuming current tech trends continue.
> If anything, in 20 years, we could witness the end of capitalism as we know it because we can produce more with less employment, assuming current tech trends continue.
I have to wonder if a capitalist like Trump can be of much help with such a transition.
"We’re losing a lot of people because of the Internet,” Trump said. "We have to see Bill Gates and a lot of different people that really understand what’s happening. We have to talk to them about, maybe in certain areas, closing that Internet up in some way."[1]
Trump thinks that talking to Bill Gates will allow him to "close that Internet up". This guy hasn't got a clue about technology.
The issues facing basically the entire global economy are extremely daunting. Our system of capitalism is based around increasing population and GDP leading to increasing levels of prosperity over time. What happens when you can automate large sectors of the economy, and you literally don't need that many people to sustain economic growth?[2]
I was using that quote as an example of how unsuited Trump would be with dealing with the issue of technological unemployment (frankly, I don't think any political leader would be capable of dealing with it effectively, as no political leader deals with longer term problems, at least not in the western world). I'm not sure you want to comparing the US to China or North Korea. Yes, it's technically possible to Balkanise the Internet to attempt to control the free flow of information, but this would be utterly disastrous for the US economy.
That's an awful easy argument to make when you're an upper-middle class white collar workers. I assure you, the vast majority of the American voting public do not care about the well being of Chinese peasants over their own. It's exactly that kind of Ivory Tower thought that landed us with Donald Trump.
> You could argue that globalization has pulled millions of chinese peasants out of poverty, and helped creating a middle class in China, which is already increasing the pressure on the regime to transition to a democracy.
Of course the college-educated middle-class service industry isn't paying for this in any way, they're the ones pocketing the difference between domestic wages and Chinese ones.
> In any case, as some pointed out here, outsourcing to China is only the first step in the destruction of these jobs. Robotics is likely going to replace many of these jobs in the next 20y, which might bring back some industry into the West, ie more jobs but more sophisticated jobs.
Productivity growth is the lowest it's ever been, and when it was the highest, wages were rising fastest and employment was at its peak. Automation, as it increases worker productivity, should also increase wages - adding to quality of life as people can consume more or choose to work less. The question is whether the government will make sure that a large proportion of the benefits of productivity are distributed to the workers, or will it allow those benefits to be entirely skimmed by the financial industry, creating an increasing hole in demand for anything other than luxury goods.
Globalism shuffled jobs around the world, and trade policies can change that to a modest extent -- one's trade policy can't change the fact that your citizens are too expensive versus Thailand or China. Tariffs against Mexico cannot make a Shenzhen. GM is not metaphorically coming back to Detroit.
US manufacturing employment is going down, and even if / when high tech manufacturing brings production back to the US, it will be robotic production. And with every company in the world racing for machine learning, I don't see how the future looks good for a specific generation of people in history too old to newly take up a globally competitive trade. Also, it's been mentioned around here that driving is one of the most frequent jobs in most states in the US, and that Uber recently made a deliver of beer by automated truck. Uber and every relevant company in the world is trying to destroy a category of worker from everywhere in the world.
Tariffs can absolutely change the fact that your citizens are too expensive. You can argue that the consequences are not worth tariffs, but you can't say that they don't promote production in your country.
The only way for a rich nation to have metaphorical Shenzhen is if they're okay with Shenzhen-style citizens. Tariffs can't make it more attractive for Foxconn to move their factory plans to the US. I'd also say that worker discontent is one of the major sources of Trump support, but the last thing they want are the ecological reasons for making Shenzhen an attractive manufacturing capital. You need an environment where laborers cannot even fathom leaving or engaging in collective bargaining. China is okay with a scenario where much of the nation profits from the backs of abused workers because they have the might to quash malcontent. In a democracy where these abused workers have voting rights, this translates to instability.
The decentralized nature of the economy also makes it so that an overly internal strategy like tariffs are insufficient. If the US stops buying from China altogether, China is still the manufacturing pit stop of the world. The rest of the world has no reason to coordinate the tariff strategy with you. Only your nation artificially sees increased prices. It's even worse if your nation ups production but nobody wants to buy it because it's too expensive. Your production isn't a power unless you export, and tariffs alone won't make you export.
Manufacturing businesses want an environment where (1) citizens are dirt cheap, (2) citizens can be legitimately abused, (3) government is stable and amenable to these practices, (4) the country is connected to global supply chains so you can integrate that country as part of your production system.
Also, if / when manufacturing does come back to the US, I imagine that it will bear the fruits of every company racing towards applied machine learning. It will be robotic labor that outscales cheap labor.
I agree that manufacturing jobs are now automated, so they aren't coming back. But your other points are not true - imagine the US halted all imports. If you halt all imports, companies either produce in the US or don't sell to US consumers - it doesn't matter what labor costs. With tariffs US companies don't have to compete with dirt-cheap international labor. Whether or not this is a good idea is debatable, but you can definitely use policies to promote domestic production.
If you want <exports>, with tariffs, US companies still have to compete with dirt-cheap international labor. This is what I meant by improving production but not production that <exports>.
Because when you export, you're once again selling on the global market. You must compete with all players. If you can't export, if your manufacturing machine is too expensive, or if your output is too non-unique, then you aren't creating the fertile atmosphere of Shenzhen. How is this going to increase export to generate more American wealth?
Having a production machine that makes things only for your nation and nowhere else is just a redistribution of money. Redistribution of money can be very healthy, but why not just do it directly without potentially wasteful intermediary processes?
Also, I mentioned the point of Shenzhen style abused labor manufacturing vs. robotic high tech labor, and that if manufacturing comes back to the US, it will likely be in the form of robotic manufacturing, and it's not obvious whether this manufacturing will have much room for the masses of unskilled workers.
Manufacturing never left the US. Manufacturing in the US is doing just fine. It is, however, as you suggest, automated to a degree that means manufacturing jobs left the US.
It has not benefitted people outside developed country either. People are being exploited in mines of africa, in factories in asia (look at the textile industry or high tech)...
The alternative for most of those people is dying of famine and extreme poverty. Nobody is forcing them to work in those factories, they are doing so because that's the best alternative they will get in their countries.
> The alternative for most of those people is dying of famine and extreme poverty. Nobody is forcing them to work in those factories
So if I read you well, you are saying that it's either they die of hunger, either they work in those factories. That sounds a bit like a false choice, of course they are forced to work in those factories, otherwise they die!
The government of China is getting billions of $ because west firms make chinese people work for almost nothing. So chinese gov. isn't going to change anything, it's going so well for them that way. So the west firm are in fact encouraging those very poor conditions of work, they are NOT improving the living of those people.
> So if I read you well, you are saying that it's either they die of hunger, either they work in those factories. That sounds a bit like a false choice, of course they are forced to work in those factories, otherwise they die!
What's the alternative? They are not going to get any comfy middle-class jobs in their neck of the woods.
> The government of China is getting billions of $ because west firms make chinese people work for almost nothing. So chinese gov. isn't going to change anything, it's going so well for them that way. So the west firm are in fact encouraging those very poor conditions of work, they are NOT improving the living of those people.
Western governments or companies can't really do anything, can they? It's not their concern nor their duty to do anything about it. If the roles were reversed, you think that Chinese or African governments and companies would care about workers conditions in the West?
It's very easy to take the moral high ground when discussing this topic. But are you prepared to pay $10000 or more for your shiny new electronics? I'm pretty sure that most people are not. Truth is, as horrible as it may sound, that we all profit from this, and for the people working in those factories it's probably better than the alternative.
To me IT is blue collar, even programming is becoming blue collar too.
My friend's words were eye opener. Programming is like welding. Different languages are like different types of welding. You've got your MIG, TIG, Oxy-Acetilene. It's just the matter of learning the API.
What's the difference between software engineer and oil or mechanical engineer? Same education, same pay, same collar. Management of any of them would be white collar though. It's not about wether your hands get dirty.
They are white collar as well, I just singled out software engineers because it is a type of job that is well know to be outsourced. Not sure if that is as true if oil or mechanical engineers.
I hear this a lot, but do you mean more IT/technician jobs than software engineering/developing?
I'm reasonably sensitive to class particulars and I'm pretty sure software engineering is middle class. Or at least, exactly the same as mechanical/design engineers
As an American software developer working perm in London for 5 years and now returning to California ( ;_; ) ,
I can say that salaries are 3-4 times higher in the US for the same role. Just converting the currencies.
Out of topic: I saw your other comment, I can't upvote it because it's dead (probably for other reasons), but thank you very much for your testimonial, support and encouragement.
Of course it is, unless you don't think IT outsourcing is "a thing"? It is literally no different to the factory or shipyard or steel mill closing in country X and reopening in country Y.
We are talking about the US election voting splits, so the British definition is interesting, but not relevant. In the US, blue collar usually means some sort of physical labor. If you are sitting at a desk, it is white collar, no matter how menial the task.
Lower skill may be the important distinction rather than whether it's manual labor intensive or not like we traditionally view in the US. Sitting at a computer at a click farm in a developing country is completely different than sitting and writing options trading algorithms. On the other hand, I can't think of anyone that became a wealthy by sweeping floors, hammering nails, and greeting customers at the door regardless of their country or region.
See that's the thing, first blue collar, then white collar and eventually the entire economy is gutted to serve the rich who really don't care where the live as long as it's nice and they can remain rich.
All a result of successive trade agreements that destabilize both economies involved to cater to the elite few on both sides.
Think: That "giant sucking sound" crossed with Niemoller.
Maybe. It's possible that this self-obsessed ogre realises through the machinations of the political system that he can still be a "winner" without focusing on the accumulation of personal wealth.
Remember, from January he is running for a second term and he's set a hilariously high bar for himself. If he doesn't make his existing voter base very happy in 2-3 years, he's toast.
Destroying Wall Street and making life better for working class people are two different things.
I believe that he might destroy big corporations, I don't believe that will be good for the people they employ, or who have their pension invested in them.
Basic left wing ideas of taxing successful and rich people and reducing inequality, supporting those who lose jobs to structural unemployment might have headed this off. I guess we'll never know.
I agree, but want to point out that it is not just blue collar jobs being off-shored. Many white-collar jobs (software development included) are being off-shored, too.
I sometimes worry that liberal democracy may turn out to be a temporary fad. The rise of uninformed populism and strongmen is everywhere. Right-wing extremism, often with little love for the free press or due process, has been on the rise all over Europe. The Brexit campaign was dominated by lies and took a seriously xenophobic turn, and now the US has elected a president who is openly racist and lies more often than he tells the truth. In in increasing number of countries, strongmen seem to have more staying power than informed democracy.
It may be attractive to spin this as merely being anti-globalist, but in every instance, racism is a big part of it. After the Brexit vote, people of colour got shouted at by people who claimed they voted for foreigners to leave.
Maybe the problem is that we have allowed right-wing extremism to take hold of the anti-globalist agenda. That used to be a left-wing thing, though anti-globalism never really became mainstream with the left as its champions, but now that the extreme right is championing the cause, suddenly it wins. Does anti-globalism do better when combined with racism? Do they need each other to get a majority?
Or is the problem with democracy itself? Is it possible that the world is too complex for the average citizen to make an informed decision about it? Or do we need a regular lesson in the consequences of our choices? After WW2, everybody (in western Europe at least) was united in their desire for freedom and opposition to racism and totalitarianism, but we've seem to have forgotten that lesson. Or maybe the lesson has been poisoned by becoming too rigid and part of establishment dogma?
Democracy started off as an oligarchy of the nobles, then extended to free white men/citizens, then to women and then to every citizen. While it was idealistic, I suspect the people who designed the system did not expect large participation; usually the only participants would be city folk/wealthy landowners etc. who probably more or less held similar worldviews. Now, technology/media has made it very easy for many more people to participate in a democracy, and we have to deal with the uncomfortable situation that this gives a lot of power to people who may not be well educated; in fact, who might be rather shallow/easily influenced...
Anyways, I don't think democracy itself is the problem; it is the Establishment that has mostly lost touch with some of the things that Americans respect. A common criticism of Hillary was that she wasn't a straight shooter like Trump. Let's think about that: Hillary was a career politician, a First Lady, Senator, Secretary of State, all diplomatic positions that require her to be, well, diplomatic. Obama did well because he could actually pull off both: be a straight-shooter in public, yet diplomatic when talking to other politicians. Hillary unfortunately did not have that skill, of public oration. That is probably what hurt her most.
Now I agree its rather unfair to discount Hillary for that reason. But the reality is: that is how US politics seem to work. And politicians need to understand that fact.
I'm not sure if I've ever read anything that could construe Trump as an orator of any skill whatsoever, but this may be the closest. Clearly, there's much more factors involved than speaking and diplomatic abilities that decided the outcome of this election.
It's also hilarious to think of an ultra-wealthy racial / ethnic majority person as being in touch with anyone regardless of your country. What he seems to be in touch with that's been clear in terms of platform is anger. And he's not speaking like Malcolm X or Louis Farrakhan either except for body language.
I don't understand claims about Trump's charisma either. I find Clinton far more convincing, and don't believe a single word that comes out of Trump's mouth. But very clearly a lot of people see this very differently. Somehow his badly mangled sentences appeal to them. But I think he says a lot of things that are vague enough to invite people to project themselves onto him.
Polybius [1] would share with this point of view. He believed that governments iterated through a cycle of basic forms: democracy, aristocracy, and monarchy and their degenerate forms.
That is a very interesting concept! The American politician system seems to have resisted change remarkably though; I do hope this recent change won't trigger that cycle.
"Or is the problem with democracy itself? Is it possible that the world is too complex for the average citizen to make an informed decision about it? "
I believe, that democracy lost it when started to serve minorities instead of majority. Of course people are getting angry, when majority of them elect government which then won't care about their problems, but about immigrants, sexual minorities, big business, elites etc. Democracy, by definition, is the government of majority, and when it stops serving majority, it loses its purpose. I don't have a solution to this problem, but hopefully somebody will find it sooner rather than later, because I'm afraid some very dark times might otherwise be ahead.
But that government was elected by those people. Clearly a majority does, or at least did, care about minorities. If they really don't anymore, then that's a very sad development.
The problem is that people like you dismiss legitimate concerns as racism. If there's one thing you should take from this election, it's that we're tired of that.
* Fear of large, primarily-Muslim immigration leading to less safety within our borders
* Political correctness leading to unwillingness to address certain problems for what they are
Those are the ones I can think of off the top of my head. It's also tedious how voting for Trump is itself implied to be racist (because of the borderline-racist and racist things he's said), but that leaves out the context that the alternative was Hillary Clinton.
The lack of safety within your borders is not coming from Muslim immigration. The vast majority of domestic terrorism in the US comes from right-wing white people. If you honestly want to address the real problems, you've got to address that one. That, and the extreme carelessness with guns. More people get shot by toddlers than by Muslim extremists in the US.
It varies from person to person. Probably one of the biggest ones is the Obama administration's unwillingness to use the label "Radical Islamic Terror." I understand the argument that it emboldens our enemies and doesn't help us get allies, but it's difficult to have a lot of faith in the problem being solved when the ones in charge can't even state it.
Another I'd probably say is the ambiguity you see on the left when it comes to accepting others' cultures and values on one hand, but not feeling comfortable admonishing certain cultures for a lack of women's rights, their treatment of apostates of Islam, etc. If you're unwilling to take a stand about it being objectively wrong that certain cultures celebrate burning gays at the stake, it's unlikely you're fairly assessing those cultures. Which allies are we choosing? What cultures are we supporting?
The redefining of words is a big one for me. Global climate change, sustainability, social justice, even rape. When you take things you like or don't like and broaden their definitions to the point where they're universally agreeable / hated, it gives the appearance that you're trying to trick people into your point of view rather than actually win them over. Ten years ago, these words meant different things. Of course the climate is changing. It always has. But now, if you're an opponent of the left on the issue, you're "against global climate change," which isn't accurate--it's just the term has been redefined. It makes it tougher to discuss and come up with actual solutions when people's views are being arbitrarily grouped into inaccurate terms. Nobody likes rape, but that doesn't mean anyone having sex without a notorized consent form should fear being called a rapist. Yet it's not politically correct to stand up for anyone on the spectrum, so the problem remains unresolved.
Also, we tire of conclusions being reached about diversity in certain areas based on the assumption that all races are 100% the same, full stop. Somehow we can look at the racial makeup of the NBA or NFL and see no issues, yet in many other places, if different races are represented at different proportions than the general public, it's immediately deemed to be the result of racism. It's not politically correct to say, "Maybe X race/culture has different values or other factors that result in a disproportionate representation in this industry / organization / club." Many of us are totally open to the idea that we (subconsciously) contribute some to it and that white privilege is a real thing that calls for some adjustment, but the unwillingness to accept that some things might not be our fault (due to political correctness) can be tiring and lead to bad decisions.
> Probably one of the biggest ones is the Obama administration's unwillingness to use the label "Radical Islamic Terror."
Using that phrase doesn't magically solve the problem, and in fact runs the risk of legitimizing the terrorists from an Islamic point of view. Stopping the problem means stopping their recruitment. The more persecuted Muslims feel, the easier they are to radicalize and recruit by extremist groups. Severing that link is vital to solving the problem. It is absolutely essential that moderate Muslims are welcomed and embraced by society, and not attacked for having the same religion as terrorists.
Given Trump's recent election, would you say "Radical Old White Irresponsibility and Racism" (ROWIR) is as accurate a statement as "Radical Islamic Terror"?
Yep. Right as soon as they start blowing things up, killing people who disagree with them, and their supposed leaders don't take hard stances against it.
Until then, I'd just call them "people with ideas different from yours."
>Instead of patronising these people it's time we tried to understand their concerns and try to assuage them.
I use to think this too, before this election. But it became clear to me that the "other side" is not interested in being assuaged. They are not interested in facts, or empathy, or calmly discussing how to face an uncertain and complex world.
They are interested in control. Interested in hiring whatever strong-man seems most likely to make the bad people stop doing tbe bad things and make the good times happen again.
The politics of fear won, and I see no oppertunities to bring a divide where one side is hellbent on dynamiting every brick as it's laid.
I am very Anti-Trump, but I have to ask, could the same thoughts not be said by a right-winger to a leftist? It seems like neither side is listening.
From what I understand, this isn't what democracy used to be. We've created a divide where somebody says "I'm a democrat/republican" and they look at the party for what that means.
It isn't only the system that is broken, but it is how we view it and how we view each other.
This is why I agreed with Sama and not removing Thiel from YC. We have to listen to the other side and empathize so we can understand. Without that we all lose.
The 20th century was dominated by the struggle between the far left (communism) and what the communists perceived as imperialist nationalism (capitalism/western democracy). This was a far, far more bitter struggle than what we're seeing now.
> This is why I agreed with Sama and not removing Thiel from YC. We have to listen to the other side and empathize so we can understand. Without that we all lose.
I think the point of opposing Thiel at YC have been lost on HN. It wasn't mainly about politics or opinions. Trump is less to the right than many other candidates and the politically viable opinions of Thiel isn't particularly controversial either. It was about the downside of the "bet" on Trump.
At the RNC Trump had roughly a 40% chance of winning the election according to 538. Thiel spent a couple of million usd and some of his time to have a 40% chance of being "friends" with the most powerful person in the world. That's a huge upside with almost no downside, especially if Trump lost, and therefor an easy bet to make.
If there were more downside Thiel would have had a harder time to make this bet and would have had to be more certain on his decision. Favoring more long term behavior in the political process. Instead just ran one of the cheapest political campaigns you can imagine.
All in all this together with other similar "investment" makes a fairly bad precedent for silicon valley in mixing politics and money.
Maybe if you use logic de la ghetto, but in reality this just makes people go harder all in, it would imply that he is easy to constrain by forced pressure, -EV and probably affects his EV in a second order way. ANyways adult men who are high in power don't respond well to this sort of thing.
>We've created a divide where somebody says "I'm a democrat/republican" and they look at the party for what that means.
This statement could not be further from the truth.
Trump is not a conventional Republican, he is anti-trade for one. Sanders, the favorite among the younger generation of left-leaners, is an Independent who caucuses with Democrats. The DNC was highly criticized for favoring Clinton and the voters punished them for that.
So it's not accurate to say people look to their party for what it means to identify as a Republican or Democrat. They actively shape the parties.
I see what you're saying, and would like to agree, but let's not forget that there are Red States and Blue States, and only a few that swing this way or that. I think that goes some way to prove that people stick to their 'party'.
Trump may not be conventional, but he is only contradictory in some of his policies. 'Pro-life', immigration reform, and other policies are in line with Republican views.
I think the "uncertain and complex world" trope is a part of the problem here.
I have become very cynical over time about the way intellectuals, academics, trade negotiators, politicians and the media use/abuse complexity to get their own way. Many times when I examine an issue I see a whole lot of people saying how complex the world is, how impossibly nuanced it is and .... the kicker .... therefore you shouldn't attempt to figure it out or have an opinion. You should just do whatever the "experts" recommend even if it's apparently unintuitive or even quite clearly against your own interests. Anyone who doesn't obey this line is written off as ignorant, too stupid to have a vote, etc.
Yet are these issues really so complicated? Often they are not. The complexity, when you take the time to tackle it, ends up being largely artificial.
This seems like the classic, why did it take such a big team so long to build this product, I could have done it in five minutes....
The world is a complex place, problems that seem simple at first glance with the limited information we actually have can turn out to be horrendously complex and hard to solve.
Take Syria - should be simple shouldn't it, all you need to do is support the good guys against the bad guys. Or maybe you send in some troops to defeat the bad guys and restore order.
Which of these factions are the good guys and which are the bad guys?
You cannot really help gullible people. If you don't, someone else will take advantage of them...and you probably can't control everyone who does that either.
I don't want to diagnose this result, but it seems like a lack of critical thinking is what is missing from large swathes of the American populace.
> But it became clear to me that the "other side" is not interested in being assuaged. They are not interested in facts, or empathy, or calmly discussing how to face an uncertain and complex world.
Yep. We're all racists and xenophobes and our views have no rational basis. Please feel free to make sweeping judgments about what anyone who voted against Hillary Clinton must be thinking.
Please keep up this rhetoric so we can win in 2020, too!
> They are not interested in facts, or empathy, or calmly discussing how to face an uncertain and complex world.
Doesn't this describe the other side? "Deplorables," "ignorant ruralites," "uninformed -ist -phobes"? Is that attitude interested in empathy or calmly discussing things?
> Interested in hiring whatever strong-man seems most likely to make the bad people stop doing tbe bad things and make the good times happen
Isn't this exactly how Obama got elected? "Hope and change", and Obama's been practically worshipped as a savior ever since.
> The politics of fear won
I think fear had a lot to do with this result, but those fears are grounded in reality. One candidate acknowledged the problems that have arisen in the last decade, while the other did not. Time will tell how well he actually handles them.
It's actually funny how, when faced with your failure, you double-down on your failed strategy, rather than humbling yourself and reconsidering whether you are actually so much more intelligent than everyone else.
Not only are they idiots, but uninformed as well. That's always the root problem, isn't it? If only they would read what you read, they'd think what you think! Just gotta find a more effective way to brainw--I mean, communicate. Have you considered asking The Riddler for help strategizing? Maybe you could join forces with the Greens...
And leftists say that conservatives are stubborn, sheesh.
Globalization isn't the problem. Computerization is.
Other countries are not taking "our" jobs. We simply don't need those jobs anymore. Taxes on foreign labor will only do one thing: subsidize robots.
We're going to spend billions of dollars on a big wall, and I guarantee you we're not going to have a lot more jobs after that. (The wall itself is a pretty big project though.)
Most likely, few of the promises / threats of the campaign will materialize.
It just might turn out that Trump will be a very moderate republican president. He just might have played a role for the last few years. A role that got him voters.
Then again, he might not care at all about doing the actual job and let Pence run most of it.
I still can't believe how Americans could actually elect someone like that. I understand a protest vote, but with that candidate...
I guess the majority of voters just didn't care that he has no actual opinions, is an entitled, rich, insecure, macho, old generation 'man', and just projected their wishes for change, ignoring all of him they didn't want to think about.
Republicans hold both houses and the presidency now, though.
I guess Obama's legacy has been wiped out today.
This sounds like a statement from someone of privileged. You might be willing to take those risks that Donald Trump is not the man he says he is. Either way, the world will likely go on for you. The world might not go on for the Muslim hoping to immigrate to our country. The world might not go on for the citizen of Mexican descent who might see their parents deported. The world might not go on for the poor pregnant women who might not get access to a safe abortion. The world might not go on for the diabetic who can no longer afford insurance because of their preexisting condition. The world might not go on for the teenage girl who seems a president who brags about sexually assaulting women. The world might not go on for the gay man who might lose the ability to marry the person he loves. The world might not go on for the black teen who is stopped and frisked. The world might not go on for the trans person who is no longer allowed in the bathroom in which they feel the most comfortable.
Might is the critical word here, and I appreciate that you chose to use it. All of these things are possible, but as the original commenter suggested, I suspect most if not all of your fears will prove unfounded. I very much doubt much will change for Muslims in our country, or that deportations will change much (aren't they actually higher under Obama than previous administrations?), or that diabetics will not be able to afford their medication, etc. You may be right that limits may be placed on when an abortion can be obtained, but there's no way gay marriage will be reversed.
In short, I agree that in all likelihood the most disappointed voters will be those who voted for Trump expecting him to do all those things you're afraid he'll do. They wanted someone to really shake things up, and he'll give them modest tweaks and proposals with great branding.
"You may be right that limits may be placed on when an abortion can be obtained."
For the women in my life, abortion rights are important rights. Having the government restrict their access to this safe, legal medical procedure is a scary invasion of state power into the doctor-patient relationship.
I care about the women in my life, so when they care about access to abortion, I care about it in sympathy.
"... diabetics will not be able to afford their medication, etc."
Before the ACA, I was uninsurable, thanks to having had my gallbladder out several years prior. "Pre-existing condition." The ACA allowed me to buy health insurance again.
If they repeal that, I'm likely to lose access to the U.S. health care system.
That scares me, personally.
Lots of things about this are scary, because they affect my life and the lives of people I care about.
Abortion is a safe, legal medical procedure. Access to abortion is every woman's right. The SCOTUS has affirmed that the US constitution guarantees this.
"Safe for who?" For the woman, who is the person getting the procedure.
People who argue from the fringe view that "life begins at conception" and "a fetus is a human being" often bring in a lot of other fictions about abortion, like that it isn't safe for women, that it's murder, whatever.
It isn't.
It's also none of your business what other women do with their bodies or with their doctors. Wishing that it was your business (or telling fantasy stories based on your fringe views) does not make it so.
So mention this when you argue with such a person, or someone who specifically argues these points.
I did not argue that "life begins at conception". As for "a fetus is a human being":
A fetus is: "an unborn or unhatched offspring of a mammal, in particular, an unborn human more than eight weeks after conception"
Hence, a fetus is not "at conception", but at least 8 weeks later. According to Wikipedia on US law: "Viability is usually placed at about seven months (28 weeks, approx. 196 days) but may occur earlier, even at 24 weeks"; In other words, a fetus may be aborted 24-28 weeks after conception; Arguing that a fetus in this range is a human being is not a fringe view among those who look into the issue, or at least that a fetus might be a human being (it's possible that we don't know enough about human development in the womb to decide).
> It's also none of your business what other women do with their bodies
What women do to the bodies of fetuses is the issue here. A woman who murdered her unborn, viable child would be charged with muder despite it concerning "what she did with her body".
> Wishing that it was your business (or telling fantasy stories based on your fringe views)
Yes, "might" was the most important word in my post and that was intentional. I personally don't fall into any of the groups listed and demographically most of the people reading this probably don't either. We are the lucky ones. We don't personally face the risks of a "might". If you fall into those groups that "might" starts looking awfully scary regardless of the exact odds.
I don't live in the US (anymore), so it doesn't really affect me.
You bring up some valid points. But a lot of what you mention is very much bound to state administration and legislation. Of course federal laws and the supreme court can have a big impact, but the states still have a lot of say in the matter.
And even if Clinton had won, with the current climate, she wouldn't get much through Congress or Senate.
Then again, a different candidate than her might have helped to flip the senate.
What I mostly meant by that: it's done, he won. Have to deal with it now.
> I don't live in the US (anymore), so it doesn't really affect me.
Nor do I, but this person is the standard bearer for the stable world order that has helped lift many of us out of poverty, and has promised to continue doing so.
That world order is pretty chill, in comparison to historical standards. It seems rash to claim maintaining it doesn't matter, and that's exactly what this rich white man has campaigned on.
yes it will... in worst case scenario, US will roll back to a state 20-30 years ago. by your descriptions, people were committing suicides en mass or were put down like feral animals or whatever the heck you meant with your emotional outcry.
It seems not so long ago when Obama was criticized for his inability to do many changes he promised to do, simply because the image of US president holding all the possible power in the US is an illusion, for a very long time.
Personally, I don't care much about his racism, bigotry etc, many powerful people are like that, they just don't admit it openly to the media. What I care about is long-term chances of mankind for survival on this beautiful little blue ball, the only home we will have as a mankind for a very, very long time.
And in this topic, he seemed... pretty horrible in every single way. well, fuck.
> What I care about is long-term chances of mankind for survival on this beautiful little blue ball, the only home we will have as a mankind for a very, very long time.
Exactly. And what we need now is stability, a chance to continue to grow the technological civilization. Because if we fuck it up this time, it's gonna take many thousands, if not tens of thousands, of years before anyone will come close to industrial revolution again. All the low-tech, high-density energy sources have been used up. If the current system stops, there's no restarting. So could we all please focus on stabilizing and improving it, instead of fucking with it in spite, because someone else was born richer than me?
> You might be willing to take those risks that Donald Trump is not the man he says he is
What if the things staying the same are the larger risk? The current status quo (a change from the past) isn't sustainable for many.
> The world might not go on for the Muslim hoping to immigrate to our country.
Be specific - which criteria is keeping them out? Why do they want to come to the US?
> poor pregnant women who might not get access to a safe abortion
You mean who get illegal abort?
> who [sees] a president who brags about sexually assaulting women
because it was publicized as part of a smear campaign. What about the public officials who see the email scandal, and that it didn't hurt president Clinton?
Like Trump said, what of Bill Clintons affair? No moralizing over that?
> trans person who is no longer allowed in the bathroom in which they feel the most comfortable
Lets say this really was a "world-ender"; What about the people who share that bathroom, who are also "uncomfortable"? Are subjective feeling only meaningful if exhibited by the trans community?
This election is about establishment vs anti-establishment. People over globalisation. Remember Bernie Sanders? Anyone who has done their thinking themselves instead of CNN/FOX/MSNBC has seen this for months.
Against Trump were GOP, Democrats, left and right Media, Special Interests, all the nasty smear campaign and he still pulled through.
You do know that the wall is already there and even Clinton voted for it? Just need to be finished. [0]
Just because you haven't taken the time to look at Trumps positions doesn't mean he hasn't any. You can find them from Presidents website.[1]
If it was anti-Establishment, then why did voters re-elect Congress who had a 9% approval rating, and who quite literally, are the permanent establishment, because they're gerrymandered and not term limited like the President, who changes every 8 years?
I don't buy it. anti-Establishment is the story progressives tell themselves, that the Trump voters would have been Sanders voters. But Sanders voters believe bankers and corporations have fucked over their jobs, and Trump voters think Mexicans and minorities are to blame. There might be some overlap, but telling yourself this was merely about anti-Establishment and "draining the swamp" doesn't explain why incumbents scored a huge victory tonite.
And Clinton has Private and Public views. I get that you haven't followed Trump, but in that case you shouldn't attack him either with partial information.
The Direct Democracy President
'Months ago, when Trump stumbled on his answer about criminal penalties for women who seek illegal abortions, the public went nuts, and Trump immediately corrected his position. That’s direct democracy. Trump heard the opinion of the majority and instantly adopted it.
Consider Trump’s proposal to ban all Muslim immigration. The public felt his position was too extreme, and let him know. Eventually, Trump softened his stance to talk about countries of origin, not religion. The public still wasn’t pleased, so Trump softened again to his current position of “extreme vetting.” That evolution in policy looks like direct democracy to me. The public told Trump what it wanted, and Trump evolved to it.
Likewise, we found out this week that Trump’s plan to deport 11 million Mexicans living in the United States illegally has some wiggle room. Maybe there won’t be so much deporting after all. Because the public doesn’t want it.'[0]
But he changed his mind because he had to please the people to get elected, right?
He doesn't have to change his mind for the people again unless he wants be reelected.
If politicians change their mind all the time, we do not know what they'll do once elected, and therefore we do not know what it is we choose when we vote for them.
A lot of comments now, are about how Trump might not follow through on the stuff that was said during the campaign, or that it will become less severe. To me that sounds exactly like we do not know what sort of president the American people have elected -- And that does not sound like a good form of democracy.
> This election is about establishment vs anti-establishment. People over globalisation. Remember Bernie Sanders?
I don't understand the point you are making. If people beat globalization, if voters want anti-establishment more than establishment, shouldn't Bernie have won?
From what I understand (which is based on Clay Shirky's Twitter feed, make of that what you will) Bernie had zero appeal to black voters, who are an essential demographic for the Democrats. He was very popular in a young, white bubble, which is also important, but still a bubble.
Will it though? We have a frisky Russia, trouble brewing in the South China Sea, and the Middle East/ISIS/Syria. A large reason why these conflicts are not worse is because of the restraint shown by the US and the other parties involved.
We have essentially just put a child behind the greatest military force in the world.
This shows the power of media narrative. Clinton said multiple times 'alleged DNC hacking' would lead to a military response against Russia. No fly zone in Syria would mean effectively that.
In case you are curious look at the Wikileaks emails. Obama & Clinton administration stirred up Syria to what it is now and created vacuum for ISIS.
She also told public how long the nuclear response time is which is quite ironic after saying Trump could not be trusted with that information.
Maybe... but that's what people said after the primary elections and it wasn't toned down much. At the end of the day, Trump is a nihilist and an egotist that feeds of off the passion of his supporters. "Trump" the persona is what fired up his supporters and is what won him the election. I think he will stick with it.
Yes. Were you paying attention to the rhetoric that got him elected? A lot of it, if taken literally, was literally impossible. It worked, but it shouldn't be taken too seriously beyond that. Will he have some interesting policies? Yes. Will he follow through on many of the crazy things he said while campaigning? No.
Syria, ISIS, and whole effin' arab spring, is something that was initially supported/not constrained enough by US. Yes, conflicts could be worse in middle east, but they could also... not be, if US and west generally just didn't meddle with crappy but relatively stable systems in place.
What you mean is: Russia is portrayed as frisky in your media. That is different. Perhaps you should look up alternative news sources, YouTube can be enlightening.
It's about the arguments, about how they are placed in the current newsscape, not about the source but about how these explanations fit in your world view. They fit well with me. And how is this different from American state news like CNN?
Well, we spent the last month saying "nobody will take him seriously. Then "he will never get elected". Now I think saying "he will never do what he said he would" is pretending we are able to know what's going on and what will happen like we weren't dead wrong the whole time before. Let's shut up and see.
It's only a farce if you don't believe that Hillary is representative of corrupt, career politicians.
It seems many of the people I know who voted for him wouldn't care if he dropped his pants and took a shit in one of the Smithsonian museums. "At least he's not part of the establishment."
No, she's definitely as much or as little corrupt as any other politician.
And yes, your second point is spot on. which is the problem. The electorate focused on emails and assumed content of those emails for months, and ignored 400 problems with Trump.
It wasn't a painless choice, but the correct choice sure as hell was obvious to anyone trying.
>No, she's definitely as much or as little corrupt as any other politician.
Not according to the bought meetings via donations to the Clinton foundation. You need some significant evidence to show this is standard practice for all secretaries of state.
Look, you clearly don't think there is anything to this corruption angle. Therein stems the disconnect between you and the typical Trump supporter.
>The electorate focused on emails and assumed content of those emails for months, and ignored 400 problems with Trump.
The media focus on Trump was about him being offensive or using a tax loss carryover. The email scandal is about violations of the law with regard to the handling of state secrets. Then pretending she didn't understand classification, etc.
>It wasn't a painless choice, but the correct choice sure as hell was obvious to anyone trying.
Right, anyone trying to justify their preconceived notions.
You ignore the corruption and two-tiered legal treatment, Trump supporters ignored the pussy grabbing talk and other non-PC shit he spews.
The world will go on, but I really wonder what America's place in it will become. Will America be diminished as a leader among nations? How powerful will our economic engine remain if it becomes more isolated? How influential will we be in world affairs?
Things like this don't change overnight, but I fear by the time it's evident they've started slipping it's a long, long road to ever claw your way back.
Oh, he's going to break promises (all Presidents have), but probably not the ones you'd prefer he breaks. Ultimately Trump has shown a stark lack of concern whether his promises are kept or not.
I thought it was absurd to entertain the idea that he was a serious candidate for the republican ticket. And I thought it was absurd to think he would win tonight. A new great wall of China is absurd, too. But that doesn't mean it isn't going to happen.
These were the two people chosen by the parties to represent them. Just because they are the worst in history does not invalidate the election, and it isn't like you can call off an election because you don't have a worthy opponent.
I suspect the democrats are regretting throwing Bernie under the bus.
For me, the problem is more when people think: a) the different-skinned guy down the street is causing this problem; b) voting for right wing guy can stop globalisation. Brexit showed that the people most likely to vote on immigration/kick out foreigners basis were also those with the fewest immigrants in their region.
More left-leaning people seem a bit confused about inequality/poverty vs globalisation - inequality globally is on the way down, which is why it's on the way up locally (you're losing to the guy half-way around the world, some of your neighbours are not losing to their equivalents... yet).
Meanwhile the gap between the 1% and everyone else widens.
Globalization has indeed helped to level global inequality, but this has come at the erosion of the quality of life for ordinary citizens of developed countries, while lining the pockets of the wealthy.
The current implementation of globalization is all wrong - one small group are getting more of all the pie while the rest of the world shares a shrinking portion equally amongst themselves.
> inequality globally is on the way down, which is why it's on the way up locally
Globalization helped low and middle class people in developing countries on expense of middle class westerners. But the main catch is that those gains are miniscule, the most went to the rich who profited the most of globalization - hence voting for it heavily.
I saw the former governor of Pennsylvania on msnbc saying about 10 pct of the manufacturing jobs were replaced by trade but the other 90 was from technology.
I support globalization, and agree computerization will be more disruptive (in the future). But that you, and democrats, and the establishment republicans ignore the jobs lost to globalization over the last 30 years is exactly what leads to a reactionary election and a Trump presidency.
No wall is needed... Just make it so that employers cannot legally employ those not authorized to work in the country --and fine with an amount which will deter people/companies.
At least that's what I would do if I needed to control unauthorized workers for any place which wanted to do so.
Well, it's a good thing you don't. Fines that high would allow some random mid-level government bureaucrat to effectively shut down any business that crossed him or her.
No creditor is going to do business with an entity that could cease to exist tomorrow. Even an accusation of hiring illegal immigrants would effectively be a corporate death penalty, as the business would find itself quickly frozen out of its relationships with customers, creditors and suppliers. In theory this leads to businesses scrupulously following the rules, avoiding even the appearance of violations. In practice, though, rules are complicated and ambiguous, time is finite, competency is finite, and even the most well intentioned business can hire someone without the correct paperwork. Or hire someone, and then have their paperwork expire. Or miss a required check on paperwork. Or something else entirely. Are you going to punish a business with death for making a simple error in filing horrendously complicated immigration paperwork? If so, do you also think that we should have police snipers ready to kill anyone going even one mile over the speed limit? After all, speeding kills many more people than illegal immigration every year.
If you can't be bothered to get documents from an employee and e-verify their employment eligilbity in 5 minutes on a web app, you shouldn't be permitted to run your business.
Because something does not have absolute accuracy does not mean you do not do it. Pass, fail, and refer are perfectly acceptable, with a legitimate and efficient appeals process if you truly are eligible to work and are denied through the verification process.
It already is illegal to employ illegal immigrants, and in fact most businesses that do, are also committing tax fraud, which can be punishable with jail time.
That will happen in the long run but that's not what happened the last 30 years. Secretarial jobs are certainly a casualty of computerisation. But the job losses that got Trump elected are industrial job losses, from factories that have been essentially outsourced to China. China is barely begining to computerise its production, Chinese factories are mostly competitive because of their ample and cheap manual labor.
Disagree that computerisation is this problem. It's a problem, but it's not what's driven this. Why would the vote fall so strongly down racial lines if the primary problem was the elimination of lower-end jobs?
(Along with one of your respondents, I also don't think the wall or many other promises will eventuate.)
Lol what are you on about. Plenty of countries have a very multicultural society, and they do great.
Look at Melbourne, Australia, we have huge immigrant populations, and all the different cultures have made this an awesome place to live - E.g. I highly doubt you'd find a more diverse selection of restaurants per capita anywhere else.
This election wasn't about race. Don't project your bigotry onto all Trump supporters.
And the 'world elite' is not actually the group of people that aren't racist, it's the middle class that isn't racist. The 'elite' and the 'worker class' are actually pretty similar in how bigoted they are.
In my opinion Australia is one of the most monocultural countries in the world, and I have visited over 100 countries.
It is a monoculture because they basically exterminated natives like they were bunnies in order for some guys to take all the territory to themselves.
There is only one culture in Australia precisely because all the minorities are not significant. It is one thing to have a Muslim or two, completely different having tens of millions.
Who is the owner of the land in Australia? White families. I have a friend in Australia who has so much territory he needs a plane to move around it. It is normal there.
What makes Australia a great place to life is having a continent almost as big as the USA,with comparable natural resources, but with less than 13 times less population.
In a similar country like China there lives 65 times more population. In fact most of China is mountains so the actual density is even higher in populated places.
Paraphrasing Barry Humphries recently, on growing up in Melbourne in the 50's:
"I grew up in a Melbourne that pretended to be a home county of England. An English garden, never an Australian tree or shrub to see. A picture of Churchill on the wall. I never saw an Aborigine or indigenous Australian, and the first time I saw a kangaroo was at the London Zoo"
What the OP is referring to is that in Melbourne you have neighbourhoods of people of Greek ethnicity and then adjacent to them neighbourhoods of people from former-Yugoslavia and then adjacent to that neighbourhoods of Sicilians, Chinese, Polish...etc. There is no single WASP culture. I think you already went completely off mark when you started thinking in terms of white and non-white.
> In my opinion Australia is one of the most monocultural countries in the world
That seems to me to be a rather odd statement. Australia today (and since the 1970s) has a large and ethnically diverse immigration intake. Over the last five years, the top five immigration source countries (in order) are India, China, UK, Philippines, South Africa [1]. In 2015, 28.2% of Australia's population was born overseas, compared to only 13.7% of the US population – per capita Australia has a significantly higher immigration rate than the US. If you are looking for a country deserving the title of "most monocultural", a country such as Japan is far more fitting of that title than Australia.
> It is a monoculture because they basically exterminated natives like they were bunnies in order for some guys to take all the territory to themselves.
As regrettable as it was, I don't think what happened to indigenous Australians was hugely different from what happened to the indigenous populations of the US and Canada. And, just like the US and Canada, the question of contemporary ethnic/racial diversity is in numerical terms far more determined by the diversity of immigration source countries (both contemporary and historical) than by the surviving indigenous population.
> There is only one culture in Australia precisely because all the minorities are not significant.
Around 12% of Australia's population has (South/East/Central/Southeast) Asian ancestry. The Asian minority is concentrated in the major cities, so if you live in a major city (but especially Sydney and Melbourne) it is higher than 12%. And, the European-descended population exhibits a mix of ethnicities too – while about 45% of the population report British or Irish ancestry, 4.6% report Italian and 4.5% German. So "all the minorities are not significant" is a very odd (and quite possibly offensive) thing to say.
> What makes Australia a great place to life is having a continent almost as big as the USA,with comparable natural resources, but with less than 13 times less population.
The US has far more water than Australia, which is part of why it has 13 times the population. So I'd question how true "comparable natural resources" really is.
That's interesting. The anti-immigration right in the UK hold your immigration system up as the way forward.
We have a multicultural society in the UK that many are rejecting, with racial tensions at a high.
The difference is that many immigrants are working class. They are scapegoated to great success with the white working class. I disagree with that - I think the real problem is meagre infrastructure investment to support new arrivals but perhaps the Aussie style system works on the other end of the spectrum: focus only on valuable people where value is how much money they would earn.
It's also interesting given the relative immigrant populations:
As of 2011, 26% of the Australian population was not born in Australia.[1] That's around double the UK. The only nations with higher proportions are Luxembourg, Switzerland and Israel.
As the parent pointed out, Melbourne is particularly diverse, with 30% of the population not born in Australia.
I presume they are referring to focussing on skills based migration schemes vs humanitarian. As someone pointed out below, Australia's policies towards political and humanitarian refugees have many critics.
To be honest, the anti-immigration right hold up Australia as a model for an immigration system as a rhetorical tool rather than an explicit model because (i) it's a prosperous liberal democratic country that can't be glibly dismissed and (ii) there's widespread public perception that it's unusually hostile to the idea of accepting immigrants and doesn't let many in.
Of course the reality is that Australia lets in far more migrants per capita than the UK, but that's certainly not the objective. There are people on the anti-immigration right that want to see more skills discrimination in visa awards but are quite happy with the overall numbers arriving every year and are entirely comfortable with the idea of a large percentage of the UK population being born overseas, but they're definitely a minority.
It is not as simple as that. For example the Bangladeshi community in the UK was largely pro-Brexit. They wondered why white Europeans got favourable immigration treatment vs their own people.
Is that true about Melbourne? I mean, I believe that there are large immigrant populations, and that you have a lot of diverse restaurants. But I struggle to believe that they "do great" and that there is a lot of unity. I know New Zealand is a deeply racist country, and I had always heard that Australia was even worse.
Yeah? I'd be interested in some reading about that. I always thought we were not perfect (who is?) but OK, certainly compared to other countries with similar cultural makeups (i.e. the Maori have been treated not amazingly, but not remotely as bad as the US / Can / Aus treatment of their indigenous people).
FWIW: I come from a massive place of ignorance about this, being a white aucklander in CS. Interested in reading more.
Trump's campaign might be anti-establishment, the people he will be bringing in will not be.
Jeff Sessions
Giuliani
Christy
just to name three of his "inner circle"
I cross my fingers that we will get through the next 4 years without any significant events. However, I think this is really a black eye in America. I think right now at least, we're going to be the butt of jokes for the rest of the world. Lets hope he proves us wrong, or at least the system works to contain him.
I noticed the same thing about how how establishment his "team" is. I predict that what we've elected as a nation is, in fact, a fairly run of the mill establishment Republican. But I guess we'll find out!
The fact that the electoral college exists probably distorts the popular vote. People in non-swing states may not vote in the same proportions if the president were decided by popular vote. Of course, this trend could go either way.
The discrepancy between the EV and the popular vote is dangerous politically, in my opinion. Its significance is really underestimated, because you have the outcome unhinged from the actual vote result or sentiment; the popular vote has to overcome some structural feature that favors a different outcome. What we have now is, again, the prospect of a president who was not elected by a majority of the population. All these discussions interpreting popular opinion based on a Trump presidency are a bit moot to me because they equate the two when they're not the same. I don't disagree with a lot of the points being made here, because clearly something about voting for Trump resonated with a lot of Americans. However, if it turns out that Trump didn't win the popular vote, it is technically true that the president elect was disfavored by a majority of the voters. It's a dangerous, unfair trend and only exacerbates disillusionment with the political process.
But there is a valid reason for it. The US is a union of States, and they hold real power. I am not sure they should give up their power because it is too complicated for some people to understand. At the same time, I would prefer States to allot their electoral votes proportionally so that they could properly represent their population. Nevertheless, there would still be rounding errors.
Many votes are still left to be counted in the very blue states of CA, OR, and WA. Models such as the NYT upshot model give a high degree of confidence that those states will tip the popular vote balance to Clinton.
And much like brexit, this fiasco reveals how much of a fool the journalistic establishment has made of itself. At least we can stop debating one thing at this point, whether or not the media is somehow disconnected with reality.
It says more about the media -- in a short-sighted quest for ratings and quarterly reports -- stops doing journalism and starts being a vector for political click-bait.
Even just the Halo-effect of ridiculous claims being requoted verbatim is huge, even when followed with rebuttals.
Is it just the quest for ratings or is it outright advocacy for a position? (Probably both, but...)
It seemed (to me) to be that for Brexit and for the US Presidential election, the majority of the media outlets, the editorials, the analysts and the poll pushers all had a preferred outcome and were going to shame your character/honor/morals/intelligence if you didn't fall in line with their brand of right-thinking people.
Did you not also find that to be the case?
And, if you do, don't you think that the media (over time) is squandering any power-through-position it may have accumulated by this outright advocacy?
Immigration and gay marriage and women’s rights etc. are scapegoats. The real problems are international competition (unskilled workers in developed countries have to compete with unskilled workers in Thailand and Bangladesh and Indonesia), automation (the US has higher industrial production than ever before, but it takes much less labor), changing tax laws and easier travel/communication/money movement (letting rich people live far away from production and markets, and siphon their wealth into tax havens), break-down of civic institutions (labor unions, churches, public services, local newspapers, etc.).
After Brexit and Trump, the next milestone on this curious series is the French presidential elections in May 2017. The far right candidate Le Pen is leading the polls, but winning at the second round of the election is not going to be easy. Although, no doubt that Brexit, the Trump election, potential new terrorist attacks in France as well as the developping migrant crisis are going to give her a boost.
But like Trump she is unlikely to control the parliament. The republican party will likely temper Trump through the senate. And without a majority at the French parliament, a French president is more like a queen of England, just with the nuclear red button in her hand.
• The Geert Wilders trial in Netherlands. GW is the most popular politician in NL right now. He is on trial for what is essentially pure political speech, he asked a crowd if they wanted more/fewer Moroccans (i.e. visa policy), they said fewer, he said "OK we'll sort that out" or words to that effect. He is boycotting his own trial. If he is found guilty and punished, it's hard to believe this will go down well or hurt his support. Should be resolved by end of the month.
• Austria rerunning its presidential election. Last time the "far right" candidate Norbert Hofer lost to his Green/left wing opponent. But there was voter fraud and the vote was so close that the amount of fraud was larger than the margin of the win, so the courts required a rerun. If Hofer wins ... well, the President of the EU Commission has said Austria would be frozen out of the EU as a punishment for voting the wrong way. Should be resolved in December.
• General election in the Netherlands next year.
• Election in France, as you note.
• Towards the end of the year election in Germany. Very volatile politics there. Turkey is threatening to unleash a torrent of migration on Europe unless it gives Turkey what it wants, which the EU doesn't want to do. Germany's Trump equivalent (Frauke Petry) started losing support when the migrant crisis began slackening after the Turkey deal. If it collapses then AfD may see a resurgence in time for the election.
GW is only polling at 24/150 or so seats right now. That makes him the shared biggest in our fragmented landscape and he may well do better, but he won't get close to a majority and other parties will shun him (even though it looks like they'll need to form a coalition of five parties or so).
And nobody talks about visa policy when they discuss Moroccans, it's about the Moroccan-origin youth who live here, have a relatively high crime rate, are usually born here and often have both Moroccan and Dutch passports. Attacking that group is his party's main theme, and I'd say it was clear incitement of hate.
The issue about the Netherlands you should add to your list is that it is likely that there will be referenda about all new EU treaties, and they will all be voted down. And Rutte already doesn't know what to do with the Ukraine vote.
And the ongoing yearly Zwarte Piet shitstorm, I think there's going to be violence this year around what's supposed to be a kid's party. It's a very related issue, people feel they are told by outsiders that they have to change their own culture in their own country.
Sinterklaas, St Nicholas, comes to the Netherlands in a steam boat from Spain this weekend, is here for a few weeks, and gives lots of presents to kids on 5 december. In the US his name lives on as Santa Claus. He is very old and wears a kind of bishop's clothes (http://www.bitesandstories.com/blog/2015/12/4/the-4-dutch-de... )
He has helpers known as Zwarte Piet, black Pete. In times past they punished bad kids, but nowadays they are a lot of fun, entertain kids, hand out candy, and they are the ones who bring the presents to kids, through the chimney.
Already since the 1960s there has been a movement to abolish this, but that has always been small.
Since 2010 or so some people from minority groups have been more vocal, saying they get called Zwarte Piet on the streets, that this is a racist tradition, and that it needs to go. Apologists claim that the blackness comes from travelling through the chimney (that's what children are usually told). Some lady from the United Nations Committee against Racism or so, a black woman from the Caribbean, appears to have looked at the situation for about five minutes and declared the whole practice clearly racist.
More and more voices currently say that we should gradually change Zwarte Piet -- why not have some black streaks in his face only (from the chimney), or use lots of different non-skin colors? It's not a huge change, children will be fine with it, and these people who feel discriminated obviously have at least some point. National TV has a daily program in the Sinterklaas period ("Sinterklaasjournaal") and they are very slowly changing Piet, for instance. This movement is especially big in Amsterdam and among the highly educated.
But a large part of the country is vehemently against it along the lines of "who are these outsiders to tell us to change our Dutch traditions", "if they don't like it why don't they go back to their own countries", calling people who argue for change traitors, and so on. Feelings are especially strong in more rural areas and among the non educated.
Now people who say they'll dress up their kids as Piet using just some streaks, or in a different color, receive death threats on the Internet in huge numbers. The discussion rages for almost the entire year now, not just in november/december. That the election is in march, not long after december, is pointed out as working in favour of Geert Wilders.
The first showing of this year's Sinterklaasjournaal is tonight, and the rumour is that it will have Piets of all kinds of colours. Sinterklaas arrives this saturday. I'm going to watch live with my kids, I would like to dress them as Piet with some streaks, but I really am too afraid of being beaten up. It'll be civil war in a few years...
It's a single silly issue that runs exactly along the dividing line of all these related things.
> The far right candidate Le Pen is leading the polls
But, she's not?
Alain Juppé is, an old-school right-wing politician. Le Pen is second and the third is a party that is not quite far-left but still far enough to the left for the communist party to ally with it.
> winning at the second round of the election is not going to be easy
I don't think this has any chance of happening. But of course, who knows...
She has a good chance of ending up leading the first round. However so far she only has a chance to win 2nd round if she's against Hollande. And I don't see how he could get to the 2nd round.
I don't think this can happen, but there are still 6 months left and I didn't think Trump could win either.
>The attempts at building an interconnected globalised world are beginning to fail.
No, the attempts at building an interconnected globalized world are becoming less popular. Or maybe the people who opposed that sort of thing all along are finding a voice.
It's a different thing; Interestingly, you get different answers when you vote votes than when you vote with dollars; and in this case? the dollars have teamed up with the center (or what in america is called the center-left) - and lost to the votes. (I guess I don't really see why you think the center left (or center) has sold out to the far right. This is America, and we like our market-based solutions, but the center is capable of regulating that. I give you the ACA as exhibit A.)
>There is no genuine leftist alternative. It's a choice between center-right "left" that's sold out to the establishment and the far right.Economists need to stop acting like priests in the medieval ages who justified the existing order . The rural voter who lost his job doesn't care about the theory of comparitive advantage.
uh, so really, 'left' vs 'right' doesn't work so well when describing "third way" nationalist movements; that's kind of why it is the "third way" - I mean, not that brexit and trump are actually fascist movements, but they are similar in that they have strong nationalist and nativist aspects to them, and are less clear where they stand on the economic side of things. All 'third way' movements, historically, have had some socialist and some capitalist elements; their argument is that the left/right economic divide isn't the primary issue; taking care of "your people" and protecting those people from the others is the big issue.
The real divide here is between what I call "the coalition of everything is fine" - people like me, for whom the economy looks like it's booming, minorities and women who see that their rights get closer to parity every year, vs... uh, what I want to call the rural poor, but this election showed that it's more than just the rural poor. I mean, I can see what is up with the rural poor... but what about everyone else?
And there's not a lot of understanding in general; it's not just me. I mean, I can understand voting for the other guy 'cause you don't have a job... but unemployment, by just about all measures, has been going down for about all of the time that Obama has been in office.
Where is this majority of people who think that things are so bad?
> I mean, I can understand voting for the other guy 'cause you don't have a job... but unemployment, by just about all measures, has been going down for about all of the time that Obama has been in office.
The unemployment rate only includes people actively seeking work. One often-toted statistic is that men have been dropping out of the labor market completely (i.e. not looking for work at all) at higher-than-normal rates. These are quite possibly also people who were Trump voters.
Why not a more conventional republican then? I don't think Trump has said he would repeal the ACA. There has been vague talk of changing it, but no evidence that it won't come out more populist than it is now.
Edit: This "Because I like fiscally conservative policies" answer is one I get a lot in these discussions... but it doesn't create a working model, because as far as I can tell, Trump is not a particularly fiscally conservative Republican.
No conventional republican was selected simply because of the way the GOP selects its candidates. With 30 people fighting each other, the votes were just too split up to allow anyone to get a nice majority.
Trump wasn't a particularly fiscally conservative Republican, but he was the only representative of the most fiscally conservative party on the ticket.
What was also fascinating in this campaign is the divide between the media and the people; even if Trump had lost with 49% of the vote it would have been striking. Zero newspapers endorsed him, which means half of the US population is not represented in the media.
People like community. It's hard to have a community when people don't share similar backgrounds, when people don't share same values. People will feel less connected and less responsible for one another. People will also feel more distrust to one another. Social cohesion will break down. This is the reason why integration should be an essential part of immigration. Immigrants should adopt the leading culture, at least when moving outside of the confinements of their homes.
> "[...] integration should be an essential part of immigration."
This is an idea I have seen or heard a lot of during this election cycle. What exactly is it you want when you say it should be essential? What do you think the consequences should look like for immigrants who are having a difficult time integrating into the culture?
Further, what exactly is this culture? Speaking English? Watching sports? Joining the local church?
How do the Romans define what it is that the Romans do such that they can require it of someone?
What do you think the consequences should look like for immigrants who are having a difficult time integrating into the culture?
If immigrants move to another country in which they find it difficult to adjust, perhaps it would be better for them and for society as a whole, if these people would return to their original country.
Further, what exactly is this culture? Speaking English? Watching sports? Joining the local church?
It can be simple things, like shaking hands with woman. Wearing more or less the same clothes. Sending children to state schools and not separate schools. Learning the local language and speaking this language in public.
Adjusting to the social norms is good for immigrants as well, as they will find it much easier to find jobs.
I have a Thai girlfriend and when I am in Thailand we go to a temple quite often (I am not religious at all). I do the same rituals as the Thai people do, out of respect for their culture. I plan to live in Thailand in the future, so I am learning the Thai language. And I hope, sometime in the future, to work for some time in a Thai company, so I can perfect my Thai language skills. I also try to keep in mind other aspects of Thai culture.
I state these points specifically, because these are areas where many European countries failed, out of the failed idea of multi-culturalism [0]. I don't think the situation in the US is quite the same as Europe (yet), but perhaps it could be in the future.
How do the Romans define what it is that the Romans do such that they can require it of someone?
It's a quote from Saint Ambrose that basically means that one has to adjust to the society one moves in. You can't go to Saudi-Arabia and expect western behaviour, western norms would be tolerated. You'd find yourself in very big problems quickly. And it's the same in most countries in the world.
I get where you're coming from that it's better if immigrants pick up the culture and behaviors of the place they move to.
But what I'm asking about is what do you think it looks like when the government enforces this sort of thing? Maybe a department of cultural integration? How would they ensure they are effectively integrating people? How do we measure the effectiveness of people who work in such a department?
To me all the potential answers to this are very concerning. I'm fairly pro big-government, but the idea of America mandating immigrants behave in very specific ways in the name of cultural integration seems very dangerous in terms of the power it would over individuals.
But right now in the US we have laws around public schools helping non-English speakers learn in their native language (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bilingual_Education_Act). Municipalities frequently publish forms and other materials in multiple languages. We _could_ do away with stuff like this.
That said, I'm similarly worried about enforcing these things. My dad and his parents moved from the Netherlands to the US in the 50s. My dad started 3rd grade knowing 0 English. The whole family starting speaking it at home and now you'd never guess my dad was an immigrant. I think the zeal with which they assimilated helped my dad and his brother become the college graduates, upper-middle class people they are today.
I think you are making a great assessment and that is what fears me. I don't think your words are pretty useful on HackerNews folks in general.
My thoughts as a Swede is that I don't actually give a fuck if your president is a turd. His view on immigrations doesn't scare me, his view on NATO doesn't really scare me.
Trump say he is going to invest in fossile fuels THAT scares me A LOT.
The future already looks super dark and leaders like Obama shed a tiny light on that things would turn out for the better. But now when two of the worlds largest countries doesn't really care (USA and Russia) I mean wtf. It doesn't matter what the rest of the world does if these two giants will fuck it up anyway.
And the biggest CO₂ emitter is China, not the US or Russia. Aactually, pulling industry back to the US could reduce global CO₂ output if efficiency was made more of a priority than in China due to higher labor and energy costs.
Well if the gulf stream will discontinue to exist it will get a lot colder in northen europe..
Yeah of course China is the greater polluter but I am mainly speaking of nations that don't believe in climate change and still is one of the massive polluters. China is changing rapidly to solar and there are mass demonstrations and a great physical need for them to switch. Today, there isn't really such a broad held opinion in the US or in Russia.
One should be careful about extrapolating a trend from two disparate data points.
Trump and Brexit have one major thing in common: they relied on surprisingly high turnout from white working class men for ostensibly right wing causes after a lot of anti-Establishment and anti-immigrant rhetoric.
They have a lot not in common, like pro-Brexit voters very strongly disapproving of Trump, Brexit being a popular political cause for over twenty years backed by a vast majority of the mainstream press which actually picked up momentum because Establishment and liberal free trade figures came out in favour of it, the demographics for Brexit voters being heavily skewed towards older people[1] in a way that Trump votes almost certainly weren't, and Trump evidently picking up a lot of "the incumbent party haven't done anything for us; let's vote for change" votes that aren't really related to the appeal of his wall or birther remarks to ex-Obama voters living in Mexican-free areas of Michigan. Trump's "Make American Great" again spiel might well resonate more with an unemployed ex-factory worker than a broadsheet article extolling the virtues of comparative advantage, but it certainly isn't the sort of practical protectionist plan he needs to deliver a permanently change the status quo position on globalisation, and his new supporters aren't going to stick around if he doesn't deliver something.
It's also clear that other relatively recent major Anglosphere elections haven't been a major success for the radical right.
[1]that campaign certainly wasn't won on subreddits
> A similar divide can be found among the different age groups with younger voters favouring the Democrats and those aged over 65 years leaning towards Mr Trump.
> However, Mrs Clinton's appeal among those aged under 30 years, where she has a 20-point lead over Mr Trump (54/34%), is not as great as Barack Obama's 23-point lead.
I saw a graph much more detailed but I can't find it anymore. It showed that Clinton won the votes of the under 40 and Trump the ones of the over 40 by more or less the same margin. The story on Sky seems to confirm that.
> The rural voter who lost his job doesn't care about the theory of comparitive advantage.
This is am important point. Current system does not foster competition. As a migrant myself, I think the whole system is rigged to the benefit of chosen few mega corporation.
Taking UK as an example, Skilled immigration category was abolished few years back due to which I cannot apply for a visa and compete in free market for a salary. However, I am allowed to come to UK on a lower salary for nine years easily under company transfer scheme practically bounded to my employer with no option.
If allowed to compete as an individual, I would either compete for higher wages or go home. Current system just puts myself as well local at disadvantage to benefit chosen few.
The whole objective of free market and globalization is lost to greed and manipulation.
I agree her gender is an issue for some, but she got beaten by Obama before, and he had stronger handicaps than her (race and a "funny name"). I think it boils down to her lack of charisma and being seen as "the establishment".
Exactly. And it's not exactly groundbreaking news, so shame on the Democrats for going for Clinton and shame on her for not giving up after being defeated by Obama in 2008.
I disagree, since most criticisms has been focused on the corruption angle which is an aspect which the left side generally accuse the right of. One of the slogans of Hillary was that she wanted to take power back from the 1%, and it only further the message of falsehood and corruption when leaked conversation with wall-street came up in media.
It should also be mentioned that in a historically dirty campaign that focused less on what people wanted and more on whom they least wanted in office, gender, hair color and other less relevant aspect suddenly becomes more important. Obamas "Change we can believe in" and "Yes We Can" is more engaging than "I'm with her". Of 32 general election TV ads, 24 of those ads show or mention Trump. That explains to me why the left failed in this case, rather then the gender of the candidate.
I've never seen right wingers talk badly about Clinton due to her gender. I've heard plenty of talk on almost every single other one of her traits, but I think the progressives in the US are a bit to quick to pull out the sexism/racism card.
I don't think the sexism/racism shouts from progressives at Trump (and his supporters) were related to conservatives' disapproval of Clinton. The folks that voted for Trump did so not because they are sexist; they did it because they just plain hated Clinton (in particular) and the establishment.
I don't think the majority of Trump voters actually believe that Clinton shouldn't be president because she's a woman. They just view her as a corrupt, establishment politician and Trump just seemed like the lesser of two evils in their eyes.
I think the media vastly underreported just how much the Right hates Clinton. The Right wing media has been pushing anti-Clinton rhetoric hard for about eight years now!
Eight years? More like 20+. I was a kid in the 90s but still remember how much people plain hated the Clintons. Things like Waco and the Assault Weapons Ban drove them absolutely nuts. Like with Hillary's emails, the Clintons' shady behavior made everything so much worse than whatever they actually did.
/E these articles say everything better than I could. They were written in the early 2000s.
Responding to allegations of not being a real progressive with "well, wouldn't it be progressive to elect the first female president" really rubbed me the wrong way. Maybe I'm not the only one.
Do you have examples of the dirt that wouldn't have been directed at a man? I paid a lot of attention to this election cycle and I must have missed it.
She's a woman, and they think she is nasty. What does that have to do with her being a woman? Plenty of anti-Trump people have called him a nasty, horrible man. That doesn't make it a sexist statement, as much as the Clinton campaign and supporters have tried to make it so. (And I say this as someone who voted for Clinton.)
Are we pretending trump didn't insult every opponent in his campaign regardless of gender, or are we pretending it's worse because Hillary is a woman? I'm never sure what to pretend politically.
> Also people seem to care a LOT about immigration and preserving their culture
I don't understand that part. Isn't US a sum of N cultures that decided to have a common culture? So why the newcomers can't do what the predecessors did?
There's not really a good response I can think of here which fits with the guidelines of this site aside from basically we have a lot of ignorant short-sighted voters in this country.
I think the same mistake was made in both Brexit and this election. The people at the top looked around them, and they assumed the people they saw were a representative sample of the population. Because usually, they're more or less right.
There's a whole demographic out there that doesn't really care about politics. It doesn't matter who POTUS is because nothing will really change in my city. They don't bother voting because none of the policies particularly interest them. Suddenly you've got this guy who isn't a politician, and he's promising to do things that decades of politicians haven't been doing.
Trump got the people who are disaffected by traditional politics to come out and vote, and that's enough to make a big difference, just like it was with Brexit.
> It is possible to view this as an isolated event or a trend. Coming on the heels of BREXIT this is a trend.
It's a seductive idea but I think you're reading too much into this. It's hard to tell what people are really voting for when there are two options each of which encompasses a bunch of largely disparate policies. I wouldn't be surprised if a large amount of the Trump vote was just a vote against "political correctness" or one against Hillary as a person. Humans sure love patterns.
Over a million voters isn't a big difference? 2/5 last elections won by the loser of the popular vote seems extremely problematic.
Phrased differently, Democrats have won the popular vote in 4/5 of the most recent elections but only won office in two of them. In the 21st century, winning the most votes for president only results in a 50% success rate for Democratic presidential candidates.
> 2/5 last elections won by the loser of the popular vote seems extremely problematic.
Well, no, because it was designed this way. Popular vote is the obvious option when designing a democracy. They decided to go with something else under the specific understanding that any system other than a popular vote would allow this to happen.
> In the 21st century, winning the most votes for president only results in a 50% success rate for Democratic presidential candidates.
It will always affect Democratic candidates more negatively because they don't do as well with rural voters and the electoral college exists almost specifically to give rural voters more power. This is by design--not an oversight or misunderstanding.
Read up on why the EC exists. I think the term that applies is "concurrent majority".
If you want a counter-example, you can look at small town and rural upstate NY and realize how their concerns are always neglected because the sheer number of NYC voters drowns out any chance they have to be heard as part of the electorate.
EC exists because the states had to agree on a mutually acceptable compromise (between large and small states, and also between slave and non-slave states) when forming US. It doesn't make it inherently valuable - it was a compromise solution, which pretty much by definition means that it's not a perfect design.
That's ... not a valid argument against a different point. It's 1:41 AM on the west coast and despite the NY Times clearly calling the election for Trump, Clinton still has a forecasted 1% lead in the popular vote. Given California is incredibly blue, this will most likely hold true.
In this case the popular result is very likely the opposite of what you assert. That is, Clinton will probably win the popular vote and lose the presidency.
So popular sentiment is actually in support of an open, connected world. The political structures in the US systematically oppress this majority, due to its concentration in cities and the legacy of a voting system that respects territory over people.
If people care so much about immigration, why do anti-immigrant groups need to lie so much? If I had to accuse deficit hawks of being rapists that were conspiring with the Jews to bring down the US then I'd maybe conclude that people didn't care that much about the deficit.
The people who voted on the single issue of losing jobs overseas are in for a rude awakening when they realize that almost all of these jobs will be automated even if they do come back to the US.
I equated the discontent in the US with the discontent in the UK that led to the Brexit vote when it happened - my wife didn't believe they could have the same root cause but now I'm pretty convinced your predictions are likely to happen.
As an aside, Clinton would have given (will give?) a concession speech but Trump gave a victory speech.
> The attempts at building an interconnected globalised world are beginning to fail.
Because the interconnected globalized world had a lot of "buts" to it.
You can be interconnected and globalized...
...but we're going to still lock down copyright
...but we're going to export bad patent laws
...but we're going to externalize pollution even more than we were before
...but we're going to ignore competition and allow massive multinationals to form
...but we're going to maximize labor arbitrage while minimizing consumer choice
...but we're going to try and create a global jurisdiction that favors the guy with the most money
...but we're going to try and weaken the protections surrounding the most powerful tool for interconnection ever created.
This is why people are turning their backs on globalization - it hasn't worked for everyone, and it's hurt many people.
I'm fairly certain copyright and patent laws played no role in out-of-work steel workers in western Pennsylvania and Ohio turning out in droves for Trump.
> Also people seem to care a LOT about immigration and preserving their culture.
I believe their care about that because they have nothing else to look forward to.
(Lower-)Middle class in the West has been funding prosperity around the world (can't find the chart at the moment). Basically every social class everywhere in the world is better off than 30 years ago, except middle class in the Western world.
There is this generation that have less than their parents and know that their children will have even less. They cling to what they have, this nebulous identity/culture. And a bunch of populist politician is just happy to give them that.
What they really need is prosperity. Very few care about their neighbors beliefs when life is good. People living in cities like London demonstrate that: they are way more liberal because being liberal does not (seem to) cost them a lot.
I think it is more populism than far right.For example, in my country greece, under similar discontent, people voted the (supposed) "radical-left" party of Syriza.
> understand their concerns and try to assuage them
You can't do both at the same time.
For starters, the "theory of competitive advantage" is incredibly weak. But it's pretty clear that trade represents a small constant factor in the GDP level, which is used up once all markets have sufficient liquidity. It can explain only a small fraction of economic growth since the Industrial Revolution. And it is not necessarily a Pareto improvement with respect to nations -- which is why protectionism has been a fact of global trade for 4,000 years.
Oh the elites are headed towards a globalised world however that does not mean they need to include every country or people.
However what is happening in Europe if not the US is that people are pushing back against their governments and the elites because they are tired of being run over by the ideals of a group which suffers none of the negatives of the choices they force on others.
The elite, the political class and those connected to it do talk down to the masses, trying to embarrass or even intimidate them into accepting the needs of the elite. This means lower labor costs, more dependents on government, and long term more locked in votes. This ends up forcing the already pressed lower and middle classes further into an economic malaise they cannot escape. Worse any negatives, from loss of jobs and opportunities or worse, crime and violence, is confined to their areas as the elite tend to live in a very protected environment.
With regards to the US, at least we have been consistent in flipping the White House every eight years or so. It is pretty remarkable. However Democrats have been actually fighting a losing battle for a long time and not modifying their message but instead becoming more heated. By that I mean they are losing control over vast parts of the country with regards to the House and Senate but more importantly they lost a lot of governorship and local governments all of which feed upward
I thought about your text a few hours. Because some of it sounds really right, but somehow it also feels strange.
You say, if I understand you correctly, that the rural voter is the majority, and that we should finally start to listen to his needs, ideas, fears and dreams.
And I agree that we should listen to the majority and figure out how to make most people happy. But exactly this "rural voter" is not the one who educates himself (independent of the education he receives through his government a lot of learning happens after school). He has very simple needs and doesn't care about the details of how these interact with the needs of people who "tick differently". Sometimes when I talk to "rural folks" (have some in the family) they don't even seem to understand what they themselves want and need. They just know when they don't have it and then they are unhappy.
Therefore there is not much to learn from this "rural voter", or from talking to him. But his needs are obvious and simple as well. And we all know them already. Give him a job that exhausts him, give him a wife, 1-2 children, a tv, if possible a single family home. Keep the taxes low enough for him to provide for his family, fly or drive somewhere cheap in summer and make alcohol cheap enough for him to have some parties and a few beer on the weekend. Then he's happy and won't trouble any politician.
Thus, I would say the question is not about understanding them better but about rich and social enough to provide them what they need. And the funny thing is that the politicians on the right usually prefer the well off population and make politics for them, while the left tries to provide for the commoner, the "rural voter". That's the funny thing in my eyes, the "rural" voter hates the people who fight for him and loves the people who try to exploit him.
Your comment is incredibly condescending, which is a significant contributing factor as to why this "rural voter" got out and voted.
Perhaps rather than taking this tact (which we've seen a million times):
> Rural voters aren't smart. They vote based on feelings and ignore the stuff that actually matters (which I can identify better than they can). They're simple folks that just need simple stuff, but they're frequently tricked into voting against their interests by the other party.
You could consider something like this:
> Rural voters have different values than mine. My perception of their intelligence is irrelevant because I know there are intelligent people who share their views. Maybe if their viewpoints were taken seriously instead of dismissed outright as sexist and xenophobic, we could win their votes (or at least not cause such high turnout for the opponent) next time around.
Realize that Republicans can identify demographics that frequently vote for Democrats the same way. Take that first paragraph above and sub in "black people," "hispanics," and "women." See how incredibly offensive it is now? That's how "rural voters" feel when you post things like this.
You like the person who lies to you to exploit you more than the person who tells you the truth about your problems and cares for your well being.
Btw. a person can't change his skin color, his birth place, or with which physical organs (s)he's born with. But he can very well decide to accept that his shame comes from not educating himself, from hoping others would come and make his life Great Again, from not recognizing that only exploiters would promise him something unrealistic like that. And he can decide to do something about it.
And about recognizing cheaters vs people who really care about you:
Cheaters will say: Others f* you over. I will make you Great again.
Reliable people say: You f*ed yourself over. Let's learn, become strong and build a new Great Thing together.
> You like the person who lies to you to exploit you more than the person who tells you the truth about your problems and cares for your well being.
Have you ever thought about what it might be like to disagree with someone on something, yet respect them for having an honest difference of opinion? You know, without assuming they're an idiot?
> Btw. a person can't change his skin color, his birth place, or with which physical organs (s)he's born with. But he can very well decide to accept that his shame comes from not educating himself, from hoping others would come and make his life Great Again, from not recognizing that only exploiters would promise him something unrealistic like that. And he can decide to do something about it.
Totally irrelevant to my point. The point is that either side can group an opponent's voter blocks together and marginalize them as stupid / tricked / pointless. It suggests they don't have valid views and it's not fair.
Actually people don't understand that such kind of putting-the-finger-on-the wound talk is usually also the author taling to himself. I actually come from a rural background, and I often make the same mistakes: not educating myself before making a decision, hoping that someone else would solve my problems, falling for the cheater instead of the accepting the hard truth.
And in case that isn't clear: The second quote is me saying "no there is nothing to understand. Their needs are simple, well known, to all but themselves". And I also give reasons for that, e.g. that they don't try to educate themselves and that they hope other people come and solve their problems.
In that regard, using the internet we can also educate ourselves. All we need is some basic writing and reading skills. The rest is just putting in the effort to find the right ressources and people to learn and discuss with.
> we should finally start to listen to his needs, ideas, fears and dreams.
> his needs are obvious and simple as well. Give him a job that exhausts him, give him a wife, 1-2 children, a tv, if possible a single family home. Then he's happy and won't trouble any politician.
Yeah, right, sounds like you got it.
Please somebody tell me this is sarcasm ridiculing the leftists.
OK, I misquoted. But immediately after this "summary" you said you agree that we should listen to the majority (whatever it means) and try to make most people happy.
And then you go on ranting how uneducated they are and how you can only get binary answers from them (happy/unhappy). And somehow you conclude that the fact you can't communicate with them means you already understand everything they need, namely jobs, sex, entertainment and government handouts.
My point, and while I can't speak for Trump I think his too, is that what they need is to understand WTF is going on in economy and politics and have their say in these matters too. There's no point "working to exhaustion" (pretty much your words) if it all goes to support things you disagree with.
Politics and journalism is utter shit nowadays. See Republicans nominating Trump hoping to capitalize on bitter people. For real lulz, see Democrats nudging Republicans to nominate Trump (somebody dropped a link to wikileaks emails here) hoping they will make him look like idiot in TV and win. See the hysteria about the dumbest things Trump said in futile effort to scare people away from him.
Some people are fed up watching such games. Some don't want their emotions fucked with by zealots. Some don't want their taxes to fund gender studies and "affirmative actions" considering them bullshit. Some understand that "government giveth, government taketh away" (see the posts I linked). Some believe that countries should work on principles of individual freedom and market-based cooperation, not central planning.
And many of them don't speak in the media, don't feed twitter trolls and don't post to HN. They vote. Whether he actually wants their good or not, Trump seems to have got it.
> And if you have a point you forgot to mention it.
Be careful with that attitude. Sometimes silence indicates not acceptance but conflict.
Funny you say globalization has failed when we've had a corporate global economy for decades that has sent worker wages down in more-developed countries and corporate profits skyrocketing in more-developed countries. Believe me, these global corporations love the Republicans more than the Democrats; their profits come first, the people come last.
It's not a return to the 1920s. Globalisation proceeded too quickly, and many people got left out.
It is a revolt against a system which simply doesn't work for the majority of European descended whites.
Paul Buchheit once linked to an article from the American Conservative, which shows at least he had an open mind to hearing about these anti-establishment views.
Paul Graham and Sam A have instead just continued the political correctness anti-Trump agenda which in the long-turn actually plays into his hands, as there is a growing dislike of PC, especially from multi-millionaires who don't understand what its like to be out of work with no education behind you.
I think all this talk will come back to bite Silicon Valley and YC on the ass, as Trump will look to take revenge on the Tech Crowd. I expect the Tech Bubble to burst over the nxt year.
> Instead of patronising these people it's time we tried to understand their concerns and try to assuage them.
That to me is the key point. As someone who falls squarely into Mr. Trump's camp I've found the condesending way people talk about his supporters infuriating.
Economists study data, make observations and come to conclusions. They can't just tell people what they want to hear. Trump told coal country he'd being back mining jobs in the face of a freefall in demand. That's just lying. Don't blame economists.
> It is possible to view this as an isolated event or a trend. Coming on the heels of BREXIT this is a trend.
Good practice would suggest that you need slightly more than two datapoints to establish a trend.
There's a fairly well understood relationship between both slow GDP growth (& income disparity) and the rise of extreme political views (e.g. http://voxeu.org/article/global-crisis-and-political-extremi...). When times are good, people don't misattribute their misfortune to issues like globalisation and immigration. When times are bad, they do.
I think you are right. Here in Germany the Afd is also on the rise, who has a strong stand against refugees and the EU.
What is the common denominator? Obviously it is about globalism and culture, but maybe it has more to it?
I think none is really looking at the big picture. What are our values and how do democracies work? Do we in the west have the better system or where we just lucky? Currently the west is in a crisis. Everyone notices, that we loose on economic terms while China is winning. And groups from outside the west get more and more influence (most prominently Islam).
So how can we turn this around? One answer might be Trump, but there will probably be better solutions if we think about these issues.
You make an assumption that globalisation is a man-made thing. That we could say "no" and it would stop. But this is not so. Globalisation stems from very primal human and commercial needs that have been enabled by the internet.
Enough of this No True Scotsman bullshit that I see constantly here and basically anywhere with something approaching an international audience. In the context of the United States, which is where this election occurred and where the majority of people are reading this site from, the Democratic Party is a leftist party. Yes, if you want to lump in European democratic socialism, they fall elsewhere on the spectrum. When is the last time a US Democrat and the European Democratic Socialist were facing each other on the ballot? It's a meaningless comparison.
For your body, you are correct. But for the right side of your body, it is. My point is that US elections and politics are in the context of the US, not the world.
> It is possible to view this as an isolated event or a trend. Coming on the heels of BREXIT this is a trend.
No, you'd be extremely naive to believe this is an isolated event:
* Greece, SYRIZA and minor parties on the surge since 2014
* UK, votes for brexit in 2016, I'm not sure if UKIP is gaining votes or not though.
* France, FN (LePen) is leading the polls at least for the first round.
* Italy, M5S is awfully close to lead the polls in Italy
* In Germany AfD is on the raise
* FPO is leading the pools in Austria
Keep in mind that the mainstream media, often downplays the possibility of an alternative surging - I believe on purpose: In Greece the polls were nearly 15% off in the referendum. It's staggering! Now, Brexit and the US pollsters got-it all wrong. In Greece many people lie to pollsters on purpose.
I don't see any sort of isolation, I see a very clear and predictable pattern.
> There is no genuine leftist alternative.
Wait a minute there. I have this strong sense that if the democrats had gone with the other candidate, they'd be celebrating today. Hillary, was the only candidate that was susceptible to a loss (emails, wall street money, legacy, the surname, etc.). Hillary == Establishment in every possible way. Sanders on the other hand was possibly the most scandal-free candidate of the last 20 years at least. I wouldn't say that the leftist is the problem.
However, at least in Europe, the ones who'd screwed up everyone were the Socialist parties by pushing a Brussels-based liberal agenda for a decade or so, so in a sense, at least in the EU the left or mild left at least, is rather dead in the water.
UPDATE: I think part of T. Frank's article in the Guardian describe my feelings in a detailed manner:
Start at the top. Why, oh why, did it have to be Hillary Clinton? Yes, she has an impressive resume; yes, she worked hard on the campaign trail. But she was exactly the wrong candidate for this angry, populist moment. An insider when the country was screaming for an outsider. A technocrat who offered fine-tuning when the country wanted to take a sledgehammer to the machine.
She was the Democratic candidate because it was her turn and because a Clinton victory would have moved every Democrat in Washington up a notch. Whether or not she would win was always a secondary matter, something that was taken for granted. Had winning been the party’s number one concern, several more suitable candidates were ready to go. There was Joe Biden, with his powerful plainspoken style, and there was Bernie Sanders, an inspiring and largely scandal-free figure. Each of them would probably have beaten Trump, but neither of them would really have served the interests of the party insiders.
And so Democratic leaders made Hillary their candidate even though they knew about her closeness to the banks, her fondness for war, and her unique vulnerability on the trade issue – each of which Trump exploited to the fullest. They chose Hillary even though they knew about her private email server. They chose her even though some of those who studied the Clinton Foundation suspected it was a sketchy proposition.
If you watch stuff from YouTube you should check out Peter Coffin's break down of this. This is a failure of neoliberalism and it's something that needs to be addressed ASAP for sure.
>Also people seem to care a LOT about immigration and preserving their culture. Instead of patronising these people it's time we tried to understand their concerns and try to assuage them.
Many of the people that care so much about immigration and preserving their culture are the grandchildren of immigrants. It's very much an attitude of "I got mine, you can go F yourself".
>Whether it is for economic reasons or just plain bigotry is something for the sociologists to study and not something I can pontificate on.
In the context of the economic literature that exists in mainstream academia, which is in overwhelming support of globalism as a policy which supports economic growth of all people, it appears your comment strongly suggests anti-globalism is equated with bigotry.
I'm neither defending nor supporting globalism: is it reasonable to conclude that someone who is not in support of globalism is a bigot or racist? This seems to have more to do with political correctness and I think all people deserve the right to have a thoughtful discussion and represent their views without being effectively silenced, and when something is labelled as bigotry or racism it is effectively outlawed in western culture. Shouldn't we be more careful here?
> Economists need to stop acting like priests in the medieval ages who justified the existing order . The rural voter who lost his job doesn't care about the theory of comparitive advantage.
Weird - most people on the left don't consider economists to be priests of their world. That's a right-wing frame of mind.
If you are interested in finding the truth here, the first thing to do is stop assuming that all the people who voted conservative are unemployed farmers. There are a lot of the educated elite in that bloc.
Or the simpler view: this is result of lack of critical thinking or any thinking skills at all.
And a tendency to shoot themselves in the foot just in spite.
The Media (and you it seems) almost immediately went into "where did we do wrong and what can we do better" mode. While that's a completely important thing to do, and appropriate for many problem situations, it isn't appropriate here. Here's why:
1. Clinton won the popular vote.
2. Economists think Trump is a bad idea, so on that level, the popular vote was not wrong.
Don't blame yourselves. The electoral college and Trump's campaign taking advantage of it (and the F.B.I.) are the reason that things are going to go bad.
If the electoral college had been close there was always the possibility of a renegade Republican elector or two flipping things (especially if Trump's forthcoming trials gave them further excuse to do so). Though they certainly wouldn't have done that in the expectation of reducing riots.
The electoral college isn't close though. Given that they've won the popular vote in all but one of the Presidential elections since 1992 and lost three, it'll be interesting to see if electoral reform comes onto the agenda when the Democrats are back in power again. But in the mean time, the absolute best case scenario for the left is a revelation which leads to Trump's impeachment and four years of President Pence.
> the absolute best case scenario for the left is a revelation which leads to Trump's impeachment and four years of President Pence.
If it is determined that the F.B.I., votes, voting machines, and/or election results were manipulated, and a case is brought against him to try to invalidate the election and hold another one, he will fight back hard, and there will be chaos, riots, and perhaps a state of emergency declared. Or, the media may go into overdrive trying to gather evidence to have him impeached, but I think that would only serve to fire up those that voted for him.
We could also take a page from Clinton's playbook: keep an eye on him and record his every move, let him shoot himself down, then use that as evidence for the T.V. commercials in the next campaign. However, you risk 4-8 (or more if there is a war) years of damage.
One thing's for certain though, the time is now to start a new political party. With both candidates at record low approval ratings, and hate for the other candidate driving votes, the only reason the Green and Libertarian parties or an independent didn't win was that most of those that are qualified are too scared to run for president. Those people need to get over that fear, take one for the team, and dedicate their life to establishing a political party that is sensible and compassionate.
I called both Brexit and Trump but I can't quite agree with your synopsis. You might be surprised to hear that from a quasi-neoreactionary. I see migration and globalization as important elements of a more disturbing pattern not many people seem to have picked up on.
I don't know that Trump understands this himself, but Thiel sure does.
Having been a fan of Thiel's ideas for some time, I concocted a hypothesis called the 'Wolfian World' that gives a high level look at older currents moving in the world. It is here if anybody's interested in something different from chronocentric newspapers and talking heads with their short sight and overconfidence.
America had several massive immigration flows before NATO existed. And several racist backlashes. For example, a backlash against the slightly-less-white people from Italy in the early 1900s. There's nothing new about the current backlash.
This is utter madness. If we're lucky, this wheels fall off this whole enterprise and these people are discredited before they do too much harm.
It's deeply frustrating to hear so much crap analysis of what's been going on. If we're really honest with ourselves about what's happening, we're seeing a massive vote for protectionism of a particular demographics that have long enjoyed it.
People talk a lot about the forgotten white working class voter. And while that's a real thing, that's only half the story. The Trump voters are on the whole wealthier than the Clinton voters. That means there are a whole bunch of people with real money who've decided they can stomach the open bigotry of Trump's campaign because they think ultimately his policies are what they want. That's why the incumbents of the GOP largely never fled his side, no matter how obscene his personal conduct.
To be really blunt, Trump's entire track record says "if you're white and wealthy, I've obviously got your back", and his words have said, "if you're white and struggling, it's brown people who stand in your way". In that way, he's managed to get an extremely energetic white vote.
This election will be forever remembered for just how lurid it has been. From the very beginning of the Republican primary, it's been Trump who continually lowered the bar. God help us all if we do in fact end up with literally the least qualified Commander in Chief of American history. Going to sleep now, deeply discouraged.
Trump won because the Democrats railroaded their best candidate in favor of someone who is profoundly unlikeable and untrustworthy. Regardless of if she is truly a criminal, or not, the Democratic party choose a candidate who is under investigation by the FBI instead of a candidate that had real honest to god connection with the working people of the country. The voters have literally said that even Trump is better than what the Democrats have tried to ram down their throats this election. This election was lost, not won.
They should have woken up quickly when they noticed Bernie's level of support. He wasn't supposed to be that popular. Especially with younger people. On paper it looked like "oh she's a woman, young people would like that". When it didn't happen, it was time to listen, not throw everyone from that camp under the bus.
I don't even know how DNC will recover from that. It is viewed as a failure, a cesspool of corruption and anyone with morals would stay away from it.
> This election was lost, not won.
So true. They had it in their pocket. Bernie would have wiped the floor with Trump. But of course corruption gets in the way...
I wonder how the people who dreamt up that scheme and manipulated the media into pushing Trump so they could go up against him are feeling this morning.
Democrats lost this. She was deep in Benghazi / Emails / Foundations .. which is all public. Trump might have same picture, but its not public not even his Tax record ! Bravo to american public !
Its a slap to the democratic establishment for not understanding the dynamics. Bernie or for that matter Elizabeth would have been right candidates.
I also think Hillary used a lot of other celebs for campaign - Beyonce, Perry, Michelle / Obama, Muslim family ... rather than talking about her strong points / achievements (none ?), and I saw the women card thrown a lot. On the other side it was just Trump and his bullshit.
Elizabeth Warren is fierce, I believe she would've been a strong contender in terms of competence. But I'd be surprised if Bernie didn't have a stronger base and of the two would seem as the less controversial choice.
Personally, I would've loved to see a Warren / Sanders ticket. I'd be surprised if Trump / Pence could've held a candle to that in Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Ohio. Maybe Florida would've swung the other way as well then, although who the hell can tell? I swear that state is like a different planet. (Not necessarily a bad thing.)
Also Canadian (damn, we sound so smug now), I've been saying the same thing. But seems Americans think Socialism is a bad word. They've forgotten the opportunity they had with Bernie.
On the flipside, seems the "potentially" closest candidate to Bernie in this election is Trump. He actually has talked about controlling Wall Street, bringing back manufacturing jobs, less military, and if you look at money raised during this election, I'd say he has won the Presidency without bringing tons of big dollars in to politics (I could be wrong on some of these).
Of course, their methods are completely different and they differ hugely on other issues.
I'm not suggesting that Trump is a good replacement for Bernie, but you can see how Bernie supporters would see him as a better alternative than Clinton.
As a Conservative in America (and, as of this year, a former Republican), I watched what was my party railroad one or two good candidates in favor of someone who is a cartoon villain. So I know the feeling.
I am pretty sure the voters tell that to the losing side each election. while its easy to lay claim that Sanders could have won it is anything but easy to prove. true he had support but not among groups known to show up to actually vote. he also did not have support of many Clinton voters and there is no guarantee he would get them.
The US is pretty consistent in flipping the White House. That in itself is amazing and a good thing. The sad part is all the hate that comes out on this site which is sadly typical of people not thinking but reacting
I may not completely understand the US primary system, but wasn't Clinton chosen by the US democrat voters? (She won the popular vote, not just because of the super-delegates).
I don't really understand why she won instead of Sanders, maybe he was too much on the left for many democrats?
Yes, in the same way that Trump was chosen by US replicablican (and later, all) voters.
That said, it was a poor choice by the Democrats. They messed up. Whether it was the DNC or the rank-and-file democratic voters, IDK, but they somehow, in some way, managed to chose a more unwinnable candidate than the Republican Donald Trump.
You're right, but there are also psychological effects at play. If Sanders was seen as the lead candidate, his support might have gained momentum and given him the election, especially if the superdelegates weren't in the picture.
Awesome. After hearing for months about how voter fraud was a completely negligible concern, and how the Republicans were over blowing the problem because they're a bunch of reticent KKK sympathizers consolidating the white vote...some Democrats file a voting fraud case.
Indeed, Bernie was the only real leftist choice, which is what got young people so excited for him. Clinton though is center-right at best, and a DINO (Democrat in Name Only).
Sincerely, I am confused by this analysis. All the media outlets have talked ad-infinitum about how Trump supporters are predominantly uneducated whites, typically from rural areas, and how college educated whites support Clinton.
Hillary without question had Wall Street, Silicon Valley, and the DC circuit behind her, which are large epicenters of wealthy white, elite people.
There is without doubt a terrifying aspect of white nationalism behind Trump, but unless you have statistics I am not aware of, the white elites, maybe outside of Texas, were not behind Trump.
EDIT - to add what I believe is a hopeful note, Trump's election isn't a great reading of the pulse of the nation; Bernie Sanders could have been in my opinion, easily, the president elect. The DNC selected the less competitive candidate as the result of a dishonest primary.
I think there are many hidden Trump voters. They might never disclose at work or among friends their choice, but I suspected many did. I was watching both the Hillary and Trump Reddit channels, and on Trumps' channel there was a constant stream of educated people (doctors, programmers, lawyers), a large number of non-whites, LGBT, ex-Bernie people there and so on.
On Hillary's side there was a constant -- "Ah look at those stupid sexists, hating us for wanting a a woman President" type of complacency.
So the result was surprising, but not too surprising at the same time.
> Bernie Sanders could have been in my opinion, easily, the president elect
Bernie would have wiped the floor with Trump, no doubt.
Yet a significant portion of the hidden Trump voters were more anti-Hillary than happy about Trump. Sam Altman declared support for Hillary because he was anti-Trump; likewise people supported Trump because they were anti-Hillary. I believe if you have no identity politics affiliations, if you read WikiLeaks, it is challenging to keep supporting Hillary, unless you have strong beliefs that Trump is still the worse of the two.
It's a general portrait. I'm speaking as a Bernie supporter. Probably most salient, which I think was Peter Thiel's decisive issue, is her seeming to be pro-war and the enthusiastic support of the arms industry (biggest arms deal in history to Saudi Arabia, exports doubled under tenure, etc.), and probably the worst here was showing how she, even against the wishes of many Obama insiders, pursued regime change in Libya to have an 'accomplishment' to campaign on. Then, it would probably be the connections with corruption, via "pay-to-play" as they referred to it through the Clinton Foundation while SOS (particularly with Gulf States), and, after revelations of DWS's corrupt actions in the DNC, the seeming impunity to promote her. Maybe a final concerning image to a Bernie supporter was her position as a cog among the big banks (most poignant here was Wall Street's list for Obama's cabinet, who in fact came to be the cabinet). Arguably it's more about the DC establishment than HRC, and this characterization of her should be taken to task, but this was, in my opinion, the portrait left by WikiLeaks.
My point is that almost none of those positions are backed up by any Wikileaks evidence. It's just comforting to know that there's a big pile of "something" out there, and in it is probably something that supports what you believe.
Then surely you wouldn't mind linking me to emails which conclusively show, e.g. some evidence of a pay-to-play scheme involving State, CF and Gulf Arab states.
It's a summary of the emails from the creator of WikiLeaks, if you don't believe him than to you WikiLeaks isn't credible. You're asking me to spend 20-30 minutes retrieving and linking when you are probably the only person who would ever see it.
I do vote; what I don't do is let my imagination and bias run wild with insinuation, and I'm not lazy about my evidence. When I have confronted others about what's actually in the Wikileaks dump, nobody has failed to get past the "produce a link to primary evidence supporting your claim" step. Intellectually honest people at least reason from primary evidence when it's available to them.
It's pretty amazing that you can't even do that, and yet you want to lecture and condescend me.
No sorry, I linked you what you asked for. The "most damaging wikileaks" link has all the links to the emails organized by offense. In just the first 20 or so from my skimming there was pay-to-play evidence with the emails they were found in.
You've demonstrated a closed mind about this, and were not willing to look into it yourself, so I think that counts as being willfully ignorant.
I got as far as #3, wherein they cite an emailed article as being one of the key quotes from the email. That's nakedly pushing an agenda, there's no intellectual honesty in that -- it's like me asking you to read The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and then telling everyone how you casually refer to black people using the N-word.
To be frank, it's as honest as I'd expected it to be, and exactly why I wanted you to build your case from primary sources. Anyone can quote trash sources and force the other person to do the fact-checking; you should be able to build the case up from primary sources if there's any there there.
> Arguably it's more about the DC establishment than HRC
I think many problems WikiLeaks revealed were related to her being beholden to the entrenched interests (including controversial allies, like Saudi Arabia). But yes, :) I considered making this caveat in my original post, because I think you're 70% right. I doubt much will change re banks, but I also doubt he would appoint his cabinet based on a list emailed to him from banking execs. Re war, it's probably best to refer to Peter Thiel on why he so strongly thinks Trump will avoid war. We are currently bombing 7 countries and I'd like to think his not being beholden to the arms industry means he could change that if he wanted, and while he may not, I am more certain he would not do another $80 billion arms export to Gulf States or push for a regime change in a ME country. I don't think anyone who read WikiLeaks and decided to abandon Hillary thought highly of Trump, just the feeling that one is no longer defensible and the other is unknown but at least not beholden.
I was a Bernie supporter who switched to Trump after reading Wikileaks stuff. I can summarize really quickly what the problem was, in all the thousands upon thousands of emails that I personally looked at alongside others in dialog online, while combing through them could I could not not find even a single shred of evidence of any discussion about what is best for America. Every discussion of policy in every email was not picking and choosing which positions were the best positions for the country, but which polled the best and basing their platform sporadically on that.
A campaign should be ran with a candidate sitting down with their advisers and team, stating plainly what their policy positions, overarching themes, and plans are. Then it is the advisers job to market popular positions to the public, and spin unpopular positions or complex policy to make them more sell-able to the public.
That is absolutely not what was going on in these emails, they literally show the campaign making up positions on the fly to fill a near-empty husk containing nothing but globalization. She is the literal definition of everything that is wrong with modern politics. This is not how policy decisions should be created.
I don't even actually like Trump.
-midwestern rustbelt 'non-bachelors-holding' voter in a state that went red for the first time in years.
> Every discussion of policy in every email was not picking and choosing which positions were the best positions for the country, but which polled the best and basing their platform sporadically on that.
Agreed. But didn't you knew that already? Didn't everyone knew that?
It's naive to think that the reps and Trump don't act this way. He might not have used an army of focus groups, but he knew what people wanted to hear and went for it.
I agree with you that Bernie would have been the best for America, but 5-10 years from now the US is going to end up a worst place with Trump than with Clinton, and it's not the rich or the city folks who will suffer more, but the rural voters who will realize that they did had something to lose =/
That sentiment I understand however voting Trump because you really like the guy and his views is weird imho. Like you I suspect many many votes were just anti Hillary and the hope Trump will just be a marionette.
My highly unscientific analysis of the numbers is that Trump won in many rural and less populous districts, whereas Hillary won the more densely populated districts. This by itself probably isn't much of a surprise, and the less populous districts have significantly fewer votes – but there are more of them. Combine a strong Trump performance in these small districts with an underperforming Hillary in the others, along with a number of flipped districts, and it becomes clear how Trump won. (Note: how, not why.)
Check the results for Wisconsin for instance, and you'll find a lot flipped districts. In Michigan, the Detroit stronghold saw a drop of 8,6 points compared to the 2012 vote. To be fair, it looks like Wayne County (where Detroit is) according to that map isn't fully counted so this may very well change, but it's at 98.9% reporting so that'd have to be a pretty significant chunk of votes to widen that margin.
Again, this is armchair analysis so I may very well be writing bullcrap, but it looks to me that the Trump campaign where confident in keeping the red states and focused pretty hard on flipping some of the states the Democrats really didn't think they could possibly win, along with a strong push to win Florida. Those 29 electoral votes from the sunshine state really opened things up for Trump.
Electoral votes from working class, rust belt states - Ohio, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin - are arguably the main reason Trump won, as Michael Moore predicted.
"College educated whites" and "working class rust belt voters who are unemployed/under-employed" are largely overlapping groups in places like Ohio, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin.
If there's a huge racial divide as you're making out, with white people outnumbering all others, why was Obama elected twice?
Trump literally lives in a gold skyscraper with his name in large lettering on it so he's not exactly someone people should be able to relate to or vice versa but people like him because he doesn't talk down to them and doesn't schmooze his way around the celebrity and political circuit trying to cultivate an image of presidential perfection.
He speaks off the cuff, he knows how to draw a crowd, he tweets his mind and he's worked his ass off to get around to as many locations as possible and people also respect that. They're sick of pre-prepared speeches, evasive answers, lies and pure corruption.
Trump is a big wrecking ball that the people have chosen to smash up the current political system. The majority of politicians today are career politicians, detached from reality and detached from normality.
> He speaks off the cuff, he knows how to draw a crowd, he tweets his mind and he's worked his ass off to get around to as many locations as possible and people also respect that. They're sick of pre-prepared speeches, evasive answers, lies and pure corruption.
> "if you're white and wealthy, I've obviously got your back"
What disappointments me more than anything is how all the minority American citizens will feel knowing that the majority of the people they know preferred a man who has for many months publicly and explicitly insulted their own race and ethnicity. How do you reconcile that? I have no idea.
"I think alot of people feel like that, uh, America told them exactly - African Americans, Latinos, Muslims, you name it...Asians...I think alot of people tonight are feeling like, you know, [the] United States told me exactly what they think of me." - James Carville, after Trump's win.
Florida's Latino population is unusual (relative to the rest of the country) because of all the people who settled there after fleeing Cuba. It's typical for them to vote and identify heavily Republican based on issues around US-Cuba relations (Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz are both of Cuban ancestry, for example).
This is what Hillary supporters would like to portray about any Trump voter, and it's frankly the reason they got such a surprise. They failed to even attempt to understand why people voted for Trump. Just wrote everyone off as racists and bigots.
> Does this mean the majority of Americans are secretly inherently racist?
It is my opinion that all humans are inherently racist and that the only way to overcome it is to first acknowledge it. The majority of humans (and therefore Americans) aren't self aware enough to admit to themselves that they are racist and so the racism within lives on.
This is just something I've been pondering on and isn't a fully formed argument, but it seems to me that a large number of conflicts around the globe can be boiled down to "racist rednecks" trying to kill people that aren't like them.
I think we knew even before this that everyone is somewhat racist, and I mean everyone. This isn't just a white people thing. Most people harbor what might be considered racist sentiments.
How we should handle this moving forward is an open question. Should people never see race? Or is some level of putting your own race first acceptable? It's not like white people are the only ones voting in a singular block. Most of what we've heard in the past couple decades of elections is analysts talking about how candidates can win the black or latino vote. They might now be saying the same thing about rural whites moving forward.
> To be really blunt, Trump's entire track record says "if you're white and wealthy, I've obviously got your back", and his words have said, "if you're white and struggling, it's brown people who stand in your way". In that way, he's managed to get an extremely energetic white vote.
yeah and exactly because of this kind of insane, bogus "analysis" you lost.
When or if you find back the connection to reality, you will realize how Trump actually won. By talking about real issues that nobody else even dares to touch.
When or if you find back the connection to reality, you will realize how Trump actually won.
Trump won by appealing to people who historically felt they were and deserved to be the in-control majority but now feel they are the not-in-control minority, and he won by claiming he would make them feel like an in-control majority again.
It is that simple. It is also simply the case that the people who historically felt they were and deserved to be the in-control majority were white men.
Populism in American politics is nothing new. Nor is populism oriented on racial lines. There is no secret "untouchable" issue lurking behind it. You pick a large group, capable of forming a powerful voting bloc, a group that believes it has reason to feel resentful, to feel cheated out of power that's rightfully theirs, to feel that "elites" are conspiring against them to ruin the country, and you tell them they deserve power and you're going to give it back to them.
Exactly 120 years ago, William Jennings Bryan ran on a similar platform of "restoring" political and economic power to people who felt they once had it, lost it, and deserved to have it once again. In the process he delivered one of the objectively greatest political addresses in American history (the "Cross of Gold" speech). The only difference is Bryan lost the electoral college by about the same margin Trump won it by.
Trump won because uneducated white people voted together as a voting block. Do you criticize black people for exercising their power in a similar manner?
But trump over performed with non-whites, and I think lots of people missed this. I think that people going very far into the racial data are on a wild goose chase. The fact is that clearly, voters did not think that stopping trump because he's a jerk was important enough to be the deciding factor. Clinton just campaigned badly. She couldn't credibly articulate a plan of change for America with Obama sitting as president, and made no effort to convince voters that the status quo was worth preserving. She was just running against Donald Trump, and the enthusiasm gap was enough for her to lose.
Did Trump articulate how he would change the US though? I agree that Clinton was mostly campaigning against Trump, but Trump's campaign was even worse in this regard.
Hillary did not have a convincing plan and mostly wanted to continue and see where things go. Trump has promised a lot of fairy tales. It seems to me that the only concrete things that Trump has promised to do is to backpedal on the equality rights.
> Did Trump articulate how he would change the US though
He didn't have to. The amount of vitriol directed at him and his supporters by almost every journalist, academic, intellectual, and establishment politician told the voters everything they needed to know.
This election came down to moral outrage. The duplicity and flat out dishonesty of the media, the simmering anger at Obama's broken promises about health care ("If you like your plan, you can keepy it") and the serious and deep personal flaws of Hillary Clinton was just too much to overcome.
One thing that shouldn't be overlooked either is that while some view Trump's platform as racist, his supporters see him as the exact opposite. He's hard on illegal immigration but otherwise has no particular bias towards Mexicans on a personal level. In fact he has sympathized with them on why so many of them are fleeing for their lives to the USA, something nobody is willing to talk about.
Seriously? He literally accused a judge of prejudice simply because of his Mexican heritage. No supporting evidence. He was not an illegal immigrant. He was born here. There is only one word for that: racism.
Let's look at the data: about 30% of latinos voted for him. This surprised me and I bet it surprised Clinton too. So clearly there's other stuff that they care about more than Trump's racism.
As a sidenote, I catch myself expecting that _all_ minorities should vote 100% for Clinton. This is another example of the kind of complacency that led to this win in the first place. Trump was going on and on about how "democrats feel entitled to black votes without doing anything to help black people". Now, a policy specifically designed to help black people will get waves of criticism from Breitbart, but the point stands, and I think that Democrats shouldn't feel entitled to votes just because they aren't terrible.
Nobody criticizes any plan to help black people based on it's intent. You seem to be confusing intent with desired results, perhaps on purpose. Democrat's intent has been ostensibly to help black people (and certainly rank and file democrats really are altruistic) but the result has been the exact opposite for Black families. It doesn't matter where you go in the country, even in a deep blue city in a deep blue state where evil Republicans are nary to be found, Black people are suffering, and you only have one party to blame. I know to some, just stating this will brand me as a racist but until we can collectively recognize that what we have been trying hasn't worked, we'll never make the corrections we need.
Well you're wrong, what else can I say. You think you are so right that anything that disagrees with your position must be a racial power issue. It just isn't like that. It is definitely part of it - dont get me wrong, but the much much bigger part is actual policy issues.
You think you are so right that anything that disagrees with your position must be a racial power issue.
I think I've read my history book. I think this has happened before. I think the economic system that working-class white people without college degrees favor is one that only worked so long as people with the "wrong" skin color were either held in literal bondage or legally prohibited from competing with people who had the "right" skin color. I think the past century has seen an enormous effort to tear down the system which protected those white working-class non-college-educated people from competition, on grounds that this sort of protectionism is morally odious. I think the "economic anxiety" of Trump voters is nothing more than a yearning for a return to that sort of protectionism. I think it's possible many of them are viewing history through extremely rose-colored glasses in order not to see the magnitude of the evil that had to be perpetrated to maintain their position, but that doesn't excuse it.
Since when were American politics about issues rather than image?
People who voted for Trump clearly liked his bombastic asshole style, and want to stick it to the "liberal elite". There happened to be more of them this time around than there were people afraid enough of a Trump presidency to vote for a relatively subdued and conventional candidate.
That's, of course, given that there wasn't enough voting fraud to make a difference, which with electronic voting machines in the mix isn't really a given.
Pollers have been spectacularly wrong before.. coming out with some really sorry and unbelievable excuses for their errors. Voters somehow seem to swallow them, however. So the spectacle continues.
Clinton wasn't a very inspiring candidate, that much is obvious. I think there would have been a much better turnout for Bernie Sanders. He got people excited (and he wasn't Clinton, so Republicans fed on a diet of Clinton hatred for decades wouldn't have been so afraid to vote for him). But Sanders was too unconventional for the Democratic leadership. Now hopefully the Democrats learn that being unconventional and taking risks can win elections.
Somehow, though, I don't think they'll learn any lessons. They've dropped the ball for too long, and played the role of the appeasers for too long. They've cozied up to the Republicans and moved their party far to the right, occasionally talking the talk but rarely walking the walk. This is what they get.
> But Sanders was too unconventional for the Democratic leadership.
The DNC Chairperson, Debbie Wasserman Schultz, had to resign after showing blatant favouritism towards Clinton at Sanders expense[1]. It wasn't Sanders' unconventionality that was the issue, it was the clear favouritism towrds one candidate over the other.
Sanders fully understood what was going on with the voting base. He got that the middle class is upset and wants the national priorities focused back on improving the American standard of living, not on nation building / war / foreign meddling / boosting globalist policies, et al.
Hillary on the other hand is a classic globalist, backed by Wall Street and an endless parade of billionaires. She was the establishment in an anti-establishment election.
The problem was, if that is true, then Trump already defeated Bernie in the primaries. Those voters weren't going to vote for Hillary, Bernie needed them, but they were already attending Trump rallies.
Only about half of those voting the general election voted in the primaries. The other half (far, far more than the margin that Trump won over Clinton by) had yet to make their choice known by then.
Further, if Sanders had gotten the Democratic nomination, the debates, issues, and media coverage would have been far different, perhaps even swaying those who had wound up casting an anti-Clinton vote by voting for Trump to instead vote for Sanders.
One other thing to keep in mind that the turnout for Trump may have been much smaller had his opponent not been Clinton.
Clinton was put forward because she was to be the first female President. She has been groomed for that position for years now. I think America is ready for a female President, just not her. I think her image (rightly or wrongly) as a liar and a cheat and someone hellbent on doing anything to get that esteemed seat in the Oval Office is what did her in.
> People who voted for Trump clearly liked his bombastic asshole style
Not necessarily. All of the Trump voters I know (in the low double digits) are either single-issue voters on abortion, but who hate Trump- or they are single-issue voters on obamacare, angry because their premiums shot up, but who hate Trump.
Never underestimate peoples' desire to vote based on feelings instead of the big picture.
Not saying I agree, but it seems a good number of American voters agree.
In this way it can actually be seen as a win for American democracy that the very well-funded Clinton campaign lost against what seems more like a movement.
Trump wasn't exactly a lightweight when it came to funding.
Trump spent $367 million vs Clinton's $534 million. The next most well funded candidate, Gary Johnson of the Libertarian party, spent only $10 million.[1]
So money still plays a huge role in American politics. I'm also pretty sure not all of that money is spent on getting candidates elected, and that a lot of back scratching goes on and favors bought.
Even if this election was a win against money in politics, and a boon to democracy in that sense, it's a major loss in many other ways. Trump is pretty clearly an egotistical anti-democratic dictator in the making, who has nothing but contempt for the democratic process (ex: he stated he'd only accept the election results if he won). Now that he's won, expect a steamrolling over his perceived enemies in the very antithesis of democracy.
At the risk of sounding like I'm speaking for all Americans, I think most Americans are more comfortable with a politician spending their own money to get elected rather than be influenced by someone else's money.
How many Americans are aware that most of that money isn't Trump's, I'm not sure. But he's a billionaire! and he's against special interests! So how would a man like that just turn around and take contributions?
sigh.
There are good things that can come from this, however. We shall wait and see. My prediction is that Trump is the most bombastic, blowhard of a president, but his actual policies end up being mild.
I don't agree with Trump either, I was trying to question the idea that American politics are based almost exclusively on image and that makes it impossible that this election could have been influenced by actual issues.
>I tried to talk about good roads and good schools and all these things that have been part of my career, and nobody listened. And then I began talking about n*, and they stomped the floor.
-George Wallace
He took a very simple road. He appealed to the fear of the Other.
Those are the real issues that were discussed. People talk as if it's normal that blacks and latinos mostly vote as a block, well now white working class does as well.
Exactly. And now it is wrong that blue collar workers from fly-over states have voted as a block. Yet nobody questions Hillary for organizing a rap concert to attract African American voters and expecting them to vote as a block.
Most of all, I think they would be surprised to find out how many Bernie Sanders supporters have switched to Trump. Some I imagine will never admit it to their co-workers or friends, but I know many have never forgot being back-stabbed.
The funny thing is, the Democrats could have easily win this. They screwed up so badly, multiple times in a row, despite all the media help, and all the money donated to them, all the help from the DOJ and POTUS.
> They screwed up so badly, multiple times in a row
I hope one of the things they learned about this was that negative campaign ads dont work. I dont want to hear what shocking, Bad Thing the other guy said. In a 30 second radio spot, tell me what you're going to do, why that will help, and how its better than the way the opponent will handle it. You can only smear dirt on a surface once.
I assume he's referring to a lot of blue collar workers getting the shit end of the stick on trade deals. It's the rust belt that carried him to the presidency after all.
I think admiration goes a bit far, but and even if he does, it's far better than the default "Russians are bad mmmkay" attitude that most politicians have. There is a real opportunity for nice relations with Russia here. As a European I prefer it much to the war mongering of Kelly that damaged Russian and European business and relations and just fosters hate.
The EU is already taking Ukraine. Not by force but by politics, we already helped Poroshenko in place there. too bad some countries prefer not to associate with corruption ridden Ukraine [0]. But hey, EU leaders usually don't care what voters think (we got the Treaty of Lisbon after we voted no on the EU constitution).
EU surprisingly did take strong position when Ukraine crisis started. Only way EU countries can stand against Russia is if they have backing of NATO. Without this noone will take the risk.
Because we have a vested interest in keeping peace in Europe. As a country it has worked to our advantage to keep large markets under our protection. Having a dumpster fire in your neighborhood is bad for business.
Extending the zone of safe and free society is definitely in our interests. I don't know when it became in vogue to openly shit on the Democratic Peace Theory, but it's certainly not for a lack of evidence. I guess it's something that you people have committed us to relearning.
But you didn't extend the zone of safe and free society; if anything, you reduced it. And it's not like you can claim it was an unforeseen consequence: Russia told you explicitly that they would "take military and other steps along its borders if ex-Soviet Ukraine and Georgia join NATO" [1], an then they proceeded to do just that in Georgia [2].
So you poked the bear without having any way to contain it, and you shouldn't be surprised that people blame you for it having razed the village.
Why do russia need baltic states? Name at least one reason. It seems that's just baltic horror. I can see only few microscopic countries without resources of strategic significance but with dead economies and most of young population in other EU countries. But yeah "Russia really wants to conquer us"
First, historic precedence. Russia has attacked & occupied the baltics multiple times. Imperial Russia occupied Estonia during 18th - 20th century, and Soviet Russia once again occupied for half of the 20th century. During this time they sent the natives to Siberia, while importing Russians here and imposing other forms of russification [1] to obliterate our culture. It's more than just about land, it's about the survival of our culture which has been under systematic attack by Russia for the overwhelming majority of the last 300 years. The current Russian regime isn't much different and holds a strongly anti-Estonian view, so of course self-preservation is the #1 political issue for us.
Second, there is both strategic significance and resources here. We're talking about the previously western border of the Soviet union here. Uranium mining, nuclear submarine bases, missile silos. Better access to the Baltic sea, and closer reinforcement to Kaliningrad.
Well, there's another historic precedence - Baltic Germans. Do you afraid that they maybe coming due to historic precedence too? Ask Czech Republic about them and "obliteration of culture". Do Czechs afraid of Germany coming back?
Again, I'm not trying to say that "big scary bear" is actually teddy bear. I just cannot imagine Russia being able to invade any country in EU. It's like saying there's a chance Russia would invade USA. Is it worth uranium and some bases? Doubt so. Does Russia have any resources or technical capabilities to confront EU? Doubt they ever will.
Also, about self-preservation - look at your emigration proportions [2] (shame they don't show trends - just pie charts :( ). Only this year trend is positive, but still estonians flee the country.
Good question and I would say the difference is the current regime and their actions.
Germans have been very cautious after WW2. They haven't been acting aggressively, they haven't been holding parades to celebrate Nazis as heroes, they don't have statues of Hitler in the middle of their cities.
Meanwhile Russia still celebrates everything Soviet as the biggest heroes that have ever lived, and have an amazing number of Stalin statues/paintings everywhere. Then they fund & organize attacks on Georgia [1], and annex Crimea [2]. Then, as recently as 2014, the FSB came into Estonia and abducted one of our intelligence agents. [3] This agent was denied contact with anyone, and was given premission to only use a Russian appointed lawyer. In a charade of a trial he was quickly sentenced to 15 years in prison. He was later exchanged for a FSB agent who was sitting in our prison. [4]
So you see, it's not only about precedence, but it's also about the continuation of the theme and actual real events that keep happening.
Crimea? Sebastopol port has always been part of Russia and the center of their fleet because it does not get frozen in Winter like other ports.
Having ships under frozen water is the same as not having ships at all.
Easter Ukraine? It is were the industry of Ukraine is. It is very near Russia and as most of Russia is plain, it is very easy to invade the country(Russia) from it.
Russia wants to have a buffer around their country in the same way the US does not let anybody to have military bases and missiles near the country, like in Cuba.
Russia needs Crimea to secure it's excess to the Black see. Losing Crimea to NATO (or losing it at all) would be a huge problem. As long as you have Crimea - you basically control most of the Black Sea.
As for the Eastern Ukraine - best case scenario - securing a terrain pass to Crimea. Worst case scenario - destabilisation of the the country and more 'ground' during negotiations over any deal. Almost like taking hostages.
Military base is not stronghold anymore. You don't need to protect it from siege. Kaliningrad is just a place of location of strategic missiles of medium range. It single-use weapon. You don't need ground path to Kalinigrad.
Crimea - it's were russian navi is. The former soviet military harbors for Black sea were rented by Russia. When power changed in the Ukraine to be USA/NATO oriented Russia did everything to keep it's military presence.
As for Eastern Ukraine - I feel like Russia doesn't need it per se - just as distraction and zone of destabilization in order to protect Crimea.
Russia never "took" Eastern Ukraine, even today. It mostly sat on the sidelines whilst a civil war between pro-EU and pro-Russian forces played itself out, at most sending weapons and special forces just like the West did.
Because Baltic states were part of Russian empire once and USSR later. Putin would be forever glorified in Russia and could rule till the end of days if he'd manage to "restore the glorious Russian Empire". Another reason is that Baltic countries stand as a gate to (old) Europe for Russia in both economical and military meaning.
RE: "restore the glorious Russian Empire" - his latest customs/economic union with Kazakhstan and Belarus is a joke. And there's two most pro-russian regimes as of now. CIS is also as good as dead. USSR is gone and won't be restored.
How Baltic countries gate from Russia in "economical meaning"?
Peaceful coexistence is all well and good, but if we're peacefully coexisting while Russia annexes more of, well, the world – that's not acceptable to many.
But those simpletons will then not assign blame to the new overlord or to themselves. The culprits will be immigrants, jews, muslims, environmental activists, journalists or whatever they don't like.
Been following the coverage since the primaries and though I don't know who I would have voted for, seeing the self righteous intelligentia being so blatantly wrong on the election outcome gives me an embarrassing satisfaction.
None of the established media did even try to keep a disguise of neutrality. Not in the US, not the BBC or here in Germany.
You can be against Trump all you want, but where has "journalistic standards" been gone? If your whole organization is made up of individuals who see themselves as morally-superior while being a Clinton-biased - how realistic is it that this organization is able to get a realistic glimpse at the outside world?
I will always remember the media in this campaign. CNN's quote of "Also interesting is remember, it’s illegal to possess, ah, the stolen documents — it’s different for the media" really typifies the type of standards the media has lowered itself to.
How could nobody see that ignorance and stupidity on that level was not helping them... It is like they took a gun, paid a lot of money for it, and then used it to shot themselves in the foot.
spot on!
In the end I (a German) was watching Fox News! Can you believe it? I know they have their own bias but this one time they were doing a somewhat better job.
I think it was an accident because they were split between loving Trump and wanting him to die in a fire. I don't see any path towards true journalistic standards for any major networks.
So true. The "feud" with Megan Kelly made her probably the most trustworthy person on TV this season. Wether FOX's motivation was election-fallout prepping or wether it was an organic change that brought things like the Ailes ousting, they were the most "fair and balanced".
The media is entirely biased towards moral liberalism and I thought it was an "open secret" that only the most self-deluded didn't know about. Of course they're going to be biased towards Clinton, she's the morally liberal candidate. That's their job. If they don't go along with it, surely they get fired. They provide an avenue for confirmation bias, which is interesting because it's a self-fulfilling prophecy, considering most people are liberal because of the strong influence of the (biased) media on them.
So not all media is as liberal as you say. The sad bit is that the source of media is so partisan that we only listen to what we want to hear (that goes both to the right and to the left).
Fox News Channel is the the one right-wing media outlet in a sea of left-wing TV, print, and internet outlets. The actual Fox channel is not very aligned with FNC - FFS they give Seth McFarlane 2 hours of primetime every Sunday night.
I think it's disingenuous to characterize a political stance of a continuation on policy as "liberal". That's what "conservative" means by any dictionary out there. These terms have become utterly useless.
if conservative means "don't change things" and liberal means "try new things" then an establishment candidate which espouses to not change things would be "conservative" while a candidate that wants to do dramatically different and new things would be "liberal".
My guess: "not economic liberalism". The word liberalism has many meanings in different places. Eg in many European countries, it's considered to be mostly an economic stance, as in "not socialism".
In the US, however, the word has a second meaning, which is more about abortion and civil rights and all that than it is about money. I suspect that the GP meant that definition of liberalism by "moral liberalism".
The media wanted a razor-tight race because it was great for their ratings, so they gave Trump billions in free advertising on the 24-hour news cycle. And they got their wish: 48% to 48% of the popular vote.
Yes, of course they do profit from escalating every piece of information. But in terms of "tightness" it was a different picture: almost every poll saw Clinton decisivly winning. There was active speculation about how huge the republican wound-licking would be because of the gigantic margins by which Clinton should have won.
I'll give the foreign media a pass since Trump was doing a lot of finger pointing at foreign countries and their citizens. The domestic media on the other hand...
True. The outburst of self-shaming should be humongous for US domestic media. Whats interesting though when you mention the difference between foreign and domestic ignorance: the intelligentia has a more international mindset and keeps to export and confirm ones bias across borders as the individuals wish.
For example, I keep getting baffled by US speakers at EU dev cons, as they sprinkle or finish their talks with their domestic political stances. For example finishing their talk about their dev ops set up out the blue with: "heres a chat room I've opened up for all the LGBT devs here that feel discriminated against". Not only not an issue in most of EU countries but certainly non-existing at the specific con. Very wierd.
The other time I remember one speaker twittering about the blatant racism of a German airline in their safety instruction videos. He managed to be ignorant not only of the context, or of the reference to a beloved German novel (Karl May's "Winnetou") but the whole concept of decency (in that, that you may not get the whole picture if you enter another culture so don't rush to your culture's conclusions). If he had invested the same amount in understanding context as he had in extruding anger, he might have even understood that the "Winnetou" stories are anything but derogatory towards native americans.
> "The loser out-spent the winner by huge amounts. Does money really buy elections? Maybe, but not this one."
I would have said attention buys elections, and Trump was the kind of candidate that had the media tripping over themselves to give him free coverage. That definitely seems to explain the primary season, but the general election campaign turned things around a bit by consisting almost solely of negative attention that hurt the candidates when they were in the spotlight. I guess neither candidate could spend enough to buy anywhere near as much attention as the various scandals attracted, and perhaps this campaign season was meaningfully different in overall tone.
> had the media tripping over themselves to give him free coverage.
Media treated people as idiots, in some cases CNN went to levels of stupidity and lies that would have put Fox to shame. They thought they were helping their candidate, but they were actually hurting the cause.
The fact that many Democrats have voted for Trump doesn't mean Trump is great necessarily, it means they really hated Hillary and what she represented (and no, not because she is a woman, if anything this will always be remembered as step-back for woman as a US president, people will remember Hillary and cringe next time).
> Media treated people as idiots, ...They thought they were helping their candidate, but they were actually hurting the cause.
Thank you ! This is EXACTLY what got me to go vote. I wasn't even planning on going, and finally I just hit the tipping point of negative-smear campaign BS and I said, "alright, if you treat me like a child, I'm going to rebel like a child" and I voted for exactly who they told me I shouldn't. I had every intention of staying home.
And from the looks of it, it was Clinton's campaign pushing liberal media to focus on the crazy outliers of the Republican candidates. Backfire it did.
I always wondered if the president really has the power people perceive him to have, or if he's still influenced and bound by many people in the background.
One can observe this with Obama. He made promises (like closing Guantanamo etc.), which he ultimately couldn't force through. But why? Possibly, because he isn't nearly as free in his decision making.
Now, Trump claimed to do a lot of things and I'm wondering if he really can pull that off or if many of his extraordinary claims and goals won't be doable, because of other people with power.
This is what I don't like about modern politics: So many things are claimed to be done, but ultimately, it's all bullshit and you only know what you've voted for long after the election – which could be something entirely different than you'd voted for in the first place.
I'd argue that checks and balances are very much a good thing. Less gets done overall but at least one side/person/party/opinion can't get pushed through without resistance if too many people oppose it.
Then again, Trump didn't just win the election, Republicans also won majority in the House and Senate. So it's going to be a lot easier for Trump to push policies through than it was for Obama.
I'd argue you're missing the most important point in this election.
Both leading candidates were despised by a large number of people. Many people were heard talking about having to vote for the lesser of two evils. Therefore it makes sense to frame the election in this way. What we have today is not a pro-Trump victory, but an anti-Clinton victory.
I don't think the Democratic establishment realised what a gamble it took by favouring Clinton over Sanders, if they had just let open primaries decide who their candidate would be I'm fairly confident a Democratic candidate would now be heading for the White House.
There were serious concerns during the primaries about how well Sanders was doing among minorities compared to Clinton, and now Clinton has failed to secure enough support from minorities to overcome a racist opponent. Plus, there's no telling how much mileage the Republican party could have gotten out of tarring Sanders as a "socialist".
Sanders definitely would have been a big risk. But in hindsight and especially given the weak set of potential candidates available to the Democratic Party, a big risk may have been necessary, and Trump was probably the best opportunity they could have hoped for to gamble on a non-traditional candidate of their own.
I don't really see the difference, but it should be noted that given Clinton's minority support there weren't many minorities supporting third party candidates, and there was a significant third party candidate vote this year. In the primaries Clinton actually lost the white vote to Sanders, despite winning the minority vote 3 to 1. It also isn't as if Trump is popular, he is one of the most disliked politicians ever to get elected. So I think it is more correct to say Clinton had weak support from white voters.
I thought he was easily the most interesting candidate and would've supported him were it my election, but it seems to me that in the US, "socialist" is a truly horrible label and it would've made for easy attack ads. He would've copped it for his age, with the idea that he'd destroy the economy and whatever else.
I spotted this on Twitter and thought it was insightful:
"Both parties nominated the only candidate that the other side's candidate could beat," Karl Rove, apparently.
The last point is super interesting. More and more the democrats are coming to represent the upper class and republicans the lower.
This election was hugely divided across class lines. Technically it's by college education status. But I believe that is highly correlated with social class.
The sad part of this is that if this election was about economics and not about racism and bigotry, then a lot of people voted rather nonsensically. The Democrats aren't exactly a social/left party (at least by global standards), but they're the party that brought better healthcare while the Republicans are the party of Ayn Randism.
So if lower class people voted Republican for economic reasons, they're only hurting themselves. Of course they'll blame immigrants or whoever, so that it can all end up in a vicious cycle of stupidity.
But I think that's the difference in this election. Lower class people weren't voting Republican, they were voting for Trump. Trump was an outsider.
It's hard to say lower class people are voting against their own interests when the entire economic (Wall Street) and political establishments that they see as their opponents were completely behind Clinton. Who knows what Trump will end up doing, but they all knew what Clinton was going to do... more of the same.
I agree that this is probably what happened at an emotional level, but a vote for Trump is still a vote that is enabling a Republican congress. That matters much more for the economic outcomes of people in the US than what Trump himself will be up to.
So voting for Trump is still fundamentally irrational from an economic perspective if you're poor or lower middle class: it's possible that Trump will block part of the Republican agenda (e.g. on healthcare) -- who the hell knows what the guy is really thinking apart from his selfishness and thin-skinned narcissism -- but with Clinton it would have been guaranteed. And surely more of the same is better than change in the wrong direction?
And yes, it's also possible that Republicans in congress will suddenly change their tune on healthcare, come up with budgets where the spoils aren't overwhelmingly going to the rich, and so on. But really, how rational is it for voters to bet on that given those politicians' past behaviour?
indeed, but throughout the history of the mankind, irrational behavior is much more prevalent compared to strictly rational one. we are not that much sane brain-driven beings we imagine ourselves to be
I agree, but it always rubs me the wrong way when rationality is assumed to be seated in the brain and ALWAYS correct/sane as opposed to emotion which is still viewed as some external force which crops up within ourselves and can't be trusted. Emotions occur in the brain just like logic, it's just in a different subconscious part. In fact evolution seemed to put a higher premium on emotions than rationality for most of our species history... and probably for good reason. Emotions aren't always wrong.
And it's not like the middle and lower classes have been treated that much worse under Republicans than Democracts when you get down to it. Certainly Republicans have been the party of Wall Street and Big Business for awhile, but there's plenty of people who still think getting rid of welfare and cutting taxes to the rich is what's best for everyone. I don't agree, but we can't reverse time and see what would have happened had Mondale won instead of Reagan. Maybe his policies would have pushed us farther into recession and actually made those lower classes less well off. And obviously we've seen the flip side of centralized communism completely fail, and rationally speaking a lot of intellectuals from 19th century Europe thought that was the inevitable logical and fair system of the future.
> In fact evolution seemed to put a higher premium on emotions than rationality for most of our species history... and probably for good reason.
Sure. Most of our species' history also happened in an environment that is extremely different from the world we live in today. I don't think the history of civilization in general and large states with high levels of economic specialization in particular has been long enough to really affect the tuning of our brains sufficiently.
From an outsider's perspective: superdelegates. Stein hit the nail on the head regarding the Democrat campaign[1]. Moderates swung to non-participation, their vote for Bernie actually meant nothing.
A lot of Bernie supporters were college kids who spared whatever money they could and donated only to find, it was rigged, their money was stolen and given to Hillary instead.
I think people have no idea how much this was a vote against Hillary. Look at Trump, even with all his rhetoric and crazy statements he made, they still picked him! That says a lot about Hillary and the DNC and the campaign they ran.
It also didn't help that Hillary didn't have any results in countering that narrative. She just hunkered down, said things about her background which sounded very politician-y, and kept the spotlight on trump. Turns out this was a terrible strategy.
Sad thing is, I'm expecting the DNC to try and pull exactly the same stunt next time round. As per their campaign; blame will be cast in every direction except internally.
Even if our Norwegian right wing is pretty much more to the left than your left wing, our left wing behaves in exactly the same way here.
Their last campaign was pretty much "if you choose them, the world will end", instead of trying to present their own policies and how they would improve things.
And they're still completely arrogant about it. It seems they will repeat their strategy the next time, but then they are in opposition, which is an easier game to play. Also, they try to blame the entire economic slowdown on the current government, even though the oil price fall is unprecedented (and Norwegian industry is seriously oil driven)...
Sigh, I'm so tired of politics. It's all about blame and ideology instead of stuff that actually matters to people.
Is there any decent account in how the primaries were "rigged"? It seems Bernie lost even without super-delegates, with millions of votes in difference.
I'm admittedly exhausted from all this, but wasn't there something about the caucus states not getting counted the same way?
In any case, she lost 40% of her party and really did nothing to reach back out to it. And Trump capitalized way back in April on that by planting the seed suggesting himself that Bernie should make the 3rd party run.
>Bernie voters simply overstate how much support he had among the Democratic base.
What the DNC ignored was the passion and enthusiasm that Bernie and Bernie supporters had and brought to the issues and the election. Bernie filled places. Several thousand came to see him in La Crosse, WI at the Onalaska Civic Center. Only a few hundred, hand picked, supporters (were allowed and) saw Hillary in La Crosse, WI at Western Technical College.
Regarding your first observation, I think that people who are very religious and anti-abortion expect their agenda to now be championed by the new administration. I have my doubts whether that will actually come to be.
Will the real direction on those issues come from Trump or the mass of influence in political power under him? I think the latter. I think his grand plans will be largely neutered by a more level-headed GOP (relatively speaking), but they will also have more strength to push socially conservative issues.
More years spent getting caught up on intraspecies drama (bathroom use!) rather than working on big ideas.
The religious right are ultimately tools. I wonder if they will ever realize it and form their own party. It's laughable that they think Trump is means to achieve their goals.
Kaine was probably promised the VC role when he resigned from the DNC and was succeeded by Debbie Wasserman Schultz. As far as I remember he even recommended her for the post. Everything was in place for a Hillary nomination except Berney...
On 538 they also talked a lot about political theory during the elections. The "economic model" of the election says that the candidates do not matter, that what matters is the economic state of the country and variables such as the presence of an incumbent.
Most people at 538 seemed to think that this theory would be invalidated after the pretty probablye Clinton win, but was a reason for them to consider the uncertainty high.
I think tomorrow they are going to discuss if this theory is not vindicated after all.
To again be fair to 538, they are pretty clear that their model is based on polling data, at least in their "polls only" model, which I think they put more emphasis on than their "polls plus" model. Maybe next cycle, they'll do more work on that plus model to account for more factors or maybe this truly was an outlier election, which happens every so often.
This is also what 1 in 6 looks like, or what 1 in 10 looks like, or what 1 in 100 looks like. You can't definitively judge probabilistic predictions based on just 1 event.
> You can't definitively judge probabilistic predictions based on just 1 event.
Well, unfortunately, we have 4 years to think about it.
My wife and I are already looking at immigrating. I'm actively sending resumes to other places. If I can't fix it, then I'll leave it to those that want it this way.
(I guess this is what it felt like when the regular Germans had Hitler voted into power?)
Not that I'm claiming Trump _is_ Hitler, but the point is he's a wildcard – nobody seems to know what he _actually_ stands for. He says one thing to one crowd, and then the next day, spews the exact opposite to a different crowd.
> Yet again, Americans didn't even consider the third party.
The presidential third party vote more than doubled this election compared to 4 years ago.
> They aren't even allowed to debate.
Ron Paul begs to differ.
---
The challenge, of course, is the the system is susceptible to the spoiler effect. Trump won Florida's 29 electoral votes by just 1%. Gary Johnson alone had double that number in the state.
In 2000, the entire election was decided by 537 votes for George Bush in Florida. And the majority of Ralph Nader's 97k votes in the state would have gone to Al Gore in a two-party race. The Green Party lost the Democrats 4+ years of the presidency.
Trump and is running mate Pence want to appeal Roe vs Wade, I wouldn't exactly call that "wishy-washy" on abortion.
Given the rest of his political standing it's pretty clear that putting women's rights back a few decades is definitely on his agenda.
Now that religious social issues like gay marriage and abortion have been essentially settled, we have been in the beginning of a trend where left-wing politics begins to align with religion. We are already seeing with people using religious arguments for things like social programs and environmentalism. FFS the Pope said people should vote for Hillary.
Obama rode to power on change ticket and immediately abandoned it, wholesale.
OK that didn't work so who else you got? Bernie, outsider with nothing, no money, no establishment friends, too old, been a democtat for 5 minutes and nearly got the democratic nomination and the dem establishment hate him and broke the rules fighting him. Donald has fame and got the republican nomination. Republican establishment hate him.
American voters want change.
Change at any cost right now. And they'll keep trying for it.
There has been no meaningful political reform. Regulatory capture and gerrymander are the norm. People hate it. They genuinely hate the status quo, the political establishment. Really hate it.
Whoever is judged the most likely to do something, anything, in the way of reform has a huge advantage. You can be inexperienced and African American, you can be a blow-hard who inherited a billion dollars. Doesn't matter if people actually believe you are more for change and reform than the opposition.
It's not the only important thing but having credibility as an agent for change is extremely valuable. Hilary had precisely no credibility on that count and was proud of it .
> Obama rode to power on change ticket and immediately abandoned it, wholesale.
He had two years where he had legislative power, and spent that time shoring up the US economy after the financial crisis and passing healthcare reform. Had he passed political reform instead he would have been accused of putting elite concerns before the practical things affecting ordinary people.
One of the problems in the US seems to be that the President has all the rhetoric of a ruler, but in fact only has power with Congress.
People invest an enormous amount of hope and effort into the federal system, but in fact it's mostly ineffective, if the two parties are at one another's throats no one is capable of action a majority of the time. The system is set up to rely on the states for action, but people move around so much the states aren't seen as worth the effort (because you might be taking a job on the other side of the country in a year or two). It's a system which doesn't really match up with how people live their lives.
> He had two years where he had legislative power, and spent that time shoring up the US economy after the financial crisis and passing healthcare reform.
Respectfully, he shored up the banks that had precipitated the crisis rather than the people most affected by the crisis. Some will call that virtuous and necessary, or 'deeply unfair' and necessary (Timothy Geithner), but the people who benefited are not the people who voted last night.
As for healthcare reform, he chose health insurance rather than health care. From the point of view of most of the people who voted last night, that means another bill to pay, not better healthcare.
He invested his power, to the degree he had it, more in keeping things the same than in the change people voted him in for.
Obamacare is a compromise and it's a compromise required because of the Republican party, there was never enough votes to get real health care legislation. So: not Obama's fault, though it is the fault of the Democratic party letting the Republicans gerrymander themselves to a consistent house majority
Until 2010, the Democrats held control of the House, Senate, and White House. At least consider the possibility that they accomplished what they wanted to accomplish.
The ACA was passed with 0 votes from Republicans in the House or Senate, and there was a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate. There was no need or desire for real comprise on the ACA.
In fact, after it passes, Speaker Pelosi and Senate majority leader Reid had a little parade where they gloated about getting it through without Republicans.
> Respectfully, he shored up the banks that had precipitated the crisis rather than the people most affected by the crisis. Some will call that virtuous and necessary, or 'deeply unfair' and necessary (Timothy Geithner), but the people who benefited are not the people who voted last night.
Well, even the collapse of Lehman Brothers meant an enormous shock. Given the scale of the crisis, it's very impressive how well the US came out of it, and that is to a significant degree down to his policy. That is, consistent growth for the interim period, and high levels of private sector job growth (up 12 million over the course of his Presidency, compared to a fall for President Bush). That is important for every ordinary individual in the country. It's all very well saying 'he should have let all the banks fail' in retrospect, with the actual prospect of that actually happening.
Also, I'm not just talking about the banking measures in the crisis, but about the moderate banking reforms he put in place, and also about the stimulus bill, which was painted as apocalyptic by the Republican leadership, but which actually seems to have helped a lot.
> As for healthcare reform, he chose health insurance rather than health care.
Well, most European countries have health insurance systems, which work well. The Dutch and the Germans have that system. The French have an insurance system for people earning over a certain level. He chose a moderate reform (which had already been trialled by a Republican in Massachusetts) presumably with the idea that it would be a fairly uncontroversial but significant step to get to universal coverage, which few people would seriously disagree with, and which could then be built on in future. Presumably remembering Hillary Clinton's failure to put a much more ambitious scheme in place two decades earlier. He probably misjudged the mood, should have reconciled himself to the inevitability of being presented as a hate figure, and done a more root and branch reform. Again, easy to say in retrospect.
Obama only had 7 weeks of legislative power. That's how long his party had enough votes to overcome the filibuster in the Senate. Criticizing him for not getting enough done is nonsensical.
Jeez, everybody is all bent out of shape on this. The Republican establishment hate Trump nearly as much as they hate Clinton so with Republicans controlling The House and The Senate how much "damage" is President Trump going to be able to do.
The really interesting part of all this was reading Scott Adams blog who proposed the idea that Trump is a master persuader (probably this is just a fancy name for populist). He has been blogging about persuasion techniques and about cognitive biases and how humans are irrational creatures 90% of the time and are open to persuasion techniques.
This seems to offend everybodies sensibilities but for me it's been fascinating and a real eye-opener. The reaction (bias?) in the media has been particularly interesting and has forever changed my world view.
If you have the time it's probably worth reading the posts for the past year or so, http://blog.dilbert.com/ It won't be so interesting now that we know the result but the ideas and methods of persuasion he talks about will shape the future for a long time to come.
The cognitive dissonance being shown by the media is particularly funny. It's amazing that they really don't understand that a large percentage of the population voted for Trump because he probably represents for them a reasonable hope for change. I'm waiting for somebody to suggest that nobody actually voted for him and instead he rigged the election all by himself.
> Jeez, everybody is all bent out of shape on this. The Republican establishment hate Trump nearly as much as they hate Clinton so with Republicans controlling The House and The Senate how much "damage" is President Trump going to be able to do.
The Republican establishment, in terms of actual currently serving politicians rather than former ones or writers, have largely rolled over for Trump. With this "mandate", they'll continue to do so for fear of getting voted out.
And even if that weren't the case Trump would still be plenty dangerous. Sure, we can imagine they'd stop him if he tried to get some terrible policy passed -- but the biggest danger from Trump isn't some terrible deliberate policy. It's the constant screwups we can expect from someone who's not competent to run the executive branch.
Media bias? If anything, the media has been weirdly accommodating to Trump. Trump literally hides his tax returns and they just kind of go "Oh well, guess that's that," but they kept reporting on Clinton's emails ad nauseum no matter how many times it was established that there was nothing there. When Comey broke protocol and commented on her emails again a week ago, the story was not, "Look how the GOP is trying to rig this election with a false scandal," the front page stories were once again credulous acceptance that there was something fishy about Clinton. And when Comey once again failed to find anything, that was a much smaller story.
IMO the media's hunger to appease Trump is one of the most interesting contributors to this result.
I agree. There's a big lesson in focus here. One side hammered the emails incessantly while the other had too many issues to get the media to lock down on one.
I tend to think that this was the meeting of three things:
- media driven by drama
- individual operating how they always have, unlike the norm
- a populace with many negative feelings, reacting to both
Part of it is also that Hillary's emails was pretty much handed to the media, with very little work required from their part. Digging into Trumps taxes or other scandals would require actual work.
As for Comey, he had a lose/lose scenario. If he didn't go forward with the new emails, and it had turned out that there was actually something worth investigating, he's would have kept important information from the US public, just before an election.
While Trump perhaps isn't exactly the ideal candidate for the US presidency, I have the same take on him as I did on the Brexit: The world is simply to boring a place for this to become a major issue. In the long run everything will be fine.
It's only been about a century since the Great Depression and the World Wars. I think it's a little early to say tragic outcomes are off the table now.
True, but it also a little to early to assume that Trump will turn the US into a 3. world country. Most of the things happing right now is due to people panicking about a future that is now perceived as more unstable, compared to if Hillary had won.
It's my belief that most of the short term problems that will arise from president elect Donald Trump is because people make wild speculations, and less because of his actions.
>they just kind of go "Oh well, guess that's that,"
Because this is what the media does for damn near every political scandal that politicians don't immediately capitulate to. Weathering the storm of news, attention and publicity to a "scandal" when a story hits is how it becomes a non-story next week.
>they kept reporting on Clinton's emails ad nauseum no matter how many times it was established that there was nothing there
Because there were incremental changes and updates, the media gets to milk the story for every new morsel. Also, a sleazy, immoral and poorly implemented system for attempting to avoid (even without breaking) open records laws is not "nothing."
IMO the media's hunger to appease Trump
The media's actions are better explained as both lazy and desperate for reader/viewer attention. It explains everything they do from coverage of Trump and Hillary all the way to coverage of the Scout Bake Sale.
I feel they were biased in another, more insidious way (and they went along with it). Trump has carefully crafter a persona for himself over the years (perhaps even accidentally, by virtue of his personality), where he can pretty much say anything (and especially things no other candidate would ever be able to say without saying goodbye to any chance at election), and the media (and people) will just go "oh, well, sure he said some racist, sexist things, but that's just Trump... you know how he is". Kind of like that racist uncle at the dinner table... you gotta put up with it, but at least he's family, so you understand him better, and perhaps realize he has other redeeming qualities.
So, this has allowed Trump to appeal to bases of people no other candidate could even hope to reach, with the current "acceptable" rhetoric.
I can't believe that someone can come to the conclusion you just did. The media was overwhelmingly anti-Trump, that shouldn't even be in dispute. He may have "won" a few talking points that the media was forced to report on as you indicated, but to say the media was accommodating to Trump is just fantasy.
The people in the media were overwhelmingly anti-Trump, no argument. But the media's coverage of the election was not anti-Trump any more than reporting objective facts in the face of Trump's lies can be called "anti-Trump." They reported on Hillary like any other candidate, but they walked on eggshells around Trump, trying and failing to find a way to report on somebody they despised — and who constantly accused them of conspiring against him — without appearing partial. For example, there were way more stories about the how sketchy the Clinton Foundation was than the Trump Foundation, even though the latter has factually violated the law and the former has not.
> how much "damage" is President Trump going to be able to do.
His rhetoric is already escalating the "war on Muslims". Electing him further confirms that Americans are the enemy of Islam. This is exactly what terrorists were trying to accomplish, and I think we can expect many more people to become radicalized. We can expect an increase in terrorist attacks. Walls won't save you. Tighter immigration control won't save you. The damage was done today, and in the months leading up to the election. I am legitimately scared to visit countries such as Indonesia and Malaysia. I was already scared about Turkey, and the situation there will only get worse. I'm worried for my relatives and friends who live there.
Donald Trump doesn't trust the science behind climate change. He doesn't believe that it's real. He would like to dismantle the EPA and increase our dependence on coal and oil. Even if I ignore his deep character flaws, business failures, and sexual assault accusations, this single issue is a dealbreaker for me. Luckily we have many other people working on clean energy, like everything that Elon Musk is doing. But how can this be coming from the President of the United States?
When it comes to radicalization, I would be much more worried over the long-term use of drone bombers. Some people have already incorporated drones into local lore (if you don't behave, a drone will get you), and from myth and lore it is a short step to define the operators as evil and create rhetoric that is used by radicalization. We saw a similar effect in art when England was under constant bombing during ww2. Several years of bombing can cause a rather radical effect on peoples mind, and I suspect studies on stress can confirm that. The wrong president being elected on the opposite side of the planet seems minor in comparison.
The climate aspect is indeed bad, even if many of the trade deals that trump oppose and Hillary was active in bringing forth was labeled as negative for the climate. Hillary was likely the lesser evil all in all, but hopefully in 4 years we can see an actually advocate for the environment and clean energy.
That's apples and oranges. On one hand, you have the actions of one person, as part of a team, handed an urgent situation of their predecessor's making. On the other, you have clearly demarcated policy positions, being declared in advance, by someone whom we should fully intends to execute them.
I'm not a smart person either, especially when it comes to solving all of the problems in the middle east. I'm honestly quite uninformed, apart from all the media coverage and mudslinging. Could you recommend some books that I should read?
I'm very worried about preemptive announcements of how his presidency will fail. That's the sort of thing that makes people resent "elites" in the first place! I think that the best thing is for the liberals to marshal their political support while saying they'll consider bills trump proposes. Keep all the leverage they can while not signaling that they'll be out to sabotage trump. Saboteur government, like with the republicans under Obama, didn't work, and I hope the Democrats doesn't try it.
Americans refuse to live in fear (at least, the block of Americans I understand and am part of). We don't really count on walls to save us. We count on the ability to destroy those who want to murder us.
That will probably freak a lot of people out here. I'm not a warmonger. But we are a strong nation, and those who want to kill our innocent civilians need to know, America will not cower.
Terrorism is on the rise because there are large groups of people who have devoted their lives to barbaric murder of innocents -- some on the front lines with bombs strapped on, others through financial and cultural support.
These groups of people have a culture in favor of anti-US terrorism. Note: I have not named the groups. You can't say "Islam", because many Muslims don't feel that way. You can't say "Arabs" because it is likewise inaccurate.
It's hard to name the group with a precise enough term. But they exist, and their culture makes them our blood enemies. They want to murder us, and therefore I want to murder them.
What really needs to die is the barbaric culture. But how do you kill a culture? (I can only think of one example off the top of my head ... atom bombs on Japan seemed to quickly, drastically change their culture. Hopefully there's a less drastic way).
Tolerance and peace are some of the greatest human ideals. But when someone desires with their whole heart to murder you and all that you love, tolerance is the wrong response. That enemy needs to be recognized, understood, and defeated.
> Americans refuse to live in fear (at least, the block of Americans I understand and am part of).
I agree. I wish, though, that political commentators would act like good StarCraft 2 casters and tack on the obligatory "But at what cost?"
Either locally: I'd rather not give up some freedoms (e.g. stop & frisk) on the off-chance some crimes are prevented or internationally: I'd prefer less drone strikes with collateral damage, despite the value of a killing a dangerous terrorist.
I have hope that Trump will back into some good results via his isolationism. I believe that the less buddy-buddy the US is with the Saudi royals, the less animosity we'll generate, making us less likely to be targets.
For one Trump will give them at least one, more likely two even more Supreme Court Justices, so some of the most right-wing conservatives we've seen in the past half century will decide the law of the land for the next twenty to thirty years.
The Republicans will have control of all three branches of government for the next few years and there is a whole lot that they can do with that. As a foreigner, what worries me most is that American progress on climate change policy will be set back by another 15 to 20 years as Obama's progress will be erased and there is no progress to hope for until another Democrat is elected in four or eight years. Russia can also be expected to threaten Europe with more confidence; hopefully our defense spending will increase to pick up the slack.
The Democrats certainly brought this upon themselves. People say the primaries against Sanders were rigged, but really the problem wasn't that the DNC pushed Clinton. The problem was Clinton herself. Clinton soundly rejected Sanders' populist ideals when almost half of the party and a great number of independents supported them. All it took at that point were a few leaks and a letter from Comey to rip the blue collar worker's vote from her.
In what sense? She didn't budge on the $15 minimum wage, universal healthcare nor free education. Those were some of Sanders' key issues.
She understandably also stayed away from some more controversial issues like marijuana legalization and NSA surveillance.
Where she actually flipped her position on issues, she did so without drawing any attention to it, as if to be able to flop back quietly after the election. On paper, she opposed the TPP, but it's no more than a bullet on her website. I don't recall one bad word she said about trade agreements or even "just" TPP, which she had already sacrificed. Trump and Sanders could give entire speeches on the subject.
Can we stop with the 'Clinton rejected sanders policies' line? She pretty much accepted most of them. Bernie supporters are idiots for not getting behind her. You reap what you sow.
Yes, and the DNC is now reaping what they sowed with their arrogant, condescending, and entitled campaign strategy of railroading through the least likeable and most corrupt Democratic candidate in living memory.
That's great. But she was still the nominee and they had two choices. They got one of them. If they didn't want him and didn't vote for her, then they're fucking idiots.
Publicly she may have done so, but privately the Podesta emails show them joking about pretending to adopt Sander's positions during the primaries.
But yes, Bernie supporters are such idiots for not getting behind a deeply corrupt person who would have been rightfully impeached within 6 months, if elected. How could you not love a candidate who runs a fake charity, has ties to child sex trafficking, and cheated throughout the entire process?
I'd completely forgotten about Scott Adams. Now we're never going to hear the end of it.
But I seriously question the idea that Trump can't do much damage because of the Republican controlled House and Senate. The Republicans have been quite eager to do damage to the US without Trump.
> how much "damage" is President Trump going to be able to do
Probably a lot less than people think domestically -- I suspect he's going to find his hands tied nearly as much as Obama. (And the outbursts of frustration we're likely to see from him as result will probably be epic.) Foreign relations are going to be interesting for a while though, and the stock market is probably going to crash, if it hasn't already.
> I suspect he's going to find his hands tied nearly as much as Obama.
Yeah no, he can just give free reign to Pence (as he explicitly said he'd do) and establishment GOP and they'll let him have his pet hates. Obama was "the enemy" and opposed at every turn, Trump just has to give the GOP their Supreme Court nominee and they'll be more than happy to indulge him.
Maybe. You're right that it's very possible that we are effectively getting President Pence with Trump as his spokesman. Trump and Pence did seem to disagree on a bunch of things though when the debates were going on, so I guess we'll have to wait and see what happens.
If Trump does try to actually do anything drastic, I think he will find his hands tied though.
Personally, I hope the silver lining may be that through these almost inevitable outbursts, the public will get a bit of a "peek behind the curtain" of how politics in the US (and the world at large) actually work. That's a tall order though, since Trump is more likely to just simplify everything to "me wants to do good, he try stop me, he bad!"
It is amazing that all the news organizations which are supposedly representing opposing views all lined up against him. You'd think if he was really a monster we'd know by now. Donald Trump is 70 years old, after all.
Well, I don't know if a "real monster", but if pandering to (and propagating conspiracy theories from) the alt-right doesn't tickle you as a bit bothersome, you might be part of the problem.
It's a long established fact that an appeal to emotion as opposed to rational argument or character, is a far stronger form of persuasion. I think a lot of people overlooked this in this election.
Sure, people will justify their support either through reasoning or judgement of character - "He's a racist bigot", "She's part of the establishment", his/her policy is better etc. but what it comes down to is the emotional appeal of the arguments.
I think Donald Trump was more successful at rallying people around his promise to "make America great again" whilst Hillary failed to rally people around the idea of "Stronger together". I think her campaign became preoccupied with attacking the character of Donald Trump, seeing this as his weakness, as opposed to founding it on a strong appeal to emotion. I would argue the Sanders campaign was much stronger in this regard.
Maybe the domestic damage will be limited, given the checks and balances the three branches provide. As much flak as congress gets, it's interesting to see that no one part of the government is all powerful.
But foreign policy and diplomacy falls squarely in the executive branch. It's impossible to separate the US election from the rest of the world, when the US is so incredibly influential. Diplomacy is tricky, time consuming, and can fall flat on the stupidest little things. Even a really good secretary of state backed by a strong state department can only do so much with an elephant in the china shop.
Like Brexit, it remains to be seen what will actually happen, but if the campaign is any indication of future performance I won't hold my breath.
I've been thinking about this too. He might have no no history in government, but the years of selling himself and his name have made him damn near the perfect politician.
Yeah, that was interesting. You did, I did. I tossed in here one of his better pieces over 3 months ago. Flagged off, of course. "La-la-la, not listening ..."
You have no clue. This is really serious shit, the genies he let out of the bottle during the election will not go back in just as victory has come into their grasp.
> Jeez, everybody is all bent out of shape on this. The Republican establishment hate Trump nearly as much as they hate Clinton so with Republicans controlling The House and The Senate how much "damage" is President Trump going to be able to do.
The President deals with foreign policy, and Trump is in Putin's pocket. Time for Ukraine and the Baltic states to become part of Russia.
Brexit and the Trump election share the same root causes:
* Inequality within developed countries, leading to dissatisfaction among working-class voters.
* Globalization benefits accrue largely to capital owners, leaving a lot of workers behind. Many blame immigration since it is the most visible cause. The blame is partly backed by human's xenophobic instincts.
Ironically, Trump's tax plan will mostly benefit the rich.
Instead, we need a much better system to mitigate hardships from job losses to globalization and technological change. The 2017 Congress will be very unlikely to enact such policies.
I wonder how this tension will play out in the future...Thoughts?
You've hit the nail on the head: inequality is at the heart of this. Unfortunately, people are quick to forget the democratic foundation of society. It is not big businesses that have the final say, neither is it the middle classes or any other segment of population. It is the people, collectively, that have influence. And when you forget that over a long period of time, it comes back to bite you hard. Lesson for the future: take inequality seriously.
It's not that strange really. I don't think most poor people hold the wealth of the rich against them so much as they resent the feeling that the rich think they're superior, or that the rich dismiss and ignore everyone, and rig the system.
A rich guy who says the things that the poor already believe (rightly or not), things nobody else will say, has a leg up on gaining their support. People want a champion, whether or not that champion looks like them. (cf. Gracchus [1])
Since the GOP now holds both Congress and the Presidency, with a possibility of the Supreme Court majority, they may enact some protectionist policies to appease the voters. However, they could in fact make the economic situations worse and some people would start to blame other things.
Could the backlash spill to the technology and related sectors as well? (e.g. a neo-luddite movement might get started)
Note: I did not grow up in the US, so I would like to hear your opinions on this, especially from Americans.
> with a possibility of the Supreme Court majority
... possibility? They already have it. He gets to pick Scalia's replacement and that's 5-4. If Ginsburg or Breyer can't make it 4-8 more years (and Ginsburg is 84), then it'll be a guarantee for the next 30+ years, minimum.
Poor whites in America seem to identify with rich whites more than others from different races who are working (or unemployed) right next to them.
To them, Trump is like the star NFL quarterback that everyone wishes to be, and wears that star's jersey on their back. Even if the fan is overweight and can barely waddle across the parking lot.
Except that in reality Trump does not have the skills necessary to do the job. (He is a great candidate, but will likely be a terrible president). Someone observed that Trump is a poor person's idea of a rich person. He is unfortunately likely a disenfranchised person's idea of an effective president.
That's ironic, because that quote means the exact opposite of what people think:
“Except for the field organizers of strikes, who were pretty tough monkeys and devoted, most of the so-called Communists I met were middle-class, middle-aged people playing a game of dreams. I remember a woman in easy circumstances saying to another even more affluent: ‘After the revolution even we will have more, won’t we, dear?’ Then there was another lover of proletarians who used to raise hell with Sunday picknickers on her property.
"I guess the trouble was that we didn’t have any self-admitted proletarians. Everyone was a temporarily embarrassed capitalist. Maybe the Communists so closely questioned by the investigation committees were a danger to America, but the ones I knew—at least they claimed to be Communists—couldn’t have disrupted a Sunday-school picnic. Besides they were too busy fighting among themselves.”
Yeah, it's one of those high-horse things elites tell themselves while they try to understand why they can't just instill their perfectly obviously correct opinions already.
Indeed. Globalization is not the enemy. Overall wealth and productivity have gone up, up, up in the last 40 years. The problem is that a disproportionate share of the returns from that growth have gone into the pockets of the rich. There's about a zillion reasons why that happened, but there are also many ways to tackle the problem and improve the situation.
Had this really been about inequality, would the winner be the rich guy with the gold-plated everything, whose tax policies favoured the richest? I think it was more straight-up xenophobia.
I would've thought that black and Hispanic people in the US were strongly represented on the "wrong" side of the inequality ledger? Yet the vote had strong divides on race, and those people did not back the winner.
US is above its head in debt right now, on par with states like Spain or Greece.
Lowering the tax means it will be less money, meaning less social initiatives that benefit the poorer such as Medicare. Making taxes more progressive would work.
This event and Brexit are proof that you cannot shame people into voting how you want. Calling them bigots over and over just galvanizes them if anything.
It's more of a case that us upper-middle class liberal elites think we are shaming this segment of the population when we are calling them bigots and racists and stupid and uninformed and homophobic and hicks and white trash, because those are horrible things that we don't want to be called.
But a large part of the population don't share that sentiment, they're not shamed, they don't care that you're screaming "RACIST!" at the top of your lungs.
And when you address their actual concerns that globalization and automation are killing their jobs, killing their communities, and killing their people with a shrug, with an "I'm so sorry, move to the cities, get an education!", they'll get angry. And political. And here we are.
I don't think you really have your finger on the pulse of most voters.
I can tell you as someone in silicon valley who sort of vaguely supports trump, that I have been essentially not permitted to talk about it. What's the benefit to it? Why would I speak up and engage in a conversation? Any talk of Trump here isn't actually a real debate. It's everyone around you saying "Trump supporters are racists and bigots. They are disgusting."
Nobody _actually_ wants to hear any arguments from the other side. So I sit with my mouth closed. It's better than losing my friends and having my coworkers ostracize me for my political views. Which maybe they would have the chance to change if they were willing to listen, but aren't.
I know so many people like myself. I was surprised with the result of the election, but not surprised at the fact that there was a surprise like this. Places like SV don't know how many Trump supporters there are or even _why_ they really support him, because they've essentially put their hands over their eyes and their ears and spun in circles shouting "Trump is racist! You are racist!"
Would you like to know how a normal person gets to vote for Trump?
I'm a male French, in France, and I intend to vote FN (extreme right). I have higer education, 10 years of experience in programming, including 5 in 3 different countries. I have social values, like companies should take care of the humans behind the employee, and we should give our maximum to include everyone who wants to be included. I turned my back on leftist movements because no matter how generous I was (e.g. thousands donated to charities, >1200hrs of volunteering, engaged in social causes, etc), leftists always find a way to depict me as a spoiled child with rich parents, and they dismiss any good work I've made as a result of luck.
Oh and my 8-year old cousin was raped by an Arab teenager – I still don't know whether that's due to probability or whether he identifies to the Arabs-against-whites cause. It did change a lot for me.
So now that I'm freed from liberal shamers, I've decided to vote depending on only one criteria. In my whole professional experience, promotions were given to women, to the point that it was unfair to me; In my whole life women have been bitter to me. I'm pretty satisfied that there are currently hundreds of laws in favour of women which offset any inequality they can claim; The only party which proposes to keep those existing laws and not adding new ones is FN, the extreme-right French party.
All in all, what you need to gain back someone like me is love. Give me luck with finding a girlfriend, give me a fair treatment at work, recognize my social engagement and the positive parts of my values, stop assuming all my rationale is just raw racism or raw machism, stop assuming I've just been lucky with work, and you'll get me back among the centrist voters.
But as long as it's not possible to expose my problems without hearing generalizations and shaming, I'll keep voting FN.
> 2. You blame an entire race for your cousin being raped
You are putting words into his mouth. His description of the event was entirely about a fact.
Quote for reference.
> Oh and my 8-year old cousin was raped by an Arab teenager – I still don't know whether that's due to probability or whether he identifies to the Arabs-against-whites cause. It did change a lot for me.
I'm GP: The race of the person is a data point, because it is entirely probable that the rapist identifies to Daesh. Remember the 8 terrorist attacks we've had in France between 2014 and 2015 and the Cologne rapes: It's entierly plausible that Daesh had a strong support among the Arab community in France, and no-one can neither deny nor confirm this hypothesis. Also, why does a random rape have to be an Arab person, just 3 weeks away from the Cologne events? Last point, I considered him as a friend of mine because I valued inclusion, I invited him to my birthday party and trusted him like I would trust any friend. Turns out I was wrong, and the result is a rape. A rape! The height of the risk is so high, so Earth-shaking, I feel guilty of overlooking our differences. I will keep trying to include people, but not as far as this time.
I'm entierly entitled to evaluate several hypothesis from this event (4 exactly: Teenage, earning power, education, and cultural community differences where race is one data point), and take resolutions to avoid getting in this situation again.
Anyway, if you're not happy with that, don't rape people.
You're right, that's why I rally to FN. Your comment says you're incapable of compassion because you conflate my case with your sweeping generalizations, and your comment shows you only see bad things in your opponents, to whom you'll never give any kind of love.
Your strategy has a name: "lutte des classes" (class warfare), and you daily complain that all you get is Brexit, Trump and FN. A little understanding for your opponent's problems would go a long way in having solidarity in a country, but good luck talking about cross-class solidarity to a socialist.
I love how most the comments to your comment is so condescending and disrespectful. I am from Sweden and intend to vote for the Swedish Democrats and I can understand how you feel.
I completely agree with you as well, so tired of feminism, leftish idiocracy, hate on white males etc etc.
Funny thing is that I am also an environmentalist, I deeply care about climate issues. That is the part that scares me about Trump. I don't understand the need to deny that shit.
Next up is Le Pen winning in France and then Sweden Democrats in Sweden.
I'm also Swedish, and the parallells are striking. During the last two general elections in Sweden, my Facebook was an endless litany of "But, but, but, they're racist!!!", same as the mainstream media, and all of it completely useless, because the argument clearly doesn't work.
I'm sorry, but what the fuck does that have to do with politics? What political party is going to promise you a girlfriend?
For what it's worth, you're proving the populist-narrative that explains why Trump was elected: Trump rose to power by assuring those who felt that they once had 'power', who've lost it (to minorities or women or whoever), and deserve to have it back again.
> What political party is going to promise you a girlfriend?
You've unframed and changed my speech so much that it looks stupid. Obviously, you conclude that this is stupid: You're right!
I'm saying: If you don't want me to vote for Trump/FN, then instead of shaming me all the time "because he's from a rich familiy, therefore he doesn't deserve consideration, even if he works hard and donates a lot", try to intervene at the private/social level by having solidarity with people's situation. If you give those people some love, and fix their lives, they'll start voting differently.
I'm actually with you as far as the missing empathy and a lack of will to even listen is concerned, but I must say I too find the bit about the girl friend odd and I think it distracts from the (IMHO) good points you made. Look at it this way: This is an "outlier" statement among everything you said, so a reader's brain is going to pay more attention to it then to the rest.
Here is what you could have said (the very short version):
You could have made a good point that part of the problem of getting a girl friend is the freakin' amount of uncertainty in our lives. You can't be sure where you live and where you get an income from. That is a big problem for stable relationships.
After reading more of your comments I'm not sure if you actually meant it literally though, meaning your own personal issues instead of the wider political picture, which I would not want to comment on.
The girlfriend is an example, it's a proxy for "fixing my life".
All my life I've been shamed by leftists, mostly because I'm a white male from a good Christian family and succeeded at schools. It has had impact on my career for example, since companies decided to promote junior women instead. Leftists couldn't get over that and see the guy who needed help to be socially included. Leftists are pretty happy to see a rich person be socially rejected or committing suicide, actually. I bet many people voting Trump feel just the same: Leftists are prompt at shaming people for being privileged while not caring for their problems. We need a return of solidarity, and if not that, then we'll just vote for ourselves.
Hence, I have stopped caring for what leftists say. But if people could get enough solidarity to help me get my life fixed (the girlfriend is just an example), then I'd go back to voting normally.
Yes, I've seen a psychologist. Psychologists can fix the person, not society. If society keeps sending crap because you're a white male, nothing will repair your self-esteem.
Or maybe people shunned you because you are an inconsiderate, spoiled, full of himself narcissist? You seem to think that those women who have been promoted shouldn't have simply because they were women. Maybe they were better than you. Ever thought of that?
> We need a return of solidarity
So you are voting for a party who's main concept is spewing hatred against minorities?
> But if people could get enough solidarity to help me get my life fixed
Why the fuck should leftists, right-wingers, socialists, or nazis sort your life out? You are a grown man. Sort it yourself.
Leftist parties are spewing hatred just as much as FN does. It's just that you don't notice it, because you identify to the minorities' cause. For example it's now forbidden to show a nativity scene in a public space in France (That was decided this week), while it's ok to wear the niqab. It's just that leftists can't wrap their mind about the hypothesis that – maybe – it's now Catholics who are the victims.
Other example: A leftist (Yesterday at lunch! It's not like it never happens!) made a joke about "all priests are rapists anyway" and no-one said anything. But if anyone made a joke about "All Arabs are thieves", they'd sure face immediate forced resignation. Both are stupidly gross generalizations that no-one should ever say.
Other example: Leftists want to close the Catholic schools in France, "because they're inequal". Truth is, Catholic schools are better schools with better results and fewer violence, and that would kill the place where I was educated. The Khmers Rouges have tried eliminating the elites, that didn't bode well for them.
Hatred from leftists and from Muslim partisans is everyday. But the world has changed. We can either match your hatred with FN, or leftists can decide to stop oppressing the historical part of the population.
You are not talking about the average person here. It depends on what circles you frequent but I am sure that most people in France are neither hardcore leftists nor FN supporters. Extremism is wrong from all sides.
> Both are stupidly gross generalizations that no-one should ever say.
Except that FN says that about Arabs and other minorities, that and much more.
> Leftists want to close the Catholic schools in France
What they want and what they can achieve is very far. I want a lot of things, doesn't mean most people agree with me and that they will give those things to me.
> We can either match your hatred with FN
Or you know, take the approach a normal person should and side with neither of the crazies. As I said, extremism and hatred from either side will not solve anything. Hatred brews hatred, the only way to defeat bigotry, closed-mindedness and ignorance from one side is not by joining the opposing side. It's by taking the middle road and trying to find meaning and think with your brain.
Did you ever consider that ever person has their own burden to bear? That maybe the white male dominant hierarchy placed oppressive burdens on the groups you have now come to resent? You don't at all see the irony in your reaction to feeling similar pain?
I've considered it, then researched stats about women and inequality because they didn't match my experience.
All I've seen was a gross exaggeration of women's case: For example it's always the gross average of wage gap (32%) that is shown in the article's titles, and I've checked around me that no woman is aware that the average wage gap is only 8% for the same level of education and experience in the job, and the average goes the other way depending on the criteria we use (e.g. women get paid 22% more than men in Atlanta and 15% more in NY).
Also, in France, all other statistics conclude to men needing more help, while women still complain that they don't get enough: There are 18x more men who face violence on the street than women, 0.77x who get high-education degree, 2x (TWICE!) more men who are homeless, 3x who commit suicide and 20x more men in prison, so I'm a little flummoxed when I hear "Women are inequal". Examples on the same trend go on and on, see for example positive images that are associated to females ("They can do 2 things at the same time!"), negative/violent images associated to men; better education results in women than men; mark bias in mathematics in favor of women; solidarity statistics that are all favorable to women; and women keep dating richer men while high-pay jobs are more difficult for us to have, so it's a real struggle.
Men deserve dedicated help too. I'm not asking we stop helping women. I'm just asking we help men just as much, because men actually have more problems in life than women. You know, like, ...equality?
So, "white male dominant hierarchy placed oppressive burdens on the groups" doesn't trigger my solidarity anymore. Look at helping everyone who need help, instead of blaming a group for being white.
Maybe I'm having a hard time understanding this or maybe you haven't admitted it. What is this "voting normally" all about? It's clear that you don't give a damn for social pressures causing you to vote and think a certain way (normally?), because that's bit you bad. It appears that you've moved elsewhere to your own new normal (FN). If they changed and you went back, would it really be back to the same?
Are you asking "If those groups changed, would you come back to centrist voting?". Yes, my voting is only based on the womens' right criteria: I would vote for any party which doesn't propose to add up more rights to women than they currently have.
I've decided to forego any other criteria, because the groups are hypocritical with their values anyway. For example they pretended not to be racists (i.e. leftists / the President Hollande in France), but they saw nothing wrong in house-arresting 3,200 Muslims the day after the terrorist attacks, without warrant and without further proof than being filed under the "very Muslim" folder in the police notes. It wasn't necessary, it didn't yield any terrorist being arrested, and I qualify this act as a very racist action from a leftist president. I could go on and on about how leftist people fight for jobs but have never created any and have made it a burden to run a company. There is no hope in any political party of France driving France towards any kind of success, all of them will keep engaging in a sort of class warfare where anyone who's rich is considered evil, so I'll vote on the only issue that I can factually compare and on which I became expert: Their programs about women-and-men equality.
As it stands, both left and right parties propose to add up many more rights for women. See this post to quickly understand why I don't think it's fair: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12923138
Lack of confidence is highly linked with being constantly told off for being "a privileged". I regularly have to apologize for getting a degree, and if politics could stop blaming the rich, that would actually address the issue.
Plus I don't vote for a party in the hope of finding a girlfriend (lol). I vote for the party who's not proposing to add up more rights to women, because I have seen enough women be promoted to be sure the problem is the other way around.
It reminds me of Houellebecq's 'Submission', where one of the main features of islamic France is locking women in home in marriage. Women also serve as "awards" to the backers of the new regime.
I think it is true that some people put gender/sexual tensions into their politics, especially if it is radical. Grandparent might assume that in a more traditional society his chances would be better. I can't judge if it's true.
FN is not going to help you with any of the issues you're mentioning. Seriously, I don't even see what FN has to do with your issue with women or lack of recognition. Their program is mainly about France leaving the euro-zone and tougher immigration policies. And arguably, Marine Le Pen's FN is more on the left side than the current socialist party. In any case, you don't have to apologize if you think they represent your ideas.
All the other parties' programs say they will add up to laws in favour of women. FN doesn't say anything: It's more than I wanted to hear. Women don't currently have the same positions as men, but they currently have equal chances, which will lead to the same positions in less than one generation, so more laws would be unfair. Other than that, I've decided I decided to dismiss any argument about economics and immigration, because no party proposes to un-debt France, so women is my only criteria. Sounds logical since women have been the primary factor of unhappiness, both in my private and professional life.
Hey, I fully and violently disagree with you. I think you're making dangerously broad generalizations.
However, I can see how emotionally it makes sense to you, and I really appreciate how you're openly sharing this stuff on such a lefty and rationalist forum like HN. This is indeed similar to how many people feel, and if we keep excluding this thought we'll never get a good dialog going.
So kudos for openly sharing what's obviously some very unpopular ideas on HN.
Thank you, I wouldn't go as far as deserving a kudos, but it's just better if leftists can get the whole picture too. Because, all in all, I agree with leftists that the poor and disadvantaged need help. So thank you for your inclusive emotion.
Agreed. The right reaction to tajen's comment is "this sucks". Because sometimes it just does. Sure you can disagree with rationalisations and conclusions, but you should still try to empathise. It shows respect.
I can't do that. Partly because confidence is not me; But partly also because I'm afraid of discovering, after 15 years struggling to interest women, that the answer was that simple. Given how butthurt I am with the topic, I admit that this discovery would hurt me a lot. Do unconfident men, no matter how generous they are and how well they work, get no girl, which gives a major handicap in life?
If there is anything that women universally like about men it'd be 'confidence' (not overconfidence and arrogance).
At least that's my experience.
>> Given how butthurt I am with the topic, I admit that this discovery would hurt me a lot. <<
Why hurt - you'd get to have a better/happier life. You should not be dwelling on the past, "could/should/might have been" - no important, concentrate on the task at hand and what matters for you. No one has all the answers and clues, regardless how smart they are. The point is: if you don't try, you won't succeed for certain.
Lol that comment could come across as insulting ;) Is it? I'll assume it's not. First, you're trying to present it as a problem with me, instead of a problem with society. Although well-intentionned, it is often a liberal bias: "Some people are stupid/bogans/racists/elderly, that's why they vote X". It goes as far as dismissing those people's votes as invalid, and suggesting they shouldn't be allowed to vote.
Unfortunately, democracy means everyone belongs. We need to take care of needs of all people, even people like me, even though I'm depressed, even though I've had an unpleasant bringing-up with bad girlfriends and hateful leftist highschool friends. Bullying someone because has later consequences in terms of democracy, and it's your responsibility.
Second, Devoxx keeps giving talks about how women are opressed, while my employer keeps promoting women who don't know what an HTTP Header is. Said promoted women keep complaining that they're paid less than their male counterparts who knew what HTTP Headers were because they had to wait 7 more years to be promoted. Is it alright that I feel a dishonest discrepancy? Is it ok that I don't have any hope for my future?
All help goes towards minorities who barely work enough to deserve their spot. Today, I'm the one who needs help. I've worked hard, but now I need a bit of love. Can anyone see that my career has been unfair when I was an employee, bcause promotions were given to women? I've created my company and it succeeded better than competitors, is that a sign that I was competent? What I need today is people who appreciate what I'm giving to the world, both in donations and hard work, and for people to stop depicting me as a white male. Hence my sentence: All I need is a bit of love, especially from liberals, to stop voting against minorities. I'm all for inclusion, and as long as "inclusion" includes shy nerds I'm ready to support everyone else.
> I'm all for inclusion, and as long as "inclusion" includes shy nerds I'm ready to support everyone else.
How is a far-right party going to change that though? Society never liked nerds. It is in our genes to reject people that score low on the crude measure of fitness that evolution has imprinted in our brains.
Your suffering can perhaps be more generally be captured by the fact that the number of locally high-status positions in society is plummeting. Automatization destroys these position. While the push of minorities might have slightly impaired the selection of talent and diligence, the core issue is that there are too few jobs for the the traditional schema of diligence to make any sense. There are many people who have it far worse than you and they are being terribly confused by the contradiction that they are being told (work hard to gain status).
The big difference is that you can pay for the help you need (e.g. talking with a psychology to handle your depression) but the minorities can't do anything but complain to change their situation.
In my opinion, you are projecting the bad results of your love life towards the feminist movement, something like "If I cannot be happy, they don't deserve it too" (maybe you think the same in an indirect way like "why should they be happy if I'm not?"). In other words, if you were having a fulfilling loving life, you wouldn't mind the promoted women in your company or you will see it as a particular case in a country scope (realizing that there are a lot of women that really deserve that promotion but aren't getting it just for being women). But, since you are sad and depressed, you need to blame someone because of it which is either you or the women. In general, people rather blame others than themselves because if you are the problem it means that you have to work on changing yourself in order of solving it and that's a lot of work.
Take into account that nothing of all this means that you are a bad person or that you deserve to be alone. It's just that you are victimizing yourself as a way of protecting you from the apparently enormous effort of changing yourself.
To be honest, you had a blank slate and could have told whatever story you wanted to about yourself. You chose to tell this one, which basically makes the case that you are entitled and bitter.
What proves you that I don't deserve a better consideration? It is certainly possible from what I said to depict me as a bad guy through generalizations, but that would only be generalizations. What if I did give a lot and kept being told off, wouldn't that be unfair?
I am not contending that you deserve consideration. You do. I read your story and I can see parts in it which are frustrating, because you believe you are trying your best, but are stuck nonetheless.
On the other hand, because of the way you've chosen to present yourself and the issues you want to plant your flag on, I also can't help but wonder how much time you have spent looking at yourself to see how much of this is your responsibility.
I say the following with human empathy and don't want it to come across as flippant or insensitive (due to the nature of the method of communication): from what you've written it sounds like you could benefit from talking to a counselor or other mental health professional rather than voting for any particular candidate in an election
unfortunately mental health is all too often a taboo subject but it shouldn't and needn't be.
Comments like this will get your account banned, so please don't post them, regardless of how right you are or how wrong the other person is.
You've been posting many comments that break HN's rules. A user emailed us to complain about this, and having taken a look, I think he was right. When commenting on HN, please take extra care to make your comments civil and substantive, the more so as the topic becomes more inflammatory. Otherwise we have no hope of keeping the discourse here from erupting in flames.
I've never understood this absurd n-word argument.
I have a brother. Due to circumstances, I can call him a "stupid idiot" and he will know that I'm not serious and I respect him. However if a stranger calls him the same thing, he will take offense. Is that an unfair double standard?
Similarly, the n-word is a derogatory racial slur. Black people are quite justified in taking offense when being called that by an non-black person. However, if called that by a black person, the listener can be reasonably sure that the speaker is not being racist, and also that no 3rd party listener would mistake it for that.
It's just an obvious fact of language that context matters, and the speaker matters.
>I have a brother. Due to circumstances, I can call him a "stupid idiot" and he will know that I'm not serious and I respect him. However if a stranger calls him the same thing, he will take offense. Is that an unfair double standard?
I wouldn't call my brother 'stupid idiot' in public (neither would I in private by the way). I don't care what you do in private. Though, that's another topic.
When black people call other black people nigga, they don't mean it ironically or as an exaggeration. It is just a word which means black person and which is used only by black people. That's like calling someone 'bro', that's not like calling someone 'stupid idiot'.
"Nigger" was coined by whites to denigrate blacks--just like "Boy" and a dozen other terms. Its use by blacks is ironic, its use by whites communicates hate. Willfully refusing to accept that a word intended to communicate white hate would strike blacks differently than it strikes white, well, yeah that is racist.
Yeah, you see. I am white. I didn't coin that word. I am not even American. There is basically nothing that connects me to black slavery except the color of my skin. My family roots go back to slaves too (like roots of >99% of people). I used to use this word ironically to demean pervasive hip hop pop culture. Thankfully, I am no longer in high school and don't have to talk to people who listen to songs about gangsters and fucking bitches.
So basically, you are saying that you, and you alone, can judge people from different cultures and backgrounds on their practices because... hey, you are superior or something. Yeah, that sounds pretty racist.
I can damn well judge on FGM and other "primitive" practices as backward. Nothing is immune to criticism if the argument is valid. Granted there are many different types of cultural relativeism, but you decided by yourself to judge him as racist, I guess that means you are superior to him or something. Sounds like you're pretty racist.
No, I don't. I have no idea what part of my comment made you think so and what kind of mental jumps you've performed to come to this strange conclusion.
If you can't understand why words might mean something completely different to anyone who's got a completely different context built around it, you are either ignorant or too arrogant to care either way.
Not sure why you are being downvoted. I've seen a few comments in the last couple days that support your statement. My biggest fear about this election is the intolerant people in the country would get the wrong idea that being intolerant and bigoted is acceptable. Turns out, I might been right :/
If you don't call them out it doesn't stop them being bigots either. And with Brexit we saw just how much bigots were emboldened by the vote, thinking that it was a validation of their worldview. Hate crime in Briton went up by 60% after Brexit.
It's not that bigotry is a non-issue in these elections, it definitely is, the KKK endorsed a presidential candidate after all. The issue is that there are deeper underlying problems that are being exploited by race baiting politicians to win elections. The problem in pre-Nazi Germany, for example, was a deeply dysfunctional economy and trying to seek a scape-goat for the loss of WWI and the shame and humiliation that caused. Today the problem is largely economic inequality and a lack of economic opportunity and mobility for most people in the bottom half of the wealth distribution. Wages have stagnated while housing, college, and healthcare costs have skyrocketed. The recent recession left a huge crater in the economic histories and career developments of most folks under 30 in the form of unemployment and under-employment. Outside of the cities there hasn't been an economic recovery in the last decade. On top of that you have the opiate epidemic. It's gotten so severe that life expectancies for middle aged folks in middle America took a significant hit (due substantially to increases in suicide and deaths from alcoholism and drug overdose). All of that has nothing to do with gay marriage, Syrian refugees, or increased awareness of police brutality.
But a lot of the people who have been disadvantaged over the last few decades have been able to be convinced by demagogues that the cause of their problems is the elite establishment (especially liberals) and to capitalize on latent feelings of racism, anti-gay sentiment, etc. Make no mistake those bigots are not the entirety of the vote, but they are enough of it to swing the election. More so, as in Britain, there is a huge section of the electorate who may not be intrinsically bigoted per se but is perfectly content to sit around and run in a pack with true bigots and to support candidates and policies that will rollback progress in racial, gender, and sexual orientation equality. Sufficiently advanced indifference to issues of racial equality is indistinguishable from bigotry.
You're right that you can't fix this by calling everyone who voted for these things bigots, almost certainly not. But ignoring that aspect doesn't lead to a good outcome either. It's necessary to fix the underlying economic problems while at the same time maintaining a hard line on driving forward to improve equality, enfranchisement, etc.
Really shocks me that this wasn't obvious to people post-Brexit. I was a remain voter who was shocked by that result but this win has been obvious to me for a long time after that.
Calling leave voters racists achieved nothing and only strengthened their views. It was obvious when Trump voters appropriated the term Deplorables that personal attacks were going to fail. All you did was cause the polls to not reflect the final vote because people would say Hilary when asked but put an X next to Trump in private.
No it's not. They are merely two data points. Look at Germany. I guarantee you Merkel is going to be reelected next year.
Okay, the AFD is going to gain some power but it is outright impossible for them to win the election. But this isn't just about the AFD. What the experts and the media forced down the throats of the people is that there is no alternative to what's currently going on. SPD, Grüne, Linke, FDP don't even need to bother finding a Chancellor candidate.
To be fair, Merkel's policies are fairly centrist compared to the usual CDU/CSU rhetoric and ever since the WASG split the SPD has been more center than left, too.
Merkel is also relatively popular with many non-CDU/CSU voters because her policies all in all have been very moderate. She's generally perceived as very static despite having had to deal with the economic crisis, the refugee situation and now Brexit.
The rise of the AfD is largely a result of conservatives (who probably would have voted CDU/CSU otherwise) being upset with Merkel's handling of the refugee situation. The far left still hates her because she's a conservative, the far right hates her because she's too liberal. She's in the sweet spot where her policies are just balanced enough nobody can propose any sane alternatives that don't sound like almost exactly what she's been doing and any criticism either sounds petty or hyperbolic.
The problem for the SPD is that they alienated their leftist demographic under Schröder (leading to the rise in popularity of the Linke) and later with the coalition government aside the CDU/CSU. Aside from traditional party loyalists they're now directly competing with the CDU/CSU for conservative voters.
The only thing that concerns me is that the CSU is taking a lesson from the revival of the AfD (which was pretty much doomed to fail when the Euro crisis waned but was rekindled by the refugee situation) and is now spouting even more populist xenophobic rhetoric than usual. Considering how much disproportionate influence the CSU traditionally holds in the Union, this might spell trouble for the CDU internally.
As an anecdote: I would never have voted for the CDU (I've previously voted for Linke and the Pirate Party) but unless one of the other parties surprises me with a great candidate, I would probably vote to re-elect Merkel.
And let's not forget that the GamerGate fiasco shared a lot of things in common with Brexit and Trump's presidency in how the media covered it too. The media tried to attack people over and over while painting those it disagreed with as bigots, and it worked about as poorly then as it did with this election and Trump supporters.
But no, same general pattern occurred with both Brexit and Trump, with similar results.
This is exactly the moral of the story. If you want to blame somebody for Trump, blame yourselves. Democracy, especially in the US is ruled by consensus. If 30% of the people are extremely opposed to something, like gay marriage, you cannot shove it down their throats. You cannot disregard their feelings and opinions. You just have to swallow it and move on. Because if you don't, somebody will take advantage of your foolishness.
And you know what? Eventually that changed. It takes time. The approach the left has been taking lately is to make sweeping changes that a lot of people aren't comfortable with RIGHT NOW OR ELSE YOU'RE A BIGOT AND YOU DESERVE TO HAVE YOUR LIFE RUINED. For a large portion of the population it was just too much, too fast and they had enough.
Well, that's the social side of it. The rest of the election was about economic factors.
Perfect example: Brendan Eich, former CEO of Mozilla, who was perfectly competent but fired for having donated to a gay or non-gay cause (I don't remember which one). This kind of opinion dictatorship has to end.
I was actually supportive (in the "I upvoted and retweeted stuff" sense, because god forbid anyone gets out of their chair over politics) of the calls for his promotion to CEO being reversed at the time because it was my understanding that the decision was made against the will of many Mozilla employees and that they felt he could not accurately reflect the standards Mozilla tried to stand for due to his personal beliefs.
But the more I learned about it, the more I realized how the narrative was shaped by people outside of Mozilla being offended on behalf of others (although there were apparently one or two displeased employees).
That was also the last time I took online moral outrage serious. It doesn't matter whether it's SJWs shaming supposed racism/sexism/homophobia/transphobia or the religious right shaming supposed anti-Christians/Satanists. The outrage is almost always overblown and rarely justified.
Sometimes there's some truth to a particular story but if the leading narrative paints someone as unambiguously evil, it's almost always a complete fabrication.
I agree. I am refraining from commenting elsewhere in this thread because I really just don't know WHO I would piss off, and this alias is tangentially tied to my IRL identity.
Self-censorship is a sneaky, evil, corrupting beast.
You do realize we fought a civil war, right? And it's universally agreed that the people who were pro-slavery, against the female vote, etc were total bigots who deserved to lose as soon as possible.
The fact that the bad guys can hold out for a while before losing doesn't cease to make them the bad guys.
We didn't fight a civil war to ban slavery, we fought a civil war because a bunch of states seceded from the Union.
They were seceding proactively to protect slavery which was in their mind threatened; we weren't fighting the war to ban slavery but to prevent them from leaving.
> And you know what? Eventually that changed. It takes time. The approach the left has been taking lately is to make sweeping changes that a lot of people aren't comfortable with RIGHT NOW OR ELSE YOU'RE A BIGOT AND YOU DESERVE TO HAVE YOUR LIFE RUINED. For a large portion of the population it was just too much, too fast and they had enough.
Originally ,that was what the conservatives side supposed to be about: consistent small changes to society that can be rolled back, to make sure that the result works.
Viewing in that lense, things like constitutional originalist makes sense since the justices are essentially just saying "if you to change things, go through the whole amendment process", which is slow and stable.
I'm not sure if the changes can be attributed to either the left or right, but the result is that the left is now trying to make sweeping changes, the right turned into a rose-tinted extreme that goes "past is better".
I'm sorry I don't want to sacrifice my life and dreams because some people are slow learners. But it's OK, because the next generation will not suffer. /s
The US is about 10-50 years behind modern democracies when it comes to many social issues and policies, as well as governance. It's time for some change. I guess that's what a lot of Trump voters actually voted for (also Obama 8 years go), but different people have different change in mind.
In my opinion the main issue here is that only 4% (roughly) of population is LGBT and the 96% have no right to tell them who to sleep with or marry. It is none of their business.
What is being "shove[d] down their throats" because my sister fell in love with a woman and wants to make a family with that person?
Stopping her from doing that is throat-shoving. Her freedom to make her life with a particular someone doesn't harm anybody. _You_ cannot disregard _her_ feelings.
I'm sorry about the situation. I really am. But this not being normal has been the norm for thousands of years. Thinking you can change it now, in a decade, is naïve, and worse, it is arrogant. Calling people who don't want gay marriages biggots will just deepen the divide, and this is exactly what has been happening for a lot of time now - shaming, lecturing and ironically, complete disregard for the differing opinions. It is what it is and it's unfortunate but they are more and they are fanatics. Humans are animals. If you challenge them, prepare for the duel.
Grew up in the US. I'm a minority. I think this is the only time in my life I've ever felt like I didn't belong in America.
Tonight a large portion of the country confirmed that the US is for whites. That it's not a melting pot. This demographic has been angry for a generation because they've felt like their culture, their socio-economic status and way of life is slipping away and this election (after 8 years of a black president), the line in the sand would be drawn. The numbers don't show any division in voting based on class, but an entire chunk of whites (women, men, making under or over 100k+ a year, college education or not), all voting for Donald Trump.
I don't know what the future looks like now for America.
I'm a white Trump voter in flyover country. You belong in America as do all Americans. This was a push back against an out of touch corrupt elite in Washington and mass immigration. Not all immigration, but the massive increases of the past several decades. Yes, we do want to preserve the culture - not white culture but American culture. I fully expect that Trump will reach out and moderate. If not, there's always another election that's just two years away.
I'm a third-generation American, with family that immigrated from Eastern Europe in the 1900s to escape anti-semitism. I'm Jewish, my wife isn't. Her family is Scottish, English and German. She had a Cuban-American step dad. Our wedding was equal parts Jewish, Cuban, and White Anglo-Saxon Protestant. A conga line and the Hava Nagila... why not?
We've lived in towns big and small, in FL, GA, CA, and NC. We have families all over the US. Relatives who are millionaires and relatives who live in trailer parks.
It goes w/o saying that our respective families have very different ideas of the American experience.
Besides our differing families, because this is a country of immigrants, every place I visit in the U.S. is a bit different. Even within NC we can't even agree on a single style of BBQ. At the state fair the other day, I had a Cuban egg-roll (the innards of a Cuban sandwich deep fried inside a Chinese egg-roll ... genius!)
I recently learned that literally within the Koreatown portion of L.A. has sprung up a Little Bangladesh. And you know what, those immigrants will only contribute to the great melting pot that is America.
So I'm really at a loss to describe a single American culture, much less one that is under threat from today's immigrants.
I'm not just talking about what sports and music people like as being the foundation of culture.
Culture includes more important things. Just one example is casual corruption, like having to pay off the police for phony offensives. That's common in the western hemisphere south of the U.S. and many other places on the globe.
Individual immigrants as fellow human beings are fantastic and welcome. Problems arise when you try to integrate too many people as a large block from disparate societies too fast.
Problems arise when you try to integrate too many people as a large block from disparate societies too fast.
I grew up in Miami. I lived through the Mariel boatlift. And I just don't think that's what this election was about. The democratic party has ignored blue collar workers for too long. That's what this was mostly about.
I think many minorities are terrified this morning just because of your answer. Because when we peel back the rhetoric behind opposition to illegal immigration among many people (which is a legitimate position), we find opposition to the legal immigration that changed the racial fabric of America after 1965.
I'm Indian-American - my parents likely would not have ever been able to immigrate to America if the racist, pre-Hart-Cellar quota laws were still in effect.
and if he does what he's said and re-implements stop and frisk and every non-white citizen has to frequently deal with the indignity of being searched all the time?
Your sentiment while delightful isn't in line with the sort of policies Trump has been promoting during his campaign.
But he wants that authority, and has tremendous power as a republican POTUS with 2 or even 3 SCOTUS picks, a republican congress, and a republican senate.
This is indicated by his repeated attacks on Clinton for having been a politician for 30 years and not fixing, well, everything. He is an autocrat.
One can only hope that he subsides his autocratic ambitions or that there are still some hurdles left in place that prevent him from becoming the American Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
Ok, non-white writing here. I've never been stopped and frisked and neither have most of my non-white friends. And it certainly doesn't happen "all the time", at least to me in my part of town. Although anecdotal, admittedly.
I'm just reminded of a story shared in New York in the 80's where a teacher asked his mostly 14-15 year old African American class if they had been stopped and frisked and every single one of them held their hand up.
> Yes, we do want to preserve the culture - not white culture but American culture.
I respect that that's how you think about it, and maybe that's even how Trump thinks about it; but I don't think you can credibly make such a blanket statement about Trump voters in general. There are still people in America who believe American culture is white American culture.
The arguments of the more moderate Brexit voters sounded similar to yours, but after the referendum they found out that an uncomfortably large number of their allies really are deeply bigoted. That in itself doesn't make their point invalid, but they can't claim that their opinion defines the whole movement.
I think that if you actually articulate in great detail what it is that you think comprises American culture, as something which is distinct from white culture and is threatened by immigration, you'll find that you are actually talking about white culture.
But, aren't you also from an immigrant family? Isn't 99% of the country from immigrant families? I genuinely don't understand how a country that is built on and by immigration hates immigrants so much.
I think this attitude drove more people to trump. The real reasons most people voted for him were things like party loyalty, they dislike Hillary, perceived him as anti establishment etc etc.
People like you took the narrative from the big news networks of the mass numbers of bigots and racists and just ran with it. Problem was that story smelled like bull, which pushed more people to his camp.
The extreme/regressive left was too busy frothing about white tyranny to pay attention to the true tyrant, Trump, "he'll never get voted in." At the same time, the majority of that vote was being called names. Hillary made the mistake of constructing her lies in order to gain favor with the loudest crowd.
I'm very far left and completely agree with you. The American left is an abysmal disgrace in terms of what I consider social progress. Instead of attempting to spread progressive thinking, the American left spreads hatred and name calling.
Next time try making friends and not enemies. More of this[1] and less of this[2].
> They reacted the exact same way any political party would react against their opponent.
No, no they didn't. "any political party" does not react against their opponent winning an election by spending 8 years denying they have any legitimacy and stonewalling them entirely.
> sure they could have, by not voting for him (Obama)
Where do you get the idea that the people who voted for Trump also voted for Obama?
The closest she came to it was an aide's campaign memo suggesting pointing out Obama's "lack of american roots" (in the sense that much of his boyhood was spent outside mainland US). It was not about doubting Obama's citizenship or birthplace, and that line of attack wasn't even used in the campaign.
Haven't been reading the Podesta emails eh? The Clinton campaign was polling on how effective it would be to criticize Obama because "Obama's father was a Muslim and Obama grew up as a Muslim in the world's most populace Islamic country."
Even Obama agrees with me here. He apparently confronted Clinton about it in 2007.
As much as the media tried to make this about racism vs liberalism, I don't think it was really about that.
Yes, it's a snub that the pro-Trump wing doesn't give a shit about women and minorities and LGBT. That much is clear. No matter what, to vote Trump you have to see certain people as "acceptable losses".
And yes, Trump is backed by a lot of vitriolic racists.
But the key thing, I think, that won Trump the presidency was anti-globalism, and the fact that he's a gigantic asshole.
Americans wanted an asshole. Pro-Trump voters see him like Apple saw Steve Jobs - the guy who cut through the BS and saw simple problems with simple solutions, and demanded that those problems be fixed.
Faced with the problem of America's increasingly anemic industrial jobs, the political wing and the press collectively said "we're okay with this". Trump said insane things like making Apple build stuff in the USA and pulling out of trade agreements.
Faced with terrorism in Europe, the press and the left collectively said "well there's not much we can do about that, we have to take care of the refugees". Trump said "screw the refugees, I'm closing the border and kicking out the muslims".
Trump offers simple, brutal solutions to complex problems. His solutions are generally pretty stupid, but they sound like solutions, which is better than the complex rationalizations we hear from everyone else.
This also explains why his opinion on the middle-east oscillates between "let's just pull out and let them kill each other" and "let's just carpet-bomb the crap out of ISIS". Simple, brutal solutions.
My dad's family in India are very anti-gay, anti-muslim and they are elated at the result. When my aunt came for my wedding, she asked "Why is an African the president?" There's a amount of people inside and outside of the US that think it's only for whites, not knowing America's history or its current diversity.
I think you need to let things sink in a bit. There often seems to be an element of panic with the losing side of these presidential elections, but life goes on.
Ignoring the characters involved in this campaign, at a basic level, this sort of party switch is pretty normal, as there is often a party change once the President completes his second term. Its a pendulum swinging from left to right and back again. Reagan to Bush was an exception, but we know what happened with his re-election attempt. So, in 4 or 8 years, I wouldn't be surprised if things moved back to the left.
> Grew up in the US. I'm a minority. I think this is the only time in my life I've ever felt like I didn't belong in America.
It's not that simple.
There was a large section of the Indian-American community that voted Trump; presumably this was also true of "non-minority" minorities like assorted Asians and Jews.
Did he outperform the 70-30 Clinton support that polls were showing for Indian, 75-20 from Jewish, and 70-20 non-Indian Asian peoples that support that polls had him at? He won because of non-collection educated Caucasians, with whom he outperformed models by 15% points.
I don't know; don't think there is a ethnic post-vote poll out. It's also not clear how accurate the pre-poll figures were.
What follows is a long-winded take on why I think Trump would've enjoyed support, and generally about Indo-US relations.
(TLDR; Trump is actually an anti-"White" vote for Indians, in many ways.)
India is going through a phase of sticking it to the "liberal elite" too; this might just be a pullback of that sentiment (note: those who are US citizens don't care much about immigration).
Spend sometime at Indology depts. in American universities, and you'll understand the derision the American elite have towards Indian-Americans. This is the place that gives rise to people that inform Americans about India, and is generally full of people who hate our kind (for various time-varying excuses); this even while they help digest cultural things like Yoga and claim it to be their own creation. Indeed, if you read about India in WaPo, NyT and their ideological retainers in India - sites like Scroll.in, Indian Express & The Hindu (yes, what an oxymoron) - it's not hard to infer that Hindus in India are equivalent to "White trash" of the US.
Media in native languages are, thankfully, are more grounded, and don't sell-off so pathetically; thus, given the source of their Indian experience, even the likes of Noam Chomsky come off as colonial missionaries (well he does speak like one). Chomsky's Indian friends are all members of the Anglical elite, most of whom believe either that the British state/Mughal empire was the high-point of the Indic civilization. Neither Chomsky, nor the liberal elite of the West, would ever dream of doing that with the native Americans. This of course is assuming Chomsky himself isn't intrisically biased (like the liberal hero, John S. Mill), which is would appear unlikely if you've heard him talk about Indic linguistic traditions.
Ironically, support for Trump amongst Indians likely stemmed from the fact that Hillary was seen as being too keen on pushing the evangelical agenda in India. This in India, is aligned well with that of the cultural Marxists, who are more akin to the Conquistadors of South America and the Whites in apartheid S.Africa, than to Liberals in the US (it's a bit more complicated, since there is no "race" per se). USAID and assorted Western NGOs generally run by this crowd [1], are seen with a lot of suspicion, since most of them are extremely powerful in what is essentially a vestige of the British colony. Much as in Russia & China, they are seen essentially (and correctly IMO) as instruments of the US State dept. [2].
The way forward ? No one knows. It's really quite difficult. One's own country is essentially a Labour factory for the Anglo-sphere; yet, one wants to stick to the vestiges of a dying culture, but not so much that it might make it necessary to return to that dirt poor nation, and face the realities of bringing change. (I sympathize with this bunch.) Not surprisingly, no one that matters, no matter their political inclination, wants India to become anything more than a periphery of the Anglosphere; if Trump adopts the old British understanding of keeping away Bible-bashers (because the Indian state lacks the will) everything will be good and dandy for this crowd. India may even become an honorary member of NATO, now that Phillipines and Malaysia are breaking up with the US. This is essentially what has been in the making (and continues to be) for more than two decades.
There are other sides to it too. There are attempts to ally with the Jewry, partly because one's past appears to be the others' future, partly due to the shared bad experience with Islam. It's not clear what the end goals of all these state/non-state actors (unlike say Israel) are, to be honest. India is very strange, and in ways that are very alien to other nations in Asia.
Who knew that not paying any taxes, asking your "second amendment people" to finish off your opponent, and using your position of power and authority to sexually assault people could lead to becoming the most powerful person in the free world.
Here's the thing: Trump would have won by a wider margin if he had a clean tax history and wasn't on tape bragging about groping women. But, if you take away his early, inflammatory statements about (illegal?) Mexican immigrants, I think the net results might be fewer votes, but only because those comments seems to propel his media coverage. Trump was great for ratings, and frankly will continue to be. It's been a rich ride if you're CNN and FOX. But also, I think left-leaning media wanted him to be the candidate, because they though he embodied the "racist Republican" characterization Democrats always had in their playbook. I'm not sure if overt racism was a net vote-getter though.
Speaking of free media coverage... Citizens United, a.k.a unfettered super-pac spending seemed to play no part in this election. I think Clinton and her supporters outspent Trump in every measurable way.
>>"Not paying taxes"
He did it legally by exploiting (hacking) the loopholes. But is he responsible for having those loopholes? He is just acting like any other smart human. Just like us humans who found fossil fuels and irresponsibly burn those off.
I agree with your points, but I take issue with this statement:
> We live in the darkest of times
You're posting your individual opinion on an internet forum, accessible only with an internet connection, a computer and electricity, and you did so presumably from a place of warmth and comfort.
I do not think you have any understanding, historically or geographically, of what a dark time to be alive might be.
There were times and there were, and are, places, in our world, where you would have been ostracised, physically abused or even killed for expressing your opinion in this manner.
There was a time when you would not have wasted the last oil in your lamp to pen down some little epistle of your small disappointment at the political goings-on around you.
There are places today where there is no internet, even no electricity. You could have been born as many other people alive today and be in a much worse position than you are in.
You could have been born centuries ago, and may already have been killed in war, or by less civilised people more inclined to scavenging in the absence of a system of government or a reliable network of employers and payment fulfilment.
An orange, hypocritical, potentially bigoted/racist/sexist fatcat and chronic bullshitter has been elected to office. Someone who has no obvious qualification to 'have a finger in the nuclear button' or to preside over an economy that dictates the fortunes of millions of people, domestically and internationally.
Which, ultimately, makes him rather similar to his predecessors. No one is qualified to wield the power he finds himself with now. Very rarely are humans rational, and quite often it is the irrationality of a typical human being that precipitates the humane or emotional choices, while it is often the rational and pragmatic decision to pull the trigger.
Make no mistake: Donald Trump is not the only racist or sexist to sit in the oval office. His predecessors simply did not yell it to the reporters because it would have been unwise one or two decades ago.
Today, it was precisely the aggressive cultivation of mixed press that won him the election through increased exposure of a perceived decisiveness and demur character aligning with the electorate.
Hillary did not evolve, and so she lost. She would have been better for the country—as it appeared to be 24 hours ago—but it's a different country than anybody realised or wanted to realise.
Brexit was only the beginning. But do not mistake a few steps backwards for the 'darkest time' — such a millennial naïveté and sense of entitlement and ignorance is a very clear reflection of a problem in contemporary society that does indeed need to be addressed.
Trump may be a monster, Brexit may be a daft move, but they are realities brought on by real complaints and issues from real people. They don't stop being real people just because they didn't attend college or move from the pit to the office to the video conference—and the fact that they were not able to make the transition from dying industries is proof that there has been an issue in society in need of attention.
I did not vote for either but the wrongdoings of Clinton, most of which aren't just empty claims but actual shady events she was involved in, greatly outweigh Trump's. This election is just an embarrassment no matter how you look at it.
Let's see, which should I pick for this particular occasion of encountering this fallacy... we've got the US housing crisis, US war crimes and torture, NSA spying... hmm so many choices.
He made his money within a society. Money is not necessarily adding value (increasing the pie), it is also just shifted around. If his income were distributed more equally between many others who would instead pay taxes, the amount of taxes would be far, far higher.
It pains me to see HN serving pages so slowly, so I'm going to try an experiment and bury the current thread for a minute or two. Don't worry, we'll restore it or an equivalent; momentous stories like this one (or Brexit) are exceptions to the general rule against politics here. I just want to see if not having to render 2000 comments so often will let us catch a breath.
Edit: ok, that definitely helped. I think the easiest solution might be to post a different story, let that one make the front page, and link to this thread from there. The WaPo article is a bit old at this point anyhow.
If you'd like to be a good citizen—and what would be a better time for that?—then please log out to read HN today, unless you want to comment. Then we can serve you from cache and HN's single-core Racket process will creak slightly less under the strain.
I still don't get it much (not a web developer). The only customization that I see is probably in the top bar. Can nothing be done that the page contents are still loaded from the cache but the top bar is loaded separately and customized for logged in users?
Sure, it can be. You'd either need to cache the portion without the top bar (so you still need to generate some HTML), or load the same page for everyone, and then do an AJAX request for the top bar, for example. Each has its pros and cons.
Both of these increase complexity though, so they may not have done either.
Complexity shouldn't be that big an argument for a large and influential site like HN. Adding partial template caching is not that complex, definitely not for silicon valley haxx0rs.
So as a European ... Clinton didn't spend enough time in the Upper Midwest expecting to carry those states, but Trump had an actual message for them (NAFTA, etc.) while Hillary didn't, and they don't care that he is racist and sexist, they want their jobs back, so the election was called by a 40+ white demo in an economically depressed region just like old Middle England called Brexit. About right?
TBH I don't think there was anything Clinton could've done to alter this election result, other than not being female and (possibly) not getting involved in so many scandals beforehand. This was a widespread popular-vote miss: Clinton lost across a large number of states (PA, WI, MI, FL, NC) that she had polled ahead in, and even in ones she carried (like NH, ME, or MN) the margin of victory was much less than expected. It seems like a large number of Americans just don't like the vision of America that Hillary Clinton represents.
For the sake of you, me, and all other women out in the world, please don't let Clinton being a woman let the first thing that comes to mind. Your reasoning after that is much more sound and argued. But reinforcing the separation of sexes can only help men. Look at Western Europe: our gender is not even considered, so please don't let people consider it. It can only turn negative.
Keep strong, friend.
I'm confused by this response (not the OP). Do you think that they were saying Clinton's being a woman would make her a worse president?
I took it to mean that there are a decent-sized group of Americans who do believe that (probably not including the OP), and as a result nothing she could have done would have won her those votes.
I don't know how many people voted against Clinton because she's a woman, but I guarantee you it's not 0. As a result, it needs to be talked about. While it'd be a better world if people didn't focus on such irrelevancies, the fact that some do means we can't act like it's non-existant.
It's a great point you make. Because we're not allowed to think like that, we can't talk about it. However, we do base our decisions on it. So here we are. Still not allowed to mention the elephant in the room. PC gone mad.
She could have won it if her platform offered hope and excitement for the future of a regular person.
She offered free college education... that doesn't work very well if you quit high school to work in a factory or if you are like me and horrible at math (I can do everything else but that).
Job retraining doesn't work very well because many people train for the same thing. One great NPR story had a person who retrained in HVAC but he said that around 100 other people in the plant trained for the same thing unless if people move they need some sort of manual labor job.
People who worked in a factory are unlikely to start building websites, apps, manage databases, go into business management etc... they need another factory job or a basic income.
> (possibly) not getting involved in so many scandals beforehand
I don't think there's any "possibly" involved here.
While I'm no fan of Sanders, I honestly feel like he could have swept the floor with Trump solely based on the fact that he has an impeccable background and seems like a genuinely nice guy. Instead, the DNC shut out Sanders and used dirty tactics to ensure that Clinton got the nomination. That galvanized a non-negligble number of the young people in my social circle against her.
Well, we have Strache, Le Pen, Farage, Wilders, Orban, Petry,... And we sure aren't as economically depressed as rural USA. Worse - we have unstable times ahead and people will vote for these populists even more. And even worse - a climate change denier as POTUS exactly at the worst possible time.
You cannot ignore entire demographics - working class, uneducated etc - and not expect consequences. The Westminster bubble acted as if only London and the SE existed. Clinton and to be fair, most of the political establishment, have been in favour of free trade and NAFTA and ignored the consequences.
In 2012 Mitt Romney lost Ohio, Florida, Iowa, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, which Trump now won, some solidly, some barely.
With no major demographic shift there, seems also fair to assume a good portion of the voting-age population in those states saw no noticeable improvement in the past 4 years.
Ohio, Pennsylvania, etc. are traditionally Democratic states, but it's a region Trump spent a lot of time targeting with anti-globalist messages around the decline of domestic industry.
The predicted safe margin in the other direction, the narrow win, the demographic stats, the issues on the table ... it's all highly reminiscent of how I experienced Brexit.
Florida and North Carolina were considered competitive or "tossup" states, while several of the upper Midwestern states were considered fairly safe Democrat territories, probably because they were historically dominated by unionized manufacturing workers. That latter assumption has proved to be very unsafe, and it's become apparent that many of those formerly-reliable Democrat voters have switched sides, at least for this election.
That catchphrase originated from a campaign that took place during an actual economic recession. The current overall state of the economy was not a decisive factor in this election, though perceptions or fears about it might have been.
Call Trump what you will, but he played the media like Hendrix. They took the troll-bait and reported every outrageous soundbite gleefully, all in pursuit of a few clicks and ad-bucks. Meanwhile, Trump gained more and more of a platform and eventually established a cult of personality.
Given all the barefaced lies told during the Brexit campaign and the US campaign it does lead to questions about democracy, i.e. should the average man on the street really decide?
To be sure I'm not advocating Communism but perhaps up until 20 years ago the lack of social media helped contain outright lies and extreme views, perhaps with people asking the intellectual(s) in their social circles about candidates. There was also the social engineering aspect of TV soaps (e.g. featuring gay characters to make homosexuality more accepted). Social media has done away with that and allows anyone to broadcast to the world.
The media report the lies and it's impractical to research everything politicians say. Even if someone reports that the lie was a lie, by then the damage is done. Trump played this game all the way through. He knew what he said would be reported far more than the accuracy of the statements.
This result raises a lot of questions, few of which I suspect will be answered and will lead to even fewer changes I imagine.
I've never been in favor of democracy. We live in a world where specialization is a requirement to function. Politics really shouldn't be any different.
I know a lot about cybersecurity. When it comes to encryption, cyber warfare, anything cryptocurrency, you want me voting because believe me, I know more than 99.9% of the US population on those topics. It's an informed vote.
But for education, immagration, healthcare, gun law, it'd be dishonest to say I'm informed. And people who think it's my duty to be informed are being unrealistic. The number of significant issues make being fully informed a full time job. I'm not ashamed to not know what Aleppo is. I recognize that it's important and would like to yeild my vote to someone who knows more than I do.
There are other topics like energy and drugs where I would consider myself well informed, but perhaps just well informed enough to want something stupid. Should I be voting on those topics? Honestly probably not.
Hence we should form alliances with people who we judge to be experts in their respective fields, and pursue a shared platform. Oh wait, we just invented the political party system.
>> should the average man on the street really decide? <<
As opposed to who? We had only land owning white males voting early in the Republic. They were educated and well acquainted with the issues. They voted their interests, which was those of land owning white males.
Limit the election to whatever group you prefer, and they will vote for their own interests.
Well that's the question isn't it. Power corrupts. It is and always has been the way. At the moment democracy is the fairest system we have. But it doesn't contain any safeguards against electing extreme, populist candidates who may be damaging to their country and wider world.
I wonder if a parliamentary system functions as something of a safeguard against this. In a parliamentary system, a hypothetical Trump party might have been able to get a sizable number of seats, but probably not an outright majority (since many of the people who voted for him hated his guts, they just didn't think they had a better alternative), so he wouldn't be able to control the government without forming a coalition with another party that could act as a moderating influence.
> Given all the barefaced lies told during the Brexit campaign and the US campaign it does lead to questions about democracy, i.e. should the average man on the street really decide?
I think (I hope) that the problem isn't the average man, but rather our system of democracy itself. Currently, there is not any reason to do the hard work it requires to become informed, because with millions of other voters (not to mention the winner-takes-all electoral college) your vote literally does not matter. Contrast that situation with a twelve person jury, where the jurors spend weeks and sometimes months to decide, gathering every bit of relevant information, and letting each side argue in as fair a way as possible. Then the jurors spend days in discussions with their peers, often agonizing over their decisions. These are regular people, who usually make good decisions, because they know that their decision matters. Contrast this with the voter who gets all of their information from a limited number of biased sources and then makes their voting decision on a whim, and who can blame them when there is no probability of their vote changing the outcome? Elections ought to be more like juries, with a smaller number of voters randomly selected from the population and then thoroughly educated on the issues.
> should the average man on the street really decide?
I've always thought the issue was how big the street was. I trust the average man on the street in my town. I would be _very_ suspect of elites running a city of 50k.
But at scale... Personally I have no fucking clue how India runs itself.
I would trust something like the United States of New England to elect good, representative leaders. Maybe that's where we'll end up in 100 years.
It's not the media, it's the Republican Party. They had a tumour growing inside them and they failed to take strong action early enough to cut it out. Once Trump was the candidate for a mainstream party with an electoral machine full of people who live to serve the machine, it was too late for the Party leadership to get rid of him. The party machine went into automatic. At that point, for a Republican to reject him would be to admit that their beloved party was deeply flawed and capable of making a terrible mistake. That's a big challenge if you deeply believe in your party. If they can be wrong about this, what else could they be wrong about?
That wasn't enough though. Trump representing a mainstream party implicitly made him a viable choice to vote for beyond the Republican core. If he's the Republican candidate, he must be a valid choice that can be taken seriously, right? He can't be a joke.
Finally a big problem here in the U.K. with Brexit was people assuming the vote would fail and not bothering to vote remain. I wonder how big a factor that was in this case especially as Hilary was ahead in the polls for so long.
Many previously Democrat voters switched to Trump, but without a heavy base of reliable Republican voters the swing voters that supposedly decide elections, on their own, wouldn't have decided anything.
Comedians appear to have been more perceptive about Trump's appeal and Clinton's weaknesses than the media: Scott Adams and Dave Chappelle both made some salient pints this cycle. Mainstream media:0; reclusive comics:2.
I personally believe Clinton was almost uniquely qualified as the only democrat that could lose this election from Trump. The political establishment underestimates the underlying resentment.
"The winners know that they’re winning but have been very slow to realize that the losers know that they’re losing and are enraged about the fact."
The linked article, put in hash words but look beyond that, was written after the Brexit poll, but it is as relevant here:
"Corrupt elites always try to persuade people to continue to submit to their dominance in exchange for protection from forces that are even worse. That’s their game. But at some point, they themselves, and their prevailing order, become so destructive, so deceitful, so toxic, that their victims are willing to gamble that the alternatives will not be worse, or at least, they decide to embrace the satisfaction of spitting in the faces of those who have displayed nothing but contempt and condescension for them.
"There is no single, unifying explanation for Brexit, Trumpism, or the growing extremism of various stripes throughout the West, but this sense of angry impotence — an inability to see any option other than smashing those responsible for their plight — is undoubtedly a major factor. As Bevins put it, supporters of Trump, Brexit, and other anti-establishment movements “are motivated not so much by whether they think the projects will actually work, but more by their desire to say FUCK YOU” to those they believe (with very good reason) have failed them"
Very true. Allow me to add the fact that it has been shown (via wikileaks) that Hillary and the DNC conspired in the primaries process, specially against Bernie Sanders, invalidating her even more in the final voting.
Also this wasn't as much a vote _for_ Trump it was a vote _against_ Hillary.
The Democrats had this election in their pocket, if it only wasn't for their corruption. They should have really stopped and paid attention to what happened with Bernie Sanders. That wasn't just something to shrug off, it should have been a stopping moment. I believe Bernie would have had no problem winning against Trump.
Also I really liked the media in this campaign, I watched it for entertainment. Some channels thought they were helping by pretty much becoming an off-shoot for DNC and Hillary's campaign. But it blew up in their face, because people saw through that, so it had the opposite effect.
Yes, I agree completely with what you say. It is my impression that picking a fight against Trump by someone like Hillary is a poor choice. There is no way of beating him in its own ground, so Hillary was a poor choice. Someone like Bernie Sanders would have been a good rival because he is not involved (as far as we know) in dirty secrets or messy politics.
I'm surprised by how many of my non-US friends are calling Americans 'Stupid' right now on social media for voting for Trump.
I think that the Trump victory actually shows the opposite; that Americans are smart enough to think for themselves regardless of what the media tells them.
They got to the meat of the information without buying into all the spin that the media put around it.
I strongly disagree with several things that Trump stands for but I think that overall this is a really good outcome. It shows that the people are still in control - Not the media, not the celebrities, not the elites.
You don't think this is the results of years of twisted information by news outlet like fox news and friends? I mean we're talking mostly white people living in the countryside voting to curb illegal immigration. We're talking about fairly unwealthy people voting for a tax-evading billionaire because they relate to him as a simple man. The media has a role to play for sure, but it's not as simple as "at least people aren't spoon fed left-leaning media bullshit."
It shouldn't be surprising though, because outsiders would only know as much as the media tells them. They have no vested interest, like the citizens do, in making an informed decision
While I never ever wanted Trump because of the geopolitical situation in eastern Europe, I can understand Americans who voted for him.
You can't turn a dead eye on half of the population, call them stupid, racist, bigoted (heck, some even argue here democracy doesn't work and the people who voted shouldn't be able to vote, go figure.) and then expect the worst habitual liar, a psycho candidate to win.
It was literally the easiest elections in the history for the Democrats, but somehow they were able to fuck up. Let's see what the future brings.
From a personal point of view, I hope Nato stays (somewhat) strong. Again, I understand the anger of your people for us, Europeans, outsourcing the defense budget to American taxpayers (while it does come with some benefits).
> I understand the anger of your people for us, Europeans, outsourcing the defense budget to American taxpayers (while it does come with some benefits).
This is not an act of altruism. US global hegemony dictates our military spending, regardless of what Europe does. We (at least the select few elite) reap the benefits of this arrangement. Hell, even the folks complaining in America aren't complaining about the money being funneled into the MIC in their district that creates good jobs to build weapons of war.
I guess I'm in strange position wanting U.S to police the world. Only because of Russia. But with Trump we will see, hopefully it's not new molotov - rippentrop.
To me this shows how hard it is to come up with good solutions for problems.
I think both Trump and Clinton know what the problems in the US are. The difference is: Trump is naming all problems but doesn't provide real solutions, Clinton is only naming problems she has a solution for.
That's why the working class votes for Trump because he is the only one who is talking about their problems.
The same is happening here in The Netherlands. Politics doesn't likes to talk about problems with immigration. Wilders does. That's why he is very popular. But just like Trump his solutions are unrealistic.
This is also why I don't think a lot is going to change in the US. The unrealistic solutions are what they are: unrealistic. So the Mexican wall is never going to be build.
The only sad outcome is that this populistic talk is dividing the nation.
There are at least two problems here: one is figuring out a solution and the other is communicating it to the general public in a politically correct manner. Perhaps if we agreed to talk in a more straightforward fashion without making it kind of a "who's going to feel offended first" contest, things would improve faster...
It is fitting I suppose that on the anniversary of the 18 Brumaire, Napolean's coup d'etat, we should get a Trump presidency.
And it doesn't end there, you need to look at the entire ticket; it is a clean sweep by the GOP who also have control of the Senate and the House. The GOP will be able to pass any legislation unimpeded, such as repealing Obamacare.
More consequentially, Trump gets to fill the Supreme Court vacancy. The effects of that will last for a generation, way beyond his presidency.
Elections have consequences, and this election has significantly shifted the political landscape.
I don't know why anyone would think he is foolish. Listening to his speech at the National Press Club a few days ago it's hard to find many things to disagree with https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ob-LJqPQEJ4
The linked article was talking about facts, a dissection of various arguments made by Thiel and Trump. Elections aren't about facts (unfortunately?), so they cannot prove anything about whether that article is right or not.
No, there is some evidence that geriatric mice sharing a circulatory system with juvenile mice achieves that end for a while. The difference between sharing a circulatory system, and getting some transfusions really can't be overstated.
Haven't read the book so I have only the vaguest idea of what that implies.
But let me be more explicit. We can have values and thoughts that don't respect success. Sometimes that may mean being made irrelevant, being killed, or even made extinct as a group. Nonetheless, until actual death occurs, we can hold those views.
To some people that is more important than anything else. I like those people. Some are successful, some are not. The universe will erase them, as it will erase us all. But to me while that thought lasts, it is valuable.
Honestly, as someone who finds the current situation a bit abhorrent, and who generally disagrees with most things I've heard come out of Thiel's mouth, there are way worse choices.
He has knowledge of the tech sector and doesn't want to ruin it, he isn't anti-science, he's gay (and thus pro-gay rights), etc.
That said, I think it's profoundly unlikely, since unless I'm not aware of it, he'd be the only supreme court justice with no legal background.
I didn't want this to happen, but I believed it would. There were a lot of signals, for those ignoring the group-think. e.g. Clinton needed a lot more help than Trump to get big crowds to her rallies, and Obama had to get involved at the last minute in allegedly "safe" states.
There is deep frustration with our economic system, which isn't being addressed. Clinton is unfortunately a very clear embodiment of the current system.
Trump is far from a perfect vessel for his messages, but he only needed to be better than Clinton, and he hit the key notes (e.g. regarding trade and jobs) over and over.
Trump won despite being massively out-spent, despite his party being against his nomination, despite the entire mainstream media being against him, despite his business "issues", and despite all the publicised gaffes and scandals. In the face of that he seems to have won significantly more of the "white women" vote than Clinton.
Anyone seriously believing he won due to bigotry etc. needs to reassess. The USA is a better country than that, and he has won convincingly.
Edit: I forgot Wall Street. Almost unanimous support for Clinton.
To be fair, money in presidential elections typically just buys exposure. In a ceaseless chase for ratings, every media source for the past two years has shown every Trump speech and event live and in whole. Even with her stash, Trump saw more airtime than Hillary.
Trump played as an outsider. And media, his own party and everyone treated him as pariah or an outsider. This just confirmed Trump's credibility in eyes of voters looking for outsiders. I'd say that's a large part of why he won.
More than a second actually. If you read both my comments, I think we agree.
The Democrats managed to persuade themselves that the public would elect the most "establishment" candidate imaginable. This after their own anti-establishment candidate had done incredibly well in the primaries (and had been polling above Trump). Books will be written about this self-delusion.
you had no argument he didn't win off bigotry. all you said was "USA is a better country than that". Too bad it isn't. Half the country is in fact uneducated racist bigots. they can have the country for 4 years and democrats can try to obstruct it.
I think you're being unfair to the people voting for Trump. Yes, some of them are racist bigots (like white supremacists groups), however Trump struck a cord with rural USA. I doubt all are racists bigots, they just have different life style, and try to defend it from further deterioration.
This Cracked podcast[1] really opened my eyes to some issues rural America faces each day. It's not that they hate Hillary, but Hillary both tells them that everything is fine, and for them things aren't fine. They see no jobs and Walmart just waltzes in and ruins small shops, sucking the money out of the rural parts.
So, if Hilary tells them America is doing fine and we need more X, it poisons both messages. Which makes some sense from that perspective. If she's lying about America doing fine, then she is lying about X being good for country as well.
yeah after sleeping on it i take it back. trump to me is essentially 1/3 Hitler, 1/3 bernie sanders, and 1/3 orangutan. I think people voted for his 1/3 bernie sanders message for infrastructure, fighting bad trade deals, and fighting the establishment, and stupid wars. This was despite the other 2/3 not because of it. Hillary on the other hand had no reason to vote FOR her only to vote against the 2/3 portion of Trump.
I hate democracy. Most voters aren't informed at all. Attractive candidates win 2.5 times more often than less attractive ones. Money and crappy 30 second ads apparently influence the outcome. First past the post voting means no one can even vote for what they really want to begin with.
It wouldn't be so bad if the president didn't have enormous power. And they aren't supposed to. But it's been growing so much over the years. Maybe now people will understand why its so important to limit it.
The true advantages of democracy are things that are rarely talked about and which people are mostly unaware. In my opinion, they are:
1. The availability of non-violent ways to push for change and seek redress.
2. A way to reliably and peacefully transition from one leader to another.
These are big problems with non-democratic governments. If people don't feel like they have a chance to change the system from within, they'll eventually resort to violence. If there isn't a widely agreed upon way to choose the next leader and transition power to them, then there will be succession struggles.
In a healthy democracy, people are encouraged to seek change politically, and the people accept the outcome whatever it may be.
As Scott Alexander put it in his Anti-Reactionary FAQ: "If you remember nothing else about the superiority of democracies to other forms of government, remember the fact that in three years, we will have a change of leadership and almost no one is stocking up on canned goods to prepare for the inevitable civil war."
Note that these advantages do not depend on making good choices. They only require the availability of choices, and widespread acceptance of the outcomes. Obviously, making good choices would be really nice, but they aren't the best feature of the system.
This is actually what troubles me most about Trump. Bad policies and terrible morals are one thing, but he directly attacked the very notion of democracy itself. All the talk of the election being rigged and perhaps not accepting the results is setting up his followers to reject the entire system, not just his opponents. And I find myself sincerely wondering if he'd willingly leave office in 2021 if he loses the next time around, or in 2025 if he wins.
No I agree. Democracy is better than monarchy. But that's a super low bar to pass. Not something to be proud of. I think there are alternative systems that are even better.
Just as a start, switching to an alternative voting system would be amazing. It's been shown that systems like approval voting are a better improvement over plurality voting, then plurality voting is over monarchy (http://rangevoting.org/UniqBest.html#HugePos). And that still works in the framework of democracy. I'd ideally like to get rid of voting entirely and replace it with something like randomly sampling representatives from the population.
You just hate crappy democracy. Actually, the U.S. isn't even a democracy anymore. If anything, Trump winning is a return to the lost democracy, although it remains to be seen whether the country will be more democratic or even less than when he became president, after he leaves office.
But I think the US model of democracy (or republic, whatever) is a pretty bad one, and the country is in a dire need of top to bottom electoral reform. But I barely even see anyone talking about this.
Also, in more democratic countries, the media is significantly more regulated during elections. For instance, they have to give all parties equal time on TV, and other stuff like that to ensure the media bias is limited.
So if you think the U.S. is a democracy, it's a dysfunctional one at best.
The country was designed initially so that the Federal branch (i.e. the remote branch) of the government was limited in its scope and power. The State and local branches of government are supposed to be the ones with the power as it pertains to everyday citizens lives. If that were really the case, people wouldn't feel as though their personal well being is so directly tied to the outcome of these national elections and, hopefully, they wouldn't end up being the circus they are today.
You hear about it talked about all the time with regards to large technology organizations. The supposed best ones have small, autonomous teams focused on their little slice of the organization, collaborating with other teams as need be while upper management aggregates the best ideas from all teams and presents those to the rest of the organization so that other team leads can decide on whether or not those ideas would work for them.
I believe the Federal branch of the government absolutely has a role to play in the success of our country, I just think we'd be better off if it was a much reduced role.
Whether or not spending actually influences elections, most politicians certainly believe it does. Or they wouldn't spend so much effort on fundraising, and wouldn't bother with the stupid ads. They clearly believe it works. Surely they know. Modern campaigns track this stuff religiously with polls, statisticians, and A/B tests. And this belief corrupts our democracy.
One example doesn't disprove it anyway. Clinton lost. But she might have lost even worse without the spending. It's impossible to say the spending had no effect. As the election was pretty close in many states, even small effects can make a world of difference.
I honestly thought the Trump presidency attempt was a big internal joke. I didn't think Trump himself believed he would become president ever.
This guy is clearly a sociopath lacking in empathy typical of the american elite and his behavior has just been rewarded. It's really troubling what this means for Americans who are not rich or white. It also troubling we celebrate wealth to an extent we do not view having an elite class of extremely selfish and self serving individuals as a problem which has directly got us to the Trump presidency.
Hilary Clinton was completely untrustworthy and tedious so the alternative was a bad choice. The democrats have themselves to blame for not taking their own policies seriously, posturing, paying lip service to the poor and unprivileged for decades, and failing completely to put up an inspiring candidate. They have supported and built the surveillance state, ignored the poor and destroyed millions of lives in the middle east.
I don't think Trump can be called a good person. His perspective on life is shaped by wealth, privilege, ego and acqusitions. It all economics and very little humanity. Some of his positions are unquestionably racist and unpleasant.
It's troubling and telling that a majority of this country thought such an individual should 'lead' them. All pretensions are off, the mask has dropped to reveal the deep ugliness within. All those smug comedians making fun of Trump look like clowns themselves.
Honestly Brexit and Trump both tell me that democracy doesn't work, because the majority of the population is undereducated, bigoted, and has absolutely no idea about how to run an economy - it makes no sense for the working class who don't understand the most basic of economic concepts to influence how the economy is run.
I hope he doesn't screw America's economy by preventing skilled immigrants coming in and helping the tech industry, and by screwing up America's free trade deals. The return of protectionist & economically idiotic policy could truly screw the US.
Well the whole reason that we have a representative democracy is that the average citizen has no idea how to run the country, so they elect more competent officials that represent their interests to do so. Obviously the flaw is that those same (on average) incompetent people are the ones who elect the leadership. But as far as I know we haven't come up with a better alternative. What do you propose then? A dictatorship? Authoritarian state?
Of course. The only downside of dictatorship is the transfer of power on the inevitable death of the dictator. Now that machines are rapidly approaching the point of being smart enough to rule humans, that downside will soon disappear.
Can you cite an example where a modern dictatorship substantially improved its subject's lives?
This kind of demeaning talk is what got us here. Most people are, by definition, of nearly average intelligence. And someone's intellect doesn't preclude them from the right to have a voice in how they are governed just because they disagree with you.
I voted for Clinton, so I'm just as disappointed as you are. Let's work to fix it, not further divide our already fractured country.
It looks like Clinton will win the popular vote, so at least part of the blame rests with quaint 18th century notions of "democracy" rather than with the electorate.
If the US was a modern, pluralist, parliamentary democracy, then Bernie Sanders, Trump, Clinton and some traditional GOP candidate may have all run at the same time. Trump would probably have never won -- or possibly, he would've not even tried, because his flavor of populism probably would've only gotten 15-20% in a multi-party system.
The general sadness is unwarranted. Trump has already toned it down in the acceptance speech. There is no better way to sedate a demagogue than to let them gain office.
There are two types of elections these days - those where candidates are career politicians that are rather moderate, and opposing parties have very similar policies. These elections are always very close, nobody gets much of a majority, and nothing is achieved. The second type is where demagogues talk a lot of nonsense with impunity, and get voted in because of vague notions about their ability to disrupt 'the system'. They usually espouse conservative, paranoid, xenophobic views. They also don't achieve anything substantial, because fundamentally, they don't see running the country as their job, their job is to win, and whatever happens after that, well who cares? The weird leadership vacuum after Brexit was a classic example of this. Trump will probably fall into this second category, but there is a small chance he could actually turn himself into effective President. The most likely outcome though is 4 years of aimlessness. I also doubt he will get 2 terms. I think as an incumbent, the advantages that helped him win this election will probably evaporate.
It was a competitive game for Trump. Election campaign was one stage (that required being aggressive). Actually running a country is another stage, so he is using a different tactic (cooperation with other politicians).
I think it boils down to Clinton not being a good candidate - she's "the establishment", a woman, and has no charisma. You can't have all three and still win.
Obama had the "handicap" of being black and "a funny name" but has plenty charisma and was seen as an outsider. Trump has charisma (for some) and is an outsider. Clinton has no redeeming quality in the eye of the electorate, even many who voted for her did so to stop Trump, not because they believed in her.
I don't care much for america. after all they are consenting adults who voted for the best candidate they had. I am more concerned about the consequences for the rest of the world.
I assume you're referring to Trump not being happy with NATO members freeloading on USA. Estonia spends >2% GDP on military [1] as the NATO guidelines say. Thus, at least in regards of Estonia, Trump should be satisfied.
That's exactly why I'm glad that Donald Trump will soon be our president. He will ensure we serve the American people before tending to the desires of other nations.
The brilliance of our republic is that the government transitions without violence -- where the loser concedes to the victor without fighting a literal war of succession. Don't let the personalities on the ballot this time around confuse you into thinking that they are the embodiment of our republic.
In four years, we'll gather and vote again, and transition peacefully again.
Oh absolutely. Democracy is sometimes seen as boring, but actually each election is a full-on revolution that realy does topple governments. One thing about the result is it kind of exposes Assange as the narcissistic batshit conspiracy nut that he really is[0].
So many blame or give credit to Trump for winning the election.
I think the real fault lies with DNC. Why were they so hell bent on having Clinton picked when Sanders excited so many young Democrats and did better in earlier polls?
Sanders vs. Trump would have seen Sanders lose by a larger margin. "Young democrats" is a tiny demographic that can't swing an election, openly embracing the "socialist" label would have "excited" a lot of people all right - to vote against him.
Please. Sanders would have played Trump in the debates like a fiddle. Trump can shout "he's a socialist!" over and over again all he want, but he wouldn't have any of his ammunition like he did against Clinton - the emails, the speeches, etc.
Sanders is old. Old people have skeletons in the closet. Sanders wasn't a big deal long enough for the press to have really dug in and started dragging those old skeletons out.
Sanders had a similar message as Trump, just a bit different flavor. That resonated with the voters. I think Sanders would have grabbed more electoral college votes but to win, no idea. Hindsight and all that
Trump and Hillary had historically high unfavourable ratings, and Bernie is quite popular. The socialist label was worn out somewhat on Obama, so it doesn't carry the same sting. He doesn't have anywhere near the baggage that Hillary does, and had policies to address some of the white working class concerns of the rust belt, and shared some of Trump's skepticism about free trade offshoring jobs. He would've gotten all of the "anyone but Trump" votes (as Hillary did), plus he had a bloc of genuinely excited voters who enthusiastically supported him till the end, potentially meaning greater turnout. Not saying he would definitely win, but in head to head polling he did better vs Trump than Hillary did.
He might have. In pre-nomination polling, Sanders did significantly better than Clinton against Trump. He'd also have gotten his share of anti-establishment voters and arguably would have brought to the table far less baggage.
"Because he can't win". He was the Democratic equivalent of Trump in that he wanted to do something radically different, but the party had their collective stuff way more together than the red team and thus wasn't so easily disrupted. They went with Hillary and figured it'd be business as usual.
Perhaps because, aside from when he was running for the nomination, Sanders isn't a Democrat! He's an Independent who tried to take control of the party (the nominee becomes the head of the party after all) - why would party insiders have any loyalty to him over Clinton?
Honestly, I doubt you'll have very much to worry about. Sure a few minor but very visible things may change, but overall nothing major is going to change in four years.
Much of what Trump want to do isn't something that the US can actually afford to implement. The worst thing Trump could do is the take the US in an isolationist direction, but that's not going to happen because it would hurt the wealthy people... like Trump.
One extremely positive thing that could come of all this is that the rest of the world starts taking more responsibility, and intervene earlier in conflicts, now that the support of the US military isn't guaranteed.
My main worry is that he'll start a disastrous war in a fit of pique. He already said he'd start a war with Iran if they made rude gestures at our sailors. If that's what he says when he's trying to win votes, what will he do once he's secure in office?
Clinton is more interventionist than I'd like, but at least her proposed interventions have some sort of thought and reasoning behind them, even if I may not agree with them.
America's greatest outcome today was their shunning of the Media. I am so proud. As a Skeptic and outsider, 95% of the media was anti trump. America made its own choice, and it has the balls to stand by it and make a success of it.
Threads here are all over the place, and I guess there's a lot that can be said in response to Trump's election. So I'll just chime in with this, which is a hasty, from-memory, partial rehash of something I posted on Facebook earlier.
If you have a problem with Trump being elected, or with our political system as it is in general, consider this old saw
"If you keep doing what you've been doing, you'll keep getting what you've been getting."
Now, full disclosure, I'm a "third party" guy (Libertarian, specifically) anyway, so I am absolutely biased, no bones about it. But I believe that part of doing something besides "what we've always done" means starting to vote for 3rd party candidates. Screw Duverger's Law, forget "lesser of two evils" voting, and quit voting out of fear. I posit that people need to start voting for candidates they support instead of voting against candidates they are afraid of.
Along with that, of course, belong efforts to switch voting systems to approval voting, or Condorcet voting, etc., as well as efforts to eliminate restrictive ballot access laws, open up the debates, etc.
Basically, we have to break up this duopoly that has been in place for 100+ years, or nothing is really going to change. Of course my hope is that all this will lead to more Libertarians in office,but even if you don't support the Libertarian viewpoint, I hope most everybody can agree that the current system isn't working as it should.
Both the BREXIT campaigners and Trump over-promised on how they will fix the financial crisis.
Neither started to deliver yet, and will be seeing what they can actually do in 2017.
It kinda does not make sense because their promises are either mutually exclusive (strict fiscal policy but spending) or do not play well with the rest of the world (tariffs and other trade restrictions which eventually would be matched on the other side).
In many smaller countries, the politicians would run a whole campaign on the disaffected feeling and over-promising on how good they will be in fixing it.
Once they were in power however, they would not achieve much and the next party would over-promise in order to get elected.
In the following years we will witness how over-promising will play with a super-power.
And in fairness to Nate, he was saying the polls were about 42 Trump 45 Clinton with ~13% undecided and those undecideds could send the election either way. With hindsight I'd say quite a few undecideds were Trump supporters who were afraid to admit it which I can understand. Just look at the reaction to Theil backing Trump with various calls for him to be fired. I can see why people kept quiet about it.
I wonder if facebook and google could've built a better model. Prediction based on polling doesn't seem as reliable compared to what people post to their newsfeed or search for.
A major problem is that the electoral system is chaotic. In the sense of chaos theory: small deviations in input (votes) lead to large differences in the result (electoral college votes). The pollsters were off only be like 2-3% or so, and a bit the distribution.
Also, it appears Trump Supporters were often too ashamed to be honest to pollsters.
Absolutely the most depressing political event of my life. I would have generally written off an outcome like this as a product of personal mosanthropy and pessimism, only held in check by past results that surprised me in a good way.
While my filter bubble isn't solid enough to not understand this, I truly wish it wasn't the case.
Big data and big polling (Nate Silvers) took a major credibility hit in this election. People will be studying this for years.
Of course, it's not that big data itself was to blame, just the interpretation of it. Nate, not sure what to tell you but that was a significant miss in this election, going all the way back into the primaries.
Fivethirtyeight said the odds for Clinton where about 70-30 and trending narrower. Given how close the final win was I wouldn't really call that a miss. The miss where the models that where calling it 90+ for Clinton
And Silver had repeatedly stated that the reasons the odds were higher for trump in his models than in others was the much larger number of undecided voters than in past elections. It's somewhat apparent that a large chunk "undecided" voters were actually Trump supporters, perhaps afraid of being labeled as "deplorable".
Maybe the result of maligning (and I'm using the term loosely here) the opposition voters results in statistically significant polling errors (echos of Brexit). Maybe word clouds can be used to suggest a lean toward one side of the error? An embarrassment index of sorts? I dunno.
Obviously not really a win for Silver, but I'll give him credit for being more conservative in his estimates than other models. You work with the data you have.
well it simply comes down to they aren't much better than other groups and its most likely because they stopped being really objective. for those who have followed that site its not been fun to watch
Not true. Fivethirtyeight said repeatedly that Clinton's lead was within a standard polling error and that hence a Clinton defeat was about as likely as a Clinton landslide. They also pointed out over and over again, that the uncertainty in this election was higher than e.g. 4 years ago (Romney was given a 9% chance).
"To be honest, I’m kind of confused as to why people think it’s heretical for our model to give Trump a 1-in-3 chance — which does make him a fairly significant underdog, after all. There are a lot of ways to build models, and there are lots of factors that a model based on public polling, like ours, doesn’t consider.3 But the public polls — specifically including the highest-quality public polls — show a tight race in which turnout and late-deciding voters will determine the difference between a clear Clinton win, a narrow Clinton win and Trump finding his way to 270 electoral votes."
The number of electoral college votes is not a good measure of how close an election is. Like getting 50.5% of the vote in Florida rather than 49.5% increases your number of electoral college votes by 58.
A better measure of closeness might be how many votes would have to change to change the winner. I think by that measure this election is incredibly tight.
Right, but the prediction isn't about the "closeness" of the election in some ideal sense, it's about the distribution of electoral votes. That's why the site is called fivethirtyeight.
The electoral college system means most elections are pretty close if you consider how many votes could theoretically flip the result. About 70,000 votes would flip Florida this time, for example, and about 35,000 votes would flip Pennsylvania.
Of course, nothing is likely to come close to 2000, where changing a mere 269 votes would have changed the outcome.
In what way do you feel their so called lack of objectivity has leaked into their model?
Even ignoring the model they basically called out this exact possibility at least twice in very recent articles. One saying that people where underestimating the likelihood of Trump winning the electoral college, despite losing the popular vote. And another pointing out that Trumps was within one standard polling error of winning the presidency and people where shouldn't ignore error margins on the published polls.
On the contrary, FiveThirtyEight came off looking pretty good this year. Where other poll aggregators where giving Clinton very high chances, their models continued to maintain that Trump had something like a 1/3 chance. They also correctly identified the level of polling uncertainty in the rust belt, and how tight the race was in Florida (a state which continues to be the most important swing). There is this ongoing narrative that the polling wrong, when actually the results fit neatly into the level or uncertainty that the polls were suggesting. The same narrative had taken hold about Brexit polling, which is also wrong - the polls in the UK correctly indicated a close race.
Sure, the facts bear that out, but why let that complicate a good story? ;-)
I mean the public perception of data, analytics, pollsters, etc. is now being discussed in the press as something that blatantly misses the "human" element.
But the chances for a Trump win were still above 20% if I remember me well. So it's not really a big surprise that Trump won. These are the kind of the odds in russian roulette. Nobody would be surprised if someone got killed playing it while the most likely outcome is to survive.
I hope everyone in this thread realizes that what they do: writing software and creating machines to replace uneducated lower income white workers -- is probably the single greatest driver to white economic anxiety and the rise of modern white nationalism.
The scary thing is... none of us will stop. Our software, our robots, our big data, how many millions more will be displaced by the next election? How long until taxis and trucks are being massively displaced?
With automation we're digging a grave and the people whom are getting put into that grave will turn to anyone -- anyone -- who promises they can change it.
Donald Trump will be the first of many populist white nationalists in the West who meekly promise they can stop globalization and automation.
They can't. Those jobs are dead men walking. The white working class is a zombie, undead, going through the motions, with twenty million more jobs on the cutting block in the next decade.
A billion guns, a hundred million angry poor white people, and all we're doing is displacing them and validating their anger. What an industry.
Will the people who denigrated his supporters so vehemently here and on Twitter pause to ask themselves why Trump won so convincingly, and whether their reflexes to publicly shame his supporters may have played a role in the outcome?
I'd hope they would. There are many important conversations to be had but we need to begin by understanding and respecting the opinions of the other side.
+1 I did not vote for Trump, but I sincerely admire your enthusiasm.
Trump's victory speech was gracious and I hope Americans rally behind him. I intend this to be a general comment: once a candidate wins the presidency, I think it right for Americans to offer best wishes and as much support that they can, given their political views.
Why? If you deeply disagree with everything the person stands for then why would you offer anything but opposition?
I get that you think that sometimes bipartisanism is needed, but this man's views seem so deeply offensive and dangerous to the rest of the modern world that trying to be "balanced" is actually just making holding those views seem acceptable.
When Obama entered office there was a good slice of the population that genuinely disagreed with his policy, but because of his landslide victory and his overwhelming support in both houses of congress he just moved forwards with his agenda, and the opposition became very bitter, it took the next six years for those on the other side just to listen to anything he had to say as as a result major internal crisis were not dealt with as effectively as they could have been.
There were at least two major issues that could have made significant progress if Obama had tread a more middle of the road path in his first term. Gun Violence and Police Brutality. Thats saying nothing of the immigration crisis going on with minors fleeing south America en mass.
Later in his tenure I see a different Obama who just looks to be just as disenfranchised with the political system of America as the American people and I hope the lesson everyone can take away is the first priority of any ruling party should be to build bridges to the opposition, not ram through their policy's. If that is the case it is the job of the opposition to facilitate finding and pursuing common ground not just opposing everything, if you oppose everything you will just harden the differences and places where people do agree will be ignored for the sake of signaling
How coul you be optimistic about someone whos main campaign promise is to unleash wave after wave of state violence against people living in the US? How could you be that sick?
The American dream took a beating with Nixon and died with Reagan. You'll need another FDR moment to bring it back, but since apparently the closest thing to FDR was unelectable because he was "socialist" you're fucked.
There's no future for America now. It's going to squander everything it's earned in the last 240 years inside of two.
I have to readjust my own mental model of what it means to be an American. It's not the end of the world, but shit, what happens to the Supreme Court will have implications for the next few decades.
Before, your bubble usually was the people around you, physically. You had network news and the newspapers for your information. You could read books about other countries and systems. If you had cable, you could watch the 24 hour news at the time - Cspan and similar things.
The bubble has simply shifted and become slightly more obvious.
Which really disappoints me. I was all hopeful that the internet would broaden people's bubble, but that was 20+ years ago.
I'm not sure if we did, but we didn't forget that they exist. We focussed so much on publishing facts (and rants) on social media, instead of talking to the people directly.
There are zero Trump supporters on my timeline, everybody is shocked and horrified. I would bet that there are people out there who have a diametrically opposed timeline with zero HC supporters. We need to get those people together instead of further alienating and separating them by "better", more personalised and targeted algorithms.
Strange, it's been the opposite for me. Social media has revealed to me diverse political opinions from friends that I never would have known about otherwise.
1.It marks as the final blow to US hegemony ever since USSR clashes. It is hard for me to believe, after this election, US will still be hailed as THE example that others should follow. Too many scandals and ugliness have been unleashed. That era is now officially over.
2.US will start look inwards other outwards. I mean globalization will halt to correction, or we will see the start of reverse of it.
3.Immigration will be tamed, across all level of skills. There will be more political pressure and obstacle for company to absorb foreign talents. Not good news for developers to seek job here in US.
4.History will not end after all, human as species is too complex for that.
5.Last not least, this election breaks a lot of values, or the illusion of having them, but fails to bring up its own. This is the ultimate devastating part. The boundary between democracy and populism is vaguer than ever, and its benefits, other than a national ritual to legalize a new administration, is putting under questions.
And right-wing populism has also been growing stronger in countries where they're not yet in power. Geert Wilders, Front National, Alternative fur Deutschland... I don't like the direction the world is taking.
"Populism" is sort of a weasel word, but Law and Justice (in Poland) is arguably less populist than the party they replaced at power (Civic Platform), and certainly much less corrupt, whether you like their conservative outlook or not.
Ah, the ultimate PO vs PiS discussion ;) I would disagree. They keep coming up with ideas and not implement them later because despite having enough resources to pass any law they please. It just shows that their ideas cannot actually be translated into legislation. PO, the previous party didn't have a clear vision either, but I don't recall as much "breakthrough" changes being announced back then.
As for being corrupt, keep in mind they're completely bought by the church. This by itself is a huge red flag of corruption for me.
"Bought by the church"? In what sense? Financial, I assume? What indicates that?
The populism exhibited by PO was of a different sort, of course. We can probably agree about it.
Despite being "civic" and all, they actually set out on explicitly discouraging any political involvement - with the slogan that went "let's not make politics" and the infamous "how water in taps" rhetorics.
They refused to acknowledge every major problem the country faced, dismissing any voices of discontent as mere frustration (or worse). Painting a rosy picture of "the best times in a 1000 years", dismissing international security concerns as baseless fears (eg. in president Komorowski's speech not long before the invasion on Ukraine) etc.
At the same time they were - and still are - a chameleon party, perfectly able to flip-flop on every issue overnight, solely for PR reasons... All this is 100% populism. A teflon variety, of course.
> "Bought by the church"? In what sense? Financial, I assume? What indicates that?
They seem to use church as a way to get as many votes as possible while balancing between many political options. There's a lot of cases where they publicly suck up to Rydzyk, but when there was a political discussion about, say, abortion - they "negotiate" with the church trying to avoid annoying the general public. It's a weak party, trying to buy everyone's votes but not really showing any real intent of improving things in the long term.
As for your perspective on PO, I agree. Just keep in mind that it's PiS that passed the recent police surveillance law, so they don't look so good in terms of comparison to "dismissing any voices of discontent as mere frustration (or worse)". Also, the constitution crisis tells a lot about their attitude as well.
> They seem to use church as a way to get as many votes as possible while balancing between many political options
Well, it's a conservative party in a mostly catholic country. What else would they be doing? You just described the most reasonable political strategy such a party could employ. I really fail to see how this constitutes "corruption" by any definition of the term.
It's also funny how they're being interchangeably accused of being inflexible, diehard fanatics consumed by ideologies - and at the same time, "balancing between options" every time they aren't totally rigid but pragmatic about something. Fanatics! And sell-outs! Rinse and repeat :)
> Just keep in mind that it's PiS that passed the recent police surveillance law, so they don't look so good in terms of comparison to "dismissing any voices of discontent as mere frustration (or worse)"
But, while deserving criticism, this was actually the legislation started by the previous government. Which granted extra powers to several agencies (NIK, revenue), used anti-terrorist squads for arresting bloggers in their homes (the "Antykomor" case), tried to censor the internet access etc.
Yet the mainstream media didn't make a big deal out of it back then; neither did the EU nor its affiliates. Why? Because they had the backing of main EU countries. And why did they have it? Because unlike Law and Justice, they were fully submissive to international corporations who finance political campaigns in Germany, in France etc. That's the whole secret. That's all there is to it really. The rest is smokescreen.
I remember quite a few corruption scandals when PIS was ruling in 2005-2007. They have a few now too.
Hell...the vice-prime minister of justice was sentencing oppisition members to prison and his father was stalinist murderer that convicted Pilecki to death.
I would really like for people to check facts - the one that is screaming "im patriotic" louder than other is not better for us.
> I remember quite a few corruption scandals when PIS was ruling in 2005-2007
Hardly the same order of magnitude though.
> the vice-prime minister of justice was sentencing oppisition members to prison
To quote you, "I would really like for people to check facts". Kryże (I assume that's who you mean) was indeed a vice minister of justice at some point, but never a vice-prime minister.
But you're right, he used to - when he worked as a prosecutor in the communist era, that is. I absolutely agree he shouldn't have been appointed to that role in the first place, and that this was a disgrace. And the nomination also caused a turmoil in Law and Justice itself back then.
In any case, this inconsistent approach is a good, true, and sad example of their populism.
But it's not this populism most people have in mind when they accuse them of it.
> his father was stalinist murderer that convicted Pilecki to death.
Well. Being adults we should know that our children wouldn't bear responsibility for our own crimes. Even if these children become ministers.
Sure, his son only sentenced opposition to prison instead of giving death penalty like his dad. This is a great improvement.
And yes i mistyped this - I meant vice-minister of justice.
> Hardly the same order of magnitude though.
Really? The highest prices for motorways, the vice-minister of health department was sentenced for corruption.
Or maybe that one time when we all saw on TV how PIS suggested they will take over Samoobrona members of parliament by paying off their debts from OUR money? This was the reason why they lost their rule and lost next elections. There were more but those are the ones I remember without digging in sources.
What about FOZZ that was quickly killed off by Kryże?
How does this change Silicon Valley'a relationship with Washington and the American cultural narrative? In an world where urbanisation, diversification and a global American technological hegemony are "good" American values, Silicon Valley for right in. But now our values are under fire and our titans likely liable for payback.
Does this restructure the entrenched powers? Or merely force them to rebrand as rebels?
Citizens United has had basically zero effect on my life. Before it, rich folks controlled politics. After it, rich folks controlled politics. The only difference is that now they can do so more overtly, and everybody knows that's how the system works.
Citizens United is not the example I would have gone with. It really only effects the ability of corporations to influence politics, so its effects on citizens are indirect at best.
Roe v. Wade and its predecessor cases (Griswold et al.) which legalized contraception and abortion across the US have had an obvious and direct effect on many people.
If it's part of a broad-based stock market decline, not much. The risk of plummeting equity grants to Bay Area tech companies is that your employees will go to the company next door whose equity is going up like a rocket. If everybody's miserable and poor, then they just go on inventing stuff and coming out with new software.
Honestly, I think the Valley is much more fun to be in during busts than booms. All the folks who just want to get rich quick leave, and you're left with the people who actually make things.
Unless you're gay, a woman, or part of a minority. Then your situation is that the leader of the free world is at best openly dismissive of you, and at worst actively encourages hate towards you.
You want 100℅ solved, when most people just want the government to help nudge society in the right direction. Civil rights and anti discrimination laws are doing that.
>Laws cannot change what people think and how they feel, so without absolute control laws cannot prevent people from treating one another poorly.
If only virtually every single instance of social progress in this country didn't show the opposite...
Go look at charts showing public opinion about LGBT folk and gay marriage and see what happened in June of 2015.
Or look at acceptance of blacks in American society after forced integration, particularly of the military.
Or look at the acceptance of womens' suffrage before and after it was made legal.
Also, I'd like to hear a direct answer to this question: You don't think our Vice President supporting electro-shock therapy for gay teens is a bad thing that has real impacts?
You're missing the point and I'm probably just digging myself a hole, but hey, it's karma and this is my life.
I'm really glad though, that you won't be affected by a Trump/Pence presidency, their open desire to rollback gay rights, or their regular demonization and scapegoating of minorities. I mean, it's not like we've already seen incidents of violence and hate speech as a result of this election cycle. Not like we've already heard reports of kids repeating Trump's racist talk and leveraging it against other kids).
I guess somehow you think that our President and VP aren't role models for our children.
I'm glad you get to sleep tonight without worrying about how your friends and family will be affected by a Trump/Pence Presidency. I sure wish I were so privileged and naive!
The Irony is that rich countries not only benefited the most of the use of fossil fuels, we're also now in the best position to deal with changes. The people it will impact the most are poorer countries.
Only 70% of America believes that climate is changing. This will keep rising and soon people will focus on this. I think in 2 years Trump will acknowledge climate change too. He will have to.
The problem is that his political peers think, fossil energy is required to "make America great again". And unfortunately, they are right if its about the strategy that takes the least effort to achieve the economic goal.
That's in big contrast on what Clinton advertised with pushing renewable energy to a point, where it helps the economy.
That's not a bad thing. I'm not sure why people use socialist in a pejorative manner.
It reminds me of the 80s, except then the term was communist. At least then there was the cold war and in some ways communist made sense as they were the enemy, but using socialist today the same way makes no sense.
> I'm not sure why people use socialist in a pejorative manner.
Not going to run the history lesson here, but the cold truth is that most of the US isn't into 'progressive' thought, and socialism isn't acceptable to them. Most of the liberals aren't really comfortable with the actual left.
Whether it is or isn't pejorative, what it is, is not something that would be an acceptable thing for a winning candidate in 2016 outside of Seattle, SF, and a few other cities.
I would bet that Bernie would have lost with less than Hillary's EVs if he'd run, on that fact alone.
Anyway. The die is cast, the stamps are being made.
It will be most interesting to see the fallout from this on the Republican side.
Will there be consequences for all those high level Republicans who dared to publicly come out against Trump? Will they still be against Trump now that he's won, or will they start supporting him all of a sudden?
I, for one, can't see any scenario where Trump is as mild and easy going once he has power than he's been when trying to get the popular vote. If anything, he'll be far more extreme now. Will such extremism further fracture the Republican party? Or will they look the other way and act as apologists for it as they have so often in the past?
The thing is that most of these folks were elected officials. So he'd have to get them voted out. He can, of course, not appoint them to seats and things like that.
Those that aren't politicians? Unless they are in a position where he has some control over their career, there isn't much he can do.
Both the Democrats, in large part, and the Republicans, in overwhelming part, made a sort of Faustian bargain starting in the early 1970s, embracing globalization in ways that were harmful to U.S. industries but, the implied promise went, would be in the long-term best interests of the country. Partially this was economic -- a bet on trade and comparative advantage -- and partially geopolitical, in that many of the early trade deals had the effect of countering Soviet influence (e.g. Nixon's famous China trip in 1972). I think it's safe to say that not everyone felt, in the decades that followed, that they benefited as a result.
It's hard not to read this election, and particularly the Republican victories in formerly manufacturing-heavy areas like the upper Midwest and Appalachia, as a repudiation of this deal. Many people aren't impressed by either the alleged economic or geopolitical benefits of globalization, and they're expressing that extreme discontent at the ballot box.
What is the strategy for the blue collar workers? Getting rid of NAFTA and other agreements doesn't solve anything. People are getting replaced with machines and no one has come up for a solution for that.
If social safety nets get removed, they'll be in a worst position.
As others have said, this is our Brexit. The manufacturing jobs aren't coming back. The supply chains aren't here anymore. The labor is too expensive. The environmental concerns are too grave. They'll now be left with even less than they had before.
Had the media not made such a spectacle of Trump's candidacy early in the campaign, he never would have gotten anywhere near being the Republican nominee to begin with. They played chicken and lost.
Given that this has been among the most polarizing campaigns ever, could a new, truly centrist third party start building support among the many "no to both" voters and have a chance in 2020?
I realize it's crazy to suggest a third party could have a chance in American politics, but prove me wrong.
I don't think our system leaves room for three parties to coexist for any length of time, and with partisan identity being so strong these days the two major parties will continue to exist in name at least. But they have pivoted before, and in big ways. This Republican sweep has probably forestalled such a shift, but it'll be interesting to see which factions of the Republican party end up in conflict over the next few years, and which ones come to the fore the next time they're up against strong Democratic opponents. I think it's too soon to tell how the Republican Congress will get along with this Republican president.
But this was an election where voters strongly disliked both candidates, and voting "against" rather than "for" was at an all-time high. Doesn't that intense partisanship pushing the two parties further apart create some room in the middle?
In 1994 my country switched from first past the post to MMP.
Incredible fear mongering was put about (and sometimes still is). But despite our near brushes with craziness (like Kim Dotcom almost buying his way into parliament) the situation now is immeasurably better than when we had political parties who did not have to compromise and cooperate. Everyone's more...reasonable.
To an outsider it looks like getting rid of the two party system would be a great thing for the US.
That doesn't mean everyone who supported him is racist and sexist, just that they have other concerns. As hard as it might be to understand there are people who think there are most important issues than the fact Trump is racist and sexist, even if they're still aware and disgusted by that fact. This election has been one of the most divisive ever and the rhetoric of "all Trump supports are racist and sexist" has only made that worse.
I hate this view. I think you're just trying to be balanced, but really you are legitimising views that ARE racist and sexist by saying things like this.
The point is that these words are overused, and are used to label people and shut down conversation.
If confronted by a true racist or sexist, the decent thing would be to engage in honest conversation. But people don't seem very interested in understanding other points of view.
"Fun" in the "emboldens Russian aggression safe in the knowledge the US won't back up NATO" sense? I think this is a complete disaster for world peace. I genuinely wouldn't be surprised to see Europe involved in a major war with Russia in the next 2 years. If that happens China will seize the moment too.
Also having someone who thinks climate change is a lie in the White House will affect everyone. He should ask the inhabitants of Delhi whether they think climate change is a lie [1].
Russian military spending has increased in real terms for the last few years and they've ordered 2000 high-spec new tanks. What do you think they need them for?
There have to be a lot of things going bad for a major war to happen. War is probably to start out in Turkey, trying to get back a chunk of the middle east back. Russia is always ready to oppose the status quo and get back influence in Eastern Europe. They do not stand a chance against the US.
Even if China sees this as an opportunity to jump to (that's a VERY big if), the US can easily handle all three of them. The problem is going to be whether or not the US can count on its allies in Asia. Not because it needs the military support, they don't, but because you cannot be alone vs. the world. The population will simply not support you.
As it is stands now, the US can count on its allies in Asia. No matter how much they dislike the US, they fear and hate China much, much more thanks to thousands of years of history.
The status quo might change but not violently, perhaps giving influence ground in Eastern Europe and the Middle East. Also losing ground in future trade/economy deals which will have a real impact on US population if it were to happen.
> Even if China sees this as an opportunity to jump to (that's a VERY big if), the US can easily handle all three of them.
They can, but will they? Trump has made it clear that he's not so eager to fulfill his NATO obligations when it comes to Russia. If Putin decides to move on Estonia, it's possible that the EU will have to defend Estonia without US help.
I'm less concerned about China; their expansion in the South China Sea is somewhat worrying, but their mostly interested in peace, economy and improving the lives of the common Chinese. In fact, China may be the only major power that I'm somewhat hopeful about. They may not be democratic, but they're giving increasing attention to fighting corruption and pollution, and their increased wealth has made the Chinese people a lot more informed and assertive.
But Putin worries me, and Trump's election could end up removing a major balancing factor to Russian aggression.
Why challenge the US? It's a gamble. Is Trump really serious about not backing NATO or was it just talk? Will he be pressured into fulfilling the obligation by the EU and his staff? That's a lot of unknowns and if Putin falls on the wrong side of them, that will be the undoing of him and probably Russia as it is today. It's all fun and games while it's just talk and signing currency swaps. Not so fun if you poked the bear one too many times.
Much better to try and negotiate backroom deals about withdrawing influence in Eastern Europe.
"Chinese state media has warned the U.S. president-elect against isolationism and interventionism, calling instead for the United States to actively work with China to maintain the international status quo."
Whereas almost no political pundit would expect Trump to be the president-elect, there is one guy consistently predicted the result. His name is Scott Adams, the creator of Dilbert[1].
Also worth mentioning is that Bloomberg ran an length article about Trump's campaign team and how they operate. One interesting tibits was the fact that the same team behind Brexit was also the major helper in the late stage of Trump's campaign. That team is Cambridge Analytica[2], funded primarily by Hedgefund manager/computer scientist Robert Mercer from Renaissance Technologies.
As someone followed this election from India - I'll compare 2014, India's Right-wing party election with this one , my thoughts:
* Ruling party tried to seek vote by projecting opposition candidate as evil, Instead of selling their own-accomplishment to the people. (Exactly the similar case with Current Indian PM in 2014.)
* US Main Stream Media is corrupt. They didn't understand they can't fool people anymore, thanks to social media. There is lot of way to reach out common-people using social media, rather than just MSM. IMHO, US media ran campaign to projected one candidate as very bad person. (Exactly same again, with Modi where virtually all media refute the claim 'Modi Wave' across the country in 2014). Intentionally came out fake poll reports.
* Result may look close, but I'm pretty sure, If there was fair trail of both candidates by MSM, Trump might have won by bigger margin than current one.
* Fear of minority : Once you become 'head of state'. Elected leader must adapt themselves to their new role with more responsibility. So If you found something insane statement during campaign - most likely they won't be implemented. - Its just way to polarize people behind one candidate.
* I think most people voted for Trump is fed-up whats going with-their political systems and corruption. Not necessarily agree with Trump on each & every thing he said during campaign. They might have thought, why not give him chance, if its not good. We can switch votes in 2020.
Ending note: In 2014, Tea-seller Modi was running against ruling PM (phd scholar 2004-2014). People saw his development and anti-corruption promises (yes there are some political gimmicks to polarize votes). People fedup with scams & corruptions from ruling party for last 10 years, thought Why not give him a chance? and the end result is massive 171,660,230 votes to get majority to form the govt. In these two years, he still popular, way better than previous 2 govt by well-educated PM. (Just yesterday he announced surprising move to scrap Rs 500 and Rs 1000 currency notes to eliminate black-money) . Media still trying hard to create fake fears among minority since they want their master to get back in power in next election. Country is largely peaceful & economy is growing. I hope same will be case with Trump too, he will focus on most important economic and development tasks. He wont/can't implement this controversial plan which may affect his development plans.
First - Trump is not Modi. Modi is much better and experienced leader than Trump (or Clinton). I like Trump too.
Second - The entire election season was nasty. US is now seeing the real face of democracy with diversity.
Third - The voters did not have a great choice. If the elections were to occur like India, it would have ended up in a hung parliament. And that would be the worst thing to happen.
Fourth - Would you like if your job is offshored for low-costs? NO!... or Would you like to see veterans, elders or seniors live unhappily? NO!... The US (govt) will not be able to stop offshoring without allowing lower minimum pay. The only way to do that is by applying protectionist measures that will work in the short term. And most-likely that would weaken the currency over a longer term.
I like the new york times coverage better. It does a better job of acknowledging Trump's supporters and why he won, as opposed to just focusing on why Clinton lost.
I just want to reproduce here part of my comment on the today's AskHN regarding Trump:
My interpretation of Trump is as follows, though note that I'm not american nor a close follower of US politics, or politics in general.
The main concern of his is the flow of capital out of the US, be it through delocating companies or employment of cheap workforce mainly in southeastern Asia. He wants to exploit the national potential of workforce and has a more introvert, more domestic politic inclination, planning minimal involvement in international questions. And he seeks the support needed through a populist policy with a xenophobic and banale rhetoric targeting the unread american proletariat, the unemployed, and the elderly who does not appreciate the today's increasingly internationalised society and culture.
That and $3.50 gets one a cup of coffee when negotiating with fellow Republican senators and congresspeople who all have their own agendas. Just ask John Boehner.
Bernie Sanders was the candidate who could have defeated Trump. The DNC establishment and media rigged the primaries for Clinton but failed to gauge the anger that is building - Trump is the outcome.
Is there a clear, objective, and accurate list of the ways in which the DNC rigged the primaries? All of my searches turn up shady conspiracy web sites.
wow you are spot on with Bernie and Demonetisation of currency. I think I can say trump won because of independents were not allowed to vote for Bernie...effectively DNC did a self goal.
Bernie is the most popular guy ever.....somehow hillary and her machinery scrwed him, independents inturn screwed her.
Saddened to see the world heading towards a very unsavory place. The Brexit effect is going to take us backward and backward. We are going to see more hatred being spread :(. How did we come down to this place?.
#1 Americans policy in the middle east is a total washout. The repercussions of it is starting to rear its head.
#2 The rigidity of the staunch followers of religions in following the rule of the land. I mean the stupid followers. Your country men are also your brethren sort of attitude - not just people of your faith. In the highly inter-connected world if we don't shed hatred and don't learn to be tolerant towards other faiths - we will be doomed.
#3 The voting process needs a re-look. Look what happened with boaty mcboatface, brexit and now US polls. Age shouldn't be the only criteria to allow someone in voting process. I don't think this is a easy problem to solve but we definitely need a rethink.
Just curious, why is the concept of absolute majority not used a criteria? For example, to win an election in India, you require an absolute majority (if there are 3 candidates and A wins 40%, B wins 30% and C wins 30%, A is still not a winner because a total of 60% voted against A). I see it in this election and in the Brexit vote, a major decision is based on a simple majority with <5% difference.
I think its the other way around, there's a dominant two party system because of the simple majority requirement. If there's a requirement absolute majority, then neither major party wins and the smaller parties and independents that are currently considered spoil sports become very important to form coalitions. That then gives rise to more parties catering to specific interests, demographics and minorities which enable more representation in the senates/parliaments fighting for their primary causes, instead of having to choose either of two always, and any other option basically relegated to a spoil sports.
Honestly, I think that is mostly how he will behave. His "headline" behaviour in this election has been done to get media coverage. Hillary outspent him but if you look at how much coverage has been on Donald Trump, than it is almost an unfair race. But now that he's president, I predict that will change.
We don't really know yet. There are two (quite likely) possible options. A shift in the voter demographics and/or the "shy tory" (people not admitting to vote conservative because a negative social consequences).
Polls are never truely objective even if they try to be. You always have underlying assumptions about how to get a representative sample.
The third option would be that the polls were rigged. After reading the leaked Podesta mails this doesn't seem too unlikely but still less likely then other possible reasons.
I still can't believe Hillary disrespected all people who supported her and came close to her stage by not giving a final speech. Was she not paid for it?
The victor will never be asked if he told the truth. / I do not see why man should not be just as cruel as nature. / Great liars are also great magicians. / I use emotion for the many and reserve reason for the few.
Trumps handbook. He shouldn't be mistaken for the same person, since people of that caliber only happen once, but that is exactly how he elected himself. Psychology wins elections. Not policy, not integrity, not even sanity. And now he has the power.
Nothing he said or says matters. He is a magician. So I hope he's full of white doves.
This was ignored when I tried to post it recently, but maybe now is the time for Brown U. Prof. of Political Economy Mark Blyth's discussion of "Global Trumpism" - the discontent with the establishment and general revolt against technocracy and globalism.
I've never been much of an HRC fan, but it's hard to see what she could have done differently, based on the information available. Aside from "don't be Hillary Clinton, with all the baggage that involves", of course. A candidate less well-known to the public might have done better in a "change"-focused election.
But she pretty much ran a campaign according to all the best practices, and lost to a guy who basically did everything wrong (within the scope of the campaign) that you could do wrong. The problem wasn't in the Clinton campaign. The problem was that the electorate didn't want what she was selling, despite a very good sales pitch.
I suspect there's going to be a lot of analysis focusing on exactly what level of positional compromise would have gotten the Democrats enough votes in the Midwest and Appalachian states to win (off the top of my head: an about-face on gun control and some sort of mea culpa on NAFTA might do it), but I don't think the Democrats could have known that in advance. Any more than any of the Republicans who lost to Trump in the primaries could have known how badly they were underestimating the latent anger of voters when they ran their own by-the-book campaigns.
I was really impressed with her performance in the debates. She must have unbelievable self-control. Her baggage isn't even her own baggage; people have been attacking and hating her for decades, apparently only for having the gall to be an ambitious woman in politics, while being married to a successful man in politics.
She looked smarter in debates, but came off very smug to me.
A little naive to assert people don't have real reasons not to like her. There are many. Tons of crap that in the Wikileaks emails that are not as damning as they asserted but do paint a clear picture of how dirty her campaign played. The Clinton foundation stuff. 1 mil from Qatar? Wtf
And for those of us who are anti war she has some responsibility for a lot bloodshed.
This is only a sample of concrete things that are definitely "her baggage".
None of that is unique to Clinton. Look at Trump's self-enrichment through his "charitable" foundation. Look at his extremely dirty business practices. Look at the many, many corrupt politicians in the US. Yes only Clinton gets this level of shit for it.
I'm not saying any of this is okay, just that many politicians, including Trump, are just as bad or far worse, but only Clinton gets this level of shit for it.
And her attacks didn't start with any of this. It started when she was first lady of Arkansas who wasn't just a conservative housewife but very politically active on her own. And then again when she was first lady of the US. That's what got the attacks started: a woman who didn't know her place.
Whose baggage is that? Because these exact things are also true for Trump[0]. He just didn't get as much attention for it, because everybody loves to attack Clinton.
[0] Maybe not the war with Russia, but that's also not true for Clinton, and Trump seems very eager to kill a lot of people.
Hillary Clinton presidential campaign is probably the worst managed presidential campaign in history. How do you even lose to a joke of a candidate like Trump? The writing was on the wall when they named fucking Pepe the Frog the "symbol of white nationalism". The entire campaign, somehow, existed in a bubble with no connection to reality. It was painful to watch. Doesn't help that Clinton herself is suspiciously corrupt and unlikeable.
And the seeds of today's defeat: NAFTA, the 1993 free trade bill passed by her own husband that unleashed globalisation on an untrained and ill-prepared American workforce and rebooted Reagan Democrats as Trump democrats.
May be, just may be, after these elections the USA will pause and think about how we got here in the first place? when the only choices we got left are the "same old crooked politician" vs "egocentric billionaire with bathroom fixtures made of gold".
As George Carlin would say: "This is the best we got folks. These are the best people the country got to offer! So.. ENJOY the circus!!"
Whereas almost no political pundit would expect Trump to be the president-elect, there is one guy consistently predicted the result. His name is Scott Adams, the creator of Dilbert[1].
Also worth mentioning is that Bloomberg ran an length article about Trump's campaign team and how they operate. One interesting tibits was the fact that the same team behind Brexit was also the major helper in the late stage of Trump's campaign. That team is Cambridge Analytica[2], funded primarily by Hedgefund manager/computer scientist Robert Mercer from Renaissance Technologies. Mercer was a major donor of Republican party and indirectly helped Trump pick Kellyanne Conway as his one and final campaign manager.
Surprisingly, namecalling doesn't sway votes. Calling people with genuine concerns about their country and well-being racist and sexist doesn't win you votes. Calling half the country Deplorable doesn't win you votes.
It doesn't help that the DNC rigged the election against Bernie, Clinton isn't "relatable" and struggles with public image, Clinton was under FBI investigation, both Clintons have had years and years of scandals. I'm honestly surprised it was even as close as it was for the popular vote.
I did not vote, but it should be fairly obvious from this post or my post history that I lean pro-Trump and very strongly against Clinton. For those who disagree with it, I'm sure the first response is blaming bigots and racists and sexists and blah blah blah. Rather than listening to half of your country - you shout over them and call them names, names which are only sometimes "earned".
The country can either grow more divided or we can grow together. The next four years will determine which direction we head.
Sorry for the confusion, that line wasn't about the elects. It was about the people.
Yelling and screaming and threatening half of the country pushes them away - it doesn't bring them closer. I've had a lot more hate for being pro-trump and transexual from the "Never Trump" crowd than I did from the Trump crowd. Staggering amounts of hate.
Which is why I used the line: names which are only sometimes "earned". The names were used to try and persuade the public and to make people "not want to support Trump". All it did was turn huge parts of his crowd "silent". After all, "free speech is protected - but not without consequences!" and supporting Trump had its consequences. Look at how people treat Peter Thiel.
I totally agree that the division and tribalism on US politics is terrible. The threats, disrespect and alienation between both sides are not okay, and both sides are guilty of that. It's the fruits of the toxic and hostile political culture in the US, and it's gotten continuously worse over the past 20 years. I don't think there was this kind of hostility in the 1980s (though I admit I'm too young to be sure about that).
Instead of patronising these people it's time we tried to
understand their concerns and try to assuage them.
That seems pointless to me. This part of the population seems permanently unhappy and angry, no matter what happens. They blame their problems on outside causes, but their problems are actually their own and there is no change in the world that would solve them.
Every country, including utopias like Norway and the Netherlands, has a lot of these people. At least in the US they can truly complain about being poor and mistreated. In Norway and the Netherlands, even these people have a better standard of living, better health case, better prospects, an objectively better life, than 95% of the world population. Yet they vote for populists, complain about immigrants and generally act is if they are being wronged in some way.
Can democracy work if part of the demos don't have the best interest of all other demos in mind?
I've never felt less American than I do right now. The country that voted for a man who has been recorded stating that he sexually assaults women is not a country in which I want to live.
Thoughts on the election:
For the past year, I've have been made to feel stupid (only the uneducated back Trump), violent (we cause rioting), abusive (can't treat women correctly), uncool (Lady Gaga tells me), and you name it. Fake patriots are everywhere and they did not even have the courage to explain what this was all about.
Last night was nothing short of a miracle. God stepped in and brought the victory over all the lying, cheating polling stations and managers. It was amazing. Trump won even though they had totally rigged it against him!
There is still a lot left to do. And just like finding out your best friend is not perfect, Trump has a lot to learn. He needs our future support and prayers. There is so much corruption and he is not experienced with this. Many will claim to be on his side (people "love" winners) and it will take time to identify the fakes.
The news media is lying to you. Think for yourselves.
I'm not sure this is a constructive phrase. Others may be different, but I've never managed to work out what it actually means: how is my thinking not my own, while yours is? What devices or strategies do you have that allow you to think on your own, while I am not doing so?
I feel like that phrase really means: "Don't read the things you're reading, they are wrong, read what I'm reading instead, they are right, because I'm reading them."
> Trump won even though they had totally rigged it against him!
This being an example. Aren't you just parroting what Trump has said to you? There is no evidence of this election being rigged in any direction. If you were "thinking for yourself" you would presumably have been reading direct sources such as studies and reports, as opposed to Trump's twitter feed.
I meant it as a compliment to the reader. Namely, that you are smart enough to figure out and discover the best path forward. You don't need everyone in the entertainment community to guide you on economic, moral, and national betterment.
For that matter, you should not need my comments either, you truly have the capacity to think. I'm only here for conversation, to provide strength and support.
I am a member of the technology community making computers and related devices more enjoyable for people who must use them everyday. I guess you're insinuating that we differ to such a great degree that I should not be present.
I was in the industry before a lot of startups made their first pitch. I will be present long after.
The mindset most Americans have bought into is ridiculous to me. The idea that we should let our leaders waste fortunes wreaking havoc on the world out of fear that the Russian or Chinese boogeyman will rise is getting old.
I'm surprised how many chinese support Trump, when I ask them why, one of the main reasons is that Trump will withdraw military support to Asia, Japan especially.
His cabinet. That will tell us where he really is going.
If he meets with both sides quickly.
Also, I want to see if President Obama is gracious today or not. He has a chance to make the transition smooth but at the same time his own rhetoric has not been encouraging as of late. If he poisons the well all bets are off
At the end of the day I hold hope he'll approach this like a business. He'll hire the best he can find, fire the incompetent (of which government has many) and generally clean things up. What remains to be seen is how much the politics of any one group may stop that type of thing.
And this is what you get when you eviscerate education budgets and remove things like civics and government from the classroom, or make it AP-only.
The awesome part is that since I can't legally vote, I get to point at the rest of you and act like I'm George Carlin for the next four years. Brace yourselves.
I think that this is also a backslash against the PC, SJW, safe-space, trigger-warning, micro aggression tendencies that have been spreading in the U.S. for the last couple of years. This has become too much and millions of Americans are fed up with it, they have now spoken out.
With the Senate and House controlled by Republicans, Trump has an enormous mandate now. Nothing stands in the way of his delivering on his campaign promises.
We know he loves to assign blame to anyone but himself. He doesn't take responsibility for mistakes. That's been proven over and over again, by everyone from business partners to former wives.
In four years when America hasn't become "great again", who is he going to blame? That's the really scary part to me. Electing a populist isn't when things go off the rails -- it's when the in-power populists start looking for scapegoats.
So the LA times poll is the only poll that was right, from the beginning? Perhaps time to take their methodology seriously.
Also, perhaps the extreme form of multiculturalism is a failed experiment, much like communism was a failed experiment. Time to wake up, ultra liberals.
When back in India, Congress won with majority, I was flabbergasted, I mean how can people can be so retard to give vote to stupid congress ? Then I realize, Its just only me with some above average income have time to think about global warming or global harmony, most of the people plainly worried about where their next meal comes from. or at most which TV serials on air. For those people other things does not matter, until, basic necessities get solved.
What's interesting about this whole thing from my perspective:
1. Mark Cuban, Peter Thiel, Bloomberg and others might decide to run for president now that Trump has shown that it is possible.
2. Trump says he's anti-establishment, but he's also a billionaire. Wouldn't it me more accurate to see this as infighting between US elite? Or maybe a new group of elite wanting their share of power? Or maybe disagreements between elite from different sectors of the economy.
I remember back in the day when Mexican president Carlos Salinas promoted the NAFTA deal as a solution to our problems. I started to disagree when reason came to me (I was too young when it happened), few reasons:
- I believed in a more protectionist system that encouraged internal growth. I still do to a point.
- Trading is good as long as you don't compromise internal production and employment. NAFTA is way too aggressive in this sense.
- It will triggered this bad "us-american?" behavior of consumerism and materialism.
Well, here we are 22 years after and it's evident the system got exhausted, even for US-Americans who were supposed to be the strong link in this chain.
Is killing NAFTA a good idea? maybe. I don't know. We are so deep into these waters that it has to be a small "chunk by chunk" change, and even so, it'll be chaos.
What I am sure we need, is to find a new balance, going all protectionist will be a huge mistake, just like this crazy aggressive neoliberalism that allowed companies behave irresponsible. Believe me, the consequences of this 20+ years trade system in Mexico are massive.
Wait, I'm not a pro-Trump crazy Mexican, keep reading.
As I said, we need a new balance. To my eyes, Trump is an extremist and a dangerous man, he doesn't sound or act like a guy that could bring this balance. I think USA voters made a huge mistake on electing him. But, at the same time, they had 2 very poor choices. They just chose the worst one.
The years to come will be interesting ones... that is given.
I think this strongly reflects the hypocrisy of the modern society. On the outside (especially on social media, most people wanted to be seen as a liberal/ pseudo intellectual bashing Trump and his policies. But on the inside they seemed to have appreciated some of his policies or attitude or whatever, and went ahead and voted for him. It's hard to take anyone at face value just based on their social media profile.
I think we worry for nothing about his campaign promises. I guess he's a sociopath and a con man. He doesn't give a shit about what he's promised. Before he won he was going to jail Hillary, but now he says that "we all" owe her.
What's he going to do in office? He'll want what he always wants: To win. Doubtlessly he'll try to enrich himself, but other than that it's kind of hard to tell.
Ok, I'm trying to think of a silver lining of all this.
Trump and brexit are about bringing changes. For brexit to work, it has to be hard brexit, for Trump to work, he has to follow through the things he said. And they must show the changes they bring are good, for example, there need to be more jobs, less foreigner, working class people take home more money, etc. When my thought reached this point, I'm thinking: it's impossible for them to do it. They either bring the economy down and hurt more people, or they betray their supportors. Either way will spell disaster for this Trump/Brexit ideology and put an end to it.
Brexit/Trump fail => People support them realise they made a mistake => less people support far right Isolationism => we restore the happy central liberal world.
But then I realise how wrong I was, they don't have to make it work for everyone, they just need to please the people who supported them, which is only half of the country, they have the other half to screw over with. They CAN make it work in the short term for some people, like Hilter did between 1933-1939. But then what..?
Well the left needs to get their act together and form some political party and then start running candidates in elections. They don't have one right now.
Congratulations to the party that supports corporate profits over clean water, clean air, health, wealth and mental health of the working class, religion over science and education, and power over empowerment. We'll know what it's like for the Republicans to rule the world for four years, and the who just had his staff convicted will now pick Trump's staff.
I am selling my US ETF holdings. I'm hoping for a bounce to get out at break even, but I'll clear whatever the price before Trump is sworn in. Presuming nothing world-endingly catastrophic happens, I'm pretty sure I'll pick it up on a discount later.
It's obviously not going to happen, but let's play hypotheticals for a minute. Do you have to have at least 270 electoral votes, or is the requirement just an electoral majority? Hypothetically – and the chance of this happening is obviously nil – if 10 people who are supposed to vote for Trump in the electoral college decides to be faithless and abstain or vote for Hillary, what would happen? At that point Trump would have 269 electoral votes and Hillary would have 218-228. Does Trump still win or does it go to the house for a vote? (Where Trump most certainly will be voted president anyway, so moot point.)
I find the US electoral system fascinating, and scary complex.
I won't get too much into the various possibilities, but simply put, if neither candidate has 270 electoral votes, then the election is decided by congress, the incoming one. So really there is no chance its not trump.
Right, and congress must vote from the available candidates, and couldn't pick anyone? Obviously none of this will happen, but it's fun to think about I think.
If you've seen the tv show Veep, they play around with a similar scenario, but one where the electoral college is tied. In the show, congress also ends up in a tie, and so elects the vice president into office instead. As far as I understand the rules though, the vice president would only be elevated to president in case congress can't resolve the matter before inauguration day, and will only hold the office until congress resolves the tie and picks a president.
I probably have most of this wrong, but I think it's very interesting to hypothesize about the possibilities, no matter how remote. I obviously don't think any of this would happen, but it's fun to think about.
Until the 12th amendment, there were no running mates. First place in the electoral college was President, and 2nd place was VP.
In the 1796 election (John Adams and Thomas Jefferson), the President and VP happened to be bitter enemies -- parties were forming -- and 8 years later that system was done away with.
As you point out, it is still possible it could happen, though less likely.
The Alternative Vote would have prevented so many of the structural problems with USA's democracy that keep this country deeply divided, and people holding their nose when voting:
As it is, the party that nominated the establishment candidate lost all the anti-establishment, anti-globalist fervor and vote that "Bernie or Bust" people represent. This fervor is not understood in today's Establishment including the media. The Alternative Vote would have properly channeled it.
Unless you already invested money in your own life, your family and friends and there is still some money that really serves you nothing for the next 5-10 years.
Was this a result of protest votes against Hillary or do people genuinely support a Trump presidency ? Would Bernie have fared better against Trump had he been the democratic nominee ?
It was not a genuine support: this election was historical in the amount of unfavorable opinions toward both candidates.
Today he gets a lot less unfavorable rating than either candidate, but no one knows what would have happened if he actually would have had to campaign against Trump.
I can't fathom how people can vote for him after listening to his speeches. He might be good, but his speeches are crap. Can't vote for him. Sad day for competency.
That's the problem with democracy: a lot of people aren't very well informed, and are easily taken in by his crap. Other than investing more in education, I'm not sure what can be done about this.
pretty big words for someone who just posted this:
>"... Her baggage isn't even her own baggage; people have been attacking and hating her for decades, apparently only for having the gall to be an ambitious woman in politics ..."
while ignoring/not being aware about all the bad stuff she pulled off/wanted to pull off (i.e. war, making gay marriage illegal, destroyed documents ...)
The stuff she pulled off or wanted to pull off wasn't pretty, but nothing out of the ordinary in US politics. The stuff Trump has pulled off and wants to pull off is of a totally different level. You focus only on the mote in Clinton's eye, while ignoring the beam in Trump's eye.
Seriously, how do you, and clearly so many other Americans, manage to have such a limited view of reality? Do you understand how weird it looks to attack and hate someone for doing the exact same things that the guy you support also did?
I don't know why anyone listens to social science "experts" at all without asking significant methodological questions in the future.
I keep hearing how it is unbelievable how there is a 55% approval rating of the current sitting president and yet...
If it were me I guess I would be asking how exactly yet another made-up "fact" is calculated / rendered believable rather than just parroting more nonsense.
U.S Elections 2016: "Pure Evil" vs "Corrupted Good"
Some people see this a battle between purity and corruption,
Some see this as a battle between good and evil.
I think the difference in meaning,interpretation and semantics in the context of politics is much more distinguishable when we compare purity and corruption than when we compare good and evil.
Polls do have a margin of error yet the wider chances that Hillary was getting just a couple of days prior are NOT an error: private media responds to private interest. I've seen it happen before: in the US and elsewhere, to influence a presidential election or to make one choose coke over pepsi; it happened on printed media, it now happens online.
Whoelse thinks that Trump is and will mostly be a joke. That none of is populist antics will really reach our realm (mexican wall, anti climate research deeds, ...). That he and his team will get a reality check when nature, life, mind changing people will start to resist bits by bits to nonsensical projects ?
I'm disappointed in YCombinator and SamA's attitude towards Trump and his supporters throughout this campaign. However, it's not YCombinator's fault, and I will blame the Mainstream Media for successfully distorting the views of so many smart and good Americans.
So the world's most liveable city is Melbourne, Australia, we're very far from Trump, much further than Canada, VC firms and tech startups are more than welcome to come on over and enjoy the best quality of life on offer! Hehe
I've never been to either, but I was under the impression that in both Australia and NZ, there were lots of critters willing to bite/sting you without notice.
I know that a lot of countries on earth have nasty little things lurking around, but is it really that much more dangerous in Australia than in NZ then?
Yep they're quite different. In NZ we have some supremely ugly insects (http://www.themarysue.com/record-breaking-giant-weta/) but they are harmless to humans. No snakes, crocodiles or anything like that. You can walk barefoot in the outdoors with impunity.
Perhaps you could get taken by a shark if you were very unlucky.
Australia has more than its fair share of poisonous snakes. http://lifeinthefastlane.com/when-doug-met-struan/ is an excerpt from Last Chance to See by Douglas Adams. Douglas discusses poisonous snakes with Struan Sutherland.
Australia relies implicitly on US security guarantees. Given Trump's previous pronouncements about allies paying their own way, at best, there is a good chance that Australia is going to have to budget more to protect its vast territory.
At worst, if Trump were to move to a more isolationist stance and upend the world order, there are some very populous countries to the north that might get hungry.
It's going to be very difficult to find a place to escape the consequences of what happened today.
Successive Australian governments seem to hold a different view. Australians have joined US wars in Vietnam(!), Afghanistan and Iraq. The idea that Australia can do without a military alliance with the US and live in splendid isolation is a romantic one, but not very realistic.
And China and Japan are not the only populous countries to the north of Australia: Indonesia has 10X the population, and is far closer.
http://i.imgur.com/zQg1M2A.png
For Bay area VCs and tech startups which are looking for a highly liveable city a bit closer than Australia, Vancouver ranked a close third (after Melbourne and Vienna) in the Economist's ratings, and is just a 2h15m flight away from San Francisco.
If anyone is interested in relocating, I'd be happy to help in any way I can (realizing of course that I'm not an immigration lawyer).
I find it interesting that most of the people I see on e.g. Facebook talking about moving to Canada are, in fact, not eligible to do so. (At least without a job offer in hand from a Canadian company to sponsor you.)
(Canada's a lovely country, I wonder if their immigration policies help keep it that way?)
Many people aren't eligible to immigrate to Canada permanently right now, but there's nothing to say that you can't enter Canada temporarily now and then permanently later. If you pack your bags, drive up to the border, and say "after the election I'm not sure I want to live in the USA so I'd like to spend a few months exploring Canada to see if it's somewhere I could move to some day", I'm sure you'll be welcomed with open arms.
What is it you can't stand? Nothing concrete has happened yet. Maybe this doesn't apply to you but it's interesting to see how a number of celebrities with massive resources (from my point of view) which effectively enable them to insulate themselves from almost any changes which a new government might introduce, have promised to flee the country.
Fuck this shit. White supremacism has just been validated on a national scale. The markets are tanking and the value of the US dollar will drop. People like Giuliani, Christie, and Duke will have the reins; everything good Obama did will be overturned, and the Supreme Court will turn red. Even nuclear war will no longer be off the table.
My country is collapsing around me. I want out before shit gets a whole lot worse — while that's still an option. Somewhere where the US dollar has less influence and where fallout has less of a chance to reach. (And also with good coffee and beer.)
Having listened to a bunch of WWII podcasts recently, it struck me how the people who fled Germany once the Nazis came into power — ridiculed as they were by their friends and relatives! — were the most likely to weather that horrible conflict.
Maybe it's a stretch — or maybe not — but in the end it's just branch prediction. Australia sounds nice.
Australia would be great except every damn bug in the country can kill you. I'm completely terrified of Australia. See a beautiful spider? Want a closer look? Nope. You're dead.
Can confirm. A rite of passage for students in Adelaide is to drive to the big Mcdonalds on the nw outskirts of Melbourne, and then turn around and drive home again.
There had better be some serious conviction behind you. If you are aware of the great filter, then you better go get a job at SpaceX and work 100 hours for the rest of your life. We have about 20 or so years to set ourselves up for the future before it is too late.
EDIT: Just want to clarify that I'm not mad, it's just that if you realize what the Great Filter is, and you're not hopelessly selfish, that you should be working all the time to help get us safely across it. The universe hangs in the balance, friend.
I took a look at his economic plan. He seems to want to do everything at the same time, if hid campaign was a startup it would never be funded you can't present 3 bullet points as a pitch deck.
That's what you get with a Democratic "leader" such as Hillary Clinton. She inspired no one to come to vote. Most of those that voted for her did it so Trump doesn't win. But voting against someone rather than for someone is almost always a losing strategy, proved once again today.
I suppose we'll all see what he "really" meant by everything he has ever said during his campaign. Wall with Mexico? NATO? Putting Hillary in jail? Killing the families of ISIS members?
It makes sense to put the likelihood of any of that happening at a solid zero but it's hard to trust intuition at this point.
The problem is not that we ended up with Trump (or Hillary). The problem is that we ended up with Trump vs. Hillary. The majority didn't care enough for the earlier stages of our democratic process.
Libertarians of the world unite, you have nothing to lose but your bigots. Put away national boundaries and look to a worldwide connected future. Make bigotry obsolete
I reiterate my post-Brexit-vote offer of giving immigration and relocation and general advice to anyone wishing to move to Germany. Contact info in my profile.
One of my coworkers is seriously contemplating moving to the Germanic world, either Zurich or Germany. Had little to do with the election, but just in general for a much better lifestyle.
Just FYI, since I assume you're not very familiar with these countries: this kind of lumping together the so-called "Baltic Republics" with the "USSR" is generally very offensive to Estonians, Lithuanians and Latvians, who have nothing to do ethnically or culturally with Russia and generally view the Soviet era as very dark times.
Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania were invaded and taken by force because of geographical proximity to Russia. Nothing else. There are no relevant conclusions to be drawn by making comparisons like yours because these are different peoples with different histories and pretty much nothing in common.
Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania were parts of Russia for 300 years with small omissions. It is longer than the time of existence of the United States. So they have a lot cultural and ethnical similarity with Russia. But yes, they try to ignore it officially.
I was born and live in Lithuania. No, we don't have much in common with Russia. Sure, being occupied by Russia left some scars, but culturally and ethnically we are totally separate nation. USA and Mexico has about the same in common as we do with Russia. There are big Russian minorities in Estonia and Latvia, smaller in Lithuania, but that's another topic.
EDIT: also, the fact that during the >150 years occupation we've managed to stay separate nation (despite huge efforts by Russia to integrate us) and keep our identity strong, says a lot of how different we are.
> EDIT: also, the fact that during the >150 years occupation we've managed to stay separate nation (despite huge efforts by Russia to integrate us) and keep our identity strong, says a lot of how different we are.
There was no "150 years of occupation", AFAIK even Lithuania's government officially talks only about 50 years of occupation by USSR. And most of the countries that were part of USSR managed to keep their identities (basically everyone apart from Belarus), so integration efforts haven't really that "huge".
50 years by USSR + ~100 years by Russian Empire[0]
"integration efforts haven't really that "huge"."
Mass deportations[1] (5% of the population, most of whom died during severe Siberian winters), total ban of press and schools in local language[2][3], oppressive state police to prosecute or silently get rid of anybody standing against occupant government[4]. In my dictionary, that amounts to "huge" easily.
Most of Lithuania was annexed by Russia by 1795, the final step in partition of Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. 1800's was a period of Russification, revolts, and crushing of those revolts.
Then, in World War I, Lithuania gained independence again in 1918.
That's >120 years of occupation or foreign rule.
Then Lithuani lost independence again, to the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact in 1940, was rolled over twice in the course of WWII, and finally became independent again in 1991. That's another 50 years.
In Finland, we have a saying "We're not Swedes, we do not want to become Russians; let us be Finns". Same seems to apply to Baltic states.
I haven't followed up the development in Lithuania in particular, but Estonia had roughly the same population in 1959 as it had in 1939. The difference was that almost one third of the old population had been eradicated and replaced by Russians (and other Soviet nationals).
This is a fairly huge "integration effort", if we use that euphemism.
> Most of Lithuania was annexed by Russia by 1795
> ...
> That's >120 years of occupation or foreign rule. Especially in the era of colonialism/imperialism.
You are right, but foregin rule does not amount to occupation. Also, none of the "big players" in Europe has perfectly good consciousness with regards to borders, so we generally disregard everything that happened before 20th century. I understand that it's painful for smaller nations, but this is exactly the reason WWI happened, and we don't want that to return.
> I haven't followed up the development in Lithuania in particular, but Estonia had roughly the same population in 1959 as it had in 1939. The difference was that almost one third of the old population had been eradicated and replaced by Russians (and other Soviet nationals).
> This is a fairly huge "integration effort", if we use that euphemism.
Yep, that's the famous "soviet reshuffling". People were incentivised to move to other regions. That was mostly done with positive things though, e.g. young family could get a free flat if they moved to other SSR. Also, drafts would usually send soldiers far from home, so that they could get to know a new region (and many stayed there after getting out of millitary).
Your explanation "The difference was that almost one third of the old population had been eradicated and replaced by Russians (and other Soviet nationals)." doesn't seem to be supported by facts though. From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Estonia we get 992,520 Estonians in 1934 and 892,653 in 1959. The 10% difference could be accounted if you take into account people that died in WWII, those that have emigrated when soviets came, reshuffling that I mentioned and just people claiming to be russians (which was a thing).
If you have other sources or more in-depth research, I would absolutely love to read it.
> 50 years by USSR + ~100 years by Russian Empire[0]
Lithuania in fact was part of Russian Empire. That does not classify it as occupation. There is no mention of occupation in your article, nor it is called an occupation by Lithuanian government. Also, it's a bad idea to revision 19th century Europe, as pretty much every country (that existed at that time in Europe) had done some pretty outrageous things then (by modern standards).
> Mass deportations[1] (5% of the population, most of whom died during severe Siberian winters)
Why are you bringing deportations into conversation about Soviet integration efforts? That obviously was a terrifying thing to do, but was completely irrelevant to russification/integration.
Also, the wiki article that you provide as a source quotes 28,000 that died in exile out of 130,000, that makes your statement about most of them dying in Siberian winters false (not that it has anything to do with this discussion anyway).
> total ban of press and schools in local language[2][3]
As for the press ban link, it's a bit misleading here, because what was actually banned in Russian Empire was Latin alphabet, which of course targeted newly acquired Polish/Lithuanian territories, but you were still allowed to publish books in Lithuanian language in cyrillics (and that was done). So, it was more of a language reform than a total ban of its usage.
In fact, this is pretty similar to how Japan after WWII tried to move from its Kanji hieroglyphical writing (which was associated with communist China) to romaji/latin (which was associated with their new allies - US).
> oppressive state police to prosecute or silently get rid of anybody standing against occupant government
Police in Russian Empire was ready to silently get rid of anybody standing against government, period. That has nothing to do whether that anybody happened to be/live in Vilnius or Moscow. Also, political oppression and scare tactics are pretty much irrelevant to discussion about russification/sovietization/integration efforts.
"Why are you bringing deportations into conversation about Soviet integration efforts?"
Because most of those deported were well educated people -- teachers, doctors, engineers etc. and their families. It was done to get rid of any influential people with authority, that could teach others and later cause problems. It's much easier to control uneducated people, especially when there's nobody around to counter-argument propaganda. Also, deported population was replaced by immigrant Russians. The rest of your comment is nitpicking not worth discussing.
> It was done to get rid of any influential people with authority, that could teach others and later cause problems.
I do not argue, that people were deported for political reasons. However, we were discussing cultural integration/assimilation, so I assume you imply that people were deported to prevent that. That's not the case though. There were three big waves of departations:
1. 1941, Soviets just came and were preparing for war. They didn't want to have near the front line people who might be less-than-patriotic, so they deported policemen, politicians, religious leaders, etc. Sort of how US sent Japanese to camps after Pearl Harbor.
2. 1944, Soviet forces reached Lithuania again and war was still raging, so they deported Lithuanian partisans, remaining Baltic Germans and so on. Again, they did not target teachers, doctors etc specifically.
3. 1948, war is over and Soviets are trying to implement collectivization - distribution of wealth and property, but many wealthy people resist. So, they are deported as well. These were mostly farmers as collectivization was mostly about abolishing private farms and making them comunal. Yet again, people haven't been targeted here for being "too Lithuanian" or refusing to speak Russian.
Soviets targeted teachers too. Well, whoever they presumed would be opposed to occupation and/or pro-independence. Coincidentally, that was most of the educated people. Teachers, doctors, architects, lawyers...
My grandgrandparents were on the list just because they were teachers in a small town. They didn't end up in Siberia just because some of their ex-students ended up in local police and pulled strings to remove them from the list. They were kicked out of their jobs and had to work shitty jobs for the rest if their lives though.
A remote relative was a lawyer. Small time solicitor in small town in the middle of nowhere. Direct ticket to Siberia. Eventually he was allowed to leave Siberia, but not allowed to settle in Lithuania. He did get permission to get back to Lithuania late in life though.
Neither of them actively supported anti-Soviet resistance or Nazis. Not wealthy either, unless you count a small townhouse in province towns as wealth. They got in trouble just because they were educated and seemed to be a threat to Soviet establishment.
You are nitpicking facts again. Neither of your three points explain why artists, especially writers, were deported. Also, deporting might serve more than one purpose, so it might be both to get rid of political dissidents and help russification. Honestly, your comments sound just like classics from troll factory rule book: take some unimportant aspects of an argument and draw an opponent down the spiral discussing minor details to bury the original topic (which, let me remind you, was a) Baltic states are separate nations from Russia and b) were occupied by it).
> a) Baltic states are separate nations from Russia and b) were occupied by it).
I actually agree with both of these points. In fact, these are just basic facts, what's there to discuss?
But if you say "here is fact X and I prove it by Y" where X is true and Y - exagerration or outright falsehood, why is it wrong to challenge Y? I actually find this a form of trolling, because if you continue slipping an untrue with well known facts often enough, then some people might start thinking - that other thing must be true as well.
> Neither of your three points explain why artists, especially writers, were deported.
That's a good point, I don't actually know any Lithuanian artists or writers that have been deported. Could you please name some of them? That would indeed invalidate my argument.
(Btw, this - learning something new - is exactly why I am trying to have a discussion at all, it's nice when people answer with facts, even if these facts change your position, instead of useless rhetorics.)
"That's a good point, I don't actually know any Lithuanian artists or writers that have been deported."
I can't find source in English, but it's a well known fact taught in school in Lithuania. You can find it in on Lithuanian Wikipedia page[0], that states:
"Iš viso sovietų valdžios buvo įkalintas ar deportuotas 81 lietuvių rašytojas."
My translation: "a total of 81 Lithuanian writers were imprisoned or deported by Soviet government".
To name few, well-known writers: Antanas Miškinis, Kazys Boruta, Kazys Jakubėnas. Of course, officially they received some formal accusations. Other writers were forced to write pieces glorifying Lenin, Stalin, Soviet Union and their heroes or be imprisoned/deported too. Some obeyed to avoid ill fate.
> Of course, officially they received some formal accusations.
Well, according to Lithuanian wikipedia, Antanas Miškinis has been a member of partisan movement, which can't really be dismissed as "formal accusation". More interestingly both Kazys Boruta and Kazys Jakubėnas have been imprisoned multiple times during the Lithuanian independence for political reasons. Kazys Boruta even has been exiled for both Lithuania and Latvia! I guess he haven't been sent to Siberia only because neither of Lithuania or Latvia had their own Siberia.
Am I again being nitpicky? Is it only bad when Soviets do it?
Or a Russian living in Latvia and uneasy about all the flames "Ruskies" are getting in their former empire. Probably little point in arguing and even less in accusations of shilling for Putin.
The U.S. and Mexico have a lot in common. Seriously. A lot. A good portion of the U.S. was Mexico. The U.S. Southwest and the Mexican El Norte are in many ways more like each other than the other parts of the U.S. or Mexico.
So you might want to pick a different pair of countries.
For instance, the New York-New Jersey-Pennsylvania portion of the U.S. probably has more in common with Russia than Lithuania has in common with it. There are nearly ten times more ethnic Russians in New York City (600k) than there are in Vilnius (62k).
Saying this is essentially dismissing someone else trying to correct the ignorance that Estonia, Latvia, etc. are the same or have similar cultures. This isn't highlighting differences any more that someone correcting someone else that USA and Mexico are not the same countries because they were both colonialozed by europoean countries.
Where I am people have a centuries past idea that our neighbouring regions are our enemy, we're so different, look hire different it cultures are. Having traveled more widely than is the norm here (an area of the UK) it seems very similar and the supposed differences in culture look like similarities.
It's like people tell me my kids are very similar in appearance, to me they seem very different. The differences in human culture in some areas are like "well they a clog dance wearing bells but we do it with ribbons, see how different we are".
We seem often to look for the differences and use them as a way to "other" people, that is to separate from them. I think we should be guarded towards that, particularly when the differences are things politicians have decided for us to emphasise and express.
I'll bet there are many similarities between people either side of USA borders. However, as you say you are then looking at long-term indigenous populations compared to more recent immigrants (European settlers). The cultural aspects influenced by conquistadors and those from French and British culture will bear some similarity, I'd expect.
Well, Latvia and Lithuania are not Slavic in culture, save the culture pushed on to them via Russian domination. Their languages are related to each other, but are completely different to the Russian (and other Slavic languages) being in a different branch of Indo-European, with almost the same relationship as say, French and Dutch have with each other. Their folk culture has similar roots, but then so does the culture of say, Romania - another Eastern country in Europe that is not Slavic. I know a bunch of Latvians, and they are very different to the Poles, Bulgarians, Czechs and Russians I know, both ethnically and in attitude to life in general.
To be honest, even lumping the Slavic cultures together isn't really satisfactory, because even the Czech/Slovaks I know are culturally quite different to the Poles, and they are from a similar region in Europe and speak languages that are relatively close to each other.
Estonia is even less related. Their language is in a different language family, same as Finnish, and their culture is again very different to Russian.
I'd be uncomfortable with erasing the entire cultures and identities of millions of people against their will and forcing them to only care about boring mammal-level similarities with strangers.
I love diversity. The idea of forcibly eliminating it like that gives me a terrible feeling.
"Humanity needs to focus on what unifies us rather than what separates us."
Sadly, humanity is not a one, big, happy family and you can't dismiss hundreds or thousands years of history to create one. Globalization is the first step towards unified world, but as we can see now, it doesn't work so well. It just doesn't happen overnight. The first thing to a better world should be accepting difference and stop trying to force our values on other people. Invading and occupying neighboring countries does not help to achieve that and divide world even more.
It is worth to point out that the Lithuanian statehood started in XIII century. Way way earlier than the US statehood. It was once a largest country in Europe. Also, in XVI-XVIII centuries, together Poland it formed a union state with a progressive political system and the first codified constitution in modern European history.
So, I would not underestimate the centuries of cultural identity. This is, perhaps, one of the reasons why the Baltic States are doing so much better than any other countries in the former USSR.
Territories comprising modern Latvia has also been part of Germany (~300 years), Swedish Empire and Poland (~200 years).
The only thing Latvians share with Russia is the border unfortunately.
There are no major cultural or ethnic similarities.
The language is so different it doesn't even belong to the same branch in the language tree. (compared to family of Slavic languages - Ukrainian, Belarusian, Slovak, Polish, Czech, etc)
Latvians do not want anything to do with Russia or it's culture or it's politics.
> There are no major cultural or ethnic similarities.
Apart from food, folklore, traditions, musical and literatal traditions, grammar and punctuation?
> The language is so different it doesn't even belong to the same branch in the language tree. (compared to family of Slavic languages - Ukrainian, Belarusian, Slovak, Polish, Czech, etc)
> Latvians do not want anything to do with Russia or it's culture or it's politics.
Politics - wery true, culture - not much so. Older people might not want to have anything to do with Russian culture, but they don't really have much choice, as there isn't much going on in Latvia and they don't speak English. Thus every old lady in the country knows what's going on between Pugacheva and Kirkorov (old Russian pop-figures) and pretty much everyone is watching Russian TV (because there is no alternatives entertainment-wise).
I'll repeat. For the most part, there are no major cultural and ethnic similarities.
The damage and the marks the Soviet regime has left is undeniable however.
If you have heard Latvian, Lithuanian or Estonian language you'll quickly notice just how different they are and bunching them together with Slavic languages makes absolutely no sense in any shape or form.
They are on a completely separate branch which - for some odd reason - in this particular interpretation is held by a common root. The decision to have an encompassing "Balto-Slavic" group is questionable at best and is often disputed.
Even the Wikipedia source says as much:
"Some linguists, however, have recently suggested that Balto-Slavic should be split into three equidistant groups: Eastern Baltic, Western Baltic and Slavic."
Anecdotal evidence time!
All older ladies I know do not watch Russian television and don't understand Russian language well enough to do so.
Saying that everyone is watching Russian TV is objectively false. There are alternatives entertainment-wise! Latvia is in top10 by average internet speed. 70-80% of the population use the internet fairly regularly. Most households in Latvia do have an internet connection. Even out in the country!
Even if a person doesn't speak English, there still is a huge difference between watching Russian TV and watching downloaded American movies and TV-series over-dubbed in Russian.
Latvian youth almost exclusively consumes media in English.
> Baltic languages are very clearly distinct from Slavic ones
No, they are not and you're picture is not an argument for this claim. There are differences between Baltic and Slavic languages, sure, but grammatically they are very close. Rules of conjugation/declension are similar, word formation works the same, punctuation rules are almost exactly same, capitalization is similar, word order is close enough that it can be used interchangeably. It's easy to see how that could happen, given long shared history. Denying facts because of your political points is just ridiculous.
> All older ladies I know do not watch Russian television and don't understand Russian language well enough to do so.
You're right, I shouldn't have used that hyperbole. Of course not everyone is watching Russian TV, but in Riga most older people definitely do. And by older I mean >40 years, not necessary seniors. If you live in Riga and haven't met any of them, you probably just are very picky about people you communicate with.
You presented the wikipedia article (which contained the image clearly showing two distinct branches) as an argument to begin with. Now it's not good enough anymore?
There are differences between Polish and Russian language. Between Latvian and Russian language - for all intents and purposes - there is nothing common. Oh, but both languages have free-word order!
There is no shared history. Latvia has been part of Germany or Swedish Empire and Polish Livonia far longer than it has ever been under Russian Empire/occupation.
I communicate with people who speak either in Latvian or English.
It seems like you're talking here about the older Russian minority living in Riga. They might be watching Russian TV, who could have thought?
I literally don't know a single Latvian - old or young - who watches Russian TV.
I do know older people (>40) people who don't know English well enough (and are too lazy to learn), so they would occasionally watch downloaded American movies or TV-series over-dubbed in Russian.
I think it's pretty clear by now on whose behalf you are posting here.
I'm done here.
I presented wiki article, which did not consist of single image. There were, you know, words grouped in coherent sentences. If you read them, you'd see that the image you showed is just a visual representation of language taxonomy. Languages are divided in families, branches and groups. Indoeuropean language family has among others balto-slavic language branch which consists of presumably older Baltic and younger Slavic languages.
In the comment I originally responded you claimed that Latvian "language is so different it doesn't even belong to the same branch in the language tree". I pointed you that nope, actually it's the same branch. I understand that it's too much details and nuancé for some, but I presumed this being technical website people here would be accustomed to being precise. My appologies.
> There is no shared history. Latvia has been part of Germany or Swedish Empire and Polish Livonia far longer than it has ever been under Russian Empire/occupation.
Nations can have shared history even if they are ruled by different people. During most of the history there were no borders and people would move freely. Later they started to trade. Sholars and some richer people would travel intentionally to see different places. Government agents had to go where they were told. All this facilitated cultural exchange between different ethnic groups that lived in Baltic region. It's easy to see how this could influence languages, especially while languages were only used for oral communication.
> I communicate with people who speak either in Latvian or English.
At least half of Riga population has Russian as one of their mother languages. This percentage is pretty much the same across different communities, sexes and age groups. It was the same among my peers in schools, universities and workplace. If you truly don't know anyone that speaks Russian, you must really hate diversity.
> It seems like you're talking here about the older Russian minority living in Riga. They might be watching Russian TV, who could have thought?
Nope, it's older Latvian population I'm talking about. On a side note, how often do you access internet from different places? Try clearing your cookies and going to YouTube, it will show you what's trending among people in this area. Wherever you try this, no matter what ISP or accesspoint, there will be about half videos from Russia.
Most of the young Latvians that I know, including those from the countryside, are better versed in Russian comedy than in US/English. Russian Comedy Club and projects related to it are extremely well known. Certain Russian music groups are extremely popular, especially among smarter Latvian kids, for instance Akvarium. Last summer they gave a free consert on Dome Square, which was announced just an hour in advance, - it gathered large and mostly Latvian-speaking crowd. You can ignore all this as "damage that Soviet regime left" all you want, but the truth is that this has nothing to do with USSR and just shows that many people choose their entertainment out of what they find interesting/amusing, not what more suits their political agenda.
Are you kidding me Balto-Slavic languages???
1. Latvian and Estonian belongs to Baltic language family.
2. Estonian language has also nothing to do with slavic language also as it's a branch in Finno-Ugric languages.
Also using wikipedia as a source of information is questionable. As the pages related to post-soviet era countries are propoganda war zone for Russia and the countries itself to promote the point of view needed.
I am American, and my father's parents were from Lithuania.
I noticed recently, within the last few years, that several English Wikipedia articles were edited by someone with a Slavic background to promote the idea that Baltic languages are more related to Slavic ones than I have heard anyone claim before. I would imagine this is a controversial claim in the Baltic states.
At any rate Baltic languages are famously more conservative than Slavic ones. They are of course related as all indo-european languages are. The only question is how far back in history you have to go for that to be a relevant matter. I do not think they are close enough that it is relevant.
This hasn't been controversial in Latvia at all, at least in 90-00's (not that scientific theories should be judged by how controversial they are among laymen). The theory that I heard in several Latvian schools, is that lithuanians and latvians had a common language with slavs and they got separated somewhere in bronze age. Lithuanian language supposedly is the most archaic language alive (that is closest to proto-indo-european language by some measures). As far as I undestand there is consensus between linguists working in the field, that Baltic and Slavic languages are very close, the only questionable part is whether there was proto-balto-slavic language or whether these languages acquired similarities over time (also, some suggest that slavic languages separated from existing proto-baltic language).
Given tendency for revisionism and troubled past between Baltic states and Russia, one could see how it seems so alien to some people.
Food - yes, a lot. Folklore, traditions, etc - no. The only reason why russian culture was in Lithuania in, lets say, 1980, it's because we were occupied? Mostly nothing left when we regained our independance...
The post I was replying to, specifically mentioned Latvia. I mostly agree with your characterization of Lithuania. Well, I would add corruption and bureaucracy to the things that still make Lithuania look very familiar to many Russians.
Lithuania - corruption index 32/168 [1]
Russia - corruption index 119/168 [2]
Regarding bureaucracy:
You do know that almost everything in Lithuania is done electronically?
I can open a company in a couple of days without leaving my house.
Same with my taxes.
And if I do need to sign something, I usually sign it with my e-signature and just send over the signed PDF.
I haven't seen much bureaucracy here in years.
Now try that in Russia.
Language-wise (another parent, but I'm too lazy to make a 2nd comment):
I speak both - Russian and Lithuanian... and while there are similarities, like next to no word order, structure, punctuation etc.
There are more differences than similarities.
Roots of most words are different.
There are more verb forms in Lithuanian [3] which slavic languages lack.
Lithuanian still preserves a fully functional future tense, unlike say slavic languages that lost the future tense (like english) and have to use a compound future tense.
Lithuanian itself feels much more archaic.
Linguistically the baltic languages are as close to slavic languages as they are close to german languages[4]
As for bureaucracy, no I didn't know that you have functional electronic government, that's really awesome! My comment was based on experiences there in 2006-2009, I guess a lot have changed since then.
> There are more differences than similarities.
I guess, you realize that that's a really pointless statement. Russian speaker can understand meaning of some spoken sentences and some other words are understandable if you read them. Sure, there are differences, - that's why they are considered separate languages! But Russian speaker without prior knowledge wouldn't understand any sentence in German or Norwegian. I hope this makes sense. Also, speakers of one Slavic language do not necessary understand all other Slavic language speakers, so this just isn't what you should expect from linguistically close languages.
By the way, that picture you linked to (in [4]) clearly shows that Polish is relatively closer to Lithuanian (51-70 distance) than Lithuanian is to German (>=71), check out the diagram's legend.
These countries has been ruled by germans, danes, poles, swedes, etc for many hundreds of years. So what is your point? There is much more german loan words in estonian language than russian ones which would tell you something about which culture had the bigger impact.
Just a quick nitpick regarding to cultural/ethnical similarity with Russia: although the Baltic states were part of Russian Empire, the local culture had also strong German influences. Up until end of 19th century the Baltic Germans were the ruling class (although the region was in Russian Empira). So the local culture was mix of German and Russian influences, which makes it somewhat different with rest of USSR states.
Well, many countries were parts of the British Empire for more than 100 years, including India, China etc. It would be wrong to assume that would cause ethical similariy between Britain and these countries.
Lithuania was occupied for ~120 years by Russia empire and ~50 years by communists. Other than that it's different religion, different language, different culture. Similarities of course exist and Russian people are fine people but I would like to emphasis that we don't want people in other countries think that we are the same so current aggressive government of Russia have "rights" to start trouble here again because we belong to their influence zone. F* that. Lithuania and Lithuanians are free and independent. I hope you understand why this kind of innocent "they are similar" is not perceived well here in Baltic. It plays right into Russian propaganda machine (they are very very good at it, divide and conquer experience for hundreds of years). Don't be naive - this trend that resulted in brexit and Trump was a direct result of Russian information war campaign. I think next target will be EU and there is a lot of material to work on for them - France, Italy, Greece on top of current trend and traction of marginal political groups. I think it was easy to initiate such a trend as those aggressive leftist ideologies which had support of political elites basically discredited itself as no sane person can look at some of those people and say - yeah right that is smart and totally make sense. And those people got an alternative to aggressive idiocy.
> Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania were parts of Russia for 300 years with small omissions. It is longer than the time of existence of the United States.
Probably the only thing this tells us is that the US is a very young nation. 300 years is a blip compared to how long European peoples have been around.
I believe Estonia and Latvia didn't even exist as a countries before the fall of the Soviet Union. Not even before the Russian Empire conquered these lands.
And, Estonia and Latvia existed as independent nations in 1918-1940 (when they were left to the Soviet sphere of influence when Hitler and Stalin split up their spoils.)
So different indeed that the comparison is meaningless. That is my point. If you're going to draw conclusions from comparisons -- like the OP did with his coast/interior thing -- the things you're comparing have to be at least somewhat similar.
Don't forget Ukraine, bro. Now we're trying to keep distance from Russia as far as we can. We had some shared history, but that's only because of our geographical proximity. Everything else - culture, traditions, ideas, language, folklore and literature is different.
Very funny to read this absurd. I respect Ukrainians, and we (russians) have a lot of common traditions and culture. Ask yourself, what nationality had Gogol? Is it russian or ukrainian writer? You have reasons to hate Putin, not Russia.
They also have very valid reasons to hate Stalin. Since these are the most prominent heads of state of the USSR and the modern Russian Federation, they pretty much represent Russia. If you think Russia has more to offer Ukraine than genocide and invasion, maybe speak up in your own country against these things.
I could name few assholes from any nation, could argue that Mussolini doesn't represent italians as a nation, or french/britain/spain tyrans don't represent nobody except themselves. But I see you are deafened by hate.
Mmm.. Where is logical link between "15 years" and "does represent"? He will rule until death, as all dictators. It doesn't represent nothing. But if you just looking for reasons to hate Russia together with putin - nothing will help. People love and hate what they want to love or hate, arguing here is pointless.
I don't care even slightly about Putin, the link is as an entrenched dictator Russia's government represents his will. People who dislike Putin are completely reasonable to not want to be part of a country run by the guy.
PS: I find it odd that Dictators get a bad rap when kings get a good one.
We have bad kings too, no worries. People who dislike Putin can still love their country, traditions and culture. Some of them are waiting while Putin will die, or will be killed. Some are trying to make changes. Read about Franco, how long he was not representing Spain.
The thing there is that Gogol never wrote in ukranian language, despite writing quite a few things rooted in ukrainian culture. I'm not sure whether it actually supports anything, but it is basically a russian meme at this point.
Each nation deserves the leader they have.
Before Putin there was Stalin, before Stalin there was Lenin, before him there were tsars, before them there was the Golden Horde (that has destroyed Kyivan Rus and later collapsed and gave birth to Russia). Leave us alone, dammit :)
Last sentence address to Putin, please. I personally have never been thinking about anything what could offend Ukrainian sovereignty. And don't trust stories about "86%".
As a native speaker I can assure you that the ukrainian word Krai (край) has two meanings - a land and a border. But border only of a physical thing - of a cup, table or watch. Never as a border of a country (or geo-social area), for this we have a different set of words (кордон, межа, границя)
...which sounds like something that every Greek person would agree with, without even an iota of doubt or shame. Some of the Greek-Americans I have known actually have said exactly that, spontaneously, and completely independently of one another.
You are conveniently pretending that a fringe region that overtook it's founding metropoly is somehow entitled to the history and culture of that metropoly. If US annexed England it would not suddenly become a nation with a 1000+ year history.
No, nobody is saying that about Russia\Ukraine. Modern Russia comes from were we pushed mongols away and from Grand Duchy of Moscow (est. 1283). This, however, can't change the fact the Kievan Rus' (fell 1240) is the root for both countries.
All I was saying is that we do share more than some people thing or want to believe, just because of the recent events.
Folklore, maybe not, but Ukraine does have it's own literature. Anyway, the point he is making is valid. Ukraine is fighting hard to get out from under Russia's boot.
Ukraine has more in common with Poland (which was ruling the majority of territories where Ukraine is now) than with Russia (which took those territories from Poland in the late 18th century during the partitioning of Poland).
This is laughable at best. Either you're from Lviv or not Ukrainian.
I'm half Ukrainian in Canada and didn't grow up learning much love for Poland. Ukrainian folk heroes fought against Poland. There's religious differences among Ukrainians because of Poland. It's the running joke that we're arch enemies.
He is highlighting the difference between these regions within the Soviet Union so what's the point of you comment other than signalling political correctness?
I believe that this election signals if anything, a popular rejection of political correctness to the point where discussions can't be had anymore.
The OP was trying to generalize and make conclusions about culture, politics and economy based on geography -- coast vs interior -- of regions of a larger whole. But the USSR was not a nation or a homogenous union and Estonia (for instance) having been invaded, illegally annexed and made part of the USSR at one point does not in any way make it comparable to Russia.
The point: there are a lot of very fundamental differences between these countries that are arguably more important and that would more easily account for differences in politics and economics other than geography.
(Besides, Russia has coastline, too...)
I want people to know when they rely on things that are wrong to prove a point, because that probably renders the point at least partially invalid. You can dismiss that as "signalling political correctness" but it is nevertheless the truth, and on a US-centric forum like this I think many are not aware of the situation.
You have a good point. I just wanted to add that Baltic States haven't even been the most liberal/democratic part of USSR. In fact, some of the Latvian authors had to go publish their works in Moscow/St. Petersburg, because it wasn't possible in Latvian SSR. Speaking with older generations here, and I mean native Latvians/Estonians who had studied in Moscow/St. Petersburg, they often mention culture shock which they experienced there, as there was the whole Counterculture thing going on in Russia which was unheard of in Baltics.
I was a little perplexed by the parent comment as well since I thought I was highlighting differences, but I upvoted it because, well, I learned something. He was polite in his correction, at least.
FWIW, coastal Democrats are equally offended with being lumped in with Trump supporters, Scots would probably be equally offended with being lumped in with English, and Croatians would be equally offended with being lumped in with Yugoslavians, so at least I'm an equal-opportunity offender.
A Croat here; I have no idea what you're talking about; Who the hell are Yugoslavians? Where does this ethnicity live?
Before the breakup of Yugoslavia, some people identified as yugoslavian, yes - as one might identify as European today, but by far the majority of population identified as being one of yugoslavia's constituent ethnicities. After the breakup of Yugoslavia, practically nobody identifies as yugoslavian today - what would be the point, since that attempt at unification seems definitively dead to history now?
I assume you meant "lumped with Serbs (as being Yugoslavian)?".
Many who identified as Yugoslavians left in 90s and are now Americans, Germans, Australians or Canadians. They don't live in the Balkans because ethnically clean countries and ethnicity ranking so high on the political agenda is offensive to them.
Many people in central Bosnia identified as Yugoslavians before the war and I would say most in the same region born in late 60s, 70s would have identified the same. So when someone says Yugoslavia, I think Sarajevo and Bosnia, not Serbia.
sounds plausible, yeah. Looking at wiki on demographics of yugoslavia, croatia, serbia and bosnia is a bit interesting; 81', which appears the peak, has yugoslavian as the ethnicity of 5.4% of yugoslavia total, 7.9% of bosnia and herzegovina (and there it was even higher, 8.4% in 61' which isn't even remotely the case in the other 2 countries - serbia and croatia have fractions of a % in 61'), 4.1% of serbia, and interestingly 8.2% in croatia. Today ofc its essentially 0% in all of them.
So by the end of yugoslavia, got relatively substantial but still by far the majority always identified with some specific ethnicity.
Now I presumed most people revised their identification in 90' for political reasons/safety, but could be emigration as you say played a significant role too, especially in bosnia.
And yeah, a fair proportion would prob be offended by an imputation of yugoslavian identity today, because of the ethnically divided politics.
But I think further than that, a significant chunk of the people not too happy that yugoslavia failed and disintegrated (such as myself and I believe many left-leaning people around) still can't see much sense in identifying as being ethnically yugoslavian. Yugoslavia is no more; yugoslavian identity was a composite one in its rather recent origin; people knew specific ethnicities of their parents and choose to think of themselves as yugoslavian first, or interpreted having parents of different ethnicities as being that identity. As a political project - and it was that - it died just by the time it was getting any substantial traction, so seems rather pointless today.
I guess I naively see it as an umbrella identity for the other ones and it makes sense if your parents from different parts, or don't like the divison of the 90s (It pretty much means - south-slavic). But it has been heavily politicized like anything else in the Balkans. Also current political leaders in the region doing their share to smear Yugoslavian identity probably to justify the division in which this political elite prospers, rather than see a
return of some idea that will get people to look past their minor differences.
My parents came from Yugoslavia but I certainly wouldn't have been offended. I could give you information if I find that yours is wrong in some aspect but trying to guilt trip you for some offence that you certainly didn't intend to give seems wrong to me.
I don't think that winning by a margin of 100-200K votes constitute a popular rejection or repudiation or a mandate for Trump to destroy the "Political Correctness" boogeyman.
Don't pat yourself on the back too, as this PC culture is not only exclusive to leftists but right wingers too have their own emotional buttons that when pushed right, they will be triggered and exhibit similar if not more intense behavior to those they openly despise and deride as SJWs on the left.
It's not surprising. The left-liberal camp was always turning a blind eye towards many important national issues and importantly about the issue of Islam. This reminds me a talk given by Sam Harris about the blunder being done by left-liberals regarding their dishonest/spineless treatment of Islam. His video titled "Sam Harris : Liberals failure to talk honestly about Islam is responsible for the rise of Trump" is very educational [1]. This [2] also is informative in this regard.
Even democratic supporter Bill Maher has said "Bill Maher: I Wish Liberals Would Have Same Intolerance For Muslims That They Do For Christians" [3]
It seems strange to blame the left for not having a stronger response against Islam instead of the right for drumming up this insane hatred of Muslim people..
I have no doubt that this issue cost many swing state votes but how many Wisconsinites have ever even seen a Muslim? It's such an insane boogeyman created for this very purpose.
I listen to Sam Harris, agree with many of his points but there are like 10,000 Syrians in the US - many of whom are Christians, all of whom were fleeing ISIS. Shame on Republicans for using them to score votes.
The parent comment was talking about relatinship with ideology of Islam, and you've changed the subject to relationship to Muslim people. Don't you see the difference?
"The issue of Islam" pretty much says it all right there. Reducing 1.6 billion people and 57 countries around the world down to a few youtube clips that agree with your priors is what I'm going to politely describe as "an interesting worldview". Here's your flag.
If you think that a reasoned, nuanced argument is going to bring this guy over to my point of view - that view being that reducing 1.6 billion people spread across 57 countries down to a couple of Sam Harris youtube clips is silly - I'll have to disagree. Also: why on earth would you think that?
I have had a reasoned and nuanced argument with some other guy on the topic of Islam the other day on HN. It's here FYI [1].
Once again, I am not reducing all Muslims to Islamists, so your argument fails. In fact, you are trying to reduce any criticism of Islam (the ideology/religion) as attack on Muslims worldwide. This same scare tactic is used by pseudo-liberals who wish to suppress any criticism of Islam in other public spheres too.
I am opposing the ideology of Islam and I do oppose other religious ideologies too. I am not a Christian. I have left all organized religions back long ago.
Sam Harris also is not reducing all Muslims to some thing.
No. I am pointing out that your "criticisms" are conveniently conflated, totally reductive, and divorced from any objective reality. You're doing all the reducing. Re-read your own words. Or as much as are your own, as you seem to have done some copy-and-pasting.
Or? Let's try this a different way: have you ever even attempted to identify what your "issue with Islam" is? You don't seem to have any single articulable criticism or complaint besides "the others are comin', see this scary video!". Have you even thought farther than that? Did you not feel the need to?
See, here's my take: I think you've invented a neat little alternate reality for yourself where you virtue signal your love for the western liberal tradition by valiantly fighting against the Other - one you imagine and encounter only online and never in real life - and now you're full on radicalized by filter-bubble friendly Youtube clips and rare Reddit pepes, imagining the looming Sharia monsters that are a comin'. I think this because, well, you've said as much, pretty explicitly, in your profile on this board. That's sad, and worrying, and I don't want you to think that it's normal or that you're engaged in some sort of normal debate.
Why do you need an Other? Have you asked yourself that? It's clear that you do - but why?
>>Let's try this a different way: have you ever even attempted to identify what your "issue with Islam" is?
My issue with Islam is its ideology and its doctrine. It's very similar to my issue with Nazism and white supremacist ideology like KKK. Do we think, that when someone criticizes Nazism/KKK are they reducing all German/white people to some bad thing? No.
It's very similar when it comes to Islam too. I criticize Islam. I criticize Islam's pedophile, rapist and thuggish prophet Muhammad. I criticize Islam's treatment of women and kaafirs (disbelievers). I criticize Islam's barbaric misogynist doctrines.
>> You don't seem to have any single articulable criticism or complaint besides "the others are comin', see this scary video!". Have you even thought farther than that? Did you not feel the need to?
I gave links to those videos as a starting point for the western world. But I do not base my criticism on these videos. I do base my criticism of Islam on the very foundational scriptures of Islam called Quran and Hadiths. Very similar how I criticize the Nazi ideology based on Mein Kampf.
You may wish to look into those scriptures to educate yourself about the vicious ideology of Islam.
Spoiler: I'm Muslim. Interacting with you, online, in a civil manner.
>It's very similar when it comes to Islam too. I criticize Islam. I criticize Islam's pedophile, rapist and thuggish prophet Muhammad. I criticize Islam's treatment of women and kaafirs (disbelievers). I criticize Islam's barbaric misogynist doctrines.
Again: zero to do with reality. Again: learn to interact with reality and not google. Very telling that you avoided answering any of my prior direct questions.
I've spent too much of my life listening to hate preachers try to misinterpret various Surah and Hadith to achieve objective (x); x is almost always silly, always nationalistic, and always wrong.
Watching you do the same thing to justify your desperate need for an Other - which you still refuse to acknowledge, and which again, is sad and worrying and a sign that you please, should see a doctor for this anxiety - reminds me very much of the behavior of a typical hate preacher. And that extremists of all types have so much in common with each other - namely, the willingness to ignore facts in the pursuit of satisfying dogma.
For what it's worth: if you want to tell me that there is a Muslim, or a group of Muslims somewhere in the world that mistreat women or 'kaffir' or what have you : that would be true! And conflating that group of people with anything that you can reasonably call Islam - a word used to represent 1.6 billion people, 57 countries, and millenia of history - is psychotic, and not a thing you can really do with any other religion or group of people without being called out directly for it, thankfully. Conflating a massive group of people by a cherry picked example of their worst is the exact definition of prejudice. I know that you won't accept that on the face of it, and your knee-jerk reaction is that you're armed with The Truth here - but take a deep breath. Cognitive dissonance can often be difficult to confront head on. Please try to do so.
Now - I believe this is your cue to explain to me that I really just want to turn you into a dhimmi; offer some whack-ass cherry picked mistranslated hadiths to prove that really, these noble savages just need to be shown the light; or copy paste some nonsense /b/ bullet points about how "Islam does X" in order to help you ignore the real human - this one, right in front of you! - telling you that faulty generalizations in the service of your priors is the telltale mark of a bigot. Go ahead, do what you want to do. And then, for the love of God - go to a doctor.
When you get back: why do you need an Other so badly? Second time I'm asking.
>>Spoiler: I'm Muslim. Interacting with you, online, in a civil manner.
Good and thanks for it. I do have many Muslim friends, some from Kurdish land. They are real good people.
>>copy paste some nonsense /b/ bullet points about how "Islam does X" in order to help you ignore the real human - this one, right in front of you! - telling you that faulty generalizations in the service of your priors is the telltale mark of a bigot. Go ahead, do what you want to do. And then, for the love of God - go to a doctor.
Who is doing a faulty generalization here? You may indeed be a good person despite being a Muslim, I have no problem in accepting that. But that doesn't make the ideology of Islam good.
And why only you? There are hundreds of thousands of people out there who are good despite being Muslims. Hundreds of German people living under Nazi regime were good. Does it make Nazism good? No.
>>I've spent too much of my life listening to hate preachers try to misinterpret various Surah and Hadith to achieve objective (x); x is almost always silly, always nationalistic, and always wrong.
Okay, tell me, how, according to you, Islam tells its followers to treat apostates?
Also, tell me, how, according to you, Islam tells its followers to treat homosexuals?
I base my criticism of Islam on such issues.
>>which you still refuse to acknowledge, and which again, is sad and worrying and a sign that you please, should see a doctor for this anxiety - reminds me very much of the behavior of a typical hate preacher.
Thanks for your concern about my health, I am doing fine. Let me assure you, I don't preach hate. I am doing what I can do to help people realize the dangers posed by the ideology of Islam and I am telling them that do not confuse Islam with Muslim people. How is this hate preaching?
What about when Christians do it? Usually results in a viscous slave trade (Africa and the Caribbean) or genocide (colonization of North and Central America).
One side claims there is something fundamentally wrong with the religion of Islam and points to passages in the Quran. That side should, then, also note the fundamental problems with most major religions and point to passages in the Bible (old and new testament), the book of mormon, and other holy texts. But this side does not do that. That indicates to the other side that this is not a logical argument based on genuine fear of a hostile culture, but merely a race/religion war in different clothing (christians fearing muslims).
I wish to make it clear that I am not against Muslim people. But I am against the vicious and barbaric ideology of Islam. Many Muslims (especially Muslim women) are the foremost victims of Islam. So, please do not confuse Islam as an ideology with Muslims as people.
Similar thing applies to Christianity and other religions too. The Western world has been so successful on various fronts (especially on the modern, liberal and progressive cultural front) essentially because they defeated and discarded the barbaric Christianity by what we now call "separation of Church and state".
But Islamists (Muslims who wish/strive to bring Islam as ruler in the world) are trying to bring Sharia in the western world and the liberals here are quite dishonest about it.
> But Islamists (Muslims who wish/strive to bring Islam as ruler in the world) are trying to bring Sharia in the western world a
This is a fantasy that is born out of spending too much time on messageboards and not enough in reality. I get that you think that creeping sharia is on the horizon; go see a doctor about your anxiety issues, is my advice, because that statement is so far from reality that I can't imagine you'd take any other advice I'd give.
>>This is a fantasy that is born out of spending too much time on messageboards and not enough in reality.
Hope this [1] helps you see some reality. It seems UK has already allowed the barbaric and inhumane Sharia to exist there.
So, that's not at all fantasy.
Concerns about Islam were certainly a fairly major contributor to Trump's victory.
Many on the left - especially the so-called progressives - are blind to the danger of Islamism. To those who recognize and prioritize the problem, Trump was the obvious choice.
The charges of bigotry so often heard no longer work. Such labeling cannot suppress the fact that Islamist values (based on revelation) are incompatible with Western secular values, (which are based on evidence and reason).
Now if it turns out climate change is a bigger concern than creeping Islamism then we're in trouble.
A good first step might be to require a yellow half moon to be attached to every muslims chest while in public. And one starry night, let's go crush the windows of muslim-owned shops.
That is how we started dealing with the Jewish issue here in Europe a couple of years ago.
> The left-liberal camp was always turning a blind eye towards many important national issues and importantly about the issue of Islam.
First I wanted to say something about that "issues of Islam" might not be the biggest problems we have, but then I looked at your profile page and now I guess you would disagree.
The seeds of the brainwashing start to grow. I am scared about our future.
I want to have a serious discussion with people about how to tackle the second coming of hyper nationalism without people laughing me off and calling me an SJW, cuck, or quoting "Everyone I disagree with is Hitler, a child's guide to politics."
It is clear that we're about to have a second wave of prejudice based on race, religion, and sexual orientation/preference, and I want to be ready to tackle this intelligently.
Does this not prove that "diverse" liberalism isn't so diverse after all? Shouldn't a diverse group of people have seen this coming?
Or is liberalism actually systematically excluding people by labelling them as "racist" and "sexist", when in fact they're just fiscal and social conservatives?
I thought it was very interesting looking at what states won.
Looking at CA and the East voting for Hillary and the rest of the country voting for Trump.
I think we should admit it. If you are rich and in tech, well of course you want to disrupt, you want to carry on that gravy train. But what about everyone else that exists? Not everyone can retrain. Even though retraining is a huge undertaking here. It's simply not going to happen.
Also protecting ones borders is not xenophobic. Are Austrialia, Switzerland, New Zealand, Canada, Japan wrong for not allowing streams of illegals in? Look at Germany. Many who voted don't want the US to become like that.
Finally, basic income. I hope we can all see this is dead. Like many other liberal dreams. I'm hoping for a new future for the US. Jobs and the end of this PC nonsense.
I do support diversity, but real diversity. Not at the expense of other people.
> I think we should admit it. If you are rich and in tech, well of course you want to disrupt, you want to carry on that gravy train. But what about everyone else that exists? Not everyone can retrain. Even though retraining is a huge undertaking here. It's simply not going to happen.
So what is going to happen? I happen to live in Germany where the Government is trying to regulate disruption in all sorts of areas, mostly digital-related. You cannot get rich by isolating your country economically, it's been tried hundreds of times in history and never succeeded. You get rich by innovating and improving, and global competition is the best way we have to make sure our economy is competitive.
This is absolutely horrifying. To know that there are so many rural, angry white men who are so driven by hatred. There are just no words. This is a huge win for racism, misogyny and hate. I just don't know how this disgusting country is going to survive.
There's a number of people throughout this thread espousing the same opinion, using similarly divisive doomsday rhetoric.
Doesn't this reaction seem hyperbolic? It's impossible for angry racist white men alone to elect Trump. What about all the Hispanic, black, Asian, female and other minority voters who must have voted for him? Would you dismiss their view as 'misguided', or would you listen to their opinions and concerns?
I respect that you are passionate about the candidates, but I feel that the certainty you have when you dismiss all Trump voters as racist hateful misogynists is surely misplaced.
The thing is, the actions of those pundits worked in Trump's favour. Clinton was seen as a political insider, any one-sided story could be seen by Trump supporters as the establishment trying to protect one of their own. I lost count of the number of YouTube videos with one-sided Trump bashing leaving people in the comments saying it made them more likely to vote for Trump.
Honestly, I'm still a fan. He, unlike most other models, gave Trump a healthy shot and cautioned repeatedly that a large polling miss was possible this year. That's pretty much what happened.
To be fair, he was consistently significantly less favorable towards Clinton than any of the other high profile models. He even took quite a bit of flak for this in the weekend leading up to the election, but he stood his ground. While he was ultimately wrong, he was closer than mostly anyone else running a serious model.
I would hope people on this board would understand statistics. Silver gave Trump about a 1/3 chance of winning, and he said the outcomes could run from a Clinton blowout to a narrow Trump victory, which is what happened.
If people were interpreting his "33%" as "0%", despite all his warnings and explanations about what was possible, that's their problem, not Silver's.
I think he came out of this with his reputation enhanced: he gave Trump a 28% chance of winning the morning of the election which was vastly more than any other model.
I think about polling and forecasting a lot, and I've concluded that the presentation of forecasts is a big problem. People often seem to conflate "30% chance" with "30% of the vote" which is clearly wrong - or something like this anyway.
Silver went though the last month going "25% is a big chance!!" and no one really listened. I'm not sure what a better way to express it is though.
He put Trump's chances at near 30% leading up to the election. How can you ask for better than that? I don't think you can argue that an upset like this would be expected to happen more than thirty percent of the time.
Nate Silver's calls for caution are looking like some of the most reasonable pre-election commentary at this point.
I can literally say whatever I want and no one is going to flag or vote. Great.
Do you think Glass-Steagall liberalization or Silicon Valley brilliance made flyover-state citizens say "Wow, thanks for innovating all of that technology to help Walmart bean counters find ways to keep price points for common goods low enough to justify why my boss pays me near minimum wage"?
Or, maybe, do you think social media made flyover state citizens with no opportunity says "WTF WHY DOES THE INTERNET THINK I AM AN INBRED RACIST SEXIST HOMOPHOBIC BIGOTED EVIL PERSON BECAUSE I DON'T THINK ELLEN IS ALL THAT FUNNY AND THEY DOGPILED ME ON TWITTER?"
Disregard a population long enough and you'll find they discover ways to hack your morality.
I agree with you. I'm definitely in the 'Silicon Valley liberal elite' category, but the conversation around people from 'flyover states' is generally unproductive, or even non-existent.
I guess this is pretty obviously just blatant trolling and should be downvoted, but if not, you're only proving my point. You should also take the time to read the "Smug style in American liberalism" post that is also trending. [1]
Well, I'm not an American, so there's that. I'm actually a real lefty, you know, one of those people who care about income inequality, and who want real change, and think the US too much resembles an oligarchy, with a tendency of authoritarian corporatism (=fascism). I get the protest vote that Trump represents. Except I believe his pandering to the poor is only pandering, in reality he only has a his own interest in mind. But also, he's a xonophobic, sexist, racist with fascist tendencies, and he seems to have invigorated those tendencies in people. "Overcoming" pc is one of his big accomplishments.
If saying that makes me a 'smug style liberal', so be it.
But seriously, what I meant is that you _can_ be a racist now. I don't know whether you are, although as a Trump supporter (even a vague one) it's a bit of a worry (certainly Trump supporters seem to be accepting of racism). The point is that having a such an important office held by a racist often means the population follows, previously deplored attitudes and actions become mainstream. When right-wing populists get elected, there's often a surge in xenophobic attacks (verbal or otherwise).
So what I'm saying is, you don't have to worry as much about being derided as a Trump supporter now, because the associated behaviors have suddenly become much more accepted.
It only takes a small number of people carrying out disproportionately grievous actions to make this seem true.
The vast majority of Americans are not racists. The vast majority of Trump supporters are not racists. There is a small number of people holding ancient views that, if you want, you can point to and say "They are racists. They represent all of you. They represent a general trend." And one third of your statement would be true.
Racism is not any more acceptable in America today than it was yesterday, measured either by moral scale or social acceptance.
My twitter feed is full of women etc. saying they are very concerned for the future, with replies by white men telling them to get over it and generally gaslighting. I'm also seeing a lot of anti-feminist posturing connecting it to the election.
It changes my impression. I guess maybe it was more about sexism than racism.
I mean, welcome to the internet. Sorry, but your Twitter feed does not make a countrywide trend. This is the same way the same ignorant people respond to things like gamergate. Events cause outbursts.
I find Gamergate is the classic example of the surge of anti-feminism and sexism that appears to be becoming mainstream. Nowadays it's not just about the 'femi-nazis' like in the past, it's the self-victimization of white males. It appears Trump gave them an avenue to 'feel strong' again. And this is in juxtaposition to Hillary who run a noticeable feminist campaign (as opposed to Obama, who _didn't_ run a noticeable black campaign).
You might be reading a little too deeply into it. People have been calling each other fags and making rape threats ever since anonymity on the internet and in videogames was a thing.
> This semester, there's a woman walking around campus in a burka. In the freaking US of A, a woman is walking around with a burka. WTF is wrong with these people?
Would you have the same issue if a nun walks around in her robe?
Free speech is (sadly) already restricted at universities.
Make however a distinction between the free speech of individuals, and that of institutions (such as the church) operating on university premises. There is a place for indiscriminately allowing the former, but not the latter.
Individual freedom of expression has a place in a university. Institutional freedom of expression (in general) does not. When a nun or priest in uniform comes to a university, they are representatives of the church. To be there, they have to ask permissions (and if the university is any good, it would deny this permission).
A student can dress up as a nun, or priest, or nazi, or wear no clothes or whatever, and I will support his right. But the church institution, or political parties, or the army have no place there. If a nun does non-church business, she should wear civilian clothing.
I've read somewhere that the president is the captain of a very large ship with a small rudder. Not sure how correct that is factually but it is somewhat reassuring.
To think that Donald Trump is possession of the nuclear codes, dear god...
Libertarians of the world unite. You have nothing to lose but your bigots. Lets put away national boundaries and show the world that the old order have become obsolete
Let's use this as an opportunity to hold president Trump accountable in a way that we've failed to do for the past few decades. This could lead to unprecedented checks and balances and unprecedented democratic participation leading to a resurgence in the rule of law.
It's been basically a done deal for about two hours now. AP, CNN, NBC, etc. have all called different states at different times, but there's really no doubt about where the rest of this is going to fall.
Donald Trump is the president former european colons have elected on concern about immigration. What an irony.
Sioux, blackfeet, algonquins, montagnais, apache, yahi ... you are the real americans and the world is telling you Donald Trump is the president of a nation that once welcomed the pilgrims that were persecuted in Europa.
I guess thanksgiving meaning has been lost.
If only trump could be consistent and self kick all the white americans him included as illegal immigrants from the country.
there is no Sioux. it's a name the french gave them when they supplied them with guns and whiskey to fan a counter-insurgency. Sitting Bull was a Humpapa Indian.
The attempts at building an interconnected globalised world are beginning to fail. A bunch of elites decided to create their own trans-national utopia unchecked by borders and dismissed all criticism as racist or bigoted. The globalisation project has been rejected by a majority of the population. Whether it is for economic reasons or just plain bigotry is something for the sociologists to study and not something I can pontificate on.
Also people seem to care a LOT about immigration and preserving their culture. Instead of patronising these people it's time we tried to understand their concerns and try to assuage them.
There is no genuine leftist alternative. It's a choice between center-right "left" that's sold out to the establishment and the far right.Economists need to stop acting like priests in the medieval ages who justified the existing order . The rural voter who lost his job doesn't care about the theory of comparitive advantage.
If this trend holds this will soon take hold in France and other European nations. This is a return to the world of the 1920s. Not gloom and doom but a much more unstable global order with every country for itself. Not what we need when we face planet scale threats like global warming. Get out of your bubble.
Hang out more on subreddits you don't agree with.
The divide is bridged one person at a time.
PS - Reposted my comment from another thread as it got flagged. Hope its OK with the mods.
EDIT: His concession speech seems to indicate that he's beginning to appreciate what he's been entrusted with.