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On October 31 2016 02:09 biology]major wrote:Show nested quote +On October 31 2016 01:48 LegalLord wrote:On October 31 2016 01:31 ChristianS wrote:
Tbh I feel like I always hear people speak in broad terms about how corrupt, dishonest, etc. Hillary is and I never hear any specifics. When people bring up specific stuff, it seems like a long list of scandals in which what is proven isn't all that bad and what is really bad is far from proven.
It seems like after decades of mudslinging and allegations against the Clintons, some of which were actually bad and some of which were purely manufactured, nobody has the patience to actually research all the million different scandals, and just assumes if there are that many allegations out there they must have been corrupt in at least some of them. She's less bad than her opposition claims she is but she is far from some innocent victim of some unfounded smear campaign. That she is a serial liar is pretty much ubiquitous; to bring up specific examples is about as productive as trying to convince someone that the miracles in the Bible aren't scientifically or historically feasible (someone could write a book explaining the reality in detail, but pointing to specific examples in short replies is pointless because if you don't see it then it's because you don't want to see it). That she has some terrible dealings that could be described as corruption is also plain to see. And as a bonus, her political record isn't really all that great: a nominal social progressive (when it's popular), a warhawk without much long-term thinking, and in general a living embodiment of what people think of as a "career politician" with all the negative connotations that come with it. But of course, at this point, you pretty much either see it or don't. If you don't, not only is it probably too late to be convinced otherwise (a lot of us have already voted) but also it's not a productive discussion to have. She has spent well over half a billion dollars in this election and is barely able to put away Trump. She is a horrible candidate, ANY other democrat would have buried him. There is no need to hide behind soft language.
But didn't you hear about how delectably undeniably electable she is? Ungodly electable. There has never been a candidate more electable in the history of elections, ever.
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On October 31 2016 02:12 KwarK wrote:Show nested quote +On October 31 2016 02:09 biology]major wrote:On October 31 2016 01:48 LegalLord wrote:On October 31 2016 01:31 ChristianS wrote:
Tbh I feel like I always hear people speak in broad terms about how corrupt, dishonest, etc. Hillary is and I never hear any specifics. When people bring up specific stuff, it seems like a long list of scandals in which what is proven isn't all that bad and what is really bad is far from proven.
It seems like after decades of mudslinging and allegations against the Clintons, some of which were actually bad and some of which were purely manufactured, nobody has the patience to actually research all the million different scandals, and just assumes if there are that many allegations out there they must have been corrupt in at least some of them. She's less bad than her opposition claims she is but she is far from some innocent victim of some unfounded smear campaign. That she is a serial liar is pretty much ubiquitous; to bring up specific examples is about as productive as trying to convince someone that the miracles in the Bible aren't scientifically or historically feasible (someone could write a book explaining the reality in detail, but pointing to specific examples in short replies is pointless because if you don't see it then it's because you don't want to see it). That she has some terrible dealings that could be described as corruption is also plain to see. And as a bonus, her political record isn't really all that great: a nominal social progressive (when it's popular), a warhawk without much long-term thinking, and in general a living embodiment of what people think of as a "career politician" with all the negative connotations that come with it. But of course, at this point, you pretty much either see it or don't. If you don't, not only is it probably too late to be convinced otherwise (a lot of us have already voted) but also it's not a productive discussion to have. She has spent well over half a billion dollars in this election and is barely able to put away Trump. She is a horrible candidate, ANY other democrat would have buried him. There is no need to hide behind soft language. Name the other Democrat? Biden didn't want the job and he couldn't be made to run. Bernie? O'Malley?
Who knows what dealings took place to placate people against running this year, but literally any democrat except weiner. Bernie would have beaten trump, so easily. Trump would have lost a lot of his fire against trade agreements and the trump tapes would have ended it. O'Malley representing my state could have done it too.
If the opponent wasn't HRC, the entire republican party minus some fringe elements would have abandoned Trump.
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I disagree with bio's assessment. But this is all ground we've treaded VERY many times already, so adding the details seems irrelevant. if there's anyone who doesn't remember the arguments, i'll provide them; otherwise i'll just assume everyone already knows the points i'm going to make, and has decided already how they feel about them.
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On October 31 2016 02:12 LegalLord wrote:
It's not productive for the same reason the "is X person racist/being racist" discussion isn't productive. It goes nowhere and frankly I'm sick of talking about the topic. We've had the discussion plenty of times, and either you weren't a part of it for long enough, or you weren't convinced by what other people were convinced by. Either way, it's about as productive as discussing the scientific merits of the Bible; the views people have are solidly entrenched and not to be changed by anything less than a dissertation-style post or a book making the argument in detail, and frankly none of us really want to bother when in a week we can finally just forget about this disgusting farce of an election.
I mean, I have no desire to force you into a discussion against your will. But surely if the examples are so numerous and self-evident, it shouldn't be hard for someone to provide a few. I've tried to research the email server, Clinton Foundation, and a bit on Benghazi, and in every case it seems as though 1) the average person making accusations about them is fairly uninformed, and 2) if you research it more, most of the more extreme allegations drop away pretty quickly, but 3) what's left is maybe some inept mishandling, and a fair amount of dodging and changing the subject when the issue is brought up. Maybe people see that dodging and subject-changing and they think "that looks suspicious, she must be guilty"?
The idea that everybody already knows everything there is to know about these scandals so there's no point discussing seems false, i think plenty of people (myself included) don't know all the details and could benefit from the discussion. Or perhaps you're saying they don't know all the facts, but they won't change their opinion even when new facts present themselves? In which case yeah, sure, but then why discuss politics at all?
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On October 31 2016 02:27 ChristianS wrote:Show nested quote +On October 31 2016 02:12 LegalLord wrote:
It's not productive for the same reason the "is X person racist/being racist" discussion isn't productive. It goes nowhere and frankly I'm sick of talking about the topic. We've had the discussion plenty of times, and either you weren't a part of it for long enough, or you weren't convinced by what other people were convinced by. Either way, it's about as productive as discussing the scientific merits of the Bible; the views people have are solidly entrenched and not to be changed by anything less than a dissertation-style post or a book making the argument in detail, and frankly none of us really want to bother when in a week we can finally just forget about this disgusting farce of an election. I mean, I have no desire to force you into a discussion against your will. But surely if the examples are so numerous and self-evident, it shouldn't be hard for someone to provide a few. I've tried to research the email server, Clinton Foundation, and a bit on Benghazi, and in every case it seems as though 1) the average person making accusations about them is fairly uninformed, and 2) if you research it more, most of the more extreme allegations drop away pretty quickly, but 3) what's left is maybe some inept mishandling, and a fair amount of dodging and changing the subject when the issue is brought up. Maybe people see that dodging and subject-changing and they think "that looks suspicious, she must be guilty"? The idea that everybody already knows everything there is to know about these scandals so there's no point discussing seems false, i think plenty of people (myself included) don't know all the details and could benefit from the discussion. Or perhaps you're saying they don't know all the facts, but they won't change their opinion even when new facts present themselves? In which case yeah, sure, but then why discuss politics at all?
Sure, as I mentioned there is a lot less to some of those issues than people say there is. The CF we need to just wait to see what the FBI comes up with, the emails she acted stupidly and lied about it to win the nomination, and Libya/Benghazi was just garden variety bad policy. She has a pretty extensive history of flip-flopping and cronyism and the like; most of it has been discussed to death and then some. But if you look into all of those issues in depth and your conclusion is that Hillary is either just a victim of an unfair smear campaign who did nothing wrong, or "just doing what has to be done" then there's some willful whitewashing going on there. I spent a lot of time trying to tell Hillary supporters that they really need to be more honest about that.
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On October 31 2016 02:35 LegalLord wrote:Show nested quote +On October 31 2016 02:27 ChristianS wrote:On October 31 2016 02:12 LegalLord wrote:
It's not productive for the same reason the "is X person racist/being racist" discussion isn't productive. It goes nowhere and frankly I'm sick of talking about the topic. We've had the discussion plenty of times, and either you weren't a part of it for long enough, or you weren't convinced by what other people were convinced by. Either way, it's about as productive as discussing the scientific merits of the Bible; the views people have are solidly entrenched and not to be changed by anything less than a dissertation-style post or a book making the argument in detail, and frankly none of us really want to bother when in a week we can finally just forget about this disgusting farce of an election. I mean, I have no desire to force you into a discussion against your will. But surely if the examples are so numerous and self-evident, it shouldn't be hard for someone to provide a few. I've tried to research the email server, Clinton Foundation, and a bit on Benghazi, and in every case it seems as though 1) the average person making accusations about them is fairly uninformed, and 2) if you research it more, most of the more extreme allegations drop away pretty quickly, but 3) what's left is maybe some inept mishandling, and a fair amount of dodging and changing the subject when the issue is brought up. Maybe people see that dodging and subject-changing and they think "that looks suspicious, she must be guilty"? The idea that everybody already knows everything there is to know about these scandals so there's no point discussing seems false, i think plenty of people (myself included) don't know all the details and could benefit from the discussion. Or perhaps you're saying they don't know all the facts, but they won't change their opinion even when new facts present themselves? In which case yeah, sure, but then why discuss politics at all? Sure, as I mentioned there is a lot less to some of those issues than people say there is. The CF we need to just wait to see what the FBI comes up with, the emails she acted stupidly and lied about it to win the nomination, and Libya/Benghazi was just garden variety bad policy. She has a pretty extensive history of flip-flopping and cronyism and the like; most of it has been discussed to death and then some. But if you look into all of those issues in depth and your conclusion is that Hillary is either just a victim of an unfair smear campaign who did nothing wrong, or "just doing what has to be done" then there's some willful whitewashing going on there. I spent a lot of time trying to tell Hillary supporters that they really need to be more honest about that.
Oh, I should be clear, I don't think she comes out as some innocent victim of circumstance. But she also doesn't come out as a crook. On the e-mails, for instance, it seems like there was a really bad culture of information security and record keeping at the State Department, and Hillary was so incompetent with computers she had precisely zero percent chance of recognizing their IT problems and doing something about them. She seems to have understood what an email server was about as well as my parents would understand what port forwarding is if I tried to explain it to them.
Now she got put in charge of a broken organization, did not recognize it was broken, and did nothing to fix it. That's not a good thing in the slightest. But it's also not treason, or anything like it.
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On October 31 2016 01:20 LegalLord wrote:
There are plenty of people who are Hillary supporters who take one of two stances (I can't decide which, might be both):
1. I'm supporting Hillary and I think she must win so I have to shill for her, push her talking points, and obtusely deny her valid weaknesses because we must stop Trump at all costs.
2. It's not fashionable to like Hillary as a candidate so I'm going to use the "I don't like Hillary but..." disclaimer to fit in while pushing her talking points.
There is a very small cadre of open and not quite so pretend-reluctant supporters, but the above is far more common.
You're dead-on with both points. Some will see the danger of Trump and then spout campaign spin and talking points until the cows come home. Others will say they dislike her, that's there's merit to some flaws, but nonetheless spew campaign pablum. The majority of Hillary supporters in this thread fall into one of those two categories. Some days it feels like the vast majority, other days a slim majority.
On October 31 2016 01:48 LegalLord wrote:Show nested quote +On October 31 2016 01:31 ChristianS wrote:
Tbh I feel like I always hear people speak in broad terms about how corrupt, dishonest, etc. Hillary is and I never hear any specifics. When people bring up specific stuff, it seems like a long list of scandals in which what is proven isn't all that bad and what is really bad is far from proven.
It seems like after decades of mudslinging and allegations against the Clintons, some of which were actually bad and some of which were purely manufactured, nobody has the patience to actually research all the million different scandals, and just assumes if there are that many allegations out there they must have been corrupt in at least some of them. She's less bad than her opposition claims she is but she is far from some innocent victim of some unfounded smear campaign. That she is a serial liar is pretty much ubiquitous; to bring up specific examples is about as productive as trying to convince someone that the miracles in the Bible aren't scientifically or historically feasible (someone could write a book explaining the reality in detail, but pointing to specific examples in short replies is pointless because if you don't see it then it's because you don't want to see it). That she has some terrible dealings that could be described as corruption is also plain to see. And as a bonus, her political record isn't really all that great: a nominal social progressive (when it's popular), a warhawk without much long-term thinking, and in general a living embodiment of what people think of as a "career politician" with all the negative connotations that come with it. But of course, at this point, you pretty much either see it or don't. If you don't, not only is it probably too late to be convinced otherwise (a lot of us have already voted) but also it's not a productive discussion to have.
You're two for two. I presume more of an attachment to the progressive agenda than others given her record on issues like Hillarycare in a political climate of much more open market health insurance. But I can understand the perspective of people that think her less attached given her triangulation against far leftist Sanders and stuff like Trump's infrastructure spending and childcare subsidies.
As with much in politics in the past decade, you either see it or you don't. It would take a novel-length book to expound on every point you made enough to have a chance to convince someone believing otherwise.
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On October 31 2016 02:59 ChristianS wrote:Show nested quote +On October 31 2016 02:35 LegalLord wrote:On October 31 2016 02:27 ChristianS wrote:On October 31 2016 02:12 LegalLord wrote:
It's not productive for the same reason the "is X person racist/being racist" discussion isn't productive. It goes nowhere and frankly I'm sick of talking about the topic. We've had the discussion plenty of times, and either you weren't a part of it for long enough, or you weren't convinced by what other people were convinced by. Either way, it's about as productive as discussing the scientific merits of the Bible; the views people have are solidly entrenched and not to be changed by anything less than a dissertation-style post or a book making the argument in detail, and frankly none of us really want to bother when in a week we can finally just forget about this disgusting farce of an election. I mean, I have no desire to force you into a discussion against your will. But surely if the examples are so numerous and self-evident, it shouldn't be hard for someone to provide a few. I've tried to research the email server, Clinton Foundation, and a bit on Benghazi, and in every case it seems as though 1) the average person making accusations about them is fairly uninformed, and 2) if you research it more, most of the more extreme allegations drop away pretty quickly, but 3) what's left is maybe some inept mishandling, and a fair amount of dodging and changing the subject when the issue is brought up. Maybe people see that dodging and subject-changing and they think "that looks suspicious, she must be guilty"? The idea that everybody already knows everything there is to know about these scandals so there's no point discussing seems false, i think plenty of people (myself included) don't know all the details and could benefit from the discussion. Or perhaps you're saying they don't know all the facts, but they won't change their opinion even when new facts present themselves? In which case yeah, sure, but then why discuss politics at all? Sure, as I mentioned there is a lot less to some of those issues than people say there is. The CF we need to just wait to see what the FBI comes up with, the emails she acted stupidly and lied about it to win the nomination, and Libya/Benghazi was just garden variety bad policy. She has a pretty extensive history of flip-flopping and cronyism and the like; most of it has been discussed to death and then some. But if you look into all of those issues in depth and your conclusion is that Hillary is either just a victim of an unfair smear campaign who did nothing wrong, or "just doing what has to be done" then there's some willful whitewashing going on there. I spent a lot of time trying to tell Hillary supporters that they really need to be more honest about that. Oh, I should be clear, I don't think she comes out as some innocent victim of circumstance. But she also doesn't come out as a crook. On the e-mails, for instance, it seems like there was a really bad culture of information security and record keeping at the State Department, and Hillary was so incompetent with computers she had precisely zero percent chance of recognizing their IT problems and doing something about them. She seems to have understood what an email server was about as well as my parents would understand what port forwarding is if I tried to explain it to them. Now she got put in charge of a broken organization, did not recognize it was broken, and did nothing to fix it. That's not a good thing in the slightest. But it's also not treason, or anything like it.
Well as long as you're willing to give her the proportionate level of criticism for her genuine shortfalls, that's fine with me. Problem is, not too many people are willing to do so and too many of her supporters (including the pretend-reluctant ones) just buy her talking points as the exact truth on the issue.
The CF? A charity that looks suspect enough that the FBI is willing to investigate it, and that is certainly not worthy of the regard of a more generally appreciated charity (e.g. Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation). Maybe criminal, maybe not; let the FBI say what they want on the issue.
The emails? Very stupid show of incompetence and disregard for proper cyber security protocol; not someone I'd like to have in charge in an age where cyber security is increasingly important and the US government has shown itself to be quite bad at properly dealing with it (a multi-faceted issue, but I don't think too many people think the govt is good at cyber security at all). Probably not something you would go to prison for, but any other person who did what Hillary did would be fired and would never get another job in that field again because of gross incompetence.
Benghazi and Libya? Not entirely her doing, but Libya intervention was her initiative, and it's certainly legitimate to criticize a Secretary of State for failing to do her job properly in protecting the nation's embassies. Too bad the party that criticizes her has a case of "the pot calling the kettle black" and can't properly attack the issue, instead looking like fools when they attempt to.
Certainly there was a smear campaign against her, but it wouldn't have stuck if there weren't so much to criticize her for that it would be really stupid to think that she's a good candidate for president.
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On October 31 2016 03:17 LegalLord wrote:
The emails? Very stupid show of incompetence and disregard for proper cyber security protocol; not someone I'd like to have in charge in an age where cyber security is increasingly important and the US government has shown itself to be quite bad at properly dealing with it (a multi-faceted issue, but I don't think too many people think the govt is good at cyber security at all). Probably not something you would go to prison for, but any other person who did what Hillary did would be fired and would never get another job in that field again because of gross incompetence.
The saddest part about this is that her opponent floundered in the debates on what cybersecurity (or should I say "the security aspect of cyber") even is. While Hillary showed enough competence to regurgitate talking points, the incompetence demonstrated by the email scandal undermines her supposed advantage here--even if you don't believe the e-mails represent actual corruption, it's still a worrying degree of incompetence. Our two geriatric candidates are both utterly out of touch with technology.
Either way we're completely fucked with regard to cybersecurity for the near forseeable future and I don't see either candidate helping us in this regard.
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To my eye, plenty of people give a level of criticism appropriate to her shortfalls, and the perception otherwise is incorrect.
It seems more like a false aspersion and misrepresentation of the distribution; you say too many believe X, how many is too many?
also, high end charities getting investigated doesn't mean much if nothing is found.
things like this also make small differences in actual opinion seem larger because of quibbles over details, or modest changes with a realm of plausible interpretations. (i.e. an event might have a range of reasonable interpretations, and someone choosing one a bit more modest, and they get accused of glossing over bad stuff). There's also a real issue with statements like "some people say or do X and go too far"; because there's a lot of people in the world, and even in the thread, so its' hard to argue with well because of the lack of specificity.
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On October 31 2016 03:17 LegalLord wrote:Show nested quote +On October 31 2016 02:59 ChristianS wrote:On October 31 2016 02:35 LegalLord wrote:On October 31 2016 02:27 ChristianS wrote:On October 31 2016 02:12 LegalLord wrote:
It's not productive for the same reason the "is X person racist/being racist" discussion isn't productive. It goes nowhere and frankly I'm sick of talking about the topic. We've had the discussion plenty of times, and either you weren't a part of it for long enough, or you weren't convinced by what other people were convinced by. Either way, it's about as productive as discussing the scientific merits of the Bible; the views people have are solidly entrenched and not to be changed by anything less than a dissertation-style post or a book making the argument in detail, and frankly none of us really want to bother when in a week we can finally just forget about this disgusting farce of an election. I mean, I have no desire to force you into a discussion against your will. But surely if the examples are so numerous and self-evident, it shouldn't be hard for someone to provide a few. I've tried to research the email server, Clinton Foundation, and a bit on Benghazi, and in every case it seems as though 1) the average person making accusations about them is fairly uninformed, and 2) if you research it more, most of the more extreme allegations drop away pretty quickly, but 3) what's left is maybe some inept mishandling, and a fair amount of dodging and changing the subject when the issue is brought up. Maybe people see that dodging and subject-changing and they think "that looks suspicious, she must be guilty"? The idea that everybody already knows everything there is to know about these scandals so there's no point discussing seems false, i think plenty of people (myself included) don't know all the details and could benefit from the discussion. Or perhaps you're saying they don't know all the facts, but they won't change their opinion even when new facts present themselves? In which case yeah, sure, but then why discuss politics at all? Sure, as I mentioned there is a lot less to some of those issues than people say there is. The CF we need to just wait to see what the FBI comes up with, the emails she acted stupidly and lied about it to win the nomination, and Libya/Benghazi was just garden variety bad policy. She has a pretty extensive history of flip-flopping and cronyism and the like; most of it has been discussed to death and then some. But if you look into all of those issues in depth and your conclusion is that Hillary is either just a victim of an unfair smear campaign who did nothing wrong, or "just doing what has to be done" then there's some willful whitewashing going on there. I spent a lot of time trying to tell Hillary supporters that they really need to be more honest about that. Oh, I should be clear, I don't think she comes out as some innocent victim of circumstance. But she also doesn't come out as a crook. On the e-mails, for instance, it seems like there was a really bad culture of information security and record keeping at the State Department, and Hillary was so incompetent with computers she had precisely zero percent chance of recognizing their IT problems and doing something about them. She seems to have understood what an email server was about as well as my parents would understand what port forwarding is if I tried to explain it to them. Now she got put in charge of a broken organization, did not recognize it was broken, and did nothing to fix it. That's not a good thing in the slightest. But it's also not treason, or anything like it. Certainly there was a smear campaign against her, but it wouldn't have stuck if there weren't so much to criticize her for that it would be really stupid to think that she's a good candidate for president.
I think this is the only quibble I have (aside from noting that as far as i know, it's only the funding sources of the CF that are the duspect; unless I'm mistaken, the work they do is mostly considered fairly good compared to other charities). There's a lot of this logic out there of if a smear stuck, that means there must be something to it (and the closely related argument that Hillary must be bad, or else how is she only barely beating Donald Trump?)
They're nothing but appeals to the masses. That an idea is popular is no proof that it is right. A Republican might say she is unpopular because she is bad, a Democrat might say she is unpopular because of widespread subconscious sexism. On the surface it isn't clear why one explanation is clearly better than the othet, or why the answer might include contributions from both.
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On October 31 2016 03:32 ChristianS wrote:Show nested quote +On October 31 2016 03:17 LegalLord wrote:On October 31 2016 02:59 ChristianS wrote:On October 31 2016 02:35 LegalLord wrote:On October 31 2016 02:27 ChristianS wrote:On October 31 2016 02:12 LegalLord wrote:
It's not productive for the same reason the "is X person racist/being racist" discussion isn't productive. It goes nowhere and frankly I'm sick of talking about the topic. We've had the discussion plenty of times, and either you weren't a part of it for long enough, or you weren't convinced by what other people were convinced by. Either way, it's about as productive as discussing the scientific merits of the Bible; the views people have are solidly entrenched and not to be changed by anything less than a dissertation-style post or a book making the argument in detail, and frankly none of us really want to bother when in a week we can finally just forget about this disgusting farce of an election. I mean, I have no desire to force you into a discussion against your will. But surely if the examples are so numerous and self-evident, it shouldn't be hard for someone to provide a few. I've tried to research the email server, Clinton Foundation, and a bit on Benghazi, and in every case it seems as though 1) the average person making accusations about them is fairly uninformed, and 2) if you research it more, most of the more extreme allegations drop away pretty quickly, but 3) what's left is maybe some inept mishandling, and a fair amount of dodging and changing the subject when the issue is brought up. Maybe people see that dodging and subject-changing and they think "that looks suspicious, she must be guilty"? The idea that everybody already knows everything there is to know about these scandals so there's no point discussing seems false, i think plenty of people (myself included) don't know all the details and could benefit from the discussion. Or perhaps you're saying they don't know all the facts, but they won't change their opinion even when new facts present themselves? In which case yeah, sure, but then why discuss politics at all? Sure, as I mentioned there is a lot less to some of those issues than people say there is. The CF we need to just wait to see what the FBI comes up with, the emails she acted stupidly and lied about it to win the nomination, and Libya/Benghazi was just garden variety bad policy. She has a pretty extensive history of flip-flopping and cronyism and the like; most of it has been discussed to death and then some. But if you look into all of those issues in depth and your conclusion is that Hillary is either just a victim of an unfair smear campaign who did nothing wrong, or "just doing what has to be done" then there's some willful whitewashing going on there. I spent a lot of time trying to tell Hillary supporters that they really need to be more honest about that. Oh, I should be clear, I don't think she comes out as some innocent victim of circumstance. But she also doesn't come out as a crook. On the e-mails, for instance, it seems like there was a really bad culture of information security and record keeping at the State Department, and Hillary was so incompetent with computers she had precisely zero percent chance of recognizing their IT problems and doing something about them. She seems to have understood what an email server was about as well as my parents would understand what port forwarding is if I tried to explain it to them. Now she got put in charge of a broken organization, did not recognize it was broken, and did nothing to fix it. That's not a good thing in the slightest. But it's also not treason, or anything like it. Certainly there was a smear campaign against her, but it wouldn't have stuck if there weren't so much to criticize her for that it would be really stupid to think that she's a good candidate for president. I think this is the only quibble I have (aside from noting that as far as i know, it's only the funding sources of the CF that are the duspect; unless I'm mistaken, the work they do is mostly considered fairly good compared to other charities). There's a lot of this logic out there of if a smear stuck, that means there must be something to it (and the closely related argument that Hillary must be bad, or else how is she only barely beating Donald Trump?) They're nothing but appeals to the masses. That an idea is popular is no proof that it is right. A Republican might say she is unpopular because she is bad, a Democrat might say she is unpopular because of widespread subconscious sexism. On the surface it isn't clear why one explanation is clearly better than the othet, or why the answer might include contributions from both.
I see where you're coming from, in that you're making the "big lie" argument, that if a ludicrous argument is repeated enough people will believe it. I see it as a somewhat different effect: that you can tell someone is a liar if they lie all the time, even if you can't pinpoint exactly which thing they lied about. People do have an innate sense for whether or not someone is a liar and Hillary... well as GH puts it, you would be an idiot to trust someone who lies as much as she does.
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depends on what you're trusting them for/to do, and on which statements they're making.
politicians in general tend to lie a lot as well.
it also matters an awful lot which things they were lying about.
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On October 31 2016 03:25 TheYango wrote:Show nested quote +On October 31 2016 03:17 LegalLord wrote:
The emails? Very stupid show of incompetence and disregard for proper cyber security protocol; not someone I'd like to have in charge in an age where cyber security is increasingly important and the US government has shown itself to be quite bad at properly dealing with it (a multi-faceted issue, but I don't think too many people think the govt is good at cyber security at all). Probably not something you would go to prison for, but any other person who did what Hillary did would be fired and would never get another job in that field again because of gross incompetence. The saddest part about this is that her opponent floundered in the debates on what cybersecurity (or should I say "the security aspect of cyber") even is. While Hillary showed enough competence to regurgitate talking points, the incompetence demonstrated by the email scandal undermines her supposed advantage here--even if you don't believe the e-mails represent actual corruption, it's still a worrying degree of incompetence. Our two geriatric candidates are both utterly out of touch with technology. Either way we're completely fucked with regard to cybersecurity for the near forseeable future and I don't see either candidate helping us in this regard.
Besides the "won't make the government better at securing its data" issue, I could easily see Hillary doing something stupid like trying to play cyber war games with Russia's financial systems. That would probably end worse for the US than for Russia and would cost everyone hundreds of billions of dollars when all is said and done. Hillary has just enough of a mix between aggressive and technologically incompetent to make me think that she might try it.
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On October 31 2016 03:09 Danglars wrote:Show nested quote +On October 31 2016 01:20 LegalLord wrote:
There are plenty of people who are Hillary supporters who take one of two stances (I can't decide which, might be both):
1. I'm supporting Hillary and I think she must win so I have to shill for her, push her talking points, and obtusely deny her valid weaknesses because we must stop Trump at all costs.
2. It's not fashionable to like Hillary as a candidate so I'm going to use the "I don't like Hillary but..." disclaimer to fit in while pushing her talking points.
There is a very small cadre of open and not quite so pretend-reluctant supporters, but the above is far more common. You're dead-on with both points. Some will see the danger of Trump and then spout campaign spin and talking points until the cows come home. Others will say they dislike her, that's there's merit to some flaws, but nonetheless spew campaign pablum. The majority of Hillary supporters in this thread fall into one of those two categories. Some days it feels like the vast majority, other days a slim majority.
I don't think that's true, most of them voted Hillary over Bernie
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On October 31 2016 03:57 LegalLord wrote:Show nested quote +On October 31 2016 03:32 ChristianS wrote:On October 31 2016 03:17 LegalLord wrote:On October 31 2016 02:59 ChristianS wrote:On October 31 2016 02:35 LegalLord wrote:On October 31 2016 02:27 ChristianS wrote:On October 31 2016 02:12 LegalLord wrote:
It's not productive for the same reason the "is X person racist/being racist" discussion isn't productive. It goes nowhere and frankly I'm sick of talking about the topic. We've had the discussion plenty of times, and either you weren't a part of it for long enough, or you weren't convinced by what other people were convinced by. Either way, it's about as productive as discussing the scientific merits of the Bible; the views people have are solidly entrenched and not to be changed by anything less than a dissertation-style post or a book making the argument in detail, and frankly none of us really want to bother when in a week we can finally just forget about this disgusting farce of an election. I mean, I have no desire to force you into a discussion against your will. But surely if the examples are so numerous and self-evident, it shouldn't be hard for someone to provide a few. I've tried to research the email server, Clinton Foundation, and a bit on Benghazi, and in every case it seems as though 1) the average person making accusations about them is fairly uninformed, and 2) if you research it more, most of the more extreme allegations drop away pretty quickly, but 3) what's left is maybe some inept mishandling, and a fair amount of dodging and changing the subject when the issue is brought up. Maybe people see that dodging and subject-changing and they think "that looks suspicious, she must be guilty"? The idea that everybody already knows everything there is to know about these scandals so there's no point discussing seems false, i think plenty of people (myself included) don't know all the details and could benefit from the discussion. Or perhaps you're saying they don't know all the facts, but they won't change their opinion even when new facts present themselves? In which case yeah, sure, but then why discuss politics at all? Sure, as I mentioned there is a lot less to some of those issues than people say there is. The CF we need to just wait to see what the FBI comes up with, the emails she acted stupidly and lied about it to win the nomination, and Libya/Benghazi was just garden variety bad policy. She has a pretty extensive history of flip-flopping and cronyism and the like; most of it has been discussed to death and then some. But if you look into all of those issues in depth and your conclusion is that Hillary is either just a victim of an unfair smear campaign who did nothing wrong, or "just doing what has to be done" then there's some willful whitewashing going on there. I spent a lot of time trying to tell Hillary supporters that they really need to be more honest about that. Oh, I should be clear, I don't think she comes out as some innocent victim of circumstance. But she also doesn't come out as a crook. On the e-mails, for instance, it seems like there was a really bad culture of information security and record keeping at the State Department, and Hillary was so incompetent with computers she had precisely zero percent chance of recognizing their IT problems and doing something about them. She seems to have understood what an email server was about as well as my parents would understand what port forwarding is if I tried to explain it to them. Now she got put in charge of a broken organization, did not recognize it was broken, and did nothing to fix it. That's not a good thing in the slightest. But it's also not treason, or anything like it. Certainly there was a smear campaign against her, but it wouldn't have stuck if there weren't so much to criticize her for that it would be really stupid to think that she's a good candidate for president. I think this is the only quibble I have (aside from noting that as far as i know, it's only the funding sources of the CF that are the duspect; unless I'm mistaken, the work they do is mostly considered fairly good compared to other charities). There's a lot of this logic out there of if a smear stuck, that means there must be something to it (and the closely related argument that Hillary must be bad, or else how is she only barely beating Donald Trump?) They're nothing but appeals to the masses. That an idea is popular is no proof that it is right. A Republican might say she is unpopular because she is bad, a Democrat might say she is unpopular because of widespread subconscious sexism. On the surface it isn't clear why one explanation is clearly better than the othet, or why the answer might include contributions from both. I see where you're coming from, in that you're making the "big lie" argument, that if a ludicrous argument is repeated enough people will believe it. I see it as a somewhat different effect: that you can tell someone is a liar if they lie all the time, even if you can't pinpoint exactly which thing they lied about. People do have an innate sense for whether or not someone is a liar and Hillary... well as GH puts it, you would be an idiot to trust someone who lies as much as she does.
I think we're conflating different issues again. What does it mean to "trust" a politician? The scenario in which the politician says they saw a wolf and we have to decide whether to believe them is pretty rare. The scenario in which a politician makes a campaign promise, and then we expect them to follow through on it, is fairly common – but in that situation I'm not "trusting" them based on their sense of honor and duty; I'm trusting them based on the understanding that they know it will help their popularity, reelection, etc. if they try to get those things done. She's got the incentive to, say, defend Obamacare from repeal and try to fix it without dismantling it. If you want to call that "trusting" her to do it, then I guess I trust her, and I don't think that makes me an idiot.
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On October 31 2016 03:25 TheYango wrote:Show nested quote +On October 31 2016 03:17 LegalLord wrote:
The emails? Very stupid show of incompetence and disregard for proper cyber security protocol; not someone I'd like to have in charge in an age where cyber security is increasingly important and the US government has shown itself to be quite bad at properly dealing with it (a multi-faceted issue, but I don't think too many people think the govt is good at cyber security at all). Probably not something you would go to prison for, but any other person who did what Hillary did would be fired and would never get another job in that field again because of gross incompetence. The saddest part about this is that her opponent floundered in the debates on what cybersecurity (or should I say "the security aspect of cyber") even is. While Hillary showed enough competence to regurgitate talking points, the incompetence demonstrated by the email scandal undermines her supposed advantage here--even if you don't believe the e-mails represent actual corruption, it's still a worrying degree of incompetence. Our two geriatric candidates are both utterly out of touch with technology. Either way we're completely fucked with regard to cybersecurity for the near forseeable future and I don't see either candidate helping us in this regard.
Well, one of the theoretical advantages of a functioning bureaucracy is that the expertise should remain around no matter who is elected. What's really dangerous is when the executive or legislative think they understand how things work but really don't have any idea what they're talking about and force the hand of agencies into doing pointless or downright harmful things.
The leader needs to be able to hear "hey no, that's a dumb idea" and then not do it. Which is not Clinton's strong suit (but it's not really the strong suit of Sanders or any of the other Democratic candidates, either, and at least she has some inkling of how government advising works).
Unfortunately, a lot of the government is hamstrung because they literally cannot do things they know they need to be able to do because of a nonfunctioning and/or bought Congress, which stymies the development of a more optimal structure.
And there's always the "they're so wasteful and government is bad" angle, of course. That varies hugely by the culture of the agency though.
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On October 31 2016 04:17 Nebuchad wrote:Show nested quote +On October 31 2016 03:09 Danglars wrote:On October 31 2016 01:20 LegalLord wrote:
There are plenty of people who are Hillary supporters who take one of two stances (I can't decide which, might be both):
1. I'm supporting Hillary and I think she must win so I have to shill for her, push her talking points, and obtusely deny her valid weaknesses because we must stop Trump at all costs.
2. It's not fashionable to like Hillary as a candidate so I'm going to use the "I don't like Hillary but..." disclaimer to fit in while pushing her talking points.
There is a very small cadre of open and not quite so pretend-reluctant supporters, but the above is far more common. You're dead-on with both points. Some will see the danger of Trump and then spout campaign spin and talking points until the cows come home. Others will say they dislike her, that's there's merit to some flaws, but nonetheless spew campaign pablum. The majority of Hillary supporters in this thread fall into one of those two categories. Some days it feels like the vast majority, other days a slim majority. I don't think that's true, most of them voted Hillary over Bernie
The post is about how they (and you perhaps) talk about the candidate, not act in the voting booth. LegalLord had on-point analysis for the rationale.
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On October 31 2016 04:28 Danglars wrote:Show nested quote +On October 31 2016 04:17 Nebuchad wrote:On October 31 2016 03:09 Danglars wrote:On October 31 2016 01:20 LegalLord wrote:
There are plenty of people who are Hillary supporters who take one of two stances (I can't decide which, might be both):
1. I'm supporting Hillary and I think she must win so I have to shill for her, push her talking points, and obtusely deny her valid weaknesses because we must stop Trump at all costs.
2. It's not fashionable to like Hillary as a candidate so I'm going to use the "I don't like Hillary but..." disclaimer to fit in while pushing her talking points.
There is a very small cadre of open and not quite so pretend-reluctant supporters, but the above is far more common. You're dead-on with both points. Some will see the danger of Trump and then spout campaign spin and talking points until the cows come home. Others will say they dislike her, that's there's merit to some flaws, but nonetheless spew campaign pablum. The majority of Hillary supporters in this thread fall into one of those two categories. Some days it feels like the vast majority, other days a slim majority. I don't think that's true, most of them voted Hillary over Bernie The post is about how they (and you perhaps) talk about the candidate, not act in the voting booth. LegalLord had on-point analysis for the rationale.
I mean, this is just part of the larger issue that the arguments people give for their beliefs and positions are generally not the actual reasons they hold those beliefs, right? Often they might not fully realize the reasons themselves. That's pretty ubiquitous, though, it extends well outside of politics, too. Some people think this means that political discussion is worthless, because nobody actually gives their real reasons for their beliefs. But I tend to think there's some value in people being forced to defend a position and outline their logic. Even if their prior belief is determined on other grounds, sound logical reasoning plus cognitive dissonance can push people subtly into better, more rational beliefs.
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On October 31 2016 04:17 ChristianS wrote:Show nested quote +On October 31 2016 03:57 LegalLord wrote:On October 31 2016 03:32 ChristianS wrote:On October 31 2016 03:17 LegalLord wrote:On October 31 2016 02:59 ChristianS wrote:On October 31 2016 02:35 LegalLord wrote:On October 31 2016 02:27 ChristianS wrote:On October 31 2016 02:12 LegalLord wrote:
It's not productive for the same reason the "is X person racist/being racist" discussion isn't productive. It goes nowhere and frankly I'm sick of talking about the topic. We've had the discussion plenty of times, and either you weren't a part of it for long enough, or you weren't convinced by what other people were convinced by. Either way, it's about as productive as discussing the scientific merits of the Bible; the views people have are solidly entrenched and not to be changed by anything less than a dissertation-style post or a book making the argument in detail, and frankly none of us really want to bother when in a week we can finally just forget about this disgusting farce of an election. I mean, I have no desire to force you into a discussion against your will. But surely if the examples are so numerous and self-evident, it shouldn't be hard for someone to provide a few. I've tried to research the email server, Clinton Foundation, and a bit on Benghazi, and in every case it seems as though 1) the average person making accusations about them is fairly uninformed, and 2) if you research it more, most of the more extreme allegations drop away pretty quickly, but 3) what's left is maybe some inept mishandling, and a fair amount of dodging and changing the subject when the issue is brought up. Maybe people see that dodging and subject-changing and they think "that looks suspicious, she must be guilty"? The idea that everybody already knows everything there is to know about these scandals so there's no point discussing seems false, i think plenty of people (myself included) don't know all the details and could benefit from the discussion. Or perhaps you're saying they don't know all the facts, but they won't change their opinion even when new facts present themselves? In which case yeah, sure, but then why discuss politics at all? Sure, as I mentioned there is a lot less to some of those issues than people say there is. The CF we need to just wait to see what the FBI comes up with, the emails she acted stupidly and lied about it to win the nomination, and Libya/Benghazi was just garden variety bad policy. She has a pretty extensive history of flip-flopping and cronyism and the like; most of it has been discussed to death and then some. But if you look into all of those issues in depth and your conclusion is that Hillary is either just a victim of an unfair smear campaign who did nothing wrong, or "just doing what has to be done" then there's some willful whitewashing going on there. I spent a lot of time trying to tell Hillary supporters that they really need to be more honest about that. Oh, I should be clear, I don't think she comes out as some innocent victim of circumstance. But she also doesn't come out as a crook. On the e-mails, for instance, it seems like there was a really bad culture of information security and record keeping at the State Department, and Hillary was so incompetent with computers she had precisely zero percent chance of recognizing their IT problems and doing something about them. She seems to have understood what an email server was about as well as my parents would understand what port forwarding is if I tried to explain it to them. Now she got put in charge of a broken organization, did not recognize it was broken, and did nothing to fix it. That's not a good thing in the slightest. But it's also not treason, or anything like it. Certainly there was a smear campaign against her, but it wouldn't have stuck if there weren't so much to criticize her for that it would be really stupid to think that she's a good candidate for president. I think this is the only quibble I have (aside from noting that as far as i know, it's only the funding sources of the CF that are the duspect; unless I'm mistaken, the work they do is mostly considered fairly good compared to other charities). There's a lot of this logic out there of if a smear stuck, that means there must be something to it (and the closely related argument that Hillary must be bad, or else how is she only barely beating Donald Trump?) They're nothing but appeals to the masses. That an idea is popular is no proof that it is right. A Republican might say she is unpopular because she is bad, a Democrat might say she is unpopular because of widespread subconscious sexism. On the surface it isn't clear why one explanation is clearly better than the othet, or why the answer might include contributions from both. I see where you're coming from, in that you're making the "big lie" argument, that if a ludicrous argument is repeated enough people will believe it. I see it as a somewhat different effect: that you can tell someone is a liar if they lie all the time, even if you can't pinpoint exactly which thing they lied about. People do have an innate sense for whether or not someone is a liar and Hillary... well as GH puts it, you would be an idiot to trust someone who lies as much as she does. I think we're conflating different issues again. What does it mean to "trust" a politician? The scenario in which the politician says they saw a wolf and we have to decide whether to believe them is pretty rare. The scenario in which a politician makes a campaign promise, and then we expect them to follow through on it, is fairly common – but in that situation I'm not "trusting" them based on their sense of honor and duty; I'm trusting them based on the understanding that they know it will help their popularity, reelection, etc. if they try to get those things done. She's got the incentive to, say, defend Obamacare from repeal and try to fix it without dismantling it. If you want to call that "trusting" her to do it, then I guess I trust her, and I don't think that makes me an idiot.
Some of the most consequential decisions a president makes are related to trust. Can you trust the president that Iraq really has WMDs and it's important to invade? Can you trust the president not to sign trade deals that are not popular with the public but are popular with influential parties, when said president used to support it strongly but meekly backed away and stopped talking about it when it proved to be supremely unpopular? Can you trust the president to push social issues they promised to support if it starts to be particularly politically challenging to do so, in light of that person's tendency to flip-flop as it becomes politically convenient to do so?
No, I do think a politician's trustworthiness is a factor that can't just be ignored and dismissed as "that's just what they do." This year just set the bar so low that some people are willing to take it and convince themselves that that is ok.
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EPT
