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Read the rules in the OP before posting, please.In order to ensure that this thread continues to meet TL standards and follows the proper guidelines, we will be enforcing the rules in the OP more strictly. Be sure to give them a re-read to refresh your memory! The vast majority of you are contributing in a healthy way, keep it up! NOTE: When providing a source, explain why you feel it is relevant and what purpose it adds to the discussion if it's not obvious. Also take note that unsubstantiated tweets/posts meant only to rekindle old arguments can result in a mod action. |
On December 13 2016 04:53 LegalLord wrote:Huffington Post managed to compile pretty much all the absurdities of the Clinton loss-rationalizing into one cringeworthy article. I'll post some highlights since it's pretty long. Show nested quote +A month has passed since American voters took to the polls to elect our next commander in chief, with a general consensus having pervaded public discourse that, love her or hate her, Hillary Clinton would become president. Her erstwhile opponent, Donald Trump, a reality television star viewed as crass and inept, having boasted about possibly sexually assaulting women in a now-infamous Access Hollywood tape, had all but forfeited the race.
In the weeks leading up to the election, Clinton exhibited dominance over her Republican challenger that lead some to speculate that she was running up the score as her campaign expanded into typically red states like Texas and Arizona. Following resounding victories in the election season’s presidential debates, Vox Editor-in-Chief Ezra Klein proclaimed to the world that “Hillary Clinton’s 3 debate performances left the Trump campaign in ruins.” Her polling numbers indicated a landslide was imminent. Pundits speculated that Donald Trump’s path to 270 electoral votes was slim to non-existent.
...
Just hours after the stunning upset that proclaimed Donald Trump president-elect, the vultures began to circle around the scene of Secretary Clinton’s political death, the body, so to speak, not even cold yet. Senator Bernie Sanders, her democratic rival in the primary, who spent the tail-end of that campaign impugning Clinton’s integrity and questioning her qualifications to lead, hit the talk show circuit immediately. Despite having begrudgingly supported Clinton following his primary defeat, both at the Democratic National Convention and on the campaign trail through November, he seemed to almost gloat with a “told-ya-so” self-righteousness, openly implying that he should have been the nominee and offering prescriptions to the Democratic party.
...
The problem with all of these analyses is that they are all painfully reductive, overly-narrow displays of revisionist history. These arguments are just. plain. wrong. Entertaining them without looking at the broader systemic failure at play is contributing to a pattern of failure by the media to fulfill their journalistic responsibility as editorial gatekeepers, an historic injustice against the most qualified candidate to ever run for the presidency and who won record-breaking votes, and a heinous narrative shift that holds us back from looking at, or solving, the real problem.
Hillary Clinton did not lose the 2016 presidential election. We did.
...
Any and every discussion seeking to analyze why Hillary Clinton lost the 2016 presidential election MUST begin and end with the following as its central premise: “Hillary Clinton won the national popular vote by 2.7 million.” Or, put in another way, “Hillary Clinton won more votes than any other presidential candidate in history, second only to Obama.” (Note: Cook Political Report believes that she may surpass Obama’s 2012 total, for good measure.)
...
Soon enough the liberal progressive voter base supporting Sanders began to regurgitate the same right wing talking points and lies used to impugn Clinton’s integrity for decades. Once maligned for being a liberal harpy and socialist, Clinton was now subjected to the cruel injustice of having fellow progressives label her “too conservative,” a “war hawk,” an “imperialist.”
This of course was the same lot who believed it an omen of their candidate’s rightful claim to the presidency when a bird landed on his podium at a campaign event in Portland.
...
This is just one of literally hundreds of examples of lies that have been propagated about Clinton over the years that have been packaged as news, or that legitimate news sources will falsely equivocate with the truth. and spread like wildfire through fake news channels. The time required to engage with and disprove each accusation point by point with each person who consumed it would be nearly impossible.
“Fake news” is a major problem that has had an out-sized effect on our politics and our presidential election. It is not a new phenomenon, but it has reached fever pitch. Until legislation is passed that addresses the problem and/or the heads of various social media companies implement policies to forbid them, the proliferation of fake news will continue to meddle with our elections.
...
Democratic faithful thought by November that the damage done by Sanders’ hail-Mary strategy would soften and fade. A week before the election, “Benghazi” and “Hillary Clinton’s e-mails” were still ridiculous fodder being churned out by the mainstream media and consumed ravenously by the electorate. The media failed time and time again to call these stories for what they were. Outright lies.
Some argue, and I subscribe to the notion, that the media failed to report on false equivalencies during the general election campaign, and Clinton’s adversaries were able to malign and abuse her ad nauseum without any checks by the media, because of at least one obvious reason. No one wants to admit it, her adversaries scoff at it, and even women seem to downplay it’s significance throughout the 2016 presidential campaign: misogyny. The 2016 presidential election, much like in 2008, revealed staggering gender biases, mostly in the constant and baseless scrutiny of Clinton’s character.
...
Women, after all, cannot seek power without being innately bad, evil, or corrupt. Gender studies experts have talked about this phenomenon at length, and yet we failed to highlight the way it was taking life in the campaign before our eyes.
...
Clinton’s massive popular vote victory is important in that not only does it dispel shameful myths that this superb, historic candidate FAILED us in some way, but serves to highlight one of the real problems: the electoral college system of apportioning votes is no longer fair or representative. This is not to say that the electoral college must necessarily be abolished. But at the very least, it must see reforms that address the country’s vastly shifting demographics.
Donald Trump won the electoral college with 306 votes. 270 are needed to win the presidency. The states of Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania, with their 10, 16, and 20 respective electoral votes, all went for Trump and gave him the edge he needed.
The chilling truth: Donald Trump won those three states with a total of 79,646 votes in an election where more than 136 million people cast their ballots. That’s less than a fraction of a percentage point.
...
How can this be possible? Let’s pretend for a minute that the very real possibility of foreign interventionism is not a factor, or the unaddressed fact that overwhelming evidence suggest Russia interfered, and ignore investigative journalist Greg Palast’s stunning revelation that more than 3 million absentee and provisional ballots were wrongfully disqualified and thrown away uncounted.
...
Subsequently, the Electoral College has not been updated to reflect the massive population and demographic shifts in America, or update the strength or apportionment of the votes.
...
These are the same voters who crave social democracy, just so long as it isn’t called socialism, a dirty word amongst the majority of the American populace, and a flaw that Sanders, untested on the national stage, would have seen exposed in a general election match up.
...
There has been a real and demonstrable systemic failure to protect the integrity of our elections that Americans, and yes the Electoral College, must wholly reject. This isn’t conspiracy theory. This isn’t conjecture. This isn’t poor sportsmanship. This isn’t even about Hillary Clinton anymore. This is about protecting our democracy. Free and fair elections are one of the cornerstones of American democracy and we have now seen credible reports that our rights thereto have been impeded upon by:
1) Voter suppression in North Carolina* and Wisconsin; 2) Russian interventionism via hacking in Florida’s election systems*; 3) FBI Director Comey’s willful and intentional release of documents meant to suggest criminal wrongdoing by the Democratic nominee a week before the presidential election; 4) The use of Wikileaks as an agent for a hostile foreign power to meddle with our election; 5) A systemic failure by the news media to serve as editorial gatekeepers, differentiate false equivalencies, or to report on falsehoods propagated about the Democratic nominee.* 6) A voter-cross check system that allowed millions of valid absentee, provisional, and machine-error ballots to be wrongfully disqualified.
...
Allowing revisionists to shape the narrative and lay fault at the feet of Hillary Clinton for losing, whether expressly or impliedly, is a historic injustice that, if allowed to continue, only hurts us as a nation and as a democracy. It allows a shift in conversation away from crucial global and sociopolitical issues facing our society, and towards petty partisan squabbles and the unproductive blame game. If we do not respond to threats to our democracy, the epidemic of fake news, the various interventionist forces in our election, and demand action be taken, we are more culpable than either of the candidates in this election. Indeed, we are complicit in the downfall of democracy itself. SourceAnd wow, there's more absurd highlights there than I thought there would be. A bonus bit of wisdom from the comments: Show nested quote +As always, it is never Hillary's fault. No matter how many of her supporters explain this loss.....it is on her not on anyhting that happened. Sorry.....I do not support Trump, but we cannot be blind to what happened and why.
Biased, disingenuous "journalism" at its finest.
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On December 13 2016 07:33 Mohdoo wrote:Show nested quote +On December 13 2016 07:31 Thieving Magpie wrote:On December 13 2016 07:21 Mohdoo wrote:On December 13 2016 07:13 ragz_gt wrote:
Before I thought my house might turn into a waterfront property was the biggest threat... but now we have a non trivial chance of actually going to war with China.... what an amazing month. Under no circumstances will the US ever go to war with China. I would argue we are past the point of war in history. Or at least major war. Little shit countries fighting for coconuts will always happen. Its fairly naive to think we have evolved past war. It only takes one aggressor to force one-front war to happen. The main thing stopping war right now is that the US is so far ahead of everyone. But one can never assume that the dominant empire will always be dominant. Anyone ever going all-out against any nuclear-allied nation will get blown up. There's no escaping the nuclear issue. Best case scenario against the US is both sides being eliminated. No one is going to consider the elimination of their nation a suitable outcome.
Well, there's ways to fight wars against overwhelming force that don't require nuclear war. RT, social media and hacking come to mind. Of course, the existing powers will resist such attempts and might try to censor that type of thing... Dammit, Overlord Zurik Gobbelblab III left the crazy dial on full again.
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United Kingdom13775 Posts
I do wonder to what extent the US has actually thought through the scenario of fighting a nuclear war and how to win, beyond MAD.
In any case, a trade war or more Ukraine-like forced schisms is more likely than open war, by far.
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On December 13 2016 07:39 Incognoto wrote:Show nested quote +On December 13 2016 04:53 LegalLord wrote:Huffington Post managed to compile pretty much all the absurdities of the Clinton loss-rationalizing into one cringeworthy article. I'll post some highlights since it's pretty long. A month has passed since American voters took to the polls to elect our next commander in chief, with a general consensus having pervaded public discourse that, love her or hate her, Hillary Clinton would become president. Her erstwhile opponent, Donald Trump, a reality television star viewed as crass and inept, having boasted about possibly sexually assaulting women in a now-infamous Access Hollywood tape, had all but forfeited the race.
In the weeks leading up to the election, Clinton exhibited dominance over her Republican challenger that lead some to speculate that she was running up the score as her campaign expanded into typically red states like Texas and Arizona. Following resounding victories in the election season’s presidential debates, Vox Editor-in-Chief Ezra Klein proclaimed to the world that “Hillary Clinton’s 3 debate performances left the Trump campaign in ruins.” Her polling numbers indicated a landslide was imminent. Pundits speculated that Donald Trump’s path to 270 electoral votes was slim to non-existent.
...
Just hours after the stunning upset that proclaimed Donald Trump president-elect, the vultures began to circle around the scene of Secretary Clinton’s political death, the body, so to speak, not even cold yet. Senator Bernie Sanders, her democratic rival in the primary, who spent the tail-end of that campaign impugning Clinton’s integrity and questioning her qualifications to lead, hit the talk show circuit immediately. Despite having begrudgingly supported Clinton following his primary defeat, both at the Democratic National Convention and on the campaign trail through November, he seemed to almost gloat with a “told-ya-so” self-righteousness, openly implying that he should have been the nominee and offering prescriptions to the Democratic party.
...
The problem with all of these analyses is that they are all painfully reductive, overly-narrow displays of revisionist history. These arguments are just. plain. wrong. Entertaining them without looking at the broader systemic failure at play is contributing to a pattern of failure by the media to fulfill their journalistic responsibility as editorial gatekeepers, an historic injustice against the most qualified candidate to ever run for the presidency and who won record-breaking votes, and a heinous narrative shift that holds us back from looking at, or solving, the real problem.
Hillary Clinton did not lose the 2016 presidential election. We did.
...
Any and every discussion seeking to analyze why Hillary Clinton lost the 2016 presidential election MUST begin and end with the following as its central premise: “Hillary Clinton won the national popular vote by 2.7 million.” Or, put in another way, “Hillary Clinton won more votes than any other presidential candidate in history, second only to Obama.” (Note: Cook Political Report believes that she may surpass Obama’s 2012 total, for good measure.)
...
Soon enough the liberal progressive voter base supporting Sanders began to regurgitate the same right wing talking points and lies used to impugn Clinton’s integrity for decades. Once maligned for being a liberal harpy and socialist, Clinton was now subjected to the cruel injustice of having fellow progressives label her “too conservative,” a “war hawk,” an “imperialist.”
This of course was the same lot who believed it an omen of their candidate’s rightful claim to the presidency when a bird landed on his podium at a campaign event in Portland.
...
This is just one of literally hundreds of examples of lies that have been propagated about Clinton over the years that have been packaged as news, or that legitimate news sources will falsely equivocate with the truth. and spread like wildfire through fake news channels. The time required to engage with and disprove each accusation point by point with each person who consumed it would be nearly impossible.
“Fake news” is a major problem that has had an out-sized effect on our politics and our presidential election. It is not a new phenomenon, but it has reached fever pitch. Until legislation is passed that addresses the problem and/or the heads of various social media companies implement policies to forbid them, the proliferation of fake news will continue to meddle with our elections.
...
Democratic faithful thought by November that the damage done by Sanders’ hail-Mary strategy would soften and fade. A week before the election, “Benghazi” and “Hillary Clinton’s e-mails” were still ridiculous fodder being churned out by the mainstream media and consumed ravenously by the electorate. The media failed time and time again to call these stories for what they were. Outright lies.
Some argue, and I subscribe to the notion, that the media failed to report on false equivalencies during the general election campaign, and Clinton’s adversaries were able to malign and abuse her ad nauseum without any checks by the media, because of at least one obvious reason. No one wants to admit it, her adversaries scoff at it, and even women seem to downplay it’s significance throughout the 2016 presidential campaign: misogyny. The 2016 presidential election, much like in 2008, revealed staggering gender biases, mostly in the constant and baseless scrutiny of Clinton’s character.
...
Women, after all, cannot seek power without being innately bad, evil, or corrupt. Gender studies experts have talked about this phenomenon at length, and yet we failed to highlight the way it was taking life in the campaign before our eyes.
...
Clinton’s massive popular vote victory is important in that not only does it dispel shameful myths that this superb, historic candidate FAILED us in some way, but serves to highlight one of the real problems: the electoral college system of apportioning votes is no longer fair or representative. This is not to say that the electoral college must necessarily be abolished. But at the very least, it must see reforms that address the country’s vastly shifting demographics.
Donald Trump won the electoral college with 306 votes. 270 are needed to win the presidency. The states of Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania, with their 10, 16, and 20 respective electoral votes, all went for Trump and gave him the edge he needed.
The chilling truth: Donald Trump won those three states with a total of 79,646 votes in an election where more than 136 million people cast their ballots. That’s less than a fraction of a percentage point.
...
How can this be possible? Let’s pretend for a minute that the very real possibility of foreign interventionism is not a factor, or the unaddressed fact that overwhelming evidence suggest Russia interfered, and ignore investigative journalist Greg Palast’s stunning revelation that more than 3 million absentee and provisional ballots were wrongfully disqualified and thrown away uncounted.
...
Subsequently, the Electoral College has not been updated to reflect the massive population and demographic shifts in America, or update the strength or apportionment of the votes.
...
These are the same voters who crave social democracy, just so long as it isn’t called socialism, a dirty word amongst the majority of the American populace, and a flaw that Sanders, untested on the national stage, would have seen exposed in a general election match up.
...
There has been a real and demonstrable systemic failure to protect the integrity of our elections that Americans, and yes the Electoral College, must wholly reject. This isn’t conspiracy theory. This isn’t conjecture. This isn’t poor sportsmanship. This isn’t even about Hillary Clinton anymore. This is about protecting our democracy. Free and fair elections are one of the cornerstones of American democracy and we have now seen credible reports that our rights thereto have been impeded upon by:
1) Voter suppression in North Carolina* and Wisconsin; 2) Russian interventionism via hacking in Florida’s election systems*; 3) FBI Director Comey’s willful and intentional release of documents meant to suggest criminal wrongdoing by the Democratic nominee a week before the presidential election; 4) The use of Wikileaks as an agent for a hostile foreign power to meddle with our election; 5) A systemic failure by the news media to serve as editorial gatekeepers, differentiate false equivalencies, or to report on falsehoods propagated about the Democratic nominee.* 6) A voter-cross check system that allowed millions of valid absentee, provisional, and machine-error ballots to be wrongfully disqualified.
...
Allowing revisionists to shape the narrative and lay fault at the feet of Hillary Clinton for losing, whether expressly or impliedly, is a historic injustice that, if allowed to continue, only hurts us as a nation and as a democracy. It allows a shift in conversation away from crucial global and sociopolitical issues facing our society, and towards petty partisan squabbles and the unproductive blame game. If we do not respond to threats to our democracy, the epidemic of fake news, the various interventionist forces in our election, and demand action be taken, we are more culpable than either of the candidates in this election. Indeed, we are complicit in the downfall of democracy itself. SourceAnd wow, there's more absurd highlights there than I thought there would be. A bonus bit of wisdom from the comments: As always, it is never Hillary's fault. No matter how many of her supporters explain this loss.....it is on her not on anyhting that happened. Sorry.....I do not support Trump, but we cannot be blind to what happened and why. Biased, disingenuous "journalism" at its finest.
The one thing that *is* absolutely true is how women and men are judged in terms of gut-instinct and automatic reaction.
Men being power hungry, deceitful and "do what it takes to win" is absolutely more acceptable than for a woman to be. A man can still be viewed positively while still being ruthless and conniving.
Simply put, a dishonest, power hungry woman is a much worse "woman" than a similar man is a "man".
On December 13 2016 07:42 a_flayer wrote:Show nested quote +On December 13 2016 07:33 Mohdoo wrote:On December 13 2016 07:31 Thieving Magpie wrote:On December 13 2016 07:21 Mohdoo wrote:On December 13 2016 07:13 ragz_gt wrote:
Before I thought my house might turn into a waterfront property was the biggest threat... but now we have a non trivial chance of actually going to war with China.... what an amazing month. Under no circumstances will the US ever go to war with China. I would argue we are past the point of war in history. Or at least major war. Little shit countries fighting for coconuts will always happen. Its fairly naive to think we have evolved past war. It only takes one aggressor to force one-front war to happen. The main thing stopping war right now is that the US is so far ahead of everyone. But one can never assume that the dominant empire will always be dominant. Anyone ever going all-out against any nuclear-allied nation will get blown up. There's no escaping the nuclear issue. Best case scenario against the US is both sides being eliminated. No one is going to consider the elimination of their nation a suitable outcome. Well, there's ways to fight wars against overwhelming force that don't require nuclear war. RT, social media and hacking come to mind. Of course, the existing powers will resist such attempts and might try to censor that type of thing... Dammit, Overlord Zurik Gobbelblab III left the crazy dial on full again.
At the end of the day, if the US feels legitimately threatened, someone is getting nuked. We have done it before and we would absolutely do it again. I imagine there are very intricate plans in place to deal with every single potential threat with some sort of nuclear response. It is straight up impossible for the US to fall without 10s of millions of deaths on the other side.
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United Kingdom13775 Posts
A woman isn't a man and shouldn't try to be one. Frankly I don't see anything wrong with a female leader acting more... feminine. In the business world in my own anecdotal experience I found women who didn't try to act like men to be better bosses than women who did.
In any case, no, misogyny didn't defeat Clinton.
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On December 13 2016 07:44 Mohdoo wrote:Show nested quote +On December 13 2016 07:39 Incognoto wrote:On December 13 2016 04:53 LegalLord wrote:Huffington Post managed to compile pretty much all the absurdities of the Clinton loss-rationalizing into one cringeworthy article. I'll post some highlights since it's pretty long. A month has passed since American voters took to the polls to elect our next commander in chief, with a general consensus having pervaded public discourse that, love her or hate her, Hillary Clinton would become president. Her erstwhile opponent, Donald Trump, a reality television star viewed as crass and inept, having boasted about possibly sexually assaulting women in a now-infamous Access Hollywood tape, had all but forfeited the race.
In the weeks leading up to the election, Clinton exhibited dominance over her Republican challenger that lead some to speculate that she was running up the score as her campaign expanded into typically red states like Texas and Arizona. Following resounding victories in the election season’s presidential debates, Vox Editor-in-Chief Ezra Klein proclaimed to the world that “Hillary Clinton’s 3 debate performances left the Trump campaign in ruins.” Her polling numbers indicated a landslide was imminent. Pundits speculated that Donald Trump’s path to 270 electoral votes was slim to non-existent.
...
Just hours after the stunning upset that proclaimed Donald Trump president-elect, the vultures began to circle around the scene of Secretary Clinton’s political death, the body, so to speak, not even cold yet. Senator Bernie Sanders, her democratic rival in the primary, who spent the tail-end of that campaign impugning Clinton’s integrity and questioning her qualifications to lead, hit the talk show circuit immediately. Despite having begrudgingly supported Clinton following his primary defeat, both at the Democratic National Convention and on the campaign trail through November, he seemed to almost gloat with a “told-ya-so” self-righteousness, openly implying that he should have been the nominee and offering prescriptions to the Democratic party.
...
The problem with all of these analyses is that they are all painfully reductive, overly-narrow displays of revisionist history. These arguments are just. plain. wrong. Entertaining them without looking at the broader systemic failure at play is contributing to a pattern of failure by the media to fulfill their journalistic responsibility as editorial gatekeepers, an historic injustice against the most qualified candidate to ever run for the presidency and who won record-breaking votes, and a heinous narrative shift that holds us back from looking at, or solving, the real problem.
Hillary Clinton did not lose the 2016 presidential election. We did.
...
Any and every discussion seeking to analyze why Hillary Clinton lost the 2016 presidential election MUST begin and end with the following as its central premise: “Hillary Clinton won the national popular vote by 2.7 million.” Or, put in another way, “Hillary Clinton won more votes than any other presidential candidate in history, second only to Obama.” (Note: Cook Political Report believes that she may surpass Obama’s 2012 total, for good measure.)
...
Soon enough the liberal progressive voter base supporting Sanders began to regurgitate the same right wing talking points and lies used to impugn Clinton’s integrity for decades. Once maligned for being a liberal harpy and socialist, Clinton was now subjected to the cruel injustice of having fellow progressives label her “too conservative,” a “war hawk,” an “imperialist.”
This of course was the same lot who believed it an omen of their candidate’s rightful claim to the presidency when a bird landed on his podium at a campaign event in Portland.
...
This is just one of literally hundreds of examples of lies that have been propagated about Clinton over the years that have been packaged as news, or that legitimate news sources will falsely equivocate with the truth. and spread like wildfire through fake news channels. The time required to engage with and disprove each accusation point by point with each person who consumed it would be nearly impossible.
“Fake news” is a major problem that has had an out-sized effect on our politics and our presidential election. It is not a new phenomenon, but it has reached fever pitch. Until legislation is passed that addresses the problem and/or the heads of various social media companies implement policies to forbid them, the proliferation of fake news will continue to meddle with our elections.
...
Democratic faithful thought by November that the damage done by Sanders’ hail-Mary strategy would soften and fade. A week before the election, “Benghazi” and “Hillary Clinton’s e-mails” were still ridiculous fodder being churned out by the mainstream media and consumed ravenously by the electorate. The media failed time and time again to call these stories for what they were. Outright lies.
Some argue, and I subscribe to the notion, that the media failed to report on false equivalencies during the general election campaign, and Clinton’s adversaries were able to malign and abuse her ad nauseum without any checks by the media, because of at least one obvious reason. No one wants to admit it, her adversaries scoff at it, and even women seem to downplay it’s significance throughout the 2016 presidential campaign: misogyny. The 2016 presidential election, much like in 2008, revealed staggering gender biases, mostly in the constant and baseless scrutiny of Clinton’s character.
...
Women, after all, cannot seek power without being innately bad, evil, or corrupt. Gender studies experts have talked about this phenomenon at length, and yet we failed to highlight the way it was taking life in the campaign before our eyes.
...
Clinton’s massive popular vote victory is important in that not only does it dispel shameful myths that this superb, historic candidate FAILED us in some way, but serves to highlight one of the real problems: the electoral college system of apportioning votes is no longer fair or representative. This is not to say that the electoral college must necessarily be abolished. But at the very least, it must see reforms that address the country’s vastly shifting demographics.
Donald Trump won the electoral college with 306 votes. 270 are needed to win the presidency. The states of Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania, with their 10, 16, and 20 respective electoral votes, all went for Trump and gave him the edge he needed.
The chilling truth: Donald Trump won those three states with a total of 79,646 votes in an election where more than 136 million people cast their ballots. That’s less than a fraction of a percentage point.
...
How can this be possible? Let’s pretend for a minute that the very real possibility of foreign interventionism is not a factor, or the unaddressed fact that overwhelming evidence suggest Russia interfered, and ignore investigative journalist Greg Palast’s stunning revelation that more than 3 million absentee and provisional ballots were wrongfully disqualified and thrown away uncounted.
...
Subsequently, the Electoral College has not been updated to reflect the massive population and demographic shifts in America, or update the strength or apportionment of the votes.
...
These are the same voters who crave social democracy, just so long as it isn’t called socialism, a dirty word amongst the majority of the American populace, and a flaw that Sanders, untested on the national stage, would have seen exposed in a general election match up.
...
There has been a real and demonstrable systemic failure to protect the integrity of our elections that Americans, and yes the Electoral College, must wholly reject. This isn’t conspiracy theory. This isn’t conjecture. This isn’t poor sportsmanship. This isn’t even about Hillary Clinton anymore. This is about protecting our democracy. Free and fair elections are one of the cornerstones of American democracy and we have now seen credible reports that our rights thereto have been impeded upon by:
1) Voter suppression in North Carolina* and Wisconsin; 2) Russian interventionism via hacking in Florida’s election systems*; 3) FBI Director Comey’s willful and intentional release of documents meant to suggest criminal wrongdoing by the Democratic nominee a week before the presidential election; 4) The use of Wikileaks as an agent for a hostile foreign power to meddle with our election; 5) A systemic failure by the news media to serve as editorial gatekeepers, differentiate false equivalencies, or to report on falsehoods propagated about the Democratic nominee.* 6) A voter-cross check system that allowed millions of valid absentee, provisional, and machine-error ballots to be wrongfully disqualified.
...
Allowing revisionists to shape the narrative and lay fault at the feet of Hillary Clinton for losing, whether expressly or impliedly, is a historic injustice that, if allowed to continue, only hurts us as a nation and as a democracy. It allows a shift in conversation away from crucial global and sociopolitical issues facing our society, and towards petty partisan squabbles and the unproductive blame game. If we do not respond to threats to our democracy, the epidemic of fake news, the various interventionist forces in our election, and demand action be taken, we are more culpable than either of the candidates in this election. Indeed, we are complicit in the downfall of democracy itself. SourceAnd wow, there's more absurd highlights there than I thought there would be. A bonus bit of wisdom from the comments: As always, it is never Hillary's fault. No matter how many of her supporters explain this loss.....it is on her not on anyhting that happened. Sorry.....I do not support Trump, but we cannot be blind to what happened and why. Biased, disingenuous "journalism" at its finest. The one thing that *is* absolutely true is how women and men are judged in terms of gut-instinct and automatic reaction. Men being power hungry, deceitful and "do what it takes to win" is absolutely more acceptable than for a woman to be. A man can still be viewed positively while still being ruthless and conniving. Simply put, a dishonest, power hungry woman is a much worse "woman" than a similar man is a "man". Show nested quote +On December 13 2016 07:42 a_flayer wrote:On December 13 2016 07:33 Mohdoo wrote:On December 13 2016 07:31 Thieving Magpie wrote:On December 13 2016 07:21 Mohdoo wrote:On December 13 2016 07:13 ragz_gt wrote:
Before I thought my house might turn into a waterfront property was the biggest threat... but now we have a non trivial chance of actually going to war with China.... what an amazing month. Under no circumstances will the US ever go to war with China. I would argue we are past the point of war in history. Or at least major war. Little shit countries fighting for coconuts will always happen. Its fairly naive to think we have evolved past war. It only takes one aggressor to force one-front war to happen. The main thing stopping war right now is that the US is so far ahead of everyone. But one can never assume that the dominant empire will always be dominant. Anyone ever going all-out against any nuclear-allied nation will get blown up. There's no escaping the nuclear issue. Best case scenario against the US is both sides being eliminated. No one is going to consider the elimination of their nation a suitable outcome. Well, there's ways to fight wars against overwhelming force that don't require nuclear war. RT, social media and hacking come to mind. Of course, the existing powers will resist such attempts and might try to censor that type of thing... Dammit, Overlord Zurik Gobbelblab III left the crazy dial on full again. At the end of the day, if the US feels legitimately threatened, someone is getting nuked. We have done it before and we would absolutely do it again. I imagine there are very intricate plans in place to deal with every single potential threat with some sort of nuclear response. It is straight up impossible for the US to fall without 10s of millions of deaths on the other side.
That sounds like you are suggesting there is a chance the US will decide to nuke Russia over its TV, social media and hacking efforts. I think it is far more likely that the US will make some concentrated efforts against the type of actions that Russia is taking. In my mind, that will be some form of censorship or something to help define national borders on a digital level. I don't know how it will express itself, but maybe we've some evidence of it already in the fake news stories, and now the efforts from congress to deal with the Russian hacking interfering in the election.
Russia has their own social media networks, and they've recently made efforts to step away from American made software/hardware. The US doesn't really have these options available to defend against Russian interference at those levels, so some other steps must be taken.
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On December 13 2016 07:47 LegalLord wrote:
A woman isn't a man and shouldn't try to be one. Frankly I don't see anything wrong with a female leader acting more... feminine. In the business world in my own anecdotal experience I found women who didn't try to act like men to be better bosses than women who did.
In any case, no, misogyny didn't defeat Clinton.
Dude, what? Are you saying Clinton tries to act like a man? My point is that certain positions in society require/lead to expression of what we traditionally view as masculine qualities. When women are in these positions, if their behavior matches a man's, our existing ideas of what makes a man or woman "good" cause the woman to be viewed differently.
I'm not saying she lost because of that and only because of that. I am simply pointing out that women can do something another man does and be viewed more negatively for it than the man.
On December 13 2016 07:51 a_flayer wrote:Show nested quote +On December 13 2016 07:44 Mohdoo wrote:On December 13 2016 07:39 Incognoto wrote:On December 13 2016 04:53 LegalLord wrote:Huffington Post managed to compile pretty much all the absurdities of the Clinton loss-rationalizing into one cringeworthy article. I'll post some highlights since it's pretty long. A month has passed since American voters took to the polls to elect our next commander in chief, with a general consensus having pervaded public discourse that, love her or hate her, Hillary Clinton would become president. Her erstwhile opponent, Donald Trump, a reality television star viewed as crass and inept, having boasted about possibly sexually assaulting women in a now-infamous Access Hollywood tape, had all but forfeited the race.
In the weeks leading up to the election, Clinton exhibited dominance over her Republican challenger that lead some to speculate that she was running up the score as her campaign expanded into typically red states like Texas and Arizona. Following resounding victories in the election season’s presidential debates, Vox Editor-in-Chief Ezra Klein proclaimed to the world that “Hillary Clinton’s 3 debate performances left the Trump campaign in ruins.” Her polling numbers indicated a landslide was imminent. Pundits speculated that Donald Trump’s path to 270 electoral votes was slim to non-existent.
...
Just hours after the stunning upset that proclaimed Donald Trump president-elect, the vultures began to circle around the scene of Secretary Clinton’s political death, the body, so to speak, not even cold yet. Senator Bernie Sanders, her democratic rival in the primary, who spent the tail-end of that campaign impugning Clinton’s integrity and questioning her qualifications to lead, hit the talk show circuit immediately. Despite having begrudgingly supported Clinton following his primary defeat, both at the Democratic National Convention and on the campaign trail through November, he seemed to almost gloat with a “told-ya-so” self-righteousness, openly implying that he should have been the nominee and offering prescriptions to the Democratic party.
...
The problem with all of these analyses is that they are all painfully reductive, overly-narrow displays of revisionist history. These arguments are just. plain. wrong. Entertaining them without looking at the broader systemic failure at play is contributing to a pattern of failure by the media to fulfill their journalistic responsibility as editorial gatekeepers, an historic injustice against the most qualified candidate to ever run for the presidency and who won record-breaking votes, and a heinous narrative shift that holds us back from looking at, or solving, the real problem.
Hillary Clinton did not lose the 2016 presidential election. We did.
...
Any and every discussion seeking to analyze why Hillary Clinton lost the 2016 presidential election MUST begin and end with the following as its central premise: “Hillary Clinton won the national popular vote by 2.7 million.” Or, put in another way, “Hillary Clinton won more votes than any other presidential candidate in history, second only to Obama.” (Note: Cook Political Report believes that she may surpass Obama’s 2012 total, for good measure.)
...
Soon enough the liberal progressive voter base supporting Sanders began to regurgitate the same right wing talking points and lies used to impugn Clinton’s integrity for decades. Once maligned for being a liberal harpy and socialist, Clinton was now subjected to the cruel injustice of having fellow progressives label her “too conservative,” a “war hawk,” an “imperialist.”
This of course was the same lot who believed it an omen of their candidate’s rightful claim to the presidency when a bird landed on his podium at a campaign event in Portland.
...
This is just one of literally hundreds of examples of lies that have been propagated about Clinton over the years that have been packaged as news, or that legitimate news sources will falsely equivocate with the truth. and spread like wildfire through fake news channels. The time required to engage with and disprove each accusation point by point with each person who consumed it would be nearly impossible.
“Fake news” is a major problem that has had an out-sized effect on our politics and our presidential election. It is not a new phenomenon, but it has reached fever pitch. Until legislation is passed that addresses the problem and/or the heads of various social media companies implement policies to forbid them, the proliferation of fake news will continue to meddle with our elections.
...
Democratic faithful thought by November that the damage done by Sanders’ hail-Mary strategy would soften and fade. A week before the election, “Benghazi” and “Hillary Clinton’s e-mails” were still ridiculous fodder being churned out by the mainstream media and consumed ravenously by the electorate. The media failed time and time again to call these stories for what they were. Outright lies.
Some argue, and I subscribe to the notion, that the media failed to report on false equivalencies during the general election campaign, and Clinton’s adversaries were able to malign and abuse her ad nauseum without any checks by the media, because of at least one obvious reason. No one wants to admit it, her adversaries scoff at it, and even women seem to downplay it’s significance throughout the 2016 presidential campaign: misogyny. The 2016 presidential election, much like in 2008, revealed staggering gender biases, mostly in the constant and baseless scrutiny of Clinton’s character.
...
Women, after all, cannot seek power without being innately bad, evil, or corrupt. Gender studies experts have talked about this phenomenon at length, and yet we failed to highlight the way it was taking life in the campaign before our eyes.
...
Clinton’s massive popular vote victory is important in that not only does it dispel shameful myths that this superb, historic candidate FAILED us in some way, but serves to highlight one of the real problems: the electoral college system of apportioning votes is no longer fair or representative. This is not to say that the electoral college must necessarily be abolished. But at the very least, it must see reforms that address the country’s vastly shifting demographics.
Donald Trump won the electoral college with 306 votes. 270 are needed to win the presidency. The states of Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania, with their 10, 16, and 20 respective electoral votes, all went for Trump and gave him the edge he needed.
The chilling truth: Donald Trump won those three states with a total of 79,646 votes in an election where more than 136 million people cast their ballots. That’s less than a fraction of a percentage point.
...
How can this be possible? Let’s pretend for a minute that the very real possibility of foreign interventionism is not a factor, or the unaddressed fact that overwhelming evidence suggest Russia interfered, and ignore investigative journalist Greg Palast’s stunning revelation that more than 3 million absentee and provisional ballots were wrongfully disqualified and thrown away uncounted.
...
Subsequently, the Electoral College has not been updated to reflect the massive population and demographic shifts in America, or update the strength or apportionment of the votes.
...
These are the same voters who crave social democracy, just so long as it isn’t called socialism, a dirty word amongst the majority of the American populace, and a flaw that Sanders, untested on the national stage, would have seen exposed in a general election match up.
...
There has been a real and demonstrable systemic failure to protect the integrity of our elections that Americans, and yes the Electoral College, must wholly reject. This isn’t conspiracy theory. This isn’t conjecture. This isn’t poor sportsmanship. This isn’t even about Hillary Clinton anymore. This is about protecting our democracy. Free and fair elections are one of the cornerstones of American democracy and we have now seen credible reports that our rights thereto have been impeded upon by:
1) Voter suppression in North Carolina* and Wisconsin; 2) Russian interventionism via hacking in Florida’s election systems*; 3) FBI Director Comey’s willful and intentional release of documents meant to suggest criminal wrongdoing by the Democratic nominee a week before the presidential election; 4) The use of Wikileaks as an agent for a hostile foreign power to meddle with our election; 5) A systemic failure by the news media to serve as editorial gatekeepers, differentiate false equivalencies, or to report on falsehoods propagated about the Democratic nominee.* 6) A voter-cross check system that allowed millions of valid absentee, provisional, and machine-error ballots to be wrongfully disqualified.
...
Allowing revisionists to shape the narrative and lay fault at the feet of Hillary Clinton for losing, whether expressly or impliedly, is a historic injustice that, if allowed to continue, only hurts us as a nation and as a democracy. It allows a shift in conversation away from crucial global and sociopolitical issues facing our society, and towards petty partisan squabbles and the unproductive blame game. If we do not respond to threats to our democracy, the epidemic of fake news, the various interventionist forces in our election, and demand action be taken, we are more culpable than either of the candidates in this election. Indeed, we are complicit in the downfall of democracy itself. SourceAnd wow, there's more absurd highlights there than I thought there would be. A bonus bit of wisdom from the comments: As always, it is never Hillary's fault. No matter how many of her supporters explain this loss.....it is on her not on anyhting that happened. Sorry.....I do not support Trump, but we cannot be blind to what happened and why. Biased, disingenuous "journalism" at its finest. The one thing that *is* absolutely true is how women and men are judged in terms of gut-instinct and automatic reaction. Men being power hungry, deceitful and "do what it takes to win" is absolutely more acceptable than for a woman to be. A man can still be viewed positively while still being ruthless and conniving. Simply put, a dishonest, power hungry woman is a much worse "woman" than a similar man is a "man". On December 13 2016 07:42 a_flayer wrote:On December 13 2016 07:33 Mohdoo wrote:On December 13 2016 07:31 Thieving Magpie wrote:On December 13 2016 07:21 Mohdoo wrote:On December 13 2016 07:13 ragz_gt wrote:
Before I thought my house might turn into a waterfront property was the biggest threat... but now we have a non trivial chance of actually going to war with China.... what an amazing month. Under no circumstances will the US ever go to war with China. I would argue we are past the point of war in history. Or at least major war. Little shit countries fighting for coconuts will always happen. Its fairly naive to think we have evolved past war. It only takes one aggressor to force one-front war to happen. The main thing stopping war right now is that the US is so far ahead of everyone. But one can never assume that the dominant empire will always be dominant. Anyone ever going all-out against any nuclear-allied nation will get blown up. There's no escaping the nuclear issue. Best case scenario against the US is both sides being eliminated. No one is going to consider the elimination of their nation a suitable outcome. Well, there's ways to fight wars against overwhelming force that don't require nuclear war. RT, social media and hacking come to mind. Of course, the existing powers will resist such attempts and might try to censor that type of thing... Dammit, Overlord Zurik Gobbelblab III left the crazy dial on full again. At the end of the day, if the US feels legitimately threatened, someone is getting nuked. We have done it before and we would absolutely do it again. I imagine there are very intricate plans in place to deal with every single potential threat with some sort of nuclear response. It is straight up impossible for the US to fall without 10s of millions of deaths on the other side. That sounds like you are suggesting there is a chance the US will decide to nuke Russia over its TV, social media and hacking efforts. I think it is far more likely that the US will make some concentrated efforts against the type of actions that Russia is taking. In my mind, that will be some form of censorship or something to help define national borders on a digital level. I don't know how it will express itself, but maybe we've some evidence of it already in the fake news stories, and now the efforts from congress to deal with the Russian hacking interfering in the election.
If hacking, TV or anything else ever makes the US feel legitimately threatened or like their position in the world is at risk, yes, they will. I don't think that will ever happen. As you said, there are a variety of other things that can happen first. But at the end of the day, the US is never going to let their dominance slip. Any concentrated effort to dethrone the US will be resisted with increasing severity until it works.
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United Kingdom13775 Posts
What to do?
Censorship: good luck. The net neutrality crowd has a lot of influence here.
Better security? Cyber security issues are a very deeply rooted problem that cannot so easily be solved.
Retaliation? Then next time they will hit the stock market or a power plant and cause billions worth of damage. Or if it's on a smaller scale, the results will be kind of mediocre. It's not like Russian leaders have never been subject to hack and leak, it just doesn't have the same effect.
Legislation to define boundaries? Net neutrality is one issue, that our president and establishment leaders disagree on this issue is another. That would be tough.
The focus should be on the internal issues that allowed the leaks to strike so hard. Such as the organization which showed favoritism towards an utterly electable candidate.
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On December 13 2016 07:47 LegalLord wrote:
A woman isn't a man and shouldn't try to be one. Frankly I don't see anything wrong with a female leader acting more... feminine.
That sounds like gender essentialism to me, unless I'm misinterpreting. What do you mean by that?
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On December 13 2016 07:59 Mohdoo wrote:Show nested quote +On December 13 2016 07:47 LegalLord wrote:
A woman isn't a man and shouldn't try to be one. Frankly I don't see anything wrong with a female leader acting more... feminine. In the business world in my own anecdotal experience I found women who didn't try to act like men to be better bosses than women who did.
In any case, no, misogyny didn't defeat Clinton. Dude, what? Are you saying Clinton tries to act like a man? My point is that certain positions in society require/lead to expression of what we traditionally view as masculine qualities. When women are in these positions, if their behavior matches a man's, our existing ideas of what makes a man or woman "good" cause the woman to be viewed differently. I'm not saying she lost because of that and only because of that. I am simply pointing out that women can do something another man does and be viewed more negatively for it than the man. Show nested quote +On December 13 2016 07:51 a_flayer wrote:On December 13 2016 07:44 Mohdoo wrote:On December 13 2016 07:39 Incognoto wrote:On December 13 2016 04:53 LegalLord wrote:Huffington Post managed to compile pretty much all the absurdities of the Clinton loss-rationalizing into one cringeworthy article. I'll post some highlights since it's pretty long. A month has passed since American voters took to the polls to elect our next commander in chief, with a general consensus having pervaded public discourse that, love her or hate her, Hillary Clinton would become president. Her erstwhile opponent, Donald Trump, a reality television star viewed as crass and inept, having boasted about possibly sexually assaulting women in a now-infamous Access Hollywood tape, had all but forfeited the race.
In the weeks leading up to the election, Clinton exhibited dominance over her Republican challenger that lead some to speculate that she was running up the score as her campaign expanded into typically red states like Texas and Arizona. Following resounding victories in the election season’s presidential debates, Vox Editor-in-Chief Ezra Klein proclaimed to the world that “Hillary Clinton’s 3 debate performances left the Trump campaign in ruins.” Her polling numbers indicated a landslide was imminent. Pundits speculated that Donald Trump’s path to 270 electoral votes was slim to non-existent.
...
Just hours after the stunning upset that proclaimed Donald Trump president-elect, the vultures began to circle around the scene of Secretary Clinton’s political death, the body, so to speak, not even cold yet. Senator Bernie Sanders, her democratic rival in the primary, who spent the tail-end of that campaign impugning Clinton’s integrity and questioning her qualifications to lead, hit the talk show circuit immediately. Despite having begrudgingly supported Clinton following his primary defeat, both at the Democratic National Convention and on the campaign trail through November, he seemed to almost gloat with a “told-ya-so” self-righteousness, openly implying that he should have been the nominee and offering prescriptions to the Democratic party.
...
The problem with all of these analyses is that they are all painfully reductive, overly-narrow displays of revisionist history. These arguments are just. plain. wrong. Entertaining them without looking at the broader systemic failure at play is contributing to a pattern of failure by the media to fulfill their journalistic responsibility as editorial gatekeepers, an historic injustice against the most qualified candidate to ever run for the presidency and who won record-breaking votes, and a heinous narrative shift that holds us back from looking at, or solving, the real problem.
Hillary Clinton did not lose the 2016 presidential election. We did.
...
Any and every discussion seeking to analyze why Hillary Clinton lost the 2016 presidential election MUST begin and end with the following as its central premise: “Hillary Clinton won the national popular vote by 2.7 million.” Or, put in another way, “Hillary Clinton won more votes than any other presidential candidate in history, second only to Obama.” (Note: Cook Political Report believes that she may surpass Obama’s 2012 total, for good measure.)
...
Soon enough the liberal progressive voter base supporting Sanders began to regurgitate the same right wing talking points and lies used to impugn Clinton’s integrity for decades. Once maligned for being a liberal harpy and socialist, Clinton was now subjected to the cruel injustice of having fellow progressives label her “too conservative,” a “war hawk,” an “imperialist.”
This of course was the same lot who believed it an omen of their candidate’s rightful claim to the presidency when a bird landed on his podium at a campaign event in Portland.
...
This is just one of literally hundreds of examples of lies that have been propagated about Clinton over the years that have been packaged as news, or that legitimate news sources will falsely equivocate with the truth. and spread like wildfire through fake news channels. The time required to engage with and disprove each accusation point by point with each person who consumed it would be nearly impossible.
“Fake news” is a major problem that has had an out-sized effect on our politics and our presidential election. It is not a new phenomenon, but it has reached fever pitch. Until legislation is passed that addresses the problem and/or the heads of various social media companies implement policies to forbid them, the proliferation of fake news will continue to meddle with our elections.
...
Democratic faithful thought by November that the damage done by Sanders’ hail-Mary strategy would soften and fade. A week before the election, “Benghazi” and “Hillary Clinton’s e-mails” were still ridiculous fodder being churned out by the mainstream media and consumed ravenously by the electorate. The media failed time and time again to call these stories for what they were. Outright lies.
Some argue, and I subscribe to the notion, that the media failed to report on false equivalencies during the general election campaign, and Clinton’s adversaries were able to malign and abuse her ad nauseum without any checks by the media, because of at least one obvious reason. No one wants to admit it, her adversaries scoff at it, and even women seem to downplay it’s significance throughout the 2016 presidential campaign: misogyny. The 2016 presidential election, much like in 2008, revealed staggering gender biases, mostly in the constant and baseless scrutiny of Clinton’s character.
...
Women, after all, cannot seek power without being innately bad, evil, or corrupt. Gender studies experts have talked about this phenomenon at length, and yet we failed to highlight the way it was taking life in the campaign before our eyes.
...
Clinton’s massive popular vote victory is important in that not only does it dispel shameful myths that this superb, historic candidate FAILED us in some way, but serves to highlight one of the real problems: the electoral college system of apportioning votes is no longer fair or representative. This is not to say that the electoral college must necessarily be abolished. But at the very least, it must see reforms that address the country’s vastly shifting demographics.
Donald Trump won the electoral college with 306 votes. 270 are needed to win the presidency. The states of Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania, with their 10, 16, and 20 respective electoral votes, all went for Trump and gave him the edge he needed.
The chilling truth: Donald Trump won those three states with a total of 79,646 votes in an election where more than 136 million people cast their ballots. That’s less than a fraction of a percentage point.
...
How can this be possible? Let’s pretend for a minute that the very real possibility of foreign interventionism is not a factor, or the unaddressed fact that overwhelming evidence suggest Russia interfered, and ignore investigative journalist Greg Palast’s stunning revelation that more than 3 million absentee and provisional ballots were wrongfully disqualified and thrown away uncounted.
...
Subsequently, the Electoral College has not been updated to reflect the massive population and demographic shifts in America, or update the strength or apportionment of the votes.
...
These are the same voters who crave social democracy, just so long as it isn’t called socialism, a dirty word amongst the majority of the American populace, and a flaw that Sanders, untested on the national stage, would have seen exposed in a general election match up.
...
There has been a real and demonstrable systemic failure to protect the integrity of our elections that Americans, and yes the Electoral College, must wholly reject. This isn’t conspiracy theory. This isn’t conjecture. This isn’t poor sportsmanship. This isn’t even about Hillary Clinton anymore. This is about protecting our democracy. Free and fair elections are one of the cornerstones of American democracy and we have now seen credible reports that our rights thereto have been impeded upon by:
1) Voter suppression in North Carolina* and Wisconsin; 2) Russian interventionism via hacking in Florida’s election systems*; 3) FBI Director Comey’s willful and intentional release of documents meant to suggest criminal wrongdoing by the Democratic nominee a week before the presidential election; 4) The use of Wikileaks as an agent for a hostile foreign power to meddle with our election; 5) A systemic failure by the news media to serve as editorial gatekeepers, differentiate false equivalencies, or to report on falsehoods propagated about the Democratic nominee.* 6) A voter-cross check system that allowed millions of valid absentee, provisional, and machine-error ballots to be wrongfully disqualified.
...
Allowing revisionists to shape the narrative and lay fault at the feet of Hillary Clinton for losing, whether expressly or impliedly, is a historic injustice that, if allowed to continue, only hurts us as a nation and as a democracy. It allows a shift in conversation away from crucial global and sociopolitical issues facing our society, and towards petty partisan squabbles and the unproductive blame game. If we do not respond to threats to our democracy, the epidemic of fake news, the various interventionist forces in our election, and demand action be taken, we are more culpable than either of the candidates in this election. Indeed, we are complicit in the downfall of democracy itself. SourceAnd wow, there's more absurd highlights there than I thought there would be. A bonus bit of wisdom from the comments: As always, it is never Hillary's fault. No matter how many of her supporters explain this loss.....it is on her not on anyhting that happened. Sorry.....I do not support Trump, but we cannot be blind to what happened and why. Biased, disingenuous "journalism" at its finest. The one thing that *is* absolutely true is how women and men are judged in terms of gut-instinct and automatic reaction. Men being power hungry, deceitful and "do what it takes to win" is absolutely more acceptable than for a woman to be. A man can still be viewed positively while still being ruthless and conniving. Simply put, a dishonest, power hungry woman is a much worse "woman" than a similar man is a "man". On December 13 2016 07:42 a_flayer wrote:On December 13 2016 07:33 Mohdoo wrote:On December 13 2016 07:31 Thieving Magpie wrote:On December 13 2016 07:21 Mohdoo wrote:On December 13 2016 07:13 ragz_gt wrote:
Before I thought my house might turn into a waterfront property was the biggest threat... but now we have a non trivial chance of actually going to war with China.... what an amazing month. Under no circumstances will the US ever go to war with China. I would argue we are past the point of war in history. Or at least major war. Little shit countries fighting for coconuts will always happen. Its fairly naive to think we have evolved past war. It only takes one aggressor to force one-front war to happen. The main thing stopping war right now is that the US is so far ahead of everyone. But one can never assume that the dominant empire will always be dominant. Anyone ever going all-out against any nuclear-allied nation will get blown up. There's no escaping the nuclear issue. Best case scenario against the US is both sides being eliminated. No one is going to consider the elimination of their nation a suitable outcome. Well, there's ways to fight wars against overwhelming force that don't require nuclear war. RT, social media and hacking come to mind. Of course, the existing powers will resist such attempts and might try to censor that type of thing... Dammit, Overlord Zurik Gobbelblab III left the crazy dial on full again. At the end of the day, if the US feels legitimately threatened, someone is getting nuked. We have done it before and we would absolutely do it again. I imagine there are very intricate plans in place to deal with every single potential threat with some sort of nuclear response. It is straight up impossible for the US to fall without 10s of millions of deaths on the other side. That sounds like you are suggesting there is a chance the US will decide to nuke Russia over its TV, social media and hacking efforts. I think it is far more likely that the US will make some concentrated efforts against the type of actions that Russia is taking. In my mind, that will be some form of censorship or something to help define national borders on a digital level. I don't know how it will express itself, but maybe we've some evidence of it already in the fake news stories, and now the efforts from congress to deal with the Russian hacking interfering in the election. If hacking, TV or anything else ever makes the US feel legitimately threatened or like their position in the world is at risk, yes, they will. I don't think that will ever happen. As you said, there are a variety of other things that can happen first. But at the end of the day, the US is never going to let their dominance slip. Any concentrated effort to dethrone the US will be resisted with increasing severity until it works.
Well, that is certainly an alarming notion... Thanks for that. I almost feel more sympathetic to North Korea now.
Regarding the woman vs man thing, I kinda wish that women getting into politics (aka suffrage) would have brought those classically feminine personality traits and such (whether they were legitimately attributed to women or not) to the table as a whole -- not just in women, but in men also as a social by-product of sorts. Unfortunately, it seems that those types of traits aren't as valuable in politics as one would have hoped. Instead, you get mannish women in terms of personality who are often as bad, if not worse than men. I hear you can look at eastern Europe for some prime examples, but HRC was also one of those cases, I'd say.
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On December 13 2016 08:05 kwizach wrote:Show nested quote +On December 13 2016 07:47 LegalLord wrote:
A woman isn't a man and shouldn't try to be one. Frankly I don't see anything wrong with a female leader acting more... feminine. That sounds like gender essentialism to me, unless I'm misinterpreting. What do you mean by that?
This direction in a conversation is a very deep rabbit-hole that is extremely unlikely to end well.
I saw a conservative claim that Clinton is currently doing more to undermine faith in the election than Trump was (or at least Clinton ally's are, since she seems quiet herself). The case they made was mildly compelling, and I'm sure some variant of this argument is going to be made across that side of the aisle very soon.
The Incredible, Spineless Hillary Clinton
I fear I may have been the victim of persistent auditory and visual hallucinations throughout the election. After all, I’m pretty sure I heard Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton promise– not once, but several times over the course of many months– that she would accept the results of the 2016 presidential election.
I then seem to recall that after her loss to Donald Trump, she followed through on that promise. “We must accept this result and then look to the future,” she said (or did she?). “Donald Trump is going to be our president. We owe him an open mind and the chance to lead.”
But I find that hard to reconcile with what I’ve seen since then: namely, Clinton and her campaign doing everything in their power to delegitimize Trump’s victory and work towards getting the results of the election overturned.
First, it was the quixotic attempt by Green Party candidate Jill Stein to challenge the results of the election in three states, which would’ve then handed Clinton the election. The Clinton campaign should have been content to let Stein defraud hapless supporters out of millions of dollars on behalf of a recount doomed to fail. But instead, the Clinton campaign announced that they were joining the effort.
Then there was the Clinton campaign’s statement Monday, announcing that they were backing efforts for members of the electoral college to receive intelligence briefings about the government’s conclusion that Russians hacked the DNC in an effort to elect Trump. “Electors have a solemn responsibility under the Constitution and we support their efforts to have their questions addressed,” said campaign chairman John Podesta. Again, the request comes at the same time that Clinton supporters are calling on electors to ignore their state’s results in order to stop Trump.
You can see why I’m questioning my own sanity: the Clinton campaign’s stance is all over the map. They aren’t contesting the election… but they do support a recount? They put out a statement saying they believe it’s mathematically impossible for them to win… but they think it’s worth spending millions for voters learn exactly how much they lost by?
The Clinton statement clarifies that “we feel it is important, on principle to ensure our campaign is legally represented in any court proceedings and represented on the ground in order to monitor the recount process itself.” Huh? On what “principle”? Why have no other presidential candidates in history identified this amorphous “principle” that requires them to join unserious third-party efforts to overturn their opponent’s victory?
Likewise, what the campaign is not saying in today’s statement about the intelligence briefings is more important that what they are saying. Electors need to know whether or not Russia intervened on Trump’s behalf… why exactly? Because “electors have a solemn responsibility under the Constitution.” Okay, but what’s that responsibility? How should the intelligence briefing help them carry out that responsibility?
Everyone knows that the only conceivable reason an elector would want to see the intelligence before voting is to decide whether they should ignore the will of their state’s voters and vote against Trump. But Clinton already conceded the election: “we must accept this result,” remember? Why would Clinton back an effort with the sole purpose of overturning a result she supposedly accepts?
This is not merely about hypocrisy, although there’s plenty of that. No, this is about cowardice. Clinton and her campaign are taking overt and targeted actions to try to have the results of the election overturned, all while lacking the decency to come out and say so. At the same time, they’re studiously avoiding media interviews where they could be pressed on their actions.
(For what it’s worth, I don’t think the Clinton campaign actually believes their recount/electoral college efforts will be successful. I think they realize that delegitimizing Trump will be a helpful narrative when Democrats inevitably find themselves the new “party of obstruction” the next four years, and are lending a helping hand.)
At least with previous flip-flops, Clinton didn’t try to insist she was she still holding her previous beliefs. But now she’s having her cake and eating it too. She gets the play the part of the genial statesman who has graciously accepted defeat. All the while, her allies are feverishly working in contravention of her public position.
Right now, the media is letting her get away with it. When Trump called the election rigged before he won and when he suggested millions voted illegally afterwards, he was justifiably torn to shreds. Now Clinton’s campaign is suggesting that she should essentially be installed as president despite losing the electoral vote. Where are the angry tweets? Where are the front-page headlines, the stern condemnations on cable news? I remember when questioning the election results was literally treason.
We all know what will happen next. Clinton will disappear for a year. She’ll then give give a softball interview to a big-name journalist (prediction: Andrea Mitchell). She’ll talk about her post-election life, how much she’s enjoying being a grandmother, maybe hints that she’d like to see Chelsea run for office. The fact that she was a shameless hypocrite a year earlier, the fact that she went further to undermine the electoral process than anything Trump ever did will go unremarked upon. And in the end, she’ll escape unscathed in the public eye.
It doesn’t have to be that way. We were told many times during the election that it wasn’t enough for Trump’s campaign to denounce X, Y, and Z in a statement, he had to come out and say it himself. Now, we should demand the same of Clinton. If it really is so essential that electors get a briefing and so essential that the recount go forward, Clinton should go in front of a camera and say so herself. Let the American people see her play the sore loser rather than letting her surrogates do it for her.
http://www.mediaite.com/online/the-incredible-spineless-hillary-clinton/
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I got kick out of this part of that Mediate piece:
We all know what will happen next. Clinton will disappear for a year. She’ll then give give a softball interview to a big-name journalist (prediction: Andrea Mitchell). She’ll talk about her post-election life, how much she’s enjoying being a grandmother, maybe hints that she’d like to see Chelsea run for office. The fact that she was a shameless hypocrite a year earlier, the fact that she went further to undermine the electoral process than anything Trump ever did will go unremarked upon. And in the end, she’ll escape unscathed in the public eye.
This is the Clinton's in a nutshell. People tend to forget how much of a stink there was to the White House when Bill Clinton left in 2001.
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United Kingdom13775 Posts
On December 13 2016 08:16 Nevuk wrote:Show nested quote +On December 13 2016 08:05 kwizach wrote:On December 13 2016 07:47 LegalLord wrote:
A woman isn't a man and shouldn't try to be one. Frankly I don't see anything wrong with a female leader acting more... feminine. That sounds like gender essentialism to me, unless I'm misinterpreting. What do you mean by that? This direction in a conversation is a very deep rabbit-hole that is extremely unlikely to end well.
Yes, yes it is. Which is why I generally don't respond to those kinds of absurd misdirections.
On December 13 2016 07:59 Mohdoo wrote:Show nested quote +On December 13 2016 07:47 LegalLord wrote:
A woman isn't a man and shouldn't try to be one. Frankly I don't see anything wrong with a female leader acting more... feminine. In the business world in my own anecdotal experience I found women who didn't try to act like men to be better bosses than women who did.
In any case, no, misogyny didn't defeat Clinton. Dude, what? Are you saying Clinton tries to act like a man? My point is that certain positions in society require/lead to expression of what we traditionally view as masculine qualities. When women are in these positions, if their behavior matches a man's, our existing ideas of what makes a man or woman "good" cause the woman to be viewed differently. I'm not saying she lost because of that and only because of that. I am simply pointing out that women can do something another man does and be viewed more negatively for it than the man.
She certainly doesn't act feminine. But I'm talking about "women having expectations" more so than "Hillary Clinton acts this way."
In any case, my point was perhaps taken a little too specifically. I simply meant that you should try to emphasize the strengths traditionally associated with your "identity group" rather than try not to be a part of that group. If you're an old man, you shouldn't try to run marathons to prove you can; instead, focus on life experience and how much of it you have. If you're a cripple... don't try to walk just to prove it. If you're young, don't try to prove you have infinite experience; just show you have competence and you bring fresh experience to the leadership. If you're a young woman, you're going to be judged for your appearance and that doesn't have to be a bad thing. If you're an old woman, it's not bad to be grandmotherly. And so on and so forth. People may or may not mention it, but they absolutely do recognize that there are expectations of certain candidates by virtue of who they are, that other candidates who are from a different set of identity labels would not have. And my position is that it's better to embrace and use those labels than to try to subvert them because it doesn't work.
Even worse is to play the game of identity politics and to try to divide people by labels to call them bad people for who they were born as.
In other words: sure, women can't just be "ruthless and conniving" but that doesn't mean they're at a disadvantage because they can do other things men can't.
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My opinion on the Russian thing is that the Democrats would be best off just letting McConnell look at it. He has said he wants to look into it and he won't be powerless in January, unlike the Democratic party. His relationship with Trump is lukewarm at best, even with his wife being tapped for a trump admin position.
The desperate accusations and implications being made by Clinton allies are almost certainly acts with no possible net positive for their actions. They aren't going to get the electoral college to change their mind and their criticism of Trump from this angle, one of the only ones where it legitimately looks like he himself did nothing wrong, just makes him seem like a victim of bullying from the elite. There's literally no upside I can see to throwing this kind of ... Frankly, it seems like a tantrum.
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United Kingdom13775 Posts
I would prefer fewer Benghazi oversight committees this early in the election. That is what this would be.
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On December 13 2016 07:22 Tachion wrote:Show nested quote +On December 13 2016 07:13 ragz_gt wrote:
Before I thought my house might turn into a waterfront property was the biggest threat... but now we have a non trivial chance of actually going to war with China.... what an amazing month. why would you think we would go to war with china?
WTF we gonna do if TW declare independence the day after inauguration? Or some nut job blow up a bunch people somewhere. The thing with all the tough talk is sometime shit happens and you are shit out of luck.
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On December 13 2016 08:49 ragz_gt wrote:Show nested quote +On December 13 2016 07:22 Tachion wrote:On December 13 2016 07:13 ragz_gt wrote:
Before I thought my house might turn into a waterfront property was the biggest threat... but now we have a non trivial chance of actually going to war with China.... what an amazing month. why would you think we would go to war with china? WTF we gonna do if TW declare independence the day after inauguration? Or some nut job blow up a bunch people somewhere.
quietly look the other way as China gets medieval on their ass?
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United Kingdom13775 Posts
On December 13 2016 08:49 ragz_gt wrote:Show nested quote +On December 13 2016 07:22 Tachion wrote:On December 13 2016 07:13 ragz_gt wrote:
Before I thought my house might turn into a waterfront property was the biggest threat... but now we have a non trivial chance of actually going to war with China.... what an amazing month. why would you think we would go to war with china? WTF we gonna do if TW declare independence the day after inauguration? Or some nut job blow up a bunch people somewhere. The thing with all the tough talk is sometime shit happens and you are shit out of luck.
Sanctions and petty whining if past policy is any indication. Ultimately the US isn't committed enough to Taiwan to go to war over it if that has to happen.
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On December 13 2016 07:43 LegalLord wrote:
I do wonder to what extent the US has actually thought through the scenario of fighting a nuclear war and how to win, beyond MAD.
In any case, a trade war or more Ukraine-like forced schisms is more likely than open war, by far.
quite extensively I think. There's a whole lot of plans prepared for all sorts of things in quite a lot of detail.
But you still don't really win nuclear war.
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On December 13 2016 08:49 ragz_gt wrote:Show nested quote +On December 13 2016 07:22 Tachion wrote:On December 13 2016 07:13 ragz_gt wrote:
Before I thought my house might turn into a waterfront property was the biggest threat... but now we have a non trivial chance of actually going to war with China.... what an amazing month. why would you think we would go to war with china? WTF we gonna do if TW declare independence the day after inauguration? Or some nut job blow up a bunch people somewhere. The thing with all the tough talk is sometime shit happens and you are shit out of luck.
I'm pretty sure that Taiwan is not declaring independence in the immediate future. not even their most pro independence parties like the NPP would do something like that. Their probably just going to keep gradually trying to get more independence and push back a bit on China. but pretty much everyone there realizes that an immediate declaration would be disastrous.
Taiwan appears to be wanting to push for a free trade agreement with the US which would put Trump in a very awkward position between being tough on China and his railing against free trade
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EPT
