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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 February 13 2017 23:12 Biff The Understudy wrote: Btw, I remember when i was a kid, that voting Le Pen was an extremely shameful thing to do in most people's mind. It basically made you a bad person.
Then appeared the idea that you really shouldn't say bad things about Le Pen voters and now it's totally ok to support fascism. Surprise, Le Pen is also at 25%.
This PC crap about not simply calling a FN voter a fascist is a strategic mistake imo.
Much like calling Trump voters racists or mysoginists, I doubt it will have the effect that you are looking for. Shame only works when the people being shamed care enough about your opinion.
But the level of enthusiasm with which half the country voted for Trump still floors me, and suggests that there is another motive, because his towering intellect and sensible behavior is certainly not the reason.
Only about 20% of the voters perhaps voted with enthusiasm. The other portion was left with an ugly choice between two utterly terrible candidates who are both terrible and made a difficult choice to choose Trump over Clinton.
That doesn't matter. What scares me is that the other 80%, even though they weren't enthusiastic about Trump, looked at his intelligence and temperament and decided "Yeah, I'm OK with that." This isn't even getting into his policies or lack thereof. We can debate until the cows come home about immigration reform, tax codes, and national security, but I was disappointed in the amount of people who apparently don't see that he is a complete moron and a danger to us all.
No, they weren't ok with that. They simply felt that they were very much not ok with Hillary, and they had to make a difficult choice.
Let me just put it this way: when people utterly hate both candidates, they have to make a choice they won't be proud of.
You are misunderstanding my argument. There are many reasons why Hillary was a terrible candidate, but these candidates were not created equal, and I expected record low turnout due to that exact type of person who hates both candidates and could not bring themselves to vote for either one.
It's at that point where people lost me, because people actually decided to vote for Trump in that situation, even after watching a year and a half of this circus where he constantly lies and is clearly uninformed, arrogant, and unstable. Again, this is obviously my opinion, but Trump was an OBJECTIVELY bad choice for anyone who wasn't gung-ho about his immigration and economic policies, which is an entirely different topic.
Which suggests to me there are a lot more people than we all expected who are excited, publicly or otherwise, about his proposed policies, despite the fact that there was no proof he would actually follow through and his temperament and competence did not even factor into their decision-making process.
To phrase it another way, I thought there was a non-insignificant portion of the Republican Party who would have drawn the line at Trump, and I was wrong.
On February 13 2017 23:12 Biff The Understudy wrote: Btw, I remember when i was a kid, that voting Le Pen was an extremely shameful thing to do in most people's mind. It basically made you a bad person.
Then appeared the idea that you really shouldn't say bad things about Le Pen voters and now it's totally ok to support fascism. Surprise, Le Pen is also at 25%.
This PC crap about not simply calling a FN voter a fascist is a strategic mistake imo.
Much like calling Trump voters racists or mysoginists, I doubt it will have the effect that you are looking for. Shame only works when the people being shamed care enough about your opinion.
Agreed. So many people have convinced themselves that the designation "racist" or "misogynist" means nothing that this strategy does not work. The thing that still floors me is that people can watch or listen to him talk and think to themselves "Yeah this guy is totally smart and rational, he would make a good leader of the free world."
Believe me, I understand hating Hillary as a candidate and I totally get the people who didn't want to vote for either one. But the level of enthusiasm with which half the country voted for Trump still floors me, and suggests that there is another motive, because his towering intellect and sensible behavior is certainly not the reason.
I once commented online that I didn't join in the Woman's March and was immediately congratulated on my white penis. It was quite astonishing. I have some understanding on why people attach little value to accusations such as "racist" and "misogynist".
Just for the sake of discussion, were they wrong in guesstimating that you are a white male?
What relevance does that have in whether or not he chose to take part in some event or other?
That was clearly not the discussion. For instance, being asked "so, did you go to the woman's march?" and answering "no", then being told that, would be a bit weird. Barging into a reddit discussion about the woman's march to loudly pronounce that you didn't go... well... different context.
On February 14 2017 00:45 LegalLord wrote: They probably would have drawn the line at Trump if not for the fact that Hillary is extremely hated among those people.
I think you simply underestimate how much people don't like her.
That's probably the most confusing part of the whole thing when seen from the outside. To me Clinton is just another cookie cutter politician, why do people hate her so much? I just can't fathom any sequence of thoughts that would make me pick her as unacceptable and Trump not, so this whole theory of Trump "winning by exclusion" is really hard to grasp.
I tried to ask some people randomly and usually got some generic stuff about establishment, big money etc... is it really all that there is, or is there some henious aspect to Clinton that only americans understand?
On February 14 2017 00:45 LegalLord wrote: They probably would have drawn the line at Trump if not for the fact that Hillary is extremely hated among those people.
I think you simply underestimate how much people don't like her.
That's probably the most confusing part of the whole thing when seen from the outside. To me Clinton is just another cookie cutter politician, why do people hate her so much? I just can't fathom any sequence of thoughts that would make me pick her as unacceptable and Trump not, so this whole theory of Trump "winning by exclusion" is really hard to grasp.
I tried to ask some people randomly and usually got some generic stuff about establishment, big money etc... is it really all that there is, or is there some henious aspect to Clinton that only americans understand?
People feel like our country should be doing much better than it is. People who were in careers of inflated value suddenly saw their value drop to a more reasonable level. This damaged their fragile view of their self worth and they blamed the elite.
On February 14 2017 00:45 LegalLord wrote: They probably would have drawn the line at Trump if not for the fact that Hillary is extremely hated among those people.
I think you simply underestimate how much people don't like her.
That's probably the most confusing part of the whole thing when seen from the outside. To me Clinton is just another cookie cutter politician, why do people hate her so much? I just can't fathom any sequence of thoughts that would make me pick her as unacceptable and Trump not, so this whole theory of Trump "winning by exclusion" is really hard to grasp.
I tried to ask some people randomly and usually got some generic stuff about establishment, big money etc... is it really all that there is, or is there some henious aspect to Clinton that only americans understand?
She's a democrat. Americans are very keen on the us versus them mentality.
On February 14 2017 00:29 TomatoBisque wrote: If you replace "racist" with some generic insult like "dickhead" or "asshole" it becomes apparent why the strategy fails. That sort of label means nothing because it's just a bullying tactic, trying to strongarm someone into changing their beliefs through that kind of pressure without actually undermining why they support Trump and dislike Clinton or whatever candidate you wanted instead. This is never ever going to work, it will just breed contempt and resentment
You cannot factually be a dickhead. You can factually be a racist.
This is nonsense. You can't factually be an insult. People are more then just the labels people put on each other. People can be racist and do racist things but that can't define someone factually like a progressive or a conservative can define themselves factually as those labels.
Once you identify someone with a negative label like that you slowly dehuminize them like hate mongers all do.
On February 13 2017 23:12 Biff The Understudy wrote: Btw, I remember when i was a kid, that voting Le Pen was an extremely shameful thing to do in most people's mind. It basically made you a bad person.
Then appeared the idea that you really shouldn't say bad things about Le Pen voters and now it's totally ok to support fascism. Surprise, Le Pen is also at 25%.
This PC crap about not simply calling a FN voter a fascist is a strategic mistake imo.
Much like calling Trump voters racists or mysoginists, I doubt it will have the effect that you are looking for. Shame only works when the people being shamed care enough about your opinion.
Agreed. So many people have convinced themselves that the designation "racist" or "misogynist" means nothing that this strategy does not work. The thing that still floors me is that people can watch or listen to him talk and think to themselves "Yeah this guy is totally smart and rational, he would make a good leader of the free world."
Believe me, I understand hating Hillary as a candidate and I totally get the people who didn't want to vote for either one. But the level of enthusiasm with which half the country voted for Trump still floors me, and suggests that there is another motive, because his towering intellect and sensible behavior is certainly not the reason.
I once commented online that I didn't join in the Woman's March and was immediately congratulated on my white penis. It was quite astonishing. I have some understanding on why people attach little value to accusations such as "racist" and "misogynist".
Just for the sake of discussion, were they wrong in guesstimating that you are a white male?
What relevance does that have in whether or not he chose to take part in some event or other?
That was clearly not the discussion. For instance, being asked "so, did you go to the woman's march?" and answering "no", then being told that, would be a bit weird. Barging into a reddit discussion about the woman's march to loudly pronounce that you didn't go... well... different context.
It was an imgur post about enthusiastically marching on the day of the march. I had commented something along the lines of "I'd march, but I'm about ready to give up altogether". I don't remember the exact wording, and I'm not sure if I included my general support for the spirit of the march despite my lack of willpower to support them on the ground. I deleted my comment rather quickly, feeling defeated due to their accurate assessment of my physical appearance.
On February 14 2017 00:45 LegalLord wrote: They probably would have drawn the line at Trump if not for the fact that Hillary is extremely hated among those people.
I think you simply underestimate how much people don't like her.
That's probably the most confusing part of the whole thing when seen from the outside. To me Clinton is just another cookie cutter politician, why do people hate her so much? I just can't fathom any sequence of thoughts that would make me pick her as unacceptable and Trump not, so this whole theory of Trump "winning by exclusion" is really hard to grasp.
I tried to ask some people randomly and usually got some generic stuff about establishment, big money etc... is it really all that there is, or is there some henious aspect to Clinton that only americans understand?
People feel like our country should be doing much better than it is. People who were in careers of inflated value suddenly saw their value drop to a more reasonable level. This damaged their fragile view of their self worth and they blamed the elite.
This even without context is a absurdly great description of people's reaction to globalization.
For a new discussion what do people think about a legitimate military intervention into Mexico to drive out the cartels and end the drug war afterwords?
On February 14 2017 00:45 LegalLord wrote: They probably would have drawn the line at Trump if not for the fact that Hillary is extremely hated among those people.
I think you simply underestimate how much people don't like her.
That's probably the most confusing part of the whole thing when seen from the outside. To me Clinton is just another cookie cutter politician, why do people hate her so much? I just can't fathom any sequence of thoughts that would make me pick her as unacceptable and Trump not, so this whole theory of Trump "winning by exclusion" is really hard to grasp.
I tried to ask some people randomly and usually got some generic stuff about establishment, big money etc... is it really all that there is, or is there some henious aspect to Clinton that only americans understand?
that's mostly all there is. but also the republicans have hated her for a long time (decades), and there have been smear campaigns and some questionable information for an equally long time. it's like if you accuse someone of rape or murder and they're found not guilty, some people will still think they did it (regardless of the quality of the evidence at trial, which most people probably didni't look through carefully anyways). so partisan bias against hillary + a long history of making accusations against her means many of those people believe some of the accusations were true, or that "where there's smoke there's fire" so there's something shady going on.
so a very long running smear campaign and a large number of accusations.
it also doesn't help that, due ot the large number of accusations and hate she gets, hillary is kinda paranoid/secretive in response.
On February 13 2017 23:12 Biff The Understudy wrote: Btw, I remember when i was a kid, that voting Le Pen was an extremely shameful thing to do in most people's mind. It basically made you a bad person.
Then appeared the idea that you really shouldn't say bad things about Le Pen voters and now it's totally ok to support fascism. Surprise, Le Pen is also at 25%.
This PC crap about not simply calling a FN voter a fascist is a strategic mistake imo.
Much like calling Trump voters racists or mysoginists, I doubt it will have the effect that you are looking for. Shame only works when the people being shamed care enough about your opinion.
Agreed. So many people have convinced themselves that the designation "racist" or "misogynist" means nothing that this strategy does not work. The thing that still floors me is that people can watch or listen to him talk and think to themselves "Yeah this guy is totally smart and rational, he would make a good leader of the free world."
Believe me, I understand hating Hillary as a candidate and I totally get the people who didn't want to vote for either one. But the level of enthusiasm with which half the country voted for Trump still floors me, and suggests that there is another motive, because his towering intellect and sensible behavior is certainly not the reason.
I once commented online that I didn't join in the Woman's March and was immediately congratulated on my white penis. It was quite astonishing. I have some understanding on why people attach little value to accusations such as "racist" and "misogynist".
Just for the sake of discussion, were they wrong in guesstimating that you are a white male?
What relevance does that have in whether or not he chose to take part in some event or other?
That was clearly not the discussion. For instance, being asked "so, did you go to the woman's march?" and answering "no", then being told that, would be a bit weird. Barging into a reddit discussion about the woman's march to loudly pronounce that you didn't go... well... different context.
It was an imgur post about enthusiastically marching on the day of the march. I had commented something along the lines of "I'd march, but I'm about ready to give up altogether". I don't remember the exact wording, and I'm not sure if I included my general support for the spirit of the march despite my lack of willpower to support them on the ground. I deleted my comment rather quickly, feeling defeated due to their accurate assessment of my physical appearance.
aka you were called out for shitposting a motivational image.
On February 14 2017 00:29 TomatoBisque wrote: If you replace "racist" with some generic insult like "dickhead" or "asshole" it becomes apparent why the strategy fails. That sort of label means nothing because it's just a bullying tactic, trying to strongarm someone into changing their beliefs through that kind of pressure without actually undermining why they support Trump and dislike Clinton or whatever candidate you wanted instead. This is never ever going to work, it will just breed contempt and resentment
You cannot factually be a dickhead. You can factually be a racist.
This is nonsense. You can't factually be an insult. People are more then just the labels people put on each other. People can be racist and do racist things but that can't define someone factually like a progressive or a conservative can define themselves factually as those labels.
Once you identify someone with a negative label like that you slowly dehuminize them like hate mongers all do.
Hate monger is a negative label, I don't think you should label me like that cause there's more to me than just that and you're dehumanizing me when you say it.
Or you know, we could stop saying stuff that is utterly absurd. Of course there is such a thing as factual racism.
On February 14 2017 00:45 LegalLord wrote: They probably would have drawn the line at Trump if not for the fact that Hillary is extremely hated among those people.
I think you simply underestimate how much people don't like her.
That's probably the most confusing part of the whole thing when seen from the outside. To me Clinton is just another cookie cutter politician, why do people hate her so much? I just can't fathom any sequence of thoughts that would make me pick her as unacceptable and Trump not, so this whole theory of Trump "winning by exclusion" is really hard to grasp.
I tried to ask some people randomly and usually got some generic stuff about establishment, big money etc... is it really all that there is, or is there some henious aspect to Clinton that only americans understand?
People feel like our country should be doing much better than it is. People who were in careers of inflated value suddenly saw their value drop to a more reasonable level. This damaged their fragile view of their self worth and they blamed the elite.
This even without context is a absurdly great description of people's reaction to globalization.
For a new discussion what do people think about a legitimate military intervention into Mexico to drive out the cartels and end the drug war afterwords?
we can't legally do a military intervention without the approval of the mexican government. I wouldn't want to do one without that, or else it'd end poorly. if the mexican gov't approves, i'm willing to seriously consider it. but it's not clear you'd actually manage to drive out the cartels. ending the drug war requires legalizing drugs; otherwise there's piles of money to be made and some people will go through the effort to make it. to maintain security in mexico would require an ongoing american presence, the amount of money generated by drugs is simply so large that it's hard for mexico to fund the counterefforts on its own. going in to sweep the cartels just means they, or some other group, will come back as we leave. there's some rebuilding time sure, but it's not that long.
On February 14 2017 00:45 LegalLord wrote: They probably would have drawn the line at Trump if not for the fact that Hillary is extremely hated among those people.
I think you simply underestimate how much people don't like her.
That's probably the most confusing part of the whole thing when seen from the outside. To me Clinton is just another cookie cutter politician, why do people hate her so much? I just can't fathom any sequence of thoughts that would make me pick her as unacceptable and Trump not, so this whole theory of Trump "winning by exclusion" is really hard to grasp.
I tried to ask some people randomly and usually got some generic stuff about establishment, big money etc... is it really all that there is, or is there some henious aspect to Clinton that only americans understand?
People have a lot of different reasons. She's a liar and a famous flip-flopper, she has a history of poorly conceived FP projects, she has a lot of conspiracy theories around her, she had that entire issue of DNC collusion, she plays too hard to identity politics, and many other reasons which may or may not be fair.
In any case, foreigners generally think of candidates in how they will help their own situation, so domestic issues of a country that is foreign to them are generally irrelevant.
On February 14 2017 00:45 LegalLord wrote: They probably would have drawn the line at Trump if not for the fact that Hillary is extremely hated among those people.
I think you simply underestimate how much people don't like her.
That's probably the most confusing part of the whole thing when seen from the outside. To me Clinton is just another cookie cutter politician, why do people hate her so much? I just can't fathom any sequence of thoughts that would make me pick her as unacceptable and Trump not, so this whole theory of Trump "winning by exclusion" is really hard to grasp.
I tried to ask some people randomly and usually got some generic stuff about establishment, big money etc... is it really all that there is, or is there some henious aspect to Clinton that only americans understand?
People feel like our country should be doing much better than it is. People who were in careers of inflated value suddenly saw their value drop to a more reasonable level. This damaged their fragile view of their self worth and they blamed the elite.
This even without context is a absurdly great description of people's reaction to globalization.
For a new discussion what do people think about a legitimate military intervention into Mexico to drive out the cartels and end the drug war afterwords?
we can't legally do a military intervention without the approval of the mexican government. I wouldn't want to do one without that, or else it'd end poorly. if the mexican gov't approves, i'm willing to seriously consider it. but it's not clear you'd actually manage to drive out the cartels. ending the drug war requires legalizing drugs; otherwise there's piles of money to be made and some people will go through the effort to make it. to maintain security in mexico would require an ongoing american presence, the amount of money generated by drugs is simply so large that it's hard for mexico to fund the counterefforts on its own. going in to sweep the cartels just means they, or some other group, will come back as we leave. there's some rebuilding time sure, but it's not that long.
This would be a huge waste of time and money, it would be better spent increasing the border security. if you drive them out of mexico they will move to another neighboring country and do the same. Prevent their entry into the US and we will have less of a reason to interfere in Mexico's behalf.
i'll give a lazy epistemological account of hillary hate. useful philosophy yay
besides believing in various conspiracy theories and drawing lazy inferences from donations, the clinton hate and 'establishment democrat' hate is really a case of the very natural and normal process of how people represent politics at a conceptual level.
when you ask a bernie supporter why reformist dems/traitor dems are bad, the basic answer is that they represent more of the same corporate control etc. it doesn't really matter if the alternative is without specific content as to how stuff will work. the representation covers don't need precise, complete extensions to reality for people to operate from them.
not that we must get rid of ideological labels and coarse political categories, but we should be mindful of their generality and work to confirm them from specific facts and empirical observations, rather than the other way around, letting the bias from large categories unduly influence the interpretation of empirical observations.
when your political universe is about struggle between systems, say, 'corporate control' vs 'government of the people', the choice of which categorical bin to put a particular individual is really important. it may obscure the distance between hillary and republicans if you don't develop a different view of corporations in society and so on.
then you throw in the information selection process and everything gets reinforced.
Do we really need to beat the “Hilary Clinton electability” dead horse some more? Have we not gotten enough blood from that stone over the last 2 months?
On February 14 2017 00:45 LegalLord wrote: They probably would have drawn the line at Trump if not for the fact that Hillary is extremely hated among those people.
I think you simply underestimate how much people don't like her.
That's probably the most confusing part of the whole thing when seen from the outside. To me Clinton is just another cookie cutter politician, why do people hate her so much? I just can't fathom any sequence of thoughts that would make me pick her as unacceptable and Trump not, so this whole theory of Trump "winning by exclusion" is really hard to grasp.
I tried to ask some people randomly and usually got some generic stuff about establishment, big money etc... is it really all that there is, or is there some henious aspect to Clinton that only americans understand?
that's mostly all there is. but also the republicans have hated her for a long time (decades), and there have been smear campaigns and some questionable information for an equally long time. it's like if you accuse someone of rape or murder and they're found not guilty, some people will still think they did it (regardless of the quality of the evidence at trial, which most people probably didni't look through carefully anyways). so partisan bias against hillary + a long history of making accusations against her means many of those people believe some of the accusations were true, or that "where there's smoke there's fire" so there's something shady going on.
so a very long running smear campaign and a large number of accusations.
it also doesn't help that, due ot the large number of accusations and hate she gets, hillary is kinda paranoid/secretive in response.
This sums it up pretty well (see the video LegalLord just posted above for an example of a smear video with out-of-context clips to peddle a false narrative of HRC being particularly dishonest). You'd also have to add the obsession of many in the media over finding a Clinton scandal, jumping at every bit of smoke even if it later turns out there's no actual fire. The smear campaign wasn't only coming from the right either (note that I'm not talking about honest disagreements here, which are perfectly valid).
edit: by the way, Plansix, I'd be curious to read your review of SW: Rogue One in the relevant thread, since we had a disagreement on Episode VII and I was wondering what you thought of this one :-)
On February 14 2017 00:45 LegalLord wrote: They probably would have drawn the line at Trump if not for the fact that Hillary is extremely hated among those people.
I think you simply underestimate how much people don't like her.
That's probably the most confusing part of the whole thing when seen from the outside. To me Clinton is just another cookie cutter politician, why do people hate her so much? I just can't fathom any sequence of thoughts that would make me pick her as unacceptable and Trump not, so this whole theory of Trump "winning by exclusion" is really hard to grasp.
I tried to ask some people randomly and usually got some generic stuff about establishment, big money etc... is it really all that there is, or is there some henious aspect to Clinton that only americans understand?
People feel like our country should be doing much better than it is. People who were in careers of inflated value suddenly saw their value drop to a more reasonable level. This damaged their fragile view of their self worth and they blamed the elite.
This even without context is a absurdly great description of people's reaction to globalization.
For a new discussion what do people think about a legitimate military intervention into Mexico to drive out the cartels and end the drug war afterwords?
What do you mean with "end the war on drugs"? Legalize marihuana and decriminalize cocaine? Shouldn't you start with that? Going to war in Mexico to *drive out* the carterls (as if that were an easy thing) is expensive, and will do exactly nothing unless you remove the monetary incentive for the cartels' existence in the first place. And if you *do* do something about the monetary incentive for the cartels' existence (by legalizing marihuana and decriminalizing cocaine), then the situation in Mexico will change. If it turns out the cartels are just transferring into something else (like the mafia after the prohibition ended), and Mexico needs help cleaning that up, then maybe help them with that.
On February 14 2017 01:32 Plansix wrote: Do we really need to beat the “Hilary Clinton electability” dead horse some more? Have we not gotten enough blood from that stone over the last 2 months?
I mean, it's relevant enough to how we got to where we are now, so it's important to acknowledge it again and again and again.
When people question how we got to where we are now... just look at the electable candidate who we had to choose because we couldn't afford risking the loss here. Turns out, if you push people enough in a bad way, they might just elect a meme.
EPT
