If by “tainted with scandal” you are alluding to that email baloney or her husband´s affair, I agree that is complete bullshit and shouldn´t influence anyone´s vote. Of course it still does while Trump admitting openly to sexual assault and tax evasion seems to be just fine, but that´s another subject. I´m not sure which of the two candidates would have been worse in terms of international policy though. Not being American, I guess I may have a different perspective on that question.
I can only agree wholeheartedly with that.
However I dislike Clinton, just in terms of civil liberties and his attacks on minorities (among many other things), Trump is an absolutely horrible figure.
[quote=“daneel, post:136, topic:89796”]
I think campaigning is by some distance the weakest part of her political skills.
[/quote]This is the biggest issue she has/had. It doesn’t matter what she actually does if she isn’t ever going to be charming, relatable, or open on camera.
People who seek conversion should learn from religionists: Discussion is preferable to direct debate and always start from common ground. One conversation will not win converts but may plant seeds.
People who do not seek conversion might as well slap people for all the good it will functionally do.
I think this is an interesting and important point. I’m sure I’m not the only person who tries to turn away door to door proselytizers firmly but politely only to find that the slightest niceness is used as a wedge for them to start a conversation. And the good ones usually start it by asking things that you can’t help but agree with. Something to keep in mind.
OTOH, I feel dirty encouraging anyone to be preachy. Enough in the world as it is.
i think that clinton would have been much more likely as president to use military force than obama did. she has a much closer and friendlier relationship to the democratic foreign policy elites than obama does and they tend to be much more hawkish than the democratic base. despite my serious reservation in that sphere, she actually has an understanding of international norms as well as a working knowledge of u.s. alliances and treaty obligations as opposed to trump for whom the term “norm” may only have meaning as the name of a character on an old american sit-com. i might have disagreed with clinton about the use of force in foreign policy but it would have been within one standard deviation from the mean of u.s. policy options. trump represents an unknown and abnormal actor and the result, judging by many of his transition decisions, may be completely new and wildly variant failures. metaphorically, with clinton we might have seen 2 + 2 = 5 while with trump we might see 2 + 2 = CINNAMON.
[quote=“navarro, post:147, topic:89796”]
[…] , she actually has an understanding of international norms as well as a working knowledge of u.s. alliances and treaty obligations as opposed to trump for whom the term “norm” may only have meaning as the name of a character on an old american sit-com. [/quote]
Too often the conversation is about how we need to confront people. That’s great if your objective is confrontation. If your objective is conversion, you act like someone who proselytizes. When was the last time you gave someone toting a sign declaring that you were going to hell the time of day? Compare that to very nice, affable Mormons. Elders John and Jake seem like nice folk. You may not be interested in what they have to say, but you’re going to be relatively polite for the most part because anything else would just seem like an overreaction.
If your objective is catharsis, then you don’t need me to tell you what to do.
It’s all about what you want from people. People are not rational thinking computers. They are dumb, fiercely tribal apes, and you’re no exception. And when it comes to relatives, you quickly realize that either you want nothing from them, or that they’re already providing you with some of what you want from them. Anything else you want from them must be managed accordingly.
When I got up on election day, I had a feeling Trump would win. I’m sure people everywhere had similar feelings of anxiety, regardless of who their preferred candidate was, but I suppose outside of that rationalization, there were reasons, there were signs, literally, there were a lot of signs, Trump signs. In my state, I could count the number of Clinton signs on one hand, hell I even tried to get one, but found out that there weren’t any at my local Democratic Party HQ, or the one in the next town over. Instead, all I saw was the army of Trump, and I live in a swing state. To comfort myself, I thought, every house without a sign must be for Clinton, so its not so bad, but when the day came, I felt it in my gut, even after I voted. The day went on, and when the election came down to my state for Clinton’s road to victory, I saw the signs. Enthusiasm was lacking, on my part too.
I saw Clinton as the lesser of two great evils, two dark futures, and I said to myself, this will be the last time I vote for the Democratic Establishment to stop a cartoon villain from becoming President. I expected that perhaps another even worse person would come up on the ticket the next time, this couldn’t be real, this must have been a ploy, but it wasn’t. People voted, in numbers that blew my socks off (even if they were average in reality), for a man that was a misogynist, racist, thin skinned, totalitarian lunatic. I know not everyone saw him that way, it certainly isn’t the way he is portrayed on Right Wing media. People have commitments to what they believe, they have perspectives through which they view the world, and that has a way of glossing over the problems, particularly when everything is black and white. I’ve talked a lot about this in the past, and I guess I thought those ways of thinking were more limited in scope than they turned out to be.
I think these maps are cool. I also think they’re completely misleading. Everyone who looks at them—including me!—says, “Wow! Look how unpopular Clinton was! Almost the entire country preferred Trump!”
But the maps show no such thing. They show only where the support is clustered. Just because people who supported Trump tend to have more elbow room doesn’t mean their support is somehow… more vocal or more sincere or more important.
Sure, we need to understand why people in various places or professions or walks of life turned away from the Democrats. I just think these maps are misleading. (In the words of the Times: “Donald J. Trump won most of the land area of the United States.” Okay. But so what?)
The US produces far more food than we actually need even with a tiny number of farmers compared to historical numbers. We even pay farmers not to grow crops in many cases in order not to send the price down to absurd levels. And even if every farm (which are mostly run by corporations rather than the rugged individualists of pop culture) in the US went out of business, we could do just fine with importing our food as we do nearly everything else.
The GOP probably wishes that Virginia Heffernan had been put in charge of Clinton’s marketing. This would be hilarious if it were satire. This sort of language would probably be rejected in Pyongyang as being too over the top.
The problem with Clinton as a candidate was not with her policies, but with her brand. She has been subject to relentless attacks from the right since she became 1st lady of Arkansas, with the same language that has plagued her this year. For example, when she defended women’s right to work during the first year of Bill’s administration, she was immediately branded as an “elite”.
The Democratic establishment should have recognized and accepted this 2 years ago and convinced her not to run, but anyone who thinks there is a huge difference between Clinton and Sanders or Warren politically, or does not think there is a vast gulf between her and Trump, has not been paying attention. (Or is in a different country; I’ve enjoyed following the US election on the BBC and DW this year, but it has been a strangely 1-dimensional picture. I don’t know if French or Italian coverage was more nuanced.)
So you’re saying that there are people in your country you could do without?
And really? You would be fine with importing all your food? That is the very definition of hubris.
I wasn’t attempting to prove how important farmers are, otherwise it would be simpler to point out how unnecessary most office jobs can be or how unnecessary iPhone’s are in a world with cheap Chinese android phones, must we depend on cities to keep financial markets afloat?
My point, and it still stands, is that splitting every conflict into an “us Vs them” narrative is not relegated to bigots. It is a very human way of dealing with conflict, what does seem troubling is the idea that giving up on people is an option.
Hah! I posted the same song in another thread on the same subject a few weeks ago, only mine was from a completely different and not at all exactly the same people group called Special A.K.A.
