#Do NOT go gentle into that shitty night;
#Rage, RAGE against the dying of the light.
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I think the only honest conversation I’ve ever had was with one of my stepmoms who admitted that passing tough-looking black men in the street made her nervous. She is seriously aware of her reactions, and it makes her feel sad and guilty.
Anyone else I talk to sets off my bullshit-omometer.
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I have to agree.
I don’t think anyone who voted for Obama will vote for Trump. At least not in significant numbers.
And remember, folks, even if Trump DOES win, his powers are limited. I mean, he doesn’t MAKE the laws, that is the legislative branch. So the hysteria I see where a vote for Hillary is a vote for the EPA and all these other departments because Trump would do away with them is hysteria. He doesn’t have the power to do most of those things. Executive orders only do so much.
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I agree with this. The most interesting thing to see in this election cycle, imho, is that the Republican party is fracturing. If you couldn’t square the people who go on and on about how Democrats were the Klan party and the Republicans were the party of Lincoln, with the people, well, behaving like they do now, it’s because there were people who were still clinging to the party’s past.
Whites have voted against Democrats since the 1964 passage of the Civil Rights Act, and “the liberal cause has been saved by African-Americans, who are populous and disciplined and consistent enough voters to overcome white rage.”
Oh, bullshit. Well, okay, it’s not totally bullshit, but it’s somewhat bullshit.
This is the thinking that’s causing Republicans to discriminate against blacks, though.
Here’s a reality check: even with post-Civil Rights Act gerrymandering to give black voters more of a voice, and even though the white population is on the decline, white people account for 63% of the U.S. population. Black people only account for 12% of the population. That statement leaves out a whopping 25% of the US population that is a non-white, non-black minority. This also leaves out the fact that women tend to be more liberal than men.
If I were to guess, I’m guessing the main problems are apathy among younger white voters, and older white men who are convinced that, somehow, there’s going to be some great “white genocide” and feel the need to vote for fellow old white men.
Good. The is dead to a lot of people. I hope it dies by fire and something better rises from the ashes. I mean, it won’t, but I can hope, right?
I mean, remember the Whigs? They won some elections in the past. Possibly we will still have a two party system, but it will be a new 2 party system.
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I’m old but not that old.
They should be a reminder, though, that political parties need not be right and left. They can simply be urban versus rural, or aristocratic versus plutocratic.
Politics tends to descend into a two or one party system, but neither reflects the complexity of anything other than the simplest societies. That’s the problem we haven’t yet managed to solve.
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Ok. So that stops Trump. But what then? The neoliberal slide continues. I would feel a lot better about holding my nose and voting for Hillary if someone had an articulate plan for progress after she is elected. Trump represents a very rapid descent into fascism. Clinton represent the same downward trajectory towards a neoliberal world of vast working poverty and absurdist levels of inequality that landed us in the place where we have a trump at all. Even if Clinton wins, if we continue on as we have been, there will be a new Trump waiting in the wings, possibly worse.
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When I was younger, I was a staunch Republican, with all the trimmings. However, looking back, I understand a fundamental part of what drove me, and what might drive others, is a belief that people are essentially evil. The concept was best laid out in The Leviathan. The idea of the lone hero plays into this, the idea that good is a miraculous exception to the rule. This world view instills many things, among them, a warped sense of meritocracy where there is an ‘other’ who deserves their place in the world, because the world is a bad place made up of bad people who do bad things, so screw them. At the same time, while judging myself harshly I came to a paradox where I thought that despite my faults, I could be the lone hero, if only I had the money and power to do it. Empathy drove me to want to do something to raise others out of that situation and slowly I learned that humanity isn’t ‘evil’, it is flawed.
Now I know someone close to me who is a staunch Republican, and they believe that people are evil except for the chosen. They believe things like Breitbart because it reinforces their exceptionalism, the idea that they are a light in a dark world. This can extend to a nationalist concept, where their version of America is the light. They don’t think Trump is a good person, but he’s a wall between them and the truly terrible ‘others’ of this world. So debating him on Trump’s worthiness proves fruitless.
So I propose a new strategy, tell these people positive things about the world they live in. Show them it is not a dark place, but one full of life. We have to find a way forward in which we can share happiness and that’s a hard road, especially for an individualist invested in the idea of lone heroes. I might sound naive, but I prefer this to the dark and dreary place I came from, and maybe others will too.
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The same Stalin who asked sarcastically “How many divisions does the Pope have?”
One of them is still around. (And no, Putin is not the heir to Stalin.)
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For once, I wanted to make a prediction, write it down somewhere, so I can be held accountable. If I’m wrong, you’all can call me on it in less than half a year.
I think that for the majority of the American citizens, either choice will be a bad one. If Clinton gets elected, a lot of people who will have voted for her will be turning a blind eye to the bad stuff she’ll be doing because “she’s the first woman president” [in the USA]. It worked for Obama, no?
Edited to add: Alan Minsky, of Pacifica Radio agrees with me:
"…the Dems have put forward a candidate who embodies an establishment widely recognized as having betrayed the majority of the American public."
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The election will be a selection. It won’t matter much, majorities in any sense. The popular votes, suppressed or otherwise, tend to run in the 47 vs 53% marginal splits, in any case. The Manichean polarization never concludes with overwhelming popular wins. This is an excellent way to make popular vote almost neutral in effect.
It is almost certain, by evidence, that Ohio was given to Bush in 2000 through vote tabulation fraud. Remember this was aided by the Diebold machinery and by easily manipulated back-end software, which had no viable audit or authentication mechanisms.
The Florida “hanging chad” debacle was a circus side-show, used to distract “the marks” from how the con was really being laid out.
How did everyone forget this, between 2004-08? Somehow, in the Obama fanfare of pseudo-progressive cosmetic politics, this was ignored, and 2008 was hailed as a genuine contest, without any effective remedy having been placed for the abuses of 2000/2004.
It ceased to be a legitimate system. It was not corrected.
It is ultimately naive to think that every interest, with significant and established power really allow meaningful popular input to policy on matters - other than cultural feature.
The election cycle, and its various “debates” (hahahhahahha) and party conventions resemble WWF seasons on television, more than any legitimate form of representative government. The comparison is not merely superficial.
Shirky is bright, thoughtful and good intentioned. He does however, misunderstand the purpose of the equipment. It is not designed to produce a functioning republic, but instead made to blunt and misdirect the political will and energy of the people. Governing isn’t even the real objective of this exercise. It’s just holding actions and gambits to more greatly concentrate wealth and power.
One recent, hackneyed example of this? After the 2008 election, the USA got the Heritage Foundation plan to enrich the insurance industry, lauded as a “liberal victory” under the branding of “Obamacare.”
Thus “Liberalism” is most often a vanity. It’s a way to appreciate one’s own fair-mindedness and tolerance - easily provoked to support unearned rent-extraction by elites and foreign wars of conquest in exchange for cosmetic tokens of “progress”.
The road to hell is paved in white liberalism.
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Thanks for remembering this.
There were deep flaws uncovered in every aspect of vote tabulation, between 2000-2004.
The “Voter ID” sideshow is meant to distract public attention, as if fraudulent voting was a matter of aggregate individual action at the polls, rather than systemic manipulation of tabulation.
This has never been officially addressed or remedied.
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Absolutely.
Hillary is a vote for aggressively escalating conflict in every theatre, and pushing the limits of nuclear confrontation. She is in actual policy and personal conviction, far to the right of Richard Milhous Nixon.
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No no no. We’re in denial about that. She’s simply less than ideal. We’re planning on staying in denial about that until it really beggars belief how anyone can take us seriously. Instead of, I dunno, acknowledging it in a substantive way that might actually get people to take the idea of voting for Hillary seriously.
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There are direct, and indirect powers over society. Trump and the forces that preceded him have crafted a spectacle of fear and doubt in the world. He has made no laws, but there are people who demand them, people who have been driven further into darkness and depression. Regardless of who runs the government, we have to make our society what we want it to be like in our everyday actions. We must endeavor to be idealistic in spite of the grit of realism. Theater only works as long as the audience is watching.
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Y’know, I don’t actually give a damn about being right or wrong; personally, I have a little more than my ego invested here.
I’m happy to be “wrong” when it means the best possible outcome can happen, and I take no joy in being “right” about it when I foresee things going awry.
This isn’t about me and my feels, and I’m savvy enough to know that.
There’s a difference between a subpar or distasteful choice and an utterly disastrous one.
When a house is infested with termites the solution is not to burn it down while one is still inside it.
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The danger of thinking it’s a forgone conclusion isn’t that it will cause people to switch votes.
The danger is it will cause people to not put in the effort to show up at the polls. The country always swings left/progressive when you poll everyone. The country as a majority don’t want the kooks in power. The country does not vote with any regularity.
If people think that the election is in the bag they will not show up to the polls!
It’s not because people will switch votes.
It’s not because people will want the orange sock puppet.
It’s because people are lazy and won’t show up if they think that they don’t need to.
This is how shit like Brexit happens.
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Except that had a massive voter turnout.
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Yes - but it makes my point. When people think that they have it ‘in the bag’ they skip the polls - do this just a little - and then add in a push from the other side and bam… election lost.
If you’re going to elect drumpf, please make sure that wall gets built promptly and tall and all around the entire perimeter. We’ll send you plenty of our Great White North water to fill the pool.
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