It’s been some time since I knew my logical fallacies as well as I probably should, and I wish I could more correctly cite the reason your post makes no sense whatsoever. You are essentially defending your irrational emotional state by pointing into the crowd and saying they are being irrational too, when it’s irrelevant to someone challenging your “where there’s smoke…” assertions.
The problem is, as it’s been pointed out, is that Trump’s campaign has all the flaws (including the ones levied against Clinton) that normally sink a campaign but he has been able to ride a fan base this far because it got combined with fanatics. Trump isn’t rumored to be associated with open racists, he has always had a direct connection to them since before his candidacy began. Trump isn’t rumored to have relied on family money for his lifestyle, it’s been a fairly well documented thing since the 80s. Trump isn’t rumored to be changing is political stances on a whim, he’s literally reversed his positions within hours consistently. Trump isn’t rumored to be corrupt, he bragged about politicians owing him favors because he donated to their campaigns. The “smoke” in this case nearly always discovers fire.
On the other side, Clinton has had her opponents invest millions of taxpayer funds in finding the “smoke” with no sign of fire. She’s had foreign interests trying to hack her for years, and dump what they found only to reveal non of the fire from the “smoke” of fixing the primaries (in fact, a lot of people are waiting for that big one to drop expecting it will happen at the most opportune time for Trump). There is a private organization that has been funded for decades to try to find fire from the “smoke,” only to get additional investments for some reason - it’s honestly not very clear why. The only thing we do know is that the Clintons have been important figures in the DNC for decades, and they have had success despite a level of scrutiny that no politician in recent US history has had.
The only reason this election has been a fight at all is because Hillary isn’t immediately likable as a person and her campaigns are always terrible.
Yeah, no. You used the phrase “cognitive dissonance”, but here’s another one for you: false equivalence. I’ll certainly have a discussion about Clinton’s failings, ways I wish she were different, her screw-ups. Obama too (I despise the drone program and think it’s unethical and should be stopped.) But Trump is a racist and a bigot and a xenophobe. He’s supported by racists and bigots and xenophobes. He re-tweets Alt-Right White Supremacists. To pretend they’re on the same level, or that being somewhat skeptical of the 25 years of deliberate Right Wing attacks on the Clintons is the same as looking the other way on the unprecedented way in which Trump has brought white supremacist ideas into the mainstream is absurd.
If those friends of yours live in a swing state, they’re idiots. I get that they want to throw a tantrum about not getting everything they want right away, but they’re putting their desire to feel this way over the safety of people of color, Muslims, immigrants from all walks of life, and the LGBTQ community. Not with the Supreme Court on the line and a burning dumpster fire of a human being on the threshold of the White House. Ask the UK how well protest votes went for Brexit.
While I general vote leftist, third party, because my state has in recent years been safe for the republicans, this year, it might not be the case. I will not vote to allow Trump into office, as much as it pains me to vote for someone I disagree with so much.
The people who wouldn’t vote for Bernie because he’s an atheist Jewish socialist would vote Republican even if Christ himself was running on the D ticket.
Nobody can say what a Bernie v. Trump race would look like at this point. I’d imagine his numbers wouldn’t be much different, since he’s not a great campaigner, he’s a self-described Socialist which hits him with a lot more people than just Republicans, there was a notable contingent of Dems. who disliked him during the Primary, and he’s Jewish, which is really an unknown factor. Early polling is a virtually meaningless metric, so we can all play the “what if” game to our heart’s content, but it’s all just pointless fantasies at this point since he lost.
My 15 yo daughter told me that some girl in her school posted on instagram a picture of herself and maybe another girl in a pro-trump shirt. What proceeded was a rather nasty 100+ comment exchange between pro trump and pro hillary students including comments to a gay kid to “loosen his jeans, fairy” and “I hope you die” to another. Unclear who those posters supported but it’s irrelevant. “People I know are saying terrible things!” she lamented. It starts early, apparently.
Well one kid in her grade has decided to organize the democrat leaning students to man phone banks. Our state isn’t a gimme for Hillary, so this is a great thing for democrat leaning students to do.
Point is at this point, if you feel strongly the best thing you can do with your time isn’t argue on instagram. It’s to do something. Posting shit on facebook doesn’t count.
i wish you would take a closer look at what you are saying here because you’ve chosen to compare a 37 year-long concerted effort by rightwing billionaires to destroy the clintons to the possibility that there might sometime. somewhere have been a situation that someone can think of when a republican was accused of something that didn’t get proven yet they ended up under a cloud.
i’m going to save a copy of that quote for an example of the term “false equivalence.” just in case i ever have the responsibility of curating the section of the dictionary containing the letter “f.” if someone were to use logic that sloppy in a gun thread you’d flay them alive.
i’m less concerned with the accusations which didn’t stick than with the things that did. if you read through the list in the link coming up you can find plenty of things he really has done that really are either illegal, immoral, or both. but by all means let’s equate allegations and innuendo with actual wrongdoing so you can press on with your “both sides do it” argument. The Many Scandals of Donald Trump: A Cheat Sheet - The Atlantic
your summation shows a blithe, or perhaps a studied, ignorance for how the political system in the united states actually works. because of the nature of our electoral system the two party paradigm is inevitable. the only time that changes is when there is an instability in one of the currently existing parties which leads to a realignments and a split into two or more parties from one of the preexisting parties but that is followed almost immediately by most of the members of that party going either into the new party or into the other preexisting party. currently there is a possibility for a split and realignment but it is in the republican party that this is happening. if anything a new political party is going to end up being formed that is to the right of the current republican party (fsm save us) and those who can’t stomach that are going to move into the democratic party and trying to make them more conservative. under those circumstances it makes no sense for people on the left to go third party or stay home on election day.
i would be delighted to have a conversation with you about the deplorable policies the republican party has put forward over the past 35 (like so-called entitlement reform, social security privatization, reproductive policy, etc.) years and how the policies of the democrats differ from them. i’d also be happy to discuss those policies democrats have come up with which have been similarly wrongheaded (welfare reform, the drone program, etc.). however, as long as you are in the mode of “both sides do it nanny nanny boo boo!” i see no reason to engage you as a serious interlocutor. for all your intelligence you’re making a terribly wrongheaded argument which you would see immediately if the subject were something you actually cared about.
It isn’t about “appealling to the Republican demographic”. They’re a lost cause; even before Trump showed up, the GOP base had shifted so far to the right that the only way to gain their votes was to support policies that are actively destructive. Not worth the price of the ticket.
Obama didn’t get into office because large numbers of Shrub supporters finally grew a brain. He got into office by making those idiots so depressed that many of them stayed home, while inspiring large numbers of Dems and previous nonvoters to show up.
Clinton is achieving the opposite result; suppressing her own vote with third-way triangulation and a refusal to address the obvious and extreme corruption of business-as-usual pay-to-play American politics.
Trump, meanwhile, is the GOP base’s dream candidate. The cynical plutocrat faction in the party can’t stand him, but they were always only a tiny minority. Some of the theocratic wing are turned off as well, but most of them are happy to support an obviously irreligious candidate so long as he’s sufficiently racist, misogynist and sectarian. And the primarily racist wing (which has been the largest faction since Nixon) are throwing a party.
i was referring to a field that consisted of clinton, sanders, webb, o’malley, chafee, and lessig. i voted for sanders in my primary as a means of trying to help pull the party platform to the left and because i have a weakness for self-professed socialists but once she emerged the winner i was and am delighted to support her in the general election and i would be happy to support her versus any of the candidates who ran in the republican primaries. i have deep philosophical differences with the republican party which has became what i call the cruelty party over the past 30 years or so.
look, if the democrats had nominated rod blagojevich to run from his jail cell i’d be looking for a third party to vote for, maybe i’d even have been trying to help fund an effort to get the socialist workers party on the ballot in texas, but that’s not what happened. instead we have as i said above, “a very cautious, utterly conventional democratic candidate” and not only can i live with that i can be happy with that.
I really appreciate what he was trying to do, calling for a referendum presidency on getting money out if politics, but I don’t think it would have worked. Our legislators are perfectly happy doing nothing and taking legalized bribes, and the whole concept of a referendum presidency would have confused and scared the electorate anyway. In fact, Larry Lessig himself would probably have confused and scared the electorate
