Again:
If we can’t criticise now, when can we?
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When Trumps out of office and hes on his way to Federal Correctional Facility?
Think big picture:
Do you want this?
or this?
This is the least of our worries, especially since Il Douche is likely part of that composite image (I’d guess Bill Weld is in there, too). It’s the stories here about the Dem candidates in particular that I’m staying away from until at least next spring.
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That’s EXACTLY the man who will beat Trump!
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That would be really amazing if we could combined multiple white men into the same president. Instead, we’re probably going to have to settle for just one.
This is the Primaries. The whole point is to dig out weaknesses now as opposed to the General.
But as long as there is a (D) after the name, it’s all good, even if they keep us on the current course. Because that’s what you are saying.
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I tend to remember people acting like Obama was the next coming of Jesus, only to be surprised how nothing really changed. Guantanamo didn’t close, the rich got richer, he stripped the DEA of regulatory power, and increased funding to programs George W. started. Wall St. and the Auto Companies got bailed out, not students struggling with rising education costs, where’s my bailout Obama? Also created self learning AI extra judicial drone strikes. No trial? No problem, boom! You’re now dead. Let’s not forget Eric Holder throwing the book at people like Aaron Swartz in defense of large corporations profiteering publicly generated research. Holder personally pressured Swartz to kill him self by destroying his life for JSTOR, was it worth it?
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And what you’re saying when you say that we can’t criticise candidates during the primaries is that it doesn’t matter. When you say no one is allowed to say “hey, Candidate X just supported voter suppression efforts”, before the candidate for the general has been chosen, we just have to go with Candidate X.
If you change nothing, nothing changes. Furthermore, Trump is not the entire problem. If you want to go with someone who is going to “work together with Republicans” to find a solution, because you never vetted them during the primaries, things will get worse.
And guess what. Those weaknesses will get dragged out. Only it’ll be during the general, where it is a binary choice. And that is not going to work out the way you hope.
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All I’ll say about Scalzi’s writeup is that it’s overly simplistic, but I expect that from a white dude who seems to have always played at one of the lowest difficulty setting of any white dude ever. Yeah, I’m going to have a much easier time getting a newspaper production job where I live than a black woman. But Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez stands a much better chance of becoming President than I do. To be fair, we both stand a better chance of becoming President than a Hispanic woman from Chimayo, NM.
Also…I suppose it’d be low of me to post a pic of the white dude who made the composite of white dudes, wouldn’t it.
Some of you could really stand to listen to “It Could Happen Here”, or read it. Listen to the episode about a poor rural white uprising. Trump happened because, well, look at this thread. White urban liberals looking down at 77% of the US population and telling them to sit down and shut up because the rich white people have had their turn already. Meanwhile rural communities are going to shit and they have this ridiculous orange guy who makes noises about bringing industry back and making people work instead of letting them sit and draw a check and take opioids for “chronic pain”.
Ignoring these people is how you end up with Donald Trump for another four years.
(And yes, coming from roughly the same part of the country as David Wong, I realize how much of the Obama backlash was due to racism, thanks.)
Scalzi is explicitly describing a general condition of skin and gender privilege to people (like our recently departed commenter) who reject such concepts – it’s meant to simplify things. A combination of things like talent and charisma and perseverance and razor-sharp intelligence – all of which Ocasio-Cortez has in carloads – can transcend privilege in outlier cases. However, absent rare gifts it’s skin privilege that still sadly counts for a lot in this country – which is why white people without those rare gifts are so terrified of losing their skin privilege.
Ocasio-Cortez is in the game because a) she wants to be and because b) she has the chops. Unlike myself or you or the white men in the composite, though, she was told most of her life that she had no business in the game and that (regardless of the realities) she didn’t have the chops. That’s the difference between playing on Scalzi’s Easy mode and playing on his Hardcore mode.
Andrew P Joyce isn’t hiding who he is. His photo is right on the Twitter account that posted this composite image. So what’s your point?
I first read it in the days when America’s foremost grifter was the butt of jokes in Spy magazine. I’m sure others commenting here have as well. You’re not exactly blowing anyone’s mind with this recommendation or with the idea that right-wing demagogues know how to pander to the desperate and poorly educated (especially by making a convincing case that the former are one and the same with the latter). For example:
And here we go again with the American variation on the old right-wing populist trope of the Coastal Elites vs. Real Americans™ in the Heartland™. Yes, the “country vs. the city” cultural gulf exists and has for a long time, but it’s not the basis on which to currently excuse the deplorable (if you will) behaviour we’ve seen over the past few years – especially since 80% of Americans currently live in cities and since most of those who voted for Dolt-45 were middle-class white suburbanites throughout the country and not your salt-of-the-earth Midwestern farmers.
So in fact what you’re seeing is educated urban liberals – and not just white ones – looking down at the Know-Nothing 27% of the electorate (in both rural and urban areas) and telling them to try for once to look beyond the melanin content of skin as both a solution to and as an origin of their own problems. Perhaps, just maybe, they might consider the economically exploitative system that’s championed by the same people who pander to their bigotry as a source of the problem, and the system championed by Ocasio-Cortez and Sanders as a possible solution.
No-one here’s ignoring them, but the bad ol’ BB elites are not going to take their BS concerns about skin colour and Invisible Bearded Sky Men™ and the opportunity to be Randian tycoons and the 1950s-vintage American Dream seriously when there are more pressing and sometimes existential reality-based problems that need to be addressed.
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Imagine The Turner Diaries, but written by a Cracked editor with actual war correspondence experience, and not a far-right idiot writing revolutionary fantasies to masturbate to. That’s this series. He came back home and saw echoes of those conflicts right here in the US. This episode is about, and I fully agree with him, a very real chance of an uprising among disenfranchised rural voters. We’re not talking about a bunch of guys in pickups with AR-15s, we’re talking about people who have access to raw materials to make explosives. Y’all Qaeda knows how to make things go boom. I know, I get to hear the tannerite blow up on the regular. With a tiny bit of chemistry knowledge and stuff readily available in rural America you can make Timothy McVeigh-sized bombs with the stuff.
Scoffing doesn’t change the fact that Cliven Bundy thought he was on a mission from God, and that when he got done with his standoff, his case was thrown out due to mistrial and was pardoned by the President. Y’all Qaeda is a funny thing to say but these people are about two steps from being the real deal. Yeah, the pardon has an element of rich white privilege to it, but that’s not all. It also has a strong element of rural-urban divide to it. I don’t know who convinced Trump, one of the most coastal-elite of the coastal elites, that he should court rural voters and people in the Rust Belt, but it was a genius move. I can tell you, from being right here in, as you put it, the Heartland™, it’s a powder keg. I’m in a left-leaning state and when Trump showed up here, the crowds were unreal.
I mean…keep scoffing. Personally, I’m armed, because I live in the part of the country you just made fun of and these people scare the shit out of me.
See, you might think they’re dumb, but they’re going to see your mocking tone and dismiss what you say as elitist bullshit. In the meantime the airwaves here are full of people convincing them that even former Republicans like Elizabeth Warren are communists hellbent on destroying America. You guys are angry that white dudes are running for President, and the Trump voters think that a Trump loss could mean the end of freedom.
And I agree with most of what you said! I’m just saying that telling 77% of the country to sit down and shut up might not be the best approach.
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As a rural person who used to buy into the nonsense, it’s not so much that as it is being from a disadvantaged background and that your skin color means you’re too privileged to consider. It disturbs white people because it sounds a lot like the racism they’ve doled out for years; it was disturbing to me because I was raised to recognize that racism is fucking idiotic.
Again, these rural voters were not the primary voters for Il Douche. And second, the people you’re talking about have already staged an armed occupation of federal lands.
What it has is a strong element of land-owner vs. non-land-owner divide to it, one which is conveniently conflated with the rural-urban divide to cover for skin and gender privilege.
I assume it was someone who, unlike his counterpart on the Clinton campaign, understood how to work the Electoral College (another vestige of city-vs-country that’s been turned to the advantage of the ownership class).
The crowds are large and enthusiastic because he chooses his rally venues in any given state carefully. Here are the lists, which don’t feature a lot of left-leaning states and certainly don’t feature any left-leaning counties:
Like all demagogues, he’s a coward and a con man. I’m surprised anyone falls for his smoke-and-mirrors act to the point that they worry about his rallies reflecting a larger movement.
I’m not making fun of the Midwest, I’m making fun of those who draw a bogus and stereotypical divide for cynical political point scoring.
Also, if you’re armed you’ve already given up and lost. The entire Midwest is not a Mad Max wasteland of Cliven Bundy types, and no-one is forcing you to live in counties that are.
I don’t think they’re dumb. They’ve been bamboozled by confidence artists for 40+ years, and they’re too invested in the racism- and Jeebus- and Rand-infused con to admit it on their own. If the Know-Nothing 27% wants to keep listening to AM talk radio and reading Breitbart and taking Fox and Friends as gospel then my estimation of them remains the same: a political write-off for serious and reality-based people.
Which, again, is why Scalzi framed it in a way that avoided that confused and thin-skinned interpretation. White privilege is an element of institutional racism, just like easy mode is an element of a video game; as Scalzi notes, the difference is not that the latter exists and the former doesn’t (his point is that both do), but that you get a choice in the latter.
And again, no-one here is saying that. No-one here is even telling the entire 46% portion of the popular electorate that voted for Il Douche in 2016 to sit down and shut up. We’re telling the 27% sucker conservative base that’s gone under various names since 1968 (the Silent Majority, the Moral Majority, the Tea Party, the MAGAites) and the affiliated right-wing populist extremists to sit down and shut up. They haven’t earned our respect and civility.
If you want to argue with straw men to signal your virtue, find a left-leaning site where they form the consensus. Otherwise address what actual commenters here are saying.
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Your math is off.
“ 19.3 percent
“Rural areas cover 97 percent of the nation’s land area but contain 19.3 percent of the population (about 60 million people),” Census Bureau Director John H. Thompson said.Dec 8, 2016
New Census Data Show Differences Between Urban and Rural …”
And the people in that picture are white guys - so even if it were 77% - it’s really less than half that number. Let’s say 37.5%.
And of course - 9% of the rural number. Though none of the guys in the composite are anything but elite white guys - mostly living in DC or similarly elite environs.
Cloven Bundy ain’t running - and certainly isn’t running as a Democrat.
Edit: on a related note - I personally don’t give a fuck that he knows how to make a bomb. It wasn’t rural areas being targeted by bin Laden or by right wing bombers. We in Cities were.
We don’t negotiate with terrorists. Maybe you rural guys are afraid of them - we’re not. Feel free to piss your pants and hide under your beds - we didn’t- and we won’t.
2nd edit:
The Bundy Militia was about 18 guys with pickup trucks - half of whom were of retirement age. The New York City police force alone has over 50,000 people.
I like those odds.
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I just need to throw this 2 cents out there, regarding AOC’s “better chances” of becoming POTUS over, say… any fine, upstanding members of this forum:
AOC is already in the political arena, and she’s actually likable.
Not talking down to people or sucking up all the air the room goes a helluva long way.
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That reminds me: 6 years ago, when they were casting the new pope, I made a composite “black smoke superposition: 115 cardinals edition”:
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You quote 77% more than once. What are you talking about? The US isn’t 77% rural.
Oh! That’s the percentage of white people. Even though most white people are urban.
This is as irritating as when people use “working class” as a synonym for “regular white people” when the working class is clearly not a single skin color.
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Because when the invective reaches a certain level, it doesn’t stop after the primaries. You still had bitter Bernie supporters, after the nomination, repeating GOP/buttery email, talking points.
Dissent is fine, but if you start sounding like the RNC twitter feed, maybe take a step back and reevaluate.
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When Trump started conducting rallies right after he had won, at first I thought maybe he was… confused? Maybe he didn’t know what he was doing, the impression he was conveying, how a new President is supposed to conduct himself. When he continued to keep doing them, hours-long, always to his base, always in “safe” red-state territory, the reaction is: Jesus Christ, this shithead knows exactly what he's doing.
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