How jokes won the election

boing
#21

I see a growing “Im so tired of political discussion” crowd. I have a feeling those were single issue voters and now they are realizing their vote might not be worth it when measured against the growing, and endless, pile of negative.

But the majority of trumpers, the same crowd ypu mentioned, will defend EVERY decision the guy has ever made, while just taking random character shots at any opposing fact/opinion. I feel like the only way to quiet this crowd is not to give them power, Dont feed the trolls.

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#22

Was your top picture intentional (Green Man architectural motif)? GM = plant/vegetation deity. With a slight stretch, that sort of fits.

#23

One again, the media that failed to read the room is purporting to tell us that Hillary failed to read the room and that this time, they really know what’s what.

Ads looked like news News looked like ads and so did propaganda so propaganda was unrecognizable without perspective and so did was actual comedy

FTFY

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#24
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#25

Trump lost the popular vote, and won due to interference by the FBI, interference by a hostile foreign power, mass scale misinformation campaigns, and voter disenfranchisement in swing states. He did not win by being popular because of his and his followers’ great sense of humor.

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#26

Yes, and since we are functioning as the Greek chorus this time around, the joke is on all of us. Entertaining in the same manner that the NY Times judgement in 1922 looked then and now, but not so much during the years between.

Horace was oh so right - Mutato nomine de te fabula narrator.
(Change only the name and this is your story.)

#27

You believe pointing out someone being absolutely horrifyingly terrible is equivalent to being absolutely horrifyingly terrible?

I agree that the jibes aren’t effective, but I don’t see the “scandal” unless you’re doing the whole “someone is intolerant of my intolerance for women, gay persons and blacks!” shtick.

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#28

While this is true, he also won because Clinton ran a sloppy, entitled, tone deaf campaign – and was incredibly vulnerable as a candidate with so much political baggage.

A Series of Unfortunate Events, indeed. For all of us.

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#29

“You suck, McBain!”

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#30

Note that the guy who won literally bragged about committing sexual assault.

It’s interesting that Clinton’s is the campaign that you’re choosing to accuse of being sloppy, entitled, and tone deaf.

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#31

I think you could make a fair case that almost any other democratic candidate might have done better vs. Trump.

The end result, unfortunately, is that we all get four years of Trump. And that is tragic.

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#32

I’m not arguing against any of that, and indeed have never done so. Only against your claim that a “sloppy, entitled, tone deaf campaign” was the reason Clinton lost, and that that was therefore the lesson we should take away from this event. (nice bet-hedging with the “might”, incidentally)

Trump’s campaign was sloppier, more entitled, and staggeringly more tone-deaf than Clinton’s. Recent history has now shown us that these things do not actually cause one to lose elections. Trump won, despite possessing all these things in far greater quantity.

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#33

Yes, that is why I said

and

Clinton’s mistakes were a factor, among many others. She didn’t need many more votes to win those swing states, but it didn’t happen. So all the small mistakes added up… to one big mistake with a capital T.

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#34

Alternately, she could have chosen not to spend the entire campaign working to alienate everyone to the left of the centre-right corporate Dems. Or offered something to the working class more than just a belated, begrudging, partial and unconvincing commitment to raising the USA’s atrociously inadequate minimum wage.

There are plenty of those folks, too. More than enough to swing the balance.

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#35

Trump is larger than life. Surely he deserves a plural.

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#36

Yes Clinton’s shitty campaign also was a factor (though there I wouldn’t say humorlessness was the central issue), and her major baggage, and her total lack of charisma, and her getting pneumonia which caused a health freakout, and a very bitter primary, and an all too large delusional group on the left that equivocated Trump and Clinton, and polls that gave a reduced sense of urgency of the threat, and a bunch of other fucked up bullshit all came into play to add up to the Trumpocalypse. For various reasons I think Sanders may well have gone down as well (that guys baggage was really toxic, but didn’t come up in the primary). But of factors that I’d say were cause rather than accidental attribute or correlation, I will not list jokes, since they are at best symptomatic of deeper causes.

I was a Classics student and hated Nussbaum’s hot takes back then that were always some erudite but bizarro-land parsing, so I’m biased to want to slag her ideas, but even knowing my biases I think this article was dumb.

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#37

I would like to reiterate that, despite the confluence of hundreds of events that conspired to make this happen, we are all deeply saddened by the final outcome.

But on the plus side, short of the civil rights movement in the 60s, there has never been a better time to be an activist in America than the next four years.

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#38

When it becomes such a side show distraction from the hard work of encouraging localized ground game politics leading up to an election, yes.

I’ve written this elsewhere on the forum, but I happen to live in Pennsylvania where Hillary lost by less than one percent. I know dozens of people who obsessed on this election via social media about Trump, reposting all the jokes and memes. They truly believed they were doing their duty standing up against what was horrible.

And yet, I know nobody who actually volunteered for the democrat party or do anything tangible to help her win. Everybody was convinced a win was inevitable, and that they didn’t have to do anything.

No signs. No calls. No door knocking. No polling.

Media can easily be exploited by demagogs. With the margins of the loss so thin, it was sad to witness the lack of community based political organizing occur against the rise of a sarcastic but powerless left. The election was completely winnable, despite the bullshit, if more of us had put our money where our mouth was.

To me, this is a scandal.

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#39

I can’t swing a dead cat around here without hitting a life-sized hot wheels truck flying two American flags.

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#40

Have you considered that maybe the people so far left of Clinton that she alienated them aren’t a meaningful voting block to chase? Remember, her and Bernie Sanders’ voting records were mostly similar, her policy goals reflected the same ideas but usually in a more pragmatic fashion (and sometimes, actually more progressive than Bernie’s), and so on. People don’t seem to realize or acknowledge that she was more progressive than Obama, significantly more progressive than her husband, and ran pretty much the most inclusive, progressively oriented campaign the Democrats have done in ages.

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