If you vote for Trump, then screw you

Realizing that simply pulling up the ladder behind them won’t be enough to stop the demographic shifts, they’ve decided to set the building on fire and go “Nyah nyah! When we’re gone you get nothing!”

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Consider the source.

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I agree with you completely… and I’m not defending anything Trump says. But as Hillary said, half of Trump supporters are deplorable and I’m pretty sure that we (liberal types and moderates) have failed the other half.

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That’s fair. But then the others are supporting a man who is demonstratively more corrupt and craven than Hillary, who has no grasp of the issues beyond jingoistic soundbites, and who is the perfect dictionary definition of both “narcissist” and “egoist”, and they appear to be doing it for purely partisan reasons. That’s just as idiotic as the actual idiots.

I have no idea what that future would hold. The global markets could crash simply on the news that he is the winner. His business history reveals someone who bends rules, breaks rules, screws people over, and is gleeful about it. How that would translate into being President I don’t know. It’s not the same as running a business, despite what so many people think-- Trump can’t just fire generals or congressman or judges, like I’m sure he wants to do. It might be Pence’s show with Trump just making appearances-- are you OK with President Pence?

Maybe, or maybe once she has achieved what is basically any politician’s final goal in the US she will be herself and stop worrying about consultants and focus groups (those are, after all, from the world of campaigning more than governing.) What will the real Hillary do as President? I’m willing to bet she will be more or less just like Obama: mostly center-left.

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Could you please expand on this? Not sure I understand.

Say, something like this?

But that gets overlooked because she also called the white supremacist half, with total accuracy, deplorable. So apparently respect doesn’t count unless you are actually respecting the core values of racism, xenophobia, and all other sorts of ignorance. And of course any respect for that is patronizing, which is itself disrespectful.

So congratulations, you now have a movement that’s made itself so horrible it can’t be treated with anything but contempt, and now get to try and blame people who won’t make excuses for it. Like the KKK, which just happens to support Trump, not that that’s a reason for introspection or anything.

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Well, Pence has openly said that his role model is Dick Cheney, and that he admires how much power Cheney had as VP.

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Bingo.

The guy who worked for Nixon, who thinks the President should have more power, who thinks torture is OK (but water-boarding isn’t torture, FWIW) and who almost single handedly gave us the disaster that is Iraq, a disaster we are still dealing with.

Now imagine him working with a GOP congress and maybe getting a Supreme Court pick in the process too.

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That’s an awfully heavy-looking bag of stereotypes. You should think about putting it down and walking away from it.

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I grew up there… St. Louis is a minor bastion of blue in a sea of red. Even back to the 1980’s I had to resist the urge to deck my peers in college after some of the racist idiocy that came out of their mouths when I went to college in a small town.

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Yeah, um, about that protest vote thing. Yeah, yeah, it’s your vote you can play how you want to with your toys, I’m not the boss of you, etc etc. But we all saw Brexit, right? And the protest voters who were startled it actually happened?

If you’re foursquare for Trump then sure, exercise your right. But if you’re not… then be willing to accept what happens if he wins. Because voting for him or not voting for Hillary amounts to the same thing when they tally results.

The last thing we need is the U.S. version of “Man Who Voted For Brexit Is ‘A Bit Shocked’ His Vote Counted, Is Now ‘Worried’” ( http://theslot.jezebel.com/man-who-voted-for-brexit-is-a-bit-shocked-his-vote-coun-1782553004 )

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HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA…(breathe)…

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA…no! Wait! That’s so dumb! HAHAHAHAHAHAHA…(breathe)…

Oh, but do tell.

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If one person starts talking how we should exterminate all cats for sport, and another is all “leave my pets the hell alone”, I suppose you could say they’re both contributing to polarization. But you could hardly expect the second person to compromise, or accept the view of the first.

Because the polarization isn’t really the problem, it’s that the first person is being impossible. And somewhere between rejecting very well understood science as a conspiracy, and asking for the country to ban specific minorities, I think it is entirely fair to say the Trump supporters have passed that line.

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I don’t think Clinton is an especially liberal candidate. She’s a status-quo conservative candidate. Like Obama. I do think she’s our best chance to stop the fascist candidate with the Nazi ties.

One way to vote against Trump is to vote for the leading candidate who is running against Trump.

Another way to vote against Trump, if you know and trust people who are voting against Clinton, is to pair off, 1 never-Trump voter with 1 never-Clinton voter, to vote for third-party candidates.

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Why is it that when somebody says something about liberals, it has to imply something about conservatives?

Hillary maintained high approval ratings while she was First Lady, while she was Senator, and even higher while she was Secretary of State. She only gets the hate when she’s actually running for a job. I think she’s been a victim of largely unconsciouis, sexist bias against women showing ambition, and that she’s been much more harshly judged during her campaigns for doing things that would generally be accepted as politics-as-usual for a male candidate.

It will be interesting to see where her ratings go in office, should she win - and I sincerely hope she does.

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Pfff. Trump couldn’t burn down a matchbox. Vote for real change: Red Giant 2016!

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There are a lot of factors that drive polarization. I think you’re getting at that we need to try to communicate with people in a way that promotes mutual understanding and a mutual respect of our shared humanity, rather than painting everyone in the cartoonish stereotypes current politics evokes all over the place. I do think that the type of dismissive NYT liberal op-ed pundit assholery that calls most of America “flyover states” contributes to making things worse. Thats’s something we should all aim for (radical, liberal, moderate, conservative, reactionary alike). I see some liberals trying for that, and some conservatives, but the forces we’re dealing with are:

a strong evangelical movement of politicized Christianity that sells conservative talking points as a kind of faithfulness

a massively polarized right-wing media like Fox/Breitbart/Limbaugh/etc. that throw out outrageous lies to polarize the base on an hourly basis

a useless corporate media that decides the narrative then goes investigating to find the facts that fit it (CNN, NYT, WSJ, etc)

a polarizing and generally useless left wing media that I’ve mostly just stopped reading out of sheer aggravation (MoJo, HuffPo, Alternet, etc)

campaign finance changes that allow billionaires to pay for candidates that fit their ideals, and spread propaganda during elections with no restrictions

social media and web forums that create echo chambers reinforcing false views, polarized views, and an us vs. them mentality that dehumanizes people that don’t agree with some set of tribal politics.

As individuals, we participate in that last part, and I agree we can do better (myself included), but we’re honestly a drop in the bucket of a machine that would be as full of polarizing garbage and misinformation even if there was no internet. In the early 90s Fox, AM radio, and the rest were already driving things, the NYT et al were as useless as now, and the Moral Majority and it’s cousins were already running full steam.

I’m all for being better to each other, keeping the importance of being civil and respectful of those who disagree in mind, and trying not to dehumanize fellow human beings even when they hold dangerous and foolish ideas. Still, it’s a drop in the bucket of a set of conditions that keep the polarization going, and even if every liberal was really nice, decent, and thoughtful in their interactions with conservatives (and I do think we should try to live up to being better human beings), I don’t think we’d see any groundswell of improvement.

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This. If you’re voting for trump, then you’re voting to take the country backwards in the face of civil rights, free speech, basic civility, etc. etc. Why is this even a surprise to people?

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