Polls not looking good for Trump after Orlando

[Phrenological]

I just wish it was high enough to elect more non-Reptiloid members of Congress.

[anon8420928]

@KathyPartdeux

He should start his own country of Trumpistan in Utah.

Hey! There are still some nice places here.

Find your own desert.

[KathyPartdeux]

What do I have to do to put you into one of these beautiful Trumpistans today? We’ll give you top dollar on your trade-in Palinstan!

[Brainspore]

@lava

Yeah, true - she’s been persecuted by right-wing-nuts. But on the other hand she managed to set up an illegal mail-server without the help of the GOP, and it would be no surprise if some or all of the primary election shenanigans we just experienced tracks back to her.

The same investigation that concluded that setting up the email server was a Bad Thing To Do also noted that her predecessors did the same thing. If they charge Hillary with a crime but not others (including members of the Bush administration) it will be justifiably perceived as an election-year partisan witch hunt.

[Marktech]

@Enkita

As every Catholic know, confutatis maledict[orian]is, flammis acribus addictis.

And people who listen to Mozart (among others): voca me cum benedictus.

[anon50609448]

@Richard_Kirk

Well, this is strange. Generally any politician in an event like that will at least come up with something awful and bland like “our prayers and thoughts are with the victim’s families”.

That is precisely the political correctness that Trump eschews. When something like this happens, politicians don’t say what they think, they say a canned line, because maybe what they think is terrible and will lose them the election. Trump showed us that in the Republican primary the politically correct aversion to overt racism wasn’t necessarily a winning strategy (though if he’d been against a single credible candidate instead of against a field of 16 losers maybe it wouldn’t have worked). But with the general population, if you are as lacking in empathy as Trump is, political correctness is your friend.

@daneel

Stein? Johnson?

I know Johnson was polling over 10 at some point, and it looks like most pollsters are including him in national polls. Are they including Stein?

@wsmcneil

In any case, conservative, even Canada’s capital-C Conservative, isn’t the same as authoritarianism. Harper was never an authoritarian. Or maybe he tried to be, but he wasn’t charismatic enough to pull it off.

Harper wasn’t a fascist dictator, but in the end I think he was pulling support mostly from people using a pattern of thinking that would just as easily support Trump. And while he wasn’t literally dismantling parliament in the sense of abolishing it and naming himself emperor, the Fair Elections Act was a pretty good first step to outright removal of democracy (for our international friends, Harper passed an act that removed the authority of our politically independent body to investigate elections fraud and nominate scrutineers and placed both of those functions in the hands of the winning party).

[anon50609448]

@jerwin

Medical professionals adopted other terms, such as retarded, so as be able to to talk about these sorts of things without sounding insulting, and those replaced moron, idiot, and imbecile, in the technical literature, Now "retarded* is used as an insult, and new terms of art have been invented. Stephen Pinker called this linguistic phenomena the “euphemism treadmill”.

When schoolyard kids start taunting one another with, “You’re a person with a developmental disability,” I will admit that this is merely a pointless shuffle rather than a gradual refinement.

[Wanderfound]

[quote=“Humbabella, post:109, topic:80012, full:true”]When schoolyard kids start taunting one another with, “You’re a person with a developmental disability,” I will admit that this is merely a pointless shuffle rather than a gradual refinement.
[/quote]

It’s a bit of both. There is refinement, and even when it’s a shuffle it isn’t necessarily a pointless shuffle. “Person with a developmental disability” is too much of a mouthful for a schoolyard taunt, but I wouldn’t be at all surprised to hear some shitty kid using “developmental” as a slur. Probably with an exaggerated emphasis on the last two syllables.

There’s definitely a repeating oscillation between person-centred language (“my disability does not define me!”) and disability-centred language (“my disability is an important part of my identity, and I choose to proudly affirm it!”), though. There are valid arguments on both sides of that, so the only “correct” answer is to follow the preferences of whomever you’re dealing with at the time.

[lava]

Its not quite so simple. What is at play is the nature of the information that she stored on the server which has implications on the severity of the transgression. That could all be clarified, but we have the issue of the deletion of a portion of the data which is a huge red flag. And following on that are lies, or misdirection/obfuscation about it given by Clinton under oath. No love for past GOP admins here, but its not the same. And after doing these things the GOP individuals did not turn around and say “time for me to be president”.

It does not matter if you believe or deny all this. The GOP will run wild with this, and plenty of people will be ready to believe. And this is why Clinton is such a vulnerable candidate and a bad choice.

[anon50609448]

@Wanderfound

I wouldn’t be at all surprised to hear some shitty kid using “developmental” as a slur.

Well, I would say that the fact that a person is insulting other people using not the accepted term is exactly the point. I’m sure kids still throw around “moron” and make up new things based on popular culture. (When I was a kid people used to yell, “Gretzky” at each other because of a TV commercial that intended to humanize people with developmental disabilities that didn’t work out as planned in its target audience) But the term itself doesn’t become derogatory.

[Phrenological]

@Brainspore

If they charge Hillary with a crime but not others (including members of the Bush administration) it will be justifiably perceived as an election-year partisan witch hunt.

Why should they care how its perceived by a bunch of godless Librul Commies?

[smut_clyde]

Take your flame war to Phlogistan.

[KathyPartdeux]

I don’t know…sounds like a combustible mix to me.

[blaeceorcanstan]

I agree, but I also think both of your paragraphs hold true if you replace “Trump” with “Clinton” (she’s an old Goldwater girl, which makes it all the more appropriate).

[miminq]

No, it is a Greek root meaning “new” or “young,” often used to mean a later manifestation of something. E.g. neoclassical, neo-Romantic, Neoplatonism, Neo-Babylonian, neonatal, neophyte.

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/neo-#English

[miminq]

Commenters on political threads routinely throw out “moron” (sometimes misspelled “moran” but a moran is a Maasai warrior).

I wonder if children still tell jokes about “the moron.”

[miminq]

After a euphemism is introduced to paper over an idea rightly or wrongly thought unpleasant, if underlying attitudes don’t change, the new term eventually acquires the taint of the old term and must be replaced with a still newer term.

Examples: old, aged, elderly, senior citizen, elder, senior, aging, older

cripple, handicapped, disabled, differently abled, challenged, people with disabilities, special needs

poor (I’ll let Jules Feiffer speak on this one):

---

I used to think I was poor.

Then they told me I wasn’t poor, I was NEEDY.

Then they told me it was self-defeating to think of myself as needy, I was DEPRIVED.

Then they told me deprived was a bad image, I was UNDERPRIVILEGED.

Then they told me underprivileged was overused. I was DISADVANTAGED.

I still don’t have a dime.

But I have a GREAT vocabulary.

---

Today, “in poverty,” “impoverished” and “low-income” could be added to the list.

[miminq]

Trump is such a willfully ignorant demagogue, so beyond the pale, that his being the presumptive nominee of a major party is straight out of Sinclair Lewis’s “It Can’t Happen Here.”

Here’s a man who says that Muslims in New Jersey were celebrating when the Twin Towers went down, who eggs on his followers to commit violence against those who oppose him, who wouldn’t reject the endorsement of a white supremacist, who said that the drought in California had ended, who ran a scam “university,” who is infuriated at the smallest slight and wants to change the libel laws so he can silence critics.

Even Bernie Sanders knows that the most important thing now is to stop Trump. Wish some of his followers would get the message.

Any attempt to put Mrs. Clinton on the same level with him is false equivalence.

[Enkita]

@jerwin

But English has moved on, and now moron has a meaning in the vernacular meaning 'very stupid"

And this invalidates my point that there is no necessary correlation between Trump-voting and stupidity or lack of mental capacity how, exactly?

Trump voters may be malicious, misled, capricious, uninformed and/or resentful of the established political classes but this does not make them “very stupid”, to use your interpretation. It does show that the media and the political classes have failed to encourage thoughtful political dialogue, but we all know that already.

[jerwin]

It’s a joke.

Neoliberal and neoconservative are both bogeymen, in the right circles.