It's going to take the left a long time to grapple with this. I look forward to moving past the shock and outrage.
In the novel, Germany invades France, but the French soldiers don't truly understand that they are at war.
The Germans destroy village after village, but the French soldiers don't truly understand that they are at war.
With superior tanks and airplanes, the Germans quickly defeat the French, but the French soldiers don't truly understand that they are at war.
The French are forced to surrender, but the French soldiers don't truly understand that they are at war.
The French soldiers are taken to a temporary prison camp, but they don't truly understand they are at war.
A rumor spreads among them that Hitler has decided to send them home to their families. The soldiers are cheered. Some even praise Hitler for his graciousness in victory. They don't realize they are actually at war.
At the end of the novel, the Germans order the French soldiers onto trains. The trains start moving. It is understood by the soldiers that if the trains go north, to Germany, then they are being sent to slave labor camps, but if the train turns south, then they are being sent home to their families.
In the final scene, the train comes to a fork, where it must go north or south. The soldiers watch anxiously. And then train turns north, toward Germany. And then, finally, the French soldiers realize they are at war.
I feel like this election was a bit like that, for many weak liberals who thought that it was okay to be "centrist." I feel like they are finally waking up to the fact that this is a war.
This is the only upside that I find in this election.
This kind of divisive and baseless finger-pointing at moderates is what is wrong with US politics. To see it on the liberal side is both ironic and painful. For years the gop ousted moderates in its ranks as RINO's (Republican In Name Only). This approach badly damaged the party: it left them with no standing among young voters, formerly moderate McCain went hard to the right for a presidential primary and never came back to center. Senator Olympia Snowe resigned and penned a famous open letter denouncing this very ostracizing of moderate republicans. It has taken nearly a decade for the republicans to present a candidate with social policies that are not entirely at odds with the under 30 demographic. Trump may be socially distasteful, but he is is not looking to repeal gay marriage and plans to keep pot a "states issue". Imagine hearing that from a GOP candidate 4 years ago.
Now that the GOP has a winning candidate, your answer is to double-down, and call the moderates in your party "weak"? Listen, political stances are neither weak nor strong. They are opinions based in personal experience, individual ethics, and our respective priorities. There is no "right" answer here. There is no "war" being fought. This is how democracy works. The pendulum swings one way and then the other.
Comparing the result of this election to french soldiers being sent to nazi camps is perhaps the single most absurd analogy i have seen since the primaries kicked off. And that is saying a great deal given the ridiculousness we have all suffered the past 18 months. Shameful.
Hillary didn't lose because she's a woman, she lost because she's a condescending crook.
- A Washington State alternate for Sanders who voted for Clinton in the general
[0]: In fact I found this latter accusation so offensive that I considered going full rogue and voting Trump.
And when people revolt, you double down. As if you wanted Trump to get his second term.
Your social circle may be made up of extremists who won't tolerate diversity of opinion, but there are many, many centrists in this country and if this election does mark the end of the "centrist" Democrat, it may mark the beginning of Republican rule.
It's the same thing that has been happening in Britain, where the Labour party as lead by Corbyn is miles behind the Conservatives (who in turn have made blunder after blunder).
Not saying I agree with that at all but thats what I see in a large circle of leftist, northern middle-age/class people.
Corbyn is a disaster and has no new ideas - he's not even a reliable Brexitsceptic. His only advantage is being free of the taint of Blairite compromise. But who else is there? Possibly Tom Watson. Someone really needs to come up with a good answer to the question "what is the point of the Labour party?" other than "not being the Tory party".
(Don't blame me, I'm voting SNP, who give exactly the kind of reliable centrist technocracy that's extremely popular with actual voters.)
This is not true at all, at least for anyone who counts when there isn't going to be a vote. The media and the entire consultocracy have rallied around the Blair generation even harder, and still have the bizarre fantasy that a David Miliband could ride in and save Labour. It's the same fantasist thinking that thought Clinton was a shoo-in and Brexit could never happen. Labour has no future as a moderate Tory party because the Tory party is currently a moderate Tory party. Labour already has no future in Scotland, and should ally with the SNP; that the Blairites can't see that Labour's last election in Scotland was lost because Dugdale was outperformed on every level by both Sturgeon and Davidson shows that they're living in a fantasy world.
Centrist Labour have openly declared scorched-earth war on the left of the party, and out of some misplaced sense of civility or ideal of compromise in governance, Corbyn won't do the same. He needs to use the power while he has it, and if the attempt is a failure, clear out and allow the centrists to do their unstained-Tory-governement-in-waiting thing until the next financial crash.
Corbyn's ideas are fine; from my (absurdly distant) perspective, what the Labour party needs are old ideas, not new ones. The bulk of the PLP seem to think that their only job is to listen to Tory proposals for cuts, counter-propose the same cuts, but only 2/3rds of them, scream that the Tories are heartless over and over again, and then abstain on the final vote. Corbyn is the only one offering any proposals that aren't slightly modified Tory ones. The problem is that Britain has one of the worst media environments in the Anglosphere outside of Australia, precisely zero mainstream outlets can manage to quote an entire sentence from him verbatim, and think that Bill Clinton telling lobbyists that he's a shabby "maddest person in the room" is an important news story. There shouldn't be secret PLP enemies lists to be "discovered." He should have proxies that are reading these lists to every outlet that will listen, every day.
No voters are looking for centrist technocrats other than the highly-paid professional service workers who the centrist technocrats are drawn from. Voters are looking for change from the neoliberal consensus. Labour and The Conservatives are completely weak, and in total disarray. Wait until your own racist reality tv-show host shows up, with a fistful of protectionism and an explicit platform to completely reverse austerity, steeped in racism and a hint of social conservatism. Britain is gagging for it - Nigel Farage, Boris Johnson - is Lord Sugar available?
Sorry about the babbling, but it just annoys me that people don't see that it's the left being marginalized by the media, not Corbyn in particular. Anyone who came from the left would have their mannerisms ruthlessly battered by the British press, and content-free constant accusations of "unelectability" and "uselessness." Eventually, a demagogue will come who will completely dominate the press through naked aggression, evocations of a better, purer time in the past, and, likely enough, an large ownership stake in the media itself. Then, we'll learn the lesson yet again that we should have learned from Western dabbling in the Middle East: once you've helped an oligarchy to eliminate all of the tolerant, secular opposition in a country, all you have left are the maniacs.
Again, sorry. The idea of ranting like this to a SNP voter is silly:) Just needed to get it out.
edit: There was 50x the coverage of a later retracted non-story about whether Corbyn could get a seat on a train than Chilcot, which had come and gone in maybe two weeks (after all of the wait.) Colin Powell was pretty happy about the priorities of the British media. Why would you relitigate some old pointless war anyway?
John Stewart even made fun of this particular attack 6 years ago (http://www.cc.com/video-clips/m0pvy5/the-daily-show-with-jon...), and our principle easily extends to all the other accusations the Left thinks are still effective in their "fight".
McCain: 60 million votes; Romney: 60 million votes; Trump: 60 million votes.
Obama: 72 million votes; Obama 2: 66 million votes; Clinton: 60 million votes.
Thanks for sharing that with us.
But he ran strongly to the right of the GOPe on:
Immigration
The Muslim subset of that
Globalism
The Right to Keep and Bear Arms (RKBA)
Political Correctness
Related, respect for the Mainstream Media (we'll know he's really serious if he takes the advice to abolish the White House Press Corps).
Need more? I'm sure I can come up with more. But you're 100% right that "everybody is fucking tired of ... the Clintons", and after having them "live rent free in my brain" for 24 years (!!!) I'm profoundly glad Trump put them in the ash heap of history. Except I have expect Master Level Troll Obama (something he has in common with Trump) to not pardon them, to not "end our long national nightmare" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inauguration_of_Gerald_Ford)WR... to them.
Seriously, me and mine are prepared for one and continuously upping our preparations (note, those hold as well for many/most disasters), but we don't see specifics on the horizon, didn't even WRT to Hillary labeling us as irredeemable. What would be the Fort Sumter? Which, I'll note, happened over 3 months after the state succeeded.
Since I don't see any prospects for "try[ing] to bring things back together somewhere in the middle" after what my side perceives as an unrelenting and pretty much ever increasing assault from the Left for over a century (the Progressives, not to mention our latest reaction of God-Emperor Ascendant, excuse me, President Elect Trump (!!)), I'm really hoping for some sort of middle option.
But really, what choice do the Democrats have but to go as far into the kaleidescope of identity as then can go? The DNC has been totally disgraced as a sham. Its a puppet establishment in the pocket of Wall street and the Corporate Globalists just as much as the Bush Neo-cons were.
There is nothing left of the Democratic party for the working class. They threw the European Americas overboard as 'irredeemable deplorable'. And they think the melting pot and Integration are Racist oppressive ideas of the Patriarchy. The idea that America should have one national language is Racist. The idea that people need legal citizenship in order to vote and collect services is literally Hitler level oppression.
How are you going to bring that back to a 'Center'? Is there even a center for the Democrats anymore that includes The Constitution and the Declaration of Independence that was written by White Men who owned Slaves?
As bad as the problems are for the Republicans there nothing compared with what is happening to the Democrats.
The Dems CRASHED already. We lost everything. We barely have any states. We do not even make a sizable minority party in the House. We don't have the Senate.
This is the result of years of trying to meddle in with "identity" politics that the GOP are good at. But that's not what the Dems should be doing.
Get back to the populist roots that defined the Party for many years. Get back into that and get back the rural and urban and young voters and we can finally move forward.
Maybe they were once good at it, but I just don't see that as of, say, 2008 and on. See, for example, my one line description of the Alt Right as "People on the right who respond to being called racist with 'We Don't Care'". At least at the national level, the GOPe(stablishment) is either not playing that game, or playing it well. Which is one reason Trump won, and the down ticket races resulted in your cited crashing.
Me, I'm surprised how the Republicans ran the tables statewide in Missouri, defeating a Carnahan and installing a weasel with no moral courage as Governor. And this is a catastrophic change from 2012, when they won Governor, the Senate race, AG, Secretary of State, and Treasurer, that is, every state-wide race but President and Lieutenant Governor. Although we also elected supermajorities to the statehouse, with the governor ending up having the most veto overrides in state history (then again, he didn't play well with the legislature).
We're also not betting that Claire McCaskill will be able to pick her opponent in 2018. I'm not yet willing to say we've turned Red from Purple, but it doesn't look at all good this year.
Eh, no, half weren't irredeemable fit only for liquidation, half were judged capable of being reeducated.
That's important to the extend fewer people believed they belonged in the irredeemable camp, those of us who did got "crawl over broken glass" motivated to vote against Hillary.
How are you going to bring that back to a 'Center'? Is there even a center for the Democrats anymore that includes The Constitution and the Declaration of Independence that was written by White Men who owned Slaves?
Disrespect for both documents long precedes the identity politics that now condemn them, so I'm not sure it's a new thing so much as a new excuse.
I don't think there's any bringing back that center, at least for the foreseeable future. It takes only one side polarizing things enough (for the purposes of my point, it doesn't matter which side you think did it), to where both sides view those in the middle who claim to belong to their side as traitors.
You think identity politics are imaginary to the various minorities (of all descriptions) who just want equal footing and the ability to not deal with race and gender every day of their lives?
In other words, if I say 'The law enforcement and legal systems of the United States treat African Americans very differently than white Americans, and this needs to be changed.' - is that recognizing a problem that needs attention, or am I engaging in irrelevant, invalid 'identity politics'?
Having said that, if you want to tackle the problem of discrimination separately (e.g. because you believe you can solve more quickly and easily than the economic inequality problem), then the tactics currently used (i.e. feminism - complaining, protesting, self-victimisation, and shaming reasonable conter-arguments) are the wrong way to go about it.
Lets for a moment consider a similar, yet different problem. Rape. Men are statistically more likely to rape women than women are (feminists are happy to point that out). I don't think it's correct to villify men as a group for that, but I do think it's reasonable for women to be extra cautious when interacting with men (e.g. it may be a better idea if a drunk woman asks a female friend to take her home, than a male friend, or to cross the street to avoid strange men at night). Nothing personal, just statistics - and oponents can scream "sexism" as loud as they want, but you can't put a price on personal safety (of course, feminists won't scream "sexism" in this istance, because it's fashionable to shame men).
Same with blacks and crime. Blacks statistically commit more crime, so it's not unreasonable to be more afraid of or cautious with blacks than with whites (or asians). Sure, it could be plain racism (pre-judice), but it could also simply be pattern-matching based on statistics (post-judice). And even if you consider those instincts to be wrong, it's hard to fight against them, after all they've been keeping us alive for thousands of years!
If you nevertheless want to fight those instincts, I guess the best way is more information, and emphasizing that people should be treated as individuals, not as a group. Unfortunately, feminism/social justice/identity politics isn't very good at either. In particular, if you attack (verbally or physically), shame, fire, riot against those whose opinion you want to change, I can't imagine you'll achieve much.
Anyhow, that's my thinking, although I fully accept it's wrong/there's more to it - here in the EU, I'm quite a bit removed from racial issues...
When it comes to the disemploying and physical violence, I assure you that you'll indeed accomplish a lot, just not anything you want. The verbal abuse of course doesn't help, either, and has helped to harden attitudes prior to this period where disemployment and physical violence are rising to the fore.
I do not know the best way to convey this to poor whites. It certainly presents a difficult task to tell someone who has struggles with life, or has overcome almost unsurmountable obstacles, that they have it easier than others. But some have given it a try:
http://thoughtcatalog.com/gina-crosley-corcoran/2014/01/expl...
Also there's nothing bigoted about folks working to make sure women get the same wages as men, or to break the cycle of poverty black folks in Chicago's south side are stuck in. Those are problems plain and simple, and they need to be solved.
Yes, there could be other discrimination (e.g. there probably is some discrimination against women achieving high management positions) (although it's really hard to measure) - I agree that's a problem and needs to be solved, but it doesn't appear to me that the public discourse revolves around it (it usually ends at the "70 cents to the dollar" myth), and I think the current tactics are actually counter-productive (e.g. they're making men afraid of working with women, lest they say something inappropriate or wear the wrong t-shirt).
Consider a resource A. All humans should have equal access to this resource, but because of various social, cultural, economic and historical factors, minority groups B and C have less access to A than the rest of humankind. I don't think there is anything wrong with targeting those specific groups to help them engineer better access to resource A.
That's simply not the world I see myself living in; to quote Margret Thatcher, "The trouble with socialism is that eventually you run out of other people's money".
And for today's object lesson on that, see Venezuela, where those that are not pure money problems are inherent and unavoidable in the political process you're endorsing to "target a specific population". As shown by the very word target; in the case of Venezuela, replacing competent STEM types with politically reliable ones, 18,000 in the first wack, and then favoring current production over longer term investment necessary to maintain production levels.
Yes those it's unfair those 4 people take advantage of welfare, but for me, that's an acceptable cost for helping the other 8 who need it. I'm happy my tax dollars go to that.
Of course you can argue forever about whether the cost is worth the benefit, and whether basic income is better than welfare in this form and yadda yadda, but I'm trying to illustrate to you that in a system designed to help a population (I don't agree with you that women are not disadvantaged, but substitute them with any other minority group like black people), some people will inevitably abuse the system, but that's okay as long as there are enough people who benefit to justify the cost of the small number of abuses. In sum: helping a population with less access to resource A is not bigoted and, if implemented right, is a very reasonable approach.
The GOP plays with identity issues (God, Guns, Flag, etc).
The Dems need to stay away from that and get back to the populist roots and focus on the working folk. That is what made the Dems a successful party in the past.
That's all.
Sometimes, a thought percolates up from my poor rural white-boy hind-brain, that maybe instead of absorbing themselves in thinking and protesting and teeth-gnashing about these issues, they might be happier if they focused on themselves and things they can do to improve their own lot in life. If you constantly pick at a scab, it takes forever to heal.
I have to remember to not let these forbidden thoughts dribble out. Damn...
I note that, somewhat to my surprise, in what's considered to be the Purple state of my home Missouri, the Republicans ran the tables this year at the state level, and we had some very good reasons to vote for the Democratic gubernatorial candidate this year (as I did), but he lost by twice the margin of our Senate race, where as I saw it the differences were more clear. The Carnahan dynasty also lost a statewide race.
Only thing off hand I can think that makes sense of those two results is that there was a strong anti-establishment vote, which made the Senate race that much closer. And I guess no one, or no one credible enough, see all our discussion of the decline and fall of our Lügenpresse in this topic, was able to sufficiently point out that the non-establishment Republican gubernatorial candidate was a weasel with no moral courage.
Heck, I stopped reading that part of my local paper when rather early on they endorsed Hillary for her foreign policy experience. Call it disastrously neocon, call it as I do setting a large part of the world on fire and palpably wanting to start a shooting war with Russia, the only county which can end the US in 30 minutes ... well, I'll also note the paper turned off comments for that article. It certainly didn't make any difference in my county's voting numbers.
Republicans were trained over the years to pick someone "electable". They figured it would go better with the population, electoral votes.
So in 2008, they went with McCain, a Republican who supported campaign finance reform.
In 2012, they went with Romney, a Republican who was governor of Massachusetts, a traditionally moderate/liberal state, who implemented Romneycare.
Both of them were normal, Romney made a faux-pas regarding the %47 line, but all in all he would have been an OK president, and kept the Republicans moderate.
The media slaughtered him in the general election. Called Republicans racists (which I didn't notice him being), classists (umm, do you think Clinton would live in a project?), and he couldn't answer back.
That's why in 2016, the base got fed up with having to hold their nose and vote a moderate, they decided that if they're losing anyways, they might as well pick someone "who says it the way it is". Now when the media says that he's a racit, they say "Oh, like they called Bush (who had an African American Secretary of State) racist? They just hate Republicans".
Liberals cried wolf. They refused to have a conversation, and we ended up with Trump.
Liberals are tired of the Clintons. They're tired of nominating people just left of center who fail to inspire them, while candidates who speak their mind and call for change (Bernie) are ignored by both the DNC and the mass media. They perceive, rightly or wrongly, that Republicans have been fighting a battle while Democrats make concessions to people who are unwilling to compromise. And now that the most outspoken, uncompromising candidate has won the election, they're being told to compromise again, to swallow their emotions and have a conversation with people who aren't interested in talking with them.
The media told them this was Hillary's turn. They were told to vote against Trump, but nothing about what they were voting for. They were told that feelings don't matter and to vote for the greater good, even while candidates within the party and without inspired based on emotion. Is it any wonder that turnout was down?
A chart that sums up the election for me:
Trump didn't win the election, dropping Democrat turnout lost it.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/10/27/do...
Both Trump and Clinton's campaigns seem successful - there was less voter turnout than in 2012. However, the angles they took seem to have reshuffled support in a way that ended up with Trump winning.
Turnout this election was 2% higher than 2012. It just doesn't look that way because everyone is focused on Clinton's and Trump's totals. This election saw the most votes cast for alternate candidates (a hair over 5% according to Wikipedia) since Ross Perot's run in 1996.
For that matter, compare Democratic votes in all three elections, looks to me like you can draw a fairly straight line 2008 to 2016.
But if you drop the loaded word suppression, yes, of course part of the game is to discourage the people who might vote for your opponent, the biggest change is that the language used today is by comparison quite tame.
I'm shocked that's not getting more discussion this time around. I seem to recall that it was a huge complaint for ages after it happened in 2000.
Note also that at least in this election the unofficial margin (at least per the AP, which hasn't called Michigan and New Hampshire yet) is rather small, and one also has to count 3rd parties.
Putting the shoe on the other foot, what do you have to say about both of Bill Clinton's elections, where Perot resulted in more people voting against than for him. For that matter, just checking now (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_presidential_ele...), every third party candidate but the Constitutional party's, and independent Evan McMullin, earned more votes than the margin between Hillary and Trump. So it's really hard when you look at those non-major party vote total to say that in any way she won the popular vote, especially if you claim this didn't matter for her husband in the '90s.
2000 was the first presidential election I was old enough to vote in. I have voted in every presidential election (and every midterm and local one except when I was living overseas) since. Of the presidential elections I've voted in, the electoral college has flipped 40% of them. So don't try to dismiss my complaint on the basis that it's rare. Maybe it is throughout history, but it has become distressingly common lately.
And don't assume I'm complaining just because "my side" lost. I didn't vote for Gore in 2000. I did vote for Clinton in 2016, but I do not identify as a Democrat, and only voted for her because I believe Trump is a terrifying and dangerous choice. I was too young to vote for Bill Clinton in the 90s, and while I think he did a decent job, I think HW Bush and Dole would have too.
I don't really see how Bill Clinton is "putting the shoe on the other foot." My ideal system wouldn't be a simple first-past-the-post arrangement. I would like to have runoff elections or ranked-choice voting or something like that.
You seem to be imagining a whole slew of arguments on my behalf that I didn't make and don't believe. If you want to reply to me, please reply to what I'm saying, not whatever you imagine I must think.
But my bigger point are things that I think you must address, if you're to address my concerns, like how it will make half of the the Great Compromise non-operative, and change the election to a focus on 8-10 metro areas, none of which I or my family live in, even those in the Kansas City metro area (30th).
You feel disenfranchised in 2 out of your 5 presidential elections; do you think I want my family and myself to be disenfranchised in them forever?
See also how if the GOPe hadn't sabotaged the GOTV effort for Trump, we probably wouldn't even be having this discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12932865
It's a different country now. We have many more states, and the role of states has greatly diminished. Most Americans think of themselves as Americans first, and citizens of their state a distant second. Many aspects of our electoral system have changed. The idea of allowing an 18-year-old black woman who owns no property to vote would be as bizarre to the founders as the idea of directly electing the president.
I don't actually feel disenfranchised. I've always lived in swing states, so my vote counts for far more than most. My dislike of the electoral college is not rooted in the fact that I feel like I don't have a voice.
I don't understand this notion that you and your family would be disenfranchised in a system where the president is chosen directly. Your vote would count exactly as much as the vote of someone living in New York City. Sure, there are more people living in NYC than there are where you are, but there are far more Americans not living in NYC than living in NYC. A quick look at the popular vote totals will show you that the 10 biggest metro areas don't overwhelm everyone else.
Sure, a lot of attention would be given to big cities. I don't see what's wrong with that. A lot of people live there! But other places wouldn't be ignored, since every vote in every location would be just as important. Wyoming probably wouldn't get many visits from candidates, but how many do they get now?
As it stands, the swing states get all of the attention. Neither candidate cares much about what voters in California or Texas think, because their attention won't change anything. Democrats just need to not totally piss off California, and Republicans just need to not totally piss off Texas. If Californians have some important issue they'd like to see action on, nobody is going to care about it. That's 65 million people disenfranchised right there, just in those two states.
Why is it better to have the candidates care almost exclusively about the needs and desires of ~60 million Americans living in swing states, and completely ignore the other 260 million of us? You say that people in Kansas City would be disenfranchised with a direct vote. I say that they're disenfranchised now, because neither Kansas nor Missouri have the slightest chance of choosing Democratic electors. In a popular vote system, the candidates might care more about New Yorkers than Kansans, but at least they'd care some.
The power is anyway going to shift to cities. If it doesn't happen in the 2020 census, it will in the 2030 census.
And are you really sure about that? The AP, the "definitive" source I've been following through Google (https://www.google.com/search?q=election+results+2016+usa#eo...), says California reporting is 100%, and the nationwide margin is still about the same as it's been for some time, medium 6 figures.
http://www.scpr.org/news/2016/11/09/66046/california-la-coun...
Maybe that's a high estimate, I don't know. We'll know in a few weeks in any case.
Am I sure the demographic trend towards cities will continue? Yeah, I'm pretty sure. They may not continue to vote the way they do now, but they are going to decide presidential elections.
Also, as the only groups legally able to propose a change to this system are right now benefiting from it, I wouldn't hold my breath.
Sure, I don't think that it'll ever change. But that doesn't mean people can't complain.
For me, that was through a combination of his refusing to play the game by the other side's rules (a restatement of disposable099's point) and how terribly awful a politician Hillary is. In fact, I go so far as to say she's an almost total failure in life, aside from graduating from the good schools she went to, the one good decision she made in life was to accept Bill's outstanding offer of marriage, everything successful in her life after law school flows from that.
To give you a hint of that, it's pretty obvious the reason she accepted and self-exiled to Arkansas in the 1970s was that between failing the D.C. Bar Exam and being terminated with extreme prejudice from the Watergate Investigating Committee, she had completely burned her potential future career in D.C./East Coast politics. There's lots more if you want more details, but, I can close with the obvious facts that she twice reached for the highest brass ring in US politics with serious campaigns and failed both times, to rather different sorts of people (weasel words since, for example, both Obama and Trump are master level trolls).
She wasn't fired from the WIC.
But, tell me, why did she exile herself to 1970s Arkansas? As someone who grew up 3 counties north of the state, I can assure you back then it was considered to be a massively worse place than my native Missouri, and the very close states of Kansas and Oklahoma. There was something qualitatively different about it, in a bad way.
Note that she went from working on the Watergate Committee, which was the highest pinnacle of the Left in the '70s aside from perhaps the Carter Administration years later, to being a partner at a politically well connected law firm in Arkansas, one no one ever heard of outside the state before the '90s.
What's your explanation for her move? Surely she could have tried again to pass the D.C. bar exam.
I have no comment on her reasons for leaving Arkansas or anything else.
That sort of trick just doesn't work any more, which is, of course, the whole reason we're having this general discussion in the first place.
Could you explain a bit clearer?
The claim that Hillary was fired with extreme prejudice from the WIC is political.
My claim that citing Snopes claim to the contrary---it being a political issue---does not make it a mistruth to me, rather, you might say it's an example of the maxim that "nothing is confirmed until officially denied".
That, in fact, is pretty much how we on the Alt Right† nowadays treat anything political on Snopes.
†For the purposes of this discussion, the Alt Right are those on the right who's response to being called racist is "We Don't Care".
Are you saying you dismiss Snopes as being left-biased, therefore the matter over whether "Hillary Clinton was fired with prejudice" is still not resolved?
And until Hillary Clinton (or presumably the WIC) come out and directly either confirm or deny that statement, then repeating the statement is "fair game"?
But doesn't that put the onus on the subject to confirm or deny every single tinpot, falsehood statement out there, otherwise its safe to consider it the truth?
Is it similar to the example you gave of being called a racist and responding with "We don't care"? Should Hillary Clinton respond to the statement with "I don't care if you think I was fired with prejudice from the WIC"? Is that what you are saying? How would that stop the "mistruth" from being repeated?
(apologies, I'm from the UK so this isn't a line of thought I've come across)
Edit: Bit of rewording for clarity
Yes.
As for the rest, I believe the evidence I've seen that this was true is sufficient to support my opinion, especially when combined with my own analysis of "Why the hell did she self-exile to Arkansas?!?!??!!!", the latter admittedly using data most Americans, let alone people in the world don't and can't have, and therefore we don't need to get into epistemological weeds.
Is that not the textbook definition of bias?
And as I further gather, your response to this is "I don't care", as in "I don't care that I am biased"; not that "I acknowledge my biases as a weakness in my rational thought processes".
Do you see bias as a strength? Do you believe that adjusting your mental model of the world to adapt to new information as a hindrance? Have I mistaken your point?
(Please please please do not mistake my questions as judgements; I genuinely am interested in your opinion and argument!)
I assume you're not talking about the "fired with prejudice" claim here because you'd be directly contradicting Zeifman's own words. But if you are, can you show us this evidence?
Fayetteville, AR was a cute, hippie college town in the mountains. Going to high school there in the early 90s, we thought Missouri and Oklahoma were holes, and the only place we related to in Kansas was Lawrence.
And neither are D.C., a center of international power. Hillary was nothing if not ambitious.
This really hasn't been a good year for Establishment Authorities, has it?
What do you make of the rumour (I think it's still a rumour rather than confirmed?) that Steven Mnuchin will be Treasury secretary? Would you call him "establishment"?
"Establishment Authorities", and I should emphasize I'm talking about "Authorities", not, for example, the ever more loathed GOPe(stablishment), on the Right who haven't exactly covered themselves in glory this year include:
National Review (NR/NRO)
Erik Erickson and his Redstate website (a leading article the day after the election was "Is Trump [an] Antichrist?")
Hugh Hewitt
Pajamas Media but only in general, dissent was allowed, then again, if they'd purged co-founder Glenn "Instapundit" Reynolds...
The Weekly Standard and very notably its founder William Kristol, who has the true neo-con pedigree as the son of Irving Kristol
I think the latter's Commentary, except they pay-walled themselves out of relevance....
Oh, what about NRO's Kevin Williamson telling the Rust Belt people who provided the margin that elected Trump that:
The truth about these dysfunctional, downscale communities is that they deserve to die. Economically, they are negative assets. Morally, they are indefensible.
That's from http://www.nationalreview.com/article/432876/donald-trump-wh... and deserves a particularly special place in the Decline and Fall of most of the US Right's "Establishment Authorities" in 2016, especially when he and his organization doubled down on it.
Possible exception, who's part of NRO, Pajamas Media, and the Hoover Institution (which means it's much harder to purge him), Victor Davis Hansen, but he's an odd duck in so many ways.
Ask and I can come up with more ^_^.
And what isn't political nowadays? Although the demarcation is pretty clear, falls along the line of a particular person who does their explicitly political stuff. But who trusts the rot to stay there?
And it sounds like you don't believe in, or have never heard of Robert Conquest's Second Law of Politics: "Any organization not explicitly right-wing sooner or later becomes left-wing." See Fox over the last few years, first the top dog explicitly said they were moving to the left, now he's been ousted in a coup and the writing is on the wall for the remaining figures on the right who are still under contract.
So you're defining centrism as impossible? No wonder everyone ends up in bubbles.
And you're calling Fox News, the prototypical right-wing TV news station, left-wing? What? Why? How? I just did a quick scan of foxnews.com and had a hard time finding a single story that wasn't obviously pro-Trump. The best I could do was http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2016/11/11/obamacare-enrollm...
Hired an explicitly politically biased person to do their political "debunking", see the item mdpopescu linked to: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12930881 With of course the predicable results.
So you're defining centrism as impossible?
Post-French Revolution, yes, by and large. Something we on the Right in the US have been saying prior to, say, this election, is that we think the Left is wrong, they think we're evil. Well, it's now polarizing as we decide they're not just wrong, but definitely evil.
And you're calling Fox News, the prototypical right-wing TV news station, left-wing? What? Why? How?
Maybe from your end of the pond they're "prototypically right-wing", and you might just be right about "prototypical", but they've always carried themselves as being "Fair and Balanced", i.e. allowing both sides a fair hearing. You can certainly look at their lineup of Leftists prior to the explicit shift to the Left that started a couple or so years ago as confirmation of this. Would a true "right-wing" (as defined in the US!) station give e.g. Juan Williams an honored seat at the table?
And I guess you missed Megyn Kelly's feud with Trump, and her leading role in the coup that ousted the founder and head of the channel?
I'm not telling you as someone across the pond that it's worth investigating, just like I haven't put any effort to speak of in discovering the causes of the Decline and Fall of the Torygraph, which I avidly read as a right of center 5 hours early for me news source back in the '90s, but, seriously, Fox has changed, and it's still a work in progress as two of Murdoch's more liberal sons run the place.
I think this issue of mutually acceptable information sources is really problematic. How do we rebuild this? How do we get people to start trusting each other again?
When I get approvingly labeled "irredeemable", the answer is, that will never happen.
The best outcome is that we'll live and let live, although Ian Fleming's famous "Live and Let Die" formulation is of course much more accurate.
Going back to your starting point, this is indeed a total rhetorical fail, which I thank you for pointing out. I'm going to assume that pjc50, who as I recall has a good head on his shoulders, hasn't noticed how institutions can change.
To give an example on my side with about as much amazement as he's expressing about Snopes, I no longer dismiss out of hand everything Alex Jones and Infowars have to say (!!!).
Thanks for the compliment! A little civility can go a long way in these things.
Institutions and people certainly can change. I've lost a lot of respect for various media institutions over the years. e.g. the Telegraph, not just for having a climate change denial column but for the reasons Peter Oborne resigned (influence by advertiser HSBC to prevent adverse coverage). The BBC's political coverage is increasingly just bad, apart from Paxman - Question Time is the two sides shouting across each other, not an informative or useful programme. Their Scottish coverage in English is poor (weirdly, their Gaelic news programme is excellent despite, or possibly because of, its tiny budget).
Sometimes news is absurdly localist, in the style parodied by the Onion's "Area Man": http://www.ellontimes.co.uk/news/aberdeenshire-business-owne...
I do wonder how much of this is just popularity effects. Do people actually want slower, more careful, less angry partisan news? Or do they want a team they can cheer for? The BBC hide all their insightful, analytical programming on BBC4.
https://www.opendemocracy.net/ourkingdom/peter-oborne/why-i-...
Edit: you may be surprised to know that I used to read ZeroHedge, although not seriously. For sane capitalism-skeptic news coverage I'm fond of FT Alphaville.
I'm sure that just like the US examples just listed in my "loss of respect" list, I don't really follow at all the ones you list, except for adding the Torygraph to my list and no longer reading them.
"absurdly localist" ... well, that's like Obama referring to Sarah Palin, sitting Governor of a US state, as a mayor of a small town in that state. Except, of course, he was a Presidential candidate and that was more than a little disrespectful and polarizing. In fact, we could label pretty much 99% of the Establishment Feminists as "Feminist Deniers" based on their treatment of her, simply because she wasn't on their political team.
I have no idea about "popularity effects", and I don't follow any of the MSM over here besides my local paper, but I don't think that's it, I think the start of a better explanation over here, from Glenn "Instapundit" Reynolds is:
Just think of the media as Democrat operatives with bylines, and it all makes sense.
Except it's wider than that, as we saw when almost all of the GOPe, as well as much if not most if not almost all of the Right's Establishment Authorities (press), went all in against Trump. Who, if nothing else, we can thank for putting two particular political dynasties into the ash heap of history this year.
†"angry" is an entirely insufficient word for this.
How can I consider this to be tangential when our current President started his political career in the home of two of the most notorious '70s figures advocating this, who made a wild guess that 10% of the population could not be reeducated and would have to be liquidated? You might say, people they thought to be "irredeemable". And these are people of Hillary's generation.
I bring this up not to attack Obama, but to show how well received such eliminationism is on the US Left (heck, in one of those things that makes you wonder if there's a God, the man had a feature article in The New York Times on 9/11 (written and printed before the attack, of course), with him standing on an American flag).
That this sort of thing, including Hillary's speech, is not completely out of bounds means I cannot for a second assume the political struggle in the US is not existential for me and my family.
And given that, I can't in the least see how trust can be rebuilt, at least prior to driving out of polite society all of these figures, instead of feating them.
So, yes, it is, and unfortunately has to be a complete derail of the conversation, given that to the best I can discern you're not taking this issue seriously.
Can I ask roughly how old are you? Did you grow up horrified at the mass murders by the tens of millions by the Left in the 20th Century, including by the Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei AKA National Socialist German Workers' Party? How the Soviets were poised to kill > 100 million Americans in 30 minutes if they launched their misses and bombers? How Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge (Red Khmers, formally the Communist Party of Kampuchea per Wikipedia) killed off perhaps half their nation's people. How just having glasses was a death sentence, because it suggested to them that you might have a formal education?
What's your opinion on the US crusade for gun control? Is it really about "gun safety"? Has it become something more sinister than the explicit through the 1970s "Keep guns out of the hands of blacks" (and other minorities starting around the turn of the century, but blacks were the foremost target)?
> I cannot for a second assume the political struggle in the US is not existential for me and my family.
So, I once asked my Romanian colleague what it was like in the revolution at the death of Ceaucescu. It was, obviously, horrifying and chaotic, with all sorts of self-appointed street violence squads. Since then I've generally cut him a bit more slack when he rants about leftists. That kind of thing sticks with a man. And so I also have some sympathy with the Cubans who've maintained that Cuba is some great commie threat to the US, etc. etc.
What I cannot understand is the belief that there is going to be some kind of purge of white right-wing Americans. To me, the idea that "eliminationism" has any kind of base in the "left" (or at least the part that has the Democratic party in it) is just unrecognisable. To me, it is completely out of bounds already.
(Edit: I suppose the US does maintain an internment camp for political opponents, beyond the rule of law, and Obama has failed to close it. But Bush opened Guantanamo and put its inmates there. This is also why we campaign against the unaccountable drone murder programme)
I'm sorry I appear not to be taking it seriously, but I find it about as plausible as an alien invasion. Now, if you asked me who in the US was genuinely and plausibly afraid of eliminationism, I would have said the usual: ethnic minorities (not just black people and Native Americans, but bearing in mind the internment of Japanese people during the war), and non-straight people. And Jews.
I'm middle-aged enough to remember the Cold War. I also remember walking past a TV showing footage which I assumed was Beirut and turned out to be the LA Rodney King riots. And I know enough history to know that massacres extend a long way back before the French Revolution.
I'm baffled at the ascribing of the Nazis to the "left", given their explicitly murderous anti-Bolshevism and war with the USSR. The thing is, there are a lot of people on the left who believe that Trump is going to start exactly the same kind of eliminationist event. Aren't both sides afraid of the same thing? Has someone left their tu quoque mirror on upside down?
Gun control is probably going to take another post tomorrow; but you can probably guess if I tell you I'm a Brit. In the meantime, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12054306 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11288841 (summary: the UK had an armed insurgency with AR-15s and it kind of sucked for everyone)
Obviously I disagree with the "out of bounds" analysis, and something has prompted Americans to buy arms at unprecedented rates, and for years with few breaks, more each month than the same month in the previous year. During a grinding recession.... And there's been no changes in concealed carry law for a full 5 years and 10 days; that's a factor, but it doesn't explain how the entire supply of rifles of military utility dried up....
Perhaps, with my being here, and you obviously not, we should agree to disagree on it?
As for the Nazis, you're confusing national with international socialists, and if we just view that as an internecine fight, we all know how nasty those can get. Plus Hitler hated the Weimar socialists with a burning passion, I'm told by one source more than the Jews, and come to think of it from my recent readings on the development of the atomic bomb (Rhodes especially), they were a higher priority target in the civil service, see e.g. Richard Courant.
As for your armed insurgency, from everything I'eve heard the AR-18 "Widowmakers" were more infamous (certianly a better rifle, Eugene Stoner atoning for the AR-10/15), and on that note, maybe the difference between subject and citizen also can't be bridged.
Not quite true. She was an outstanding commodities futures trader. She deposited $1,000 in cash into a trading account, and in ten months worked the account up to near $100,000.
So at least she has that skill to fall back on.
Or, maybe, just maybe, it was simply a bribe paid to the wife of the Governor of Arkansas.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hillary_Rodham_cattle_futures_...
And of course, if she wasn't the Governor's wife, but you of course implicitly acknowledge that. For that matter, it was also said that that sort of trading back then was dangerously leveraged for thinly capitalized neophytes, you could lose a lot more money than what you put into your trade. I seem to remember independently of this, that at worst case you could end up taking delivery of what you wagered on. Now, my family with 3 boys bought a half-side of beef at a time right at that time, but....
There has been a slowly growing populist faction on right that reject the Neo-con aggressive military policy. And has an America first trade policy that rejects NAFTA style free trade.
That movement had been building and finally broke through with Ron Paul in 2008. The populist movement and Liberty movement after Ron Paul has grown exponentially. It was only a matter of time before the Washington wing was challenged by the populists for control of the party.
That is what has allowed Trump to win the nomination. The populists in the party establishment supported Trump and the Washington wing was out numbered and had to concede and surrender. This is a process that has been in motion for over 20 years to bring the Republican party to the quite amazing transformation.
The US GDP in real dollars is 2.3 times larger than it was in the mid-70s. In the same time period the median household income went up 1.12 times.
Considering the size of the US GDP, that's a staggering amount of money that's just disappeared into the 1%'s bank accounts. It's a multi-trillion dollar heist. People are so loss-adverse that they've been fine with not getting paid literally twice as much, so long as someone told them they'd have less chance of losing their job if they went along with it.
Regular Americans did their part - the economy grew, but they didn't benefit from it. The left should be making that crystal clear, that clarity should make people furious, and the left should ride a tide of justified anger to power.
What the they shouldn't to is ponder whether the right is on to something and it really is the Mexicans that are to blame for their job insecurity, or that taxes and regulations maybe actually are the reason that the median American household doesn't have the 6-figure income that they would have had, had their wages been commiserate with America's success over the last 40 years.
The left should act like the left, and address the economic problems of the poor and middle class people of America directly -attacking the deliberate fiscal and taxation policies that caused them. And if that doesn't focus group well, they should have some actual principles and do it anyway.
That's exactly what the left needs to do, but I don't see it happening when a large portion of the typical politician's work schedule is calling the people responsible for that heist and asking for money. That conflict of interest is fundamental problem[1].
People want a platform that actually is liberal, but liberal politicians moved further to the right in an attempt to work with people that were never going to compromise. Instead of seeing even an acknowledgement of the real economic problems that many people struggle to deal with, the left instead showed the were more interested in taking corporate money.
> attacking the deliberate fiscal and taxation policies that caused them
That's hard to do in an environment of regulatory capture and large donations from the people that would be regulated.
[1] yes, I wanted to vote for Lessig
Reminds me of the following: "listen to your users, but ignore what they say". Which is actually an entire chapter of Programming as if People Mattered, a great book.[1]
So I don't think the left should have done what the right says, but it definitely should have listened more. Sort of like the whole seriously vs. literally thing with Trump.[2][3]
[1] https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=tzEABAAAQBAJ&pg=PA107&lp...
[2] http://www.cnbc.com/2016/11/09/peter-thiel-perfectly-summed-...
[3] http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/09/trump-ma...
How can this not be true? The 1% just knew how to play the game, where the game = finding all the loopholes in the mountain of shitty taxes and regulations you talk about.
Adding more taxes, more regulations, and more social programs isn't the answer. Adding the _right_ taxes, regulations, and social programs may actually do something.
Please don't add to the former. This is not a war. It is a fundemental disagreement, but we are hopefully a long long way away from it being a war.
1. Trump says something really bad 2. Check a poll aggregator (538) 3. Breath sigh of relief
For a good chunk of the election, Hillary had a really big lead in the polls. But after the Comey incident, things got tighter[1]. Nate Silver had some really good analysis on how tight the race was (a Trump win was within the polling error, and when state level polls are off, a lot of times they are all off in the same direction). But he was getting shouted down by the other aggregators. I was pretty on edge for this part of the race, but at the end, it looked like Hillary was picking up some momentum.
I think part of it was the bubble effect, but I also think Democrats put too much faith in these forecasts.
[1] At least on 538, a bunch of the other forecasters didn't budge. HuffingtonPost had a 98% chance of Hillary winning at the end. I really hope someone holds them accountable for that, as I wouldn't be surprised if such confident forecasts contributed to voter apathy.
What's the evidence for them being wrong?
To be clear, I'm not arguing that they were correct. But I see a trend of attacking any prediction (including those of 538) that rated a Trump victory at less than 50% likelihood as wrong, based on the evidence that he won.
If I predict there's a less than 1% chance of you winning the lottery, you winning the lottery doesn't prove that I was wrong.
I have no idea what the likelihood of a Trump victory was before the election. Maybe it was 1%, maybe it was 99%. But I think discussion of predictions shouldn't be results-orientated for single results.
As for the rest of the forecaster that gave Clinton 99% to win, given a US presidential election, the priori of a candidate winning is 50% (historical data, roughly speaking). So you would need some quite extraordinary evidences to get the posterior to 90+% for a candidate.
In this case, the evidences were mostly the polls. To have 99% prediction for a candidate based on a poll, the poll would need have at least 98% accuracy (assuming that when they're wrong, the probability of they being wrong in either directions is the same). Personally, I don't think the polls to be anywhere near that level of accuracy in general. Unfortunately I don't got any number of poll accuracy on hand - I'd love to see it if anyone have a citation.
There are more factors that will affect an election, but with similar reasoning to above, to get a 98-99% prediction, those factors will have to be 90%+ reliable as well. That is some quite tall order.
This is a case where the onus is on the forecaster to show that their number (98% for example) is sound, since they're the one making the extraordinary claim.
Regardless, for something like an election where so many factors can influence an outcome (turnout, late breaking news, biased polls) and with so few previous events to base your model on (~12 elections worth of data), you should heavily discourage your model from outputting such a high number. It is irresponsible considering what kind of an impact those types of forecasts can have on voter apathy and decision making, and the only reason I can think they did it was so that they could award themselves the 'most accurate forecaster' title after the election. But instead, they now get to award themselves the 'worst forecaster award', and the rest of us are stuck with Trump for 4 years.
[1] http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/pollster-forecast-donald...
538 made the compelling (and in the end, sadly accurate) statistical point that modeling errors in polls are very likely to be correlated across states, not independent like a lottery.
Nate Silver's reputation went up again for me in this election.
[0] - http://www.economist.com/news/united-states/21710024-how-mid...
I've gotten the general impression that while he might have done not as badly as others in this last minute polling, in general he did not cover himself in glory in 2016, and here I rate it by an org's confidence in their numbers.
But I didn't follow this at all closely, for it was obvious to me all or almost all the public polls were getting it seriously wrong, see e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12930950
Or to question your logic another way, what would a poll mean in the context of a lottery?
Nobody likes Cassandra.