The unbearable smugness of the press | Hacker News Reader

The unbearable smugness of the press

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163 pointsandrenth258 comments

Insulting millions of people serves no other purpose than to point out your own superiority in some way. I can't fathom how much hubris is necessary to do that without feeling ashamed of yourself.

How can it be so hard to be nice to others? Everybody disagrees with everybody else on something. Everybody has false ideas about the truth. Do we toss a kid in a meatgrinder when it has a weird idea about society? No, we include it in our discussions because opinions change when they are challenged. But when they cross the age of 16, or is it 18?, then they suddenly become demons that we need to get rid of. The cancer of our society. Where do you draw the line?

If you honestly think that you have a moral superiority that gives you the right to tell people what to do just because they are stupid (or pick any other negative attribute), then know that there are a lot of people to whom you are literally stupid (they are more intelligent and know more than you). Would it be okay if they told you what to do? If they tried to silence you? Ignored your desperate calls for help, which they think are stupid and wrong?

I suggest you read the vox piece from april about this phenomenon in american liberalism. They go in to exhaustive detail. http://www.vox.com/2016/4/21/11451378/smug-american-liberali...

I think that it is far to easy in the modern world to only see, meet and talk to people who think and act like you. It certainly seems that many of my friends think that America looks and acts like their friends from coast to coast. That everyone is the same, and thus that their views are universal. The press really ought to be a place where one can get information from outside the bubble not an extesnion of it.

"The press is impotent when it abandons itself to falsehood." Thomas Jefferson

I read that last week, and it's great. I love the part about GWB. I still know people today who call him an idiot, but it is that attitude, and underestimation that helped him win the Presidency twice.

The liberal has become synonymous with elite. If you disagree with a liberal you're uneducated, angry, racist, or pick any other disparaging word. It has caused a divide that crosses right/left, and is instead top/bottom. According to a poll NPR quoted, ~40% of registered democrats voted for Trump. That is why Hilary lost. The Republicans AND Democrats have become parties of the elite. The rise of Trump and Bernie came from those people who are rejecting elite regardless of party.

40% of democrats didn't vote at all, that is why Hilary lost. Each candidate getting <25% of the vote coupled with 50% not voting, does not mean people voted for Trump so much as most just stayed home (apathy was the biggest winner in the election). The democrats don't have to win over Trump voters, they just have to convince people to vote at all.

Where does your certainty that people who stayed home would vote for Clinton come from?

Turn out numbers. The people who stayed home were mostly the same demographic that voted for Obama in the last election: Minorities, millennials. Trump didn't magically win over Obama voters, conversions were rare.

Yet apparently the vote ratio was not that great for Clinton in those demographics either - apparently even 30% of non-white voters went Trump, and what I've seen it was only slightly in favor of Clinton in that demographic too

Again, what makes you think that the people didn't stay because they sure didn't want to vote for Clinton?

(Disclaimer :I am not an US citizen, I identify with Bernie)

I would have never voted for Clinton, even if you paid me.

For as vocal as the never Trump people were, there was also a quieter never Clinton feeling across many groups.

Not voting tells you something too though. Here is the link to NPR article: http://www.npr.org/sections/alltechconsidered/2016/11/10/501...

It totally does tell you something. Polling didn't get support for Trump wrong, it got support for Hilary wrong instead. The likely voters didn't vote.

You could say the same thing about Trump voters....

You realize that staying home was no less an intentional act than voting. Those Democrats who stayed home, stayed home to not vote for Hillary.

The most effective way to get those people to vote is to not have Hillary Clinton as your candidate.

I think something that might not always be mentioned is that voter turnout likely remains low because of the electoral college.

I only bother voting if there is a referendum or local politician I care about. Neither was true in this election. Living in Maryland I already knew Clinton would carry the state. So why go vote?

I bet there are people like that in deeply red states who feel the same. I bet voter turnout would be higher all around under a Popular vote scenario.

Voter turnout was still low in swing states are well, so I could be wrong. But I think at times people realize their vote is sort of pointless.

Yep, literally every race on the ballot here ended exactly as it was expected to, usually with double digit margins. I voted, but I can see why this wasn't motivating for some people.

> Living in Maryland I already knew Clinton would carry the state. So why go vote?

I think it is helpful in these situations to extend your thinking to everyone else and see if you like the result:

1) My candidate has a big lead in my state so I won't bother to vote. 2) My thinking in 1) is rational and therefore lots of other people will think and behave the same way.

vs.

1) My candidate will only win if their supporters vote for them, so I will vote. 2) My thinking in 1) is rational and therefore lots of other people will think and behave the same way.

So which behavior will most likely lead to your desired outcome?

Merely being aware of the tragedy of the commons won't make it go away.

Who said 'merely'?

> I think it is helpful in these situations to extend your thinking to everyone else and see if you like the result:

I don't see how this is helpful. The calculus is obviously different between your state being carried 60/35 vs a 50/50 battleground.

Well, according to people who installed an app, http://www.npr.org/sections/alltechconsidered/2016/11/10/501...

To be fair, if you disagree with a conservative, you are naive, power-hungry, and maybe godless.

The usual online slurs I see: "libtard", "regressive left".

You don't hear the candidates and party officials saying that publicly though. Sure in private they probably say worse but Clinton called the middle of the country a basket of deplorables.

Absolutely, but 2 things. The GOP has typically been known as the old white guy elite/establishment so, at least in stigma, people already consider them the elite. The second is that the same problem the Democrats had in the general election, the GOP had in the primaries. The GOP didn't want Trump, yet he destroyed every establishment candidate they had. Bernie may have had a similar move on the Democrat side if the DNC had not interfered with the process.

Trump won as the GOP candidate, but based on his history I do not think he is conservative. Many of his ideas are closer to Sanders than people want to admit, and he's likely going to have both sides in a constant uproar.

True. The change is that the liberals have the megaphone to a greater degree than they did before. Despite talk radio, the liberals have by far the majority of the media now.

This post-election narrative that liberals hate Trump out of elitist bigotry is killing me. People hate Donald Trump because they're afraid they'll be deported, or their friends and family will be deported. This is very real and very personal for a lot of people, I think it's lame to tell them "calm down, why can't you be nice?" and other platitudes about uniting the country.

Ya, and let's not forget his "grab them in the kittens" remark. There is no way to explain that away, none! GWB, even though he stole the election, was much easier to accept than this guy.

We are merely afraid that Trump is as bad as he sounds, whatever the press said about him is irrelevant to that, and much more concrete than Hilary's abstract emails.

My friends use this kind of language between each other all the time, as I imagine other groups of friends as well - and they are all normal people with loving wives. You're trying to be dramatic but you're actually being funny.

You have strange friends then. I can't imagine any of my friends saying that kind of thing, or quite simply they wouldn't be my friends anymore. I'm not being elitist or dramatic here, I just can't stand and wouldn't stand for that kind of talk.

But I guess many voters out there thought like you. I just can't comprehend it personally. I'm sure there are many of us who don't consider such talk moral and acceptable even in casual settings.

>I can't imagine any of my friends saying that kind of thing

These comments always make me chuckle. You live in a squeaky clean world that I've personally never experienced and I'm not really sure where you go do find it. I mean, hell, browse around on any popular image sharing site for 5 minutes and you'll see worse comments in any thread with a vaguely attractive female.

If you've ever been in a men's bathroom, you've overheard these types of obnoxious conversations. But collectively, America loves to gasp and shout about how utterly shocking it is that people would talk in such a manner! Outrageous! "Well, I never!"

I have never heard these kind of things spoken in a men's bathroom. We obviously are using different ones.

Your comment literally made me cringe inside.

Your's made me cringe even more. I really don't get America, open racist and sexist signaling and an electorate that would react positively to that. Whatever.

Should those friends be commander and chief of the largest military force in the world?

No - he should be absolutely perfect in every way and never have used a swear word, even privately among friends.

So those friends -should- have that much power?

If elected to do so, yes. I'd like to reverse the question on you though: Should what he said in private make him legally ineligible to hold office or even any job?

Of course not - the election should be cancelled, the votes should be thrown into a garbage can and it should just be you who picks the best candidate.

You're misstating the concern, which I assume you recognize. Nobody gives a fuck (see what I did there? :-) if Trump used a swear word. What people are concerned about was that he bragged that he was able to capitalize on his fame to assault somebody. I'm going to presume you're male - how would you feel if, say, Newt Gingrich walked up to you and grabbed your penis?

Many people swear -- heck, I just did so in a public post under my own identity just to make a point! Many people use many terms to describe male and female anatomy. Nobody I know brags about being able to willfully assault people.

What a magnificent deflection. No one is angry that he said "grab them by the pussy". It's that he does this without consent. He does this because he has power and can. That's what is deplorable. Your defense of this is also deplorable.

What power? Surely if he did that the woman could call the cops on him and make a massive media shitstorm. You actually believe he goes around assaulting women?

The power stemming from his fame and money. Are you being deliberately daft? Do you not understand the concept of power differential and powerlessness? Your second question suggests you have a profound misunderstanding of the sense of powerlessness victims often feel and thus don't call the cops. The cops aren't always called after every crime.

You need to study more about crime and the psychology of victims/perpetrators.

I'm sure after I study crime more I will learn that Trump regularly rapes women because he made a vulgar joke. It's just that the evidence is missing, but the crimes surely have happened. Sorry about me being so daft.

He didn't make a joke. He made a claim. He said he just grabs them by the pussy. I don't believe doing this is rape. I think it may be sexual assault but I'm not versed on the legal definition of these terms. I was molested as a kid. I did not call the cops or tell anyone. I was not raped. I was molested (i.e. touched sexually without consent).

You are being daft and you are not sincerely apologizing for it. You are defending a person with a lot of power who claims to grope women without their consent. If you want to argue that the claim is not correct and that he was lying the do so. But he clearly was not joking. It was not funny.

You are being daft because I clearly said that you need to read up on the psychology of victims/perpetrators because you made the stupid claim that if the women really were groped then they would have called the cops. I did not say you need to do this reading so that you can conclude Donald Trump is a criminal.

Quite a few people have said so:

http://nymag.com/thecut/2016/10/all-the-women-accusing-trump...

First, let's settle on definitions: In this context, let's agree to define "assault" as including willfully touching someone's breasts or groin region without consent, and also to include kissing them on the lips without their consent. Please note I did not say "rape." I said assault:

https://www.justice.gov/ovw/sexual-assault

"Sexual assault is any type of sexual contact or behavior that occurs without the explicit consent of the recipient. Falling under the definition of sexual assault are sexual activities as forced sexual intercourse, forcible sodomy, child molestation, incest, fondling, and attempted rape."

With that definition, then yes, I do believe that Trump has done so, and I believe the evidence supports that conclusion.

One thing that I found illuminating as a result of the discussion around this was the number of my female friends and colleagues who talked about their own experiences being assaulted in these and similar ways. It's a very, very real problem.

If the evidence supports that conclusion then how come he wasn't convicted? Is it all a big conspiracy and the judges are in on it?

I think you truly don't understand how the American justice system works. There are lots of crimes that go unpunished. Sometimes even when the evidence is overwhelming. Prosectors have a budget, have political considerations to make, have to make decisions on what crimes to prosecute and which ones not to prosecute.

There was overwhelming evidence that OJ killed Nicole. He wasn't convicted. Lack of conviction does not indicate lack of evidence or lack of occurrence. In the case of Trump and his sexual assault of women they didn't report it to the police. Try hard and you might be able to wrap your head around the fact that many victims don't report the crime.

But the crime was committed for sure. I trust you. But the thing is apparently the voters would need evidence. Tough luck.

The people who have a problem with that tape aren't upset about a dirty word. If you friends are kissing and groping people they just met "without even waiting," you should probably call the cops. If they think "she let me do it" is the thing as consent, they should be corrected before someone gets hurt.

Did he get any assault convictions? If I said I'd like to kill my boss would you call the SWAT team on me?

Well, if you said instead, you killed several of your prior bosses and the widowed partners of some these were making public appearances in TV and you settled claims with some of them for undisclosed sums of money, yes, then I would maybe call the authorities or consider not voting you in the highest office.

Yes but you see - he was voted in. He won.

Well, it's not such a big deal, apparently. Everybody looking the other way, when the boss touches the secretary. Good times!

Ah, well now you're changing the subject. If you're granting that the issue is sexual assault and not bad language we can talk about that. Saying he would like to commit sexual assault would be disqualifying on its own, but in any case what he actually said was that it was something he does "whenever I meet a beautiful woman." So, I guess the better comparison would be if you said "when my kids talk back I beat the shit out of them."

In part, it's this kind of casual dismissal that many people are concerned about.

Look at this one, then try to be serious:

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2016/nov/2/donald-trump-...

For a broader view: https://ballotpedia.org/2016_presidential_candidates_on_LGBT...

Trump himself has gone both directions on some of these issues, so it's hard to understand what his personal position really is, but he's made more statements -- particularly recently -- that indicate opposition to federal protections for LGBT. (I'm choosing my words carefully - he's indicated that he wants to defer many of these issues to the states, when pressed on it.)

It's likely that Trump is - from a personal perspective - one of the more LGBT-friendly republicans, outside of the Log Cabin Republicans crew.

Viewed through the lens of whom he selected as his running mate, the Trump Team (as opposed to Trump himself) is rightly viewed as threatening for both marriage equality and transgender rights. Pence has a very consistent history of voting both against protection for LGBT, as well as actively supporting discriminatory policies such as "don't ask, don't tell" and proactive definitions of marriage as between one man and one woman.

I fully agree the major problem for this particular issue is that too much of the GOP identifies with being anti-LGBT. That is serious. But Trump personally seems to be the only one among them that was able to do this flag stuff all and still remain supported.

I consider as the major GOP problem, over all other issues, global warming denial. It's easy to see that even here it's not recognized.

Seriously, there is no way to explain that remark?

Have you never talked shit off the record? Did you never ever laugh at a racist/classist/* - ist joke?

I agree that Trump will probably be bad, but thats because he clearly has no plan whatsoever.

Yet entire Clinton campaign was just shit slinging, manufactured outrage, meaningless pandering, name calling, avoiding burning issues, more shit slinging, more pandering

She could have gone out and ripped him to shreds should she have focussed on actual plans

Instead she just goes out and calls people deplorable everything-phobes because they dare to oppose PC nonsense. Wanting to deport illegal immigrants is not racist. Pretending that there are no problems with islam, where you've got Europe as a control environment (where they harbor and abet proper terrorists and obstruct law enforcement as hard as they can) is fucking crazy)

It's not manufactured outrage. Trump said he uses his power status to grope women without consent simply because he can. He bragged about walking in on teen constestants whilst they were nude. It wasn't him talking shit it was him bragging about doing said shit.

Was there any proof? Apart of him talking shit with some other brodudebros while being stupid enoug to keep the mic on...

Depends on what you consider proof. I mean, the man himself said that he gropes women because he can. He said this in a private conversation without any knowledge of being recorded. I have not reason not believe his claim. Maybe he was blustering but I don't believe it. He's claimed to walk in on beauty contestants while they are naked. He didn't mind when Howard Stern referred to his daughter as a "piece of ass". The totality of what we know about Donald Trump is such that it takes a lot of mental gymnastics to believe that he has never groped women.

Chappelle continued that what Trump said didn't sound like "sexual assault" to him and that the media "twisted" Trump's words. "He said, ‘And when you’re a star, they let you do it.’ That phrase implies consent. I just don’t like the way the media twisted that whole thing. Nobody questioned it.”

I said a thing or two like that... twenty or thirty years ago. I've grown up a bit since then, though. And I'm younger now than Trump was when he said that.

Have you considered that when it comes to electing politicians people don't put anywhere as much weight into personal remarks a candidate makes but rather the policies he's planning or how well he represents them?

That was a comment made in private and lightly. He didn't get on a podium and said that was going to be the Government's policy. I feel that you're equating Donald Trump the private person with Donald Trump the (future) head of state.

Actual policies matter much less than you would think. Both candidates either didn't talk about their proposals at all or were very vague about them. And many if not most of Trumps positions remain unclear to this day.

Daughter to mom: "Hey mom, this Hitler guy was just elected chancellor who is saying hateful things about Jews! We are Jewish, I'm scared!"

mom: "Don't worry, he was just saying this stuff to get elected, I'm sure he isn't that bad."

The world is upside down right now.

Well if they are illegal aliens (not immigrants), they should be deported.

What about Muslims waiting for a green card[1]? Are they "Illegal"? What if you are a non-muslim but just from a "terror prone" country? I'm not smug. I'm scared. Forgive me for not being "nice" to the supporters of a candidate who would strike existential fear in my heart.

[1]: https://www.donaldjtrump.com/press-releases/donald-j.-trump-...

[2]: http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/07/22/us/politics/tr...

Were they granted asylum, then waiting for a green card? If so, they are not illegal. Deportation requires a hearing.

They need not be refugees either. But Trump's new laws ban the "immigration" of Muslims. This means, a freeze on green-card approvals based on religion. If you don't have a green-card, you have to leave this country. Not all deportations are carried out by ICE.

P.S: Green-card applications could be active for over 8 years with no-fault. The system is just that screwed up.

What he actually said was: temporarily banning muslims from certain countries known to harbor terrorists.

Not sure why you saw "law". Only congress can make laws; not the president. Besides, the 1 st amendment is in his way. There is some precident for banning immigrants from certain countries. Chinese immigration was banned for a time, over 100 years ago.

And hopefully we agree that the Chinese immigration ban hass been a black stain on America history, since forever?

You completely validated the comment you responded to. I suspect you did not mean to this so convincingly.

Deportation is the natural result of illegal immigration. You're acting like they didn't know they were committing a crime.

There are proper channels for immigration. If you want to move to a certain country and your first choice is to break their laws; how can you expect to be entitled to anything over there?

I'm not acting like anything. I've not stated a position on deportation of illegal immigrants. My comment had nothing to do with the issue. Please reread the exchanges without making assumptions on my positions.

BTW, under Obama more people have been deported than under any other President. I'm in favor of trying to do as much as possible to prevent illegal immigration. And yet the comment I made that you responded to is absolutely correct. Think about it.

But the problem at least in the US is that the "proper channels" are purposely set so low as to encourage illegal immigration. Many industries, including Trump's field of construction rely on illegal immigrants for a large part of their labor source. Demonizing the illegal immigrants is kind of like Claude Rains in 'Casablanca' claiming to be shocked by the illegal gambling at Rick's while participating in it.

> But the problem at least in the US is that the "proper channels" are purposely set so low as to encourage illegal immigration.

No, they're set to discourage inmigration that doesn't prove to be a net benefit to the country or doesn't serve a particular cause.

> Many industries, including Trump's field of construction rely on illegal immigrants for a large part of their labor source.

They rely on it for bigger profit margins; they don't need illegal immigration to exist. The market can perfectly adjust to the situation: If workers are pricing themselves too high to the point many building projects are no longer worth the investment, either the project doesn't happen and workers have to adjust their prices accordingly, the project is actually valuable enough for the client to cough up the extra cost or the intermediary (construction company) lowers their profits to stay competitive.

So they are afraid the actual law will be enforced, because they're criminals.

They're afraid because their lives are in America.

Do you think the law should be changed? Should we try to perfectly enforce every law, no matter how cruel or costly it is? Should the DEA start raiding cancer patients again?

Laws are always selectively enforced, by necessity. Politicians, prosecutors, police chiefs, LEO's and others dictate how resources are allocated to enforcement.

And an election should decide who should be the one to allocate those resources with the people's best interest in mind. That's literally what happened.

So.....legal immigrants are afraid of being deported?

That's called irrational fear. It has no basis in reality.

I'm worried he might withdraw the US from NATO, also a very real worry.

While I understand where you are coming from please consider it through the lens of a re-negotiation opportunity. Personally I don't think NATO will be dismantled by Trump as it is a keystone to US foreign influence and power and I believe it will ultimately be strengthened because NATO members have historically got a 'free ride' by not meeting their defence obligations under the treaty. This means that the benefits of defence, such as economic stability and growth of the 'free rider' nations were subsidised by the US tax payer. How is that fair? I know that many here may find it unpalatable, but if people were to read 'Art of the Deal' I believe it will give them insight into how Trump will deal with NATO, any other re-negotiations as well as how he won the election.

Do you know that the art of the deal wasn't written at all by trump, and the guy who wrote it doesn't support him?

Hi wikibob, yes I am aware of that and the article where the ghost writer laments his association with Trump post the book being published.

However that does not invalidate my point... which is that by reading the book one can better understand Trump's approach to the media and what I believe will be his approach to the presidency.

So, in spite of the ghost writer, consider that Trump did put his name to the book and endorse it, therefore I think it is reasonable to assume that he was happy with the contents. Certainly if the roles were reversed I believe anyone would read a book about themselves and insist on changes if there were major errors prior to publishing.

I think it's funny that Europe wanted the US off their soil since the end of the Cold War. Now that Russia is moving westward, they are all worried about the US leaving.

Trump wants Europe to foot more of the bill for NATO.

People who are afraid of being deported are illegal aliens, so they weren't able to vote.

I fully support their plight and their right (I am myself an immigrant, a legal alien for 11 years with little chance of acquiring citizenship), however, this is exactly the limit of modern democracy. Non-citizens do not vote, despite living in the country and sharing similar rights and responsibilities.

Birthright citizenship is the largest remaining privilege and discrimination out there — legally enforced, and nearly as oppressive as racial discrimination before. It was really convenient to sweep the issue under the rug — until now.

"I am myself an immigrant, a legal alien for 11 years with little chance of acquiring citizenship"

I'm curious, why do you think you have little chance of acquiring citizenship?

I live in Switzerland, which has strict policies on naturalization. My wife is a scientist (postdoc mathematician), so we have to travel a lot between countries — in Europe, mobility is a significant part of academic culture. Each time (4 times, in fact). Each time, our "uninterrupted time spent in Switzerland" counter was reset.

I think you miss the point - liberals hate Trump voters.

And if your feeling is that anyone who voted for Trump is worthy only of contempt, then you truly missed the point.

Many are willing to see a failure of empathy in others but not in themselves.

I'm very liberal and have a lot of admiration for Obama and Clinton, despite their flaws. I don't hate Donald Trump or Donald Trump voters. I feel sad for them and for the fact that our country has disemployed so many people, and left so many people out in the cold, that they felt like their only living option was... this. I'd pity them, but they want my pity even less than my hate.

I hate the racism and sexism that his movement represents. I hate that people are treating his election as a vindication of the worst elements of our nation's history, rather than an expression of sheer desperation from the burping turtle at the bottom of the stack.

I've worked in tech for 10 years. It's full of people who did not vocally support Trump (and may well have voted for Clinton) but who perpetuate sexism and racism and think that they're doing so for valid business reasons ("culture fit"). I know who the enemy is and I know who to hate. It's not the guy in Milwaukee who lost his job and his dignity and can't afford to insure his family and gets socked with an "individual mandate" penalty for it.

>a lot of admiration for Obama and Clinton, despite their flaws

That is a problem. Because despite you overlooking their flaws, the "portions of the country that have been most ravaged by free trade orgies and globalism — Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, Iowa — were filled with rage" saw "a protector and beneficiary of all the worst components of status quo elite corruption" and overlooked intolerance and targeted crony capitalist corruption.

Solely focusing on “racism/sexism/xenophobia” while ignoring “economic suffering” is what led to this outcome.

Cenk Uygur put it succinctly during the primaries: “Instead of looking at it as, ‘Hey, one guy hasn’t taken corrupting money and the other one has,’ you frame it as male vs. female,” Uygur said. “And hence, put me in a position where I’m forced to say, no, I don’t think it would be historic because I think it’s the same old establishment.”

In the 1990s, Hillary Clinton got the shit kicked out of her by that same corrupt establishment for (a) trying to fix healthcare, and (b) being a woman and having an IQ over 140. (Sexism and racism both have a U-shaped distribution on the economic spectrum, but the top of our society is even more sexist than the bottom.) I'd rather plant a bomb in the Establishment, by electing a closet liberal who's been playing centrist in order to get in, than throw a brick at it and only do superficial damage by electing a political naif who'll surround himself by right-wing psychopaths.

Rudy Giuliani, Newt Gingrich, and Peter Thiel are categorically not what this country needs. I wish we had given Hillary a chance. If she had turned out to be an Establishment hack, we could fire her in 2020.

What further evidence that she's an establishment hack could have convinced you?

A record as a carpet-bagging New York senator, notable only for her vote to go to war in Iraq. A stint as Secretary of State unblemished by any positive accomplishment. Both of those jobs were from the Democratic establishment, which then went on to literally fix the nomination process for her.

Forget the money from Goldman Sachs, she took money from Donald Trump for goodness sake. She is the epitome of an establishment hack. The Democratic establishment sold out their base.

What further evidence that she's an establishment hack could have convinced you?

I'm in my 30s, which means that I'm 97 in tech years. So I remember the 1990s. People were horrible to that woman. Her complaint about a "vast right-wing conspiracy" is spot-on. The Establishment beat the hell out of her.

So she realized that she had to work with the Establishment to get things done. Like I said, I'd rather take a chance of planting a bomb in it than throw a brick at it. And if I'm wrong and Clinton proved a sellout, we could fire her in 2020.

Yes, she accepted her market rate for speeches at Goldman Sachs... after leaving public service. Wouldn't you? I despise Goldman Sachs and I applied to work for them at one point, because if I'd gotten the Core Strats gig, it would have been good for my career. Almost all of us are whores, or were at one time. That's how capitalism works.

The Democratic establishment sold out their base.

I dislike the Democratic establishment (although it is less onerous than the Republican one). I dislike the fact that left-leaning and rational people face a complacent one-party system. Not enough to vote for Trump.

Just saying that people are "dirty" because they have friends in the Establishment is bigoted and Trumpist. We have to accept that people have different strategies for dealing with corruption, corporatism, and national failure and that one only knows the right one in hindsight.

People were horrible to that woman.

Do you suppose that might just have happened because she's a horrible person?

If you remember the 1990s, do you remember Billy Dale? Waco? Gary Aldrich (and if you do, was enforcing a no no-pan rule good or bad ^_^)? The magically moving Rose law Firm billing records and her law partner going to the Federal pen? Her public responses to those who accused her husband of rape, sexual assault, or inappropriate (power and age) sexual relations? The looting of the White House? Filegate, with it's blackmail treasures?

And that's just stuff that happened in the 8 year administration that her fingerprints are clearly on.

Were you really paying that much attention, seeing as how if you are in your late 30s, you'd have been exiting college about the time the administration was over?

In the 1990s, Hillary Clinton got the shit kicked out of her by that same corrupt establishment for (a) trying to fix healthcare, and (b) being a woman and having an IQ over 140.

Incompetently trying to fix healthcare.

Let's not forget it was her very own party who refused to buy off on her unbelievably complicated scheme, remember those charts?

Look, maybe I buy Hillary once having an IQ of 140, but can you give me any evidence it ever translated into success in her life, except for attracting Bill?

Compare to, for example, the #1 woman of this election, the one you've probably never heard of, Kellyanne Conway, who became Trump's campaign manager as of August 17th. She's the first successful female US presidential campaign manager, BTW.

Anyway, just a thought or three from one of HN's right-wing psychopaths....

Why should anyone have empathy for those that have no empathy for anyone?

Because empathy is explicitly not transactional.

Says who?

Do you think Trump and his supporters were at any point nice and respectful?

How was Obama treated by the right wing after his election and during his presidency?

If something is racist, it's racist. That doesn't change when it's coming from a president-elect. Pointing it out is and should be okay for the media and anyone else to do.

I've now seen it justified amount my Facebook peers as, "I can't accept a Trump supporter or their views because people are going to die! Don't you realize you are supporting the collapse of civilization?!"

And they (your Facebook peers) don't seem to understand that they are helping to cause the collapse of civilization, by exactly their refusal to listen to or engage with the other side.

How can it be so hard to be nice to others?

As a Canadian, I can say this: I have no idea. It's really hard to develop a culture of niceness and it can be so very fleeting.

Just as the US has a huge cultural divide between the coastal big cities and the great middle of the country, so too does Canada between east and west as well as between Anglophone and Francophone. Yet somehow this divide in Canada is not quite as acute, not quite as mean.

Perhaps the biggest issue is that the moral fault lines constructively interfere with the cultural ones. I think of big-city vegans vs those who love BBQ and it becomes a microcosm for the rejection of all the respective cultural elements: yoga and country music, environmentalism and hunting/fishing, political correctness and religion.

In defense of hunting and fishing, sportsmen and their outfitters tend to be the strongest proponents of environmental protection. This distinction does somewhat favor fishing over hunting, but hunting does serve as an important backstop against explosive population growth in the absence of apex predators.

- http://fishpondusa.com/about/corporate-responsibility

- http://wamu.org/news/11/05/23/deer_overpopulation_yields_dis...

Oh yeah, I'm not saying that sportsmen are against the environment. I'm referring to the cultural divide between city-dwelling vegans who rarely, if ever, venture into the wilderness and sportsmen who eat meat and fight tirelessly to preserve nature.

It's a matter of people talking past eachother.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Veil_of_ignorance

The amnesia in this article and many of the comments here is stupefying. Have we all forgotten the things DJT said and did throughout his campaign:

- Called Mexican immigrants rapists and murderers;

- Mocked the physically disabled;

- Used his ownership of a beauty pageant to look at naked women dressing;

- Made threats of political violence;

- Demonstrated a contempt for science;

- Put forth conspiracy theories regarding the President, HRC and climate change;

- The racist (yes, racist) comments he made regarding Judge Curiel;

And this isn't even the half of it. Let's also not forget the behavior of those who showed up at his rallies spewing hatred, racism and xenophobia. That actually happened.

Does the press have issues? Undoubtedly. But to write off the last 18 months and Tuesday's election as "smugness" is to have lost the plot.

Might I humbly recommend going to www.untruthaboutdonaldtrump.com put together by philosopher Stefan Molyneux? Just please keep an open mind and do fact check as all sources are listed in an intellectually honest and transparent way.

It's not either/or. It's both/and.

Yes, Trump has done a lot that should disqualify him. (You didn't even mention what to me is about the biggest ones: Threatened revenge on those who spoke against him.)

And yes, the article has a very valid point about the media - it really does live in its own bubble, not understanding most of the country.

Funny how the anti-trump people are now resulting to physical violence and rioting.

Right is right and wrong is wrong. You have to stand up for the right thing even if that means telling other people that they are wrong, or even stupid.

You don't have to be smug about it, but that can be a tricky line to walk. Personally, I think it's better to advocate for certain values as respectfully as you know how and not worry about offending people who disagree. Placing too much emphasis on phrasing and tone is what people refer to derisively as "political correctness". It's best to focus more on saying the right thing, and less on how you say it

I would humbly challenge your opening sentences. Right and wrong are constructs of judgement created in the human mind. So while I agree that people should stand for their beliefs I completely disagree that you have any moral authority to tell people they are wrong or stupid. I believe in a free market of ideas protected by the freedom of speech and mutual respect. I also believe that if you want to change someone's point of view you should do so with facts and reason. If your goal is to change someone's thinking outright rejection of their beliefs on the basis of biased judgement and name calling will not achieve your goal and will most likely close that person's mind.

I don't understand how thick headed the mainstream media (MSM) seems to be in not getting it. This "upset" win of Trump (upset in the sense that it didn't play by the MSM's wishes) was not an isolated incident - it's happened in India (2014), it happened in UK (Brexit), and it has been repeated in the US.

The fundamental driver for all three instances has been the removal of all filters on social media. The problem was that for too long the MSM used their power to filter content to its readers/viewers, and the filter was tuned by a group that wanted to script reality in a form that they wished to see come to fruition, even if their stand was hypocritical.

So for example, you'd see a huge hue and cry in the MSM about how freedom of expression was being harmed because a right wing outfit threatened someone for speaking out against a majority religion, and yet, when someone spoke out against Islam, and Islamic groups placed a bounty on his head, the same MSM would just go silent. It is this blatant hypocrisy that finally got them.

And now, with social media, for the first time people have access to unfiltered news and can form their own opinions. And for better or worse, the hypocrisy of the MSM is glaringly obvious for people who have access to multiple viewpoints on an incident - not just a filtered viewpoint. With the hypocrisy bare, it's basically been a revolt against the established media.

And unless the established media takes it upon themselves to be more honest in whatever stand they take, this is going to repeat, because, people aren't fools you know.

"yet, when someone spoke out against Islam, and Islamic groups placed a bounty on his head, the same MSM would just go silent."

Salmon Rushdie, Charlie Hebdo and Jyllands–Posten all seem to be a cause célèbre of the liberal media even though the liberal media would otherwise despise Charlie Hebdo.

That was only true until the refugee crisis gained momentum in the news cycles. You'll have troubling finding a peep defending the person and groups you listed in most international, big name media.

I agree, with a "but", however.

It's not just that now there are more points of views to reference and understand, it's that now people do have the ability to reinforce their beliefs with articles and commentaries from virtually anywhere on the planet. While this has eroded what was an openly more liberal western media influence, it's what is seeping in through the cracks isn't exactly concrete journalism either.

Ease of access to information is a good thing, and I am in no way condemning or suggesting that the freedom of access to information we have is bad; but we also have a large public that isn't very well versed in how to do research for themselves. With mass media no longer serving as gatekeepers for information and everyone just finding sources for themselves, we're in the middle of what I'd consider a very arrogant age where we assume we are experts on virtually any subject because we can find information on it so quickly. We're ready to defend any position because, odds are, there's probably supporting evidence for it somewhere, if you just search long enough. And it happens regardless of political affiliation - outside of politics, you'll see such debates all the time on Facebook or forums with people constantly just posting citation lists at one another without actually taking the time to understand what the information they're citing actually means, if it's relevant, or processing it.

Mass media probably could stand to tone down the commentary and go back to facts - it would be nice, and we do occasionally get some really good pieces of journalism as a result of an editorial/opinion piece, but some more bare facts info would probably be better. But at the same time, people like the opinionated stuff, as long as the opinion is congruent with the viewer's own opinion. Not only that, but the opinion stuff sells; what was yelling at the TV screen is now screaming at the laptop screen while typing up a post furiously on Facebook.

But as a populous, we are complicit in it as well - the information available to us has made us very arrogant and very hard-headed/hard-hearted, since no matter what position we take, we know there's likely evidence enough to support it and to keep going without concession.

Yes, this year the media got caught with its pants down because they didn't appreciate the fact that they now have completely lost their position as gatekeepers. But it's not just media hypocrisy that is causing these changes, it's a world that more than ever is ready to fight and is armed with a whole new wave of information.

I don't know what major media's role is going to be in the years going forward - I do hope though that as people, we get past our arrogant stage of believing we know everything. The whole world is basically a bunch of college freshmen right now having just passed their first semester - we think we know all there is to know, and need to have the humility beat into us with the cudgel that is how much we don't know.

> Mass media probably could stand to tone down the commentary and go back to facts - it would be nice, and we do occasionally get some really good pieces of journalism as a result of an editorial/opinion piece, but some more bare facts info would probably be better.

Actually, I really like that different newspapers have different opinions, and it's even better to see those opinions defended with passion and emotion. What riles me is that the newspapers are hypocritical and choose to mute their stand on an issue when it goes against another narrative that they've chosen to project. If you, as a newspaper, have taken a stand to say, bat for freedom of expression or women's rights or whatever, then go the whole way and be passionate about it. Just don't throw that under the bus and fail to call it out when another group who you think needs your voice for another cause is also guilty.

Yes, there are biases in e.g. the NYT and Washington Post. However, in terms of objectivity, they are miles ahead of the "unfiltered news" on social media. The written press try to check their sources, and hedge their statements if they are not certain. I admit that they do sometimes filter some stories that go against their beliefs/interests. However, they have things like op-eds that often contain different perspectives.

If you look at the "unfiltered news" on social media, most of it starts from a tidbit of information and then twists it to fit whatever narrative they are trying to promote. On top of that, in the social media bubble, you literally never get exposed to contrasting opinions. As an example, a week ago Wikileaks leaked a mail about 'spirit cooking', and tweeted a misleading message. That got picked up by 'news' stories on social media and turned into some satanic ritual. It even got mentions on Fox News. If you were trying to figure out what 'spirit cooking' really was, in the first days the first few pages of google were only links to dubious websites reinforcing that it was some satanic ritual (with authoritative sounding names like usapoliticstoday.com). Only later did you get links to sites debunking the story. I very much doubt that the average reader of these stories ever even went to Google to check the background story. You say people aren't fools. I would say people are easily fooled.

Add to this active disinformation campaigns (alt-right 'news' websites, twitter bots, troll farms), a constant drip of easily twisted Wikileak emails and an FBI director putting his whole weight on the scale during the last week of the election, and you get this disastrous election result.

I'll repeat what I said in response to another comment:

I think you're underestimating the intelligence of people. We like to think that we're much better than the average Joe at separating the wheat from the chaff, but the truth is that the average Joe just isn't so bad at it either - or at least, isn't much worse than an editor sitting in his echo chamber.

If I look at my twitter feed now, for example, I have a bunch of tweets criticizing a new decision of the government to withdraw high-denomination currencies (I'm from India), and for every such tweet there are others that are calling out the fallacies of the argument put forth. And vice versa.

Gives me all the viewpoints I need to form an opinion.

[My Twitter feed gives] me all the viewpoints I need to form an opinion.

Given that hubris seems to be the theme of this topic I have to say this is particularly appropriate.

One advantage if Twitter is that a lot of the primary sources(the politicians, Project Veritas, Wikileaks, etc.) all communicate using it.

Another one is that you only have 140 characters, so people are more likely to link directly to a primary source. I've seen too many "news articles" that spin very weak data into a big article, with too much interpretation by the editor.

A third one is that you can choose who to follow, so it's possible to have items from the other side show up in your feed. You can also choose to only follow sources that you consider high-quality.

I didn't use Twitter much before, but I did start using it this election just because it was a good way to get information.

I hope you're not considering Project Veritas a high-quality source. Mr. O'Keefe has a track record of selectively and deceptively editing his video recordings: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_O%27Keefe

It is telling that he is often not releasing the full, unedited video, which I would consider the primary source. Once the video has been edited, the meaning could have been altered (and in the case of Project Veritas, it often is).

If you regard the Twitter feed of Wikileaks a credible source of information I can't help you. https://mobile.twitter.com/wikileaks/status/7944506234041139...

Even if you believe the information is unreliable, surely you agree that suggesting the idea and then pointing to a particularly bad example is a dangerous confirmation bias trap?

If somebody told me, "CNN is doing a segment on how Trump's rise eerily parallels Hitler's rise", it would be confirmation bias to start off assuming it's false because I like Trump, watch the segment, record all the errors in the presentation, and then use those errors to support my initial conclusion.

I agree that the Spirit Cooking was better entertainment than it was credible information.

Sorry I do not understand what you are trying to say.

Twitter is awash with garbage information and offers far more opportunities to indulge your biases than to acquire useful facts about the world. Most "primary sources" are worth less than quality analysis and most analysis of any value comes from something akin to mainstream media. They are the only actors with at least some economic interest in facts and truth, however imperfect they are.

I think you are overestimating the intelligence of people. Like anti-vaxers who believe vaccines give their kids autism. Where does that come from? Definitely not the mainstream media, they heard some rumors... I imagine this also applies to India where the rumors can get much crazier.

The number of people who actually believe that anti-vaccine nonsense is pretty small to be honest.

I thought so also, but the pediatrician we interviewed a few days ago said it was more common than you think. And this is in highly educated SoCal.

It's hard to know how many of these people believed that vaccines cause autism, but MMR vaccination rates dropped quite a bit in the UK.

http://www.sfam.org.uk/en/news-features/news/index.cfm/mmr-a...

>> In 1998−9, 88% of children had been immunized against measles, mumps and rubella. By 2003−4, coverage had fallen to 80% and to 61% in some London areas.

> Definitely not the mainstream media,

"Vaccines cause autism" was widely pushed by mainstream media in the UK for some time before the Lancet withdrew the paper.

Here's the daily fucking fail continuing to push it in 2006: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-388051/Scientists-fe...

Here's a nice review of UK press coverage: http://www.sfam.org.uk/en/news-features/news/index.cfm/mmr-a...

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2006/jun/16/whenjo...

I might be underestimating the intelligence of people, but I don't think so.

Here are some sobering statistics:

  - 54% of the GOP electorate think President Obama is a Muslim [1]
  - 29% of the GOP electorate grant that President Obama was born in the United States [1]
  - 47% of conservatives now say the climate is changing (not that necessarily that climate change is man-made) [2]
  - 49% of Republicans said they do not believe in evolution [3]

[1] and [3] are from publicpolicypolling, which is a democratic polling agency, so take them with a grain of salt.

Now you tell me if the average Joe is good at separating the wheat from the chaff. To me it seems fully half of the conservatives/Republicans are unable to do it for scientific truths.

You say that people are calling out the fallacies in your twitter feed. That gives me hope. But are the people who have been advancing the fallacious arguments changing their mind based on the evidence?

[1] http://www.publicpolicypolling.com/pdf/2015/PPP_Release_Nati...

[2] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/many-more-republi...

[3] http://www.publicpolicypolling.com/pdf/2015/PPP_Release_Nati...

I've had reasonably intelligent people tell me that George Soros owned all the voting machines and he was going to hand the election to Hillary. Just because someone is misinformed and gullible doesn't mean they are unintelligent. If all this countervailing info was getting to them, the wouldn't be telling me this.

That's just silly, the company Soros has a stake in only has about 30% of the voting machines!

Kidding aside, I don't think he would have actually been in a position to do anything to them to affect the outcome of the election.

It's worse than that. Soros didn't have a stake in any voting machine company, but the company had an executive who served on the board of directors of a Soros charity. It's a comically tenuous connection.

I would put it the other way around: that we're all very bad at separating truth from fiction. That's what's terrifying to me. How many people are genuinely bothered by how hard it is to find truth? How many people even think it is hard?

Every caste has a different way of dealing with this uncertainty, but I'd say very few cultures systematically accept that they have no idea what's true and what is not. Every group has a different heuristic that they consider "good enough." Some groups appeal to morality (although each group has different moral guidelines). Some groups appeal to simplicity or aesthetics. Analytically oriented people tend to use probability as their crutch, telling themselves that any truth they deem "unlikely" would be a waste of time to investigate.

When any of these groups is wrong, they vehemently maintain that their heuristic is appropriate and sound. They made the right decision based on what they knew, they tell themselves. The process is infallible, even if the result is unfortunate.

Because the uncertainty of truth terrifies me, I try to keep an open mind. I would hope that this open mind affords me a better "truth ratio," but that's impossible to measure. Every single day I'm disheartened by how hard it is to find actual truth. Even something as simple as checking the sources on a news article can be so difficult (or impossible) that there's no practical way to judge its reasonableness. The more viewpoints you hear, the more you realize that it's impossible to discriminate between them with any sort of actual accuracy; you just rely on heuristics once again. "Oh, this girl stated her argument much more coherently than that guy, so I'm inclined to believe her." Now your heuristic is rhetoric, which may or may not have anything to do with truth. When you try to do your own research, you're swayed by the quantity of arguments or the coherency of the sources or how they match up with what you already think you know. You just make guess upon guess upon guess.

At the end of the line you have academic studies, but no individual is an expert in more than a couple things, so no individual is qualified to vet/interpret/understand the vast majority of the academic literature on the subject. We just make a guess, or we appeal to probability again (i.e. "it seems to me like more academics are saying this, so that's the most likely truth. I'm going to assume anything else is wrong").

I'm not trying to downplay the importance of science or academics here; it's the best we have. But those who are "waking up" to reality after this election—if they follow the thread far enough—are destined to come to an uncomfortable conclusion: there's a limit to how "right" you can ever be.

"However, in terms of objectivity, they are miles ahead of the "unfiltered news" on social media."

There isn't actually a contradiction between the news media being miles ahead of "unfiltered news", and the fact that unfiltered news can show the biases of the media. In a social media age, if the filtered news can have its errors exposed easily, then trust will still decrease in it even if it is, hypothetically, 90% accurate.

Which is probably a great deal more accurate than it actually is, because the "filtered media" has been operating in a space where "nobody" (to a first approximation anyhow) could independently check it for decades and has gotten very used to its ability to filter things unopposed. We don't even have to hypothesize anything about hubris necessarily; it has simply been used to this being the reality in the same way that, say, the Federal government has become used to being the dominant governmental authority. It isn't necessarily "wrong", it just is. This position has left the media unable to deal with any sort of challenge to its authority... even the very confused, chaotic, challenge offered by current social media. They have never needed to develop an "immune system" to that sort of thing, though that's not a perfect metaphor.

It's hard to even judge how right the old media was, because you're measuring a yardstick against itself. How do you know the old media back in the 1990s was that good in the first place? Where are you getting the information you'd use to check that claim? How do you know that the filtered media didn't have things "start[] from a tidbit of information and then twists it to fit whatever narrative they are trying to promote"? It's not exactly hard to find instances of things that look like that in the past; to come up with a non-political example, "moral panics" are not a new phenomenon. D&D had a pretty good one off of a pretty small "tidbit".

A new media ecosystem will arise eventually. Probably some of the old media will manage to up their game enough to compete again. But it's never going to be monolithic again until social media is somehow entirely destroyed. And the social media is going to get better. Diversity is coming to the news industry whether it likes it or not.

> In a social media age, if the filtered news can have its errors exposed easily, then trust will still decrease in it even if it is, hypothetically, 90% accurate.

Especially if the inaccuracies (or mere biases) all slant the same direction.

Can't speak for the US, but the Brexit result in large part was driven by "traditional" media, in the form of tabloids that have a large circulation among the bulk of Brexit supporters and have long held nationalist and anti-EU positions.

> I don't understand how thick headed the mainstream media (MSM) seems to be in not getting it. This "upset" win of Trump (upset in the sense that it didn't play by the MSM's wishes) was not an isolated incident - it's happened in India (2014), it happened in UK (Brexit), and it has been repeated in the US.

Hubris. Hubris, to a hilarious degree.

Here's a story published 72 hours ago: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/election-day-things-look...

The first sentence says Hillary has a "98.2 percent chance of winning the presidency". It only gets better from there.

I bet against Hillary starting in May. I was nervous in October when the "grab them" audio came out but I stuck with it. Buffet's rule of going opposite the analysis that everyone knows can work out well.

Turn out you can make a lot of money betting $5 per electoral vote..

> The first sentence says Hillary has a "98.2 percent chance of winning the presidency". It only gets better from there.

That is why physicists demand 99.99% (three sigma) significance before they are calling it hints. The thing is, it is absolutely true that (some) polling models predicted a 98% chance of an Hillary win. It is just the problem that these models have trouble to predict the behavior of Trump voters.

And frankly that is the problem with models. I have predicted, on reddit, that Trump would win. And I managed to do that precisely by not having a model, I just looked at the model outputs of Real Clear Politics and added a fudge factor, because usually models underestimate right wing populists, for perfectly understandable reasons. However, having a model means that you can not just add in a fudge factor, honesty demands that you have to justify each and every parameter and actually all forecasts where I did bother to look, did that. But the thing is at rather uncertain predictions like 98% the fudge factors reign.

If the Facebook filter bubble and new non-mainstream media outlets like infowars are the new narrative, good luck world. You will need it.

It's sad how this fetishization of "objectivity" has spread – unlike other urban legends, even smart people have bought into it.

The idea already breaks down because journalists have to make judgements when deciding on what to print – page space is limited, and that holds for the digital realm as well, if you include the prominence a story gets.

It appears these critics want journalists to judge everything without deference to prior knowledge. When they get an anonymous letter saying Obama kills puppies, it deserves the same billing as press release by the CDC about the recommended flu shots. Because it's "bias" to consider the CDC a more reliable source, or not to question the existence of this supposed "flu".

I don't know the example you're mentioning. I knew about the Fatwa against Salman Rushdie, and I learnt about it from mainstream sources. There are many clerics in islam, and maybe, in your example, it wasn't reported because it's some self-declared mufti whose opinion has no actual weight in islam? Or maybe it's a man-bites-dog situation: the intolerance within islam is well known and not "news", whereas we still hold domestic organization to a higher standard, as we should.

So here we are now. Everyone is equal. Facebook gives "the average joe (janes need not apply)" the same tools as the NYT. Let me ask you: are we better for it? Do you believe you are better informed reading a random twitter feed instead of having a subscription to the NYT or WSJ?

The answer is pretty obvious. Even Republicans marvel how easy it was to elevate what amounts to a random youtube comment threat to the national conversation. Grandpa's forwards, previously laughed at with their caps lock stuck and a tenuous grasp of basic grammar will soon be turned into laws.

I'd like to believe this. You seem to paint a picture of each person having objective view of reality but that has not been the case in my experience watching the online discourse. Voters on each side of the fence were so far up their asses they couldn't fathom to give a shred of doubt to their own views. The liberals had the blind spots outlined in OP article while the conservative actually believed Obama is a Muslim, he never went to law school, Hillary killed our soldiers and sent secret emails to Russia. So if the news were indeed unfiltered both sides would have some objective insight and lean one way or another, instead completely dismissing the other side as fascist or criminal.

As a guy who once described himself as "very liberal", I have to say that I'm ashamed at the lack of empathy and the sheer smugness of my liberal friends.

There is a disease in modern liberalism about wanting to appear smart, even about things people should have no clue about.

This "wink wink, look how smart I am!" posturing is seriously misplaced and seriously off-putting.

If you want to know why Trump won, you have to start by dismantling this smugness.

I mirror your stance in a way... and it is funny how this election has helped me grow as a person. I've rejected labels such as liberal or conservative and consider myself as someone who trys to overcome my natural tendency toward cognitive bias through reason and fact. Until I'm convinced that facts support reason I reserve the adoption of any belief and I always keep an open mind to new facts or stronger reasoning.

Personally, I've made a rule that for every two pieces of liberal media I consume on an issue, I should seek at least one argument against it from a conservative.

Online, the dangers of living in an echochamber are very real

I applaud and stand with you in your resolve to seek out views that challenge any narrative, liberal media or otherwise, before making your own judgement.

As a European, this article on cracked.com (yes, cracked.com) gave me a lot of insight into why / how Trump won.

http://www.cracked.com/blog/6-reasons-trumps-rise-that-no-on...

It's Brexit all over again. Will the politicians in my country (NL) learn to listen to 'the other half', before their campaigns start (next spring)? Probably not.

Trump won because people are sick of SJWs. He won because people are sick of being called racists when they're not. He won because his opponent was objectively worse. Any other democrat running against him would have probably led to different results, but the bickering between the children turned out in Trump's favor. It's ridiculous that either one ran. All we can do now is hope Trump does well. It really wouldn't be that hard to do "well"; we haven't had a good president for quite many years.

It's overall a very good opinion piece, but this little ditty didn't escape my notice:

> We diagnose them as racists in the way Dark Age clerics confused medical problems with demonic possession.

"Medical problems"? I don't know much about these things, but isn't this what some would call a "microagression"?

Eh, I'm going to give the guy a pass. At least he's trying.

I think the thrust is, "we don't understand the real problem, lets call it something that we think we know about."

All in all, I think it's a pretty solid article, and hits on a lot of the rural-urban disjunctions that I've experienced, as a redneck Mainer from up near the Canadian border having to move out of 1950s-throwback-world.

According to the article, there is more to it than just hating sucial justice warriors. The fact that rural infrastructure is crumbling, jobs are lost and not returning and the fact that during 8 years with a democrat at the helm didn't change much for them. It is enough for a lot of people to seriously consider the alternative, especially if the (untrusted) establishment hates this alternative.

> The fact that rural infrastructure is crumbling

That's what I don't get. Do Trump voters think he gives a flying fuck about the state of rural infrastructure or the lives of poor people? I don't see it. Sure, the incumbent elite are feckless, tribal, irresponsible, greedy, and dishonest, but Trump is worse, obviously so.

I guess that's the problem in a two-party system. Usually you choose the better of two bad options. In this case, all the options were so bad that people just said "fuck it".

I know democrats who voted for Trump. One of the reasons is that he is planning on investing $500,000,000,000 in infrastructure, including rural infrastructure. So yes, I think economics played a large role in his win.

But I'd ask myself where is that half-a-trillion dollars going to come from, on top of the increases in military spending, the thousands-of-miles-long Mexico wall, the massively expensive roundups and deportations, and so on. Especially when taxes are apparently also going to be reduced.

And asking myself that question, I'd think his promises somewhat empty and opportunistic.

Obama pushed hard for big spending on infrastructure from the start of his first term. Not only do we need it in general, but then it also would have greatly helped push the recovery from the recession along.

Republicans in Congress were able to block it until they took control of both Houses, and then it was effectively dead.

Do they really think Trump has a better chance of getting Congress to pass a large infrastructure bill? I haven't looked into it in great detail, but from what I have seen it doesn't look like the incoming Republican House and Senate are at all inclined to be looser with the pursestrings now.

Also, Clinton's plan also called for large infrastructure spending, although only about half of what Trump's plan calls for. That makes it hard for me to understand why a Democrat who voted for Trump would cite infrastructure spending as a reason.

Do you refer to the "shovel-ready" stimulus? They burned through $830B on that, to little effect. One would hope that the next big infrastructure effort would be better focused on actual infrastructure.

http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB100014240527023039457045793876...

And here I thought Trump won because of record low voter turnouts.

Everyone has a theory.

The current popular vote total stands at 127MM votes cast, and the Attorney General of California has already announced that they have at least 3MM absentee and provisional ballots to check, so it's expected that turnout will exceed 2012's 129MM votes cast.

Forgive me for going off-topic here but I'm curious about your reason for using MM to designate 'million'?

I think in the financial industry, particularly in the US, MM is often used to signify millions. MM is also one million in Roman numerals (1000(M) x 1000(M)).

I don't think there's any hard and fast rules globally how one specifies "millions":

https://www.quora.com/What-should-be-the-abbreviation-for-mi...

Wouldn't it be 2000 in Roman numerals?

I thought that too, but there's an implied multiplier. I'm guessing it's one of those examples of borrow and abuse things.

Roman numerals use implied addition and subtraction, not multiplication.

MM may signify million in some contexts, but not in Roman numerals.

> Roman numerals use implied addition and subtraction, not multiplication.

I already agreed to that fact; whilst reluctant to invoke "appeal to authority", I know how Roman numerals work, I studied Latin and Classical Studies. I also said "I'm guessing it's one of those examples of borrow and abuse things".

> MM may signify million in some contexts

I already stated that: I think in the financial industry, particularly in the US, MM is often used to signify millions - I didn't mean everywhere, that was just one example where it's sometimes used.

From my fairly lengthy google searching the rough consensus is that MM has been hijacked from Roman numerals and that there's an implied multiplier. Whether you like it or not, it's just how it is.

Sorry if you took my post the the wrong way. While the use of it was likely inspired by Roman numerals, I read your post as indicating that it actually did mean one million in Roman numerals and wanted to be clear that it did not as I was likely not the only one to understand your post that way.

000's, MM, Bn, Tn, - how to spot a banker :) (I interned at an ibank, not criticizing)

Exactly this. I interned at a pension fund, but now refuse to work in the financial industry.

For a little context, some rough voter totals going back to 2000 (in millions):

While, certainly, there were less votes cast than the last two elections, it doesn't appear to be a record low.

Edit: Sources are Google for 2016 and Wikipedia for the rest.

Don't forget to factor in population growth (above 18 years of age) from 2000 to 2016. Is it enough of a factor to make 2016 the record low? I don't know.

low turnout is just a symptom. the cause was weak enthusiasm for a candidate that didnt emotionally resonate with the public, and had no simple, strong messsage about what she would do.

on the other hand, you had enough enthusiasm from trump's side that they more than compensated for "normal" Republican voters that hated him.

> his opponent was objectively worse

If he really continues with global warming denial and make real effects based on that idea, I'd like to see who will dare to say that to his kids. Just this single issue is enough to make the whole difference.

https://thinkprogress.org/trump-victory-climate-a0c595572299

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Six_Degrees:_Our_Future_on_a_H...

That's also the biggest issue that's still not clear in the confused heads of too much US citizens, and where the real action is needed.

Misinformation paid by the oil companies sadly worked. The good proof than even the side that sees other manipulations isn't immune at all.

As one thinker said: "when you look at somebody and hold your head and think how come the other side just doesn't see the facts, there's a simple answer: you're an idiot, and, by the way, the other side is too. People aren't rational. The proof: almost 50-50 opinions, even among the supposedly "smart" people, on some important subject -- how probable is that to be the reflection of the real rational state of the truthfulness of the issue in question. Effectively zero."

> objectively worse

On what objective metric(s)? Answering this properly is extremely hard.

There is one objective metric on which she definitely was worse: telling lies. And by worse I mean, he told many more of them.

That's part of it, but I wouldn't put it at more than 20-30% of the total explanation.

Ummm that article doesn't seem to notice the whole shit ton of blue in the rural northeast. Like the entirety of Vermont and the Berkshires in Massachusetts. The most populous part of Connecticut appear to be the red parts of Connecticut (looks like Bridgeport?). It's hard to tell but the red parts of New Hampshire seem to be around Portsmouth? Which isn't exactly a city in the traditional sense of the word but certainly nowhere near rural. As an aside Portsmouth drivers are seriously the most polite drivers I've ever encountered. The red part of new York is Buffalo which is the second most populous city in new York state! EDIT: now that I look closer it appears Rochester and Buffalo seem to be tiny little blue dots surrounded by red.

Does this person think the entire Northeast is a giant city?

I don't think you can discount the populations of elderly Democratic voters in these New England rural areas. People that have been voting Democrat since Kennedy or longer.

Maine tilted pretty hard, with the rural 2nd District going convincingly for Trump. However, LePage also gets a lot of support and approval from those same regions, even now, with everything he's said and done, so we may just like blowhards.

I'm not discounting anything just saying the map the author used as proof of his or her hypothesis doesn't follow for the Northeast of the US from first glance. The thing that really stuck out for me was New Hampshire and Vermont. Though it's hard to tell for sure with a tiny unlabeled map. Anyone got a bigger one?

With Vermont, it's sort of notoriously infested with hippies. I'm kind of joking there, but there's a kernel of truth to it. Out of the three rural New England states, Vermont is always the farthest left, and in places there, Bernie Sanders would be considered too much of a centrist.

I'm not sure New Hampshire really falls into anyplace reasonable on the 1D Republican-Democrat axis, except for a standard deviation one way or the other from the middle, shifting with the winds. If you add in the authoritarian/libertarian axis to make it 2D, NH is pretty far up the liberty scale. No income tax, no sales tax, extremely minimal firearms regulation, hell, you don't even have to wear a seatbelt if you don't want to. The southern parts of the state are starting to turn into commuter satellites of Boston, to some extent, but it hasn't really eroded that "Live free or die" character.

That article struck a chord with me. I live in a city, but I am not of a city.

The no-car, 600-square-foot-apartment, minimalist, trendy-restaurant, latest-social-justice-fashion people that surround me feel like a gang of condescending children. They wave policies with reaching consequences like foam fingers at a sports game. They are mugged and then bend themselves into a pretzel to avoid describing the attacker as black and explain the crime as a symptom of economic injustice. They pretend like Hillary doesn't have 20 years of corrupt history and an attitude that approximates the worst of European nobility.

I don't like Trump, but sometimes a giant orange middle finger is needed to break out of a rut.

Does this actually happen? It sounds like a total caricature of what someone thinks city folk are like. I mean, I spent the majority of my life in cities of different sizes and also have friends across the entire Northeast and I travel a lot. Nothing like this actually happens. My extended family are casual racists and complain a lot about Puerto Ricans. Hillary was widely unpopular with everyone I know, liberal, conservative, and moderate. I don't know a single minimalist but know a lot of people who complain they are poor while buying a bunch of junk. When my house was broken into by unknown assailants a friend of mine said "It must be niggers." Nobody really goes around talking about political policies very much, it's almost never a topic of conversation. We are generally just a bunch of normal people and none of us actually do that stuff. We have different culture and mostly different activities than rural Americans but we are not at all like you describe.

We do go to restaurants, coffee shops and bars a lot but never because it's trendy. Actually now that I think of it that wasn't big in one of the cities I lived in.

>They are mugged and then bend themselves into a pretzel to avoid describing the attacker as black

This is absurd and nobody is bending anything. People i know who got mugged said "I got mugged." I do admit i never heard "I got mugged by a black man" but probably because that information isn't entirely relevant but no bending like a pretzel. Unless you believe bending like a pretzel means "not bitching endlessly about an entire race because of the actions of on person."

My caricature is more aimed at urban 20-something hipsters I know, not anyone in a city.

My comment about mugging and race is from repeatedly watching people try to describe criminals in a politically correct way. "20s black guy in athletic gear" makes a lot of people uncomfortable to say when describing a criminal to watch for.

For a great example of pretzel bending, watch this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xfO1veFs6Ho

This is obviously a different topic, but it's a great example of how far SJW and political correctness have gone.

It does happen. This almost perfectly describes my experience living in Durham, NC (the most liberal city in NC, by most counts).

The caricature has some grounding in truth. For example, the crime reports in university news services, where those schools sit in rough areas of town, are comically vague. "Male in a hoodie and jeans"... okay then.

I don't like Trump, but sometimes a giant orange middle finger is needed to break out of a rut.

These are generally the sentiments that are comforting but do not actually make any practical sense. Policies matter, decisions that will make things worse now will in fact make things worse now.

The only people with the luxury of being able to think "it needs to get worse before it can get better" or some approximation of that are people with enough economic and social security to be unlikely to be harmed by the "getting worse". To me that is real smugness.

If the unprivileged had believed that same pablum the Democrats have been feeding them for decades, they would have voted for Clinton like they voted for Obama (in e.g. Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Florida), and she would have won the election. They can see the rut they're stuck in, even if others can't.

> The no-car, 600-square-foot-apartment, minimalist, trendy-restaurant, latest-social-justice-fashion people that surround me feel like a gang of condescending children.

Your complaint is about people who you feel are condescending, yet you are describing them as children?

EDIT: Since I've already been downvoted, perhaps I need to say that I'm pointing out the inherent contradiction in this statement.

I upvoted you, since I think it's a fair question :)

I may be miss reading it, but it is probably not meant to be condescending - They are noticing someone's behavior and use a commonly understood proverbial phrase or idiom to describe it. In this case "gang of condescending children" might have been better stated as "childish attitude and groupthink" as it is meant to portray them as behaving with mentality of elitism that feeds off other people around them who echo and embolden their thoughts, making it very easy for them to dismiss others and their views unilaterally instead of reasoned and compassionate objective reasoning.

This statement might also be used like this - "So when Billy and his friends came back to town from their freshman semester and humanities 101, they were all too eager, like a gang of condescending children, to argue with Billy's WW2 veteran grandpa about how wrong he was about how the world worked and how much more they knew about it."

In a way, rural America was a tech bubble. In the 19th century and earlier, factories were in the city or near water. As the interstate system made shipping cheaper, factories moved out of the cities and coastlines for cheaper land and labor.

Now container shipping has moved factories into cheaper countries altogether. But we have generations of people that have lived in these rural factory towns which now have no factory.

The issue is real and Donald Trump was the only one addressing it. It's just too bad Donald Trump was the only one addressing it.

But Trump didn't actually address it. He acknowledged the problem but didn't provide any tangible solution other than "I'm going to bring your jobs back" which is never going to happen. As you said, rural manufacturing was a buble.

He said he would renegotiate NAFTA, pull out of the TPP, and do something nebulous involving labeling China as a "currency manipulator".

Earlier in his campaign he said he was going to introduce tariffs as well, but I guess that statement didn't count since it's no longer in his "Contract with the American Voter".

These are all strategies to add economic friction to importing foreign goods.

Then he has his immigration push to block importing cheap labour from abroad.

The end result is that American manufacturing and farming done by American citizens will see some improvement but at the expense of the economy as a whole.

I'm not sure if he or his advisers really think of the manufacturing decline as a logical advance of shipping technology. When framed that way, they seem like luddites tearing down the cotton mills. But the platform is definitely not as illogical as everyone makes it seem.

> These are all strategies to add economic friction to importing foreign goods.

They also add economic friction to exporting US made goods, unless these renegotiations somehow manage to result in deals that are very one sided in favor of the US.

The US exports about $310 billion worth of goods annually to Canada, and about $240 billion to Mexico. A lot of US jobs are involved in making those goods.

For some reason I don't understand, exports almost always seem to get overlooked when politicians go on about trade.

Well, he made empty promises for votes. I don't see any way he could realistically bring those jobs back, even with raising tariffs.

I mean, if all it takes is having someone tell them "I'm a Democrat, and we're going to bring your jobs back, promise!", then liberals should start sending some random guy to all these places and saying that at town meetings and local public access channels on a weekly basis to prime and placate them early for the next election.

I wrote another comment in this thread detailing his platform. I think it's a terrible platform and may be ineffectual, but it still makes logical sense.

You don't see how getting a big company to move their industrial robots from Mexico to the US will bring back jobs?

As far as tariffs go, wouldn't raising tariffs actually encourage companies to move their factories outside the US, at least for the bigger companies?

Most of the big manufacturing companies sell their products internationally. If the US slaps big tariffs on products made in country X, presumably country X is going to return the favor with big tariffs on products made in the USA.

As long as the other countries keep their free trade agreements intact among them, so that these tariffs only end up applying to products that go to or come from the USA, then a company that builds its products in the US ends up paying tariffs on sales to every country except the US.

A company that builds its factory in one of the other countries ends up paying tariffs on ONLY sales in the US.

The US is a big market compared to most other individual countries, but if we get into a big tit-for-tat tariff situation it isn't the size of other individual country markets that matter. It is the size of the combined markets of the countries in various tariff-free associations.

Thanks for your thoughts. That is indeed why he will be unsuccessful at bringing the jobs (especially the manufacturing jobs) back into the country.

I appreciated that article, though I hated the headline and the format. I shared it a couple times and had to make apologies for both in order to ensure people would actually read it. The cracked format better serves pop-culture rants.

I found this article similarly enlightening, and a far better read.

https://www.propublica.org/article/revenge-of-the-forgotten-...

I was pretty smug about Trump supporters until I started to see a couple things on/after election night:

1. Clinton underperformed Obama's numbers dramatically in the Rust belt. You can certainly still be a racist if you voted for Obama, but it doesn't necessarily follow that you're a racist if you voted for Trump. There seems to be strong evidence that a number of people in the Rust belt have voted for both men.

2. 20% of exit polled Trump voters do not think he is qualified to be president.

This was a protest vote by many reasonable(ish) people who are telling the rest of us, "We're doing so poorly right now, it really doesn't matter to us if an incompetent narcissist is President."

I honestly don't know what to do next. I've never hated Republican voters, something I seem to be accused of doing by every underlying assumption in articles about division in our country. I suspect that many people are like me, I never hated the other side, but I lost respect for them long ago. I'm going to try to get it back somehow.

A lot of areas around me that went for Obama in the last 2 elections went Trump this time around. And a lot of the areas that went Hillary around here went a lot less heavily Hillary than they did Obama 4 & 8 years ago. This is in suburban New Jersey.

Im not sure there's much evidence of switching.

There are large numbers of people who didn't vote relative to the numbers that separated candidates, so the likely explanation is that people who normally dont vote voted Trump and people who normally would vote Hillary didnt vote. A little bit of those two things would tip it.

Which is what we see: high rural turnout; Hillary underperforming/low turnout in urban areas.

There's just a group of white people who like Trump, and nobody liked Hillary.

I feel like this article is also missing the point. How about the unbearable self-flagellation of the press? I voted for Hillary, but goddamn was she an uninspiring candidate! She played not to lose, and that turned out to be a bad strategy. Donald Trump didn't get some surprisingly high number of votes, Hillary just managed to be even less inspiring than we thought. And now the tone has inevitably flipped to "what did we do wrong? Maybe it was our tone of voice?" Absurd and self-absorbed! Be as smug as you like, just don't be just smug! It's not wrong to reduce Trump's appeal to racism because it's smug, it's wrong because it's wrong. It's lazy thinking. There was a lot of positive and maybe even unfair disdain for trump. But that's not why he won the election. There was also a lot of positive and maybe even unfair hatred for hillary, but that's not why she lost. One candidate was able to harness anger (the way Bernie also did) and one candidate couldn't harness any positively motivating emotions. In fact, hillary was, if anything, the fear candidate. Fear of terrorists (guised as foreign policy experience) and fear of trump himself, fear of his racism and his misogyny. And the press fed those fears, and did little else. Be an smug, who cares. Just be smug for something.

As a non-Trump supporter who's frightened that a loose cannon like him can have his finger on the big red nuclear button, I'm disappointed but not surprised that the mainstream media was smug.

Here's an example MSNBC video clip showing what the article is talking about: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7zL-ip6GH4c

At the 23 second mark in the video, you can see Brian Williams' body language struggling to contain his condescension for Mark Halperin's interpretation of the poll statistics that could point to a Trump victory. Mark wasn't saying Trump will win or even has a good chance of winning. Mark was just saying there's a possible path to winning. Even discussing what's mathematically possible with plenty of hedging, disclaimers, caveats, and uncertainty -- is ridiculed by the mainstream press. Everyone who thinks like Brian was caught up in the same delusion. If they dismiss one of their own professional peers with a minority perspective, it shouldn't be a surprise they treat rural Americans with condescension. (It turned out that Mark was correct in that Trump's late surge would affect the battleground states and that Clinton would misjudge the continued support of previous Obama voters.)

Looking back, a journalist could have assessed Mark's interpretation of the data in 2 ways:

#1) the poll data is a priori correct (there is no hidden Trump vote missed by pollsters) and therefore Mark sees something in the data because he's sympathetic to Trump

#2) Mark is open to the possibility of Trump winning and therefore can see something in the poll data and make (hedged) conclusions about it that all Trump opponents are blind to

It may seem like positions #1 and #2 are just rearranging the words but they are stating opposite cause & effect. They have profound differences in reality. Brian and the rest of msm interpreted any favorable Trump conclusions about the data as situation #1.

It's the same situation with taking Trump's chances seriously when he's characterized as "a clown" or "he insults women":

#1) Trump can't win because he insults women.

#2) Trump can win regardless of whether he insults women.

The mainstream media and elites focused on #1. The election results proved the actual voters standing in line to choose Trump saw the reality as #2.

I think against Elizabeth Warren for example the anti-women sentiment would of had a greater effect on the outcome. Hillary Clinton's comments about Monica Lewinsky while first lady and her defence of Bill's actions makes this a bit of a pot kettle black situation. Somebody like Bernie can take the moral high ground on sexism and racism in a way that Hillary's record prevents her from doing so.

>I think against Elizabeth Warren for example the anti-women sentiment would of had a greater effect on the outcome.

Sounds plausible but it's very hard to tell with a black swan candidate like Donald Trump. So many msm articles about Trump insulting blacks[1] and yet, he got more of the black vote than Romney in 2012[2]. It's another glaring example of the disconnect between what narrative the msm feeds us and what actually happened at the voting booths.

[1]https://www.google.com/search?q=trump+insults+blacks

[2]https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-cage/wp/2016/11/1...

ISTM black Americans are used to (I'm not saying "happy about") being insulted. They meet lots of admitted racists, but also lots of insincere infantilizing jackasses. Obama was neither of those things. The candidates this time around? One of each. Occasionally, one might prefer a different sort of insult...

Hillary getting a child rapist out of serving a very long sentence in prison was a big one, in my own opinion. The fact that she had a taped interview where she laughed it off as no big deal and said she did it 'as a favor' made it indefensible to anyone except an apologist.

> who's frightened that a loose cannon like him can have his finger on the big red nuclear button

I grew up during the Cold War and in Europe we were gobsmacked and terrified when a loudmouthed former actor was voted in as President on a ticket of opposing the SALT II agreement. Indeed he started funding SDI and emplaced GLCM and Pershing II in Europe and it looked like the US nuclear policy was heading towards survivable-first-strike. Survivable for the USA, that is.

But he went on to sign the INF Treaty and very nearly signed START II ( he would have done so if his advisers hadn't derailed him at the Moscow Summit ). He stood on the steps of the Kremlin and recanted his former accusations of 'evil empire' and he pulled us back from the nuclear brink.

You just never can predict...

As a non-American, I completely agree. One of the things I found to be most egregious was how some people used "The KKK endorses Trump" as an argument as to why you shouldn't vote for him. If people only voted based on an organization's endorsement then that organization would have complete control over the election.

They just couldn't comprehend that people could or would vote despite the KKK's endorsement. And reading a lot of opinion articles on a few bigger media outlets (hi NYtimes!): instead of realizing that something may be flawed with their perception, you see them doubling down; saying that people are so racist/sexist/homophobic/<insert insult here> that they actually voted because of that. A massive election figuratively slapping them straight in the face wasn't enough to make so many people think about what they might be doing wrong. Obviously some did, like the linked article but it seems to be such a minority.

It's uncanny.

For someone looking from the outside, it seemed like 90%+ of the media were all on Clinton's payroll or had some kind of deal with her.

It was disgusting, and one of the reasons why I feared a Clinton presidency. So much of the media being unwilling to criticize her and try to destroy her opponents so easily and so intensely. This coupled with the fact that Clinton herself was paying trolls to make positive comments about her on the Internet to the point where they had full control of one of the largest subreddit's on Reddit (likely with Reddit admins' tacit approval, for the same reason Google and Twitter was banning anti-Hillary hashtags and auto-suggestions) reminded me too much of Putin's Russia (ironically enough) to be comfortable with it.

Also, NY Times was bad enough with this, I expected much more from them, but I'll never forgive or forget Washington Post's bias in this election. For a "general purpose" media entity, it was no better than Breitbart or such on the right.

And it goes without saying that CNN, and often MSNBC were even worse. Those two I've already forgotten about.

It spread to the Canadian press (at least Quebec's) like wildfire. Everything I would hear in the media was unapologetically anti-Trump. It lead to a climate where people would just assume that Trump was crazy/racist/mysogenic/untrustworthy, and further confirm their smug idea that the US is full of rednecks. Most people went along with it, and would casually mention how disgusting Trump is, without being able to name one concrete argument for it. "Trump is bad" became an axiom. I'm sure it's been similar in many other countries (including the US).

I think that people assumed Trump was "crazy/racist/myogenic/untrustworthy" because there is ample evidence that he really was each and every one of those things. Most of the evidence is in court documents and on tape, completely verifiable. Don't mistake being a "contrarian" for just being wrong. The media reported the facts on Trump and they assumed that facts mattered, but they did not. Or they did but no one cared about the substance of those facts and what they say about what kind of president he might be.

Perhaps you're right. I might be overlooking these traits because I don't consider these things (except for trustworthiness) very important.

If you think trustworthiness is important then I would suggest that Trump's election should be particularly worrisome.

This is it.

There's a huge gap between the press corps today: Ivy League educated, NYC-bubble lifestyle and the rest of the country.

The bias is palpable.

And I don't like Trump.

I think it is funny/sad that almost every comment online or in person, I find myself feeling I need to add "and I don't like Trump" or equivalent qualifiers, for fear of negative bias in interpretation of any statement I make.]

What happened to where being able to state your opinion or make a logical argument has to to be qualified so you don't get assumed to be racist, or sexist or whatever. I am going to try and unlearn that behavior and assume the best about people until proven otherwise.

Ha, I agree.

But with politics, it's all biased.

I'm not 'in fear' of being called 'racist', but I think it's important to know I have no stake in the game. Political bias is a strong thing.

Because 'saying the media is biased' is a trope that you might find over in Trumpland. Even though the are biased about it, they are effectively correct.

Yes, the corporate press was smug, hubristic, and often hilariously wrong.

I think the best journalism came from people outside the normal news.

Here are three nontraditional journalists who did excellent work:

Nate Silver did the best math.

His final election prediction is like a crash course in data science. Humble, thorough, quantifies uncertainty, acknowledges that errors may correlate. Explained in plain English and illustrated in a way that would make Edward Tufte proud. He lays out three scenarios (polling average accurate, 3-point error for Clinton, 3-point error for Trump). The latter describes in detail pretty much exactly what ended up happening.

http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/final-election-update-th...

Chris Arnade got the best stories.

He's a former bond trader who now travels the country as a photojournalist, befriending and talking to all kinds of people, mostly working-class and poor.

Here's his best work, in my opinion: https://medium.com/@Chris_arnade/divided-by-meaning-1ab51075...

It was the first thing that really helped me understand Trump voters.

Finally, Michael Moore nailed it.

Months ago, he wrote an essay called Why Trump Will Win, asking his liberal audience to campaign hard and not get complacent.

http://michaelmoore.com/trumpwillwin/

It came true pretty much exactly as written.

One of his speeches was taken out of context and edited down into an unofficial grassroots Trump ad. It is the single best pitch for Trump that I have heard:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wxDRqeuLNag

MM really understands the disenfranchised. So many lessons.

Since the beginning it was obvious the people would choose change and it actually looked like they would choose change for the better of you allowed them to (as the Bernie vs Trump polls showed).

But Democrat party decided the people knew nothing and they would just make them choose between what looked like change for the worst or for everything to continue the same.

And well, people really preferred change non the less.

Democrat party should now do some soul searching, stop blaming others for Trump election, and figure out how they allowed Hilary to manipulate so much the DNC in order to push Bernie aside.

> (as the Bernie vs Trump polls showed)

Those same polls also showed Clinton winning handily against Trump. You can't pick one side as proof of your argument when the other side has been proven wrong in reality.

No, that's incorrect. Those polls showed Clinton leading against Trump by 3 points, and Bernie leading against Trump by 10 points.

That's a huge diference.

Ok, I'll remove "handily" - my point still stands that you can't point to polls saying X when they also say Y which has been proven wrong since.

I think its more a question of discovering how they lost ohio and michigan, which are reliably blue states. What strategic nd tactical choices did they make that cause them to lose in so many states that they thought they had won. Clinton was rated 80%+ to win by everyone at the start of the night.

Is it an over reliance on polling? Likely to vote stat seems like a viable arguement

A poorer ground game? In the city I live in Trump came, sold out the colliseum, and Clinton sent Kaine who who sold out a middle school gym. This is in a blue city in a blue state.

Did they just get played by Trump and spend the entire campaign making it about him instead of about Clinton?

I don't know, but at this point they have plenty of time to try to figure it out and they really ought to. After all, it doesn't look like the greens or the libertarians are going to be a viable opposition party in 2 years

> I think its more a question of discovering how they lost ohio and michigan, which are reliably blue states

Michigan I'll grant, but in the last 10 elections, Ohio has been blue 5 times and red 5 times, with a fairly even spread.

To further drive your point: Ohio is the one state that has always voted for the winner, not a single miss. That's as even spread as it gets.

Maybe it wasn't the press? Sure, they were completely one-sided, but look, the opponent won with 0 press by his side. So, why do we think that whatever the media said matters so much? Maybe the rhetoric of the democrats was wrong? Maybe every time hillary unconditionally pandered to minorities or women , a switch flipped inside the head of a voter?

Anyway, if you want to attribute something to the press it's their inability to doubt themselves. This actually begins in academia, where social sciences have switched from arguments to a war of punchlines. Skepticism is the foundation of science.

he won precisely because he had 0 press on his side. when the press exaggerated the idiocy of trump's words and actions, that played right into the anti-establishment sentiment of voters.

as a result when trump really did do dumb things, and the press continue to make him look bad, the public would respond by saying "screw you! u elitists want to make us feel this way but we are going to respond by just not caring twice as much!"

Whether they were on his side or not, they still printed every single thing he said, often in giant letters on the front page.

... thinking that it would deter voters, because they could not fathom that someone might actually agree with it.

As a outside US person, this article is pretty much nailed it. Clearly explained what's going wrong with US media

This might not make Americans feel better but other countries have it even worse. Swedish media has been surreal during this election. You would think the US just elected the literal devil as president.

The Bonnier papers (the single company that totally dominates Swedish media) ran a story about how to talk to your children about Trump, instructing parents to tone down the apocalyptic comments in order not to scare the kids too much.

Most EU media seemed to have parroted CNN throughout the campaign. In a way, the continental europeans were more shocked tham americans. And they continue to do so, e.g. yesterday's guardian was literally a list of lamentations.

Not just Swedish, I imagine all European media too; it certainly looked like Danish and Portuguese (the two I follow closely) media thought that their audience was able to vote in the US elections, the way they were attacking Trump.

French medias are a parangon of complacency, all of them.

I like how in an article written by a liberal acknowledging how condescending the media can be to conservatives, there is a propagation of the myth that in the Middle Ages people thought sickness and demonic possession were the same thing. In fact, the Middle Ages had physicians, nurses, hospitals, and medicine. Not as advanced as ours, but modern medicine didn't just spring up from nowhere.

See for example https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_hospitals#Medieval_... - there were hospitals, and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medieval_medicine_of_Western_E... - medicine certainly involved prayer, but also involved experimenting with different materials to relieve physical symptoms.

What an unbelievably refreshing and honest piece. I have to say it's pretty sad when Wikileaks is doing the job of the press, and the Press is doing the job of paid lobbyists. I'm pointing the statement both sides of the political debate, because it's happened to both.

It’s a profound failure of empathy

So "empathy" is the only thing keeping people from becoming complete shitstains?

Empathy is currently experiencing buzz as a positive value people like conspicuously talking about, but what happened to simple old standards?

I don't need to empathize with someone to treat them as human. Maybe this is one the kind of thing that makes people say "everyone should work in the service industry once in their lives" line, because you have to separate seething hatred from evaluating how to behave.

I would think that "not be an insufferable know better douche that considers some people beneath them and without redemption" is pretty obvious when your job is ostensibly informing the public.

In fairness, if your job is to inform the public, feeling that you "know better" is somewhere between a job requirement and an occupational hazard.

(Actually, the "sweet spot" is where you actually know more, but don't feel like you do.)

The unbearable smugness continues with articles like these

How true. Someone should tell them to shut up, and start talking for the people, not to the people.

What I love is all the people complaining about "liberals" in such broad, stereotypical strokes - kind of ironic, no?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QSfS2u-SmoI

This basically sums it all up. The news anchor deserves a promotion for saving what little dignity they still have left.

I am really enjoying pieces like this, of a dose of humility with self inspection in the wake of the Trump election. Call his election what you will, but if I see more humble news reporting, I'll call that at least some positive.

It's blowing my mind.

The problem is that we allowed this election to be cast as a clash between Corporate America's superego and its id. The fact that Hillary Clinton came from a middle-class Midwestern background and that, while she's absolutely terrible at optics, she's above-average for ethics and honesty among politicians... got missed. People went for raw id rather than what they perceived as the superego of a corrupt system.

I personally think that Hillary is far more liberal than she was given credit for. She's been turned into a cynical pragmatist by 20+ years of bitter experience in politics... and that's not necessarily a bad thing. I think her heart was in the right place all along. She'd probably twist arms and threaten careers of people on both sides of the aisle to get a public option passed, and that's the kind of ballbuster the country needs. However, she's the sort of person who does very well in 1-on-1 interactions but fails with rooms and groups. She has grace but no charisma. She let her self be painted as a duplicitous Establishment hack.

The irony is that Clinton and Trump voters both voted on the premise of their candidate being radically different from what they'd seen. Clinton voters believed that she was a liberal working within the establishment who'd bring us single-payer healthcare. Trump voters (except for the small percentage who actually are "deplorables", meaning racists and sexists and xenophobes) believed that Trump's dog-whistle rhetoric was just cynical game-playing. It bothers me that people accused Clinton of being "two-faced", while supporting a candidate in whom the best-case scenario is that he doesn't believe half the shit he says.

We also have a country where people hate the perceived cultural elite that is occasionally condescending ("flyover country") more than they hate the socioeconomic elite that is actually ruining their lives and that needs, for the good of red and blue staters, to be overthrown. Numbers may explain that. There are more of us in the 4.99% for them to hate than in the 0.01% that something actually needs to be done about (although I doubt that Trump is the solution).

No mention of the lower turnout this year (even as the population continues to grow) or that most voters were actually #WithHer.

The media are suckers for the overton window, and this is calling for more of the same kid gloves that they used during the Bush/Cheney years. No, thanks.

That's not true at all

Using [1], which is still incomplete, and [2], I calculate:

    Turnout (2016) = 49.43% = (60071781 + 59791135) / 242470820 * 100

Using [3], back to 1932 (for no particular reason), I calculate:

    Turnout (1932-2012) = 55.64(± 3.92)%

Obviously, caveats are that (1) the 2016 percentage will continue increase slightly, and (2) using turnouts back until 1932 was arbitrary choice.

[1]: http://www.nytimes.com/elections/results/president

[2]: https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/table/PST045215/00

[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voter_turnout_in_the_United_St...

> most voters were actually #WithHer.

No, they weren't. According to the latest results, Mrs. Clinton received 48% of the popular vote: that means that most voters didn't vote for her.

More voted for her than for Mr. Trump, but neither earned a plurality of the popular vote.

Well.. you're parsing a bit, aren't you?

Clinton received the most votes, that is, the votes of most voters. The number of votes she received didn't represent a majority of the votes cast, but she still received the vote of most voters.

> Clinton received the most votes, that is, the votes of most voters. The number of votes she received didn't represent a majority of the votes cast, but she still received the vote of most voters.

No, that's precisely not the case. She received the most votes, but not most of the votes. She did not receive the votes of most voters: 52% of voters did not vote for her. If we had instant run-off voting, we might know who would have come in first in a head-to-head matchup, but we don't.

Some folks like to blame third parties for their candidates' loss (Bush in '92, Gore in 2000, Clinton in 2016), but I don't think that's fair: we have multiple parties, and the parties are free to nominate the candidate most capable of winning the votes across America. People who voted for a third-party candidate didn't vote for either first-party candidate.

> neither earned a plurality

You mean a majority, no?

Yes, I'm an idiot.

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