You Are Still Crying Wolf
slatestarcodex.com
slatestarcodex.com
However, the people who he surrounds himself with, are. This article makes no mention of Steve Bannon, who suggested too many Asian CEOs is a threat to civic society [0], and ran a website that peddled anti-Semitic and anti-Muslim conspiracy theories. Come January 20th, he'll be the chief strategist for the nation's highest office.
Nor does it mention Kris Kobach, the Kansas Secretary of State who has ties to white nationalist groups [1]. He's now on Trump's transition team.
I don't doubt Trump's intentions, but it's looking like the alt-right is using his campaign (and will use his administration) for their own ends.
[0] https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/how-bannon-flattered...
[1] https://www.splcenter.org/hatewatch/2015/11/02/what%E2%80%99...
That was my biggest gripe with the article. Otherwise I thought it was refreshing to read such a well-presented argument, regardless of whether or not I agreed with his points.
Back to the issue: the kinds of people Trump seems to be surrounding himself with shows bad judgment, which is very concerning and should not be downplayed. We have many reasons to be wary of his presidency but maybe they're not the ones people shout loudest about.
And while we focus on all of this dog-whistle, he's secretly a racist BS, we lose focus on the the true ways that he's a bad president.
I don't he would have won the election if the focus had been on "is Trump a good president" instead of "is Trump a racist".
Interestingly, an earlier version of the article did contain a defense of Bannon, concluding that the accusations that Bannon is anti-semitic suffer from the same issues as the accusations of Trump's racism. I can't find it online any more, but it included the sentence: I feel like a non-wolf-crying person might reserve “anti-Semitic” for the sort of people who don’t even have longstanding Orthodox Jewish friends/employees with degrees in Jewish Studies who are willing to write long defences of them.
The reference is to this recent article by Joel Pollak, who claims that 'Steve is a friend of the Jewish people and a defender of Israel': http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2016/11/14/stephen-k....
Separately, Alan Dershowitz also says that accusing Bannon of anti-Semitism "demeans the term": http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2016/nov/16/alan-dershow...
I don't know if Alexander removed this section because he came across new information, or because he thought it was a distraction from the main theme of the article. Personally, I have no knowledge of Bannon other than what's been recently reported in the media. But without defending Bannon's other views, there does seem to be evidence that 'anti-semitic' may not be an entirely accurate accusation.
This question is not meant to be facetious, I would like to hear from you what effect you hope to have by raising them and who you hope to influence.
I have seen many many people raise points like this over and over again and have come to the conclusion that it seems mostly to be tailored towards people who already think such point raised are 'bad' and so it's of limited effect on those who might support Bad Thing regardless.
But I may well be wrong.
I'm aiming to come across as non-combative here and am interested in hearing how you or others who raise point like this hope them to influence others.
Perhaps you don't intend for them to do so and are just sharing an opinion? I have seen lots of people share this sort of thing e.g 'He's not X but others near him are X so I imply you shouldn't support him'.
That might not be your intent, but if it is, can you expand on how you think this would be effective?
And again, this isn't meant to be singling you out, I'm interested in the conceptual argument of how we influence others.
"Show me your friends and I'll tell you who you are"
It's absolutely pertinent to the discussion what kind of people Trump willingly choses to put into positions of influence.
As for why people are responding... I don't understand. The premise of the article is Trump's attitudes (and therefore possible actions) towards people of other races. If we disagree with the article, isn't this the place to discuss it?
I'm interested in how what we share hopes to influence others of a different viewpoint.
So to you:
"It's absolutely pertinent to the discussion what kind of people Trump willingly choses to put into positions of influence."
To someone else it wouldn't be, so I'm interested in, for example, how you'd go about influencing/debating with someone who didn't share that viewpoint?
The GP post does something I've seen a lot and raises a point with an implication that because they find that point to bad, it obviously is bad and no further persuasion is needed.
For instance:
"I don't doubt Trump's intentions, but it's looking like the alt-right is using his campaign (and will use his administration) for their own ends."
That's reads as an implication that this is a bad thing, perhaps because alt-right is bad.
I'm interested to hear how the poster would hope to influence someone of the opposing view (that alt-right is good). To me, it would seem that raising a point that someone else thinks is actually good wouldn't be a way to change their mind, but I see almost everyone in this and other debates do it.
So I guess I'm just trying to understand what/how raising points like this (one the poster holds self-evident if holding their viewpoint but otherwise unpersuasive) could hope to persuade someone who thought the point raised was actually good.
I'm also trying to avoid sounding like a dick over this. I don't know everything so my view that this sort of point raising might not work may be wrong, so I'm trying to ask about the actual process of influencing others who share different views.
That isn't the point. If someone believes that the alt-right is good, it is very difficult to convince them otherwise, and this isn't anywhere near an argument towards that end.
Instead, this is an argument for people like me, who are unsure of Trump's intentions and who are looking at the article's arguments that Trump is not leaning in unsavory directions.
The idea is that, even if Trump is no worse than any traditional Republican, he is surrounding himself with people who are.
Did you find the point important/did it have an effect on your pre-existing opinion?
There is room for such arguments, of course, but not every discussion needs to be framed as winning over the Alt-right.
In this case, I think what people are trying to achieve is to say to those who are generally liberal: "No! Don't normalize Trump and his allies' behavior. Don't say that everything is ok when it is not. Because then you start to ignore it when it becomes true in way that are subtler than you expected, like banning Muslims without using a scary-sounding "Muslim Registry" [1]"
The normalization of this president is part of what allowed so many people to sit out the election. See also https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/nov/15/dangerous-fa...
[1] http://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2016/11/16/13649764/t...
I was just interested in kicking off a more on-topic discussion about 'influence' and how one might do that, and less about the specific politics.
Not that it matters much as the post has been flagged now anyway.
Both New Yorkers and businessmen have been racist before, and race based discrimination has been a not-infrequent source of legal troubles for Trump.
And that's not even considering campaign rhetoric.
That, however, does not preclude wilfully pandering to & profiting from the racial prejudices of others - "acting racist" as compared to "being racist", if you will. And I believe he's far less innocent on that count.
For a good illustrative example, consider the historical incident where the DoJ sued him & his company for refusing to rent to black people[0]. I see no need to assume he did that out of any personal dislike of ethnic minorities - far more plausible, IMO, is that his motivation was the (arguably accurate, if distastefully cynical) notion that it was more profitable to discriminate: a combination of factors (eg, "white flight", and the generally-worse employment prospects for black people - ie, consequences of past institutional discrimination & of the prejudices of others) would have meant that renting to black people could be bad for the bottom line.
Or take his final campaign advert, with its ominous talk of a "global power structure" who "control the levers of power" over grained-up photographs of influential Jews[1] - again, I very much doubt Trump himself is personally anti-semitic; but I find it hard to argue with the interpretation (shared by the ADL, among others) that it was designed to pander to the anti-semitic sentiments that some parts of the electorate hold. And if reports from inside his campaign[2] are to be believed, Trump insisted on editorial oversight on every TV ad - so it's not like that could be passed off as, say, Bannon running that message without his knowledge.
That particular case does cause me to take exception to the article's somewhat histrionic passage about anti-Trump people crying "globalists? that means jews!": they're pointing out the anti-semitic euphemisms, not coining them - the author's shooting the messenger a bit there. That said, I do take his point that it could lead people who do earnestly blame "globalists" for their problems, with no prejudiced intent, into the arms of those who use the term in its anti-semitic sense.
Regardless, all-in-all, it's an interesting and thought-provoking essay - even if I don't agree with all of it.
[0] http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2016/sep/...
[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/11/06/se...
[2] http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/07/us/politics/donald-trump-p... (subheading "I'm Going to Win")
But to answer your four questions, none of those things are racist. Two of them are discriminatory, one is addressed directly in the article and the last one is plain and simply concerning, but it's not racist.
Again, not defending them, just recontextualizing. You're doing exactly what the OP is calling out: Painting everything as racist rather than attack the actual issues. This is how we got in this mess.
How is discrimination based on race not racist?
Students house-sharing at universities.
Online dating.
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/donald-trum...
It is against all principles that America is founded on. It is utter bigotry and yet it is happening.
At the core of these issues you'll find people who are being sold solutions to a problem they personally have, regardless of the problem being valid. Labeling those issues and people as racist does nothing to help, and it's certainly not a solution. Especially when the labeling is wrong - I know a lot of trump supporters who want nothing to do with any of the discriminatory bullshit, yet people call them racist as soon as they speak out. This is a real problem, it's not something that's happening to a couple of guys out of 300 millions.
1. >Why am I harping on this?
>I work in mental health. So far I have had two patients express Trump-related suicidal ideation. One of them ended up in the emergency room, although luckily both of them are now safe and well. I have heard secondhand of several more.
2. No mention of Bannon? This article was written yesterday, and we knew Trump had chosen Bannon to be his right-hand man long before then.
3. No mention that Trump believes that an American judge of Mexican heritage can't judge him? Of the birther claims? Or of playing to white fears with completely make-believe images of "inner cities" being war zones?
4. The jiu jitsu over saying that banning "All Muslims" from entering the country isn't really racism because "most Muslims are white(ish)" is nonsense.
5. And yes, it is special pleading. The author goes out of his way to explain things in a way that is unique to Trump:
> 15. Don’t we know that Trump supports racist violence because, when some of his supporters beat up a Latino man, he just said they were “passionate”?
> When Trump was asked for comment, he tweeted “Love the fact that the small groups of protesters last night have passion for our great country”.
> I have no idea how his mind works and am frankly boggled by all of this, but calling violent protesters “passionate” just seems to be a thing of his. I think this is actually a pretty important point. Trump is a weird person.
Oh. Ok. He doesn't support beating up people. He's just "weird."
----
Edit: Also the author seems to have confused two statements of "passion." Trump's tweet about "small groups of protesters" was made just the other day. Instead, after the beating up of the Latino man, he said
"I will say, the people that are following me are very passionate, they love this country, they want this country to be great again."
Note that not only is he calling those men "passionate," he is essentially justifying their actions by bringing up their "love of country," which is particularly telling in the case of men beating up an immigrant.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/11/11/do...
The first one was dismissive, the second one was supportive. Why not discuss them both?
The other one that jumped out at me was the taco bowl. I'm pretty sure lots of racists like tacos, tacos are delicious. So liking tacos doesn't say a whole lot. I'd go so far as to say that ham-fisted pandering using a taco bowl says more than liking tacos.
Most people don't talk this way, but everything he says about minorities lumps them together: "The Hispanics." "The Blacks." "The Muslims."
> “I have a great relationship with the blacks, I’ve always had a great relationship with the blacks.” [1]
> “The Hispanics are going to get those jobs, and they’re going to love Trump.” [2]
> “I’m doing good for the Muslims,” [3]
[1] http://firstread.nbcnews.com/_news/2011/04/14/6471219-trump-... [2] http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/donald-trump-border_us_5... [3] http://www.cnn.com/2015/12/09/politics/donald-trump-don-lemo...
The essence of racism is the refusal or inability to understand others as fully human. It's possible to be racist without hate.
My father didn't hate Chinese people, he liked them and respected them, but he couldn't quite see them as the same as him in the fundamental way. He said once, "Chinamen make good citizens."
When I visited New York City, I noticed that the races got along but self-segregated. I went to a large business cafe and all the tables were each one "race": Blacks, Whites, Asians, Hispanics.
Growing up in San Francisco my friends and all the people I knew were pretty eclectic: Hawaiian-born Chinese, Mexican-American Mormon, Japanese/White (his mom called herself a "rice-clackah" ("cracker" is a racial pejorative for White, and Japanese people stereotypically have trouble pronouncing the 'r' sound) she loved scandalizing people with that...), Black bi-sexual, etc..., and none of us every really "tripped" on it. We were all just people hanging out together.
Like Sesame Street, we were the real thing of what you see on Sesame Street.
I don't want to be all East Coast v. West Coast, but I definitely feel weird when I hear people talk about "I love the Blacks."
"BLACK people" vs. "black PEOPLE"
To quote Bob Marley (quoting Haile Selassie): "Until the colour of a man's skin / Is of no more significance / than the colour of his eyes"
And here's Albert Einstein: "A human being is a part of the whole called by us universe, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feeling as something separated from the rest, a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty."
I do still believe that he, and most people, are racist in the sense of having a hard time relating to "The Other" as another aspect or manifestation of "Self". But here we are getting far from the political and into deeper interpersonal relations. In other words, this is something that can't really be addressed by laws, so it is formally outside the bailiwick of the POTUS. However, I would still rather the POTUS be someone conducive to the greater good. Trump seems out of his depth here, as in so many other areas.
The standard, and in my opinion most useful, definition of a racist is "a person who believes that a particular race is superior to another" not "having having trouble relating to people of different backgrounds". That's not racist, its just human.
You see, I've seen "Gremlins II".
To me, voting for Donald Trump is like voting for Yosemite Sam. This is so much worse than Governor Schwarzenegger. I wake up in the middle of the night and experience a shock when my mind presents the thought, "President Trump". It's like Arthur Dent's early morning scream of horror as he recalls that he's stuck on prehistoric Earth. And this is all before we get to the racism, climate-denial, and so on.
Tuesday night he sent his spokeswoman Hope Hicks to tell the press pool that he's in for the night. Then he bails and goes to dinner without telling the press, leaving Hicks to pick up after him. So either Hicks lied to the press or her boss burned her. The whole thing is unpresidential in my opinion, and no racism in sight.
-----
Quite frankly, I am in an existential crisis. The world no longer makes sense to me. The world that contains "President Trump" as a real thing is like... unreal. It's like I've woken up in some alternate reality, except it's not.
This is real.
Millions of people voted for Donald Trump for POTUS and to me that makes no sense.
I don't think I'll do anything. What is there to do? Why bother?
That was all thought of before I saw your comment updates. I hope you can figure out something that you feel is constructive. Feeling hopeless is terrible.
And yet, here we are.
So I don't want to participate. It's all fun and games until somebody elects Donald Trump president. Now I want off the planet, or back through the looking-glass, or whatever. I said, half-jokingly, that if Trump got elected I was going to sit in the middle of the largest nearby intersection with a sign around my neck saying "Give me food or kill me" and wait for death. I can't actually do that because I'm the breadwinner in my family, but yeah. Take my BS with a grain of salt: I'm a lonely curmudgeon with no friends who rarely leaves the house. ;-)
As for constructive and effective things to do, call your reps, participate in government, keep communicating your values in word and deed.
I really don't think this geriatric clowntroll will last four years. He has no idea of the demands that are going to be placed on him, and I think it will wipe him out in short order.
What if there’s a candidate who does something more like, say, go to a KKK meeting and say that black people are inferior and only whites are real Americans?
We might want to use words like “openly racist” or “openly white supremacist” to describe him. And at that point, nobody will listen, because we wasted “openly white supremacist” on the guy who tweets pictures of himself eating a taco on Cinco de Mayo while saying “I love Hispanics!”
In other words, if this guy is already a 10 on the racism scale, what do we do when somebody even worse turns up? Do a Spinal Tap and turn it up to 11?
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/donald-trump-taco-bowl_u...
This one, no accusations of racism:
http://www.theverge.com/2016/5/5/11603760/donald-trump-taco-...
Nope:
http://www.usnews.com/news/articles/2016-05-05/donald-trump-...
Only the tweet from W. Kamau Bell:
http://www.cnn.com/2016/05/05/politics/donald-trump-taco-bow...
The reaction to it wasn't OMG that proves he hates hispanics, it was WTF.
So what it boils down to is that when a guy who might be racist eats a taco, all you learn from the eating of the taco is that a taco was eaten. The tweet isn't relevant to answering the question. It's noise, it's not evidence in either direction.
"When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best. They’re not sending you. They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people."
Note how totally non-racist this statement is. I’m serious. It’s anti-illegal-immigrant. But in terms of race, it’s saying Latinos (like every race) include both good and bad people, and the bad people are the ones coming over here. It suggests a picture of Mexicans as including some of the best people – but those generally aren’t the ones who are coming illegally.
It's not just that Alexander chooses as the first words following Trump's most famous racist quote "note how totally non-racist this statement is", but also the degree to which his logic insults the reader's intelligence. Mexicans "include some of the best people" (note that Trump didn't say that --- he said that their best people don't come here), just not the ones who come here illegally (note that Trump didn't say that --- he's talking about all Mexican immigrants). Alexander's own paragraph isn't even coherent on this point!
1. "Sending." This isn't Castro's boat lift. No one's sending anything. As a general rule, you have to have bigger ambitions than your options to emigrate.
2. "Their best" == you. Or perhaps he means "not even sending you".
3. Yes, the immigrants are poor and poverty is associated with crime. The other half of that is that illegal immigrants are more likely to be victims, especially since they often feel that they cannot report crimes.
4. "Some, I assume, are good people." Maybe. Although I have never met one. Or heard of anyone who thinks they're good people. Ok, I admit, they're literally Mephistophiles incarnate.
Although the article is mostly pretty good, I have no idea how the author reached the conclusions he did here.
In immigration you never get a representative set of the source nation's citizens. Sometimes you get lucky, like the US around WW2 and you get mostly the intellectuals and people who are well of. It's no secret that Syrian refugees in Europe are disproportionately physically able males. And sometimes people look back at some immigrant influx and decide to make a movie called Scarface.
Shutting any discussion of that topic down as "racist" speaks not well of America.
What? I never heard that before, so took exactly on minute to Google "Syrian refugee demographics" and found that this myth originates with Ben Carson.
In fact about 49.5% of Syrian refugees are male, and only 21.8% of them are males ages 18-59.
https://www.factcheck.org/2015/09/stretching-facts-on-syrian...
Numbers for Europe look different. Lukily eurostat (the statistics department of the European Commission) has a great statistics tool. [2] shows that about 60% of Syrian refugees registered in Europe are male (a bit less in the last three months, more in the past). Of these males, about 50% are between 18 and 34 years old (again, it was more extreme, is becoming more normal in recent months) [3].
Compare this to the Syrian population (for example with data from the CIA world factbook), and you find that the people arriving in Europe are more likely to be male, and more likely to be young males, than the average Syrian population. It's not the gigantic trend that some people make out, but that's why I said "disproportiantely", not "exclusively". In any case it's no myth but a very real trend.
1: http://data.unhcr.org/syrianrefugees/regional.php
2: http://appsso.eurostat.ec.europa.eu/nui/show.do?query=BOOKMA...
3: http://appsso.eurostat.ec.europa.eu/nui/show.do?query=BOOKMA...
What the author seems to be concerned with is: How does a guy that is blatantly evil in many ways in the eyes of so many people actually get a large percent of the vote? How did we get there?
It's making a pretty solid case that there is a lot of either baseless or unnecessary attacks against Trump's character which dilute the actual issues. Or maybe I'm extrapolating from what I believe is already the case, but it does give some other perspectives.
It doesn't matter that these perspectives "fall apart", the author isn't actually defending Trump. When you talk about perspective, it could be written by a bowl of soup and still be valid.
I mean, for fuck's sake, he tries to claim that Trump is less racist than Mitt Romney. There nobody in the world who believes that, except for Alexander's readership, who want badly to believe it.
Folks've gotten sloppy, and it's costing them in these sorts of arguments, you included tptacek.
Is it the notion of a judge being unprofessional to the point of biased an unacceptable thing to imply?
(No.)
My understanding is that judges, particularly at the higher levels, are assumed to be capable of remaining impartial unless there is a specific conflict of interest. Specific, like "I was involved in this case as a judge at the circuit level" or "I was an investor in this company" etc.
Do you agree that such a suggestion in that case would be out of line?
On [0], it does mention a case with that situation.
> In 1974, Federal Judge Leon Higginbotham issued his decision in Comm. of Pa. v. Local 542, Int'l Union of Operating Engineers, explaining why he as an African American judge with a history of active involvement in the civil rights struggle was not obligated to recuse himself from presiding over litigation concerning claims of racial discrimination.
Further thought and I agree that the judge should not need to recuse himself from said case (in your question). However, that's a distinction on whether the suggestion itself is out of line. In the quoted snippet, the judge did have to point out an explanation for his sitting it, so at the least, there seems to be some consideration for the suggestion.
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judicial_disqualification
Has a white judge ever needed to explain why he didn't excuse himself on a case regarding race? Why not? Why is the white judge the default "impartial" judge, and the black (or Mexican) judge the one who is assumed to harbor bias?
(Edit: An in your example, it's really the "active involvement in civil rights struggle" that is more pertinent, not his race. We judge people by what they do, not the color of their skin or the origin of their grandparents.)
But another issue that this article completely ignores is the subtle sexism that permeated the Trump campaign. Catch phrases like 'Trump that Bitch'; or when Guiliani says
"Don’t you think a man who has this kind of economic genius is a lot better for the United States than a woman, and the only thing she’s ever produced is a lot of work for the FBI checking out her emails?"
Note this was distorted by people on the left to show that Guiliani is openly sexist by ending the quote after 'woman', and pretending it didn't continue. But as a full statement, this juxtaposition of man and woman, one glorified and the other dismissed, phrased as a rhetorical question, actually reads pretty sexist to me.
I also tend to think the alt-right movement much bigger than the 50K that the author claims. It's not very monolithic, there are many related off-shoots. For example, the associated /r/TheRedPill has 170K members, and that's just one of them.
I'm sure there will be argument over the semantics and specifics but that's not important to the points I want to make and which is implied in this piece:
1) If you continually brand some group of people as some derogatory thing if all they want to do is talk about an issue, it's only a matter of time before they stop listening to you.
2) If your only response to dissent to your world view is to brand the dissenter some derogatory term and then turn inward to others of your own mind, it's only a matter of time before you lose influence outside your inner circle.
3) You can't hope to influence others behaviour by labelling them something you yourself would hate to be labelled. The label may have no meaningful effect on them, other than to reject your statement entirely, thus actually diminishing your effect on them.
The trouble with all these things is people cherry pick statements, occurrences, inferences and associations to match their own narrative. This includes the media, popular groups and individuals themselves, despite the double standards this might expose when their favoured candidate/group does the exact same thing (of has done it previously).
Only through actually communicating with others of differing viewpoints in somewhat of a reasoned fashion can any effective influence hope to be achieved.
Point 16 brings up especially good angle on this so skip to that if you don't read the rest.
The conclusion is one I support strongly too - stop fear-mongering, stop labelling dissenters racist, stop playing identity politics.
As a side note it's happening here in the UK over Brexit. Despite unemployment going down, retail sales up faster than any time in the last 15 years, the economy growing etc etc it's all framed in the context of 'yeah but everything is going to go to shit and you're all racists for not wanting free movement'.
Sure, be suspicious/cautions/prepared of/for the future but don't actively sabotage it before it's happened, or all you've done is create a self-fulfilling prophecy.
And I wish more people wrote pieces like this one that actually discuss the political/economic arguments without descending into name-calling. It was too hard to find well-written pieces on Brexit before the vote (perhaps harder on the Leave side but I'm not sure) and this is still the case.
I did this because a lively discussion sharing all sorts of random data was taking place between my friends, most of whom were simply pushing a biased narrative for once side of the other.
I parsed some of the plain data from the ONS and all it lead to was killing the debate dead. Literally no one wanted to continue when faced with actual data to work from.
That point has sort of turned my opinion on these events really. It's not about facts, it's about emotional viewpoints and personal world views and facts be damned. There seems to be so little actual reasonable debate seemingly because so few people actually want that.
Both sides of the Brexit campaign peddled absolute horseshit and people lapped it up to validate their preexisting views. And that worries me because the destination at the end of that particular road is blind extremism.
[0] https://josharcher.uk/blog/brexit-eu-referendum-uk-immigrati...
> It's not about facts, it's about emotional viewpoints [...] facts be damned.
This is absolutely my experience as well.
Thanks for sharing your post, I'll check it out!
I don't live in the US but this election has made me extremely sad. The amount of false information on both sides, causing both sides to become even more entrenched into their beliefs and hostile to each other.
And like I said in a previous post: at the end of the day, blue states voted blue, red states voted red and swing states were won/lost on very, very few votes. If you removed TV and media from the equation (that is, if you removed the ridiculous 1+ year long campaign season in the US), this election would look as if it were just any old regular election.
People like to say Trump is an outsider but this isn't his first presidential bid and he seems to have been preparing for this for a long time. And for an outsider, he knows how to play politics really well. He knew to hijack the republican platform in his favour, for example. He played the media like puppets, giving him a ton of free air time.
There's very, very real issues with not just his campaign but the upcoming 4 years. The people he already appointed, or is considering appointing to his staff for example (including the famous climate change denier as head of the EPA; and people are also already mentioning Bannon here in the comments). But when the data is drowning in a ton of nonsense noise about assassinations, conspiracies and ad hominems, neither side even wants to hear the issues anymore. When you've spent a year building up a few grand canyons worth of divide between the two parties, no matter how loud you shout the other side is not going to hear you.
Edit: This quote deserves a highlight:
Remember that thing where Trump started out as a random joke, and then the media covered him way more than any other candidate because he was so outrageous, and gave him what was essentially free advertising, and then he became President-elect of the United States? Is the lesson you learned from this experience that you need 24-7 coverage of the Ku Klux Klan?
Edit 2: Sigh, the article's been flagged. There goes any hope of actually having a discussion about shit that matters.
Users flagged it, and were correct to flag it.
I understand the desire to use HN to discuss "shit that matters", a.k.a. political and social controversies, but it isn't what HN is for. Were we all to let it be what HN is for, HN would become like all the other places we come here to get away from.
This has been distorted by the political season. We can't expect to be immune to macro trends. But that makes it even more important to remind ourselves what HN is and isn't. Is: a place to gratify intellectual curiosity. Isn't: a political or ideological battlefield.
I definitely don't want to start a "flagging this article is censorship!!" flamewar, I'm just curious about the rationale. And even though I've been posting here for a while I'm still relatively new and don't know all the rules and conventions. This is the first flagged article that I found interesting and worthwhile. (In fact I read the article, then went back to read the comments here, and had trouble finding it again because it was flagged!)
That's what's happening. Users flagged this story, moderators haven't touched it. My comment just says why I think the user flags were correct.
Edit: btw, on HN the term "flag" and the "[flagged]" marker always indicate community action: users clicking on links that say 'flag'. Moderators do other things, some of which are visible and some not, but we didn't do anything here. We never use the word 'flag' to describe a moderator action (we might say 'penalize' or 'downweight' instead). On HN you can think of 'flag' as a semi-technical term with a precise definition.
That's what's happening.
Discouraging discussion of this story may be the best for HN, but it doesn't seem fair to call this a 'community decision' unless the number of flags is comparable to the number of upvotes. If it's not, once the moderators have noticed the flagging, it seems fair to say that the moderators have made a decision that the minority should prevail. Again, this isn't necessarily a bad decision, but once you've reviewed it I think you should own it as informed editorial moderation.
On HN you can think of 'flag' as a semi-technical term with a precise definition.
Sometimes articles are marked as both [flagged] and [dead]. What's the difference in status between the two? I thought flagged meant the article was moved down the list, but I didn't find this one present even when following 'More' to the end. Is 'vouching' something that is possible only on [dead] articles? Does it make sense to view 'vouch' and 'flag' as counteracting each other? Even if it doesn't make the article visible again, it might be nice if it was possible to register a 'no-flag' dissent.
Re second para: User flags make a post drop in rank and, beyond a certain threshold kill the post as well (unless it has many comments). [flagged] means there are lots of flags. [dead] means the post was killed. A [dead] a.k.a. killed post is closed to new comments and is visible only to users who have 'showdead' set to 'yes' in their profile. Flags are one way for a post to become dead, but there are others, such as the site being banned. Moderators typically don't kill posts, unless we're banning a user or a site. Vouches are anti-flags but only exist when a post is [dead]; their purpose is to counteract any flags that are making the post be [dead]. You're right that we could have 'vouch' show up even if an article is merely [flagged] rather than [dead]. I'd have to think a bit about that. Have I answered your questions? :)
Outside of a clickbaity headline which plenty of valid articles have, how does this article qualify as the item of a "political or ideological battlefield"?
People are just confused with of all the rhetoric against war while the games continue in the Middle East. The war against terror while "moderate rebels" with ties to Al-Qaeda are treated as allies. The raising inequality paired with the dogma of the free market while we rescue banks as soon as the free market breaks down. Where the Democratic party approved NAFTA while being the natural allies of labor. Where Bill Clinton passed the Crime Law but is remembered as an ally of minorities.
In this climate where one position and the opposite one are true at the same time it's not strange that somebody like Trump can arrive, start spewing bullshit and still be taken seriously as long as he calls out the establishment.
I mean sure Bezos might feel a bit silly, you buy a whole newspaper to help influence the proles and they still vote wrong! But he's not actually writing the articles. The people writing the articles now have a whole juicy 4 years to peddle outrage and the eyeballs that fund them will lap it up.
The problem is that the vast majority of people creating content are not selling that content. We do not have a market of ideas or a market of information we have a market of viewer eyeballs. And in that market peddling emotionally appealing hyperbolic lies is apparently great business.
Otherwise he makes a good point about some over-hyping of the racist tropes, but doesn't ultimately support his argument IMO. Other comments here have discussed that clearly though.