America, what you have done?
Good luck with this petition! Let's fight for an open world.
Good luck with this petition! Let's fight for an open world.
Seriously though, I take your point and this is a reminder that if we ignore vocal minorities spouting hate, eventually they may grow big enough to take control. If you see this type of behavior in your own backyard then please vote even if you don't think it will matter.
Remember Hitler and his gangs?
I won't be surprised if a new executive order orders muslims to a camp nearest to them.
God help America!
http://edition.cnn.com/2016/11/11/politics/popular-vote-turn...
And yes, a minority voted for Hillary too. Is that supposed to be some sort of gotcha?
I've thought about the utility of making flagging (for uncivil, unsubstantive comments) the only way to dim comments. I think people want to be able to express agreement and disagreement separate from whether they think the comment is worthwhile or not, though admittedly the disagreement part is harder to distinguish honestly. In that case seeing the vote count would be useful. I don't know. It's hard to predict how community behavior would change as a result, and whether it would be for the better.
That's democracy; that is America or else there is no America. All Americans must own this problem, not say that it's not their fault.
For one thing, it didn't come from nowhere; Trump's policies merely put in action what many in his party have advocated for years. Yet many smart people I know overlooked it and continued to vote Republican.
Geek philosophy (let's pick Yoda this time) applies to Hillary and Donald voters: Fear leads to anger. Anger leads to hate. Hate leads to suffering. Attack the policies, not the voters, not the president. Convincing will happen with compelling arguments that demonstrate these policies are flawed.
This is a bit of propaganda commonly employed by the racist right (I'm not saying you are racist or a member of that group, but IMHO that's the origin of the concept).
In some sense everybody is a minority and no President every has been elected by a majority (a plurality at best), so taking the word "minority" literally is not meaningful. What is meant by "minorities" is groups that are abused by larger groups due to their overwhelming lack of political power. The people who voted for Trump were never slaves, didn't suffer segregation, weren't lynched, aren't suspected of being illegal, and generally are not excluded from power or opportunity due to their race or ethnicity.
Look at any group of powerful people, from Fortune 500 CEOs to members of Congress and Presidents to Silicon Valley leaders to leaders in academia, the military, actors, chefs, coders or almost any other field - look at any college campus - you don't say, 'wow, there sure aren't many white guys there'. White-skinned people make up 66% of the US population; black-skinned are ~12%, Latino ~16%. Those aren't comparable situations.
That doesn't mean that Trump voters don't have legitimate concerns, but they aren't at all a "minority" in the common meaning of the word.
I agree that it is a trap to only blame Trump voters. Some 43% of eligible voters did not vote at all. Some Democrats didn't vote either because they thought it was a sure thing Trump would not win, or due to their own disaffection with a politically flawed candidate (without any respect to what degree this is deserved). And also the general political dialog in the country is fairly abysmal. Many things have conspired to bring us to this point.
I think Democrats, liberals, progressive, moderates, are all best off focusing on policy disputes rather than personal ones.
Unfortunately the best I can do as a single voter in a non-swing state is continuing to petition my representatives. Even then you face futility by having to deal with someone like our esteemed Senator Cory Gardner (R), who goes on CBS to claim that all the people calling and writing his office are "paid protesters".
It seems like a GOP talking point is that they can completely ignore political opposition and democracy. It's just wishful thinking on their part.
Don't stop; it's not futile; the U.S. is a democracy and Gardner, if he wants to be re-elected, will need to pay attention to his constituents.
Or, I have a better idea: point the finger at the people who cast the votes.
Edit: I get it. This doesn't help. The thing is, I don't know how to fix it. It looks like we're just fucked. I'm thinking and trying to come up with a fix but it's not working yet. And in the mean time, when someone tries to blame me for this mess I didn't cause and argued against, I'm going to push back.
2 necessary skills, that everybody can improve, are:
- empathic listening (always using the most generous interpretation of the other person's argument, and then walking back from there to your own opinion, to find common ground)
- problem-solving (look at the big picture, find the problem, and think of a good solution)
> And in the mean time, when someone tries to blame me for this mess I didn't cause and argued against, I'm going to push back.
There's nothing to push back against. This is just political conflict, and it's resolved the same way as any other conflict. If someone calls you crazy, and you reply: "well clearly I'm not crazy!" you may feel right but it's not effective communication.
- Jonathan Haidt's The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion
- Rapoport's Rules: https://www.brainpickings.org/2014/03/28/daniel-dennett-rapo...
- The Principle of Charity: http://philosophy.lander.edu/oriental/charity.html
I'm not exculpating the ethno-nationalist forces (leaders or followers). They are dangerous and wrong (and their more moderate fellow travellers have allowed, for ignoble motives, nasty stuff to fester now for decades).
But when you have a rising class allocating ever rising shares of the world's wealth to itself, resentments will build. The Gates & Thiels of this world are fairly invulnerable and can buy themselves more fiercely guarded and gilded palaces to hide in (ever higher as the oceans rise). But for the rest, you would think even self-interest (let alone ethics) would have encouraged them to use their wealth and power to argue for a fairer polity. They didn't, and it's too late now: here comes the backlash with dizzying speed. It looks to me like we're beyond reason and are headed for widening violence and wars. I hope I'm wrong.
I just can't understand the short-term thinking of many here. The political system is volatile. You have growing radical fringes on both sides of the spectrum, increasingly more organized, more hysterical, and less factual.
Blaming "the other side" achieves what? Put your egos aside and look at the big picture. How do you avoid total dislocation of the country?
This was all predictable. All this is, is an escalation of political conflict between the left and right. How do you resolve conflict? Not by yelling at the other side, or telling them "they're responsible for their votes". You resolve conflict through competent communication. Most people don't want to do that, since it's easier to attack.