Biden wins White House, vowing new direction for divided U.S. | Hacker News Reader

Biden wins White House, vowing new direction for divided U.S.

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As many have pointed out, a dozen or so submissions on this topic were flagged by users. That's actually the immune system working as intended, but another component of the system is that moderators rescue the very most historic stories so HN can have a single big thread about them. We did that 4 years ago, also for Brexit, etc.

Since this was the first submission on the topic, it seems fairest to be the one to restore. (It's still on our todo list to have some form of karma sharing for situations like this, to make it be less of a race and/or lottery.)

I changed the URL from https://www.cnn.com/ since that is not the most useful link and the AP seems as close as one can get to a neutral source.

There's a famous optical illusion with a spinning silhouette of a dancer. When you look at it, you'll swear it's spinning in one direction -- say, counter-clockwise. In fact, you'll be so sure it's spinning counter-clockwise, that the idea it could be spinning in the opposite direction will seem impossible to you. But if you stare at it long enough, and intently enough, you can make it spin the other way.

I've noticed the same phenomenon with political views.

People on the left think that anyone on the right is a lunatic, and everyone on the right thinks the same thing about the left. I, as most people do, lean in one direction politically, so naturally any comment I see coming from my side seems reasonable to me. In fact, it seems impossible that a reasonable person could think any other way. But since I grew up in a family that leaned in the opposite direction, and I shared their same mindset in my younger days, I can now draw on that experience, and I can take a political tweet that everyone on my side thinks is insane, and I can stare at it, and just as with the spinning dancer, I can flip it in my head so it seems reasonable.

To me, it's a testament to the power of the tribal instincts within us. We think it's the other side that's crazy, but we're all under the same spell.

I think this is a really valuable way of thinking. Something similar I wish everyone would ask themselves is "why do I have this opinion/belief/etc?" for any topic.

Just like most religious people are the religion that their parents were, most people don't really choose their political beliefs. It's not to say we don't learn justifications for what we believe, but it means that the fact that we believe in one thing over another is somewhat random imo.

Somewhere out there in the US is someone who's pretty similar to me in most ways, they were just born in a part of the country where their default beliefs are different.

And for consistency, I do put more stake in someone's beliefs when they change from their "defaults".

Here's another one: https://i.pinimg.com/originals/59/c3/f3/59c3f3e74d9ca7f2ce94...

Political language "is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind"

This feels a lot like GP/OP — Orwell’s politics and the English language, let’s metaphor away values and principles to the relativity of sounds from our meat flaps and we will all be free of this human condition

Growing up in a country where I was in the ethnic majority, I went through a period of right-wing political bent as a teenager. Then I came to the US, where I found myself in the minority and leaning left. So I feel that I have some personal insight into the mindset that pushes people right. But... maybe it’s that my past right-leaning self was a teenager with half-baked ideas about the world, when I reflect on what drove me that way, I cannot point to any coherent, constructive thought, mostly feelings of entitlement and an unwillingness to put myself in the other’s shoes. And that’s what I see in the right-wing of today in the US. I guess I empathize with their fear and anger better because of my experience, but I don’t buy that their arguments are just a “different” way of looking at the world; a narrower, myopic way, maybe.

As a minority considered “disadvantaged” in the US I’d like to counter that there’s a lot more to the right than lack of empathy for minorities or fear. I’m very appreciative of the opportunities provided to me here and don’t appreciate the recent cultural tendency to privilege shame people or to look back on the history here as only cruel or exploitative.

Trump saw the highest turnout among minorities for republicans in 60 years and it’s for a reason. I look back at Ben Franklin or Jefferson or Washington and feel inspired, I don’t think “oh, I’m not privileged I could never do what he did.” I can see people as products of their time and separate the good from the bad. As someone who grew up in an apartment shared between 2 families and worked my way up into college and the tech field I’m just shocked at how many people today have grown into learned helplessness and think that the system is so bad and irreparable that they need to vandalize and protest in cities for months.

The left has done so much more to insult me and my appreciation for this country than the right, and it’s just tragic that they think they’re the only good guys. I really do believe that foreign interference to agitate our society is real, as discussed by Tristan Harris in his interview by Joe Rogan, and it’s convinced millions of young Americans that they’re somehow resisting literal Nazis.

> literal Nazis

Is it all the swastikas? Maybe it’s all the swastikas.

It’s disingenuous to suggest that far-right extremists aren’t dominating the messaging from the right, and that Donald Trump isn’t amplifying them.

Agree - Literal swastikas. In America, a country whose most patriotic war was the one where we kicked the shit out of swastikas

many people who have nothing to do with swastikas have been called literally nazis

including myself,an israeli jew

National socialism is philosophy, which can be applied everywhere, including Israeli.

If somebody thinks that his nation is "gifted", while others are not, so government must support gifted people and punish other peoples, then it's National Socialism, regardless of country and nationality.

The formula “government must [support] X people, and [mitigate] Y people” seems like a pretty consistent formula for all collectivism. They only differ in the reasoning.

It could be anything: smart/dumb, peaceful/violent, weak/strong, poor/rich. And in any order. Today people seem to be fixated on race. I wonder if we’ll ever get past that.

Nazism is one thing , national socialism is another (with non-capital letters)

to my understanding , national socialism is in principle a socialism that is tooled to deliver social policies within a ntaion-state , which is not a very controversial idea .

there is no intrinsic need to punish anybody for anything

and frankly , thinking that one's nation is "gifted" is not an illegitimate opinion, even if its probably wrong ,as long as it doesnt translate into any kind of racist or expansionary policy

Nazism is formally known as National Socialism. (Wikipedia)

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

Yeah but what about the ones holding swastikas saying chanting "Blood and soil, Jews will not replace us" who were not condemned by the to of GOP leadership. The left uses their words like a shotgun, however, theres still nazis out there.

Not condemned? He literally used the phrase “condemned totally” referring to them. How much more condemned can you get?

Here’s a direct quote from Trump’s press conference:

> “It’s fine, you’re changing history, you’re changing culture, and you had people – and I’m not talking about the neo-Nazis and the white nationalists, because they should be condemned totally – but you had many people in that group other than neo-Nazis and white nationalists, okay?”

It’s an outright lie to claim otherwise and the media was complicit in allowing Biden to do so. Over and over.

The first statement said both sides, the second statement 2 days later tried to clarify the statement with an excuse that he was saying other people that walked amongst nazi were the good people. As a constant pattern of trumps presidency, he throws out a dog whistle and then walks it back 2 days later sayig he was taken out of context, misspoke, or was joking. You can claim he's fighting against antisemitism and racism, but I just straight up don't trust his good faith. My jewish eyes see him as supporting nazis and a supporter of those who walk with nazis. Him being a poor communicator is a lackluster excuse why I should trust him.

All those other good people walked under those nazi flags. Why would I trust them either?

> The first statement said both sides, the second statement 2 days later tried to clarify the statement with an excuse that he was saying other people that walked amongst nazi were the good people.

The first statement is in regards to people protesting to bring down monuments. There’s clearly two sides to that argument and there are many fine people, myself included, that do not want to see statues of Lincoln torn now.

> As a constant pattern of trumps presidency, he throws out a dog whistle and then walks it back 2 days later sayig he was taken out of context, misspoke, or was joking. You can claim he's fighting against antisemitism and racism, but I just straight up don't trust his good faith.

If your own biases interpret everything in some perverted negative light, then it’s an impossible standard to meet.

> My jewish eyes see him as supporting nazis and a supporter of those who walk with nazis.

And yet his grandchildren are Jewish and he’s had more success negotiating Middle East peace deals that benefit Israel than any other president.

If he’s Nazi supporter he’s doing a pretty crappy job at it.

> Him being a poor communicator is a lackluster excuse why I should trust him.

If you refuse to ever give the benefit of the doubt then why even argue about it?

> All those other good people walked under those nazi flags. Why would I trust them either?

Nobody says to trust them. But they’re not the only ones that wanted to preserve historic statues.

That’s like reducing all of recent racial / police protests to a bunch of looters robbing a Best Buy.

The question is why some on the left think they are fighting nazis. I think I answered my anectdotal view sufficiently. There are people out there at protests acting under the symbols of nazism and the chief executive charged with assuring those who are concerned fails again and again to ease that concern. Defend his actions all you want. The vote has come in, you can look at that for it's democratic feedback and mandate on preferred leadership.

> The question is why some on the left think they are fighting nazis.

Using the labeling of the opposition as Nazis as the proof that they are Nazis, is one hell of a circular argument.

Ignoring the Nazi flags hanging over the argument is a questionable way to claim circular logic. People think they are Nazi, Nazi sympathizers, Nazi allies, because these people were standing beside Nazi flags, within the people yelling blood and soil, Jews will not replace us. There is a distinct start to the argument. Do you not care to recognize that?

> there are many fine people, myself included, that do not want to see statues of Lincoln torn now.

Who was trying to remove statues of Lincoln? In all the reporting I've seen on this issue I've only seen people trying to remove statues of Confederate generals and leaders. I, like many people, have no problem with these statues being moved into museums. They just shouldn't be public monuments.

> Who was trying to remove statues of Lincoln?

Both Lincoln and Teddy Roosevelt statues were torn down: https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/portland-protesters-tea...

Sure, you could say, “oh but that was two years later”. That’s not a coincidence, it’s the slope of the line when the left encourages an insurrection.

I wasn't aware of that incident. This does appear to be a single isolated case and not a widespread issue.

> That’s not a coincidence, it’s the slope of the line when the left encourages an insurrection

I can see how you'd make a slippery slope argument here. However you're mixing it with some serious hyperbole that diminishes your argument. The left in the US isn't some homogenous, well organized group. You're taking millions of people, many of whom would not be consider "the left" in other countries, and lumping them all together. That's a huge oversimplification.

Can you show me where there are calls for insurrection? Most of the protests in the US in the last year that I'm aware of have been non-violent or were intended that way by their organizers. Some have had violence break out. While I'm sure some of the people involved have been on the far left wing you can't blame all of the violence on the left wing protesters[0][1].

[0] https://apnews.com/article/virus-outbreak-race-and-ethnicity... [1] https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:bGtLQh...

> Here’s a direct quote from Trump’s press conference:

That's a quote from August 15th. Trump had made statements about the murder in Charlottesville as early as August 12th, when he famously walked out of the interview after being asked to condemn white supremacists.

Please see my post here on HN about this incident[1]:

> You've linked to the second interview he gave about Charlottesville. In his first statements in an interview on August 12th, 2017, he famously didn't condemn white supremacists who murdered someone, saying instead that he condemns "egregious displays of hatred, bigotry and violence on many sides, on many sides".

> Then, several days later in the second interview on August 15th that you linked to, he equates the violent white nationalists that murdered someone with what he calls the "alt-left", the purported group that the murder victim belonged to, saying that he thinks there is blame on both sides. After asking for further clarification, he says that there were fine people on both sides. Only after further questioning, and in a separate statement, does he condemn white supremacists.

> People were criticizing him for his initial equivocation on August 12th, comparing the white supremacists who murdered a person to the victims of their violence, and the fact that he didn't name or condemn white supremacists. In fact, when journalists asked him to condemn them, he walked away from the interview. He refused to differentiate between the two.

> Then, on August 15th, he defends his initial comments through his continued equivocations in the second interview.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25019361

It's also disingenuous to suggest the extreme left isn't dominating the messaging from the left.

The extremes tend to dominate the messaging on both sides. And frankly, the internet being dominated by younger people, there is a good case to be made that the extreme left's voices are louder.

>It's also disingenuous to suggest the extreme left isn't dominating the messaging from the left.

Except it's not disengenuous to say that at all. We can see that by the candidates each party has supported. Biden is considered a pretty centrist democrat by pretty much any metric. Trump, however, can't be considered a moderate. He's enabled fascist White nationalist supporters. Biden hasn't done the same.

Also, for the record, BLM and SJWs aren't equivalent extremist left compared to literal Nazis - the left wing extremist equivalent is Communism and the position to kill and eat the rich. That is the level of extremism that Trump has facilitated in office. If Biden also enabled people who explicitly call to overthrow the US government, I'd say you have a fairer point.

The 2 extremes are indeed closer to each other than they are to the center, the Horseshoe theory. Of course, extremists on either side would hate to be bundled together, their ideology is different but their extremist approach is not.

But I can't help but think this is a very asymmetrical horseshoe where the right side extends much further then the left side ever did. The problem is not even necessarily the particular ideology but rather that the right side is willing to be far more extreme in their views. That in itself is exceptionally dangerous no matter what the views are because it implies a very, very unpleasant life for those who don't share them.

It's the reason why today the US is so divided, there's no more overlap, the 2 sides each sit in their corner. The only possible response to increasing extremism on one side is increasing extremism on the other side until one has enough power to quash the other.

> The only possible response to increasing extremism on one side is increasing extremism on the other side until one has enough power to quash the other.

I think this statement is wrong. There are a lot of other possibilities. For example: "A minority that is agressively vocal for extremism in one aspect could be cushioned by a strong general consensus for a political culture of reasonable cooperation and discussion."

There are extremists on the left, Biden disavowed them publicly.

There are extremists on the right, Trump disavowed them publicly.

Nevertheless, media commentators on either side try to portrait these candidates as if they supported, or at least "enabled" extremists.

Can you be more specific on how either of these candidates "enable" or "do not enable" extremism? How would you falsify an accusation of "enabling" something?

Genuinely interested when/where Trump disavowed right wing extremists. I've seen him refuse to denounce white supremacy in the first debate but I haven't seen him denounce anyone who might vote for him

> Genuinely interested when/where Trump disavowed right wing extremists.

https://www.factcheck.org/2020/02/trump-has-condemned-white-...

https://www.bbc.com/news/election-us-2020-54381500

> I've seen him refuse to denounce white supremacy in the first debate...

That was clearly a missed opportunity to clear things up, but the counter-question "Who do you want me to condemn?" is a fair one. It's easy for Trump to condemn the KKK, not so easy to condemn militia groups in general. Similarly, it's easy for Biden to condemn rioters, not so easy to condemn Antifa in general. Effectively, both candidates dodged that question.

> ... I haven't seen him denounce anyone who might vote for him.

That's moving the goalpost a bit too far for my taste. Trump has condemned white supremacists, that at least is on the record.

"to condemn Antifa" Antifa is a construct from Fox News to designate a broad category of mostly young people that range from anarchists calling for direct democracy to people who are against racism and intolerance that have in common that they are not against clashing with police forces. So condemning Antifa does not make much sense. Maybe he could have condemned violence in the protests but anyone who has been in a demonstration knows elements in both the protesters and the police are looking for the clash. But the police always has the upper hand and violently crush what is mostly damage to property. Just tell me how many people have been killed by so called "Antifa"? Is that comparable to the number of people that have been killed by right-wing activists? Why is it always the progressive leaders that get shot? Right wing activists always say they are here to "defend" against something but they are the one attacking.

Here's a compilation of some of the instances he's done so: https://streamable.com/sr9o2s

Title of that one says 20 times, here's one with 38 times: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bd0cMmBvqWc

> Can you be more specific on how either of these candidates "enable" or "do not enable" extremism? How would you falsify an accusation of "enabling" something?

I can indeed do this, but the question itself seems to be asked in bad faith. How on earth do you need me to report to you on Trump's behavior and words even into the final debate?

This isn't specifically about Trump, but about the political tactic of accusing the opponent of "enabling extremists". Both sides are using it.

Let's focus on the falsifiability: What would a candidate have to do in order to disprove the accusation?

If there isn't a clear answer to that question, then how is this tactic materially different from name-calling?

What you are pointing out here is fundamentally true and verifiable. I think I find myself, along with many other americans, in a bizarre position where we see comments like this which we know are accurate get barraged by downvotes or whatever system in Internet commentary exists to decrease the visibility of the comment, and I find this troubling. This mostly happens, from what I've seen, if there is any suggestion within the comment that the right is in some way defensible. I think many internet forums have tried to use downvotes as a signal for validity, but so frequently that signal is obviously misapplied, making it almost entirely meaningless. In fact, it is has become a signal for the direction of the political leanings of the majority, rather than anything having to do with the usefulness or appropriateness of any given comment.

This is probably a bad thing.

Extreme wanting to be like denmark?

> It's also disingenuous to suggest the extreme left isn't dominating the messaging from the left.

Except they're not. Your country has drifted so far right, every opposing voice may look like "extreme left", but it's not. Nowhere close.

If you want to argue about the actual extreme left, go right ahead. I'm as left-leaning as they are, but I'll probably agree with you. There's some idiots.

But the extreme left isn't really that vocal at all in the US right now. It's the moderate leftists trying to restore some sense of normalcy.

I'm conservative. I'm active on social media. I don't see what you're talking about at all. My feed is constantly being inundated with "We need to make lists of every trump supporter" and similar, but never do I see the supposed ultra-widespread nazi/alt-right hate.

Trump, for all his flaws, has disavowed white supremacy so many times it hurts to watch and even the most famous "very fine people" quote was [0] taken out of context (if you can call that anything but an outright lie, frankly).

The membership of racist organizations like the KKK is small, vanishingly small. It's not even .1% of Trumps base. [1] And, more importantly, it's shrinking. It has been for a very long time.

[1]Despite their diminishing numbers, there are still approximately 3,000 Klan members nationwide, as well an additional but unknown number of associates and supporters. Even with relatively small numbers, groups like the North Carolinabased Loyal White Knights (LWK), perhaps the most active Klan group in the United States today, have a fairly expansive geographical reach. In 2015, with just 150-200 members, they were able to draw attention to themselves in 15 different states (mostly in the south and east), typically through fliering, which requires only a single participant.

[2][3] It is a matter of public record that Biden supported segregationists, voted against integration-supporting policies like bussing (which Kamala Harris roasted him for repeatedly), and pushed legislation that disproportionately harmed black folks.

Ultimately, there's plenty of good reasons to dislike Trump that are completely and unarguably valid. Covid, John Bolton, numerous conflicts of interest (like using personal assets for the military and government functions) are a small piece of that. But calling Trump racist or a nazi is just taking the bait that his political opponents have set out.

In my personal opinion, Biden is the worse choice for president purely on the basis of his likelihood of supporting additional war efforts (whereas Trump is the first president in 40 years not to start a new war - AND has helped bring about a series of peace treaties in the middle east.)

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DZfzJATDmXs

[1] https://www.adl.org/education/resources/reports/state-of-the...

[2] https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/03/joe-biden-record-on-...

[3] https://www.npr.org/2020/10/14/920385802/biden-vows-to-ease-...

I'm totally with you on Trump not starting any wars (which is a low bar for a US president, but one which is rarely hit).

However, his treatment of Israel and Saudi Arabia were perhaps 100 times worse than any previous president.

He moved the US embassy to Jerusalem, which was incredibly inflammatory to both the Palestinians and the wider world, and will make it very, very difficult for any peace deal to be signed there (as the Palestinians want it as their capital).

His support of Saudi Arabia, regardless of their extra-judicial killings was another low point in the US relations in the middle east.

The other "peace" deals he signed were more caving to particular factions rather than bringing them together.

Each deal can be criticized and certainly worth exploration, but the overall trend is, at least in my opinion, quite clear. Comparing Trump's record on international conflict to any president in my lifetime makes him look like a saint. And all of the criticisms levied at him (in my opinion) pale in comparison to stopping the literal mass-murder in the middle east. If the US reverses course on vying for peace, and instead picks up the big stick approach, it will make it clear what the policy of established politicians really is. If that happens I hope America has the conscience to remove them all.

> Although Trump has talked of withdrawing completely from Iraq, Pentagon officials have cautioned that a U.S. troop presence remains necessary to guard against an IS resurgence and to help the Iraqi government limit the political and military influence of Iran, which supports militias operating inside Iraq. [1]

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-54554286

[1] https://www.militarytimes.com/news/your-military/2020/09/09/...

His actions in the middle east have been far from universally positive (not that any American president in 50 years has done any good there).

He has supported Saudi Arabia with weapons to help their slaughter in Yemen.

He has reneged on the Iran nuclear deal, proving for the second and probably last time that making deals with the USA is a fools errand (it's the second time the US has reneged on a deal with Iran; I doubt there will be a third).

He has publicly assassinated a high dignitary of Iran, during an official visit to a different country, an act of war by any measure.

He has moved the US embassy to Jerusalem, an extremely inflammatory decision that further stops any remaining chance that the USA can ever be seen as a negotiator in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Overall, while maybe not as bad as Bush and Obama in direct deaths, his legacy has shut down any hope of peace in the region with America's involvement. So I wouldn't rank him too highly on this area.

Let's also not forget that he has unilaterally cancelled the USA's nuclear disarmament deal with Russia, another extremely anti-peace move, one that will have far-reaching consequences.

The only truly decent external policy that he has shown is his handling of the North Korea crisis - that was a true diplomatic success by any measure, which I gladly admit.

And of course, we shouldn't forget that all of his other horrible decisions pale in the face of his anti-climate moves, which have likely helped push the world over the brink.

I don't disagree with a single thing you've said. That said, when comparing presidents you have to compare them to each other, or to candidates that might replace them.

In that light the bar is set so appallingly low that even Trump managed to get across it. Presidential candidates in the US are almost universally pro-war and pro-military escalation, even while pretending otherwise.

It's great for you that your Twitter feed has managed to avoid the most depraved, violent side of the right. I'll attribute that to the relatively rarefied air of Twitter broadly. Fact is, the Internet skews left; Twitter skews left of that; and the Twitter feed of an educated Hacker News commentator (which I presume you are) skews even lefter. So you might not be getting an accurate reading of the temperature of the country.

Go visit r/The_donald (or wherever they find themselves these days), 4Chan, or just go to any small town in the South. Violent racism is a badge proudly worn.

Can you provide some example links? Maybe in a gist or something.

I think you’re underestimating the power of filter bubbles. I’m very left, mostly live in SF and LA, and browse r politics. I’ve never seen what you’re talking about. R politics has an strong point of view but if anything is posted along those lines it gets downvoted to oblivion.

I think you need to reassess how your feeds are being filtered because they appear to have zeroed in on ultra extreme pockets. Either your clicks or the algorithms have put your feeds in a skewed place. It sounds like you’re being shown the right wing caricature of the left. Of course that makes them look insane.

I follow primarily esports players, a handful of folks like Patio11 and Paul Graham, some constitutional conservatives, a handful of John Locke style liberals, a few gun people (Colion Noir, and others) and that's it.

Despite this, I am rarely shown anything conservative on Twitter. If the algo gods have decided I'm extreme left, then they are broken beyond repair. It seems more likely to me that Twitter simply de-prioritizes conservative media.

Meanwhile, stuff like this is pretty mainstream.

WAPO opinion writer and MSNBC contributor - https://twitter.com/JRubinBlogger/status/1324792225260253184

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez - https://twitter.com/AOC/status/1324807776510595078

The Trump Accountability Project (There are two, the original has now distanced themselves from this one) - https://www.trumpaccountability.net/

MSNBC Host Chris Hayes - Tweet deleted, found this instead https://twitter.com/VoteMarsha/status/1325477249697673217

Thank you for posting this, it was a very helpful perspective for me to hear.

One thing I am curious about – what sorts of people do you see posting things like "We need to make lists of every trump supporter"?

I've seen a bunch, just a few quick ones I've noticed most recently.

WAPO opinion writer and MSNBC contributor - https://twitter.com/JRubinBlogger/status/1324792225260253184

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez - https://twitter.com/AOC/status/1324807776510595078

The Trump Accountability Project (There are two, the original has now distanced themselves from this one) - https://www.trumpaccountability.net/

MSNBC Host Chris Hayes - Tweet deleted, found this instead https://twitter.com/VoteMarsha/status/1325477249697673217

Rhetoric that I've seen is essentially that "anyone who voted for, donated to, or promoted Trump's policies should be on a list which should be used to remove them from 'polite' society."

Use of the words polite society has popped up quite a few times as well. I'm sure you can find substantially more by googling around.

Thanks, that does sound upsetting.

What I meant to ask, though, was whether you saw liberal or conservative folks sharing these?

Personally I'd only seen them shared in conservative circles... Wondering if it's more an example of "one side taking an extreme comment and applying it to everyone on the other side" (like many on the left have done with racism etc) or an actual movement of mccarthyism.

I've seen this get traction in both circles. The left leaning people I know are what I would describe as "sane" but they are still willing to like/retweet this message.

Of course the conservative leaning people are responding more along the lines of "And you called US fascists?!"

I think having mainstream media writers and hosts, as well as an elected representative promote this message is enough to suggest that it's spread too far already. Hopefully this sort of rhetoric dies down and the legal claims about the election are resolved through fair evidence-based examination. If not, I think we might be headed towards yet more unrest.

Thanks! It's so hard to find out what the world looks like from other people's digital/social bubbles...

I totally agree - it's really, really important that conservatives don't feel attacked (let alone hunted) and that concerns about election integrity are taken seriously and investigated thoroughly.

Here's hoping...

> Is it all the swastikas? Maybe it’s all the swastikas.

The only swastikas I've seen are on public bathroom stalls and I've seen them for many many years and they haven't increased in frequency in recent years. Increase in visibility isn't equivalent to increase in frequency.

> I’m just shocked at how many people today have grown into learned helplessness and think that the system is so bad and irreparable that they need to vandalize and protest in cities for months.

It's quite right to be shocked so many people protested, because it's a strong signal that there's something drastically wrong with the system; something that nobody has any problem understanding and accepting when protests occur in other countries.

Aren’t the only countries where people don’t protest in cities for months totalitarian ones? Having protests seems to me to be a sign of a free country.

It's great that you feel empowered and have been successful in this country. Lots of minorities haven't been, and for reasons outside of their control, based in historical inequalities.

The fundamental problem of the entitled right is that they can't imagine that other people have had different experiences than they have, and therefore attribute their disadvantaged state to "victim mentality."

The fundamental problem of the entitled left is unchecked imagination of other people experiences completely divorced from daily realities of those people. You have someone from a minority describing his experience to you and you feel the need to put him in his place immediately because there is an unknown number of people who have it worse. The entitled right at least donates a lot of money to charities (more than anybody else in the world) and helps a lot of people through various kinds of organizations. But hey if you say they can't image other people's experiences than it must be so.

Charity is not a substitute for social justice.

My understanding of other people's experiences is not based on imagination. I've been there. I've seen it. Have you?

Guilt tripping and emotional blackmail is not a path to social justice or any kind of justice. It's a dead end.

"Charity is not a substitute for social justice." Of course it is not. Charity is real and it helps people right now where they need help the most. Social justice is a fantasy dreamed up in ivory towers. But only the left is compassionate, right?

"I've been there. I've seen it." Where have you been and what have you seen to feel the need to put down experiences of those in minority who have succeeded in life? What have you as a member of the compassionate party done to help the poor people since charities aren't you thing?

"Have you?" I have never ever once heard a migrant say: "I hope those nice social justice people succeed with their big ideas.". It was always: "Look what those nice people from the church down the road did for us.".

How deluded do you have to be to think that I'm "puting down" his experiences, just by pointing out that he doesn't speak for everyone?

I hear a lot of Americans saying "I really wish we had socialized health care" and "I wish that women made as much money as men did."

Poverty and suffering is not a left vs. right thing, it affects people all over the world. This doesn't mean that those people are morally superior to others who are e.g. rich or that they have the right to demand certain things from them.

They can make their case just like everybody else and negotiate in good faith for a better position. If because of their situation they cannot do that, others typically do it for them.

But you coming here and diminishing someone's experience, just because there's someone somewhere who isn't successful is merely an attempt emotional blackmail. This kind of emotional blackmail seems to work a lot better recently than in the past, but let's not confuse it with good arguments.

Would you say that the movement to abolish slavery was based on "emotional blackmail"? How about the movement for women's suffrage? No, I think that "emotional blackmail" is an attempt to color negatively any attempt at progress towards equality.

I'm not diminishing anyone's experience. I'm just pointing out that he doesn't have the right to speak for everyone.

Sure. And the fundamental problem of the entitled left is that they think they're standing up for minorities, but often speak over them, just like the right, while telling them it's for their own good, which is a dividing force just like the strawman right-winger in your head. They internalize so much racial shame that they casually walk straight away from being egalitarian, while claiming they never have.

You're reading an awful lot into people who you've apparently never spoken to. Do you think anyone who makes an attempt to help other people and improve equal treatment is motivated by "racial shame"? By your logic, we should have kept slavery and denied women the vote.

I don't advocate for those things because I'm egalitarian. I don't think internalized shame is the only motivation for equality. I think we all are born with a little bit of universal empathy and we shouldn't be afraid to tap it. I've seen a lot of social justice that is motivated by the thrill of the attack more than simply achieving equality, and it easily falls away from the delicate balance they claimed to want at the start.

I would say you’re definitely misunderstanding the right in the US. It has nothing to do with that here. It’s largely the left showing fear and anger, although many seem oblivious to it.

" maybe it’s that my past right-leaning self was a teenager with half-baked ideas about the world, when I reflect on what drove me that way, I cannot point to any coherent, constructive thought, mostly feelings of entitlement and an unwillingness to put myself in the other’s shoes. And that’s what I see in the right-wing of today in the US. "

It seems you had a bad experience with what you felt were 'right wing' ideals but probably had little to do with that, as it would be a pretty intellectually shallow description of any kind of Conservatism (although understandable if one were to equate 'Trump' with 'Conservative' and I don't think many people would in the intellectual sense) and also oddly experientially 'upside down'.

Most 'young people' are progressive, people tend to get more conservative as they get older.

Cynically, one could say it's due to age and myopia, but more likely it has to do with responsibility, perspective, maturity and frankly living through decades and seeing how the world adapts.

Believing in the institutions of family (and monogamy as a commitment to that institution), the objective rule of law, moral obligation through duty of various kinds of community service, prudence, faith as an integral part of worldview, a sense of community that can possibly be expressed through nationalism, the notion that people must act responsibly to the extent they are able and assume responsibility for their actions - these are not ideals of 'entitlement' frankly.

Barack Obama, for example, is a 'Progressive Conservative', and he is in many ways in his own personal life a model 'cultural conservative': religious, church going, mild mannered, straight forward marriage, traditional formal education. He speaks formally and graciously, and is literally a living embodiment of many cultural historical artefacts. He didn't serve in the military but he very well could have, it's totally within his character.

He's not at all that far away from Mitt Romney for example.

Donald Trump is not a 'Conservative' or even 'right wing' really, he's just a jerk who found a 'following' in appealing to the worst qualities of 'bad right wing tropes'.

"In 1999, Trump described himself as "very pro-choice" and said "I believe in choice." (Wikipedia)

Donald Trump was a tough-guy New York 'kind of Democrat' most of his life. He always supported gay marriage. The Clintons were literally at his wedding to Melania.

He's a serial scammer, effectively a polygamist who marries woman purely on the basis of their attractiveness and then dumps them later, cavorts with prostitutes, lies, cheats, steals.

He changes his political views to suit the day, because they don't matter to him - he's just about being rich and popular.

He's managed to convince a lot of people that he is something that he is not, and that's sad, and it's brought out the worst in so many people, and that's what we are seeing today.

Have a look at this Charlie Rose interview with Senator Jeff Flake who's a much more traditional conservative, and FYI detests Donald Trump and 'fell on his sword' rather than go along with the toxicity. [1]

[1] https://charlierose.com/videos/30822

Excellent analysis (not sarcasm; I enjoyed reading this)

I guess what a lot of us are struggling with is how anyone cannot see these truths for themselves in Trump. I don't need to listen to anyone but Trump himself to realize he lies constantly and has only a rudimentary grasp of how government and society functions. His history in popular culture speaks for itself. So what is going on with the 70 million people who can't see that plainly? The only conclusion we can reach is "he says the quiet part out loud" and that resonates with a lot of people. "They are sending us murders and rapists" was an early example that has stuck with me. Perhaps it is not a charitable view but nearly every office holding member of the GOP lined up to lick his boots after he said thousands of things like that.

As near as I can tell, Conservatism is deader than disco.

I would agree. The explanation I have for it in the US is tribalism. Thats it. I'm an immigrant to the US and feel like I have an outsiders perspective. I find that American's suffer a from a severe case of Proportionality Bias https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proportionality_bias when they think about American Politics. They think that because Trump has had a large effect on American Politics, there has to be larger forces at play. "He's some kind of political genius", "He's playing 3D chess", "There is some kind of unexplained magic to his words" etc etc. It's much more basic than that, he found a way to speak to the baser parts of one of the tribes and turn them against the other tribe.He makes his tribe feel good and promises to get the other tribe who are very bad people. It's amazingly and shockingly basic.

It is both incredibly simple and readily apparent. What is interesting/amusing is how the further up the right-wing food chain you climb the closer you get to people who you _know_ understand the difference and can see what is happening and what is being said, but who will deny and justify for the sake of eliminating the cognitive dissonance between their own reasoning and what the leader of their tribe is saying.

Here on HN if is almost funny to watch the different flavours of Trumpkin try to explain and justify themselves. You have the hard-core believers who only barely manage to keep the racism and xenophobia in check but can still throw out a dog whistle all the way to the ones who probably once thought of themselves as principled conservatives but who are reduced to simple projection when presented with facts ('no, we are not the ones driven by fear and anger, it is the left...') As unpleasant as the Trump experience has been, one of its few benefits has been to let the truly cretinous among us feel like they have permission to drop the mask and show us who they really are.

While I'd agree Trump has indirectly revealed the priorities of many, let's take care not to permanently label people.

I was on the right most of my life and hated Trump. Yet he seemed to be the least worst for many single issue voters. Thankfully forums like this helped challenge my worldview enough to overcome the indoctrination of my youth. Now my entire perspective had flipped.

Everyone has the capacity to change. And that's much more likely to happen in a welcoming and curiosity friendly environment than an echo chamber.

As they say in Germany, if there’s a Nazi at the table and 10 other people sitting there talking to him, you got a table with 11 Nazis. There is a lot of variation in political opinion that I enjoy and solicit and I enjoyed having some honest conservatives as friends, but to support Trump four years ago is bad and to support him today is unconscionable. I am happy to write-off those who spent the past year supporting trump and do not care if they have the capacity to change because as far as I and a lot of other people are concerned they decided to sit at the table with the Nazi.

This sums it up. Trump took low participation voters and made politics sport for them. The slogan "make libs cry again" - it's not about what he can do for them, it's about how he can hurt "the other". That his supporters identified with him so much every attack against him they felt was an attack on them.

The rabid cult of personality that popped up around him has been highly disturbing to watch. Decking everything out in shirts, hats, flying his name as a flag, painting your house with his name, covering your vehicle with flags. The non-stop rallies and campaigning even after he was elected.

And no, before someone trys to compare, it was not like that with Obama. People were excited about him but it did not become an everyday identity alongside a never-ending campaign.

The only conclusion we can reach is "he says the quiet part out loud"

If you ignore the last 4 years of analysis of what motivates Trump voters, why he's popular despite his personality issues and so on, then sure, you can "only" reach one conclusion. But it's the wrong one.

Still, it's great fun believing half of America is filled with racist hatred isn't it?

As near as I can tell, Conservatism is deader than disco.

It just drew basically level with the left despite Biden being far more presidential than Trump, and despite nearly the entire media and tech industry pulling every lever they could for Biden. That seems very far from dead.

I think that this is what cost him the election. Some people voted for Trump, some against Biden, some for Biden, and some against Trump. The latter two groups are 7 millions bigger than the first two groups. That's what we know. Looking at the Senat/House races, there seems to be a sizeable group of people voting Biden, and then pro Republican further down. I interpret that as "against Trump, but also against the general goals of Democrats as perceived by them". I believe this is because the Republicans managed to paint all Democrats as Bernie-like Socialists, while the Democrats did not manage to paint all Republicans as Trump like Idiots/Racists/Liars.

I'm not saying the Democrats should, but they should try harder not to be painted as Socialists, if they are not. Or be socialist. I don't think the latter is a winning strategy in America, but at least they would lose for what they stand for, not for what they don't stand for.

I'm really sad to see so many Trump supporters as well, but ... but maybe you are young?

Bill Clinton banged a very young intern in the Oval Office.

Bill Clinton lied, deceived, distorted, mislead - and then very 'point blank' lied about that directly to the Justice system, which is illegal.

Do you remember that? I do.

Bill Clinton has legitimate accusations of sexual assault hanging out there against him - just like Trump.

Why did Democrats (and others) 'forgive him'? And 'look the other way'?

How was the Democrat Brand not 'destroyed forever' by a 'Serial Abuser in Chief' in Office?

Democrats (and others) forgave him, because they think it was not so bad, that ultimately he was a good person, the act was ostensibly consensual, the Republicans were making to much of it - etc etc..

Some people simply don't see a 55 year married old man, banging a 22 year old intern in a prestigious office as hugely relevant. Others do.

I think most Donald Trump supporters believe that he 'Loves America' that he's a 'Business Genius' who just 'Speaks Plainly' and sometimes says aggressive things, but that it doesn't mean much.

I personally don't think any of those things are true, but it's not hard to see how people watching Fox News might be 'believers'.

To some people 'they are sending us their rapists' is like an inappropriate Chines accent or an off colour joke - inappropriate and little bit offensive, but not existentially so.

"I guess what a lot of us are struggling with is how anyone cannot see these truths for themselves in Trump. "

I don't think they do see 'Traditional Conservative' in him - I think they see mostly something else and that's my point.

If the GOP base wanted a 'Traditional Conservative' there are a dozen other, more obvious choices.

But it's all moot: Trump really isn't much of a 'Conservative' in any way, it's a 'Bully Nationalist' which unfortunately 1/2 of Republicans will vote for because they want to, the rest will vote reluctantly.

Both traditional Conservatism and 'American Socialism' (i.e. Centre Left) are not 'dead' - they are everywhere but it's that populism is having it's time, and supported in the press.

The Intersectionalist Reactionaries on the Left are very close to taking over the Democratic party, much as Trump 'barn stormed' the GOP.

I'm old enough that I voted for Clinton, and yes I did see it that way and since then I haven't criticized any politician about sexual indiscretions. I think it reflects negatively on character but its a common flaw.

I try to look past Trump's character flaws but they are so embarrassing and cringe inducing, and when you add the poor foreign policy, bungled COVID response and really very serious incitement of hatred, violence, and division he's created its really still quite perplexing but I appreciate your thoughts on it.

Trump's character flaws are clearly existential and deeply problematic, I think to any mature observer.

Not only is he a brutal narcissist who cares only about himself, he's willing to throw a democracy away for his vanity and power.

My articulation is more about 'mass perception' not so much what he actually is.

Clearly Bill Clinton is a good man, so are McCain, Romney, Obama, even Bush etc..

'Understanding Trump Support' is hard because what 'smart people see' is something completely different than what the plebes see. They think he's a genius, brilliant businessman, and probably don't realize how powerful his negative language about migrants etc. really is, they just don't understand what statesmanship actually is or how important that it is that he is a role model as well. I guess it's one of the more obvious problems of raw populism.

> Believing in the institutions of family (and monogamy as a commitment to that institution), the objective rule of law, moral obligation through duty of various kinds of community service, prudence, faith as an integral part of worldview, a sense of community that can possibly be expressed through nationalism, the notion that people must act responsibly to the extent they are able and assume responsibility for their actions - these are not ideals of 'entitlement' frankly.

I kind of agree with you. However - maybe I am wrong - but you seem to equate these values with "conservatism" and believe other people think these are ideals of "entitlement". I don't think non-conservatives, myself included think that way or don't believe in these values. But feel free to correct me if I misunderstood you.

You make a good point.

A lot of classical left/liberal and conservative values are not 'opposite' so much as 'orthogonal' and it's a matter of relative importance, focus etc..

Funny but the stereotype is the opposite from the 60s. As the saying goes

If You Are Not a Liberal at 25, You Have No Heart. If You Are Not a Conservative at 35 You Have No Brain

https://quoteinvestigator.com/2014/02/24/heart-head/

Note: I'm not conservative and I don't necessarily agree with the quote. The point is not that the quote is correct, the point is someone (not me) thought it was the unthinking young person that thought alone liberal lines and the experienced wise person that thought along conservative lines.

Again, not agreeing, just pointing out some feel the opposite, that more experience and exposure to the world leads to more conservative thinking for some people.

I believe there is some evidence to suggest that there was a mistaken correlation between getting older and getting more invested in the world as it is (i.e. getting richer).

Given that the age at which people tend to switch is increasing, I wonder if there may be something to it.

That's really strange because I agree with exactly everything that you said except swap Democrat for Republican I was a Democrat when I was young didn't care about anybody else now I'm a Republican and I have morals

> maybe it’s that my past right-leaning self was a teenager with half-baked ideas about the world, when I reflect on what drove me that way, I cannot point to any coherent, constructive thought, mostly feelings of entitlement and an unwillingness to put myself in the other’s shoes.

Thank you for saying this. It's hard to admit an error.

> Growing up in a country where I was in the ethnic majority, I went through a period of right-wing political bent as a teenager.

I think it's inevitable when majority of people that surround you have conservative views. Don't feel bad about that.

> don't feel bad that you were a conservative at some point we all make mistakes

My god, the sense of moral superiority.

When innocent people are murdered in their homes, who would you say are more moral? The people protecting the murderer or the people seeking justice for the murdered?

Conservatives as a cohort are murdering and/or support murdering people in their homes?

What in the world are you talking about?

>I cannot point to any coherent, constructive thought, mostly feelings of entitlement and an unwillingness to put myself in the other’s shoes.

You point this out as if it is some moral failing on the right. In fact, this is a personal failing. It should be simple enough to recognize that for any ideology that is large enough there almost certainly exists coherent and constructive thoughts within it. If you have yet to discover them, this is not because they do not exist, it is because you're not actually looking for them. I think this is done by people on both the left and the right all the time. They fail to deeply investigate the ideas of the other side, and then criticize the other side for having no good ideas.

case in point are the left and right's rhetoric on abortion, which each intentionally bypass the other side's argument. i.e. pro-life rhetoric does not acknowledge that women are inherently stakeholders, while pro-choice: woman's right to choose doesn't address whether the fetus has rights (or choice). It is difficult to make progress when rhetoric pretends that the other side does not have reasoned arguments, but is instead based on toxic masculinity/sexism/paternalism while the other side pretends that those who get abortions are just loose immoral women.

I see no end of this, and that is why I choose to think about actually constructive policies: e.g. free, prevalent, effective birth control for both men and women.

> You point this out as if it is some moral failing on the right.

It’s not a comment on conservative politics as a whole, it’s a reflection on my own past immaturity, and how I recognize it in others when I see it. And I’ve had 4 years to observe Trump’s tweets, Breitbart, alt-right, Qanon, Proud Boys, so if you want to convince me that there’s constructive, long-term thinking behind any of that, you’ll have to be a little more specific than “look harder”.

I think you speak as if you don't currently have a bias. yet something I've noticed and even had to correct amongst coworkers who came to the United States via a student visa and then eventually obtained a green card is that they have a huge bias towards large parts of the United States. This bias has been created in their minds by university professors who have never been to these parts of the country themselves. The bias manifest in things like a coworker being afraid to accompany me on a business trip to Walmart headquarters in Northwest Arkansas thinking it was dangerously racist. I had to explain to him that there are multiple cricket leagues in the area in that racism is not nearly as prevalent in the south as Hollywood would have him believe. He ended up enjoying it so much there that he later relocated there from Fremont. Living near Boulder I routinely encounter the exact same ideological brainwashing amongst people who came to the US as students. I say this is someone that is done extensive volunteer consulting work for the Democratic party including my last gig in 2014 for the midterm elections. I agree with the vast majority of the Democratic party platform but have become very dismayed at them overemphasizing race as a motivating factor for their opposition. I can promise you that for most southern Americans that vote Republican abortion is a much bigger factor in their vote than race. and economics is much bigger than either those categories.

As a foreigner not living in the US of A, I feel that your last paragraph outlines it perfectly. Also, a lot of the outspoken left wing is about groups and not about individuals. To mind comes: institutional racism, gender equality, white privilege, mandatory healthcare/insurance, high taxes on the rich, minimum wage

I don't think "I didn't have a good reason for being conservative, therefore conservatives in general don't have good reasons" is a very strong argument...

Makes me think of San Francisco Bay Area politics, where progressives have become so progressive that they in one breath say that all minorities should be accepted and that the environment is precious, but in the next espouse policies and weaponize environmental legislation to prevent immigrants from entering while simultaneously destroying the environment, as though there's no internal contradiction in those actions.

It's like people don't recognize what they truly think and do, but instead imagine themselves as a reflection of some ideological group they associate with and apply that image to their ultimately selfish motivations.

Quite a lot of local politics becomes more comprehensible when you add a 'NIMBY/YIMBY' axis completely separate from other stated political views.

This. And yes to GP, progressive + NIMBY seems to be a very hypocritical view. Which is why more progressives ought to become more YIMBY [0]

[0] opinion

I personally find it hard to look at the right as anything but poison.

I can disagree with you on economic ideologies, I can disagree with you on military spending, how to treat the drug epidemic, how to solve the incarceration problem, etc. However when one side literally empowers those that executed my family in WW2, it is no longer a disagreement, but a fight for my life.

Did the Jews kill your family in WW2? Because Trump spent a lot of time pissing off Germany and cuddling up with Israel.

wow man, theres a lot tied up in here. First of all, "the jews" and "israelis" aren't the same thing. In fact, the nazis killed basically zero Israelis in the holocaust. Second of all, the modern state of Isreal under Bibi is essentially an right wing Jewish ethnostate that oppresses the Palestinian minority, and the majority of American Jews do not support the current Israeli government.

What the hell are you talking about. Israel was created after ww2 just for the jews mainly affected by the wars

...yes. How could you execute someone from a country that didn't exist yet?

To be more clear, the Jewish ethnic identity and the Israeli national identity aren't the same identity, and while there is overlap conflating them isn't insightful. OP was conflating them.

Lol, well it’s hard to take you seriously when the comment I replied to said that the right was literally empowering the same people that killed his family members. If Israelites don’t qualify as Jews then the alt-right certainly don’t come close to Nazis.

I don't know of any legislation introduced by any right wing government anywhere in the world, that literally empowers Nazis. I'm sorry that you feel like you're fighting for your life, but I'd be interested to know which country you live in that you fear for your safety. Surely, unlike during WW2, we have enough freedom of movement that you can leave a place where genocide could occur at any moment?

I suspect that you may already be aware that one does not need explicit government legislation to empower. Also, "if you fear for your life because of your ethnicity, you should leave" literally supports ethnic cleansing. Healthy societies view that as outside the bounds of legitimate political discourse.

Communism has killed millions around the world, yet it's ideology is growing on the left as well.

That's part of the problem. There's such focus by the left on Nazis and by the right on Communists that the overall capacity to form a consensus and negotiate between the two groups is significantly hindered.

The majority of both sides is not extremist, but ignoring each other is amplifying those extreme groups.

I won’t say there are no communists on the left, but they are very few in number. Even most people that call themselves “socialist” really mean something more like capitalist with a string safety net. Any communists in the left are a threat to exactly nobody right now. They don’t really have many opportunities to forcefully take central control of the means of production.

Unfortunately Nazis can do their work retail, they don’t need to take over government to do real harm individually.

The difference being, of course, that the left hasn't been in power for four years. One side of this discourse is based on projection and conjecture, the other on observable behaviour. I think that's one reason why I'm not seeing a huge appetite for finding the middle ground in some parts of the left: they need to see that the reasonable folks on the right will repudiate and, where necessary, punish the extremists they see as having been encouraged and given a free rein, rather than continue to give them a political home. I think the core of it is that with the extremists on the right wing (whether that's swastika-flashing Actual Nazis or the radical theocrats) they've actually had power, whether in the form of boots-on-the-ground "very fine people" that the police turn a blind eye to or actual elected/appointed office, whereas "card-carrying communist" describes an uninfluential fringe of Democrats who won't now be able to achieve very much. Because that repudiation hasn't happened yet, some would view anyone who unflinchingly supported the Republicans over the last four years as complicit in the actual, demonstrated, real actions that the extremists performed as at least an enabler, and possibly worse. Until that gets fixed, and mainstream Republicans own that, I don't see them moving.

Unfortunately, if McConnell is still in the driving seat in the Senate, form says we should expect political logjams, which won't help win anyone over either, and contrition isn't a trait I'd expect to magic itself into being purely on the basis of the presidential result.

Biden is about a billion miles away from Communism.

In Germany he would be a boring conservative.

This insinuation that the Democratic Party makes the world in some sense safer for Communists is blatant absurdity.

The reverse – the Republican Party and especially Trump making the world a safer place for Nazis – is very true. Nazis can feel encouraged and supported in what they do by Trump.

Obviously even Trump, however shambolic, manages to build up some level of plausible deniability there.

(All of this says someone who, yeah, is totally up for some Marxist ideas. Don’t worry, I’m not an American.)

> Surely, unlike during WW2, we have enough freedom of movement that you can leave a place where genocide could occur at any moment?

I know you went for hyperbole, but ... refuges are not exactly wanted. Have a look at what life in refuge camps is, the issues and destabilization it brings.

There are genocides and atrocities going on now and last years. And it was not easy or possible for those people to leave. It was even less possible for many of those who left to actually build new lives.

And in any case, by the time of WWII Hitler was firmly in power. The time to prevent his atrocities was years before and atrocities happened because his party was not stopped 1918-1932.

You may not realize it but you're referring to the Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees. 1951.

It is long considered a fundamental human right to be able to flee danger. Because otherwise wars start and atrocities happen.

Trump consistently blocks their rightful entry into the US, vilifies them as invaders, denies that they have rights to entry, and tries to scare people into thinking they are a threat.

The child separation from parents policy, and there are hundreds that have still not been reunited with their parents today, has been admitted publicly without shame. Vindictiveness. It is to scare immigrant and refugee alike so they don't come here. It is to bully them in order to make American liberals angry, because making liberals angry is an inherent good in right-wing ideology.

Meanwhile Europe is having its own problems with refugees, and right-wing movements who hate them. So no we do not have freedom of movement, at least not everywhere and not for everyone who needs it. And that means we haven't learned a few important lessons - all of which are relatively well contained and explained in the 1951 Convention documents.

It is long considered a fundamental human right to be able to flee danger

They are still able to flee danger, but they now need to wait in a detainment center while awaiting their hearing. This exists because only a tiny fraction of those released would actually go to their hearings, and most would stay here illegally.

Meanwhile Europe is having its own problems with refugees

You admit here that mass immigration causes issues. Well mass immigration has been occurring in the US for decades. We have over 10 _million_ illegal immigrants today. This is why trump's anti-immigration statements gained traction, because it was/is an issue here too, especially in the southern region of the US.

Though the obvious answer is your family is Jewish and the right empowered Nazis, the ambiguity of your statement means your family could have been Nazis and the right empowered Americans. There are like thirty correct choices in this macabre madlib.

"when one side literally empowers those that executed my family in WW2, it is no longer a disagreement, but a fight for my life."

Oddly, Trump is the most staunchly Zionist / Pro-Jewish President in American history (of course, all for his own benefit, I don't think he actually cares about any of it.)

Literally his daughter, and most trusted advisor converted to Judaism.

Paradoxically, it's now the 'global left', particularly in Europe who have faced real and serious problems of anti-semitism. In the UK, the Labour Party has had to eject several members for anti-semitic views (not just anti-Israel) and had to embark on programs to remedy the situation.

"In October 2020, the UK's human rights watchdog found Labour to be "responsible for unlawful acts of harassment and discrimination"." [1] From the BBC no less!

Most of my childhood friends grew up behind the Iron Curtain (Ukraine, Poland, Czech) or in Communist nations like Vietnam, Cambodia, China. Many family members murdered, starved. My Uncle fled with his mother through a forest across the border, chased by soldiers to escape. Many Serbian/Croatian friends who's parents lived through a very special kind of hell.

Perhaps you can ask one of your workmates from Hong Kong what he thinks about 'Socialism With Chinese Characteristics'? [2]

Please don't let us assume that one person's history or clan's mortal enemies represent the 'big picture' of anything.

Trump is a 'thuggish businessman with authoritarian tendencies' - not actually an ideologue. The extreme views on either side are toxic and have quit a history of mass murder. If we want to compare 'Deaths Caused by Stalin/Mao vs. Hitler' that would be a futile effort I think.

Mitt Romney and Barack Obama are both fairly good representations of either side and they're both fine men, if you're having trouble grasping why most people would be ok with that statement, maybe spend some time in another part of the country (Utah?) and make some friends there.

[1] In October 2020, the UK's human rights watchdog found Labour to be "responsible for unlawful acts of harassment and discrimination".

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socialism_with_Chinese_charact...

Quite a lot of American liberals think Trump conned his supporters. Promised them factory jobs, didn't deliver, etc. It should be considered the other way around, that the populists saw him as a narcissist who would bully their enemies for the mere simple favor of adoration. Who was being conned?

Neither side empowers anyone who executed your family WW2. Where on earth did you get such a delusion? Are you trying to turn the “alternative facts” thing around? What a completely insane thing to suggest.

> we're all under the same spell

Isn't this an oversimplification of politics, though--that our political opinions are nothing more than preferences around which we form tribes, and that there is not one single tribe that is objectively correct when it comes to matter of policy when, in fact, there are correct ways of deciding on policy.

Take vaccines, for example, or the matter of wearing masks. If I am for vaccines and for wearing masks during the pandemic, am I simply in some kind of "spell" and am I not, objectively speaking, correct, because my opinion on those matters are backed by science?

lol i no longer have energy for gotta hear both sides argument, whether its naive because of a myopic and narrow world view or just bad faith. like you said - how tf is mask wearing a political issue jfc

Combination of decadence, selfishness, cultism and vindictive politics.

The first two are self explanatory and certainly cross party lines.

Cult of Trump is to merely accept his say so that mask wearing has no efficacy and is merely political correctness. And really believe he knows better than scientists (anyone really).

From many conversations, it's just to piss off liberals. What I call vindictive politics. Literally many conversations, why do you like Trump and agree with him on things like fighting over masks? Schadenfreude. Making liberals scoff and angry makes them happy.

Ok why so much annoyance with liberal? A common example, is gay marriage which many Trump supporters consider completely immoral on religious grounds. It's so heinous to them they use oral rape metaphor to describe it: you liberals jammed gay marriage down our throats. We support Trump because he makes you angry.

I've asked for clarification: this is pay back for things like gay marriage and protecting abortion rights? "You betcha its payback! We don't care what crazy things he does or says. The more it pisses off liberals the better job he's doing." Their words. They have grievances. Trump soothes it by helping them get payback.

He grew his base by 7 million in this election. He gained almost as many votes as Bernie Sanders total vote count in the 2020 primary.

A lot of people think this is about Trump. And it's gone once he's gone. I don't.

> It's so heinous to them they use oral rape metaphor to describe it: you liberals jammed gay marriage down our throats.

This is such a ridiculous spin on “jammed down our throats” that none of them would have even considered that as a possible interpretation until you said it. Gay marriage is definitely not an issue that is top of mind for many Trump supporters.

”not an issue that is top of mind for many Trump supporters.” with a group that large I could replace 'gay marriage' with anything else and it would still be true. It might not be on spot number 1 for shared worry. However pretending that a _substantitial_ part does not have it on top of their mind (even if just to piss liberals) is dishonest.

You’re simply wrong. Do they have a position on it? Yes, obviously. Is it why they voted for Trump? Not even a little bit. And obviously they would have been pretty disappointed if they had, because he didn’t do anything to oppose gay marriage, nor did he say he would if re-elected. Yet 70 million still voted. I’m not going to call you dishonest, because like most on the left, you simply don’t understand folks on the right.

It’s not a single issue driving votes like abortion or guns but it’s a notable component in the “defender of Christianity” imagery a LOT of right-wingers use to justify why they supported such an un-Christlike person (the King Cyrus comparison being a common choice), and you don’t have to try hard to find people who link it to pedophilia and now the QAnon theories which have a large number of of adherents.

Oh they are way more hateful of transgender people. Same with Trump as evidenced by his policies. He really does represent his supporters. Democracy in action, I suppose.

> how tf is mask wearing a political issue jfc

The most common argument I've heard isn't about the mask itself, it's about the government acting like a parent that knows better than you. Lots of anti-mask people have said they would wear a mask if the government simply treated people like adults and asked instead of mandated it.

This is the most childish excuse I’ve ever heard. Imagine putting yourself and others at risk because you feel like you’re being forced to stay safe in a pandemic.

> one single tribe that is objectively correct

There are conclusions that are more true than others, but it gets messy when people start talking policy. Ground level facts have regularly led to horrible policy decisions despite being 'correct' according to the science.

> am I not, objectively speaking, correct, because my opinion on those matters are backed by science?

It is true that shutdowns, distancing, masking are all evidence based methods to contain the pandemic. However, politics is not only about selecting what methods work, but where they are applied, and who bears the cost. There is rarely an objective 'backed by the science' answer across the board.

You're correct, but observably that's not where the political trenches are dug. The wedge issues for the past few years haven't been around "how do we best implement the science", instead they're around fundamental disagreements that the science even exists.

Moving the trenches such that the main problem was trying to decide what the implementation of the shared science-based policy should be would be such a seismic shift in political discourse that I don't think I can visualise what that world would actually look like.

I mean President Trump literally said disparagingly at a rally "Biden will listen to the scientists" and then Biden put "I approve this message" at the end and turned it into an ad.

You can't get any clearer messaging on anti/pro science.

>You can't get any clearer messaging on anti/pro science.

Surely you can get clearer messaging than an out-of-context misinterpreted quote.

Trump always seems to take himself out of context, we all has accrss to his tweet history, but every missteps is a "joke" or "out of context". He can't even accept the results of a democratic election.

> Ground level facts have regularly led to horrible policy decisions despite being 'correct' according to the science.

Yes but that's because of lack of specificity, isn't it? That is, exactly the science in the lab is what is deployed on a grand scale outside the lab in terms of policy, when the specificities of the real world should have been taken into account.

In any case, with the real-world peculiarities taken into consideration, the underlying science would be the same nonetheless. It would be preposterous to say that just because vaccines and masks work in the lab doesn't mean they won't work in the real world.

>there is not one single tribe that is objectively correct when it comes to matter of policy when, in fact, there are correct ways of deciding on policy.

There are objectively correct matters of policy when your goals, values, and assumptions have been specified. But it is these goals, values, and assumptions that separate the population into different factions. It is not simply a matter of we're right and they're wrong when it comes to settling these foundational issues.

> I simply in some kind of "spell" and am I not, objectively speaking, correct, because my opinion on those matters are backed by science?

You are under a spell that maximizing lives saved from the virus is the obviously correct goal, which is why its never even stated out loud. But your policy choices given that goal are objectively correct. The issue is whether maximizing lives saved from the virus is the correct goal. Lockdowns have a cost which is mostly borne by those who do not have the means to go for weeks or months without work or cannot work from home. There's also the mental health costs of extended social distancing. These questions are not answered by simply referencing the science behind controlling pandemics. There are very contentious foundational issues that that must be settled before we can make factual determinations about policy.

There is an alternative to such polarized views. In many countries, politics is just politics, it happens in the background and is about as heart felt as the weather report.

It can be controversial and felt by all sure, but it shouldn't be a lifestyle or ideological platform that the general public use to divide themselves.

It's backoffice stuff, for the most part, and I am too busy being friends to really mind what someone's political views are, if they even think about it much at all themselves.

Now more than ever the US needs democracy, and the government needs to work harder than ever on protecting it.

But I argue that the people of America, the general public, need to give it a bloody rest with the politics. Be humans again and meet your neighbors as you are, part of the same cohort as citizens. Your vote is just as powerful, no matter how many flags, banners, or yard signs you have. Your vote is what decides the direction of your country, not the chest thumping and rallies and flag brigades.

>In many countries, politics is just politics, it happens in the background and is about as heart felt as the weather report.

Which countries are those? Because the US are insane, but politics is heartfelt in all countries I'm familiar with.

Which doesn't mean we have to reach such levels of infighting of course.

Canada feels closer to what your parent described than to what I see in the US, for one. There are of course those at the extremes who are very partisan. Although most of those identify more with US politics than Canadian it seems. But for the vast majority it's much less of an issue than it is in the US. For one thing, most people are not members of one of our federal political parties. Local politicians don't even align with federal parties, nor do provincial ones in all cases. Many people will shift their vote between ideologically similar parties, especially the Liberals and NDP.

Basically, for myself and most people I know, we vote for the party whose platform most closely matches our own priorities and beliefs, but it's not part of our identities in the same way. The parties themselves are also far less polarized than in the US. And because it's a multi-party system, you can have minority government that actually functions by garnering support of opposition parties. (We also effectively don't have multiple veto points though, so generally the governing party is able to govern; I think that also helps keep things from getting overheated.) Of course, the system isn't perfect. For instance by virtue of being both multi-party and first past the post, the winning party usually has the vote of a minority of the population, and still generally holds a majority of seats in parliament. But I've really come to appreciate it in comparison over the past few years.

As a Canadian, I would say the organization of our system of government and how voting in Canada works also plays a part in this. I can vote for my party of choice in a federal election and even if they do not become the governing party, I have the possibility of gaining more seats for party in parliament.

Compare this to the US where aside from being a two party system, the majority can vote for a candidate in a federal election and that party can lose and get nothing. (Of course, votes for members of congress don't function like this, but clearly not as much weight as placed on these.)

That's a good point. Less feeling that your vote was wasted. Of course the first past the post system does mean in many ridings it still effectively can be, but I still agree with your point. The lack of divided government also largely removes the blame game. Government governs, and the people either like it and keep voting for them, or vote for change (and get it). That's actually the one thing that gives me pause about a proprtional representation system (despite having voted for in in two BC referenda now). Would regular minority governments bring in more of that uncertainty? Maybe. But it would further improve the situation you described, which seems worth trying to me. (From my perspective it would be reasonable to agree to hold two elections under a PR system, then automatically have another referendum on whether to switch back.)

Australia is one, New Zealand another. I can't speak too much for other countries I guess so I probably shouldn't have written "many countries" as that's just an assumption on my part.

We must know different people in NZ and Australia, because I disagree with the inference their citizens treat politics like the weather report. One of the biggest differences at least in NZ is that there exists MMP for voting, which allows NZ to avoid brinkmanship in policy and winner-takes-all mindsets that lead to sharp divides.

It's not quite that it's unimportant to people I guess, it comes up in conversation during election periods of course. People just aren't particularly partisan or passionate in my experience. I think most people have other things they would rather talk about.

Similarly as the comment above mentions, Australia has preferential voting which helps in reducing the overall divisivness of the two party system most democracies end up with.

I'm from the US, moved to Australia and am now a dual citizen.

I think the reason for this here is because we have preferences in our voting, and we have compulsory voting. I can say, "First the communist, then the gun people, and if neither of those, finally go for a major party." if that suits me. That means our voices get heard, and the major parties listen.

In NSW government for example we had an unpopular law put in place that killed our nightlife, so an entire political party was created just to fight that one law. They got lots of first preference votes, and the votes for all who did that were routed back to candidates that actually won because of the preferences. Being able to allocate our votes back to major parties with our voices being heard is important. Liberal then realised this wasn't a hill they were particularly keen to die on, so they repealed the law. (https://www.timeout.com/sydney/nightlife/keep-sydney-opens-o...)

Also, compulsory voting means that everyone is going to vote. They have to by law. So there's no need to stoke the base to get turnout. Stoking the base makes you scary to everyone else and you get the smack down at the polls for it.

We currently have Greens members in our house of reps, and many many 3rd party candidates in the senate. It's nowhere near perfect, but having your voice heard clearly, having that reflected in law, and ensuring there's no apathetic middle that lets the extremes dictate policy cuts the crazy right down.

Issues like basic rights for transgender people, protection of voting rights for minorities, health care for unavoidable illnesses, and the major economic retooling needed to mitigate the effects of climate change are 'just politics' only for people privileged enough not to suffer because of them.

I don't dispute that, but also realise my comment is about the general population so inherently has to generalize.

I guess my reply would also be that in a well functioning democratic government people get to trust that those issues will get addressed in time, though that is also not universally true.

The history of the US shows that 'in time' means hundreds of years to get nominal equality, a hundred more years for that equality to be even moderately enforced, and continued harassment, mistreatment, and open murder by the state fifty years after that.

Well, when you have one side saying "count the votes" and another side saying "stop the count", it's unlikely we're in a well-functioning democracy. These are the exact issues at stake in elections: whether religious protections extend to denying abortion care, whether one polling place per county overwhelmingly favors rural whites, whether racial sensitivity training is itself racist and should therefore be banned from government contracting. These are from the last month. So it's fair to assume, with one side for and one side against, that while these issues might resolve themselves they might not to your satisfaction.

You also have the same side saying both "count the votes" and "stop the count."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jrj3n0j2Q2w

There is generally not just one side that has a meaningful investment in the resolution of some political issue. Arguing that the other side does not have a legitimate concern regarding some political conflict is generally not going to be very persuasive, and it isn't going to make those people go away.

That being said, I think it is possible to care very deeply about certain issues, and act on those concerns, in a way that largely avoids the political sphere. Trying to fix the problems we are concerned about by means of influencing the power games of elected officials is often very crude and ineffective. Sometimes influencing politics is necessary, but if we let ourselves believe that the only way to effect change is "shake the vending machine" of governmental power we will generally end up frustrated.

Which minorities don’t have voting rights? Are you sure you’re in the correct century?

You don't have to say some community cannot vote, you can suppress their political rights by other subtle actions like closing voting centers in areas they predominantly live, gerrymandering district boundaries such that they are insufficiently represented in state assemblies, etc.

Early in the last century, poll taxes were popular, as well as literacy tests. There are a lot of methods to make it harder for people you don’t like to vote.

- Felons, in varying degrees in different states.

- Residents of DC, Puerto Rico, the US Virgin Islands, and Guam

- People who have had their names removed from voter roles with no warning, as in Georgia, Wisconsin, and North Carolina, in the last few years.

- People who can't get US citizenship despite having lived here most or all of their lives.

- Vulnerable individuals who couldn't get an absentee ballot in Texas despite the pandemic

And so on. They're smaller, more specific minorities now. But there's a lot of them

Nothing here supports the argument that minorities don’t have voting rights, and I think the fact that you’re trying to stretch this to include non-citizens says a lot about how honest the original comment was.

I understand how you could assume that these issues aren't about minorities, but they really all are. Each of these issues barely touches white people while affecting minorities deeply.

- Felony convictions: Black and latino men are convicted of felonies at much higher rates than any other population. In 2016, 7.44% of black people had their voting rights stripped for felony convictions.[1] Over 1% of all black people in the United States are currently incarcerated, compared with about .2% for white people.[2]

- DC in majority minority, with 46% black residents.[3] Puerto Rico in 98.9% hispanic.[4]

- Citizenship: Over 800,000 people have enrolled in DACA, mostly of Latin American and East Asian origin. [5] They are ineligible for citizenship. Among those eligible to apply for Citizenship, many are from Canada or Europe.[6] Our immigration laws are setup to favor high school immigrants, who are far more likely to be white than the immigrant population as a whole. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, but it means our voting population is far more white than our resident population.

- Disenfranchisement: This is far more piecemeal, but southern states routinely take actions that just so happen to make it more difficult for minorities to vote rather than white people. I recommend listening to [7] if you're interested, which covers a specific recent circumstance in Florida, with a few examples from other states. It's no coincidence when eliminated polling places and dropboxes just so happen to always be in Black neighborhoods.

Remember, the voting rights marches of the 1960s weren't about giving black people the right to vote, that happened in 1870. They were about how certain states had made it so difficult for black people to vote that it was essentially impossible. Sure, many black people vote in these states today, but that doesn't mean that they have an equal ability to vote. The measures aren't as strong as they once were, but they still exist.

[1] https://www.sentencingproject.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/08... [2] https://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/p19.pdf [3] https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/DC [4] https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/PR [5] https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/09/25/key-facts-a... [6] https://www.dhs.gov/sites/default/files/publications/lpr_pop... [7] https://www.npr.org/2020/10/26/927846676/who-gets-to-vote-in...

Minorities are disproportionately affected by long waiting times. Minorities have to wait twice as long to vote on average. Examples abound of people having to wait 5+ hours just to vote in heavily Democratic, minority locations. Its an easy problem to solve - add more/better locations, more voting machines, more poll workers - but seems to be consistently ignored or even exacerbated.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/smartphone-data-s...

Same for issues like diversity hiring and SJWs irritating well-running open source projects. I say this as a left leaning person. Politics and religion tend to divide people thus they have to be kept away, it won't harm anyone but self important non-technical idiots who think renaming master to main will change the life of oppressed people.

It doesn't matter how important the issues are if the political system is so paralyzed it can't get anything done.

The USA seems to have devolved into a system where elections are like votes on those huge omnibus bills that rightly get so much flak - if you want to see action on the environment, you have to also support increased welfare spending, increased gun control, gay rights and any number of issues that have nothing to do with environmental policy.

Similarly, if you want fiscal conservatism, you have to support people who want to ban abortion, oppose any climate action, use the state to prop up religion in society and so on and on.

This is nuts. The two-party system seems to make it impossible to tackle political issues on their merits, and I hope the people start to organize around specific issues instead of around the current parties. Pick an issue important to you, maybe starting on the less controversial end, and I think you will find that if you don't mix it up with every issue under the sky, people across the blue-red divide will support it. Organize those people outside the party system, and maybe you can get some change going.

Yeah, sorry, but my access to healthcare isn't something as heart felt as the weather report. I either live or die without it.

Right, but my comment isn't about current-day America, more a possible future where your access to care doesn't rest on an election, because not everything is hyper-politicized and some decisions get made for what is the best decision for most not what matches the ideology.

The hyper-polarization of the political landscape means you either get care or you don't. If one side will help you and one side wont, you're going to have a tough time holding on to your rights regardless of one election win.

A more unified America with a strong middle class wouldn't need to undermine one group to bolster another, and you would have more moderate political candidates rather than having to choose between two distant evils every election.

I get to not care because years of moderate politics in my country has seen a general trend toward humanitarianism regardless of which "side" wins. Recently the "right-wing" political group of my country protected same-sex marriage, even though it doesn't align with their ideology, because they're only moderate-right, and so their priorities still lie in pleasing the majority and not extreme political interests.

Obviously the US would have a long way to go before it could ever take any of this advice seriously, I was just trying to point out that the divided nature of your population drives the politics too.

I don't think anyone who's sick/dying gets turned away from the hospital.

Only for emergency care. If you need, say, cancer treatment, you are on your own.

Would you rather be forced to pay 130 bucks a month and still have to pay up to 800 bucks a year for initial costs of health care? Because that’s what it means. Or you get your own health insurance and have something to choose from

You're talking to someone who buys health insurance on the individual market. $130/mo premiums and a $800 deductible sounds amazing, considering that I pay many multiples of those rates. I'd gladly pay more than triple or quadruple that, as I'd still be saving money and would wind up with better benefits.

If I bought a family health plan, I'd be paying at least 15 times those rates on the individual market.

Meanwhile, other first world nations are able to insure all of their citizens with better health outcomes than outcomes in the US, and at half of the cost the US pays for its inferior levels of care[1].

[1] https://www.healthsystemtracker.org/chart-collection/quality...

Totally agree, and I've also voted both ways before. But I also would caution against going too far on the "both sides" thinking. There are some obvious examples of regimes in the past in certain countries where one side was just bad and it was not just a matter of different opinions: Germany, Serbia, Rwanda, etc.

I think Trump and his administration lie somewhere between just being misunderstood by "the other side" and 100% depraved. I tend to think they're actually quite far to the depraved side of that spectrum, but that doesn't mean we can't still pay attention to making sure we see things from other perspectives (within reason).

Are you trying to say that "Truth isn't truth"?

The difference is that with the spinning dancer optical illusion, there's never a "wrong" way to view it.

This isn't always the case with politics, or any kind of view for that matter. It's important to empathize with people you disagree with, but it's just as important that we start with a foundation of agreed upon facts.

In other words, reality isn't a point of view.

Apologies in advance if this sounds snappy, this hits an issue I feel strongly about.

My local supermarket has precisely no empathy for me and the only thing I expect to agree on with the local store manager is price. Yet it is by far the most effective conduit for getting me cheap food. Effective systems simply are not very good at empathy and agreement on non-core issues is unimportant. Empathy in particular recommended at a personal level but not especially useful in politics. The critical tool is the ability to comprehend, negotiate, compromise and articulate why things are necessary.

Having "empathy" for "the left"/"the right" isn't possible. The groups are too large and diverse. Ditto for major components of the left or right like "the black vote", "the evangelicals", "people in cities", "people from Detroit", "the wealthy", etc, etc. Entities that you can have empathy for or agree on facts with are too small to be politically important like individuals or families. Politics is done by large groups who's beliefs are too nebulous to align.

Wasn't that OP's key point? Vast majority (if not all) political messages are both true and false, depending on context and personal bias.

I completely disagree. I think reality IS a point of view. You are suggesting that there is only one way to think about reality. And that is complete lunacy.

"Alternative facts" are not facts, they are lies people tell themselves to justify a point of view. It's not truth, it's not sanity. Someone can't just substitute a lie for the truth because it feels better. I mean, they can, but they aren't living in reality - and that's actually complete lunacy.

Are you a glass half empty or a glass half full kind of person?

So, it's quite possible to have 2 truths - factually accurate - arise from the same physical reality because the observers are different.

It's also possible that people substitute falsities in exchange for truth based on bad intent or erroneous reasoning (and maybe there are other reasons but these would seem to be the most prevalent of the bad sort).

Since all these are possibilities, would you agree that it's best to apply some charity[1] to those you disagree with before deciding that they are not only wrong, but malign and should be tarred as lunatic?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principle_of_charity

Whether the glass is half full or half empty is not a fact, it's an opinion. The glass being, say, 45.67% from full capacity is a fact. The glass being emptied right now at 55 millilitres per second or being filled at 45 millilitres per second is a fact.

It might be a fact that two people can have greatly different kinds of opinions from the same facts, but they both still deserve to know the facts.

Whether you consider the glass to be half full or half empty is not a fact. It's an opinion.

> The glass being, say, 45.67% from full capacity is a fact.

The glass is at 50% capacity. Was it more convenient for you to change the fact of the statement?

You’ve simply substituted one kind of measure for another without providing a distinction between them.

The key point is that a fact has a different effect on different observers that can be discerned from the way the express it. The state of affairs being described is not a belief or an opinion or will magically find less millimetres (as in your comment) by being stated differently.

When the glass is at 50% capacity, one is making an observation of the state of affairs.

When one says that it is "half full" or "half empty" one is already making it into a statement of belief or opinion that reflects one's inner workings and beliefs.

> making it into a statement of belief

I want to get this straight. You’re saying that a glass that exists hypothetically, posited by the speaker, may only be known to be half full as a belief by that very speaker?

> or opinion

Or that it’s their opinion that it’s half full? Even if it wasn’t hypothetical, would you find it at 50% capacity or not?

> that reflects one’s inner workings and beliefs

I can’t tell if that means you read what I wrote or if you didn’t. Regardless, using a relative measure does not turn a factual statement into a belief or an opinion of the explicitly stated fact. That which may be inferred from the way of stating a fact may well be beliefs and opinions but that does not change the fact any more than it would by being stated in English rather than in French. Relative measures are no less factual - or valid, sound, precise or accurate - than absolute measures. Just try restating using absolute measures of pints and millilitres and tell me that makes the statements less factual or that beliefs and opinions cannot also be inferred from them.

There’s being charitable and then there’s ignoring flat out disinformation.

Let’s not forget that the phrase “Alternative facts” was coined on day 3 of the Trump presidency to defend the lie that he had the biggest inauguration crowd ever.

This wasn’t a glass half full situation, this was someone saying it’s up to the brim when it’s under a half. That in itself to me reflects bad intent: lying from the seat of government about something so easily disproved at the start of your presidency, then spending days trying to back it up, is pure gaslighting.

The Trump administration deserves most of the blame here, but it’s very hard to treat with charity the subset of his supporters who repeat blatant lies like the above, because they are being willfully ignorant at best and acting in bad faith otherwise.

Among the long list of important things to worry about in politics, the number of people at Trump's inauguration isn't one of them, and I wonder what number of his own supporters even care. It must be vanishingly small.

The response to "there can be more than one view of reality that is valid and true" isn't to respond with "lies are lies and using lies in place of truth is lunacy", (to paraphrase the parent comments, perhaps more fairly than the latter deserves) so to remain focused on "Alternative facts" is to be led astray by what amounts to a straw man. That whole debacle was a petty response by a narcissist to a petty narrative line by a media that isn't focused on what matters anyway and anyone repeating the White House line was more than likely acting tribally - as was anyone criticising the numbers. The proverbial storm in a teacup.

Regardless, who is arguing for "Alternative facts" here?

Nobody is arguing for them here. I was saying that the people pushing them should not be given any charity, as they have proved themselves to be acting in bad faith time and time again.

There is a clear line of behavior that began with lying about crowd size and extended throughout the presidency, and yes a lot of it is driven by narcissism. It’s mostly not harmless though. A recent deadly example is how Trump supporters (speaking generally again) act concerning COVID. The president and his cohorts said “masks don’t matter, it’ll disappear soon anyway” for months and months, and his supporters believed it despite factual evidence, which has worsened the pandemic.

Tribalism is the word I was seeking, thank you.

Reading the thread again, I think you may be putting more weight on the use of “complete lunacy” than the poster intended. That was a reference to its parent post, which used the same words while taking “reality isn’t a point of view” out of context to mean “there is only one way to think about reality.” If there’s a straw man here, it’s all the way up there.

"The world is flat" was "settled science" for 100000 years.

Actually no. That was Christianity who tried for a short time. It was not true and it didn't catch on, except for the urban legend itself.

Is a fetus considered a human baby? This is one of those 2 sided debates that regularly occurs and the problem is that no amount of science will be able to give a definitive answer. It's a personal worldview and both sides have valid arguments.

> it's just as important that we start with a foundation of agreed upon facts. In other words, reality isn't a point of view.

I don't think these two things are as strongly related as you suggest. Two reasonable people can look at the same problem with the same facts, make reasonable guesses on what the best course is, and yet reach two completely different, reasonable approaches to the problem. Otherwise, we would have already decided which programming language is the best one.

Some situations are more clear cut than others, and I agree that we need to separate facts from opinion better. But for situations as complex as the present and future of a country there might very well not be a "right" way.

"Reality" is not a point of view, but we only experience it through the lens of our personal experiences. No one experiences "true" reality.

Have you ever dug into Bayesian reasoning? See E.T. Jayne's probability theory chapter 5 for an explanation on this.

The more facts we get, the more likely our views diverge and become more strongly held.

Yeah, I don't disagree. The more facts we have to choose from, the more susceptible to bias, because we will have a wider variety to cherry-pick from.

But for those who are genuinely interested in the truth and vigorously fighting biases, more facts can only help construct a "more complete" truth.

An ironic stance, given that it is the left in the US that are pushing ideas like Critical Theory, which is based on post-modernism, which in turn maintains that reality ("knowledge claims") is effectively a point of view ("socially conditioned").

Various factions within the US left have been trying to convince everyone for decades that subjective truth is more important than objective facts; that "lived experience" is what really matters.

Then those same people pull a surprised Pikachu face when Orange Man comes swinging out of right field with the same argument, just in the opposite direction with "fake news" etc.

No surprise you've been upvoted so much. Yours is a truly remarkable comment, and observation.

I'd humbly add that at least to my eyes, most of the time the discussions on disagreements between two political parties are simply ineffective at trying to solve the disagreement, and rather irrational or badly arranged. In other words: most political discourse you hear these days seems useless.

Honestly, right and left is pretty nonsensical, at least the current beliefs that qualify as right or left. The average person likely has beliefs that would fall on both sides and this incessant need to categorize someone as either left or right just leads to more polarization and more extreme views. When people are told they must be one thing because they have certain views about one issue, meanwhile their views on other issues lean more to the other side. But because of this strange all or nothing paradigm going on, there's no room for common ground or compromise, it's all or nothing one side or the other, you believe one thing, so you must believe all the things or you're on this side or the other.

That's utter nonsense, political spectrums aren't all or nothing, take it or leave it, all inclusive things. A person is capable of having a range of views on different issues that may fall on either side and it's perfectly acceptable for this to be the case.

Politics like everything in life isn't black and white all or nothing, take it or leave it, it'a a bunch of shades of grey like everything else and as with most things the average person, when asked about issues without the context of left or right involved, will likely express views that fall across both sides of the political spectrum.

While this might sound reasonable and balanced in most democracies, it's just not applicable to what is/was happening in the US. Regardless of moderate views of individuals, this election was not about economic policies or other debatable differences, this election was about if we can get back to this described discourse level of coexistence, not where one side's chief strategist says it's required to behead scientists for deterrence, any adherence to truth, decency and the general right to exist for minorities was on the table.

You seem to be affected by the exact thing the post you replied to is alleging. As an outsider who reads both sides' arguments all the time, I am convinced that Republicans currently lean towards supporting freedom of speech and personal liberties, civil discourse, equal rights while the Democrats are the exact opposite. They are supporting and defending violent protests, looting, segregation(!), vowed to make lists of Trump supporters to deal with after the election etc. etc. ... Perhaps this is "truth and decency" for some people, but to many it's not.

It was not about what reasonable people think at this point, it’s about what they do and who they enable to enact power. The people you mentioned have no power and are not endorsed or are told to „stand by“. This is a very significant difference. As a reminder the whole reason Biden entered the race was Charlottesville.

Charlottesville is a good point, as it was one of the most perpetuated lies during the Biden and supporting media campaign that Trump somehow supposedly called extremists "good people" (media and Biden omitted the rest of the quote to distort what Trump said, he explicitly condemned extremists).

He didn't explicitly call them good people. He didn't have to.

He explicitly said there are good people on both sides.

The thing people are upset about is that Trump walked the line between condemnation and support.

While that's true, I think the parent is right that the media went too far with this one. Trump did explicitly say later in the speech that he wasn't referring to the white supremacists as good people, but to others in the crowd that just wanted to protect the Lee statue.

I think you're right that people were upset with Trump for focusing on that and drawing a moral equivalence between the counter-protestors and even those willing to march with white supremacists. One could even reasonably argue that no 'good' person would choose to join a march largely inhabited by white supremacists, or even that their support of the General Lee statue was itself a racist act. But those are the points that should have been made, rather than stretching it to say Trump literally called white supremacists good people, which he didn't. There's plenty you could criticise without resorting to taking him out of context.

That isn’t what “stand by” meant, and the intent of that statement was obvious. Also, Trump repeatedly condemned the racists at Charlottesville, and not only were they not endorsed, but explicitly disavowed. Repeatedly.

There are absolutely extremist supporters of both sides. For instance, I'm dismayed at some of the schadenfreude reactions on Twitter by anti-Trump people right now. (In particular the "I love to see Trump supporters cry" meme that really needs to die, as it's extremely antagonistic and unhelpful.) However the difference is, on the Republican side, it comes right from the top. Just read Trump's twitter feed: it's an endless stream of ad-hominem attacks and lies. Regular politicians will attack their opponents' positions, and they'll spin or stretch the truth sometimes, but I've never seen another American politician, much less a president, stoop to the level that Trump regularly inhabits in his everyday discourse. I mean, just listen to Biden's victory speech and compare it to Trump's. Or compare their twitter feeds. To say the Republican party stands for civil discourse... I honestly don't know how you could have watched the President for the past four years and come away with that impression.

Also the Roger Stone - Alex Jones connection, it’s a preposterous projection of the extreme right to justify abuse of power on their end. There is simply no objective „both-sides“ ground to any of those claims. https://amp.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/sep/13/roger-stone-...

> I mean, just listen to Biden's victory speech and compare it to Trump's. Or compare their twitter feeds. To say the Republican party stands for civil discourse... I honestly don't know how you could have watched the President for the past four years and come away with that impression.

Easy, just look at who is in favour of censorship, "deplatforming", violence against people with the "wrong" opinions. Words don't hurt, Tweets are overrated. But silencing people, causing them to lose their jobs, or just assaulting them, that hurts.

Words can absolutely hurt. Trump's rhetoric has severely ramped up partisan anger and disaffection, contributing to real violence in several cases.

I don't believe it's the case that Biden or anyone in the leadership of the Democratic party has advocated for violence against people with wrong opinions, or indeed anyone.

> and the general right to exist for minorities was on the table.

No, it wasn’t, obviously. What a disgusting thing to say.

If only you were right.

It is indeed a disgusting thing to be true.

And this is why the democrats can’t figure out what they’re doing wrong. What you said is a hilarious fantasy. Please, show me the proposed legislation that would suggest minorities can’t exist. I’m dying to see how that could even be worded.

https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2020/06/12/8680730...

Yeah, in no way does that suggest minorities don’t have a right to exist.

>People on the left think that anyone on the right is a lunatic, and everyone on the right thinks the same thing about the left.

I firmly disagree. Not all political climates and discourses are as poisoned as they are in the US.

That said, not all political disagreements are created equally. We can have a rousing polite disagreement about immigration levels, national financial priorities, cultural values and so on, but if the discussion is premised in a fundamental disagreement about whether or not certain people deserve dignity as human beings then there's very little common ground to build off of.

I’m fairly lefty, and used to have quite a a bit of respect for the right, since I am at heart a bit of a libertarian. I’ve lost quite a bit of it though after seeing how so many of them lined up to support sometime so obviously amoral as the current President.

>We think it's the other side that's crazy, but we're all under the same spell.

In this case, one side is provably crazy, and the evidence from our intelligence agencies shows they are dangerous lunatics. The other side wants empathy, equality, science, and truth to rule the day.

I'm not sure how you can just hand-wave that away. Your comment is the same old "both sides" fallacy.

Is the provably crazy side the one you’re on? Because this is provably false.

Then prove it.

When you think like that, you've already lost.

Like, if you believe that all humans have rights and dignity, then you shouldn't be saying crap like that.

If you don't then how are you different from your enemies?

What you are saying is that GP's conclusion is impossible, and are thereby falling into the very trap you describe.

Describing your opponents as "provably crazy" is unlikely to provide a basis to make things better.

Denying that assertion the possibility of validity is unlikely to prove it false.

Quite relevant to that, there's this one SMBC comic from almost a decade ago that I've referred back to on a monthly basis, and it just keeps getting more and more relevant every year.

https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/2013-04-07

This is what often happens in politics. There are a small subset of extremist on either side, and when people argue, they're pointing out the worst things the other side's extremists did. Calling each other KKK and Antifa and racist and SJW. Realistically, between those two extremes, the majority of people are good well meaning people who just don't know what the truth is anymore due to all the lies and disinformation on the web. All the clickbait shoving the most rage inducing stories about the other side all day long.

> anyone on the right is a lunatic

In my country where there isn't a two party only system, but a plethora of positions ranging from the most extreme to the most moderate, for decades the left Vs right battle created a gradient of opinions

There are lunatics on the left and on the right, sometimes they have been violent, sometimes they put our democracy at risk, but in the end both left and right rejected them

We had our momentary lapse of reason when we (not me, but still...) elected Berlusconi, it seemed we lost our mind (we probably did) and nothing worse could ever happen to any other country politically speaking

Trump is on a new level of tribalism, divide and polarization though

How a real lunatic, with evident sever mental health issues ended up at the white house is gonna be a big black spot on American history (the greatest democracy in the World, the greatest country in the world, etc. etc.)

Is this not a function of how rationality actually works? We all begin with premises which are fundamentally unproven and unprovable. Our conclusions follow from those premises. Change the premises and the result changes, though both sets of deductions may be perfectly rational. In other words, rationality is a process, not a set of conclusions.

One word for this is "tradition". If I've piqued your interest, please read Alasdair MacIntyre's book "After Virtue," and also it's sequel with a more provocative title, "Whose Justice? Which Rationality?"

That’s a very long winded way of saying supporting a man who went on stage and openly opined that ingesting disinfectant could be a solution for covid is very sane

I was a "Trumper" 20 years ago. Your comment initially made sense to me. Then I remembered the many wrong and harmful ideas that I recognized and rejected since that time. These ideas lead to real harm for many people.

For example, during Bill Clinton's impeachment trial for sexual harassment of his woman intern, I thought that his behavior was no big deal, that we accept that powerful men like to play around with women, and that the intern knew what she was getting into when she got the job working for him. Later, I realized that I was wrong. Those beliefs enable sexual harassment of women across society. We must reject those beliefs so women can have equal opportunity and good quality of life.

Other wrong ideas that I had:

- Poor people are poor because they are lazy.

- Violent criminals are violent because they don't want to control themselves.

- Unlucky people failed to prepare properly or were careless.

- Gay people are bad for society.

- Men should be breadwinners. Women should be housewives.

- USA is powerful because God is rewarding its Christian citizens for following His rules.

All of these ideas are wrong. These ideas harm people and make our society poorer.

Yes, I can remember my previous thought processes and see the dancer spin the other way, but the dancer is carrying a single-edged sword and spinning the other way way hurts people.

People change.

Trump was even a Democrat 20 years ago.

Got lots more attention as a Republican now, since 2009.

The two parties provide the opposing agendas which dominate, and the particular characteristics of each candidate are secondary.

Especially when neither party has much to offer the average citizen any more, they have built their strength traditionally on low voter turnout where extreme factions loudly broadcasting gradually become over-represented in the most polarizing way.

As cycles continue only the most polarizing issues drive the turnout, and for turnout to grow beyond a certain point the majority of the potential voters must perceive the other party as a more serious threat, when compared to any security offered by their own party which they (might) have chosen because they found it less offensive (maybe only in past cycles too).

The parties no longer need to have as much to offer the average citizen as cycles go on, when they can get contending turnout from their own extremists combined with orders of magnitude more sympathizers who can be convinced to strongly fear what the _other side_ could take away.

Seems like after a party has been around for longer than any living person, they will not get support by having more to offer average citizens than in previous cycles, only by taking less away from them.

So the average citizen hasn't had a positive outcome within reach for a while.

Now it's too late, these top candidates are realistically as youthful as you can get compared to the grand old parties themselves, and regardless of personal integrity or leadership style can not offer anything above that from the parties alone.

Even in the case of Trump's extreme personality, which the Democrats did not even try to nominate a candidate having that feature, so this element was as one-sided as you can get.

I saw agreement from both sides that a wet dishrag could defeat Trump if only 270 electors represent voters who just plain dislike or hate him. Conversely it was recognized Trump would win if he had merely 270 electors of voters who dislike or hate one or more of the current items on the Democratic party platform.

Neither strategy can offer anything to the majority of the citizens in the political middle, the true average citizen, since turnout has been driven by fear not opportunity.

Building a coalition from a carefully-crafted extreme attention-getting position, and pushing hard from there so the other side ends up below the 50 percent needed to be in power, has turned out to prevail over representing even the middle 50 percent of voters which is how it was supposed to be at a minimum.

So once the issues and/or personalities representing them have reached full polarity, 50 becomes more of a constant to be converged upon from afar rather than a starting point to build a majority from in both directions.

Resulting in half the voters who turn out, and half the politically centrist citizens (which is a much larger group by a variable multiple of active voters) who will always be dissatisfied and these are two different groups (but having significant overlap), the latter of which is the core of the majority that all parties are supposed to be treating as constituents.

But the core of the majority in the middle doesn't have a voice because they don't have any party which represents them any more, the parties are doing other things with the money and the concerns of centrist citizens are given lowest priority.

The party gets more votes over the long run by fear-mongering against the other side regardless of who the candidates are at the time, and only declining resources can be justified which might actually benefit the majority of citizens.

Problem is, the majority are voting against their own best interest because their own best interest has not been available for a number of cycles. Rather each side votes against what's perveived as the other's best interest instead, since that's the only thing at stake anyway.

So the majority of voters end up speaking for the entire population as designed, but all votes are cast against someone's best interest because the minority party is voting exactly the same as the majority in this regard.

So it's unanimous by both parties that as few of the average citizens as possible should have their best interest be served, and to redefine democracy in that direction can not be accomplished during a single cycle or maybe not even a single generation.

Ending up with the choice between a trustworthy Joe and a dishonest Don the thing that doesn't really matter to half the voters as much as it should.

It would probably help if there were parties which were younger than the candidates.

I'm not American but my non-political echo chambers have gotten quite political. Chess, Infosec, Atheism, philosophy, reddit, etc HATE trump for example. Then I have other echo chambers that tend to love Trump. Personally I'm neither side as I'm not American. I also enjoy looking at both sides and it's remarkable how different the viewpoints really are. The echo chambers worked exactly as expected, those places that hated trump only hear about things that are terrible about trump. Nothing negative about Biden at any point. Every single Gaffe by Biden was portrayed as completely fake as deepfakes or old footage dubbed over etc.

Generally speaking my echo chambers leaned anti-trump. The one thing I failed to find in the last 2 months is any actual discourse. There is absolutely no neutral viewpoints. There is absolutely no discussions between the 2 camps. The political divide in the USA is worse than I have ever seen it.

The perception I have, that wasn't a free and fair election. What's even more curious is that nobody seems to care. Ends justify the means. Which hey, I personally very much prefer Trump to lose. However, if healing the political divide is a goal, that's basically impossible now.

I really, truly, would like to believe both of the major political parties in the US have reasonably good intentions. It makes logical sense—how can half of the entire population be mostly wrong, and the rest mostly right?

But then I always remember that in the United States, there is only one major political party that believes Climate Change is real. The other party believes the phenomenon is some sort of gigantic ruse.

I consider Climate Change the most pressing issue of our time, and myself a single-issue voter. Not because everything else is unimportant, but because Climate Change is even more important. We have to get this right, and we have to start immediately!

If the two parties disagreed on how to address Climate Change—say, with a carbon tax versus renewable energy subsidies—that would be one thing. But that's not the world we live in. As long as one of the parties insists that Climate Change is a complete fabrication, I don't see how I can possibly take anything they say seriously.

OK, so the transition from Make America Great Again slogan to Make America Decent Again (and Better) reality is inevitable and welcome. It is easy to get overjoyed by results of the U.S. Presidential Election (and some celebration certainly is in order).

Uniting the country is definitely a commendable goal, though it is easier said than done. The election results across all levels clearly illustrate just how divided and polarized this land is. Thus, it will take quite a lot of time and effort to see a reasonable progress on this front. We all can play our part in it by a polite and constructive dialog with opponents and first finding common ground on such pressing and all-encompassing issues as coronavirus pandemic, environmental protection, social justice and health care reform.

In the meantime, let us not forget that, in order to restore the heavily damaged moral fabric of this country, relevant measures should pass through the Congress. And while Democrats retain control of the House, the opposing party might retain control of the Senate. Which most certainly will lead to a significant gridlock in moving forward with the democratic and, in some cases, progressive agenda unless Democrats retake control in the Senate. Remember, winning a battle is not a guarantee for winning a war. That is why the U.S. Senate run-off elections in Georgia to be held on January 5 (https://georgia.gov/vote-2020-runoff-elections) are crucial.

Is there really any common ground?

My experience talking to the other side during this administration is that they are completely unable and often unwilling to consider any argument or information that conflicts with their views. How do you debate with people who don't care about facts or reason?

In addition their leadership appears to be completely unwilling to act and good faith and the rank in file appear unwilling to hold them accountable for that fact.

I would love to be able to see some way to find common ground, but It seems to me that doing so would just be playing the sucker.

> My experience talking to the other side during this administration is that they are completely unable and often unwilling to consider any argument or information that conflicts with their views.

This absolutely goes both ways; that is the biggest problem.

Sorry, this isn’t true, and it’s important to call out as such.

https://www.vox.com/polyarchy/2017/9/22/16345194/republican-...

I think you just proved my point.

How?

Nothing was proved either way.

No, no that didn't. Just because someone denies an adverse position doesn't mean that they are fanatically denying evidence, it can easily be the case that the adverse position is false, and that they are open to seeing it proven true but haven't seen it.

Perhaps a better question would be: Consider two parties starting out relatively reasonable. Over time, members of both parties claim the other party is becoming unreasonable or outright crazy. This could be true in the following to scenarios:

(1) Both parties have become crazy. Both parties would be correct in their claims but of course also guilty of having gone crazy.

(2) Party A has stayed reasonable and party B has become crazy. Party A would be correct in their claim and party B's claim would be part of them being crazy.

How do you distinguish between (1) and (2) from the outside?

Absolutely not equivalent. Find me a liberal police captain who’s calling for Trump supporters to be shot in the head: https://abc3340.com/news/local/alabama-police-chief-on-socia...

One loud, crazy voice doesn't represent the majority.

Normally I'd agree, but in this case, the loud crazy voice is often Trump himself.

She is not alone.

If intransigence is justified by any violent idiocy among the opposition, we will have mass intransigence indefinitely.

We cannot reasonably ask for peaceful daytime demonstrations to be considered separately from after-sundown looting and arson if we aren't willing to make likewise considerations.

The difference is that the police captain can shoot you and me and get away with it.

If you go hunting for extreme examples then you'll certainly find them, on every side.

Or perhaps we should stop cherry-picking the extremes as representative of all the people.

On the contrary, this type of "both side-ism" is exactly what sabotages honest discussion. The sides are not anywhere near equal in their willingness to use violence to achieve their means.

One side has leftists rioting in the streets and looting storefronts. The other side has conservatives plowing their cars through liberal protestors at full speed and murdering them.

One side has leftists setting police cars on fire. The other side has conservatives plotting to kidnap and/or murder mayors and governors.

One side has leftists throwing milkshakes at so-called "independent journalists". The other side has political candidates bodyslamming real journalists.

No, it's the concept of "sides" that sabotages honest discussion. It's just extremists who are very loud and amplified by others. They do not represent the majority in the middle.

There is no group with better humans. It's a failure of context, nuance and understanding if you think so.

Exactly. Side-ism — or the uncritical oversimplification of the complexity that is American politics and American demographics - is about as useful as racism. Honestly, what’s it good for?

No there absolute is: it's the side which hasn't ongoingly and repeatedly attempted to murder members of the other.

Property is not lives, and your "but the middle!" is meaningless: the middle if it exists is a group of people going "well, someone's dead, but also what about that vacant Wendy's?"

There may be no group with better humans, but ideologies can be better or worse.

"Ideologies" are just as bad as "sides".

Nobody really thinks that way. Better to discuss individual policies which will show that the vast majority of people comprise a complex mix of perspectives.

I'm not going to engage with you in this violence score-keeping exercise, but I will say that it should be apparent to anyone capable of popping their media bubble that you are cherry-picking.

You're always free to show us examples of leftists plowing their cars into conservative protesters.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2017_Congressional_baseball_sh...

> One side has leftists setting police cars on fire. The other side has conservatives plotting to kidnap and/or murder mayors and governors.

There were also assassination attempts from the other side:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2017_Congressional_baseball_sh...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_Donald_Trump_Las_Vegas_ra...

The first one is a good example. The second one is about a mentally ill British man whose "assassination attempt" never had any chance of success.

Should we count as political violence the plot to kill Barack Obama with a "death ray"? I think there's a distinction to be drawn between political violence and crazy people being crazy.

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

Interestingly, reading the pages you linked and dredging up the Death Ray link induced me to notice that (1) the previous shooting of a Congressperson was by a right-wing terrorist, and (2) that page about Obama recounts something like 6 very real plots to kill him mixed in among a bunch of variously mentally ill people being delusional. I think it's pretty clear which way the wind blows here.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_Tucson_shooting

While you found one crazy person...

How about the high level democrats literally creating a list of "Trump Supporters" with the express purpose of "ejecting them from polite society" aka canceling them socially, and economically,

More like we decided we don’t care for their shitty ideas or opinions.

So you admit that you are completely unable and unwilling to consider any argument or information that conflicts with your world views

If I do not agree with you, if I have a outlook on the world that is different from your then I have "shitty ideas or opinions" and thus is ethical, moral and just of cancel me economically and socially?

So you are admitting that the Democrats do no really want reconciliation or compromise, they want victory and subjection of their perceived enemies (republicans, conservatives, libertarians)

Thanks for clearing that up for us

Goodness me. I hate talking politics but let's not make the mistake of getting into false equivalency.

The Trump presidency has gathered a cesspool of supporters and sycophants who:

1. Have at best maintained prosperity and growth (mostly by keeping interest rates low and patching economic holes with deregulations and/or short-term protectionist policies). The BBC(1) had a nice collection of charts showing -- essentially -- that the rate of change in the well-being of the economy did not deviate when Trump took office.

2. Have increased spending and absolutely ballooned our national debt (see "short-term" policies) (2). While I do not mind spending money to solve structural economic problems (automation removing jobs, the transition from polluting industries to cleaner ones), much of the funding went to solve problems the Trump administration created themselves!

3. Have absolutely demonstrated a complete dearth of moral and ethical values. This is an absolute killer in my book. From forcibly creating orphans (3) or allowing an enemy state to promote the hunting of American soldiers, it's clear that the administration has no moral qualms regarding their actions.

When it comes to COVID, the United States has a per capita COVID death rate that is insanely disproportionate when compared with other developed countries. The US has a per capita COVID death rate that is 66x Japan, 18x Australia, and almost 6x Germany. While the rallying cry has been, "But saving the economy is more important than saving lives!", this is absolutely unsupported by data. The delta in GDP between the end of Q1 and the end of Q3 is roughly a loss of 9% in the United States (5). In Germany, that same period of time resulted only in a loss of 2.5% (6). The willful spread of lies and misinformation have caused much death not only in the United States, but in many other countries which historically have looked towards the United States as being a bastion of truth and information. Trump and his cronies have enabled many other leaders around the world by normalizing an unethical and immoral response to a crisis.

Beyond the reduction of some federal taxes (which has admittedly saved me some money) and a stronger stance against IP theft (which I think is better for the United States but perhaps worse for the world), I struggle to come up with cases in which the Trump administration has improved America, the American people, or society as a whole in any meaningful manner.

For four years, Trump and his assembled cohort causing a regression in American ethics, integrity, world standing, and education. They have done this intentionally. From the beginning, they've approached the governance of America like a popularity contest where the end goal was to satisfy sycophants and fill their own pockets. I am not calling all who support Trump racist or evil, but Trump and many of those he associates with have absolutely promoted hate, demonstrated unethical behavior, and upheld the highest levels of greed and degeneracy.

If these people were my acquaintances in my personal or business life, you would not fault me for "ejecting" them from my life. I would imagine that if you had a friend who cheered when five hundred children were not only ripped from their families, but then kept in fear and isolation away from anyone they knew, and then were told that they would never see their parents again...you would not want to be associated with them at all. The fact of the matter is that there were people who did cheer this type of degenerate behavior and there were people that actively enabled the destruction of American integrity. Those people should absolutely be excised from "polite society" as pariahs to set an example so that others do not tread on the path of wickedness. Becoming socially undesirable is not even in the same realm as enabling the deaths of tens of thousands of Americans, allowing American soldiers to be killed, accepting foreign bribes to influence the American government, creating concentration camps where children are made to be orphans, fanning the flames of racial tensions, and so on.

Sources:

1: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-45827430

2: https://www.thebalance.com/trump-plans-to-reduce-national-de...

3: https://coppercourier.com/story/545-children-trump/

4: https://www.healthsystemtracker.org/brief/the-pandemics-effe...

5: https://www.bea.gov/news/2020/gross-domestic-product-third-q....

6: https://tradingeconomics.com/germany/gdp-growth#:~:text=GDP%....

Goodness me, it seems you love to talk politics and a decided one side view of them as well.

There is alot to unpack here most of it twisted and filled with incomplete or out right false information from a liberal bias that completely ignores a lot of recent history

lets start with the most obvious, child separation. While I oppose this, and absolutely oppose the use the fenced in cages. Lets not pretend that Trump's administration created this from thin air, these policies and these buildings / cages where in place before Trump took office, and while you should and can criticize him for not only failing to stop the policy, and by all accounts allowed immigration to ramp up the use of it before outlawing it completely due to public backlash... These policies where not started by Trump.

If you want to proclaim some kind of moral superiority, do you really want to point to Drug warriors Biden and Harris as people of moral fortitude.

The War on Drugs has cost the lives, directly and indirectly, of many many millions of people, upended families, put millions people of all races (disproportionate number of minorities) in cages, and separated them from their children, created orphans, etc..

Biden and Harris where right there not only cheering that on from the side lines but where ACTIVE participants in this process, they personally sent people to those cages.

Where is your moral outrage for those children? for those parents? for those victims?

To be clear, I am not a Trump supporter, but I am also not a Biden supporter. Though I would have preferred Trump over Biden for about 11 Trillion Reasons... My politics are libertarian, I am Anti-War, Pro-Gun, Pro-Free Markets, Pro-Free Trade, Open Borders, Anti-Social Welfare and Pro-Legalize Drugs... Biden is bad on all them, Trump is bad only a few of them.

I am sure we are going to disagree on most public policy, including COVID Response which I do not believe can or should be a Federal responsibility but should continue to be a State level response, with at most Federal Resources (aka money / supplies / personnel) when needed / requested. I also believe when the final accounting is done a LARGE part of our covid death rate was down to several irresponsible governors mandating COVID positive people be sent to Elder Care Facilities, this was something unheard of in other nations (and not something Trump was responsible for, or could have prevented) and I am still grappling with the logic of that, even in the early days where information was limited

However none of that was the point of my comment, the claim was that only Republicans / Trump Supporters are "completely unable and often unwilling to consider any argument or information that conflicts with their views"

That further devolved into claims that Trump supporters want to kill Biden supports, with a link to some wack job.

Now you have charged that is false equivalency the point that many democrats also are "completely unable and often unwilling to consider any argument or information that conflicts with their views" to the point where they are creating lists of Trump supporter

I do not believe this to be a false equivalency at all, and the fact that you attempt to justify it either by being willfully ignorant of history, or attempting to spread incomplete or outright false information further proves my point

> Biden and Harris where right there not only cheering that on from the side lines but where ACTIVE participants in this process, they personally sent people to those cages.

Absolutely, and this might be an interesting point if they continued to support those policies now, or if anyone voted for them due to those policies. Instead, you see the opposite: Biden and Harris have admitted that those policies that put people in cages were mistakes and that they'd act differently now. On the other hand, Trump has doubled down on putting more people in cages.

You can't claim that Trump is superior if he's the only one actively doing it. This of course doesn't mean that he gets a free pass, but Biden will, without a doubt, be better about domestic policy and putting people in cages than Trump will be. Trumps populism depends on caging people his base sees as the outgroup.

Like can you explain this argument better, as best as I can tell it's "Hey we know our candidate is actively doing a bad thing, and refused to stop doing it despite pressure to stop, but the other candidate did a similar bad thing a long time ago, and has recognized the mistake and no longer supports that policy. These are equivalent, so ultimately the choices are the same on this issue."

> Where is your moral outrage for those children? for those parents? for those victims?

Yeah it exists. But I can't fix it now. And again, I would be stupid and uncaring to punish the people currently being put in cages because I disapprove of something a politician did before I was born.

> Biden is bad on all them, Trump is bad only a few of them

There is no universe in which Trump is better than Biden on Open Borders or Free Trade. You might be able to make that argument with Trump vs. Sanders, but not with Biden.

> I also believe when the final accounting is done a LARGE part of our covid death rate was down to several irresponsible governors mandating COVID positive people be sent to Elder Care Facilities

As far as I know, that happened in exactly one state and is responsible for, at most, a few thousand deaths. Unacceptable certainly, and NY and NYC absolutely deserves criticism for that mistake. But we're currently seeing similar numbers of deaths weekly, and we have been for the past 20 weeks, and no longer due to the actions of any single state, but due to inaction by governors of many states, in part because those governors have been afraid to go against the president. Even if you believe that policy should be set per state, you should support the president not peddling misinformation and lying about the scope of the pandemic.

> Now you have charged that is false equivalency the point that many democrats also are "completely unable and often unwilling to consider any argument or information that conflicts with their views" to the point where they are creating lists of Trump supporter

That's okay, it's clear that you're not willing to consider any argument or information that conflicts with your views ;)

Less snarkily, there's no equivalency, false or otherwise, between refusing to work with a person, and refusing to consider a position. Suggesting that a politician who lies and claims that 1000 deaths a day aren't happening is the same as a political who says "hey the guy who lied about the 1000 deaths a day should face political consequences for lying" aren't similar, at all.

Perhaps, in 20 or 30 years, when they've proven that they've moved on from those policy positions and demonstrated that they've actually changed, perhaps then they might have redeemed themselves. But on Feb 1? Nah.

I see that I may have been a bit snarky to start off my response and in an effort to be clear, I'll see if I can refrain from coming across as an asshole.

>Goodness me, it seems you love to talk politics and a decided one side view of them as well.

I mean, not really. If you look at my (sparse) comment history on HN, I mostly don't even comment. I'll also point out that in my previous reply to you, I avoided making any assumptions about your belief systems or any conclusions (as I don't know you from Adam) -- I find that arguing the argument is typically a better way to come to a clear conclusion.

>There is alot to unpack here most of it twisted and filled with incomplete or out right false information from a liberal bias that completely ignores a lot of recent history

Sure, I'm happy to go through your response line by line and see what I have perhaps presented incompletely or falsely. I'd also like to remind you that I had three factual points about the Trump administration: that they did not cause economic growth beyond baseline average, that they increased our nation's debt by 36%, and that they caused or participated in immoral and inhumane treatment of humans. It was specifically on this last point which I drew my line in the sand to say that I would have problems working with people who to this very day continue to behave in an unethical manner.

>lets start with the most obvious, child separation...

First off, I'm glad that you outright state that you are against child separation and oppose fencing people in cages. I agree too!

Let's be clear. I never alleged that Trump's administration created these detention centers from thin air. According to USA Today, the cages were built during the Obama-era to temporarily house children so that they could be relocated to safe child-care within the United States. They were not built to house people for any extended length of time and they were not used as such (1). There's also an interesting discussion as to the Trump Administration's role to inflame an existing situation (a lot of migrants want to come to the US) and making it inhumane and worse (2). So there were policies in place before (which might have been not great), but Trump's administration turned the knob up to 11 here and crossed over to immorality.

But hey, I never even talked about cages or whatever, but what I did link to was specifically speaking about forced family separation and forcibly turning children into orphans (and remember, these are decidedly "non-combatants" -- as far as I'm aware, we are not at war with any of the countries to the south of the US). That is something no president has done in recent memory, but please correct me if I'm wrong here.

>If you want to proclaim some kind of moral superiority, do you really want to point to Drug warriors Biden and Harris as people of moral fortitude.

I mean, if claiming that orphaning children is bad somehow makes me more morally superior to everyone else, then...then I don't quite know where the baseline is. I feel like I'm just being rather rational in my assessment of the situation. I also don't really want to engage in strawman arguments because like ad hominem, they don't actually provide a clear argument for us to agree/disagree upon. But hey, you brought it up, so I'll respond.

I not once claimed that Biden/Harris/anyone else were morally superior or more ethical. I, in fact, never even mentioned them by name so I don't see how you can claim that I pointed to "Drug warriors Biden and Harris".

>The War on Drugs has cost the lives, directly and indirectly, of many many millions of people...for those victims?

Hey, I agree with you too! I think that Nixon's War on Drugs is likely one of the stupidest policy moves in recent American history. Several economics professors I know start Econ 101 by talking about supply and demand in the context of the War on Drugs. Essentially, attacking the supply side (DEA, invading South America, etc) has been shown to have no real effect on demand and therefore, should cease because it's a giant money sink (3). The real way to "fight" drugs is reduce the demand (through education, rehabilitation, etc). Beyond just being a dumb idea, the War on Drugs was a popular idea and unfortunately, many people tied their political success to funding/expanding a popular idea.

If you had asked, I would have absolutely criticized anyone who continued to promote the ridiculous War on Drugs -- especially after the awful ethical knock-on effects became well known. Yes, this includes Biden and Harris.

Here's the thing. Both Biden and Harris today have learned and understood that perhaps, they did make mistakes and though it was considered widely to be the right move twenty or forty years ago, today, we know better! In fact, Biden publicly apologized, and expressed remorse for his mistake (4). To connect your strawman back to Trump's administration. Trump and his crew are still doing awful, unethical things. They cannot claim to be doing the "popular" thing or "ignorance" because literally the majority of the country, journalists worldwide, leaders of countries and religions, and even his former cabinet members publicly and vociferously tell him and anyone who will listen that doing obviously unethical things is...unethical. This is how I know that Trump and people who may agree with the unethical policies he has put into place, are...unethical.

>To be clear, I am not a Trump supporter, but I am also not a Biden supporter. Though I would have preferred Trump over Biden for about 11 Trillion Reasons... My politics are libertarian, I am Anti-War, Pro-Gun, Pro-Free Markets, Pro-Free Trade, Open Borders, Anti-Social Welfare and Pro-Legalize Drugs... Biden is bad on all them, Trump is bad only a few of them.

Cool! I am an independent voter and have voted for Republicans and Democrats historically. I try to stay away from generalized "buzzwords" because I prefer to deal in specific policy. For instance, I'm for the legalization of drugs, but believe that they should be regulated very tightly because like anything addictive (gambling, alcohol, etc) the societal impact on others can be highly detrimental. I don't mind if you want to get wasted every night, but if you get wasted and drive a car into my wife, I'll be pretty pissed.

While also not on topic, I disagree with your statement that "Biden is bad on all [policies]" and "Trump is only bad on [a few policies]". I at least know that Biden has seriously considered many questions and has publically written very thoughtful policies out for people to read and think about. One such policy favors the federal decriminalization of marijuana and I also know that Trump is staunchly against decriminalization of marijuana. So, since you write that you are "pro-legalize drugs" I don't quite understand why you claimed to agree with nothing Biden presented.

>I am sure we are going to disagree on most public policy, including COVID Response...information was limited

Uh, I also didn't talk about state vs federal responsibility regarding COVID. I merely pointed out that Germany (and pretty much every other developed country) was doing significantly better than the US. Sure, states have their own rights and their own mechanisms for doing their own things, but we are Americans. As our president, as our leader, as the highest officer in the land, it is his responsibility to take care of his people and Donald Trump did not do that.

Also, do you really believe that somewhere between 238k and 324k people (6) who have died due to COVID were mostly elderly people who were forced to live with other sick elderly people? Do you have reputable analysis that shows that this claim has any merit?

>However none of that was the point of my comment, the claim was that only Republicans / Trump Supporters are "completely unable and often unwilling to consider any argument or information that conflicts with their views"

I feel like the response to the OP was that looking to find a center was problematic fundamentally because one side (Trump and his band) are willing to constantly subvert ethical, moral, pro forma, and per se rules so you cannot treat them in a good-faith sort of way. I generally disagree with their assertion because if you don't come to the table, then you have no agreement ever. So I rather explain my logic, point out flaws, and see if we can agree on some shared ideal.

>That further devolved into claims that Trump supporters want to kill Biden supports, with a link to some wack job.

Well again, I don't think this "wack job" is inconsistent with their representation. In the past few weeks alone, you have had people arrested for planning to kill the Gov of MI, to kill Biden, and to attack voting counting centers. In fact, before these things even took off, right-wing terrorists were linked to the majority (67% of domestic terror plots and activities in the United States (7). So we should call a spade a spade, no?

>Now you have charged that is false equivalency the point...proves my point

Well yes, creating lists of people who have done morally repugnant things is very different to making a list of people to shoot! And refusing to work with people who are unethical is just good business sense and is likely personally healthier for yourself. Do you see what the difference is here? It's not a crime for me to say that someone is immoral and that I wouldn't work with them nor should any of my friends hire this person who might be a liar, cheater, and potential murderer. What is a crime is for me to plan, buy weapons, and execute a domestic terror plot. Can you see where I might be coming from in this case?

You set a person who declared murderous intent equal to someone who wanted to make sure that those who participated in potentially unethical actions were publically on record. Can you see where perhaps there is a false equivalence that you have made?

1: https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/factcheck/2020/08/26/fac...

2: https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/a27813648/concentratio...

4: https://www.businessinsider.com/biden-apologizes-for-pushing...

5: https://apnews.com/article/d1a9a629ade8ba444da6d31b997baef5

6: https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid19/excess_deaths.htm

7: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/oct/22/white-supremac...

> I do not believe can or should be a Federal responsibility

So you dont think that Trump when he says masks are not good. When he says the virus will go away and its under control.

You dont think those statements are responsible for many Americans not taking covid seriously?

Should US dismantle CDC and have individual states have their own CDC's

One of the most destructive trends in recent political discourse is the tendency to seek out the worst, rather than the best, arguments from the opposing side.

Instead of engaging with articles from The National Review or Mother Jones, we just dunk on the most outrageous morons and trolls we can scour on Twitter or Reddit.

Yup, this is exactly the problem with modern politics. Take the absolute worst of the other side and project it to all of them. You like Republicans? You can't be anything other than a neo nazi racist white supremacist extremist. You leaning left? Then you have to be a communist shill who wants to tax every remotely financially successful person to death and take all liberties away from everyone ever. It's really tiring.

This argument would have more weight if "the worst" was rightfully repudiated by Republicans instead of reelection, pardons, denialism, or blistering conspiracy theories. There are outrageous acts on both sides but only the Left consistently calls out the missteps of their own.

Like the riots?

You mean the property damage and looting that was repeatedly repudiated by the left, as GP pointed out? Yes.

it wasnt though

This is just lazy. It took sub-1 second to google for this information.

"However, after George Floyd’s death, Joe Biden repeatedly condemned violent protests. In a May 31 post on his blog shortly after George Floyd’s death, he wrote, “Protesting such brutality is right and necessary. It’s an utterly American response. But burning down communities and needless destruction is not. Violence that endangers lives is not.”"

https://www.reuters.com/article/uk-factcheck-biden-condemn-v...

yeah right. because the narrative the past 6 months was definitely that Biden didn't want them to riot.

Those are words, but that is not a coherent statement.

Not sure what you’re referring to. Failing to condemn white supremacists? That’s a talking point which is more about taking Trump’s erratic speech patterns out of context than it is a reflection of his actual statements or personal views. https://youtu.be/RGrHF-su9v8

So no, you can't find a liberal police captain who’s calling for Trump supporters to be shot in the head, can you?

Why should he/she? That has nothing to do with the generality of “talking to the other side”.

If you just want extremism, just pick some random Antifa post supporting “the killing of fascist police”.

> That has nothing to do with the generality of “talking to the other side”.

It has everything to do with it. You should ask the question why does a police chief want to put bullets in Biden supporters?

If you have such people in the police then can you understand why someone in Antifa supports “the killing of fascist police”?

It goes both ways, if you don't consider that one side has a leader calling out his people to be vigilant and prepared and in fact two men father and son have been arrested yesterday in Philadelphia armed of ar-15 with hundreds of rounds, the other has leaders thanking the volunteers of all sides and talking about reuniting American people

All this talk about "sides" is not helpful.

What I will say is that there are those are reflective of their viewpoint, will question and review their choices, and change their mind about things in light of new information...

And then there are those who are not and won't; those who act out of tradition and pride, those who believe in conspiracy theories, those who let themselves be played like marionettes with simple trigger topics, etc.

There is a difference; but it's not left or right, conservative or liberal, it's reflective or not reflective.

Disagree. When Obama was elected, the Republicans in congress swore to never support any of his policies, regardless of whether they agreed with them. (Eric Cantor and others admitted this in interviews.) This severely degraded the relationship between the parties beyond repair.

Precisely this.

right. its THE BAD REPUBLICANS. not THE GOOD DEMOCRATS.

completely ignore the never trump idea.

(they didnt do this with trump huh?)

No, they didn't. Remember the CARES act? House Democrats are still trying to work with Trump, and it's still Senate Republicans that are blocking.

uh no. you're talking about pelosi refusing to go below 2.2 trillion. they stopped working weeks before just so that Trump wouldn't pass anything before election day. where have you been?

Sorry, should have said 'were' rather than 'are'. I don't agree with your framing, but thinking about it more it probably would be fairer to say that both sides can't agree in this case, rather than that one side is obstructing.

I'm sorry but it would be most correct that one side refuses to go below a certain value and thats the value they've decided is worth it. And you know which side it is.

Logically wouldn't it be equivalent to say the other side refuses to go above a certain value?

I can't afford a 25k used vehicle. I can afford a 15k used vehicle. lock me up tempstn. I'm clearly a fascist against the community. shame on me for not meeting your budget requirements!

Sorry, this doesn't seem productive anymore, so I'm going to called it a night. I appreciate the perspective.

True. The ACA was after all, literally the republican plan straight from Mitt Romney, but Democrats were unwilling to negotiate or compromise. (Yes this is sarcasm, ACA was literally the Democrats meeting in the middle when they didn't even have to)

Everytime someone like you makes this claim I ask the same question: show some examples. "both sides are the same" is a weak excuse for supporting bad behavior. The Republicans haven't acted in good faith since about the early 90s.

Err, you meant Republicans were unwilling to compromise, right? Because the Democrats bent over backwards to introduce 160 Republican amendments to the ACA and even delayed votes to have more Republican voices heard during debate.

It was tongue in cheek, apologies if that wasn't obvious.

Ah, yup, Poe's Law got me again. Sorry.

I think this is a bit of historical revisionism. Yes there are some amendments in the bill from Republicans because Dems wanted a "bipartisan" bill even if they only got a handful of GOP reps (they ultimately got none).

But the Democrats couldn't have gotten a bill more left-wing through the senate. They tried, but various Dem senators stripped out both lowering the Medicare age and the public option.

I’m excited and eager to have discussions with people who don’t share my political position on the issues. However, I am not at all eager to have a discussion with people who are arguing in bad faith or staking their position on lies and falsehoods.

What’s the point in having a discussion on the best ways to combat the effects of climate change when one political party has taken the position that anthropogenic climate change doesn’t exist?

What’s the point in having a discussion on the best way to fix the broken US healthcare system when one political party not only refuses to acknowledge that it’s broken, but is trying to undo what minor improvements we’ve been able to make in the last 12 years?

The GOP has marked itself as an opponent to everything that Democrats suggest and has painted itself into the stupidest possible corner, where they need to fight tooth and nail against their own policies because there’s a Democrat administration.

The way you have framed conservative positions on these issues seems like you’re imputing bad faith to them and assuming no reasonable person could hold those views.

With climate change, one doesn’t have to deny the science at all to hold a position that the optimal policy choice should be to do nothing, or to wait several decades before taking action. The science predicts some real but finite amount of harm in the future from global warming. Mitigations would also be very painful, eg carbon taxes that make air travel unaffordable to all but the very wealthy.

And in terms of healthcare, everyone agrees the system is broken. In fact, one of Trump’s biggest campaign promises was to fix the US healthcare system. The difference is that conservatives see the government intervention in the healthcare industry as the main problem. (The Federal government pays 2/3 of all healthcare spending in the country, so our system is pretty “socialized” already.) Trump’s first step was an attempt to repeal Obamacare and start to return the healthcare system to more market-based solutions. However Congress was not willing to go through with it so we haven’t had any progress on healthcare since.

Conservative views are not simply a bunch of people arguing in bad faith.

There are some reasonable conservatives, and many completely insane trump supporters. I believe there are more insane trump supporters than reasonable people on the right these days, and denying the existence of this very vocal group that has a stranglehold on the zeitgeist is not helpful at all.

I would love to be pointed to the detailed climate policy plan from the GOP or a GOP politician that explains how climate change is real, of anthropogenic origins, and that we need to take action to stop it starting in a few decades.

I am not aware of any such plan, or any GOP politician espousing such views.

Correct and it appears that even though Trump lost, Trumpism allowed most Republican Senators to keep their seats and they even won more seats in the House, and didn’t lose a single Statehouse.

This election has been a repudiation of Trump but not Trumpism.

I think there’s a good chance that the GOP leaders are almost as happy to see the backside of Trump as the DNC leaders are.

Yes, there is a ton of common ground with 99% of the people on the "other" side, whichever side that is from you.

If one big problem facing U.S. politics right now is that everything is distilled down to a binary either-or with no room for nuance, its sibling problem is assuming that everyone on the "other side" from you is the same, i.e. that the crazy extremist you see on TV is a prototypical example of everyone in that group. In reality, nothing could be further from the truth.

That's what I used to believe, but these aren't people I see on TV, these are people I actually spoke to. When they ignored the facts I asked them what facts would change their mind and was told point blank that there were no facts that would change their mind.

I don't see how you can engage with that.

Indeed, how does one have a serious discussion with someone that refuses to acknowledge 2+2=4 because they "believe" the answer is 5.

Sure, I don't disagree with you on that point at all - but for every 1 of those there are 10 (100? 1000? more?) who aren't like that but who, given what was effectively a binary choice, voted the same way that they did.

The die-hard (blind) fanatics on either end of the spectrum don't make a big enough group to win an election, but the assumption that they are representative of everyone in that group is incorrect and - maybe more important - counterproductive.

You engage by not going in with the intent to change a person's mind. Instead, you go in with the intent to understand their position. Just because someone's conclusion seems ridiculous or wrong doesn't mean there aren't underlying facts that, when seen from a certain perspective, and with a certain context, make that conclusion seem reasonable.

There are real, legitimate, reasons why Trump voters believe what they believe. That many get caught up in the rhetoric of their "side" or don't know how to have a discussion with a goal other than "win" doesn't mean they don't see real problems that are urgent and important problems that need to be fixed.

Empathize first, argue second.

Their "facts" include gems like pedophilia rings run out of nonexistent basements below pizza shops, the Q-anon conspiracy (Trump's going to take down the evil cabal any day now!), and millions of illegal voters and criminals around every corner. Zero evidence for any of it. These aren't fringe views as many of us can attest to - this is crap millions have to listen to every day coming from their closest friends and family.

Two decades ago the Republican party acted as a bulwark against rapid change and as the yin in the yin-yang of individual vs collective. Not no more; we don't have another two decades for our education system to bring us back from the brink.

This approach right here is why things are getting worse.

Do you know Tylenol can cause horrible death where you have all your skin fall off and veins explode? Do you talk about this when you have take that simple medication?

Try to find common ground. See what you can work together on, see what you can agree upon, rather than point to the most stupid and extreme points of the other side and giving up completely or ignoring all their concerns.

> Try to find common ground. See what you can work together on, see what you can agree upon, rather than point to the most stupid and extreme points of the other side and giving up completely or ignoring all their concerns.

They're not even the most extreme, that's why there's no common ground! The most extreme would be the honest to goodness neo-nazis like the ones marching through Charleston a few years ago, several other flavors of white supremacists and "nationalists" like the NatCons and Bugaloo Boys, religious extremists like Pence, their crazier brother the dominionists like Bill Bar, and outright authoritarians (all of the above).

I'm all for finding common ground, but I don't care for the liberals putting in the extra effort anymore, just to have bad faith actors take advantage of it. It's time for the conservatives to "find common ground" by getting their house in order. Get rid of the Nazis, get rid of the supremacists, get rid of the extremists, and undo all the damage that Barry Goldwater predicted the preachers would do.

You definitely won’t find common ground if you think the Republicans accept or even tolerate Nazis and white supremacists. They have about as much to do with them as the democrats have to do with the KKK (which was started by democrats).

While this view is potentially applicable to the party as a whole. I still maintain that the best way to engage with an individual is to try to understand, from their perspective, why they've come to the conclusion they've come to. Even when they say there's nothing to understand. Even for those with extreme, reprehensible views. You can understamd without agreeing, but it takes effort to fight down the "cast out the evil other side" feeling that is super easy to fall into.

Most people aren't that one-dimensional, even when they've wrapped themselves up in a one-dimensonal identity. There is nuance and context to how each person arrives at the conclusions they do, even when they'd struggle to explain or remember it.

If you refuse to empathize, you're making things worse.

I honestly think that if Biden does nothing else, engineering an environment where people accept basic common facts has to be somewhere at the start of it. As you say, once your base facts about reality differ there's really no hope for reconciliation about things at a higher level than that. And for all the healthy spirit of "both-sides-ism" in this thread, I will put it out there that there is one side that has egregiously allowed it and its supporters to become detached from reality. Note I'm not talking about "bias" here which both sides certainly exhibit, but concrete basic verifiable facts of reality. I really don't see how much can be achieved if we can't repair that. And as much as I want to encourage a new spirit of unity, I fear that if that becomes an excuse to not confront this problem, then it will actually just make things worse.

The best way I’ve heard this described is that we are all part of a book club that meets every four years to talk about the book we read.

Some show up to discuss a book they didn’t read, others show up having read a completely different book than the other half.

We have no common ground anymore. Everything is inherently political or can be made political.

It’s somewhat of a surreal game you can play. Name something not political.

I agree. I don't think the vast majority of conservatives are intransigent, just so emotional wrapped up in their beliefs that they're completely unable to distinguish fact from fiction. I don't think it's a coincidence that it happened to the party that Barry Goldwater referenced in this prediction: "Mark my word, if and when these preachers get control of the party, and they're sure trying to do so, it's going to be a terrible damn problem. Frankly, these people frighten me. Politics and governing demand compromise. But these Christians believe they are acting in the name of God, so they can't and won't compromise. I know, I've tried to deal with them." It's not a coincidence that the qanon conspiracy is chock full of rhetoric about satanic rituals either.

> And as much as I want to encourage a new spirit of unity, I fear that if that becomes an excuse to not confront this problem, then it will actually just make things worse.

Here's why I have absolutely zero faith that a spirit of unity will work: this "situation" has been festering since the founding of this nation and every time "unity" prevailed, the can was just kicked down the road. We wanted "All men are created equal" and got the 3/5ths compromise. We tried to save the Union, only to give up on Reconstruction before it could even really begin while institutionalizing slavery in the 13th amendment. Instead of letting general Sherman raze the south, we paid for their rebuild on the backs of "free" African Americans and let them institute Jim Crow laws to continue the oppression. When the Civil Rights movement and desegregation finally came home to roost, it caused the biggest political realignment in this country's history taking us up to this point.

We wanted the best, but it turned out like always.

Nothing demonstrates more the acceptance of basic facts than pretending, when launching a campaign, that it is motivated by Trump calling white supremacists “fine people” when anyone can look at the transcript of that speech and see that a few lines below Trump explicitly condemns white supremacists.

It is unfortunate but lying openly about facts has become the only common ground in US politics, and so many people seem to be completely blind to the lies of their own camp.

I completely agree with you. I have winced about that being thrown at Trump ever since the incident - I think it was horrendously poor wording, but it was actually him in his own way attempting to unify people.

However at the same time I want to clarify that I'm talking here about a level of facts even more basic than that. That is still an interpretation of what he said but at least he said it. We have an even deeper problem right now where people believe things that are completely totally untrue. Things that are provably not true without any need to bring any interpretation into it.

For example, how do we have a reasonable discussion about how to fix social justice if one side believes most of Portland has been taken over by anarchists burning cars and smashing windows of every shop and the other things it's a peaceful hippie commune covering a block and a half? Somewhere in there is an objective truth. If we can't get to that, we're never going to have a productive discussion about the underlying problems.

What’s really unfortunate is you get downvoted for pointing out a fact. Probably by people who complain that the right won’t accept facts.

Are you able to please link to the transcript?

https://www.politifact.com/article/2019/apr/26/context-trump...

"you had some very bad people in that group, but you also had people that were very fine people, on both sides. [...] And you had people -- and I’m not talking about the neo-Nazis and the white nationalists -- because they should be condemned totally. But you had many people in that group other than neo-Nazis and white nationalists. Okay? And the press has treated them absolutely unfairly."

You're quoting the second interview Trump gave about Charlottesville[1].

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25019361

He didn't call whites supremacists white people, if you listen to the rest of the sentence, he was referring to the protesters from BOTH sides that they are fine people. And then said that he condemns neo Nazis and white supremacists. I only came across this this morning btw, and I too believed he really did call them fine people.. EDIT: watch this whole thing https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JmaZR8E12bs

He's not off to a good start. It's not even a "fact" that he is president elect yet.

What president in modern history has waited for the electoral college vote to make a victory speech? Given that Trump isn't likely to ever concede, I'm not sure what he's supposed to wait for, besides all the networks calling it. (Which they were very cautious in doing, waiting until PA was clearly out of reach.)

I suspect you're lying because Pew research shows the vast majority of Republicans don't even know what QAnon is. More Democrats know about QAnon than Republicans (28% vs 18%).

https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2020/03/30/qanons-cons...

Your kind of rhetoric is what's dividing people.

I'm lying about my personal experience with my family?

18% of Republicans is at least ten million people, if not tens of millions, which is an order of magnitude more than I thought. Pizzagate and the illegal voters was the party line from Fox including Hannity and Carlson and is easily accessible with a [whatever you prefer] search.

The time for rhetoric and comity was a year ago when COVID didn't kill hundreds of thousands. Now is the time for action.

That is a ridiculous argument to be honest. 100% of Americans have heard of Nazism. Does that mean 100% of Americans are Nazis? By your logic, more Democrats are QAnon believers (28%).

Fair point, but the Democrats aren't the ones literally espousing Qanon and Nazi rhetoric. The number is somewhere in the middle, enough so that all the major networks utter the name on a regular basis.

I just did a Google search for QAnon for Tucker and Fox News. The news on QAnon are labeled under "conspiracy" on foxnews.com. I see no promotion of the QAnon theory anywhere.

I didn't say that Tucker/Carlson/Fox promoted qanon (I referenced them in the context of pizzagate/illegal votes), I implied that some Republicans did, far in excess of their opposites.

For what it's worth, AFAIK qanon has only been mentioned/displayed in passing on Fox [1] and while I haven't been on Fox specifically, I've never been prepped or had my wardrobe reviewed on other national broadcasters' programs so I assume they don't exert editorial control either. I'm too tired to do a deep dive for pizzagate so I will admit I may be confusing it with the Seth Rich conspiracy. It's hard to keep track this deep into the abyss.

[1] https://www.mediamatters.org/qanon-conspiracy-theory/definit...

Qanon is just todays Dominionists. The democrats tried to push the same dangerous "other" group back when palin/mccain were running.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/blogpost/post/dominioni...

The democrats love to trot this out, the fringe group that somehow is a massive threat. Meanwhile they act suspiciously silent about the riots we had with BLM, which caused actual and serious damage. Not much about Philadelphia at all.

Looking at the survey it asks "How much, if anything, have you heard or read about QAnon?" I'd be interested to see how many are aware of QAnon conspiracy theories but don't necessarily know the origin.

I bet more Trump voters believe QAnon is real than Biden voters.

You bet? How very scientific of you.

Do you believe otherwise? It's very clearly the case; the whole QAnon conspiracy theory is built around Trump being some kind of savior and democrats being a ring of child molesters. Of course it's believed by more Trump than Biden supporters. That doesn't mean the majority of them believe it of course, but some high profile ones certainly do, including Marjorie Taylor Greene, who is now a member of congress.

When I say "facts", I don't mean the politically charged "facts" that people argue with. I mean the ones about their life experiences that led them to the dark place they find themselves in. You don't exit the womb a neo-nazi, you get there over time, through (bad) experience, and (questionable) learning. If you can't answer the "why do they believe what they do?" with a genuine, i.e. not rhetoric, not othering, answer, you don't have the facts.

There are truly horrible people out there, but the vast majority of people that voted Trump are normal people with boring everyday lives. Treating every individual in that group like its extremists serves only to divide and polarize. It makes the problem worse. IF your goal is to effect positive change, you need to take a different approach. However, if you goal is to feel superior and good and like you're "on the right team", feel free to keep hating.

> Just because someone's conclusion seems ridiculous or wrong doesn't mean there aren't underlying facts that, when seen from a certain perspective, and with a certain context, make that conclusion seem reasonable.

What about things like taxes where it’s all cold hard math? There’s no nuance when a poor or middle class person thinks they need to worry about (for example) an inheritance tax.

Who you tax and what you spend tax revenues on is entirely based on a point of view. Calculating taxes is cold hard math, but deciding taxation and spending policies is not.

Yeah, but I mean the type of people that think accepting a raise will mean less money in their pocket because they’ll be in a higher tax bracket.

There’s a some people are just flat out wrong and need to be told so.

There is nuance for why a person who, in practice doesn't need to worry, thinks they need to. Why does that scare them? Why does it motivate them? Why is it so important to them?

This can, and will, vary subtly from individual to individual, and unless you're spending millions on TV airtime, you're only interacting with individuals.

Trying to understand first is futile when there is no good faith way to see 'real, legitimate, reasons ... believe what they believe'

Th 'rhetoric they get caught up in' is so wildly insane it's like looking at a falling apple. Except half would go wow look at that gravity! the other half would say, oh that's a secret sign from Q about an underground pedophilic sex ring funded by selling pizza.

that may seem like an extreme example, but part of my state elected a CONGRESSWOMEN who believes this.

I can't attempt to understand first - because it's absolutely bonkers and detached from reality.

And that's just one of the more extreme examples I could spend all night typing more

> when there is no good faith way to see 'real, legitimate, reasons ... believe what they believe'

That's exactly my point. There is. It's not impossible to come to understand the life experiences that led a person into a dark place where they feel attacked and choose to wrap themselves in fantasy to feel empowered.

> I can't attempt to understand first

While it may make you feel good and superior to reject these people outright, by refusing to do so, you become part of the problem.

> And that's just one of the more extreme examples I could spend all night typing more

I can't stress this enough: WHAT they believe is basically irrelevant to my point. If your response to what I say involves "extreme examples", you've missed (accidentally, or purposefully) my point.

I did. It didn't get me anywhere. Let me explain why:

Most of the people in my extended family are right-wing Republican Mormons.

They believe that anything that could be labeled "socialism" is literally evil, and will literally lead to the "destruction" of our country, because Eisenhower's Secretary of Agriculture said so, and they literally believe that man was a prophet of God.

I'm not exaggerating here.

A significant portion of these people get their news from Rush Limbaugh, Tucker Carlson, and Glen Beck. They might be a little wrong once in a while, but for the most part, these are "smart men" who "know what's going on behind the curtain".

A significant portion of those people actually believe QAnon. Hell, we have congresspeople who believe that conspiracy theory.

So how did they get there?

They are in a cult. I'm not going to pull any punches: Mormonism is thoroughly falsifiable. It insulates its members from the faith-destroying facts about its history.

Cults work. The belief these people have is so deeply heartfelt that they refuse to even consider the possibility they might be wrong.

Cult members have a lot of practice. If they can ignore reality to preserve their religious faith, they can reject reality to defend their political ideology.

Cult members are vulnerable. Anyone who convinces a cult member that they promote the cult can manipulate most cult members into supporting them.

I know my perspective is only a small part of America, but everything I know about Trump's political base has the same hallmarks. Cults are not a small or isolated problem in America.

I have tried to appeal to them with the overtly socialist agenda of New Testament Jesus. That simply isn't the deity they worship. Most American Christians worship Supply Side Jesus. Conservatism has become a deep-rooted part of their personal ideology.

There are no underlying facts. There is instead underlying fiction. There is no reasoning these people out of their delusion.

> It didn't get me anywhere.

Where were you trying to get to?

> They believe that anything that could be labeled "socialism" is literally evil, and will literally lead to the "destruction" of our country, because Eisenhower's Secretary of Agriculture said so, and they literally believe that man was a prophet of God.

What qualifies (to each of them) as "socialism"? What kind of "destruction" will befall the country, and when? It sounds like they want to protect something. What is that something? Why is it important to them?

> A significant portion of these people get their news from Rush Limbaugh, Tucker Carlson, and Glen Beck. They might be a little wrong once in a while, but for the most part, these are "smart men" who "know what's going on behind the curtain".

So? Why do they want these people to be right? What part of their value structure make these comfortable conclusions for them?

> [Stuff about cults]

Cults are a terrible thing, no argument here.

> There are no underlying facts.

Of course there are, you've stated some of them here. I don't means the "facts" of rhetoric, I mean the facts about their lives.

Several people have responded to me and explained how "ridiculous" the things the things these people believe are. Which misses my point entirely.

> Conservatism has become a deep-rooted part of their personal ideology.

Why? This is a question whose answer can, and will vary subtly from individual to individual. People aren't robots, and beliefs don't have an off switch. A dozen people can believe the same thing for different reasons and to different degrees. Others will say they believe something, while actually only believing that they should say they do for some other, unsaid reason. Yet others still will think they believe something, but certain experiences might unmask the cognitive dissonance within.

People are complicated bundles of personal history, not mannequins with an R or D sticker on them.

> > It didn't get me anywhere.

> Where were you trying to get to?

Does that really matter when the distance traveled is zero?

You said earlier:

> You engage by not going in with the intent to change a person's mind. Instead, you go in with the intent to understand their position.

Having done the latter (I was in the very same position only a few years ago), I was trying to do the former.

> What qualifies (to each of them) as "socialism"? What kind of "destruction" will befall the country, and when? It sounds like they want to protect something. What is that something? Why is it important to them?

Anything that can be labeled Socialism. Single payer healthcare. Higher taxes for anyone, including billionaires. Minimum wage.

> What kind of "destruction" will befall the country, and when?

It doesn't really get less vague than that. This is where belief in a cult's narrative gets abused by the right-wing political narrative. For Mormons, it's the "Second Coming of Jesus Christ".

There is actually a significant intersection with the right-wing political narrative and the Mormon one. His name was Ezra Taft Benson. He was Eisenhower's Secretary of Agriculture, then the President of and Prophet for The LDS Church. He preached that God himself was against communism and socialism. He called the Civil Rights movement a "Tool of Communist Deception".

> It sounds like they want to protect something. What is that something?

The status quo. The world as a reflection of their ideology. Their delusion. The Republican Party. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

> Why is it important to them?

Cults demand importance. They are told constantly that if the world doesn't reflect their ideology that society will literally fall apart. They are taught in Mormonism that all throughout history, God himself felled cities like Sodom and Gomorrah because the people became "prideful and immoral" and refused to listen to the warning of Prophets. They are told by right-wing talking heads like Rush Limbaugh, Tucker Carlson, Glen Beck, etc. that our society is losing its moral footing, and that anyone who thinks differently is stupid and malignant.

> > [Stuff about cults]

> Cults are a terrible thing, no argument here.

The stuff about cults is vitally important. It informs a pattern of thinking that is open to abuse. That is the root of the problem here. The stuff about cults cannot be separated from the rest.

> > There are no underlying facts.

> Of course there are, you've stated some of them here. I don't means the "facts" of rhetoric, I mean the facts about their lives.

What these people believe to be facts about their lives have no basis in reality. The very foundation of these alleged facts is rhetoric.

> > Conservatism has become a deep-rooted part of their personal ideology.

> Why? This is a question whose answer can, and will vary subtly from individual to individual. People aren't robots, and beliefs don't have an off switch. A dozen people can believe the same thing for different reasons and to different degrees. Others will say they believe something, while actually only believing that they should say they do for some other, unsaid reason. Yet others still will think they believe something, but certain experiences might unmask the cognitive dissonance within.

Why? Because they are in a cult. Their personal ideology has literally been replaced by external narratives. They do differ on small details (rejecting what they personally know to be false), but the greater picture is always the same.

> People are complicated bundles of personal history, not mannequins with an R or D sticker on them.

Well, that's how it should be. Unfortunately, many are convinced that being a mannequin with an R next to their name makes them an excellent political candidate, and that anyone with a D next to their name is an evil socialist actively destroying our society. Does it make sense? No. It's not about sense. It's about keeping everything in line with the ideological and cult narratives.

Consider if they knew which facts would change their mind, their mind would already be changed.

You have to get to know their values before you can figure out what would work.

I don't see how that can be the case when nearly 50 percent of the country still supported Trump despite Biden running on a centrism and reconciliation platform. If this matchup wasn't enough to get Republicans to cross the aisle then I'm not sure I believe that anything is.

It’s possible that many Republicans did cross the aisle, just like many Democrats (such as myself) did so as well.

>It’s possible that many Republicans did cross the aisle, just like many Democrats (such as myself) did so as well.

It's possible. But the numbers don't bear this out.

In every state that was close where Biden won, his margin of victory was less than the number of votes that Jo Jorgensen (the Libertarian candidate) received.

That tells me that enough R-types were disgusted enough with Trump that they voted Libertarian for President and R for everyone else.

Check out the numbers for yourself[0]. Just click on each state and it will break down the vote totals for each candidate. And in every. single. case. the margin of victory for Biden is less than the number of votes received by Jo Jorgensen.

[0] https://abcnews.go.com/Elections/2020-us-presidential-electi...

Jo under performed Gary Johnson from 2016, so I do not believe your correlation is very valid

In Some States, Like Nevada, the number of people that choose "NONE OF THESE CANDIDATES" for president more or less matches the number of people that voted for Jo...

Further an over all Analysis shows there were almost as many Split Biden votes, as there were Split Trump Votes

This idea that "3rd party spoils the election" or changes the election has been dis-proven often, as absent the 3rd choice most people that vote 3rd party simply do not vote at all, or choose no one in that particular race (which is an option most people for get, you do not have to pick a person in every race on a ballot, blank is a valid choice)

Biden was running as a centrist?! That's news to me.

Biden's branding during the primaries revolved around not being as extreme as candidates like Sanders and Warren. Then during the election his branding predominantly revolved around healing America's partisan divides. He was definitely running as a centrist.

What positions has he taken that you view as extreme?

I know right, he is definitely on the right in the political spectrum.

The left or even centre-left has never been in power in the US and probably never will.

That's what most of the Republican voters I know said.

The GOP has gone so far right that "centrist" is unrecognizable.

It's pretty obvious that the democrats failed to demonstrate that their goals were rather close to the center of the spectrum: Down-ballot, the Dems did worse than Biden, and I suspect that the statistics will show a lot of split ballots.

Both on foxnews and on WaPo, there were more news about the more leftist actors. Bernie, AOC, etc. The Dems did not manage to show that these are not the mainstream democratic goals.

The pictures of rioters, combined with "defund the police" scared a lot of people, and if you start out skeptical, you might not look close enough that this doesn't mean "get rid of the police", but "descope the police, let them do their job, and find other people to do the things which are not their job".

> It's pretty obvious that the democrats failed to demonstrate that their goals were rather close to the center of the spectrum

IMHO this is just something people say to push Democrats to the center and then further and further right ... because the evidence shows that the current Republican party won't support any Democratic policy, basically.

These folks we're talking about will not be convinced by anything.

It's not an honest argument.

If you read closely, you will notice that I do not make an argument that the Democrats should be more centrist, but that their strategy was to be centrist, and that they failed to sell it as such. That leaves to options for the future: Not be so centrist, because you can't sell it anyway, or be centrist, but actually sell it. But being centrist and looking leftist seems like a lose-lose, whether you prefer a more leftist or more centrist approach.

That being said, it might be interesting to look at Germany, where Merkel moved the CDU left from a center/right position to the center. This secured the CDU a rather long stretch in power, essentially spelled doom for the center/left SPD, but also gave rise to a more hard-left Die Linke and, worse, an ultra-right AfD, whicht started as a conservative party, but essentially was taken over by neo-nazis.

I may have misread your previous comment -- thank you for the clarification.

I do agree with you that it's tricky to try to sell being centrist when you are not, and, in some ways, better to just be out-and-out left.

TBH I'm not sure Biden really tried to sell himself as something he is not. He's been pretty clear about wanting to address systemic racism, the green new deal, a science-based response to covid, valuing international coalitions, etc.

If anything I'm kind of anticipating him walking back his pledges on those things when in office. Though I hope not.

Let's also bear in mind though that, while we can armchair-quarterback, his strategy succeeded.

I think the question of if moving to a more aggressively Progressive agenda would bring in voters hungry for change who are otherwise turned off by Democrats, or if moving more to the center to bring in voters turned off by a more Progressive agenda, is an extremely vexed question to which I have no answer.

That is interesting about Germany though.

And at the end of the day my own belief is that we are living in a time of change, and that it's important to offer policies I believe to be right (mainly Progressive policies) to address that change.

Or otherwise the void will be filled, as you pointed out about Germany, by something else.

At the same time we haven't seen that approach be successful on a national level in US politics yet. So I don't know.

Curious what your thoughts are.

I do think Biden stayed true to what he believes. I think he might not have pushed the green new deal so hard by himself, maybe. My point is this: For somebody sympathetic to the Democrats, Biden appears as a rather centrist person. He isn't advocating for abolishing private health-insurance for example. But if you ask a Republican voter (not even a Trumpist), I'm not sure they would say the same. Or they believe that the party would force him to be more left.

I'm not so sure with regard to the votes. 2016, yes, I believe many people on the left were not happy with Clinton and did not vote. This time, we had record vote participation, and I believe that's from both sides, so the result should reflect the true political will in America. It's likely that the coasts would prefer a more progressive candidate, but I think on average, the US is somewhere between Biden and Romney.

I like the picture of the pendulum. While Obama was quite centrist, the USA made great advances in personal liberties. Gay marriage and so on. The world was changing too fast for many. Or they felt that their problems weren't in the focus as much, or at all. So the pendulum swung back, and we had Trump. We need to dampen the swinging to make steady progress, and I think Biden might be good at that, maybe especially because of his age.

Personally, I am somewhat wary of some of the more progressive ideas. I'm not a big fan of single-payer healthcare, seeing the results in England. I generally think that a market-run system is better than a government-run, but that markets need firm rules set by the government. ACA was pretty good, but long term, America has to get away from the employment-coupled insurances. And covering preexisting conditions necessarily means mandate (or mandate through the backdoor).

> It's likely that the coasts would prefer a more progressive candidate, but I think on average, the US is somewhere between Biden and Romney.

You might be right. Let's also bear in mind, though, that even with all the people voting this year that's still I think less than half of all eligible voters.

Other countries which have national voting holidays or making voting mandatory (which tbh I kind of like; you're a citizen, it's your duty, you can go vote for no one but goddamnit you have to vote) see much higher turnout.

This means that votes alone don't currently present an entirely accurate picture of the view of the country.

There is also the vote surpression which is nontrivial and hard to measure. Probably not a massive difference but perhaps more than a tiny one.

Lastly I'm actually not a fan of Biden's age. I'd like to see more politicians under the age of 50.

By the way although I'm sharing my disagreements I thought your comments were thoughtful and insightful and appreciate our conversation : ).

I, too, enjoyed our discussion. Thoughtful exchange with people who are not of the same opinion is so much more rewarding than the echo chambers we often find ourselves in.

It would be quite interesting to hear from those not voting why they didn't vote. My suspicion is that these people would almost never vote, or maybe only vote for so extremely perfect candidates that it's just not realistic. But yeah, maybe there is a large group of people who would vote if the candidate would just be a little bit more progressive. But honestly, in a situation like this, with the knowledge of the last four years, I just can't understand why you wouldn't vote, at least if you are left of center.

I also cannot understand why election day isn't on a Sunday, or a holiday. It should be the highest holiday the US has. Any democracy has, actually.

Biden is also somewhat too old for my taste, but no candidate is perfect. Age does bring experience though, and he has long-lasting relationships with people on both sides of the aisle. That will help. Personally, I really liked Buttigieg, and I'm happy to see that he'll like have a role in the Biden administration.

> He's been pretty clear about wanting to address systemic racism, the green new deal, a science-based response to covid, valuing international coalitions, etc.

Those are all standard centrist neoliberal goals - aside from the green new deal, which Biden already explicitly said won’t be anything nearly as radical as what AOC/Bernie were shilling.

All of which, even if inadequate are better goals than the dark authoritarian visions of the far-right : ).

Systemic racism has been danced around by centrists until now.

And yeah I agree we have to wait and see what the Biden administration actually does.

But as a Progressive I'm heartened because now there's an opportunity for Progressives to push the Biden administration. With Trump, there was zero chance of that.

As the FDR quote goes, "You’ve convinced me. Now go out and make me do it."

I don't think any Progressives have idealistic visions of a Biden administration. What they are hoping for is a degree of influence and an opportunity to exert political pressure or leverage.

Which is how politics is : )

> He's been pretty clear about wanting to address systemic racism

In case folks haven’t clued in yet, using this phrase is probably the single most important contributor to why the democrats almost lost the election and lost so many seats. The house is absolutely going red in 2022 if they don’t clue in and drop the identity politics nonsense. There is no “systemic” racism, and this is an unnecessarily divisive narrative.

It's funny, because if you talk about gun control, most Republicans think the same thing about Democrats. The difference being they've been burned over and over by compromise and the fact once something is passed it never gets reviewed or sunset for relevance.

It cuts both ways. People disagree, and where they disagree is the most likely place for both sides to hold the other side to account for previous behavior.

It's part of why I was so disgusted about fast tracking the Supreme Court nomination after McConnell set a precedent the Presidency before.

In terms of game theory it just cemented that the other side couldn't be trusted.

The really interesting thing is that when Democratic platform proposals are on the ballot, they pass even in red states.

For example, this year Florida voted for Trump by 2% AND a $15 minimum wage by 20 points.

The actual policy is extremely popular, but if a Democratic politician brings it up it just gets labelled socialism.

This is very inaccurate, and seems to be a misunderstanding among the “defund the police” democrats. And that’s precisely the problem.

"defund the police" means "defund the police", it is a clear and unambiguous sentence. If you mean "let the police do their job", don't run on "defund the police". It's not that people didn't look close enough at the slogans (and by the way we have seen many cities actually defund their police depts so it doesn't help the idea that the slogan means anything else).

I don't think that Biden himself holds leftist views but he also did nothing to distance himself from this fringe, and if he is not neutralised by a republican senate, I think there is a legitimate concern that he will be held hostage by the left wing of the democratic party and apply many of those policies (not the least because Kamala Harris would if he steps down for health reasons).

> It's pretty obvious that the democrats failed to demonstrate that their goals were rather close to the center of the spectrum

tldr; Republicans did not even attempted to demonstrate that their goals were rather close to the center of the spectrum. Why is that the democrats are supposed to reach to center both when they won and loose?

I don't think so. When you are closed in right wing bubble, Biden is hardcore socialist, nearly progressive communist about to destroy American capitalism. Literally. He is also sleepy Joe in clear early stage of dementia. This has zero to do with what democrats demonstrated. This is made up, because making it up is good for "our side". It does not matter what Biden is or demonstrates.

Frankly, it is like relationship with narcissist. Dont let him/her gaslight you into thinking you are at fault for whatever was done to you. It is overall unfair and biased toward right wing. You dont fix relationship with narcissist by going out of your way further and further trying to prove made up accusations are false. It does not work, the middle just shifts constantly and abuse just escalates.

Republicans did not demonstrated the Trump along people he appointed, proud boys are not what the party is. You want left to stop pursuing their own policy goals, with threat that right wing will go crazy if they dont. But that is abusive logic, right wing is responsible for right wing does. And left wing is responsible for left wing does.

Trunp didn't, but many other Republicans did. Or let me phrase it a different way: The Democrats made it stick that the right wing fringe = Trump, but they didn't make it stick for down-ballot races. It was the other way around for the Republicans, I think.

So you can either take your ball and go home, or you can try to pierce the bubble. Hoping for them to come out of the bubble on their own seems pointless.

I do agree with ball analogy, but disagree that it has anything to do with trying to move further and further to the right to accommodate people who don't listen to you.

What I don't understand is, Bernie is painted as this rabid socialist, but what are his positions that people don't actually like? He wants single-payer healthcare. So do most Americans. (And as a Canadian I can tell you, it sure is nice not having to worry about cost every time I need to visit the doctor, or if I were to have an accident and need to go to the hospital.) If not that, then what?

For one thing, people don’t like the impossible price tag associated with his ideas. They don’t like throwing good money after bad. They are in fear of having their life depend on a system that might function similar to other organizations like the DMV or the VA or USCIS. And generally speaking, if you have insurance, quality of care is much better than Canada. So even compassionate people who understand why it’s a problem for people who can’t afford care still have some reluctance to an irreversible commitment that carries so much risk. It’s purely rational on their part, and it’s hard to criticize people for acting rationally.

It's an impossible pricetag only because we don't tax the rich.

Billionaires have taken $50 trillion from the poor and middle class. The poor and middle class are afraid of taxes because they have nothing left to give.

No, they haven’t. When you order snacks from Amazon, Bezos isn’t “taking” your money. You’re giving it to him.

What's the difference?

Poor and middle class Americans are afraid of higher taxes because they don't have enough money.

Where did all the money go? To 400 billionaires.

50 of them now control as much wealth as the poorest 165 million Americans.

Tens of millions of Americans are in poverty, and what do we do about it? Pray to Bill Gates? Jeff Bezos?

What do I have to convince them to give their wealth to me?

Tens of millions of Americans are in poverty. 10% of Americans hold 70% of wealth, and they are all getting richer. Their income comes either from the rest of us or from inflation.

You’re misinformed. Wealth is not zero-sum.

> people don’t like the impossible price tag associated with his ideas.

The US government spends more on healthcare than many single payer systems, and has worse outcomes.

This fact doesn’t change the price of what he has been proposing. Also, I wasn’t only referring to health care. He has a lot of ideas. Free college, guaranteed free housing for all, medical debt and student debt forgiveness for all, free child care for all, increased social security, etc.

Nordic countries say hi! Those are all standard over here. We pay more taxes yes but we don't have to worry about the extra costs of the above, so it's a clear (to me) net win.

I'm not sure it's actually true that the quality of care is much better than Canada. The one negative I see to the Canadian system is that it's true people can wait months for elective (but still very important) surgeries like joint replacements. It's not true, as some propaganda states, that we wait months to see the doctor, can't get prescriptions, or die in the hallways of hospitals waiting for a room. In fact we can go to any walk-in clinic when we need to see a doctor, or to any hospital when we have an emergency, and be seen without an appointment. (You can also make an appointment with your family doctor if it's non-urgent). To me that seems far superior to having to choose from those covered by your insurance, and then sometimes being unsure of what will be the cost to you until after the fact.

I will agree with you that the standard of care for those with the best insurance in the US is probably better than the Canadian system. But the standard of care here is still very good, and even as someone who could afford that good insurance, I wouldn't want to switch. Also, the US already spends more public money on healthcare than Canada does per capita despite not having single payer, so it appears there's a lot of efficiency to be gained.

Edit: please don't down vote my parent in disagreement. They answered my question in good faith and helped illuminate that viewpoint. Shouldn't be punished for that.

I have a lot of exposure to both countries systems, including close people with chronic and terminal illnesses, major and minor surgeries, etc. And yes there’s a reason that it’s not rare for wealthy Canadians come to the US for medical treatment.

Regardless, I’m answering the question that was asked. You didn’t ask which health care system is better, you asked what people don’t like about Bernie’s policies. I’m attempting to offer some clarity into why people hold those positions. And do keep in mind that even if governments in other countries manage to run a decent health care system, that does very little to boost the confidence of opponents that the US government will be equally as functional in their implementation, or how long it will take them to sort it out. They have provided too many examples of poorly run institutions for some people to just disregard.

But your question wasn’t only about health care. When I say impossible price tag, I mean everything:

https://berniesanders.com/issues/how-does-bernie-pay-his-maj...

Thanks, those are fair points; I do appreciate the thorough answer to my question. And for what it's worth, I'm Canadian, but I'm pretty happy with the moderate dealmaker Biden as the eventual nominee (and President-elect). I agree with you that given the existing situation, a public option as opposed to a complete replacement of the existing system is a more realistic path to providing healthcare to everyone, with less room for catastrophic error. Unfortunately it seems unlikely that even that will happen now, but who knows.

As for the rest, some aspects of it do look a bit unrealistic to me. Others look ambitious but morally right, and something I'd like to see up here too, like a real focus on basic housing as a universal right, and a corresponding push to end homelessness. Regardless, you did help me see the opposing point of view; thanks.

When I hear single-payer healthcare, I don't think about the Canadian system, but the English system, which is terrible, compared to the quality of care you get in Germany, or most people get in the US.

Which brings me to another reality: Most people in the US have access to a very good healthcare standard. It's not so much that they don't want all people to have that, but they do wonder if that requires a complete change of system for them.

So, I don't know much about the English system, but I do know the NHS is very popular in England. Are you sure it's actually terrible? Or could there be an element of the same propaganda I see in the US about the Canadian system, like people waiting months to see a doctor, etc.?

It its more fair (no two classes like in Germany), and that's why it's well liked, but it's chronically under-funded. For example: https://www.physiciansweekly.com/elective-surgery-ban-for-sm...

Waiting times: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2711192/ https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-50397856

Biden’s position on gun control, combined with Kamala Harris, is what did it for many of the republicans I know.

The history of how gun control came to become such a sharp and reliable wedge issue is well worth understanding. It's a relatively recent thing.

Something I've found worth thinking when I hear that, to paraphrase a random sentiment you might hear, "Democrats need to understand that people need to feel secure, that's why gun control matters" is this: who is telling these people that they should be scared?

One serious look at Feinstein and other's proposed legislation is enough to convince every gun owner I know that Democrats don't know the first thing about guns.

We need reform, not absurd threats to ban AR-15's while keeping Mini-14's. Not arbitrary tax stamps and wait times for suppressors and short barrel rifles.

I personally haven't seen gun control legislation proposed in America that isn't totally laughable. It's a deep-rooted thorn in the foot of progressive American politics.

And the underlying problem is that gun owners are populous enough that this objection is a serious political blockage. Why do so many Americans own guns? Who is telling them that this is reasonable, desirable, necessary? In most developed countries, gun control is a political footnote. Why is it different in the US?

> Who is telling them that this is reasonable, desirable, necessary?

Is it unreasonable undesirable or unnecessary?

I disagree. Guns are tools. Guns are toys.

The overwhelming majority of firearm use is safe and recreational.

Gun ownership is not correlated with gun violence[1].

The problem with guns isn't that there are a lot of them. The problem is that they are, in very rare cases, used to do serious harm.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gun_violence_in_the_United_Sta...

> Is it unreasonable undesirable or unnecessary?

In the context of self-defense... yes? It's just not a very good return on investment.

> I disagree. Guns are tools. Guns are toys.

> The overwhelming majority of firearm use is safe and recreational.

Right, so that's the other half of gun owners, who don't say they have a gun for self-protection, which wasn't the context of this thread. That's fine, though.

> Gun ownership is not correlated with gun violence[1].

I mean, it clearly is. You get less gun violence in countries where there are fewer gun owners. That's trivially true. And you'll have to forgive my cynicism, but I can't take wikipedia seriously as a reference on this topic. It's too well-funded a concern for that page not to be pulled in every direction under the sun.

> The problem with guns isn't that there are a lot of them. The problem is that they are, in very rare cases, used to do serious harm.

The CDC says 39,740 firearm deaths in 2018. Four or five weeks of COVID, at that rate. Whether that counts as "very rare" is subjective, I suppose. That's the cheap bit, though: because the US seems to have a congenital inability to prevent people from going bankrupt over medical bills, you've also got to factor in the same again (to a tolerable approximation) in hospitalisations, according to the NIH.

At some point you've got to look at that situation and think "Is the fun of making things go pop worth it?"

It's not just the direct harm. In supporting a culture that normalises making things go pop for fun, you get an extensive infrastructure that also benefits people who end up being a serious problem. Yes, that includes school shootings which, yes, are rare, but they're also fairly unique to the US in scale and regularity. Saying "they're rare" doesn't absolve anyone of the need to question why that is, or what can be done to make them less lethal. They make headlines - or used to; they're frequent enough now that they're less news-worthy, which in itself points to a really deep issue - out of proportion to the number of people directly affected because of the combination of the innocence of youth and the extremity of the violence, but now all the schools need to have active-shooter drills because, as a society, the behaviour of the US shows us that it prefers making things go pop to making kids safe.

Look at gun deaths per 100000 in MX. Guns are very controlled in that country, you can only own a 22LR or a 38 revolver. Gun deaths are still right on par with the US. And of those quoted 39k deaths, 13k of the were homicide, with suicide taking the majority.

> At some point you've got to look at that situation and think "Is the fun of making things go pop worth it?"

So again, you are taking your opinion and projecting it onto others. You may think removing guns solves gun crimes. Mexico stands blatantly against that. You may think violence stops when guns disappear, then you see knife and other brutal attacks. You are stating you don't need them, so nobody else does. The second you the victim of some violent crime, or lose a family member you'll change your tune, as you see tons of democrats doing now.

Guns are notoriously out of control in Mexico. That's part of their problem. But it's interesting that you would pick a country with a long-running inter-cartel drug war, rampant police corruption, extremely weak enforcement, and less than a quarter the average household income as somehow directly being comparable to the US. The more remarkable question we should be asking is, with all that going on, how on earth is the US struggling to do any better than Mexico?

Try that comparison with literally any of the other G7 nations.

> You may think removing guns solves gun crimes. Mexico stands blatantly against that.

No, what Mexico shows is that gun control legislation is pointless if you can't enforce it. I'm not arguing that gun control legislation alone is some panacea; that would be absurd. It needs to have teeth.

> You may think violence stops when guns disappear, then you see knife and other brutal attacks.

Yep. That's a reasonable tradeoff. Apart from anything else, it means the police can de-escalate themselves from assuming that they might get shot during any encounter to assuming that if they don't get close enough to get stabbed, they're less likely to be in immediate danger. That's a good thing.

> The second you the victim of some violent crime, or lose a family member you'll change your tune

It seems reasonable to you that your position requires me to undergo an experience so traumatic as to prevent rational thought? Think I'll pass.

> Guns are notoriously out of control in Mexico.

How did it get this way? There's laws in place to prevent it. Buying an AR in MX is impossible. How do they get in the country? They should be stopped at the border. Just like hard drugs should be stopped when coming across the US border. Proof that even import controls don't work. We're also in the age of 3d printing and home fabrication. Guns are not going to disappear from criminals hands, only law abiding citizens.

> But it's interesting that you would pick a country with a long-running inter-cartel drug war, rampant police corruption, extremely weak enforcement, and less than a quarter the average household income as somehow directly being comparable to the US.

So two questions here, how did it get corrupt in the first place? What has stopped corruption in the US? If the Mexican citizens wish to end this corruption, how can they? I'm going to disregard the poverty claim because it's just senseless to imply poor people are violent.

> The more remarkable question we should be asking is, with all that going on, how on earth is the US struggling to do any better than Mexico?

Great question! Perhaps violence is just as out of control here as in Mexico?

> No, what Mexico shows is that gun control legislation is pointless if you can't enforce it. I'm not arguing that gun control legislation alone is some panacea; that would be absurd. It needs to have teeth.

What does the legislation having "teeth" entail?

> Apart from anything else, it means the police can de-escalate themselves from assuming that they might get shot during any encounter to assuming that if they don't get close enough to get stabbed, they're less likely to be in immediate danger. That's a good thing.

So then if the police are overly violent, or if they were to take control, then what? Wasn't a majority of the left just rioting over police being too violent? You want to throw your trust entirely into the hope that they are sane?

> It seems reasonable to you that your position requires me to undergo an experience so traumatic as to prevent rational thought? Think I'll pass.

How is the desire to defend one's self irrational? This just seems like pure opinion, and slightly scary. Again, for those in immediate danger how do they defend themselves? You clearly lack experience in any traumatic event, and are now running around saying that because of your lack of experience, nobody should be able to defend themselves with firearms. Really?

> who is telling these people that they should be scared?

Life in general? If you have an idea that this country is safe, then great! But the reality is it’s not, not for many. And to take someone’s method of defense because you can’t see a reason why doesn’t do well for relations. And as the sibling post here said, the left hasn’t tried to understand guns enough to enact gun control that doesn’t sound laughable.

Again, this comes back to an underlying message people are being sold. Two, actually. The first is "It is reasonable to expect to need to defend yourself with lethal force, and a gun is a reasonable tool for doing so." The second is "Feeling the need to defend yourself such that it is a day-to-day concern is a reasonable social position."

People will vote on fear before they'll vote on the abject failure of social policy that creates situations where that fear might be justified. That's just how humans are wired: we're not rational. It shouldn't be a matter of taking someone's means of defense, it's trying to address why they feel they need it in the first place. But even then, guns just aren't a particularly good investment if what you want to do is successfully defend yourself from crime. The stats just don't bear it out. So again, who is telling people that they should have one? Who does it suit for large amounts of people to believe that this specific form of mitigation makes sense?

Unfortunately, gun control is such a hot-button issue that it's actually outside the Overton window for an entire political faction. If you bring it up at all, even if you're talking about meta-issues like this, the conversation tends to shut down instantly. This is why the response is always "the Dems need to understand" not "the Republicans need to propose." The fear it represents, and the self-image that any conversation around it challenges, are so fundamental that attempting to approach it from any direction is seen as a personal attack. Again, this is not accidental; it is worth understanding when and how this happened, and who was involved in it.

Well the other side of the second amendment, and one the left shuts down when it's brought up, is protection from government. Then there's the idea of militia's. Both of these are also reasons for people to have the "scary black rifles" in their house, and a central idea to the 2A. So add these to the questions: "Is it reasonable to believe the US may need a militia", "Is it reasonable to force citizen to provide this militia", "Will the US gov ever violate human rights such that the citizens of the US would have to defend themselves against this gov".

Then lets also consider that when you talk about self defense, and the possible loss of life, should we be forced to play the "just enough" game with defensive force? Who exactly likes gambling with their life?

To this end, the terror that was Donald Trump should have made this clear to the us generally on the left.

To the first questions, you do have a point, those are questions that are worth asking. And it all hinges on "which government?", "is the militia well-regulated?", "is it feasible to constitute a modern militia such that it could realistically resist modern state forces?" and so on. Randomly scattering black guns into people's bedroom wardrobes does not a militia make, so if a militia is what we want, what are the processes we need to go through in addition to providing the tools to make sure that such an organisation could be effective if it was needed? What would the command structure look like? Training? Membership eligibility? And not incidentally, how does it avoid being classed as a terrorist organisation from the moment it breaks cover, rather than a constitutionally relevant political body? All that's in the mix. And that's a reasonable set of questions to pose. I don't have the answers to many of them, but critically, that's not how the second amendment is politically framed today. The prevailing interpretation of the second amendment is in support of individual rights, not collective. And again, that is an intentional framing created by specific people for a specific purpose.

> Then lets also consider that when you talk about self defense, and the possible loss of life, should we be forced to play the "just enough" game with defensive force? Who exactly likes gambling with their life?

That's exactly the situation in most of the West. It's just not normal to have to expect to be both in a life-threatening situation, and for the correct response on your part be to kill someone. That's a social and governmental failure right there.

> Randomly scattering black guns into people's bedroom wardrobes does not a militia make

Actually it does, and in some countries this is required by law. Here is the definition of militia: "An army composed of ordinary citizens rather than professional soldiers."

This is a last resort army, and in fact every able body citizen able to take up arms is already a "member".

And what will training do? If you train someone crazy who wants to kill people, this doesn't take their desire to kill people away does it? Dems keep leaning on that training as if it's a silver bullet but in reality it will do nothing. The democratic politicians holding, how come they've never been seen at a range if training is so important? This sounds like the dems saying everybody but them needs some training again. Not likely to get traction.

> organisation

organization

> That's exactly the situation in most of the West. It's just not normal to have to expect to be both in a life-threatening situation, and for the correct response on your part be to kill someone. That's a social and governmental failure right there.

What west? The US? or the Western US? This is pure opinion. It may not be normal for you, but every California politician has a conceal carry permit. Some 500k lawyers do as well. It very much is normal, just not for you.

> Life in general? If you have an idea that this country is safe, then great

This is literally the safest period in American history when it comes to crimes, especially violent crimes.

I think many people are still failing to see the real split.

The split is not "Democrat VS Republican". That always was a bit of an artificial construct, at least within my living memory.

There would be debates, at the end everyone would shake hands and life went on. Nothing substantially changed in policy. Bush said XX, did some stuff, Obama said XX, did pretty much the same stuff and on it went.

But then people got sick of that game.

The left wanted real change. Not forced payments to insurance companies for health care while corporations went right on doing what they do. Real action on climate. Real addresses to the problems of generational poverty and race issues instead of a few token figures and some talk.

The right also wanted real change. An end to globalist policies. An end to unfettered immigration. And an end to meaningless foreign wars (which the left also should have been in on but for some reason were not so much). Judges that would uphold their religious values. And they managed to elect a president that actually started to do some of this much to the dismay of the old guard of both parties.

So now here we are.

The Joe Bidens and Mitt Romneys of the world think they can put Humpty Dumpty back together again and it will be back to business as usual, a few drone strikes, some trade deals and big companies growing ever more powerful. But I suspect not this time. If Biden actually is certified and elected I think he will greatly disappoint the left and the more radical wing will become increasingly hostile. Meanwhile the right, believing the election to be stolen by "communists" through voter fraud will become increasingly conspiracy minded. None of this is a recipe for reconciliation.

My feeling is we need to move beyond facile political posturing and step back and take a hard look at globalism, at nationalism, at the role of federal governments.

We can't deny globalism is here. It's not going away. Capital and information and product and even jobs are going to cross borders. There are many issues we can only solve globally. But if it's not done in a way that protects the livelihoods, dignity, traditions, cultural preferences and aspirational wishes of people there are going to be problems, and probably even bloodshed. People must get most of what they want or at least feel it's possible.

The "right" and the "left" as they are commonly understood in the US are not as far apart in this as it first appears. They both feel they are engaged in a struggle against oppression and for human freedom.

The alarming part is, in order to maintain order (and of course the system which much chug along) the paranoia about authoritarianism from both sides might be realized soon enough.

Politics here stopped being about policy so now it's just a very unproductive culture war battlefield. Absolutely nothing will ever be achieved in that state.

There are enough policies that both sides overwhelmingly support to keep this congress busy - marijuana legalization being the lowest hanging fruit from what I can see. Some kind of a federal minimum wage hike is another one.

I assume by "both sides" you mean both sides in the citizenry, not both sides in congress.

>Yes, there is a ton of common ground

What's an example of some common ground you see, and very roughly how does it happen? For example, we all agree that X is bad, so we will pass a bill to do Y.

Obviously, that example is hypothetical. Any common ground will not involve legislation as the explicitly stated and (very successfully practiced for 6 years) position of one party is a hard-stop on any legislative cooperation.

This may be a surprise, but there is 'Common Ground' on almost all of the issues, even the most difficult, like abortion.

85% of Americans believe there is racism in America. If it were not political, reform in the prison system could absolutely be achieved.

The vast majority of Americans would accept reforms to Healthcare if each law were not hugely politicized. For example, some Republican voters accept or reject literally the same policy when it's presented by different sides of the aisle.

Americans would overwhelmingly accept some kind of Amnesty for children of migrants, and 'some kind' of program for others if - on the other side of the aisle - there were serious reforms and enhancements to ensure border integrity. Any attempt to offer amnesty would probably be weaponized by Republicans and Fox for political points.

The majority of Americans believe that fetus/babies that are viable in the 3rd trimester (i.e. could be born premature) should not be up for abortion. But that 'the day of conception' isn't really tantamount to life. But the extremists won't allow for any common ground.

Even on business tax, income tax - if you actually put numbers together, there are plans that are very popular, but rejected by one radical side or another.

Left wing Governor Cuomo, and Far Left Wing Mayor Deblasio pushed hard for the Amazon deal for NYC, but AOC et. al. really pushed to kill it even though the majority of her constituents (ever people of colour) wanted it. Amazons investment in NYC, while controversial, was quite popular - but killed by more radical voices.

Popular political systems tend to promote and highlight the more extreme views, this is amplified in the press with arguing talking heads.

AOC, Donald Trump get huge attention for the loud, bombastic, contrarian positions they take. In politics 'attention' is everything, that's their currency. They are not incented to 'govern well' they are incented to 'get >50% of the votes' which they do so by making a lot of noise, and spinning everything their opponents do against them.

It takes a lot of maturity, a lot of credibility in systems to get away from that.

Go ahead and have a look at the politics of Germany, they have some English language sites. They have some actual Nazis over there, and yet, somehow, the news and debate is still deftly boring. It's really amazing. Angela Merkel, possibly my favorite politician, has to be the most 'opposite' to Donald Trump imaginable. Coalition governments have a lot to do with that as well.

> Coalition governments have a lot to do with that as well.

There are people who argue that the US presidential system is inherently unstable compared to parliamentary systems:

https://newrepublic.com/article/130028/americas-presidential...

> This may be a surprise, but there is 'Common Ground' on almost all of the issues, even the most difficult, like abortion.

There's no middle ground on abortion when there's a number of people that won't even accept the abortion of a fetus that is already dead. There's no middle ground when a significant number of people believe that a fetus should have the same legal protections as a human, so any abortion is murder and make no exceptions for rape, incest, or even when the pregnancy is threatening the life of the mother.

> Americans would overwhelmingly accept some kind of Amnesty for children of migrants

Eh not really. I know this is merely anecdata, but I personally know someone who firmly believes that an immigrant overstaying their visa has committed a crime, is now a criminal, and they (and their family) need to be deported immediately.

"There's no middle ground on abortion when there's a number of people that won't even accept the abortion of a fetus that is already dead."

You're missing my argument here.

You are highlighting an example of an 'extremist' view - this doesn't in any way indicate there is 'no common' ground.

Maybe own views on abortion might have triggered you to miss this (?) and that there are extremists on the 'other end of the spectrum' - there are those who believe that a baby, near the point of being born, possibly even 'past due' is merely a 'fetus' and should have no rights.

3rd trimester abortions are quite rare, but they do exist and there are some who push for them.

The point is that abortion, which is a really difficult moral issue with extremism on either side, actually does have a huge common ground.

The vast majority of Americans, outside of hyperbole, would essentially accept 'early abortions' as fairly unambiguously acceptable. Beyond that, it would be more contentious.

The 'hard anti-abortion' camp would obviously not like that, and the 'hard fetus is only a fetus' camp would be livid that there were restrictions on later abortions.

But the 'centre ground' would hold, at least in terms of popular acceptance.

Of course it won't happen because the 'far sides' war with each other on it. We may, over decades, arrive at some kind of result that looks like that, we mostly already have.

"I personally know someone who firmly believes that an immigrant overstaying their visa has committed a crime, is now a criminal, and they (and their family) need to be deported immediately."

Again - this kind of misses the 'centre ground' argument.

That you know someone who thinks 'any overstay should be aborted' only indicates that there are people who feel strongly about it.

It says nothing about the 'common ground'.

Here is the evidence [1]. Even a majority of Republicans support DACA.

I'd encourage everyone to spend a lot of time in Pew Research, it's amazing. There are a lot of surveys in there with respect to so many issues that one might find surprising.

It is frankly Pew Research that has made be understand how much common ground their is, and my OP is really based on quite some time perusing that data - I should have probably referred to it - but on every one if the issues I highlighted, there's Pew data to support it.

Here's some data on policing [2]

[1] https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2020/06/17/americans-b...

[2] https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2020/06/05/a-month-bef...

Okay, I think I see your point now. Basically, the extremes will never be pleased, but solutions exist that will please the majority of the population.

> What's an example of some common ground you see

Consider pretty much any issue and there is big fat core of common ground, but typically the debate is around how to best address that issue - what is the best approach, do we tackle this problem now or do we tackle that other problem first, will this path lead to bad unintended consequences, etc.

Immigration. Most people have a pretty favorable view of immigration and immigrants - pretty much everyone has an immigrant story in their background. The debate is more on the requirements to be let in, especially in cases where there is an established legal process and someone doesn't follow that process.

Taxes. Few people want to pay more than is needed. Everyone wants taxation to be fair. It's not hard to get people to admit that they see a lot of good can come from the proper use of taxes. The debate is more about tax rates, where taxes should be spent, etc.

Abortion. A huge majority of Americans do not like the idea of completely restriction-free abortions and quite a few people have concerns that, pre-birth, that thing inside the mother is a person to some degree or another. Simultaneously a huge majority of Americans do not like the idea of the government exerting control and getting involved in people's lives any more than it should.

Gun control, the economy, national defense, education, the climate. It goes on and on - name any issue and there's a ton of common ground. For people who are interested in progress and solving problems, it's ripe with opportunity.

> Immigration. Most people have a pretty favorable view of immigration and immigrants - pretty much everyone has an immigrant story in their background. The debate is more on the requirements to be let in, especially in cases where there is an established legal process and someone doesn't follow that process.

I used to think this, but after speaking with trump supporters over the last few years (consisting of both friendships IRL as well as inflammatory people online) I'm hearing more and more the rhetoric that immigrants are just bad - keep the foreigners out

Ok, well, anecdotally I'm hearing the opposite. :) Everyone I talk to recognizes the value of immigration generally and is focused entirely on illegal immigration.

Most of the people in camps on the southern border are seeking asylum. That is an established legal process.

Nonetheless these people were demonized and subject to family separations and lesser cruelties.

I'm not just sharing anecdotes. Trump cut the number of refugees admitted to 18k in 2016, from 110k the year before. The focus is absolutely not just on curbing illegal immigrants, but also on limiting viable legal options.

So if the US immigration policy became "everyone seeking to immigrate gets a visa, pending a quick background check", they would be OK with such a policy? If the argument is just to end illegal immigration, then make all immigration legal. Otherwise, the problem is not just they're coming across the border without dotting i's and crossing t's. It's something else about immigration.

Not everyone thinks that!

> If one big problem facing U.S. politics right now is that everything is distilled down to a binary either-or with no room for nuance, its sibling problem is assuming that everyone on the "other side" from you is the same, i.e. that the crazy extremist you see on TV is a prototypical example of everyone in that group. In reality, nothing could be further from the truth.

This is why I’m an independent. The quicker people realize the solution isn’t blue or red, but instead in the middle, the quicker we can actually resolve issues.

I resisted associating with a party for a long time, but Trump changed that. I was legitimately afraid for my family, who were at the time green card holders from a Muslim-majority country.

Trump tried to cancel green cards, along with other visas, without any warning a week after his inauguration. People who had lived, worked, paid taxes in the United States for years and followed every legal process were nonetheless stranded away from their homes and families.

That was really the point of no return. Trump supporters are the enemy; no reconciliation is possible.

They are the enemy because they are trying to protect jobs at home? Which country do you come from? How difficult is it for a US citizen to become a full citizen? Is it as easy as what you’re asking for here? Do you think that by having a green card you are taking a job from someone here?

I’m sorry but the idea that a political opponent is an “enemy” is just childish. If your country is trying to kill you then apply for political asylum, otherwise realize a great majority of people here think you have side channeled your way into this country.

I am and was a US citizen. All US citizens are full citizens; we don't have second class citizens here.

There is a legitimate way to debate immigration policy. It's the intentional infliction of cruelty and dehumanization that makes this situation irreconcilable, not any desire to change policy.

Notice you didn't answer any of my questions.

This is not exclusive to any one side. That’s the problem with having “sides”.

I sincerely believe that there is definitely some common ground. Otherwise I would not have posted that thought.

Is it easy to find that common ground? Of course, not. Will it take a lot of time and effort (from all sides)? Absolutely. But, in the end, it is certainly worth trying, at the very least. That is why I have listed the areas, which I think represent some aspects that I hope we all could easier agree on than some other aspects.

Finally, I think that it is important not to generalize people, based on our own (limited) experience. Some people on other side(s) are more flexible than others. Moreover, I believe that people can change, including their point of view on various issues. If we will dismiss the idea that others are or can become open minded, we will shut the door to a potential dialog, which could bring us even more trouble.

The USA seems bound for "illiberal democracy", a la Orbán in Hungary, Bolsonaro in Brazil, Erdogan in Turkey, Kaczyński in Poland, and Modi in India.

(If you are a Republican, assume a Democratic autocrat, and if you are a Democrat assume a Republican autocrat.)

Democracy in general has the weakness that the party in power can constrain the ability of the opposition to compete. We don't yet know how to stop the slide into illiberal democracy from happening.

Hi, I'm from Australia. Voting is mandatory here! Turn out in our elections is 99.x%. You are not obligated to make a choice, but you are obligated under pain of a $30 fine to be registered at a polling station on election day. You can avoid the fine if you present a valid reason for not voting after the election when notified. Such a reason would definitely include "I was prevented from voting" or "I was threatened if I voted", and would be registered with the AEC and investigated seriously.

Our Electoral commission is the most trusted government body in the country, and has maintained a culture of independence and accuracy. We don't have any form of electronic voting, but generally have election results on election night.

Our system has multiple viable political parties! Factions on both the left and right of the spectrum at multiple government levels have successfully won and lost seats over the years depending on their ability to poll within the electorate. This has not resulted in them being regarded as "spoilers" to the main political parties, and has acted at times as an effective check on government policy since it encouraged cross-party negotiation through multiple avenues.

Is our system perfect? No - no system is. But come election night, our representative government actually represents the people. If you got 51% of the vote, then 51% of the population, through some means, selected you as a preferred candidate.

24 hours ago, a group of demonstrators chanted "stop the count" at an elections office. How do you get there from here?

I'd say you lobby for preferential voting like we have here as the first step. You write numbers in boxes for your 1st choice, 2nd choice, etc until you're done.

They put all the ballots in piles by everyone's first choice. The smallest pile (e.g. least voted for candidate) then loses, and their ballots get sorted onto their second choices. Repeat until you have a candidate with a clear majority, and you have a winner.

This allows people to say, "I want Rubio, but if not, then Cruz, and if not then Jeb" etc. I suspect if this system were in play in both parties now, we'd have different nominees, and they'd be the candidates that the majority can live with instead of being the candidates that most excite the extremes. And the people on the extremes can see that their candidate lost even with people being able to vote for them without 'wasting' their vote.

Yes, in our senate this gets a bit crazy with tablecloth sized ballots (https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/aa/Victoria...), and the first time I voted here I allocated every single preference down to about 160 something with pride. You don't have to obviously, but I chose to.

They weren't protesting voting though (but I'm sure you already know that).

> Is there really any common ground?

Politics is all about uncommon ground. People hardly ever can have one, as the word suggests the tragedy of commons follows quickly upon reaching it. Mutually beneficial status qua don't last as somebody always want to get more of the benefit than others, and exploit the situation.

People are not born equal, tribes are not equal, nations are not made equal. There are always the weaker, and stronger.

Politics is how you get along, and live another day with all above concerned. How somebody weak can live along somebody strong, without having the later kill him simply because he can. Same way, how a strong one can live with peace of mind knowing that if he lets the weak leave, they may well live to grow big, and surpass him in the future.

Life is an endless play of king of the hill.

Your comment about "facts or reason" is sort of odd given your post gives no details concerning what you consider these to be. I mean, I could fill in some but it seems like without you giving a clue as to what you're referring to, people can only shout for you or against you.

Here's an example. My facts, which I think are shared by almost all people for at least hundreds of years (at least anywhere there has ever been a plauge):

1) Sometimes human spread illness to each other via spit, like when they talk

2) A piece of cloth in the path of spit will probably block some or all of the spit

That is the entire argument for wearing masks. Wearing a mask costs almost nothing, and you know it might help save lives if you believe 1 and 2. I live in a state where not wearing a mask is very common. Most people don't even have them on in something like a gas station. People are dying here at 2x the national average.

My neighbors, whom I have known for a decade, told me that my personal wearing of a mask was a politically-motivated attack on their beliefs. Millions of people have similar beliefs.

Have you forgotten that we couldn't buy masks or other medical equipment for months because of China, and everyone, including WHO, Fauci, Obama, etc. were advising people against using masks due to shortage?

- January 14, WHO: Preliminary investigations conducted by the Chinese authorities have found no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission of the novel #coronavirus (2019-nCoV) identified in #Wuhan, #China🇨🇳(https://twitter.com/WHO/status/1217043229427761152)

- January 31, Trump suspends travel from China: Proclamation on Suspension of Entry as Immigrants and Nonimmigrants of Persons who Pose a Risk of Transmitting 2019 Novel Coronavirus(https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/proclamation...). A move condemned by many, including WHO and Biden.

- February 1, Biden: We are in the midst of a crisis with the coronavirus. We need to lead the way with science — not Donald Trump’s record of hysteria, xenophobia, and fear-mongering. He is the worst possible person to lead our country through a global health emergency.(https://twitter.com/JoeBiden/status/1223727977361338370)

- Feburary 2, Health Commissioner of New York City: As we gear up to celebrate the #LunarNewYear in NYC, I want to assure New Yorkers that there is no reason for anyone to change their holiday plans, avoid the subway, or certain parts of the city because of #coronavirus.(https://mobile.twitter.com/NYCHealthCommr/status/12240431558...)

- Feburary 24, Pelosi: You should come to Chinatown. Precautions have been taken by our city, we know that there's concern about tourism, traveling all throughout the world, but we think it's very safe to be in Chinatown and hope that others will come.(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VAEfSHeH4Lc)

- Feburary 29, U.S. Surgeon General: Seriously people- STOP BUYING MASKS! They are NOT effective in preventing general public from catching #Coronavirus, but if healthcare providers can’t get them to care for sick patients, it puts them and our communities at risk!(https://twitter.com/Surgeon_General/status/12337257852839321...)

- Feburary 29, WHO: Travel bans to affected areas or denial of entry to passengers coming from affected areas are usually not effective in preventing the importation of cases but may have a significant economic and social impact.(https://www.who.int/news-room/articles-detail/updated-who-re...)

- March 2, Tedros Adhanom, Director-General of WHO: Stigma, to be honest, is more dangerous than the virus itself. Let's really underline that. Stigma is the most dangerous enemy.(https://www.who.int/docs/default-source/coronaviruse/transcr...)

- March 2, U.S. Surgeon General: You can increase your risk of getting it by wearing a mask if you are not a health care provider(https://video.foxnews.com/v/6137596907001#sp=show-clips)

- March 3, Bill de Blasio (NYC Mayor): Since I’m encouraging New Yorkers to go on with your lives + get out on the town despite Coronavirus, I thought I would offer some suggestions. Here’s the first: thru Thurs 3/5 go see "The Traitor" @FilmLinc. If "The Wire" was a true story + set in Italy, it would be this film.(https://twitter.com/BilldeBlasio/status/1234648718714036229)

- March 4, Obama: Save the masks for health care workers. Let’s stay calm, listen to the experts, and follow the science.(https://twitter.com/barackobama/status/1235246706817630208)

- March 8, Fauci (Director of NIAID): People should not be walking around masks. There's no reason to be walking around with a mask. When you're in the middle of an outbreak, wearing a mask might make people feel a little better, but it's not providing the perfect protection people think it is, and often there are un-intentioned consequences(https://youtu.be/PRa6t_e7dgI)

- June 5, WHO: If you are healthy, you only need to wear a mask if you are taking care of a person with COVID-19.(http://web.archive.org/web/20200605134037/https://www.who.in...)

- June 8, WHO: It still appears to be rare that an asymptomatic individual actually transmits onward.(https://www.who.int/docs/default-source/coronaviruse/transcr...)

---

China brought up medical equipment all over the world, which is why you couldn't buy any masks and other medical equipment for many months. This was not just a result of Daigo (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X3gNQ9JnJ90), but rather, China had its overseas companies send their employees all over the country to buy up all the medical equipment they could find:

- Chinese property developing group Greenland scoured Australia to purchase bulk medical supplies - including masks, gloves and thermometers - which were flown to China. "Basically all employees, the majority of whom are Chinese, were asked to source whatever medical supplies they could," one company insider told the Herald. This exercise went on for weeks through January and February, he said. The entire accounts department, contract managers, the human resources team and even receptionists were sent on a mission to find bulk supplies of surgical masks, thermometers, antibacterial wipes, hand sanitisers, gloves and Panadol. According to a company newsletter, the Greenland Group sourced 3 million protective masks, 700,000 hazmat suits and 500,000 pairs of protective gloves from "Australia, Canada, Turkey and other countries."(https://www.smh.com.au/national/chinese-backed-company-s-mis...)

- Chinese-owned Risland Australia, boasted online last month that "90 tons (sic) of selective medical supplies" were sent "air transport direct from Sydney to Wuhan via corporate jet."(https://www.news.com.au/finance/business/second-company-sent...)

- Sydney-based Mr Kuang, former officer in the People's Liberation Army, imported 35,000 sets of protective medical suits, 200,000 pairs of gloves and 10 tonnes of disinfectant from Australia to China.(https://www.smh.com.au/national/former-chinese-military-man-...)

- China stockpiled 2 billion face masks and 25m medical items.(https://www.news.com.au/lifestyle/health/revealed-china-stoc...)

Other related news:

- Beijing demanded praise in exchange for medical supplies(https://www.axios.com/beijing-demanded-praise-in-exchange-fo...).

- Chinese government rejects allegations that its face masks were defective, tells countries to 'double check' instructions(https://www.businessinsider.com/china-face-mask-defective-do...)

- Italy gave China PPE to help with coronavirus — then China made them buy it back(https://spectator.us/italy-china-ppe-sold-coronavirus/)

---

If Biden/the democrats were interested in uniting the nation then perhaps they should’ve united with Trump against China instead of pushing CCP propaganda to attack Trump and blame him for everything. Perhaps they should’ve been honest about why they didn’t want people to wear masks for the first many months. Accept responsibility for the fact that USA is so heavily reliant on China, largely thanks to the likes of Biden. Perhaps they should acknowledge that they were wrong to encourage people to gather, wrong to attack Trump for limiting flights from China.

Literally everyone has a little piece of cloth they could put over their mouth, and literally everyone should if it has a a reasonable chance of saving a life, to say nothing of many lives.

The fact that there’s any controversy about this at all leads me to believe that many have abandoned all reason.

"reasonable chance" -- for anything less than well fitted N95 masks "reasonable" approaches zero.

>literally everyone should if it has a a reasonable chance of saving a life

This is a moral judgement and not everybody shares the same values as you, especially regarding what a "reasonable" chance is. Some people don't believe they should inconvenience themselves just because it would contribute to a tiny decrease in deaths. There's also an absence of data: given we've got months of data on death rates and mask usage rates in different areas, it should be possible to quantify exactly how strong the correlation is, but nobody's even done this.

This is like saying not purposely running into other cars is a just a moral judgment.

It’s not a moral judgment, it’s a foundational element of all functional human societies. If you don’t agree, you should remove yourself from society.

Your facts are wrong:

- humans can spread viruses to each other just by breathing,

-a piece of cloth won't stop the aerosol particles you exhale! Even a mask won't stop them.

Furthermore there is no good experimental evidence that masks work for anything other than surgery (for which they were intended, designed and tested).

What DOES work? Distancing, e.g., keeping away from each other.

Distancing is about disease; masks are an exercise in political theatre and political control.

The question is 'do masks prevent the spread of covid' and the answer is yes (and we knew this back in April [1]).

[1] https://www.acpjournals.org/doi/10.7326/M20-1342?fbclid=IwAR...

From the article...

> However, the size and concentrations of SARS–CoV-2 in aerosols generated during coughing are unknown. Oberg and Brousseau (3) demonstrated that surgical masks did not exhibit adequate filter performance against aerosols measuring 0.9, 2.0, and 3.1 μm in diameter. Lee and colleagues (4) showed that particles 0.04 to 0.2 μm can penetrate surgical masks. The size of the SARS–CoV particle from the 2002–2004 outbreak was estimated as 0.08 to 0.14 μm (5); assuming that SARS-CoV-2 has a similar size, surgical masks are unlikely to effectively filter this virus.

...and that's the least problematic part of the study.

The study is done on a sample size of n=4 (!!), and tests the immediate effects of masks against coughing. It does not test the longer term effect of staying in a non-ventilated room (like a mall or a train) with non-coughing (normal breating) infected people.

I'm sorry, but we've known that masks work for literally a century. They were also recommended during the 1918 pandemic. There is a wealth of literature on this topic; it is scientific consensus.

It's great that you're thinking critically about the ways that this individual study might fall short, but trying to poke holes in a study here or there does not undo the (literally) century of research underlying the efficacy of cloth masks in preventing the spread of airborne illnesses (or epidemiology in general).

This article clearly shows evidence that masks reduce the spread of covid.

In your critique you've changed the question you are debating (again) to 'does a surgical mask filter particles of the size we assume covid to have'. Because the answer 'not flawlessly' and the critique 'sample size 4' (when there were <100 cases in the country at the time!) support the answer you already had before your even read the article.

This is the conservative (and to be fair most people's) response to information that disagrees with whatever narrative hold.

Coupled with the amplification of a conspiracy presented with no evidence "masks are an exercise in political theatre and political control" and you have the right's playbook on pretty much every issue these days. Climate change, abortion, economics, disenfranchisement - experts say one thing, the right pulls out slivers of factoids "what about volcanoes and methane from cows" "what about pregnancies that have gone to 24 weeks" "what about communism", all micro-facts with almost no relevance to the overall discussion, designed to distract, enflame and stall in order to preserve the status quo.

On the left, there are similar issues, but at the end of the day, the left acknowledges and defers to experts on the subjects. The right has propagated such distrust and anti-intellectualism we have reached Trump as the ultimate demonstration of idolizing agreement over effectiveness.

This response shows exactly why Trump won, and more generally what the problems with today's society are. People cannot separate discussion from politics.

When I have to use public transport, I wear a N95 respirator. I avoid getting out as much as it is feasible. I have gifted many N95 respirators to friends and family. On a social level, I have been involved with arguing for, and implementing stronger measures against COVID-19. Specifically, getting the damn face shields and chin guards banned. And somehow you have managed to think that I am a COVID-19 conspiracy theorist because I dare to point out the flaws of what people think are solutions against the pandemic.

Good job.

The link you give above says "This article has been retracted. See Notice of Retraction." Here is the URL of the paper's retraction:

https://www.acpjournals.org/doi/10.7326/L20-0745

titled

"Notice of Retraction: Effectiveness of Surgical and Cotton Masks in Blocking SARS-CoV-2"

I’m confused about what your disagreeing with - fundamental physics? you’re saying that when you cough, covering your mouth with your hand or arm does nothing? The aerosolized spit and mucous leaving your mouth passes through your hand unaffected by matter? If so, what are you doing wasting your time on HN? You have singlehandedly disproved vast swaths of scientific research, go claim your Nobel prize!

The claim is only that a little piece of cloth in front of your mouth will block some moisture. Less bodily fluids expelled into the environment means less risk of transmitting disease. It’s not perfect but it cost almost nothing and will save peoples lives. Even if it’s only very marginally effective, why would you not suck up the very very small personal discomfort if it would save even a few lives?

This is the thing that truly drives me crazy about the political deadlock, and the replies to this comment are a good example of it: Democratic politicians propose a common-sense, obvious measure that would be objectively good for society (e.g. healthcare; slowing down climate change; addressing a global pandemic ravaging our country; providing money to the people now out of work due to the economic recession caused by the pandemic). In turn Republicans (politicians and right-wing pundits, that is; not referring to constituents), respond by fighting tooth and nail opposing it, using nonsensical buzzwords and ad hominem attacks on whomever sponsored the bill, and make it one of "The Issues" for political points, further subverting any real, meaningful discussion on policy issues. I've watched the GOP degenerate from "kind of annoying, but valid counter-points" to "blatantly obstructionist" staring with the Tea Party during the Obama Admin, and only getting worse from there.

Today there's the "Let's actually do our jobs and keep the country running" party and the "Let's destroy our country and blame it on the other side because corporate lobbyists pay us to do so" party. And somehow we need to find common ground and unity when the other side is more interested in bullying and obstructing the Democrats than it is trying not to kill another 200K people. There's compromise, and then there's calling a spade a spade.

To be clear, I won't pretend the Dems are fine (and if there were a way to vote third party without throwing away my vote, I would do so in a heartbeat). But the Democrats aren't even particularly progressive anymore. Bad-faith concession after bad-faith concession to the GOP over the course of decades has slowly dragged the Democrats to the center, while the GOP's actual extremists making a mockery of our democracy have the gall to label providing healthcare as the real extremism.

For example, during the impeachment hearings discussions generally went like this:

I presented officials who gave damning testimony before congress.

The person I was speaking to responded that person was biased or untrustworthy.

I pointed out that they were lifelong Republicans or respected experts and asked what sort of witness would change their mind.

The person I was speaking to responded that no witness could change their mind.

Yeah, the mainstream Democrats in particular engaged in crap arguments like the dubious, hyper-partisan impeachment effort. Impeachment just distinctly wounded the anti-Trump efforts and only Trump's fumbling Covid was enough to get it back on track.

But the super mainstream Democrats are one of 3-4 distinct factions who want Trump out. Those actually even the mild left were only partially on this train.

So to cover what you're washing over here: The US President and his subordinates attempted to use the office of the President's powers to compel a foreign country to "discover" evidence against the President's domestic political opponents, under the auspices of denying military aid for the defense of that country from invasion by one of the US's global antagonists.

That's what you're covering under "hyper-partisan". You know, just so we're all clear on that.

To be fair, a lot of reasonable people would say "no witness could change my mind" if I asked them "what witness testimony would convince you that politicians are secretly Lizard People from the planet Venus?" So I don't think this is really about rejecting facts & reason... it's more about having really strong priors that the rest of us don't share.

> Is there really any common ground?

Some policies, when detached from political partisanship, could be appreciated by voters on both sides.

For instance, for those who believe in human rights and social justice (a supposedly 'left' concern), there's good cause for opposition to China. In terms of jobs and national security, wresting some of China's high-tech manufacturing capability back within US borders would be a boon for employment across 'middle-America' (a supposedly 'right' concern). More importantly, I think both the concerns of human rights, and the employment of your fellow citizens, should not be a partisan issue.

I think most people want the world to be a better place to live, with better human rights, and a wage. Allowing China to gain leverage on the world, despite a track record of human rights abuses, and building a trade deficit with them, isn't really in the general voters interest.

And this is just one example. I'm sure there's more common ground if you look just at policy.

> More importantly, I think both the concerns of human rights, and the employment of your fellow citizens, should not be a partisan issue.

McConnel has already demonstrated that he will make it a partisan issue by ramming through a Supreme Court justice and recessing the Senate without even giving the appearance of considering a second round of COVID relief.

> And this is just one example. I'm sure there's more common ground if you look just at policy.

It won't force bad faith actors to cooperate, regardless of any common ground between voters because they, as the GP said, won't hold their politicians to account. Acting as the opposition even when they're in power is built into the party at this point, as demonstrated by the President's many legislative failures starting with the ACA repeal. It's just wishful thinking and I'm hoping enough people are done with the feel good woowoo.

You've missed my point entirely. I'm not talking about one legislator, I'm talking about an entire nation. At the end of the day, the one leverage you and I have over our policy-maker overlords, is the vote.

> It won't force bad faith actors to cooperate [..] as the GP said, won't hold their politicians to account.

The only way you can hold this belief, is to also believe that voting behaviour doesn't change over time, and that you don't have a part to play in that. What else could motivate you to speak with such passion if it were only futile?

> It's just wishful thinking and I'm hoping enough people are done with the feel good woowoo.

You miss every shot you don't take. A platitude, maybe, but also a falsifiable proposition, which is clearly true.

For instance, there's nothing magical about taking your vote to any of the independents with much better policies. Sure, their pitch for the white house is impossible, but they might make headway into the senate, and each % point that goes to an independent provides a signal to the established Red/Blue teams that maybe they should adopt some of those policies.

Nothing magical about organising with like-minded people, creating and crowd-funding a lobby group. Or even taking part of one that suits your interests.

There is bipartisan agreement that China needs to be confronted and contained. How it is accomplished may be debated, but that is tractable.

There is almost no agreement on the rest of the agenda, though. Democrats and leftists want green initiatives and universal healthcare, which both have zero support from Republicans. The leftist wing of the Democratic Party will be emboldened by their successes this election and will hijack the agenda, forcing America to smack the new administration (and Congress) back into doing nothing by putting in Republicans during the midterms.

Republicans have much more discipline as a party and will work to obstruct, because that's what wins them votes. Why should they cooperate with a party that spent the majority of the past four years trying to impeach a legitimately elected President? In fact, they might start a similar effort, because the saga of Biden's ne'er do well son Hunter has barely begun. Trump is not going away, neither is Steve Bannon. They have a lot more time on their hands to team up again, possibly bringing Donald Trump Jr. into the fold, to build a grassroots opposition campaign to stymie the Democrat agenda. Remember that Trump has already made the Republicans' long-sought wish of a Conservative Supreme Court (for almost a generation) a reality. He has also given the Republican party a good number of wins in the House (+5/6 for Republicans vs +1 for Democrats). So from their perspective, it may make sense to ride the Trump wave some more, because it has delivered for them.

> hijack the agenda

Please elaborate on what you perceive as 'hijacking the agenda'.

Biden is pretty centrist and is not willing to go for universal healthcare, whereas the Bernie side of the spectrum explicitly campaigned for this. That's one of the examples.

A very clear majority of Americans support universal healthcare every time they are polled about it. This isn’t the radical agenda that you seem to be claiming it to be, it’s about bringing the US system to be closer in line with what every other first world nation has already had for decades.

[1] https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2...

A majority of Americans also reject tax increases on their incomes, and this program is very expensive: A majority Republicans and Republican-leaning voters reject the notion that the Government should provide overall coverage. Roughly 37% overall do not want this at all.

Interestingly, Pew only asked the question of what the public wants, but not how much things cost and how they will be paid for. As always, the devil is in the details: Roughly 53% do not support raising income taxes on incomes above 250,000!

It's clear that when we are asked whether we want something and then also asked if we want to pay for it via higher taxes, we have balked. Ultimately, if folks are not willing to pay for something, they can't have it! And if they are unwilling to pay for something, they're effectively saying they don't want it.

https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/09/27/more-americ...

I’ve seen the impeachment described as illegitimate somehow. It was political sure, no doubt about it. But he tried to use his office to coerce a foreign government to take down his political opponent. That should be a fireable offense. He only escaped it because of purely political defense.

He violated campaign finance laws, but there was not enough evidence to support the charge of misuse of office in a treasonous manner.

You may personally be convinced of the President's wrondoing, but to try a sitting President for what is a grave offense, there are much higher standards of evidence and procedure.

The whole impeachment was an exercise in power from day one, but Democrats made a huge fuss about a similar exercise in power by Trump: appointing a Justice t the Supreme Court in an election year. Both were actions that where the actors were entirely within their rights (The lower house has the right to impeach, and the upper house has the right to try the President; similarly, a President absolutely has the right to appoint a Justice of the Supreme Court for as long as he is President.), but the President made no bones about what the whole thing was, while the Democrats tried hard to couch their act in moral and ethical terms. Judging by the way the election went (razor thin margins at almost every level with 70+ million popular votes for Trump), the public were having none of it.

> You may personally be convinced of the President's wrondoing, but to try a sitting President for what is a grave offense, there are much higher standards of evidence and procedure.

Some of us remember the good old days when a (Democratic) president almost got impeached for lying about getting oral sex from an intern, so I'm not really convinced about your argument here.

But he admitted to lying. That’s pretty rock solid evidence.

There are tapes of Trump sounding like a two-bit mobster. The GOP did not dispute the evidence, they just refused to convict because it wasn't "serious" enough.

If Trump had backed down that might have made sense, but instead it emboldened his lawlessness. We're now at the point where his undermining of the voting process is entirely expected and hardly even noteworthy.

Disputing the vote and questioning results is very common in elections. Don't pretend like Trump is the first to do this, or the first to insinuate that fraud has influenced the result. It's pretty run-of-the-mill politicking. Here's Hillary doing the same thing, except she's blaming nefarious foreign actors instead of the local machine:

https://www.politico.com/story/2017/09/18/hillary-clinton-tr...

The simple fact is that Hillary simply couldn't believe she was defeated, and did as much or more disputing of results. That doesn't make her an enemy of democracy, and neither does Donald Trump's caterwauling. But if you read the recent news reporting or watched the current President-elect's speeches, you would think that the very foundations of Democracy are shaken. Utter hogwash.

What the fuck crime is “sounding like a two bit mobster”. Is that walking around saying “yous guys”?

nit: Nixon did not get impeached, but Clinton _did_ get impeached: he just wasn't convicted in the senate.

I agree with your point, still.

It was not campaign finance laws that’s incorrect. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impeachment_of_Donald_Trump?wp... Charges were abuse of power and obstruction of investigation. That Democrats were itching to impeach him doesn’t change the reality that he abused his office to advance his own political interests.

I'm aware of what the charges were. I'm referring to the original investigation of Muller's that had these findings.

We will never know whether any of Trump's wrongdoing rises to the level necessary to convict, because the Senate decided not to call any witnesses or subpoena any documents.

I think the Supreme Court Justice issue is way more complicated than that. When going down the nuclear option, both Reid and McConnell knew this was going to happen, it was just a matter of who ended up on top.

There was always going to be a scramble for one side to change the rules, get a leg up, and pull the ladder up behind them. I suppose that's endemic to a 2-party system, but that's what happens when hard-earned consensus is destroyed. Not blaming Dems/GOP here, I'm just saying this was the inevitable consequence and it's more complicated than you're letting on.

The Obama administration used its office to take down a political opponent, on the basis of improbable claims of collusion with Russia, backed by an opposition research report funded by the Clinton campaign.

Is any of this good? Of course not. Both sides have been abusing their office in a similar way. I am struggling how people can get comfortable with “when my team does it it’s justified, but how does the other team dare to do it!”.

"on the basis of improbable claims of collusion with Russia"

Didn't Trump actually ask Russia to hack the democrats?

Nope

He literally said those exact words on live television.

For one thing, he literally didn’t. Prove me wrong.

Also, he figuratively didn’t.

I'll bite: https://youtu.be/-e-Vka_HkRU?t=107

Yeah, as I said.

You know this isn’t an actual sincere attempt to collude with Russia, right? People can’t seriously believe that’s what this is.

Not to mention, he was talking about Hillary’s lost emails, not hacking the democrats.

Wow. We all saw it happen.

How do you reach a common ground with people who reject the evidence of their eyes and ears?

You can't.

I would ask you this question. Let’s start by referencing the supposed incident in question. Where did your eyes/ears see and hear this?

We absolutely didn’t. Show me if you know otherwise.

Please see nl's comment elsewhere in this thread.

This is at the level of people who claim they saw Sarah Palin say "I can see Russia from my house". If it really happened, and "we all saw it", it should be trivial for you to produce a video of Trump asking Russia to hack the Democrats.

Direct quote from Trump:

"Russia, if you are listening I hope you are able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing."

https://youtu.be/-b71f2eYdTc?t=20

From https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/trump-asked-russia-to-...

The emails under discussion were on Hilary Clinton's personal email server, and had been deleted. So the two questions you should ask are:

1) How would a hack, initiated after Trump's statement, find those emails - even in principle?

2) Even if we posit that such a hack was requested, how does that transmute into a request to "hack the Democrats"?

1) You really think Trump understands that?

2) It's a direct request to hack the Democratic presidential candidate and party standard bearer.

> 2) It's a direct request to hack the Democratic presidential candidate and party standard bearer.

So if someone were to hack Trump's emails, do you think it would be an accurate statement to say that they "hacked the Republicans"?

While he was running for president as the candidate of the Republican party? Yes of course!

Does your argument really come down to trying to parse a difference between Hillary Clinton and the Democratic party?

I'd note the "hack the Democrats" was the OPs characterisation of what happened. If you'd prefer to claim that Trump asked Russia to hack Hillary Clinton I'm not going to try to argue that point.

I think "Trump asked the Russians to find Hillary Clinton's emails" is entirely uncontroversial. Saying he asked the Russians to "hack" the "Democrats" involves two inferences and seems like a statement designed to maximize discord. The Russians are not in Donald Trump's chain of command, there are other ways to find her emails than hacking, and Hillary Clinton is not "the Democrats".

This will be my last post on the topic because it reminds of the "blue dress/green dress" thing someone posted way up thread. I'm sure you're posting in good faith, and I assure you I am too, but it is just not at all obvious to me why someone would say "Donald Trump asked the Russians to hack the Democrats" instead of "Donald Trump asked the Russians to find Hillary Clinton's emails".

Not only that, but this is obvious political riffing.

Elsewhere you've asked people to prove that Trump made the statement, which people did. Please now prove that this was "obvious political riffing," whatever that means.

No, his statement, which was linked, was not in fact what the claim said.

Okay, he didn't say "the Democrats," he said Clinton's emails. Is that really better? Please prove he was joking.

> Even if we posit that such a hack was requested

Which we do, and was the whole point

> how does that transmute into a request to "hack the Democrats"?

Hillary Clinton (the person under discussion) was the Democratic candidate for president at the time.

You still haven't answered how a hack could find deleted emails?

I'm not arguing that Trump knows anything about how hacking works at all.

He made a very obvious joke at one of his rallies.

Right. When he does it, it's so "obviously" a joke. And yet something tells me he would have no problem accepting help from anyone, legally or otherwise, if he thought he wouldn't get caught. I submit that maybe there are some things that presidential candidates should not even joke about, because even the whiff of impropriety should be anathema to decent, serious people.

Just a coincidence that Russia then proceeded to do exactly what he asked for?

> The Obama administration used its office to take down a political opponent, on the basis of improbable claims of collusion with Russia, backed by an opposition research report funded by the Clinton campaign.

The opposition research was initialy funded by the RNC.

> Why should they cooperate with a party that spent the majority of the past four years trying to impeach a legitimately elected President?

What does the legitimacy of his election have to do with anything?

> Why should they cooperate with a party that spent the majority of the past four years trying to impeach a legitimately elected President?

Because effective government of the country depends on that, or them not having the votes to matter.

Also, the impeachment power presupposes that anyone subjected to it will hold office legitimately but be abusing that office; someone who does not legally hold office doesn't need to be impeached, as their pretense of exercising the authority of the office is a legal nullity.

Impeachment was intended to be used in the context of an elected president. It's kind of the point.

They can tackle it in other ways. US government can setup hospitals and employ doctors. It can be free of cost. Build more nuclear plants, no one from the right will oppose it.

"Why should they cooperate with a party that spent the majority of the past four years trying to impeach a legitimately elected President"

This is some very Fox Newsish spin. Trump was impeached because he commited a crime worthy of impeachment. He actually did about 10.

There’s a slate star codex post that describes research demonstrating that conservative Americans can predict the responses of progressive Americans to political questions, but the converse is not true. It’s not that conservatives are “unwilling to consider” conflicting ideas; in fact, they do a much better job of modeling conflicting ideas than progressives do!

Most of the difference is, I think, not based on factual disagreement, but based on principal disagreements on issues like the personhood of fetuses.

It's the old adage, "conservatives think liberals are stupid, liberals think conservatives are evil."

I know a lot of liberals who think conservatives (especially poorer conservatives) are stupidly voting against their class interests.

They probably still hate those conservatives though. Even now you can see the hate being directed to Blacks or Hispanics that may have voted for Trump.

One must consider the major confounding factor here that Republicans have made a substantial effort to publicly taunt and insult liberals from positions of power[1], and that being the target of that kind of thing can easily override what would otherwise be more compassionate interaction.

[1]: One example: https://twitter.com/CawthornforNC/status/1323813315169165313

What that tells you is... they don't understand those interests.

Or they don't understand that their proposed solutions don't sound likely to solve the interests.

Suppose class mobility is good for poorer people. Canada has more class mobility than the US. Canada also has universal healthcare (like most developed countries) which helps people take risks like starting their own business which helps with class mobility.

Why do poor republicans in the US keep voting against universal healthcare?

They actually don't. You get that result only if you exclude non white people.

Overall, if you define working class or poor economically, they are more likely to vote for those things.

This is because the heuristics low-IQ conservatives use are actually better than the low-quality first-order reasoning midwit liberals use. Policies that immediately enrich poor people at the expense of economically productive people are bad for poor people in the medium-long run. Low-IQ conservatives do not explicitly understand this, but their inherited heuristics encode it.

> There’s a slate star codex post that describes research demonstrating that conservative Americans can predict the responses of progressive Americans to political questions, but the converse is not true.

All this demonstrates is ideological consistency on the part of Liberals.

> It’s not that conservatives are “unwilling to consider” conflicting ideas; in fact, they do a much better job of modeling conflicting ideas than progressives do!

Citation needed.

> Most of the difference is, I think, not based on factual disagreement, but based on principal disagreements on issues like the personhood of fetuses.

A fetus isn't a person in the eyes of the US government. It never has been. This is an orthogonal issue to how to handle abortion in America. Conservatives believe that those who seek and provide abortion should be punished, but we know that this does not result in fewer abortions. Liberals believe that we should take steps to limit the need to seek the abortion in the first place.

Try to assume their views, and then work from there. What would you believe if you start out with the opposite's viewpoint? What is the easiest acceptable modification of their believe system? Move them step by step.

In most cases you're likely just engaging in rhetorical volleys with the other person.

Until someone trusts you to handle their concerns and vulnerabilities with care, you aren't going to get anywhere.

The relationship is paramount in communication, and it's the one thing that social media (and the pandemic) has most effectively eliminated from our daily lives. In this particular case I think we all need to 'act local and think global'...stop sparring on the Internet and try to make inroads to mutual understanding with those that you can see and hear.

I will give you an example: gun control.

Wait what?! Doesn't one side want to take the guns away? Doesn't the other side want teachers with guns in schools?

Well, it turns out the majority of Americans not only agree on the need for better gun controls, they actually agree overwhelmingly on certain specific controls as well.

It's a classic wedge issue though, and FUD is deployed to drive that wedge between both sides which prevents most major cooperation on the matter. Unless there is a crisis, and then both sides will make an easy sacrifice to look like they are doing something. Like bump stocks. Nobody really gives AF about bump stocks, so they banned them.

> Is there really any common ground?

Florida Amendment 2.

That's right, on the same ballot where Florida solidly selected a republican president, republican legislature and republican house delegation, they went >60% on a $15 minimum wage.

Progressive legislation is popular. Progressives are not, because of branding and demagoguery (and no small amount of bald-faced lying).

That's common ground. It may not look like it, but it's there.

Regarding common ground, I believe so. Just as several people were shy to admit voting for [candidate name redacted] those are the same willing to seek common ground.

I worry more about those for whom politics is a team sport, and who ignore whom they marginalize in their quest for ideals.

A lot of people support cannabis legalization, and Biden wants to decriminalize it and leave it to the states to handle.

I've seen a lot of people noting how drug policy liberalization won big across the country, even in red states.

harimau777 asks:>Is there really any common ground?<

First one must ask whether there is "common ground" within the factions of the Democratic party itself.

Once victory has been declared and legislators and executives ensconced in their offices, a feeding frenzy will ensue within the Democratic Party. Each faction will demand that their agenda be pursued first with the most money, time and effort. Unfortunately resources are limited (in particular time is limited to 4 and, in some cases, 2 years). Political infighting amongst these factions will increase to a level so intense that people may long for the return of Donald Trump.

> Is there really any common ground? There can be. On an individual level, where there's mutual trust. At the right time, better not in the heat of this moment.

I remember having a very fruitful discussion with a Trump/Pence supporting friend, somewhere in the middle of Trump's presidential term.

My friend's background as a conservative evangelical is _very_ different from mine. He is a decent and caring man, and I am 100% sure he'd describe me in the same way.

It started with hearing the news together. A few discussion points were Trump's pussy grabbing video, his anti-intellectualism, and the environment. The discussion also meandered through science and religion, religion as a fertile ground for symbolic language and ended up with virtue signaling.

We were able to come to the conclusion that this Trump-evangelicals alliance would damage them for years to come. How it would be better for them to ally with decent people instead, whatever their view on religion.

And here we are...

No. “Common ground” is a false peace flag... a friendly sounding phrase meant to play on liberal preoccupation with “a fair system” If you’re unfamiliar with how conservatives do business, it’s worth investigating. Start here: https://youtu.be/MAbab8aP4_A

When you need to expand your knowledge beyond YouTube videos I’d recommend this book: https://www.amazon.com/Reactionary-Mind-Conservatism-Edmund-...

A conservative plea for “common ground” is very similar to a mind game explained here: https://youtu.be/YOqJ4sc9TAc

Since you mentioned about Georgia runoff elections, I'd like to share the link to the Democrats' donation page: https://secure.actblue.com/donate/gasenatebattleground.

This site used to not be filled with leftist cheerleaderism, as far as I can remember. Shocking that such a nebulous non comment is at the top.

It's my opinion that freedom should be of primary importance in America, not feel good authoritarian inducing woo.

What kind of freedom? Many would like to be free to be freelancers without having to worry so much about health insurance. How do we get there?

I am not so sure that they like the freedom to do that but they see no other way to provide for themselves and their families. Such realities make it rather difficult to prioritize what is better in the long term over the more immediate need to eat.

While that's true, there's still some number of people who would genuinely rather have freelance and 'gig' jobs for one reason or another if they weren't dependent on the healthcare provided by a 'real' job.

The same goes for people who would attempt being entrepreneurs if all they had to worry about losing was money.

I think it's not controversial that employer provided health insurance is a silly mechanism. But animosity prevents significant progress away from the status quo.

It's disingenuous to claim that this is purely because of animosity. It is a calculated decision that some people decided that the status quo is better for them that what could be, and in various ways decide to enforce it.

Otherwise, how could you explain Obama (for all the ills he committed) taking Romney's healthcare plan, and then the entirety of the Republican magically turning against the plan that they themselves generated? It's not animosity, it is certainly calculated.

I am certainly not disingenuous. I don't know why you want to impugn my motives in this discussion.

I think there are a multitude of smaller problems to solve and smaller steps to take that would be utterly uncontroversial to the wider public. But they will not be considered because both sides are pushing for their big thing and locked into combative attitudes.

Same goes for immigration reform for that matter. There's plenty of low grade nonsense to clean up with legislation but the culture of controversy derails trying to find where consensus actually exists and acting on it.

A good positive example would be how criminal justice reform was actually attempted recently.

I don't think your motives are wrong, I have certainly myself refrained from facing reality in exactly such matters because the implications are grave.

Now, the main thing is this:

>But they will not be considered because both sides are pushing for their big thing and locked into combative attitudes.

This is not true, as per what I mentioned before. Obama took a Republican healthcare plan, and it was still gridlocked and framed as extremist.

The truth is that there are real interests in this country that actively don't want problems to be fixed, and that's the reason why there is so much low grade nonsense that gives you the idea that it's because both sides are intransigent, but past experiments show that trying to collaborate with the obstructionist party just leads to the ratchet effect [0].

In effect, there can never be consensus because the purpose of some is simply obstruction and dysfunction, which is made evident by what happened to Romney's healthcare plan. The only solution is to use an electoral breakthrough, pushed by a not-so-moderate message, to create a new fait-accompli and change the political landscape, otherwise you either fall prey to the ratchet effect or to gridlock.

There's no such thing as a free lunch. You can't just wish free healthcare into being. Nothing of value is free.

The rest of the developed world has single payer healthcare with results that are generally comparable to those in the US.

This is not true, and keeps getting brought up as if it were.

The rest of the developed world has _universal_ healthcare. In many countries it is provided through single-payer, in some it is through mandatory private insurance, in others it is a mix.

Where the United States stands alone is not the lack of a universal government program, but that we have many millions of people not covered by any health insurance system at all.

Fair enough, I don't necessarily see a problem with a non-single payer universal health insurance system as long as it is affordable for people.

Here in the UK we pay literally half as much per person for healthcare for similar outcomes, and everyone gets covered with no cost at the point of use, no medical bankruptcy.

No one is talking about a free lunch, they are talking about a better, more efficient way of doing it.

Not sure if UK is having same level of medical break through as US.

Most medical research in the US is, at a minimum, government-subsidized already.

So the budget is going into research instead of something like NHS.

No; the budget is going into insurance companies' budgets and pharma benefits budgets. There's a trillion-dollar industry that exists in the US solely to take money from people needing healthcare. That's where the money is going - look to the thing that doesn't exist elsewhere.

No, but some things are more efficient than other things. We aren't expecting health care to not cost anything.... we already spend more money than anywhere else on health care, and we get less!

We are saying "it is much more efficient and fair to have single payer health care"... it is not a free lunch... it is a cheaper, healthier lunch.

An inefficient system will waste more money. You know that.

It seems to me that the left is the side supporting freedom right now. I don't think someone is free if they don't have the material resources to make their own decisions. That's to say nothing of minority rights and ending the war on drugs.

Redistribution of wealth is not promotion of liberty. Quite the opposite.

Help your fellow man. Do not force others to do it for you at the point of a gun.

The distribution of wealth in the first place is a MUCH greater deprivation of liberty than any redistribution of wealth is.

I didn't ask to be born into a world where all of the resources had already been claimed, and asking me to accept it is as much of a pointed gun.

Distribution of wealth is a metric, it can neither provide nor deprive of liberty.

People protecting their property is an ethical action. People trying to take it from them against their will is not. This can't be reasoned away.

Fortunately, we have agency in this world that does not require violence. We can work to improve our lot.

It can absolutely be reasoned away, pretending it's a absolute fact is dogma, not logic. Look at any of the many shady things Nestle has done with water rights and tell me that's ethical.

Pretending that property rights somehow are more real than human need is an unethical action.

Re: Nestle - Corporatist structures twisting the state to do their bidding isn't property rights.

Property rights and human needs are both real things. I never argued otherwise.

The enforcement of property rights is literally the reason why the state was implemented. All property that one owns is theirs and not someone else's (or no one's) ultimately because of unjustifiable violence.

On this basis, property rights are not much more than a social construct and redistribution is not a problem if society deems that it is favorable to do so.

One can easily follow this all the way back to medieval Europe, at least in the Western world: early post-Roman European kings were just well-organized warlords, and for a very long time any idea of 'legitimate governance' was just a thin papering-over of the realpolitik involved in armies based on personal loyalty.

No, like the founders of the USA, I believe in natural rights. The right of people to be secure in their persons and their property being one of those rights.

If you and I get marooned on an unclaimed island and I construct a spear for hunting crabs, you have no right to my spear. I am within my natural rights to defend my property should you try to take it by force.

There is no natural right to private property. There is only something close to a right to your own labour.

You can make a claim to that spear, of course. It's the product of your labour, you would get to own it, and you made it with freely available resources. One would call this "personal property".

However, imagine this scenario. You and I get marooned on an unclaimed island. I claim the island before you get the opportunity. Because of my claim on this land, which now becomes my private property, I force you to give me that spear.

This is exactly what happened in all of the globe. People laid claim to land, resources and capital that they did not build, and this is precisely the base of all private property beforethen. If I were to get any object I own, I could trace my ownership of that object to someone that, at some point, violently decided that some land is theirs, and based on the idea that the land is theirs seized the product of the labour of various people who had no choice but to work it or die.

So, unless you agree that seizing land that was not yours violently is a reasonable way of generating ownership, you come to the conclusion that the ownership of essentially everything in our society is illegitimate, and can only be motivated for utilitarian reasons.

If you do, then you agree that I have a right to your spear :)

And if the island is resource poor and you quickly stockpile all of the good sticks and rocks for spear construction?

Is claiming property over things ethical? What inherent human right gives ownership of a resource to someone?

Traditionally it's been violence, but at some point(s) we decided that wasn't the best course of action.

The same can't be said of the government, of course.

Whatever the way in which something is obtained, it's possession does not seem to me to be an inherent right.

My question was aimed at the OP stating as fact that

>People protecting their property is an ethical action.

Which does not seem true to me.

If you constructed that spear with the only stick on the island, would you still hold that it is ethical for you to keep it for yourself?

Can you claim ownership of part (or the whole) of the island?

I don't see any practical difference between not being free to live life on your terms because of a government restriction or because of poverty.

The whole purpose of society is that people work together for the common good. When resources are not distributed such that that happens then I don't see anything wrong with redistributing them.

Government restriction is aggressive force or the threat thereof. It's unethical. That's the difference.

I have no problem with people redistributing wealth. Just don't use aggressive force or the threat of it to do so.

The fact that one has the wealth for it to redistributed to begin with is because of aggressive force or the threat thereof.

You mean to say all of us are thieves, only reason we don't steal is due to threat of violence.

Absolutely not. I am saying that property, as it is right now, is not ethical, as all property in its current state was originally, or derives from something that was originally, stolen.

As a result, accepting the current order of property can only be justified by utilitarianism, which also dictates that there is no issue with redistribution if it is helpful.

In essence, private property is theft, but there is no feasible alternative (for now), so let's still have private property in a limited sense.

> Just don't use aggressive force or the threat of it to do so.

Is there any other way?

I don't know of any. Is it truly moral to reject the only method for equality?

It's not like billionaires are going to have someone pointing a gun in their face. They can afford to pay taxes.

50 people literally hold as much wealth as 165 million[1].

Just because poverty isn't aggressive does not mean it is morally superior to taxation.

[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-10-08/top-50-ri...

Of course there are other ways. I don't understand this myopic perspective.

Society has a problem: poor people exist. There are a UNIVERSE of possible solutions. Charitable organizations, churches, help from family - the list goes on and on and on.

Yet here you are, saying "I can't think of anything we can possibly do except point guns at not-poor people, take their money, and give it to poor people."

The crazy thing is that I believe you when you say it; I think you're saying it in good faith! I just can't fathom how you reached that conclusion. It's utterly nonsensical to me on its face.

> Charitable organizations, churches, help from family

Those "solutions" are as old as the problem.

They didn't work.

> I can't think of anything we can possibly do except point guns at not-poor people, take their money, and give it to poor people.

The gun pointing happens as a last resort, not first.

What you are telling me is that we should just wait around for the greediest people in the world to charitably give enough back.

That's just not going to happen. We all know it.

So what you are telling me is that we should just continue the status quo, because doing something about it is technically immoral.

Meanwhile, the wealthiest 50 Americans collect as much wealth as the poorest 165 million.

Tens of millions of Americans are in poverty[1]. Is that not immoral?

Approximately 14.3 million households had difficulty providing enough food for all their members due to a lack of resources[1]. Is that not immoral?

You are so obsessed with the threat to inconvenience people who have more wealth than you will ever see that you are willing to keep millions in poverty. Get off your high horse. Children are starving.

[1] https://www.povertyusa.org/facts

> Do not force others to do it for you at the point of a gun.

Quite ironic considering the armed Trump supporters threatening the democracy of the country right now.

> Help your fellow man. Do not force others to do it for you at the point of a gun.

An alternative is that we could stop enforcing property rights at the point of a gun. What is more important; property or people? A selfish person in a society that provides for all may feel slighted but they will live comfortably. A selfish person in a society with strict protection of property can cause another person to die without lifting a finger. Frankly, if it's ethical to allow some individuals to die from neglect (thus losing everything of value) then it's at least as ethical to allow redistribution of some personal property (losing less than everything).

From my perspective, literally every word of your argument but one supports a progressive "left" policy.

Wealth has been redistributed already. $50 trillion has gone from the poorest 90% to the wealthiest 1%[1].

The one word is "gun". The wealthy don't need firearms to compel the rest of us to work for them. In fact, we beg them for jobs every day.

I want to help my fellow man, but I simply don't have the resources. They have all gone to the hands of 50 billionaires[2].

There is a way we can get them back. It doesn't require the point of a gun. It only requires better tax policy.

[1] https://time.com/5888024/50-trillion-income-inequality-ameri... [2] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-10-08/top-50-ri...

The comment you are replying to says nothing about redistributing wealth...only that people should have the material resources they need. To your point, however, when people are not being payed appropriately for their productivity and executives are making excessive amounts of money than what one could ever need in a lifetime that is the truly fraudulent redistribution of wealth.

>I don't think someone is free if they don't have the material resources to make their own decisions.

So who is the one who is to be forced to provide them with said material resources ? They don't just magically appear. The vast majority of people with material resources have worked very hard to aquire them, very often by working very hard at producing material resources.

>That's to say nothing of minority rights

What rights are being denied to minorities ?

As someone who always saw myself on the left, being a proponent of universal healthcare and focused on class issues, I can no longer recognize myself on the left with them going all in on identity politics, dividing people not by economic class, but by immutable characteristics like race and gender.

Your first point is a sentiment that I hear very frequently. I think the reaction that your hard-earned material wealth is rightfully yours is completely fair. However, it's worth pointing out that other people may also work hard and still live in poverty. Poverty can be systemic, in that things you're born into can limit your opportunity. Further, people are sometimes faced with unexpected situations such as health problems or pandemics that can make them unable to work. Many people have proposed plans that pay to distribute more wealth to these people by taxing corporate profits and the super wealthy. Some people will make a personal sacrifice to do this, but these people may actually have a better life experience if the majority of those around them are suffering less.

> What rights are being denied to minorities ? Until recently, the right to get married or adopt children, among other things. I see your point though: people of all skin colors are theoretically equal in the law. If by "dividing people" by "race and gender" you mean movements for criminal justice reform or to end police brutality toward minorities, I disagree that these movements should be divisive. They become divisive when non-minorities take offense at them, which can happen due to poor messaging from particular individuals. It can happen due to a lack of clarity about the actual goals of the movement. Some more extreme leftists might simply have views that I would also disagree with. But ultimately, "the left" doesn't hate non-minorities. When a movement is focused on minorities, it is to reaffirm that they suffer discrimination which they should not under the law. These movements focus on minorities not to say that others don't struggle too, but to bring attention to societal issues that continue to affect some types of people just because of their "immutable characteristics".

> So who is the one who is to be forced to provide them with said material resources?

Billionaires.

They took $50 trillion from the rest of us[1]. They are beyond capable of affording it.

> What rights are being denied to minorities?

Safety. Marriage. Financial stability. The list goes on.

> dividing people not by economic class, but by immutable characteristics like race and gender.

It isn't the left that did that. Race and gender were divided into economic classes by racists and sexists. Acting like that didn't happen only serves to perpetuate that oppression.

[1] https://time.com/5888024/50-trillion-income-inequality-ameri...

Or you know protesting to stop counting votes!? Talk about freedom. I'm happy we won but my god I don't how we can move forward from here

The left is abandoning enlightenment principles of individualism in favor of skin color. They define people based on external features rather than their actions or thoughts. That doesn't smell like freedom to me.

Ala, I am racist because I am a white person who is not racist.

I don’t know you do I’m not going to pretend to understand your beliefs based on a couple of comments in this thread.

Instead I wanted to try and reframe this in a way that is a lot more inline with how many people on the left talk about this issue which is in my mind fundamentally different from how I read your comments. I hope it offers a less inflammatory way to consider what often gets thrown under the umbrella of “identity politics”.

When trying to understand the root causes of problems and outcomes in society it’s often helpful to cut the data in certain ways to identify where patterns might be emerging or have existed for a long time.

This is basically the attempt to try and apply the scientific method to issues that simply can not be controlled in a lab environment.

If you were to take an issue like poverty or incarceration rates for example and then attempted to break those issues down through the context of education for example you might start to notice some interesting correlations.

However, there is nothing about this approach that does or should stop researchers from also looking at the data in the context of immutable traits either.

A big part of the conversation that is happening around these topics is that certain groups keep appearing again and again in ways that very few other groups do. The follow up question to that is obviously why?

This commonly gets reduced to comments such as the one you made like “I am racist because I am a white person who is not racist.” which is not at all what is being said.

I too am in the straight white male group and I’m not unaware of how often it can feel like that label is thrown around to the point where it can feel like a dirty word but I would beg you to put aside that initial knee jerk reaction and maybe consider that we as a society (not necessarily you personally) do in fact have some pretty serious issues that are going to overlap with immutable traits like gender, sexuality and race.

Critical race theory and its sister anti-racism reject liberalism by assigning blame, power, guilt, victimhood, privilege, etc., to individuals based on their race.

DiAngelo’s thesis [White Fragility]: All white Americans are racist. All white Americans are a product of white supremacy and are actively or unwittingly complicit in maintaining this power structure. If you say you are not racist, that is only proof that you are racist. If you believe you are not racist, same thing. Black people exist in America only to be oppressed by whites. In DiAngelo’s worldview, any progress black Americans have made is because white Americans have allowed such growth as pacifiers.

https://nypost.com/2020/08/06/peddling-the-idea-that-all-whi...

While it’s certainly true that America is not the most free country in the world, it’s still inside the top 50. What freedoms are you trying to exercise but are being stifled?

Don't think you've been around long enough to really say that for sure.

> Uniting the country is definitely a commendable goal

This is hard and may backfire in a deeply divided country. To me, instead of trying to achieve a common ground (which, in the current situation often means forcing 49% to the position of the 51%; with the chance of a swap in 2-4 years) we should learn to live, share space and collaborate with folks who hold different political views.

We can disagree on politics, but it should not prevent us from working as a team on software or sharing a beer after work. We are not at war with the other half of the country. We should respect their opinions and avoid unnecessary confrontations. My 2c.

I was agreeing with you until your next to last sentence. Sometimes you cannot respect someone else's opinions.

I believe the fundamental dichotomy is that, for some of us, our opinions are not who we are. We can change our opinions and remain the same people.

For others, their opinions ARE who they are. They cannot separate out their beliefs from themselves, so when you question their opinions, they feel you are attacking them personally.

> They cannot separate out their beliefs from themselves, so when you question their opinions, they feel you are attacking them personally.

And in that case you cannot respect those opinions?

Not if their opinions are of the flavor of: female genital mutilation is acceptable; there was massive election fraud in the US Nov. 3 election; the earth is flat; etc.

At some point you need to draw a line.

I misunderstood. I though the problem was related with people feeling attacked when their opinions are questioned. That can also happen with acceptable opinions.

Not to dispute your core point, but it's odd how circumcision rarely gets brought up in the context of female genital mutilation.

There are just some issues, though, where it's extremely difficult to find middle ground.

Look at gay marriage. There are large percentages of people in the US who would like to return to a time when gay marriage was illegal. If you were married to a same sex spouse, do you think you'd be able to say "oh, that's OK, I respect your difference of opinion." No, you'd do everything in your power to protect your family from being attacked.

I mean, just imagine how straight people would react if the government tried to invalidate their marriages.

If you were married to a same sex spouse, you may feel personally atacked if your opinion that same-sex marriage should be legal is questioned.

I thought the parent comment suggested that the opinions of those who cannot separate out their beliefs from themselves, so when you question their opinions, they feel you are attacking them personally, are less respectable.

> We can disagree on politics

The problem here is that treating politics as 'just politics' is the realm of people privileged enough that they have never directly suffered because of those politics.

Transgender rights, for example, are never 'just politics' for me: they are a basic moral issue that deeply affects the life of one of my close friends.

Anyone read a practical 20 year plan to decrease divisiveness in the US (say, to 1990s levels)?

Or: Ignoring funding, what would you do?

An example year 1 goal: "Get X million people to watch 10 hours/year of strangers who they would normally not encounter or agree with, and to see them as real people."

To do that, produce and televise + stream a long-form TV show, like a version of Braver Angels' Red/Blue Workshops[1] that's actually fun to watch. Imagine a well-produced show with deep participant profiles - a cross between a reality TV show and a HBO/Netflix long-form movie.

It would humanize the participants first, then after viewers care about them, their lives, and their families, the actors gradually explain their backgrounds and opinions - some of which a viewer will disagree with. Viewers would "meet" people they may not interact with regularly. (Sarah Silverman's "I Love You, America"[2] is the closest I've seen to this, and it's not all that close.)

This would need to be a multi-decade plan, probably with philanthropic and public funding.

[1]: https://braverangels.org/what-we-do/red-blue-workshops/ [2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xmQpf-B94mc

I think any plan that neglects ratcheting down high-stakes issues to more local levels is fighting against strong headwinds.

In other words, we can avoid winner-take-all dysfunction by allowing more diversity in governance. If we make every issue national, it makes it too important who runs the national government.

Within reason, we should find ways to let California be California and Alabama be Alabama. Alabama and California shouldn't have to struggle against one another as much as they do.

The only way that I could see that working is if we allowed states to impose tariffs embargoes and on each other. There would need to be some way for states to protect themselves from other states' negative externalities or a race to the bottom.

When there is an externality, of course the federal government can get involved. But does the majority of federal regulation really happen in domains where there would be inevitable externalities without it?

I don't think that the majority of federal regulation necessarily does, but I think that the majority of Americas current problems do.

For example climate change, immigration, poverty, healthcare, and gun control.

The fundamental flaw is that a lot of things can only be accomplished at the Federal level. 50 plans for global climate change not only doesn't make sense, it would result in direct violation of the interstate clause.

Climate change is just one thing, though. National defense and military activity may be another.

But do you really think it is not the case that most forms of regulation and resource distribution cannot be administered effectively, with some creativity, at the state level? I don't see any reason that 70% of issues can't become local or state issues. (Ignoring the lack of a political will to make that happen, I mean.)

What do you think is being administered at the Federal Level that isn't 1) really just a way to distribute money to the states and 2) should be administered strictly by the states themselves that won't violate the interstate clause?

Do you think you could name some of these topics you're thinking of? 70% seems like a substantial overestimate. As a back-of-the-envelope estimate, using budget as a proxy for "regulation and resource distribution", ~70% of government spending went to Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and Defense. You've called out national defense as something that should remain at the Federal level. Social Security spending consists literally of distributing money to individuals. Medicare and Medicaid in a roundabout way are essentially the same, and America's poor and elderly are certainly not uniformly distributed among the states. This leaves only a maximum of 30% of resource allocation that could even potentially be pushed back to the states.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_federal_budget#/...

Abortion. Education. Controlled substances. Publicly funded media. Certain categories of environmental policy (polluted soil crosses state lines less than polluted air). Various subsidies for special interests. Labor issues like parental leave requirements. Housing issues.

Yes. Some of those are somewhat state issues now, but I'm talking about divisiveness in culture and discussion. People in political discussions should be OK with saying, "That's an important issue, but best solved at the state or local level."

Social safety nets is an interesting counterexample, but it seems like a hybrid approach should be doable in many cases, especially when it comes to funding externalities like retirees moving disproportionately to certain states.

Abortion is very tricky to push back to the states, because some states want to criminally prosecute the doctors and sometimes even the patients involved. Accepting a patient from a different state could lead to a doctor having committed a crime in that state and having in future to avoid traveling to that state or to any state that would extradite the doctor to that state. This would be a mess.

Education is already largely controlled below even the state level, by local school boards. The Federal government hands out a lot of money for the purpose, largely to even out the quality of education between wealthy and poor areas of the country, but it’s pretty hands-off.

Controlled substances is another place where criminal law differing state to state creates a legal mess. The more the law differs, the greater the mess. Delivery of drugs from states where they are legal to states where they are not has not yet blown up into a huge issue because the Federal government regulated interstate commerce and still considers the substances illegal. If the Federal government takes a hands-off approach and Amazon starts selling cocaine it’ll get messy fast. This sort of mess already exists due to patchwork laws about firearms, but in that case the problem is substantially mitigated by (a) the Federal department of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, and a constitutional right to at least have firearms in every state, even if the nuances differ.

Publicly funded media seems like a niche topic? Voice of America is a State Department effort aimed at influencing foreign policy. NPR gets most of its funding from donations. I can’t think of any other examples.

I could see certain classes of environmental issues being pushed back to the states, but it would be tricky and probably a mess. Polluted soil is likely to become an issue for other states if it’s in the drainage basin of the Mississippi, less so if it’s out on a salt flat somewhere in the desert west.

Labor issues, housing issues, and subsidies are already things that states have a lot of involvement in or control over. Housing activities by the Federal government mostly consist of welfare spending like subsidizing housing for the poor and underwriting mortgages for homebuyers. Another issue where the Federal government gets involved mostly for the purpose of shuffling money around between rich states and poor states.

You keep hand waving about messes. The current political climate seems to be heading toward more than just a mess.

If there were consensus about some issues not being national issues, your points about currently local issues would be stronger. But the fact is that it's still a minority, if not niche, view that all these issues should stay local indefinitely. I suspect the gridlock is protecting federalism more than principle or even court rulings are.

But we're not even trying. Why is the minimum age for consumption of tobacco and alcohol a national issue? Why does the national government need to get involved in housing policy at any level of detail?

The thing is, any reasonable, evidence based discussion is going to end up concluding that the 90% of GOP talking points are lies, so right leaning people would claim the show is left biased.

1. Separate opinion journalism from reporting journalism.

Opinion journalism can be w/e. Reporting journalism has to be fact checked. Masquerading as reporting journalism should be a big bad. You gotta disclose opinion journalism up front, like you gotta put a Surgeon General's warning on cigarettes.

2. Mandate non-partisan districting boards and do away with "safe" districts.

This would lose majority-minority districts, which are responsible for a big proportion of our Reps of color. But safe districts skyrocket partisanship; politicians in safe districts can wander super far from the mainstream--think Steve King for example. And actually they oftentimes have to become radical in order to survive primaries. There's only so much you can do here with the current system but, a little would help a lot.

3. Empower state and local governments by repealing balanced budget amendments and term limits.

State governments have really hamstrung themselves with these policies, and as a result the federal government has to do a lot. This creates a perception--right or wrong--that a far away government is telling you how to live your life. If the federal government has secured rights for all and managed federal concerns, it should be reasonable for say, Oregon to have one set of gun regulations and Illinois to have another.

4. Make voting compulsory, make Election Day a holiday, expand early voting, establish same day registration everywhere.

The majority of Senators (and in midterms, the majority of Reps) are elected by a minority of people who are much more partisan than the mean. This pushes politicians out of the mainstream.

5. Federally finance elections, shorten the length, and amend the Constitution to obviate Citizens United.

Campaigns and their ads are super polarizing. Special interests run messaging campaigns on wedge issues (abortion, immigration, gun rights) in order to pass bills like SOPA or subsidies for fossil fuel energy companies in the night. Campaign finance reform disarms all this.

6. Limit the terms of Supreme Court Justices to 18 years and enact jurisdiction stripping.

The stakes of Supreme Court nominations are so high that it drives us all crazy. We should limit their terms so that 2-term presidents get to nominate 2 Justices, and we should limit the power of the Supreme Court on the basis that it's a deeply undemocratic and unaccountable institution. Pro-lifers feel this every day, as do progressives. We all agree it's bad; let's change it.

7. Enact affirmative action for mortgage companies, fund housing assistance, and reform public schools.

The US has a huge de facto segregation issue due to generations of discriminatory practices by mortgage companies, and the sky high cost of housing in neighborhoods with good schools. This creates fertile ground for bubbles and othering, not just in adults but also in children.

8. Re-establish affirmative action for colleges, and make it free.

The partisanship gap in the US now largely traces the education and income gap.

9. Establish clear boundaries on religious freedom.

Religious freedom is a fundamental part of the fabric of the United States, but so are personal liberty and individual rights. We need to give people the ability to live out their beliefs, but also establish a pluralistic society free of discrimination towards _and from_ the religious. Fighting a culture via religious freedom debases us all.

> 2. Mandate non-partisan districting boards and do away with "safe" districts.

This is critical, and if it can be done (and then move US presidential electors to be 1 per district) and you make things very, very different and the American people can decide what they want from there.

Compulsory national service to prevent people from living their entire lives within the bubbles into which they were born. Compulsory service erases geographic distance along with racial and class divides.

I don’t think this can be done without altering social media algorithms to revert back from the “engagement-maximizing” firehose of vituperative extremist polarizing political sludge they pump into everyone’s feed these days.

This was happening long before social media became a thing. As i keep saying, the best thing to do would be to re-instate the Fairness Doctrine.

The election of the Senate is as representative of the country as election of the president. The idea they have to vote in accordance with your opinion on issues in order to 'restore the moral fabric of the country', whatever that means, is condescending and self-righteous.

I don't think that my post promotes an idea senators have to vote in accordance with my opinion on issues. The point I was trying to make is that there is a very real threat of gridlock in the Congress (especially, considering the voting record of the current majority in the Senate), which might be extremely unproductive and even damaging to the lives of the American people.

It drives me nuts that so much order of business is controlled by a majority leader, no matter the party. These rules stifle any legislation to a predetermined show for the most part where votes and "debate" is just scripted for pundits and news.

If legislation could hit the floor for actual debate and votes without being filtered through partisan leadership I think we could see a lot more progress on things that are popular and bipartisan. Or at least legislatures would have to put their names to a vote on an issue. Minimum wage hikes, marijuana legalization, criminal justice reform, redistricting and campaign finance reform have all faced great support when put to ballot initiatives around the country. But good luck ever seeing that in Congress.

Gridlock is a feature, not a bug. Only the most important issues to American people pass through to law, whether or not you agree on those issues, which you clearly lay out in your OP in the name of "repairing moral fabric" -- empty rhetoric.

Regardless of whether you call gridlock a feature or something else, I think that it should be used to the benefit of the people. Unfortunately, too many times it is used not to the benefit of the relevant constituents, but for playing political games, catering to interests of some financial donors and sometimes even due to an outright lack of responsibility. As for "repairing moral fabric", this has nothing to do with the gridlock issue. I don't know why you even mentioned that in this context.

Believe it or not, politicians not messing up the system more than it is already messed up is an actual benefit to the people. To parent's point, it is a feature that benefits everyone. Doubly so at times where country is almost evenly split over what to do.

Edit. Also, they DO cater to their real constituencies. If you do not believe it, check the votes immediately after 2016 elections. What was the priority? Lower taxes for the already well to do.

What some classify as "messing up the system", others might classify as "progress" or "benefit to the people". So, it's a moot point.

"Their real constituencies" (emphasis mine) - I assume that it's a sarcasm. Otherwise, I don't see how wealthy people comprise a majority of relevant party representatives' aggregate constituency. The trickle-down economics is a myth.

Eh, I am worried that I am not expressing myself accurately. "Their real constituencies" was definitely not sarcasm. I am not sure how that could possibly be misinterpreted as such.

The example I gave, post 2016 election tax reform benefited said real constituencies. If you do not believe me, look back what threats were lobbed and by whom at republicans if they do not deliver to said constituency. It is not trickle down, but he with the gold makes the rules. And they -- the real constituency -- happen to pay the bills.

In that context, I am not sure I understand the point about "wealthy people [don't] comprise a majority of relevant party representatives' aggregate constituency". They don't, but we don't live in a democracy. In the best of times, assuming you subscribe to taking things as they are written, we are republic ( you know, protection from the tyranny of the majority ). At worst, we already past oligarchy.

So... what does trickle down have to do with anything?

> In that context, I am not sure I understand the point about "wealthy people [don't] comprise a majority of relevant party representatives' aggregate constituency".

It is quite simple. "Around two-thirds of registered voters in the U.S. (65%) do not have a college degree", with relevant numbers for Democrats plus Democrat-leaning voters and Republicans plus Republican-leaning voters being 59% and 70%, correspondingly [1]. For simplicity, let's use education, which, as we know, has a direct correlation with net worth, as a proxy for wealth. Thus, as I've argued earlier, the aggregate constituency of congressional representatives largely consists of non-wealthy people. Therefore, by reducing taxes on businesses (especially big businesses, which are mostly owned by wealthy, including the "top 1%") and high-income people, the post-2016 tax reform disproportionately benefited a very small segment of said constituency ("socialism for the rich and capitalism for the poor" [2]).

> So... what does trickle down have to do with anything?

Trickle-down economics is directly related to taxes, as it is based on the notion that "taxes on businesses and the wealthy in society should be reduced as a means to stimulate business investment in the short term and benefit society at large in the long term" [3]. And your example was referring to post-2016 tax reform. Hence the connection that I have mentioned.

[1] https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2020/10/26/what-the-20...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socialism_for_the_rich_and_cap...

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trickle-down_economics

This is a crippling problem for the United States. In the absence of effective governance by Congress, control of the country slips ever increasingly into the hands of an Imperial President and an unelected Supreme Court. While Congress debates "only the most important issues" Presidents have taken to ruling by decree through executive orders and policy-setting Federal agencies, pushing the line as far as the Supreme Court will tolerate , politicizing the court and damaging national trust in impartial justice in the process. Recall that the Supreme Court granted to itself its most important powers in Marbury v Madison. It's a castle built on sand, and the only things that binds a President to respect its decisions are tradition and the belief of the American people in the idea of the court as a non-partisan institution that should be respected.

And then every 4-8 years the President changes parties, scraps all major ongoing efforts of their predecessor, repeals their decrees, replaces all of the experts and advisors they have brought into the government, and reverses their foreign and domestic policies.

This disfunction has been highlighted within the Chinese Communist Party as the main reason why China will eventually (soon) eclipse the United States in world significance. A country that is governed in such a schizophrenic manner cannot compete long-term with a country capable of planning on time horizons or more than 8 years (and sometimes only two!).

I am not alone in arguing that the Senate is not representative of the country, just as the electoral college is not. And it will increasingly become less and less representative as more and more people move to a few cities in a few states.

Please don't assume that 'one side' has the unilateral moral authority to 'make things better and less divided'.

This implication directly contradicts the part about 'unity'.

'One side' having the run of the system will absolutely lead to greater divisions.

Trump is gone, I think most reasonable people will take solace in that. Now that he is gone, having regular checks and balances is a 'good thing'. Having the 'other side' with a narrow, 1 vote majority in the Senate is probably a really reasonable check on power, as Senators often break ranks with the party so there's plenty of room for a 'really good bit of legislation' to get through if the Dems want to push for it.

Don't we first need to undo the damage that Trump has done? I can see getting to a point where neither side acts unilaterally, but only after things have been balanced to actually be in the center between the sides.

Specifically, not some feelings you have, what damage?

I don't make any assumptions about any unilateral moral authority on issues. That is why I call for a constructive dialog at all levels and across all groups of our society.

As for your argument on checks and balances - yes, generally, it is definitely a very good thing. However, when one side uses their position of chamber majority not to collaborate and compromise, but to throw a wrench into "wheels of democracy" and gridlock the Congress (especially, considering the voting record of the current majority in the Senate and essentially zero breaking ranks history), which might be extremely unproductive and even damaging to the lives of the American people, that IMO does not represent the "checks and balances" that you're talking about.

I don't see one side looking to 'collaborate' other than if they had to and I object to the notion that only 'one side' tries to stonewall deals.

Senate votes [1] are almost never perfectly partisan (52-48 in current form). They are all over the place. Romney, Fluke others have bounced on some big votes for Republicans, and frankly, we don't always see the 'break ranks votes' because they are usually foregone: Senate Whip won't take it to the floor if he knows there are a handful of stragglers so those 'broken ranks' are not as visible.

[1] https://www.senate.gov/legislative/LIS/roll_call_lists/vote_...

There is some truth to what you're saying. However, regarding your non-partisan voting argument, I can say - and that's what I meant in my previous comments - that non-partisan voting was pronounced during previous congressional terms. Unfortunately, the current Congress, with some notable exceptions (like the ones you mentioned as well as the CARES Act), almost always votes across party lines~. Let's see what happens in this regard after January 20th.

~) Also consider @Steltek's point (comment below): "it's hard for Senators to break ranks if bills are never brought to a vote".

How often do senators break ranks? The Hastert rule and Senate majority leader rules have effectively neutered both chambers to rubber stamps for deals and bills negotiated out of public eye.

The playing field need to be leveled here so that party leadership doesn't have a stranglehold on what comes to a vote via backroom deals. Legislators need to have skin in the game, with real debate and actual votes to show where they stand.

It's hard for Senators to break ranks if bills are never brought to a vote.

> there's plenty of room for a 'really good bit of legislation' to get through if the Dems want to push for it.

There's apparently plenty of room on Mitch McConnell's desk. There are already hundreds of bills that passed the House sitting there.

If the Democrats win both Georgia elections (or one GA, and NC), and it ends 50:50, with the VP having the tiebreaker vote, do the Democrats become speaker?

What is “moral fabric”?

The following definition that was shared by someone on Quora is quite good, though a bit academic. Moral fabric is "a metaphor for the flexible but still assured structure of virtue that forms the basis of integrity and holds society together".

To put it simpler, I would define moral fabric as a set of foundational moral principles (common moral ground) that most people in a particular society agree on and recognize as guidelines throughout their daily lives. These principles form a cohesive environment of values, which is referred to a moral fabric.

Here's a blog post with a potentially better definition: https://nomoralfabric.wordpress.com/2012/10/29/the-loss-of-m....

It will help to have an Executive administration that doesn't have its heel on the wedge for the next four years gleefully driving it deeper for adulation and ratings.

Generally I agree with your statement here. But realize you said “we need to find common ground” then went on to say the dems need total control to progress their agenda. These conflict. This attitude is a reason for the division, and are just plain one sided. If you wanted common grounds you’d want the two parties to work together, not one have total control of the entire gov.

Well, let me literally reproduce my other comment in this thread, which was a reply to another person. It is not that easy to find, so, for your convenience, I'm reposting it below. While it talks about "checks and balances" point, I think that exactly the same argument can be made about "common ground". I hope that it makes sense to you.

But again, this is only stopping progress from your point of view. From the other, it’s stopping damage. You are implying that your side is right and must have 100% to implement it. Anything short of that is damaging. It’s still one sided.

Not exactly. That is why I have mentioned above words "collaborate" and "compromise".

And then go on to say you need total control. You can’t collaborate and compromise if the one party controls the entire gov. Nobody will believe the lie that democrats will work with republicans.

The control is needed at this particular time, because the history clearly shows that the current Republican majority and their leader are not only unwilling to collaborate with Democrats, but are simply stonewalling the process (see comment above by @thomastjeffery). When we will have a non-obstructionist Republican fraction in the Senate, the total control will not be needed.

I don't see how this can be made any more obvious. What you call stonewalling one side calls preventing damage. It's from your point of view that it's progress. The stonewalling actually serves a purpose. If both sides can't agree, nothing happens. The gov is essentially frozen. You want control to force through policies that the other side doesn't want. You claim the right doesn't want to work together, but this is opinion. There's clearly evidence of them working together. Your complaint is you don't have full control, therefore bad. "But we should work together."

Just admit it, the dems don't want to work together or compromise at all. Nanci Pelosi made this very clear recently.

> the dems don't want to work together or compromise at all

This is such a ridiculous statement that I even won't bother replying to it beyond this comment.

> If both sides can't agree, nothing happens. The gov is essentially frozen.

Well, if you see a stalemate as a positive thing and think that there is no way out, then why don't we just close Senate for the time being, furlough senators and save quite a bit of taxpayers' money?

You didn’t read any of my reply. The stalemate serves a purpose. If you would invert the parties right now you’d easily understand.

> From the other, it’s stopping damage.

By taking total control. That's not an exaggeration.

You accuse the Democrats of doing this?

Tell it to Mitch McConnell. Hundreds of bills that passed the House will sit on his desk and never get voted on.

It was not inevitable that Biden would win. The electoral college is a major hurdle to overcome — he still came pretty close to losing a few key states like Wisconsin and Pennsylvania which would have made it much much less likely for him to win. It took hard work, lots of money, and historically high turnout to get here. Incumbents rarely lose. This was pushing a boulder uphill. But it happened. Biden 2020.

I can get along with people from a different political camp, no problem. My gf is liberal, I'm conservative. We have lively debates about it, but we respect each other and never let politics get in the way of the relationship. It's as simple as that.

But over the last few years friends called me a nazi and a racist, coworkers ostracized me for having unfashionable political views, many people cut contact entirely under the premise that I "support" white supremacy. This isn't some shit you easily forgive, and it isn't something you ever forget.

This wasn't just about politics, or teams, or policy preferences, or red vs blue or whatever. This is people denying your humanity on no grounds whatsoever, and when you point it out they say "well, minorities have always felt this way, so shut up and take it." That's fair enough, but it isn't about groups of people oppressing other groups of people. It's about Bill and John and Sally-- people who used to be friends and colleagues-- treating me like I'm a monster for no reason whatsoever other than a mass psychosis. That's not something you can ever come back from.

> This is people denying your humanity on no grounds whatsoever, and when you point it out they say "well, minorities have always felt this way, so shut up and take it."

Here's where they are coming from: Donald Trump was denying people's humanity on the grounds that they came from south of the border. He was literally separating children from their parents to scare others away.

When I have explained that to Trump supporters, they immediately gaslight me; telling me it wasn't that bad, or Trump's fault.

> It's about Bill and John and Sally-- people who used to be friends and colleagues-- treating me like I'm a monster for no reason whatsoever other than a mass psychosis.

They don't mean to. Really, they don't. The trouble is, they just can't find a reason.

The only reason I can think of is that Trump supporters really don't know what's happening. That they don't believe it. It looks a lot like mass psychosis.

It looks even more like a cult. I would know: I grew up in one. If I can come back from that, you can come back from this. The first step is empathy.

Are you certain that you aren't in the "group of people oppressing other groups of people"?

I know it can be hard to confront that question. I did it about a year ago. When I did, I found out the answer was "no".

I dug a little deeper, and realized it wasn't a soft "no", either. I was an instrumental part of an institution that tears families apart and drives children to suicidal ideation. I always knew there were issues, but I had plenty of excuses for those issues and the institution's part in them.

If you really aren't a Nazi or a racist, then will you reconsider your support for the GOP? Bill, John, and Sally didn't just pull that out of their asses. What they said to you was disrespectful and dehumanizing, but it didn't come from nothing.

> Here's where they are coming from: Donald Trump was denying people's humanity on the grounds that they came from south of the border. He was literally separating children from their parents to scare others away.

To put it precisely, the child separation policy is in clear violation of the fourth Geneva Convention, the Geneva Convention relative to the Protection of Civilian Persons in Time of War, which also governs the rights of aliens in times of peace. Specifically, Article 38 §5:

children under fifteen years, pregnant women and mothers of children under seven years shall benefit by any preferential treatment to the same extent as the nationals of the State concerned.

The US has been no stranger to Geneva Convention violations but this is a particularly egregious example within our own borders thats also arguably a violation of the Geneva Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide [2].

Coming from a country that lost tens of millions of its people to the war machine that inspired the Geneva Convention, I feel physically sick that people support someone who would intentionally enact such policies. The last four years of gaslighting has made it incredibly difficult to interpret that support as anything but a complete dereliction of empathy.

[1] https://ihl-databases.icrc.org/ihl/385ec082b509e76c412567390...

[2] https://ihl-databases.icrc.org/applic/ihl/ihl.nsf/Treaty.xsp... - Article 2 is the relevant one

Well you see, normal people don't go into these sort of histrionics over -- and let me check my notes here -- detaining criminals.

What is really keeping me up at night is the existential problem the US faces for the next 50 years: the ever increasingly large divide that is the polarizing of the electorate. We have to come together as Americans or someone will divide and conquer us.

The past four years and this election has exposed some deep problems within American Society.

If about 47% of your country was happy to kill democracy and reward immoral behaviour just to retain power, often justified by religious beliefs...

And Trump is not gone yet... Who knows what the Republicans will do with the stacked Supreme Court...

> If about 47% of your country was happy to kill democracy

If you think half the country wants to rewrite the Constitution and remove democracy...I'm not really sure what to say.

It's more of the half of the 47% who are in the cult of personality. I don't think they were against democracy so much as for Trump (but it does go to show how little some folks care about democracy when they are losing).

I guess almost nobody wants to 'remove democracy' even in the least democratic places.

A more plausible explanation here would be indifference. Maybe they don't want to remove democracy, but not exactly trying to uphold it over everything else either.

Maybe seeing your cult of personality hero in office, or your religion or your flavour of boogieman (=not losing the country to commies kind of thinking) has ultimately higher priority than keeping the democracy alive.

I'm not saying that's what is happening, I'm just saying I can see how masses can smother democracy without specifically having the intention to kill it.

disclaimer: non-US, my opinion on anything US would be at best inaccurate.

I think you need to take a step back and really try understand those who disagree with you - your views or maybe just the way you express it is toxic and dividing. If you can't think of one reason why someone might not want to vote your candidate I feel sorry for you.

There are many valid reasons to vote for all candidates and the weighting of the issues is personal and perhaps not everyone agrees with the weighting that you do.

> If about 47% of your country was happy to kill democracy and reward immoral behaviour just to retain power

And these 47% would say exactly the same thing about the others. That’s the divide GP was pointing out and ironically your response is perpetuating it. Stop dehumanizing people.

Except there really was one candidate who would have been happy to kill democracy.

I can't speak for the beliefs or rationale of the people who voted for him but its crystal clear what Donald Trump stood for.

I don't think its dehumanizing to talk about the fact that lots people, many or most individually good, chose to vote for a sexist, racist, authoritarian.

And does anybody really doubt at this point that Trump is those things?

Even though it is a difficult, unpleasant, and heated conversation to have.

Do any downvoters believe Trump is a fan of democracy?

It's funny that you ask me to stop dehumanising people. But what did that 47% do constantly for four years?

What do you think those 47% want with gays, abortion (is murder!!!!) and foreigners?

Knowing full well what this last administration is up to?

Are you seriously arguing "but they do it too"?

No, the dehumanising was mostly one particular side.

That’s not even true. Stop thinking that way if you ever want this country to unite.

> What do you think those 47% want with gays, abortion (is murder!!!!) and foreigners?

Trump didn’t run on an anti-gay platform.

You’re right that anti-abortion is still big. Until you can convince people that it’s not murder, it’s pretty hard to get them to back down from that stance. This is honestly the only reason the Republicans trap so much of the religious vote.

“Foreigners” is also not something Republicans are against, it’s illegal immigration that’s the complaint. That’s why they support reforms that still allow significant immigration.

Then why did Trump cut legal immigration in half?

https://www.forbes.com/sites/stuartanderson/2020/07/21/trump...

I thought RAISE act was dead in the water insofar as things stand now.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAISE_Act

From the GOP party platform for 2016 & 2020:

> Our laws and our government’s regulations should recognize marriage as the union of one man and one woman and actively promote married family life as the basis of a stable and prosperous society. For that reason, as explained elsewhere in this platform, we do not accept the Supreme Court’s redefinition of marriage and we urge its reversal, whether through judicial reconsideration or a constitutional amendment returning control over marriage to the states. We oppose government discrimination against businesses or entities which decline to sell items or services to individuals for activities that go against their religious views about such activities.

https://gop.com/platform/renewing-american-values/#Item2

> Traditional marriage and family, based on marriage between one man and one woman, is the foundation for a free society and has for millennia been entrusted with rearing children and instilling cultural values. We condemn the Supreme Court’s ruling in United States v. Windsor, which wrongly removed the ability of Congress to define marriage policy in federal law. We also condemn the Supreme Court’s lawless ruling in Obergefell v. Hodges, which in the words of the late Justice Antonin Scalia, was a “judicial Putsch” — full of “silly extravagances” — that reduced “the disciplined legal reasoning of John Marshall and Joseph Storey to the mystical aphorisms of a fortune cookie.” In Obergefell, five unelected lawyers robbed 320 million Americans of their legitimate constitutional authority to define marriage as the union of one man and one woman. The Court twisted the meaning of the Fourteenth Amendment beyond recognition. To echo Scalia, we dissent. We, therefore, support the appointment of justices and judges who respect the constitutional limits on their power and respect the authority of the states to decide such fundamental social questions.

https://gop.com/platform/we-the-people/#Item4

Who changed the H1b visa rules so brown immigrants had to be paid a fair wage? The same guy who hates foreigners?

Ha, don't be fooled, that was an attempt to have two results:

- To make H1b people less appealing to companies, keeping them out - To hurt the companies that hire them (often more left leaning)

But there was only one side that is proven literally trying to kill democracy. There is no both sides in this argument.

The republicans might be crying about it, but they have zero proof. Whereas they've literally given us their plan out loud of how they were going to cheat. And they followed through.

The side with proven ballot harvesters in MN?

A lot of the right-wing people that I follow also seem to think that they are having democracy taken away from them. They point to their freedom of speech being restricted, biased fact checkers, big tech being against them, and ballot stuffing.

You might think that they have zero proof, but they're definitely doing their best to find something (https://twitter.com/toad_spotted/status/1325124277503406080), although a lot can be explained without "cheating" (https://twitter.com/HayekAndKeynes/status/132519429924449075...).

This is a very western view, you have war criminals as former presidents. This was not the worst of the US. You have people bombing weddings and you find this to be the worst.

As someone who is no fan of the warmongers, imperialist US policy, or the debt treadmill that fuels them, I would still rather have a conservative president that serves the US power structure, than a president that shirks his job during a domestic crisis and kills a quarter million Americans. Sorry rest of the world, we will get back to trying to stop the war machine after we get our own house in order.

(Also, witnessing the ceding of Hong Kong to China two decades ahead of schedule did make me appreciate the projection of soft power where USG had been keeping order without dropping bombs)

exactly. the fact that hes the only president in recent history not to wage a war should be reason enough for a nobel if we gave it to obama

he was too inept to start war

I would be surprised if as many as half of those who voted for him believed that they were voting to either kill democracy or rewarding immoral behaviour.

Perhaps I’m overly-cynical, but in my (limited) experience, most people just don’t pay enough attention for such motivations — or even expectations — to be plausible.

It's probably worse: they want abortions illegal and gays back in the closet. Look at the packing of the SC.

Filling vacancies is not what "court packing" means. That's never what it has meant. Court packing is when you create new positions (and thus, vacancies) to fill. Filling a lot of court vacancies is not court packing.

And you know this. And Joe Biden knew this when he made the same claim in one of the debates. It's gaslighting, and it bothers me that absolutely nobody called him out on it. Court packing is a red line that nobody should cross. I feel it's important that we all choose our words carefully so that it continues to stay off the table.

IMHO if you ask Americans bluntly if they’d be willing to end democracy so that their candidate remains in power, you’d get only a small percentage agreeing.

What actually happened was that large numbers of voters are stuck in a filter bubble and their only news sources were telling them the election was being stolen. So by supporting Trump they probably thought they were defending democracy.

Of course, those particular news stories were pure lies. But we should focus on the peddlers of lies more than those who were duped by them.

What surprises me is how politicised American teenagers have become nowadays. I'm a (European) Millenial, and when I was 14 neither I nor my peers had any faith or interest in politics. Have a look on Reddit, where most of the population is US-based teenagers: in that place politics has infected every single discussion. /r/The_Donald was a bunch of angry teenagers.

Meh, I must have become a cynical grumpy old person: to me politics has always been a game for rich, old people.

It could be you were just checked out. I certainly paid quite a bit of attention during the Bush years. (When I was a teenager) I wouldn’t say many of my peers paid as much attention but I grew up in a very conservative and rural area.

I did pay attention during the Bush era as well, I remember buying my first newspaper when US invaded Afghanistan. The point is none of us had any faith in those old farts. We wanted change and none of the parties represented change, they actually were the status quo to fight against.

Now it's like hope for a better, radically different world has just disappeared. It's with us or against us. There's no third choice.

I think it depends on how threatened you felt growing up. I grew up quite poor, and politics was a big part of my teenage years, because there weren't very many legitimate paths to stability or success where I grew up in the US. Friends I made as an adult who grew up in the more traditional upper-middle class milleu that make up Silicon Valley tech company rank-and-file were much more apolitical at that age.

I mean, at least on the surface, things seemed pretty optimistic in the late 1980s through the 1990s, from what I remember. It wasn’t a utopia, but it’s easy to see how there would be less pressure for young people to be involved in politics.

The Cold War ended and the USSR peacefully dissolved, democracy was ascendant, the Good Friday Agreement ended The Troubles, East and West Germany reunified, the Schengen Area and the Eurozone were established, the International Space Station opened an era of international cooperation in peaceful space exploration, life expectancy was up, disposable income was up, new and amazing technologies were developed at record pace, substantially improved treatments for fatal conditions like HIV and cancer were entering the market, we’d nearly cracked the human genome, we’d made great progress in eradicating infectious diseases, people around the world were being lifted out of poverty, crime was down, the Western economy was strong. The world seemed less divided and closer together than ever.

Today, tensions between superpowers are up. Russia and North Korea have renewed the threat of nuclear armed conflict. The UK exited the EU. There’s an obesity crisis. Many of our amazing technologies have turned out to be terribly unhealthy and destabilising. Authoritarianism is on the rise, along with domestic and sectarian terrorism. The Western economy was shattered in 2008 and now there’s a global pandemic. Immigrants fleeing instability in other countries have led to political upheaval and conflict. The US became an unreliable ally. And, above all, the existential threat of climate change looms over their entire future.

Maybe people just got bored? Maybe they don't like peace after all?

> Nearly all western thought since the last war, certainly all ‘progressive’ thought, has assumed tacitly that human beings desire nothing beyond ease, security and avoidance of pain. In such a view of life there is no room, for instance, for patriotism and the military virtues. The Socialist who finds his children playing with soldiers is usually upset, but he is never able to think of a substitute for the tin soldiers; tin pacifists somehow won’t do. Hitler, because in his own joyless mind he feels it with exceptional strength, knows that human beings don’t only want comfort, safety, short working-hours, hygiene, birth-control and, in general, common sense; they also, at least intermittently, want struggle and self-sacrifice, not to mention drums, flags and loyalty-parades.

> Whereas Socialism, and even capitalism in a more grudging way, have said to people ‘I offer you a good time,’ Hitler has said to them ‘I offer you struggle, danger and death,’ and as a result a whole nation flings itself at his feet. Perhaps later on they will get sick of it and change their minds, as at the end of the last war. After a few years of slaughter and starvation ‘Greatest happiness of the greatest number’ is a good slogan, but at this moment ‘Better an end with horror than a horror without end’ is a winner.

-Orwell

Should just get rid of the two party system and in 20 years there won't be a divide... Of course easier said then done.

Unfortunately that would require a revolution. The system is designed to prevent substantial change because the players are already aligned with its incentives. The last big systemic change was direct election of Senators in 1913.

Perhaps that is happening already, and some of the events we have seen in the last months are not by our own making but fabricated?

This divide is a business plan, not an organic phenomenon. If you want advertising revenue, you must build a cult of fanatical viewers/clickers. We won't solve this until we deal with advertising as a revenue stream for media.

I fear this too. As someone who had read a fair bit of the history of India, and how the British/east India company mind-fucked and pillaged them it scares the hell out of me. The after effects are still there even 70 years later.

“History doesn’t repeat, it rhymes”

Also realize that may not be possible. Regardless of who won this, half of the country does not approve. So the division you speak of has already occurred. Probably earlier than now. I could imagine a time when a Roman said the same thing you did there. "let's unite" and then the eventual collapse happens. I don't really see "conquer" in the normal sense, but the U.S. will be weaker and other countries will surely gain as a result of our division. Then I think I need to get out of here, and I wonder where I would go in the world? In the end, I agree with your sentiment. It's disturbing. The polarization is palpable. M

I feel like a big reason for the divide is the filter bubbles[1] the public has trapped themselves in. I wanted to force myself to read news from both sides of the divide rather than simply NPR, which was my go-to source for several years. In spite of RSS readers being essentially dead, there are still RSS feeds available. So I mashed up feeds from 10 left and right leaning sources each and created Smash the Bubble[2], mostly for personal consumption.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filter_bubble

[2]https://smashthebubble.com/

I have tried to do the same, signing up for the Flip Side newsletter, among other things. I think it’s still hard for me, an over-educated progressive, to understand the American right. Here are the problems:

1. Reality is often only reported in “liberal” news sources. A lot of information is censored on right wing sources.

2. Both types of news sources editorialize in the headline. Sometimes it’s hard to know they even refer to the same story.

3. People trying to achieve balance in reporting often relocate players onto the wrong team. For example, the Mueller report is not a “left wing” document and balance is not achieved by putting Mueller against a Trump surrogate.

4. “Liberal” sources already include plenty of right wing opinions. For example, David Brooks and Ross Douthat write for the New York Times. There’s no equivalent among the Wall St Journal columnists or Fox News hosts.

5. News stories found only in right wing sources are usually mendacious. For example, reporting about the Michigan ballot glitch without mentioning that it was human error and corrected before reporting the results.

Fundamentally, it’s not that we have differing information, it’s that we only accept information that confirms our world view. I can read dozens of articles written from the point of view that universal health care will destroy the country and not one will ever resonate with me. It’s just too silly to me.

> For example, David Brooks and Ross Douthat write for the New York Times. There’s no equivalent among the Wall St Journal columnists or Fox News hosts.

I used to think that too but it's not true. Example: https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/president-elect-joe-biden-to...

I just took a peak at the comments underneath the article — saying it was wild would be an understatement.

Indeed I feel the same.

I do this over in the UK, I read a selection of newspapers with different agenda's and if a story catches my interest I go look at wikipedia if it has an article, if it's a "Science says"/"Study says" I go look at the abstract of the study.

It's really hard to get a balance look at the news when everything has it's own slant but it's worth the effort I think to understand the nuance.

Looks like a read-worthy site. Are you planning to add a RSS feed to it?

I am liberal who do read conservative newspapers regularly. The amount of lies in conservative papers is astonishing. Not bias, not choosing topics, but flat out lies.

I think that they see their role to push for their side and have zero ideological commitment to any semblance of anything else. Do you get sleepy Biden in clear stage of dementia, again and again.

Note that I an not claiming journals should be objective. They can't. Just that there are more lines to cross. And frankly, liberal journals do go out of their way to extend empathy to "other side" more often.

nice website friend. it'd be nice if i could see which domain you're taking the article from without having to hover over the link

I personally subscribe to the idea that week need to kill the self serving two party duopoly[0]

Part of the problem is the candidates the parties are fielding. I know lots of people who view trump, clinton and biden as corrupt. None of them are good candidates.

0. https://freakonomics.com/podcast/politics-industry/

From the perspective of a European outsider, I very much agree. A lot of problems seem to stem from the two party system.

I'm just wondering if there is a good way for a strong third (and fourth and fifth...) party to form under the current system? Are there any good examples from other countries making that transition, and can they be applied in the US as well?

The current system is game-theory-stable given the conditions of the USA structure of first-past-the-post. You can look at the historical third parties in USA - a third party can form and gain power (with great difficulty) but then it pretty much immediately displaces one of the two parties, so you're back to a two-party system just with different two parties.

> From the perspective of a European outsider, I very much agree. A lot of problems seem to stem from the two party system.

I used to think the same way, but many (most?) countries in Europe end up having coalitions anyway, so you end up really having just two blocks. More parties might give you the option to choose a party that is more after your taste, but in reality you (often) end up with coalitions that take most ideas from the strongest party within the coalition.

I would assume the same thing would happen within the Democratic/Republican Party in the States as well, i.e. a compromise between the left/right wings within these parties based on what is shared by most members(?)

Not really. The blocks change, especially in close elections without true winners. Then negotiations happen and smaller parties often make concessions on the grand scheme of things to get their key issues through.

So, much more compromise than division. This comes back to the voters also. On every divisive topic you have a number of viewpoints instead of two polar opposites.

New Zealand switched from a mostly 2 party first past the post system to a proportional multiparty (usually) coalition system about 25 years ago. We would also end up with governments that won the most seats but lost the popular vote.

IMO we have had much better quality governments since from either end of the spectrum. We had a notorious populist authoritarian in the 70s and early 80s, and I don't see those days coming back.

In a "First past the post" electoral system, It's always more advantageous for the 3rd party to merge with the first or second party.

New Zealand changed away from First Past the Post to Mixed Member Proportional in order to fix that

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mixed-member_proportional_repr...

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

I'm not sure how you'd implement it, particularly at the senate level.

The issue with that is that you can end up with ineffective 'rainbow coalition' governments. It can also give Independents far too much power since they can threaten to collapse a coalition at any time.

Killing the two party duopoly requires significant constitutional changes to how elections are held. One way to do that would be ranked choice voting as implemented in e.g. Maine (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ranked-choice_voting_in_the_Un...).

However, the key point is that such a system would mainly benefit a potential third party, but any changes to the system need to be agreed upon by the current representatives whose interests and reelection would be hurt by such a change.

Trudeau lost my vote by not going for this in canada, but the problems did hilight that there's a lot of alternatives and choosing a specific replacement is hard.

Most agree that FPTP is bad, but nobody agrees on what to replace it with

Just pick a major one, they're all good in similar ways.

Duverger's law has a lot of redundancy in our current system. If you implement something like IRV on the state level for presidential elections without handling the Electoral College, then you've just further increased the odds of Republican presidencies.

Why Republican presidencies?

Good question. Because it will increase the probability of Electoral Votes going to third parties. That decreases the probability of any candidate reaching an outright majority of Electoral Votes. A plurality of Electoral Votes is not enough; it has to be a majority.

Without a majority, the election is decided by the House of Representatives, where each state delegation gets one vote, where each vote is determined by a majority of that state's delegation.

And there, the Republicans have a built-in advantage similar to their Senate advantage, as every state is guaranteed at least one representative regardless of population. Even after the Democratic House victory in 2018, Republicans still had the majority of 26 state federal delegations.

From what I see, the polarization is continuing to grow, and with Trump grabbing 70 million votes even when his gov failed majestically at beating the virus, the next few years is going to ne interesting.

Practically all western governments failed majestically.

Germany is doing quite okay.

Oh, really? As a direct neighbor, I hadn't noticed.

As a direct neighbor from the opposite side (Czech republic), I think they handled it well so far. They don't have a high rate of death per capita, maintained a level of alertness during this summer, and went to a partial lock down only this Monday. Of course I think that Denmark, Norway and Finland handled it better, but those are tiny countries, which makes it hard to compare with US.

Most people I know are happy and celebrating, but I can't seem to get that worked up. Certainly I'm glad Trump lost, but the 70M votes he got, and the fact that this was a close election... man, this country is screwed long term if we can't figure out a way to find some common ground and listen to each other. Being at each other's throats all the time will only destroy us all in the long run.

Is the problem really listening? The conservatives of america are ignoring facts and making up their own reality. They ignore science and reason.

What can you listen to? You can't have a reasonable debate when one side if just making things up.

Abortion is science, climate change is science, race and gender differences are proven facts.

Edit:instead of downvoting me explain what's wrong? Wtf. So much for listening...

I think Trump appeals to some of the middles too. E.g. the "losers" of globalization. They are definitely not (all) radical right.

The thing is, Trump is just a symptom of some disease which the country has been suffering for many years. I'd say it's a mix of a lot of things, e.g. the decline of scientific education + decline of the middle class + a lot of other things.

Reagan and the republicans have hollowed out public education, and that's what the closeness of the race is a symptom of, I think.

We need to funnel money back into public education; the next generation is our only hope.

What do you do then? It's not listening or at least not a conversation if you need to educate someone one. Explain why they're not actually losers how they are in fact benefiting.

I don’t have a good answer, but I do have an idea. The next time you face this situation, instead of jumping to give information that you would need to know in order for you to believe what you are saying, ask the other person instead: “What would need to be true in order for you to believe X?”

While I’ve often found that people can’t handle this question and just disengage, if you do get an answer, then you can actually try to say what they need to hear. They may move the goalposts after getting an answer, but it’s better than wasting time throwing shit at the wall to see what sticks.

al gore is the worst thing that ever happened to environmentalism.

> race and gender differences are proven facts

This sounds like a much more conservative opinion than perhaps you intended.

Ouch whoops, yeah I mean differences like wage gap, effects of racism after generations

Scientifically, you were also right the first time.

I guess technically...

> yeah I mean differences like wage gap

...has actually been disproven more than it's been proven. Or rather, proven to be caused by things other than discrimination, as "wage gap" is meant to imply.

> Abortion is science

No, to me it is ethics!

Edit, added: Killing an innocent child does not have anything to do with science.

I dont see the point of hoisting the rights of the unborn and the undead over those unfortunate enough to be living through 2020.

Ethics has nothing to do with defining what life is or what human is.

And a fetus is a human life. A person does not get redefined based on their location. What science is there that defends the right to an abortion?

Why do you feel a fetus is a human life? What does location have to do with it?

A fetus isn't viable until week 20ish. Even then it won't survive outside the mothers body. 1% of abortions happen after week 20.

About 90% of abortions happen before week 13. It's not even a fetus at this point. The body it self might abort still at this point, this is when mis carriages happen.

Why do you feel an unviable collection of cells is a human?

> Why do you feel a fetus is a human life?

Because it is human, and it is alive.

It is human, in the sense that it is descended from humans and is not dog or a dandelion or a caterpillar. It has human genetic code. It is one continuous line from the merge of two human sex cells to full-grown human. There is no jump, somewhere along the way, from not human to human.

It is alive. A plant is alive, so surely so is a fetus.

> A fetus isn't viable until week 20ish.

Whether it is viable doesn't determine whether it is human or alive. A two-year-old outside the womb isn't very viable either. In fact, some 20-year-olds aren't very viable.

Viability is shaky ground upon which to base legal protection. Just think of the handicapped or those with other chronic maladies. Or any of us can become unviable temporarily through some accident or acute illness. Does our right to life disappear?

> Why do you feel an unviable collection of cells is a human

A "collection of cells" does not describe a fetus any better than an adult.

- At about 18 days, there is a heartbeat

- At about 40 days, there is brain activity

- By the end of the first trimester, it has all its organs. It just needs to grow.

"Photography of the human fetus developing in the womb": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OD1gW88Lm-Y

> What does location have to do with it?

Inside the womb or outside the womb, its location seems to be the dimension used by those who say abortion is okay.

That's not what a human is. These things have names, zygotes, embryos, fetus. None of these are living humans yet. They're pre humans. collection of cells without an identity or awareness. Simplest of brain function where they might only respond to stimulus.

The difference between fetus and infants is the first is still attached to its mother. Its continued growth depends on its attachment to mother. Similar to a tumor.

I don't think you actually understand what you are talking about if you are confused about the term viability https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fetal_viability

Your link to photos means you are forming your opinion based off emotion and not understanding the difference between cells splitting, and what a independent human is.

At what point do you think the sperm and egg are human? Even the first split after they join is still just two cells.

What proof do you have that says a fetus at 16 weeks is alive? How are you defining alive?

> it has all its organs. It just needs to grow.

This is still dependent on the mother, it is not its own thing at this point.

> That's not what a human is. These things have names, zygotes, embryos, fetus.

Yes, and they are all human, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/human

> None of these are living humans yet. They're pre humans.

Citation needed.

> without an identity or awareness

That is pretty easily disproven scientifically. Not even a biologist who is for legal abortion would say that a baby in the womb is unaware. There was an ultrasound a long time ago where you see the fetus recoil from the abortionist's knife. Of course it's aware. Just because it can't see the outside world yet doesn't mean it's unaware.

As far as identity, well, it has a unique fingerprint, DNA, etc. Are you saying you don't have an identity until there's a birth certificate?

> At what point do you think the sperm and egg are human?

Well, they are human from inception (see above). But they are a separate human being at conception.

> What proof do you have that says a fetus at 16 weeks is alive? How are you defining alive?

Even a single cell is alive. You have drifted from textbook science at this point.

> This is still dependent on the mother

Dependence doesn't disqualify you from being human or alive.

Awareness and consciousness is different then responding to stimulus.

> Even a single cell is alive. You have really drifted from textbook science at this point.

We're not talking about human cells being alive. were talking about the whole organism being considered alive and its own thing.

Talking about whether an organism that can not exist independently of its host, that hasn't experienced life yet can be aborted by that host.

It feels like your being disingenuous arguing semantics like cell life with me. Yes cells are live, no the organism is not an independent thing with its own rights. An nonviable fetus is not a fully grown human, this isn't killing babies.

> Awareness and consciousness is different then responding to stimulus.

This is not some clump of cells that "responds to stimulus" before birth and magically becomes "conscious and aware" after birth. It doesn't even line up with fetal viability.

> We're not talking about human cells being alive. were talking about the whole organism being considered alive and its own thing.

The whole organism is alive and its own thing from conception. This is undisputed among biologists.

How reliable is the science you are referencing? 50 years ago "Science" predicted an ice age. Recently it's Climate Change. 50 years from now Science will predict we're all doomed from something else. I am not against Science, but a lot of things that pass as Science isn't Science at all. In fact, some of what passes as Science seems more like a Religion.

There is only one race, the human race. There are differences between ethnic groups, but we are all created in God's image because we're all descended from Adam. I don't know anyone who seriously thinks there are no differences with gender? Except maybe some gender confused professors at my University, but that aside does anyone who is sane really think they are the same? Man and Woman, while having physical deferences, different roles, and responisbilities, are nonethless equal before God.

I don't know what you mean by Abortion is science, but I do know that it is wrong because it's killing an innocent human being.

Science is iterative, there's a process to it. It's unreasonable to expect to be perfectly right the first time. But that is still a better effort then any one else is trying. There is logic and visible proof of climate change happening and effecting our world.

I explained my poor wording somewhere else in this thread.

Why do you feel an unviable collection of cells is a human life? It has no thought, that is what makes us human. At that point its a collection of cells leaching off the mother

So I'm saying we shouldn't fully trust in the areas of science that are likely to be wrong, especially those affected by finding, bias or groupthink. Climate change is one of those areas. The climate has been changing since the Creation of the world. God has promised that He will give us seasons and the ability to plant and reap for as long as the earth remains. (Genesis 8:22). That doesn't mean the climate won't change, maybe it will be bad for some parts of the world and good for others. But I do know we have God's promise for seasons and He has kept that promise every year for over 4300 years. He's not going to break His promise. I'm also not saying we shouldn't be good stewards of earth. We need to rule over it and take care of it. But we don't need to be worried about this planet becoming uninhabitable because of climate change, man made or natural.

Humananity is not defined by the ability to think. Even before the first thought the human embryo is not just a collection of cells. It's a distinct organism. It is dependent on the mother but those cells are independent in the sense that it directs itself on how to form. If you could remove an embryo from the womb and give it a good environment and nutrients it would form just the same. The unborn baby isn't slowly assembled out of parts to make a whole, the embryo is already functioning, it's a distinct human life. It is already human. If you define humanity by thought would you say a 3 year old is less human than a 10 year because their thoughts are less complex? What about when you're sleeping, are you less human when you're unconscious? Humanity is also not defined by it's viability. Is a wounded soldier who will die without life support all of a sudden less human or less valuable because his life depends on an outside source?

The embryo is a distinct human being that can direct it's own formation. It is separate from the mother's cells. And that is why it is a human life.

Yeah reminds me of the previous 20s and 30s when the great depression brings about the rise of polarized left and right and things only got turned around when WW2 broke out...

frsnkly i think economic populism that doesn't generate wealth for urban corporatists by desiccating the entire center of the country, combined with a cultural outlook that is not openly adversarial to people who don't listen to npr would be pretty unifying.

but instead we keep running referendums on failed obama policies combined with the sociocultural neurosis of overmedicated grad students while trying to pretend all of that is not the whitest shit imaginable.

Totally agree. How do we adjust our laws quick enough to stop strongmen using social media to whip up fear and anger?

It seems like the divide comes from an escalating fixation on having your side win, rather than doing the best for the country. As each side focuses more on winning even at the expense of public good, the other side has to ratchet up to match it to get any input at all.

I sort of feel like we're in that old tale where king Solomon says they should cut the baby in two, and both sides are like "ok, I'll take my half of the baby, then."

Ultimately, though, I personally blame the extreme right wing, mostly. I think they're dying, and they're not going down without a fight, like, you know, disinformation, bullying, holding the country hostage metaphorically, whatever. If they're going down, the whole system's going down with them.

IMO the saddest part of it all is that many people seem to be choosing paths of division. I have different family members who are firmly inside bubbles on both sides of the political spectrum. And all of them are way too comfortable in parroting the divisive language they hear on their favorite network news channels. The terms right/left, red/blue, republican/democrat, conservative/liberal are commonly used with insulting tones towards opposing sides. And when they use these broad terms they seem totally content that they have made a strong argument on some issue that actually boils down to making huge over-generalizations of people, and over-simplifications of complex issues.

I don't accept the demonization of fellow Americans based on bad faith arguments, but I sometimes I feel like this is a minority opinion. We should absolutely fight against specific events, behaviors, political rhetoric, and policies we disagree with. And sometimes individuals or small groups deserve to have their actions demonized as completely against our values. But looking for simple labels to place on literally millions of complex humans in order to point at simple answers to issues where simple answers don't exist is a fool's game.

I am not aboard with this type of "both sides are problematic" thinking.

Only one side denies climate change. Only one side denies medical consensus on vaccines and pandemic prevention techniques. Only one side is okay with mocking a disabled reporter (to pick one egregious example among countless).

Yes, if you're red/republican/conservative/right, you're voting for those things, you're signing off on them.

We don't need to "come together and find common ground" on those issues. We need to figure out how truth and decency lost their footing and slipped off the center stage.

Well said. The “both sides” thinking only serves to take us even more the tipping point of a scale that’s been moved FAR too much to the extreme right. America isn’t a left/right nation anymore - it’s a far far right and center nation.

Good points, and I largely agree with you. My "both sides" observation was more to do with how I see so many people willing to disown each other in our individual lives', not so much about broader policies. There is no common ground to be found between believing or not believing in science. But there is common ground for us as individuals to see the humanity in each other.

> Yes, if you're red/republican/conservative/right, you're voting for those things, you're signing off on them.

I wish I were able to convey this better to some stubborn family members. The argument I hear is that they are voting for partial representation of their conservative values, and they are aware of the downsides of this choice. But I don't buy it. I think they are undervaluing the negative costs of that vote, or completely ignoring them.

First, the comment you replied to didn't argue both sides are problematic, just that not everyone who voted for Trump is a bad person. Both sides being problematic also doesn't imply that one side isn't more problematic than the other.

I think it's crazy that so many people voted for Trump and honestly believe he's the best person to run the country. I'd have a hard time respecting someone who didn't see how bad Trump was in a lot of ways. But I think most people on the left seem to have no idea why anybody would vote for Trump, and don't realize that is more of an indictment of the extent they are out of touch with 49% of the country, rather than an indication of the idiocy of their political opponents.

An effective rejection of Trumpism must first involve understanding and relating to the people who supported him, and I think a lot of people are lamenting the general lack of interest in such discourse.

Edit: fixed two words which drastically changed the meaning of sentence.

Sure, but when you engage on why they voted for Trump, you receive a litany of mistruths and nonsense and it goes nowhere. Biden is going to raise taxes! Biden is going to take away guns! Hunter Biden's corruption! It's pretty hard to have a conversation when a third party is honking and playing a tuba five feet away, and that's essentially what Fox News, Facebook, Breitbart, et al are doing.

You would, but we were banned long ago if we made anything approaching valid points on places like this. Your ignorance is the result of the bubble, which follows from censorship. You cannot see it because the censorship makes the edges of your bubble invisible to you.

And to make it even more ironic, this comment was dead, and invisible to most HN readers.

The problem is the points you perceive as valid are the products of your own bubble, which operates as an automated factory of lies and deception. As with holocaust deniers, arguing with you is not a valid approach: only shutting you out.

https://slate.com/technology/2018/07/the-askhistorians-subre...

>Biden is going to raise taxes

Biden campaigned on raising the corporate income tax rate from 21% back to 28%. If you have a stock market portfolio (including an IRA or 401(k)) and this proposal is enacted, it will adversely affect the value of your investments. It's also been tied to student loan forgiveness, so people without college degrees who are investing for retirement (and those who've paid off their degrees) will in effect be subsidizing those with student loan debt, which is a demographic that skews affluent:

>https://www.educationnext.org/mass-debt-forgiveness-not-prog...

>Households in the upper half of the income distribution hold more student debt than those in the lower half. The highest-income quartile of households owes about one-third of that debt; the lowest-income quartile owes about 12 percent. People who don’t go to college don’t have student debt. They have lower incomes and more constrained job opportunities than others.

> I think it's crazy that so many people voted for Trump and honestly believe he's the best person to run the country.

...out of the two options on the ballot. Which is also the only reason why so many people voted for Biden. The most mind-boggling thing from my German point of view is how little movement there is to leave the two-party system behind.

Exactly! While our (Czech Republic) voting system is far from perfect (the current president is rather controversial and the prime minister is a populist with some rather shady financial deals) political parties regularly go out of business if they fuck up strong enough. And this system will likely also fix the current problems over time, resulting in possibly less bad state.

Having just two parties is insane, that simply means they can get away with anything & just take turns once in a while as voters have no other choice.

I was under the impression from recent reading that the situation in Czechia is really bad with mass protests and serious problems. You're happy with the system though?

There were some protests against anti covid measure a few weeks ago that got quite a bit of publicity due to taking place on the iconic Old Town Square in Prague - but nothing relly major or really ongoing.

The situation is not perfect and the protest not without merit, as the government preatty much squandered any success we had handling the first wave of covid by doing preatty much no preparations, releasing almost all restrictions and then failed to respond in time when things turned for the worse in september.

I guess it can make people angry, if their livelyhood is in danger due to the restrictive measures needed after you fuck up the initial response to the second wave like we did here. Still violent protest is not really an answer and it was indeed an one-off so far. Hopefully people will remeber at least a bit of they not to vote the populist currently in power during the next elections next year.

Also there are regular protests in Belarus and now even in Poland these days that are bigger by many orders of magnitude that what we managed to pull off here since the Velvet Revolution when indeed preatty much everyone was in the streats, which resulted in the fall of the soviet aligned comunist regime back then.

I assume that you guys have some version of proportional representation. The US doesn't. It would take a complete rewrite of the US constitution to get rid of the two party system.

Re-empowering electors could help with respect to presidential elections. Popular election of senators really ties our hands at the senate level, though. Point being, it is difficult to turn a plurality into a compromise majority without either a runoff or a delegated negotiation of some sort. Parliamentary systems have that baked in, of course.

I almost always for an Nth party, where N>2. Literally every single election, I’ve been told that I was wasting my vote, that this was the most important election of my life, etc. There is a tremendous amount of social pressure to vote mainstream. I don’t have high hopes of breaking the cartel anytime soon.

I think the pressure mostly comes from the value that if you're in favor of an outcome, you should be in favor of the prerequisite actions to that outcome. If your favored actions are counterproductive to your favored outcome, then it strikes others as irrational.

This.

There are in fact many parties in the USA. But unfortunately the USA is still using an early alpha release voting system that was invented in the 1700s before voting theory had been even understood.

The result of a majority win voting system is that it only legitimizes 2 parties in practice. This worked 'ok' so long as the 2 parties acted in good faith.

However the last 20-30 years the Republican party got twisted into a movement to undermine government, enrich themselves, and narrowly focus on a couple of right-wing Christian interests to distract a populist base. They've maintained their relevance by turning Fox news and other right-wing owned outlets into effectually state-run propaganda machines. Leaving only the Democrats trying to govern with the Republicans trying to undermine and obstruct that very government.

The only way out of the USA's problems is to have a modern preference voting method, or in the long term the country may be doom to fail.

Not sure they are bad people per se... but where do you draw the line?

Sure Hitler improved the German economy, does that make it defensible to support him?

This is the fundamental question in nationalist movements that are driven by ideologies, tribalism, and cult of personalities... instead of real facts backed up by science and data.

Given that provably almost nothing Trump ever says is even true, how can these people know he is the best person to govern? If there are no facts, it is just beliefs... and that is incredibly dangerous.

How do we reunite then?

If we are constantly going on about how bad one side is (fwiw, I basically agree with you about that), then it will only lead to more division and resentment. Based on my in group's behavior, it seems like most people who believe this think that continuing to publicly shame and wag fingers at the other side is how we get to a better world. And it so clearly is not.

I'm frustrated by this, but also truly searching for solutions or alternative explanations.

Simple solution is to not try to "solve" anything. Just be accepting of people who hold different opinions. I'm sure you would be tolerant of someone who believes Mohammed was the messenger of God. Nutty beliefs don't get much more serious than that when you consider the content of those messages.

Look, an objective observer might say, only one side advocates for abortion. You might personally dismiss it and say it's a woman's right, but you have to at least acknowledge that people who equate abortion to a form of murder aren't totally out-of-line.

Point being, anyone can pick and choose a handful of issues (and ignore others) to "prove" that anyone who votes for [insert party here] is morally bankrupt.

You make a fairly excellent point about the nature of debate and public opinion.

However, denial of scientific and historical fact is not something "anyone" can find instances of for "[insert party here]". Only on the right does that occur.

That's no longer true unfortunately. Denialism on the left about certain things is becoming rampant:

- Blacks commit far more crime than other racial groups. There are sociological explanations for this, but that is currently a fact, and one that people on the left do mental backflips to avoid acknowledging.

- Gender pay gap in most industries is small or non-existent once you adjust for experience and other factors. Not to say that there is no discrimination at all, but this is another thing people on the left can't or don't want to acknowledge.

Those are just two among many.

Hmm. But what if you reframe the data? Instead of "Blacks commit more crimes than other racial groups", you're more likely to get on the path of finding constructive solutions by framing it as "People who grew up in predominantly black neighborhoods commit more crimes than those who grew up in predominantly non-black neighborhoods."

I mean, I think we've pretty well established that crime isn't genetic. It's environmental. So why frame it as if the opposite were true?

I haven't studied the demographic data at length recently, but fairly sure that your assertion does not hold for high income blacks.

I have no comment on the pay gap, I don't know much about it.

I think you're proving my point. Can you just state the fact? You can even add some qualifying statements like I did. But for christ's sake just say it first! No need to go out of your way to find a subset that is (no doubt) excepted from the average. It's politically inconvenient, yes. But it's also the truth, and one that might help explain why african americans are more likely to have interactions with police (a group I have no love for, tbh).

My own mother can't do this. She goes on about how the fbi crime statistics are probably "biased" in some way, though has no interest in finding out if or how that's the case. "It's obvious" she says. This greatly upsets me. How can we deal with problems if we can't look them straight in the face?

> I think you're proving my point. Can you just state the fact? You can even add some qualifying statements like I did. But for christ's sake just say it first! No need to go out of your way to find a subset that is (no doubt) excepted from the average. It's politically inconvenient, yes.

It's not just politically inconvenient, it's also lacking a lot of nuance. Native Americans commit crimes at an even higher rate than African Americans do. The two groups share a long history of violent disenfranchisement. Taking the statistics in isolation, yes Native Americans and African Americans do commit crime at higher than average rates. But ignoring structural issues is just as disingenuous as ignoring the data.

> But it's also the truth, and one that might help explain why african americans are more likely to have interactions with police (a group I have no love for, tbh).

Can you prove this cause and effect chain? The rate at which African Americans encounter the police is much greater than the rate at which violent crimes are committed. I'm not saying you're wrong, but I haven't seen any causality research here, but the way you've juxtaposed these claims implies that you believe there's causality here.

I can acknowledge the statistics. Can you acknowledge that they're often misappropriated and decontextualized for the purposes of propaganda[1]?

[1] https://www.adl.org/education/references/hate-symbols/1352-1...

Absolutely. F* those people.

> I mean, I think we've pretty well established that crime isn't genetic. It's environmental.

In reality, twin studies and adoption studies have shown a large genetic component.

We don't even need twin studies to know this. It must be true unless you're a young-earth creationist. If there wasn't genetic variability in criminality, humans wouldn't have been capable of evolving to be so much less violent than other primates.

(And of course, disparities in male/female behavior is obviously biological.)

> I haven't studied the demographic data at length recently, but fairly sure that your assertion does not hold for high income blacks.

In fact, it does hold in higher income brackets too. And I'd bet whites are more violent than Asians after controlling for income, too.

I'll just say this comment screams "deceptive reasoning" / "flawed use of sources" to me. Triggers my sensors from a mile away.

Like, there is tons of research on this. This isn't up for dispute, except for people who ignore the science.

You are not going to find racial activists who deny the first fact. The second "fact" seems to fly over the whole "and other factors". That's the entire point of the statement.

Not sure of your point?

Here are the major factors I've looked at: The previously mentioned (and most significant by far) years of experience (which for many women is affected by having children), hours spent at work, self-rated confidence, (personality trait) agreeableness, etc. etc.

The _entire_ point is that maternity, preconceived biases on women's behavior in the workplace, and expectations of women to do housework are factors that are to be contemplated and analyzed in their systemic causes.

There's a reason why in European countries parental leave is split between both parents and there's effort to make it easier for men to be caretakers.

If women are statistically likely to need to take more time off work than men due to being a parent, then I would argue this is effectively a systemic pay gap. Whether or not that needs fixing is another question but it's totally bizarre to say "if you ignore all the reasons why women are often in positions where they receive less pay that men don't have to deal with, there isn't a gap".

(To be clear: whether or not this pay gap needs addressing is its own question entirely. It makes total sense to me that a woman needs time off to recover from giving birth or from health complications during pregnancy.)

A fetus is a human life.

EDIT: I'd ask for valid science showing a fetus isn't alive, doesn't feel pain, etc., but the science is clear here. The question isn't in the science but in the implications. Like it or not (here... apparently not), the conservative position on abortion had a lot of hard science to back it up.

The gender pay gap is a statistic that requires some nuance to evaluate and I think your analysis is reductive. Yes, if you add in controls it lessens, but why? Why do women as a population have systematically lower levels of work experience? The pay gap is an assessment of how well our society is structured to allow people of both genders economic opportunities.

Shouldn't choosing to raise a family account for the experience gap? Yes, this is an example of one way that we've structured society so that women tend to have fewer career opportunities. IMO, there is not a good reason men (as a demographic) shouldn't be spending an equal amount of time raising children.

> The gender pay gap is a statistic that requires some nuance to evaluate

If only nuance were present when politicians on the left make misleading or false statements like "women (are) paid 77 cents on the dollar for doing the same work as men".

https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2012/jun/21/barack-oba...

> Shouldn't choosing to raise a family account for the experience gap?

Edit: I think I misread your second paragraph. Choosing to raise a family likely does account for the existence of the experience gap, if that's what you mean; but raising a family isn't equivalent to on-the-job experience.

I agree for hard science, but I see more wishful thinking about society on the "left". A lot of the rhetoric about social justice implicitly hinges on the Blank Slate theory, the assumption that all (groups of) people would, in a vacuum, have exactly the same statistical outcomes. Therefore, all deviations from the average must automatically be a sign of systemic discrimination. When you look at studies, the situation is rarely as clear-cut.

The same is true with the "diversity is strength" mantra, where everyone seems to cite that one feel-good McKinsey study as if that told the full story.

This kind of naivety is not as bad as burning the planet, but at the end of the day, it's still people looking at studies and saying "can't be true".

Ironic that you would acknowledge bias then commit it yourself. Is the right, or the left, pushing to reject biological science that says XX = female, XY = male?

Hmm. My knee-jerk response is that the example you give is not in any way denialism.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Clearly it takes more than a dichotomy of chromosomal options to define one's gender. You're drastically oversimplifying "biological science" in order to put forth an example of the left denying scientific fact.

More importantly though, the left's "agenda" with regards to trans people isn't about rejecting medical or scientific consensus on gender. A trans woman's doctor is still going to give her advice tailored to her specific case of being born with a male body. It's about accepting people for who they want to be, and that doesn't clash with any category of facts or knowledge. Implying otherwise is disingenuous.

Depends on if you mean gender or sex. Both sides accept that as sex, but it's more common on the right to improperly accept that they mean the corresponding gender, and it's more common on the left to properly believe that gender is not sex.

I used to think about this in exactly the same way as you do, so despite the wall of text I hold no judgment against you at all. But you are mistaken, and I'll try to explain why (although I'm not sure I'll do the topic of "the epistemology of science" justice in a rambling forum post).

I think you have some misunderstandings about the term "definition", misunderstandings that I certainly used to have. We use this term both in mathematics and the sciences, but only mathematics has true definitions (as in, a logical statement which precisely determines a set). I can define a right angle as the angle that makes all four angles of an intersection of two straight lines equal. We can show that it's a unique value, exactly 90 degrees, and neither 40 degrees nor 89.8 degrees are right angles. Only 90 degrees _exactly_ is a right angle.

By contrast, in other sciences we usually only have categories with fuzzy borders. Take for instance the term "species". Wikipedia says "A species is often defined as the largest group of organisms in which any two individuals of the appropriate sexes or mating types can produce fertile offspring, typically by sexual reproduction." But as a definition, in the mathematical sense, this just doesn't work, at all. One obvious shortcoming is that every infertile individual forms a species by itself, by this definition.

But the main shortcoming is that on casual inspection, it looks like it's defining sets of organisms: the set of rabbits, the set of horses, etc. But it is not, because these sets don't exist. Let A0 be a rabbit. A0's parents are themselves rabbits, and the parents of those rabbits were themselves rabbits, and so on. But rabbits haven't existed forever, and at some point we reach an ancestor An of our initial rabbit that we would no longer consider a rabbit: species(An) /= species(A0) (where for all X: species(X) is a set). But this did not happen through some break in continuity: at any point, we would consider an organism and its offspring as belonging to the same species. But then this individual An must be of the same species as A0: species(An) = species(A{n-1}) = ... = species(A0). We have a contradiction.

So strictly logically speaking, this definition is useless. Nevertheless, the concept of species is clearly a useful concept that helps us communicate things about the real world. How do we explain this?

When we'd program a video game which has rabbits in it, we'd probably neatly define some data structure or class named "Rabbit" which simulates the rabbit. But this is not how reality works: we just have a bunch of particles that are interacting which eachother. Crucially, from these particle interactions emerge certain patterns which we can observe. Our concept of "rabbit" is not imposed on the universe from the top down, on the contrary: our brains pick up on recurring patterns in the particle soup around us, and giving these recurring patterns names helps us communicate, and therefore, survive (this is what we call abstraction; I have another long rant on this forum about abstraction, if you're interested: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24429749). But no two instances of such a pattern are identical, and exactly where one pattern ends and the next begins is somewhat arbitrary. Any strict definition of "rabbit" is doomed to fail.

Think of it as neural net classification: each object in the universe has some "rabbitness" value. The keyboard I'm typing this on has very low rabbitness. A fox has significantly higher rabbitness (it breathes, has four legs, two ears, etc) but still not very high rabbitness. Crucially, rabbitness is completely determined by some distance metric from earlier examples. So rabbitness is determined by _relative_ distance to earlier examples, not by anything absolute. We draw lines, somewhat arbitrarely, in this space and name them to help us communicate (such as: anything over .95 rabbitness is a rabbit). But these names are but tools and different names or different borders can be used in different contexts.

So back to sex/gender. Within the particle soup around us, we recognise the pattern "human" (or any sexually reproducing animal). We notice another pattern in these humans: they seem to fall apart into two categories based on their role in reproduction and physical appearance. We name these categories "male" and "female". But again, the borders are fuzzy and no hard definition can be found. Not all men have penises, there are women with beards, etc. Eventually, we discover DNA and find out that men tend to have XY chromosomes and women XX chromosomes. So do we have our hard definition of gender/sex now? Not at all. Not every person has either XX or XY. There are also "male-presenting" people with XX chromosomes (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XX_male_syndrome).

So attempting to define sex based on chromosomes falls flat, and leads to absurdities. Suppose you become friends with a male-presenting XX, who does not know he has XX chromosomes. He has male genitalia, has identified as male his entire life, and has been addressed as he/him his entire life. Then he gets tested for infertility and finds out he has XX chromosomes, and tells you this. Will you now insist to your friend that he is a woman? Will you insist on adressing him with female pronouns? Does he have to change his gender on his passport?

I would find it absurd, not to mention cruel, to do so. We're in a situation here where it seems more productive to accept that we use overloaded terms to mean different things at different levels of abstraction. Sure, on a genetic level he's "female". But he's male in how society interfaces with him, which is much more relevant to him in most situations. So why not just say "he is male", and only discuss his genetic makeup if and when that is pertinent?

I read your wall of text. You make some interesting points. But I will be honest with you: I also used to think like you, in these long convoluted ways where I was trying to explain everything I saw via programming and all sorts of mathematical extrapolations, and I for a time I believed my own bit. But then I realised: it was all cp and youthful arrogance.

In a nutshell, you are nitpicking. You can always define an arbitrary scale at which nothing matters: you used time in your rabbit example very effectively to discount the usefulness of the "rabbit category". Or you used these XX males as a counter example to a rigid definition of gender. You even yourself realise that this way of thinking is completely useless as you yourself say that the category of species is extremely useful:

> So strictly logically speaking, this definition is useless. Nevertheless, the concept of species is clearly a useful concept that helps us communicate things about the real world. How do we explain this?

I can explain this for you: you are thinking life is logical and "discreet" because you are a programmer and this is what you were taught. It is not: life is... continuous! Like the integral: each point has measure 0 but when you "add" a transfinite amount of 0 measure points you get... non-zero area! This resolves your rabbit paradox: each generation of rabbit is a point with measure 0 since its "difference" is so small with the generation before and after that it we can model it as 0...

Or second model: Rabbit_n = 0.9999 * Rabbit_{n+1}

After 100 generations: similarity is already 0.99

After 1000 generations: similarity is 0.90

After 10000 generations: similarity is 0.36

Tadaa: problem solved. So don't think so hard about this, use your common sense and realise that most people are men and most people are women and a few edge cases do not matter for practical purposes. And this is the crux of the matter: we need to make decisions. Hence we do what you very well describe: we categorise the particle soup around us and we act. So the usefulness of categories/abstractions CAN ONLY EVER BE MEASURED BY THEIR USEFULNESS FOR DECISION MAKING (sorry for caps I but want to emphasize). When I say decision making I mean almost everything: from deciding what sandwich to eat to deciding on how to prove Fermat's last theorem. If categories help you to do things, they are useful. End of story (for me, you can go write a book about this, make sure to send me a free copy).

Finally, this is also all bs so don't take it too seriously: I am a person on the internet.

Here's your free copy :)

> you are thinking life is logical and "discreet" because you are a programmer and this is what you were taught.

Perhaps I did not express myself clearly, but my point is _the exact opposite_! Life is indeed not logical and discreet, as witnessed by the fact that vaguely defined categories are clearly tremendously useful. But these categories become misleading when one makes the mistake of identifying them with logically defined sets (ie when one thinks in logically reductive ways, the style of thinking you attribute to me). This is the mistake that I claim to identify in listenallyall's post.

They make the claim that XX _equals_ female and XY _equals_ male. To be clear, I don't actually think that the statement "men have XY chromosomes and women have XX chromosomes" is wrong or must be qualified every time. It's "mostly right", in the same sense that Newtonian physics is "mostly right", and adequate for most discussions where you're not looking at the edge cases of sex or gender, which is most such discussions.

But when talking about transgender people (it has not been explicitly stated that this is the subject of our discussion, but given the context I think it's fair to assume that it is), we are arguing _exactly about the edge cases_ of the gender categories. listenallyall's argument boils down to: the "male" set and the "female" set are clearly, logically defined by sex chromosomes, therefore there are no edge cases, and (speculating a bit from here on about what their point is) trans people just have to suck it up and stop claiming they are what they are not.

This is an argument based on the assumption that life is logical and discreet, that the universe has some obligation to provide you with neatly defined sets to help you understand the world. My way of showing that this is wrong is by making two arguments:

1) Life is not logical and discreet, as I tried to illustrate with the rabbit example (and I think you and I are making exactly the same point there),

2) If you go along with this discreet, "logical" reasoning, you end up with absurdities (the XX-presenting male example). I think this is where my post perhaps got a bit confusing: I am _not_ arguing for this style of thinking, but I'm going along with it to show that it is unproductive. It is undeniable that if you accept listenallyall's argument, you must either insist that a male-presenting XX is actually a woman, or be logically inconsistent.

A far more useful way to see gender is like the rabbit example. You have a bunch of sex-related characteristics which are bimodally distributed, and from that you can have a "maleness" and "femaleness" value for every person. How you weight individual variables (like "broadness of shoulders") is a bit arbitrary. Sex chromosomes are just one variable among many in this equation, with no special status. In fact, they are for most discussions probably one of the least relevant factors, as evidenced by the fact that we got by with our "male" and "female" categories for millennia without even knowing about chromosomes, and in everyday life our views of sex and gender don't seem to be particularly informed by chromosomes. We can then move on and treat gender as a "duck typed" property: if someone presents as a certain gender, refers to themselves as a certain gender, etc, they are that gender.

In conservative circles, statements like "gender is a social construct" are basically a meme, a clear proof that progressives are detached from reality. To be clear, I'm not sure I fully agree with that statement either. But for _decision making_, this is clearly a more productive view than "gender = chromosomes". I have XY chromosomes (I think) and a penis, but this is for most practical purposes much less relevant than the fact that I interact with society through the "male" interface (although I appreciate that I can use urinals). Why should I be not be free to choose which interface to interact through?

The progressive argument to treat transgender people as their preferred gender is the stronger argument for any sort of practical decision making: to refuse to do so causes needless suffering in people who have done no wrong. Insisting that a trans woman is actually a man, should be treated as a man, should be referred to with male pronouns, etc, makes the lives of these people significantly worse, and makes no one else's life better. It is also no different than insisting a male-presenting XX is a woman, which I think is also obviously cruel.

The only conservative argument I've ever heard against this is based on precisely the reductive thinking you attribute to me: to insist that one variable (chromosomes) out of many is not just more heavily weighted than what is justifiable for any practical purpose, but actually _strictly defines_ gender, ignoring _all other factors_. They then throw themselves up as champions of science and reason, because clearly progressives are detached from reality. This style of thinking is both wrong (as in, it leads to inconsistencies and is based on a high school level understanding of science and epistemology) and unproductive (you don't gain anything in terms of practical decision making).

> Finally, this is also all bs so don't take it too seriously: I am a person on the internet.

No worries, I enjoy these kinds of discussion, otherwise I wouldn't spend any time on it. But I can't help but take it somewhat seriously too. The outcome of this debate doesn't affect me very much, but there are people whose lives will be worse if "my side" loses the debate.

> it was all cp and youthful arrogance.

What is "cp"?

And I think left has the opposite problem of denial of science by taking it as gospel and trying the most extreme solution possible instead of actually looking at the tradeoffs (let's be clear that the right buries their head in the sand instead of looking at solutions and tradeoffs as well).

No.

No objective observer would ever say that either side “advocates for abortion”. That’s the sort of thing a demagogue right-winger would say to try to score cheap political points.

California forces anybody buying health insurance to pay for abortion, and pay have to pay a tax if you don't buy health insurance. If they aren't advocating for it, why are they trying to force me to pay for it?

Interesting.

Can you provide a scan of a health insurance invoice where there’s a line item for an abortion which you didn’t request or receive? It doesn’t have to be your receipt; any insurance invoice from literally anybody in California where they were charged specifically for an abortion that they didn’t request or receive?

I’ll wait.

Or is this a specious argument like the perennial classic, “I had to pay taxes which went in part toward maintaining the roads and I never drove on that particular road over there and so therefore the taxes are unfair”? Because I am very interested in your opinions if that’s the direction you’ve decided to argue, here.

In your road example, they are in fact paying for the roads, and you aren't disputing that, so maybe try finding a better analogy that doesn't undermine your argument.

Or maybe you didn’t understand my argument. All the best.

> Only one side denies medical consensus on vaccines

You’re incorrect about this one AFAIK. From the Safety of Childhood MMR Vaccine section of [0]:

> There are no differences between party groups about this issue. Moderates are a bit more likely than either conservatives or liberals to say that childhood vaccines are generally safe.

[0] https://www.pewresearch.org/science/2015/07/01/chapter-5-pub...

That's talking about voters, not candidates.

Totally agreed. The biggest problem in the political discussion is false equivalency.

If one side doesn't believe in truth, facts and science, and the other side defends them as fundamental to everything... than those are not equivalent positions.

This has been largely a one-sided war on decency. Don't kill the messenger.

The disabled reporter example isn't what it seems. Trump had done that identical style of mocking to many non-disabled individuals before doing it to the disabled individual, most likely he didn't even know the reporter was disabled, it was just a way that Trump mocks people. The media framed it as though Trump was specifically picking on his disability even though this historical context (which they omitted on purpose) makes that explanation unlikely.

This is, of course, no defence of Trump's behavior in this instance.

maybe it has something to do with career war-mongers and sanctioneers campaigning on their 'decency' or pathological liars who waged a vindictive, no holds barred war against whistleblowers espousing themselves to be defenders of the 'truth'

i do not have to like or support trump to think that joe biden is a lifelong robber barron and his return to normalcy will be marked by suffering around the world and absolute blindness towards the the deaths of despair happening within our own country.

What really saddens me is that both sides recognize this problem in their opposition but never in their side. Or if they do recognize it, it's quickly hand-waved away because when their side does it, it's for the "greater good". The political double standards keep reaching new heights.

When people focus on the details of strategies for success in facing our shared problems it is relatively easy to test ideas and get people from all political views on board with effective solutions. When people focus on identifying and criticizing enemies it turns people off, builds barriers, and prevents the generation and spread of effective strategies for facing shared challenges.

I was talking to a US expat this afternoon. Besides the congratulations and commenting the expectations for the new administration we reflected on the damage the last 30-40 years of propaganda for individualism have made.

Individuals, their inner world and potential are very important, but you have systematically mortified the importance - and the “evolutionary advantage” - of the human societal organization.

Over optimization for the hedonistic “self bootstrapped” man turned most of you - that don’t have the strength, but most likely the luck, to be Randian heroes - into the exact opposite: submissive corporate drones.

It’s time to lay the groundwork for long term change, isn’t it?

Yes, the basic human societal unit is the tribe, as evidenced by Dunbar’s number. Within tribes, interconnected extended families used to facilitate the social cohesion. In the US, both the small-scale society and the extended family have been harmed by atomizing and dispersing people for mostly economic reasons.

this is absolutely incorrect. there is literally 0 reason to dispersing your family for economic reasons. It is always cheaper to cohabitate and long term care facilities are extremely expensive.... Especially in the US.

I very strongly agree with this. All of us need to talk, avoid judgement and just understand one another better.

A higher degree of basic solidarity will help us a lot.

Thanks for this perspective.

Absolutely not. Every society that denies individualism or prefers collectivism finds itself sooner than later in misery.

There you go again, where’s subtlety gone in this world?!

> We have to come together as Americans or someone will divide and conquer us.

I feel like we're likely already in the middle of a divide and conquer situation.

I absolutely agree with you and I think we've gotten ourselves into a state where the "fix" (whatever it may be) will be so unpalatable to either party or to anybody who wants to survive in a political environment that it'll be impossible to implement.

For example, want to bring manufacturing jobs back?

1. Implement trade-protectionist tariffs and import restrictions.

2. Unionize rural workforces to make the pay and work conditions attractive.

3. Offer massive tax incentives to build manufacturing centers in rural states.

4. Reinstitute a manufacturing oriented education system that outputs ready-to-work trained trade employees.

The parties are too far apart now to be able to put in place something like this.

Build strong international relationships.

Open the gates for immigration.

Work with allies to impose extreme tariffs on China.

Build manufacturing in India, Mexico, Vietnam, and Africa. Own the shipping.

Offer US statehood to Taiwan and keep the South China Sea open to all US Allies. Korea, Japan, Vietnam, etc.

Congratulations, you just proposed the exact opposite.

I don't think your plan works. US manufacturing is too expensive without extensive automation. And automation won't feed workers.

We need to protect our lead in tech and information and attack China's chances of leapfrogging us. Protect our industries, protect democracy. Build up our allies. Build a stronger world.

The risk is that China becomes better than us at everything we do. Then what do we have? Being protectionist is anti-growth. Industry and innovation shut down.

A new cold war is coming. The sooner we get ahead of it, the better prepared we'll be.

The future is knowledge work. Manufacturing domestically is regressive. We need to put the supply chain in the hands of our developing allies.

We shouldn't want to train anyone to do menial jobs anyway. We're about to enter an era where we'll have plenty of creative, knowledge jobs for everyone.

But you still haven't brought manufacturing jobs back.

They're gone and they're not coming back. We don't want them back. These are repetitive, menial jobs that no human should have to do. The only way we want them back is if they're fully automated.

We need to protect and expand knowledge work.

and congratulations you've also missed the point of this thread.

knowledge work isn't gonna stop midwesterners and coal miners from od'ing on heroin.

2-4 would have a plurality of support in the country, And with that, bipartisan support.

They can also be done without isolationism, but probably not without redistributing the wealth that has concentrated in the hands of the 0.1% over decades (under both parties) back into the general population.

#2 would never receive Republican party support.

There was this really good take on this divide by Andrew Yang a few days ago on CNN [clip from Twitter - 0]. Yang is the only candidate I saw who seemed to understand people from all parts of the US. Also, it would have been nice to have a president who understood technology.

[0] - https://twitter.com/KySportsRadio/status/1324552953861210112

If only Yang himself understood technology. His blockchain voting proposal was hilariously bad.

He does understand VC though? Just add blockchain to the name and get all the funding

The details of Yang's blockchain proposal may be off, but the basic idea that we could really use a strongly secured voting system and that a blockchain or other three column ledger accounting could be a part of that is sound.

I prefer candidates that don't think they understand technology.

Thinking you understand technology seems to reliably lead to overconfidence. That's better left to advisers, who then have their advice filter by people who are sceptical of things that aren't tried and true and well understood on the holistic basis of actual use in practice.

I honestly believe this is just a return to normal for both sides. Conservatism, before being injected with neoliberalism by Thatcher and Reagan, has been about leaving other countries alone while focusing on protecting American interests. Speak softly and carry a big stick. Conservatives have never wanted US hegemony traditionally. Preservation of Bretton Woods has had to be a focus post-WWII in order to combat the spread of anti-American communism. Now that the Cold War has ended, conservatives have tried to find a way back to focusing on American interests. It’s a delicate balance that has to be struck though. I think this is also the reason for the split in the Democratic Party. “Establishment” members are focused on preserving the neoliberal Bretton Woods status quo. The progressives are focused on doing away with the oligarchy that system has created and moving towards a more socialistic global society.

I believe this is really just a return to the way things used to be, before the US decided to intervene in WWII and had to find a way to pay for the massive cost of that. Conservative and liberal are not opposites like everybody thinks these days. Conservative and progressive are opposites. Liberal and authoritarian are opposites. Both parties are (or should be) focused on the American ideal of liberalism and representative government chosen by the people while either preserving traditional values or advocating for enlightenment values.

However, real life is not that cut and dry, politics are messy, parties don’t fall exactly along these lines and the media plays a part in dictating who should believe what. But in general I think Trump is an indicator that we’re headed for a more traditional alignment of values. Who knows, perhaps a viable third party will emerge from this. A Conservative party, a progressive party, and a Bretton Woods establishment party.

I believe your second sentence should end as, "has been about focusing on protecting American interests while leaving other [more powerful] countries alone."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latin_America%E2%80%93United_S...

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

> I honestly believe this is just a return to normal for both sides. Conservatism, before being injected with neoliberalism by Thatcher and Reagan, has been about leaving other countries alone while focusing on protecting American interests. Speak softly and carry a big stick. Conservatives have never wanted US hegemony traditionally. Preservation of Bretton Woods has had to be a focus post-WWII in order to combat the spread of anti-American communism. Now that the Cold War has ended, conservatives have tried to find a way back to focusing on American interests. It’s a delicate balance that has to be struck though. I think this is also the reason for the split in the Democratic Party. “Establishment” members are focused on preserving the neoliberal Bretton Woods status quo. The progressives are focused on doing away with the oligarchy that system has created and moving towards a more socialistic global society.

I would agree, to some extent, if Trump wasn't the Conservative candidate. Trump has flouted the law to the extent that very, very few American Presidents have. Where I was afraid that Obama was passing too many Executive Orders, Trump outright tried to rule by Executive Order fiat. Conservative parties pre-Bretton Woods were certainly isolationist and domestic-first, but also had a deep affection for the rule of law. I would oppose a traditionally conservative party politically, but would not be nearly as negative about it as I am about a President that seems to want to actively subvert rule of law.

Devolution of power is a solution to the polarisation. The division in the country is real and deep and in some places inconsolable, rather than just a media mirage. Rather than increasingly violent competition for the presidential office or the federal government, a more flexible union is probably a sane idea.

The US faces no threat of being conquered, it has the most powerful military and intelligence capacity in the world by a healthy margin. Insofar as foreign interference creates division, it's precisely the lack of decentralisation that makes these attacks dangerous.

Yes. Probably the worst thing about this election for me is that it seems to demonstrate conclusively that 2016 was no aberration, no temporary mass hysteria, no failed experiment in electing a political outsider to “drain the swamp”. This distorted world view of us-vs-them tribalism seems to have totally consumed our political system. Objective reality is dismissed by the majority of the population—most blatantly on the right, but also, increasingly, on the left. Even more shocking to me, highly regarded election data scientists have twice now somehow been blinded to this, releasing poll after poll that fail to capture what is actually happening in the minds of the electorate.

Carl Sagan, in his 1995 book ‘The Demon-Haunted World’, wrote:

> I have a foreboding of an America in my children’s or grandchildren’s time — when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the key manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what’s true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness.

The moment he prophesied now appears to be upon us. I don’t know how we can restore this country to one where people mostly act in good faith and try to base decisions in science and fact. I see so many incredibly compassionate people supporting the most despicable politicians. Right-wingers on Twitter repeating false talking points that the left are trying to destroy the country while tweeting about how proud they are of local youth offering free lawn care to disabled and senior citizens. Left-wingers openly insulting rural and conservative people as the scum of the earth while relentlessly supporting policies intended to improve those same peoples’ lives. How does this happen? What do we have to do—as individuals, as nations, as humans—to get it to stop?

I think the events of the past week have really highlighted the divide, or rather the gaping chasm. And it's a gulf that seeks almost impossible to bridge, any time soon at least - it encompasses race, education, financial status, social class, even history.

Trump's actions this week have been utterly shameful. He and his cronies have lied and lied in an organised effort to sow discontent among the huge segment of republicans that appear to believe their every word (regardless of how baseless or ridiculous they may be).

It seems like such a blatant attempt to subvert democracy - the kind of thing we'd expect in a tinpot dictatorship, not the "land of the free". This is not only shameful, but downright dangerous, especially with the level of gun ownership in the US.

As a European, it seemed utterly incomprehensible how he has been able to get away with his actions, inactions and lies over the past few years - and I have not the words to describe how incomprehensible it is that many of his supporters are behind the past week's events.

was al gore utterly shameful when he contested florida? the prevailing attitude among liberals ever since is that he never should've conceded, that the bushes and the courts stole the election.

That is a very interesting point of view. I fully agree with it, I think it will be an existential threat to the country as we know it now.

Do you think that the bipartidism is to blame, amongst other factors? If there were more options then some of the most radical electorate will have their own candidate and it could help divide the support they get at the Chambers.

Also smaller parties could help in having more negotiation for bills and laws.

What country in the world could conqueror America? You would need a better blue water navy and the ability to sustain 3 thousand miles supply lines over contested waters.

As for dividing the US, I hope the lesson of this election is that you shouldn't assume what you see online is representative of the real US - otherwise it would have been a landslide for Biden.

Physical borders, yes it would be near impossible to conquer us. But our digital borders (social media) are wide open. You use the power of a beast to destroy itself.

By what measure is the US more divided than in the past?

They already are. Russia & China's tactics are not so much disinformation, but simply taking our own talking points and pushing them to us even harder.

Nah.

We’re actually at an inflection point where before white men were the elite, no question, that was what it took to get in the door outside a few congressional districts.

Now it’s still mostly that but it takes more, and due to demographic shifts it will be that less and less. The right — belatedly (far too little far too late, and quite awkwardly) — has already started outreach to Latino and black communities. They will continue but it will take a while (what an embarrassment for the party of Lincoln. FFS.).

Obama was a lighting strike to those who assumed it would always be the old way, and Trump was the response to Obama.

Fortunately, that failed (unfortunately it took hundreds of thousands of dead Americans to convince enough Michiganders, Wisconsinites, Pennsylvanians (I’m sure about “Michiganders”, being one myself, no idea on the others) but at least it happened.)

The left, quite cleverly, responded with Biden, an old white guy in the classic mold. Literally: nothing to fear here, white peeps... but with Kamala as VP — a powerless position yet a powerful symbol (especially as the VP of a VP cum President).

So It’s the changing of the guard. Republicans can no longer simply ignore black and brown people (at best) or use them as bugaboos (and then Democrats won’t be able to simply count on their votes by not actively being racist). Once the powerful engage those groups they’ll find them not to be uniform, and (hopefully) that will lead to meaningful, nuanced, deep engagement... if that happens, there will no longer be such a thing as the “black vote”. (This is further along with Latinos, where some groups aren’t too overwhelmingly for one party or the other).

So...

Not really an existential crisis, at least not to my mind. It’s real progress. We can no longer force certain groups into blocks based on whether we actively believe they should be subjugated or just kinda ignore them.

Hallelujah.

This makes sense to me.

Then the transition of power or the changing demographics you speak of will disenfranchise those once in power and that could lead to violence (think white heavily-armed men intimidating or worse those they disagree with). This is what I fear as well.

> white heavily-armed men intimidating or worse

Yes, BUT: this has already peaked. A long time ago. This started big a while ago and has had ever-weakening aftershocks... Oklahoma City, Waco, Charlottesville.

Now we’re at the stage of a flash Trump caravan maybe provoking a fender-bender and baseless lawsuits from a couple of NY goons.

It’s done.

The quicker people realize this the better. (They won’t realize it quickly, unfortunately. The champions of “conservative” right now are a porno-appearing, self-bragging pussy-grabber, and a bizarrely diminished former NY mayor who now unsuccessfully promotes conspiracy theories and is a punchline in a Borat movie.)

Why has this peaked? If you don't think there is a far-right that is suppressed, angrily stewing, and heavily armed you are living in a fantasy world. The kindling is all there, just because they have been deplatformed from mainstream social media does not mean they do not exist.

Yes, the fact that this is happening due to demographics and not positions "evolving" is obvious. Many recognize immigration as a tool to help Leftist parties all throughout the Western world. Eventually those who have been disenfranchised and blamed for all the ills have had enough it will certainly come to violence. Reactionaries really do not have to engage in "Democracy", democracy certainly does not last forever.

An amicable solution instead of civil war, or being divided and conquered: how about a national divorce?

gigatexal says>" the ever increasingly large divide that is the polarizing of the electorate. We have to come together as Americans or someone will divide and conquer us."

No way. Polarization will continue. The politics of New York and California will remain anathema to the majority in "fly-over states" (e.g., Texas, Montana, etc.) for generations. The former two states (NY, CA) will economically self-destruct long before such acceptance occurs.

> We have to come together as Americans or someone will divide and conquer us.

Pardon, but isn't USA already divided approx. 50/50?

From the outside (I'm from Norway), I can't even believe how shit the US politics is.

It used to be that reps from both sides of the isle would come together on things. Think John McCain not voting to kill Obamacare as one of his last votes before he died. There was a give and take. It seems that that is what is missing.

Political pluralism in other democratic countries seems to do a good job of countering this trend. When there's only two parties they are free to drift to ideological extremes, without other parties being able to take up the center.

> We have to come together as Americans or someone will divide and conquer us.

The problem is that the US has a historical example of what happens when the "economic engine" and the "conservative culture" reach an impasse.

The "economic engine" wins. The question is how much damage will get done until that happens.

There's no divide larger than 50/50 which is just about where it's at.

Rather than blame the left or blame the right for this, I think what we really need is a third party and Instant Runoff Voting.

US social discourse shows that people don't understand how to debate and how to negotiate with opposing views for a better outcome. These are merely group behaviours and they can change with time and education.

I feel that the first structural steps must be

1./ Replace First Past the Post (it distorts the will of the people) with some version of ranked balloting (already in use in at least one US state)

2./ Dissolve or fix/improve the Electoral College

Interestingly, tech workers are responsible for such a resilient divide. Tech workers, the most numerous demographic on this thread, are the ones coding up the bubbles or creating and maintaining their infrastructure.

The purpose of the bubbles is to keep you clicking or pressing. The purpose of that is to deliver ads or sell premium services. If uncomfortable views are presented a user may click or press out of the service. Those uncomfortable views are not to be confused with click bait allowed to drive bubble responses.

No use blaming the architects or company leaders. If you are coding it up, maintaining the infrastructure, or providing auxiliary support to the bubble, you are responsible. The companies making the bubbles can't do it without you, and you are the one actually making it happen.

how would you design away filter bubbles though? people actively seek out agreement and avoid argument even when there are no filters and barely any moderation like still begets like, see the split between /pol/ and /leftypol/.

Russia, Facebook and the media have already divided and conquered us. The conquest is over. We are just trying to collect the bits and scraps. The conqueror doesn't have to be another nation. Fox News, CNN, Twitter and Facebook are the countries that have benefited the most.

I realize this will sound snarky and/or overly aggressive. However, I'm being entirely serious and can't quickly come up with a better way to phrase this:

How do people with functioning moral compasses come together with the kind of people who see pictures of children in cages and say "America, fuck yeah?"

How do people who want some form of democratic government come together with the kind of people who think it's entirely right and proper for a president to do his best to prevent his political opponents from voting -- by disrupting the postal service, by soliciting the help of multiple hostile foreign governments to smear his opponent, calling for his opponents to be imprisoned without charge, and by attempting to halt vote counting in the courts?

How do people with any kind of respect for the value of human life watch video of the George Floyd killing and come together with the kind of people who watch the video and argue that the police did nothing wrong?

I don't think these divides can be healed. These issues are not matters, like arguments over the size of government, where compromise is both possible and mutually beneficial. Instead, they are moral red lines about which compromise is neither possible or desirable. What the 70-odd million who voted from Trump want out of their country isn't compatible with the basic moral outlook of the 75-odd million people who voted against him.

To take an extreme example, if a bunch of Nazis want to kill 10 million people, 'compromising' by agreeing to let them kill only 5 million people isn't acceptable -- and yet, this is exactly the kind of moral compromise (truly in the other sense of the word) that would be involved in bringing together Trumpist and anti-Trumpist factions.

In addition to the moral divide, there is a reality/gullibility divide between the Trumpist and anti-Trumpist factions. Trumpists believe an awful lot of stuff that is factually untrue. They reject global warming and dismiss the scientific evidence as the product of a Chinese hoax to destroy America. 56% of Republicans now believe in Qanon (an ideological conspiracy theory born out of the argument that Democrats eat babies) to some extent[0]. The overwhelming majority of Trumpists get their news from Fox, a media outlet which spreads more misleading information than accurate information.[1] How does anyone with a commitment to respecting consensus reality reach people who have chosen to live in comforting fantasyland rather than cope with the world as it is?

I don't see any way for the US to get out of this mess without breaking up into multiple countries.

And, to the usual 'downvote to -1' crowd: what part of this analysis is wrong?

[0] https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-electio...

[1] https://www.politicususa.com/2015/02/06/fact-checker-finds-6...

On the data nerd side I continue to be shocked at how people misinterpret the certainty of polls/forecasts. Forecasts give us probability distributions based on historical polling error data. Not infallible predictions the expected value will 100% happen.

It’s fairly revealing of society’s general innumeracy, just as it was 4 years ago when Trump won.

What % chance did the polls/forecast give the republicans gaining seats in the house (I actually don't know but from reading pundits it sounds like very little)? I think the interesting thing this cycle is betting markets were pretty much also at odds with pollsters/forecasts on Trump's chances, basically baking in a pro-trump (R?) polling error. Perhaps there really are issues with some of these forecasts / uncertainty estimates?

I think I only saw projections for Dems retaining control (which was high). I think GOP gaining seats was always in the cards.

I think it’s interesting too how some of the qualitative predictions (like Sabatos crystal ball) were pretty close to the outcome in the Pres race.

In just about every model, but let's use 538 as the canonical example, there was a reasonable chance for the Dems to lose seats but a very, very low chance they would lose control. We are looking at a two or three standard deviation variance from expectations for loss of control but losing seats was well within the range of outcomes that should have surprised no one.

It wasn't that little at all. Eyeballing the 538 graph it was about a 38% chance of Republicans gaining in the house? Over a one in three chance.

https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/2020-election-forecast/...

Hmm looks like 548 gave a 3% chance of R control and betting markets gave about a 15% chance on election night:

https://www.predictit.org/markets/detail/4365/Which-party-wi...

You can also try to work the probability distribution from this betting market and I'm sure they were more favorable to R than he was:

https://www.predictit.org/markets/detail/6669/How-many-House...

That's a pretty big discrepancy regardless, did he ever give an explanation as to why he disagreed with betting markets so much? Seems like betting markets had a ~ one standard deviation pro Trump/R polling error baked into their pricing.

>why he disagreed with betting markets

Because betting markets are kind of dumb? Nate Silver has uttered those words a few times, anyway.

They have a pretty long track record of being predictive.

Not in this case, clearly.

Actually i think the number of seats gained by republicans will be pretty close to the P50 of the betting market probability distribution. They seem to have done better than 538 at least there. It's impossible to verify the overall Biden/Trump victory probability mass function but you could look at state by state races and see who did better.

I don't look through these very deeply but just as an example your link shows that the highest rated prediction on Nov 1st was 242-245 which is actually higher than 538's average.

Yeah I just looked at the distribution on close of Nov 2. The modal bucket was 246+, and the p50 if you convert to a quantitative variable was about 238, which is almost right in line with 538. Ultimately I think the huge difference with betting markets v. 538 for this market was they had higher variance and fatter tails, which could possibly point to a win for 538, EVEN if 538 were legitimately biased!

https://i.imgur.com/O7UegtQ.jpg

We'll simply never know without 1000 realizations of this election but next cycle I'd like Nate Silver to bet money whenever he finds mispriced events/odds and show how much money he makes to strengthen the case that his model is an improvement.

I think the big issue was the "margin of error" in many of these cases. For example, when Quinnipiac did a poll a few days before the election [1], they said Biden was winning Ohio by 4 points with a +-2.5 point margin of error... which happened to be very far off. And this wasn't isolated-–if memory serves me, Wisconsin was even further off?

[1] https://poll.qu.edu/florida/release-detail?ReleaseID=3683

But the polls then and now weren’t just bad, they were shockingly bad and not representative of any real population that matters in an election. I’d expect something like this from junior engineers looking at metrics for the first time, but these are supposedly the most respective organizations in their field that have failed spectacularly for the second presidential election in a row. What value do they possibly serve?

Should Biden ultimately be declared the victor, I’m concerned that the public will never receive the postmortem on what went wrong and how it happened again that it deserves.

I really have no idea where this idea that the polls failed comes from. There were only two bad calls this cycle and every other outcome was within the margin of error. It was pretty much the same case in 2016 where people who had no idea what they were talking about suddenly decided they were certain polling failed because they are unable to grasp the concept of margin of error and sample size.

Polls can only guess about turnout and the try to work backwards from there. The turnout estimates were wrong but not shockingly so, and as a consequence a lot of polls ended up having the result be at the far end of their margin of error. Nothing went wrong. Polling is hard. Get over this idea that you can have some sort of certainty regarding an election until we actually hold the election.

I know they were within the margin of error, but the polls were all systematically within the margin of error in the same direction. Did a single poll that was wrong predict at GOP win and end up a Democratic win?

Yes.

I can’t find that via Google. Help me out here.

"poll predicted Trump win" brings back a number of results for me, including https://www.express.co.uk/news/world/1354506/us-election-202...

Ah sorry, I was thinking of down ballot races and polls that would have had enough reputation to make it into the Economist or 538 polling averages. I'll do some more searching.

The DI poll is basically a push poll with questions like "Who do you believe is telling the truth about alleged Biden family corruption?”

https://democracyinstitute.org/poll-donald-trump-set-to-win-...

That has happened in basically every election. Errors in polls tend to be correlated across states. If they were independent, 538 would have been predicting a ~0% chance of Trump winning instead of ~10%.

If you look at RCP's polling average for Clinton in 2016, she outperformed that average for just about every race.

But, what the pollsters got crazy wrong, was Trumps polling numbers, by wide margins, far outside the margin of error.

I think they got it wrong this time too, and I think it all comes down to their methodology for actually getting a random sample of voters. Many polls are still married to live interviews and also to landline contact, and also tied to live interview polling - I think there is a partisan slant that they are not accounting for that includes a "propensity to answer a polling survey in the first place"

> I think there is a partisan slant that they are not accounting for that includes a "propensity to answer a polling survey in the first place"

They're well aware of that slant, and try their damndest to correct for it. But apparently they just don't have a good model of how large or how volatile that propensity attribute is, and how it relates to political leanings.

I was polled this year. One of the first questions I was asked is if I was answering the call on a landline or on a cell phone. They weight those differently. Also of course my basic demographic info (wage, race, marital status, education level, home ownership status, etc.)

I think your whole comment is correct, but instead of not accounting for the propensity factor, they do... just badly :)

I have no idea what the solution is to this. Maybe there isn't one, and instead we can get a silver-lining effect: If people trust the results of polls less, they're hopefully less likely to think the results are preordained. More voter turnout?

>I think your whole comment is correct, but instead of not accounting for the propensity factor, they do... just badly :)

In particular, Trump was extremely critical of polls and mail-in voting, and we have pretty much confirmed that his statements caused his supporters to avoid mail-in voting, so it's not too much of a leap to suggest the same thing happened with polls. Notably, this is a different effect from 2016, where IIRC Trump appealed to "non-likely" voters whose responses were inappropriately discounted.

> I have no idea what the solution is to this.

It is a solution that has its own problems, but mandatory voting would solve this problem. The polling failures are primarily in trying to weight the sample that you manage to capture in a way that reflects the actual turnout on election day. If everyone is forced to vote then you eliminate the RV/LV problem and pollsters would only need to make sure their sample was representative of the population at large.

Typical. Silent protest is the _most_ fundamental form of speech, how shocking that the extreme left wouldn't like it.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23548802

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20141336

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20117157

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19751970

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19743834

Are the Uncle Police OK with silent protest? http://v6y.net/unclepolice.mp4

I think the main problem is that some forecasts gave an overwhelming amount of “hope” for certain races. This costs real money, as political operatives make decisions on where to spend money based on these forecasts. The closer a race is, the more likely more money will help shift the race.

Unfortunately you cannot just wish away the cause-effect here. Did Democrats piss away a hundred million in South Carolina on a race Jamie Harrison was never going to win, or did Jamie Harrison get within striking distance because of that money and was the investment in party infrastructure and training of lower-level party coordinators going to pay off over the next decade? Texas did not turn blue, but the effort spent on Beto's race and now on MJ Hagar may build down-ticket strength and knowledgeable people who may end up turning the state in a few more cycles.

When I grew up California and Virginia were red states, and I am sure people then also said money spent there was not going to move the needle and was a waste. When you have a billion+ to spend on races sometimes a little hope now pays off in a decade or two even if you lose this race.

California hasn't had 2 Republican Senators at the same time since 1971. California became Democrat when the Republican Party realigned to the Southern Strategy, not because of campaigning.

Prior to 1992 the only time California had two Democratic senators was post-Watergate and then prior to that single term for Tunney you have to go all the way back to 1863 to get two Dem senators. California had frequently elected Republican governors (including one who went on to become president), had house delegations that were majority Republican for stretches of time, and except for Johnson's win in 1964 CA was a solid batch of electors for the Republican presidential candidate up until Clinton.

CA was a Republican state from the late 19th century up until the 1990s.

One could argue the strategic mistakes of the Clinton campaign (ignoring the rust belt) and near fatal mistakes of the Biden campaign (which looks to be on issues swinging voters in battleground states) were driven by bad polling.

When I hear the conversation about "the polls were wrong" it's never been "the predictions were outside the error margin" so much as "voter sentiment was not accurately measured in regions where voters were most likely to flip and why they would do so."

My issue with polling is that many races were well beyond the margin of error. The Senate polling in particular was bad this year.

Sara Gideon was favored to win the Maine race in the polling, because there hadn't been a single poll showing Collins in the lead since July. She lost her race by 9 points.

It's also strange to see the region makes a difference in the poll error. The polls in Minnesota were basically spot-on, but in Wisconsin (demographically very similar), the polling average was Biden +8, with one ABC news poll showing him +17, the kind of outlier result you'd expect with a +8 average. He's gonna win there by ~1 percentage point.

There's something wrong with how a lot of these pollsters determine samples, or how they judge someone's likeliness to vote.

it's not just polls that are wrong but likely this premature projection as well, tens of thousands of provisioned and military ballots are still not counted. Recounts are still to happen in most swing states. Lawsuits are pending.

I wouldn't be surprised Trump actually wins.

Everyone would be surprised if Trump wins, because at this point it is so mathematically improbable that even gun-shy decision desks at major news networks are able to make the call without fearing they will look like idiots. Recounts have never moved a state election more than a thousand votes that I am aware of and Trump is behind by tens of thousands in the states that matter. Lawsuits won't do anything, because no on has standing to prevent someone else from legitimately voting according to the rules in place at the time of election, nor of preventing someone else from counting those votes as legally mandated.

Trump lost, get over it.

> Lawsuits won't do anything

Lawsuits could definitely do something.

If there is fraud or misconduct, that can matter. Hell, the US spent two years investigating some Facebook ads and hackers.

But right now there's no clear indication that will in fact happen.

Elections are run by the states and so in almost all instances the federal courts will defer to the state courts when it comes to things like determination of fact. So far there has been no evidence of either fraud or misconduct and the thin claims put up so far have been laughed out of court. Lacking any claims of fraud or misconduct the only other option is to somehow be able to prove a miscount and since everyone learned their lesson with the hanging chads of the butterfly ballots this is exceedingly unlikely. With no claims to be made by anyone with standing the states are on a clock in terms of exercising their Article 2 powers.

On the first Monday after the second Wednesday in December (Dec 14) the electors are going to meet in the respective state capitals, whereupon they will cast their votes and attach six copies of their vote to six Certificates of Ascertainment which will go to the president of the Senate (Chuck Grassley), two to the national archivist (David Ferriero), and then one to their secretary of state and one to the chief justice of whatever federal district their state it in. Voila! Now at 12:01 on the 20th of January anyone, even you, could deliver the oath of office to Joe Biden and swear him in as the 46th president.

> Elections are run by the states and so in almost all instances the federal courts will defer to the state courts when it comes to things like determination of fact.

Yes.

It’s not just military ballots. I believe it’s also ex-pats. These may counterbalance each other.

well, as dems liked to say until this morning "count every vote".

Biden's margins are hair thin.

Biden is leading in most states by more votes than there are outstanding ballots; that does not really qualify as hair thin. The margin may be small in a few states, but it is large enough in a sufficient collection of states right now that while we keep counting every last vote we also know that Trump lost.

Want to bet?

It was both the sample (read actual reports from pollsters on how hard it is to get a sample these days... people DO NOT want to participate in polls) and an underestimate of the number of voters the Republicans would get to the polls. If your LV model is wrong you are really flying blind and for various reasons both parties activated a ton of voters this cycle so we had an electorate that no one was able to model well. The last time this large of an electorate turned out (in terms of percentage of eligible voters) they were deciding between William McKinley and William Jennings Bryan.

> It was both the sample (read actual reports from pollsters on how hard it is to get a sample these days... people DO NOT want to participate in polls) and an underestimate of the number of voters the Republicans would get to the polls.

Exactly, polling is very difficult, and getting even more so.

I was polled a few years ago by Gallup or Pew (or one of the other well known ones). The call was from an unknown number and I took it. No way I'd do that now with all the robocalls.

Is it possible that the projections themselves affected the outcome? If people saw that they had a comfortable lead, they wouldn't be as motivated to turnout.

Then the polling results might ironically be more accurate if people believed in them less.

Yes they can affect the outcome, but the opposite direction than you described. People who feel their candidate is doomed to lose don't turn out. People like to vote for a winner.

edit: To be clear, when polls overwhelmingly suggest a landslide, it suppresses votes from both sides. But a much higher proportion of the losing side will choose not to vote, thus inflating the gap.

If you dig into the the margins they aren't looking very good, even if they got a fair number of eventual winners correct.

Predicted vs Actual (FiveThirtyEight's averages vs NYTimes' current tally; Biden's margin is positive)

PA: +4.7% vs +.5% (-4.2%)

FL: +2.5 vs -3.4 (-5.9)

TX: -1.5 vs -5.9 (-4.4)

OH: -0.6 vs -8.1 (-7.5)

PA: +4.7 vs +0.5 (-4.2)

IA: -1.5 vs -8.2 (-6.7)

NC: +1.7 vs -1.4 (-3.1)

WI: +8.3 vs +0.6 (-7.7)

GA: +0.9 vs +0.1 (-.8)

MI: +8.0 vs +2.6 (-5.4)

AZ: +2.6 vs +0.6 (-2.0)

NV: +6.2 vs +2.0 (-4.2)

They pretty consistently overpredicted Biden's margin by about 4-7% in almost all of the swing states. Even if that's within, or close to, the margin of error; there's a systemic issue if it's happening in almost every state.

Edit: Added AZ and NV; and the difference

^ Exactly.

The polls were at least as wrong in 2016, even if that error was less significant this time (because the polled margin started out bigger).

Pollsters and poll-watchers downplaying this is not a good sign for future improvement.

EDIT: Overall though, I'm not sure that's a loss. People pay way more attention to polls than they should anyway.

This is such a damning list.

At some point, reporting on polls when they have this bad of a track-record serves no journalistic purpose and just confuses the public. Like, the discussions people were having in the days before the election about Biden's strength barely resembles reality.

I respect FiveThirtyEight and their work, and I do think they're intellectually honest and generally speaking good at their jobs. But they can only be as good as their sources, and when the sources are this terrible, they shouldn't be reported on this, and not given the statistical and scientific sheen of authenticity 538 gives them. Like, that site is starting to have a net negative influence on the world, and when that is the case with a journalistic institution, what are you even doing?

> I respect FiveThirtyEight and their work, and I do think they're intellectually honest and generally speaking good at their jobs.

But 538 chooses how to weight the polls. For example, they only gave Rasmussen (which was far closer on these) a C rating, preferring less accurate polls.

FWIW, their articles clearly lean left [1], IDK if that affects their analysis/forecasts.

[1] https://www.adfontesmedia.com/interactive-media-bias-chart-2... similar to WaPo

Boy, that rear view mirror makes criticism a whole bunch easier, doesn’t it? :)

One of the things that's annoying about 538 is that they don't admit they're wrong. The excuse they keep repeating is that "1 in 10 chance Trump can win. That's about the same chance as rain in LA, but it does rain in LA!". 538 seems to have forgotten in their condenscencion is that we are not look at you to explain the odds. We are looking at you to provide an accurate probability estimate. Their defense is completely ridiculous. I follow betting odds which had Biden/Trump at 60/40 split before the election day - what's the point of polling when you can look at people putting money on the line, let the incentives work for you.

They provided the probability distribution. The fact that you can’t handle math and need some sort of absolute certainty for a future event is not 538’s problem.

I am questioning - why even bother?

It's not like we do elections every month to test out their probability distribution against empirical data. The distribution collapses into a binary outcome at the end.

I have a dice. I claim the distribution is of equal outcome for each side. Well...we don't get to test the dice more than once. 1 sample size does not prove that the 538's predictions were right (or wrong).

Thanks for assuming I can't do math, no way to argue with someone but I am actually pretty bad at it. :-)

Everyone is bad at probability and statistical distributions, not just you. The problem with modeling elections is that there are so few of them and the data is very noisy and until quite recently rather suspect. Let's not pretend that this was a normal election, either in the candidates running or in the manner in which the campaign and election was conducted.

As to the question of why bother, it is because bad polling is better than no polling at all. Campaigns are now multi billion dollar enterprises managing tens of thousands of temporary employees for the creation of a product that will only be sold once and in 18+ months from when they start the process. Any data is better than nothing.

The fact that the public has become obsessed with polls is probably due to the ongoing nationalization of politics.

Here is a guy who is fairly good at math saying that the polls did in fact fail:

https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2020/11/04/dont-kid-y...

https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2020/11/07/what-would...

Ah yes. Mr 'let me tell you why Nate is wrong' Gelman, who is now Mr 'let me tell you why the fact that I missed bigger than Nate is not my fault and in fact is entirely the fault of these other people' Gelman. Forgive me if I find his excuses laughable, but I guess if it makes him feel better about himself we can humour him. He even manages to choke his first rant by missing once again on EV and vote percentages.

Whatever your complaint about Gelman is, I don't think "he can't handle math" is very convincing.

That's a bit strong for what Gelman said. I'm a big fan of Gelman (and learned from his books!), but he specifically mentioned that both Gelman et al's Model and 538's Model did indeed capture the outcomes in their probability distributions, but that to improve performance going forward it was much better to predict closer to the median than closer to the tails. (And funny enough, Gelman gave 538 some grief earlier on making a model with very wide tails.) This is a nuanced but very fair criticism, and taking a Twitter-style summary of it I think is overly reductionist.

it's not one single election -- it's consistent failure over multiple state elections, by large margins, all in the same direction -- which falls beyond any reasonable probability

I don't think much of evgen's unreasonable personal attack. But 538 isn't necessarily claiming that the per-state error will be normally distributed around their predictions.

I don't know the specifics of their model, but probably they are claiming "with these polls, the probability of this outcome is...". The polls being consistently biased doesn't tell us much about 538s model. They said Biden would almost surely win and despite a massive surprise in favour of Trump, Biden won.

And even if Biden lost, 10% upsets in presidential are expected to happen once every 10 elections like this one.

> But 538 isn't necessarily claiming that the per-state error will be normally distributed around their predictions.

If per-state error isn't normally distributed, that's evidence of bias, or bad polling.

Yep. But 538 does not run polls.

The inputs it uses to spit out probabilities is known to be bad. Any scientist or researcher who claimed to get valid results from known bad inputs would be ridiculed.

Science does not require an unbiased sample from a normal distribution to work. Bias is a technical term that the field of statistics is very comfortable working with. Scientists can also often get good results out of biased inputs.

538 has corrections for bias already. They seem to have worked in this instance - I repeat myself but: massive surprise, Biden still president.

> 538 has corrections for bias already. They seem to have worked in this instance

See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25017810

You are pointing at evidence that 538 correctly called 11/12 races using statistics, and their confident call on a Biden president withstood a 4-7% swing (!!).

The existence of bias doesn't invalidate their predictions. Everyone knows that polls can be badly off target in a biased way - that isn't a new phenomenon.

When they talk about X% chance of Y being president they should be optimising to the outcome, not the margins.

To offer a concrete example here, survery respondents are often biased based on who actually sees and fills out a survey. A common technique used to overcome this non-representative sample is called post-stratification. There are, of course, limits to post stratification especially in instances of low sample sizes, but techniques to overcome issues with data are well known.

Not necessarily. Errors, like outcomes, are not independently distributed in US elections. Politics are intertwined and expecting errors and votes to be independent on a state (or even county) basis is overly simplistic. This is also what makes modelling US elections so difficult.

Sampling errors are random, and expected. Other types of misses are not simple "errors" but polling flaws, like sampling a non-representative group, ignoring non-responders or assuming they break the same as the responders, asking poorly-worded questions, etc.

Occasional flaws in polling is understandable and tolerated. But when those misses repeatedly line up the same way, and are rather sizeable, that's evidence of either systematic flaws, or outright bias.

I'm not sure what a "sampling error" is. To echo the sibling poster, per-state sentiment is not normally distributed. For example, we know Trump is more popular among white men than other demographics. This means that if we were to create a random variable that reflected the sentiment of white men throughout the US, we would (probably though I'd have to dig deeper into the data) presume to see a higher median vote count in this demographic. However, we cannot say that Trump's popularity in Massachusetts is independent from his popularity in New York, because his popularity in the white male demographic is the dependent variable between both random variables.

> I'm not sure what a "sampling error" is.

Perhaps you shouldn't be commenting on polling then.

I was discussing in good faith, so I'm not sure why you chose to be snarky. Let's clarify here, I'm not sure what "sampling error" in this case would be, such that it is distinct from electoral trends at large. The random variables in question _are_ demographic groups. How is it meaningful to discuss sampling error if your assumption is that state and county data is independently distributed? The poll data that Gelman et al used is public data, I urge you to take a look and work with it.

> If per-state error isn't normally distributed, that's evidence of bias, or bad polling.

No!

Assuming the per-state error would be normally distributed in some neutral world is making huge assumptions about the nature of the electorate, polling, and the correlations of errors between states, you can't do that! You would specifically /not/ expect per-state error to be evenly distributed because the nature of the error would have similar impacts on similar populations and there are similar populations of people that live in different states in differing numbers.

You should review the literature about the nature of the (fairly small) polling misses that impacted the swing states and thus disproportionately the outcome in the 2016 election. You will probably find it interesting.

Yes!

There are unavoidable, expected, sampling errors which are, by definition, random. That's why valid, trusted polls calculate a confidence interval instead of a single discrete result.

Other types of "errors" -- election results that repeatedly fall outside the confidence interval, or are consistently on only one side of the mean -- only arise when the poll is flawed for some reason. Maybe you relied on landlines only, maybe you spoke with too many men, or too many young people, asked bad questions, miscalculated "likely voter," whatever. Accurate, valid, trusted polls don't have these flaws, the ONLY errors are small, random, expected sampling errors.

> That's why valid, trusted polls calculate a confidence interval instead of a single discrete result.

That is what each of these statistical models did, yes. And the actual outcomes fell into these confidence intervals.

> Other types of "errors" -- election results that repeatedly fall outside the confidence interval, or are consistently on only one side of the mean -- only arise when the poll is flawed for some reason.

Or the model was inaccurate. Perhaps the priors were too specific. Perhaps the data was missing, misrecorded, not tabulated properly, who knows. Again, the results fell within the CI of most models, the problem was simply that the result fell too close to the mean for most statisticians' comfort.

Landed within the confidence interval? Are you kidding? CI is generally 2-4 points in these election polls.

- Texas: 538 said Trump +1.0, actually won by 6

- Ohio: Trump +0.4, won by 8

- Iowa: Trump +1.4, won by 8

- Florida: Trump -2.5, won by 3

- Penn.: Trump -4.6, lost by 0.5

- Nevada: Trump -4.9, lost by 2

- Wisconsin: Trump -7.9, lost by 0.6

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

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/11/03/us/elections/...

> Landed within the confidence interval? Are you kidding? CI is generally 2-4 points in these election polls.

The models and their data are public. The 538 model predicted an 80%CI of electoral votes for Biden as: 267-419, with the CI centered around 348.49 EVs. That means that Biden had an 80% chance of landing in the above confidence interval. Things seem to be shaking out to Biden winning with 297 EVs. Notice that this falls squarely within the CI of the model, but much further from the median of the CI than expected.

So yes, the results fell within the CI.

Drilling into Florida specifically (simply because I've been playing around with Florida's data), the 538 model predicts an 80%CI of Biden winning 47.55%-54.19% of the vote. Biden lost Florida, and received 47.8% of the vote. Again, note that this is on the left side of this CI but still within it. The 538 model was correct, the actual results just resided in its left tail.

Dude, you're gaslighting by using the national results as evidence instead of the individual states, which is what this has always been about since my original comment. Nearly every consequential state fell at, or beyond, the tail end of 538's confidence interval (BTW, who uses 80%? and not 90-95%?), on the same side. A bit closer to the mean in AZ and GA but same side, over-estimating Biden's margin of victory. Deny it all you want, gaslight, cover your eyes, whatever -- but clear, convincing, overwhelming evidence of a systematic flaw or bias in the underlying polls is right there in front of you.

Many political handicappers had predicted that the Democrats would pick up three to 15 seats, growing their 232-to-197 majority

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/house-races/2020/11/...

Entering Election Day, forecasters projected Democrats would gain House seats and challenge for the Senate majority.

https://www.cnbc.com/2020/11/05/2020-election-results-democr...

Most nonpartisan handicappers had long since predicted that Democrats were very likely to win the majority on November 3. "Democrats remain the clear favorites to take back the Senate with just days to go until Election Day," wrote the Cook Political Report's Senate editor Jessica Taylor on October 29.

https://www.cnn.com/2020/11/04/politics/2020-election-senate...

> Nearly every consequential state fell at, or beyond, the tail end of 538's confidence interval

While I haven't checked each and every individual state, I'm pretty sure they all fell within the CI. Tail end yes, but within the CI.

> (BTW, who uses 80%? and not 90-95%?)

... The left edge of the 80% CI shows a Biden loss. The point was 538's model was not any more confident than that about a Biden win. So yeah, not the highest confidence.

> Deny it all you want, gaslight, cover your eyes, whatever -- but clear, convincing, overwhelming evidence of a systematic flaw or bias in the underlying polls is right there in front of you.

Posting a bunch of media articles doesn't prove anything. I'm not saying there isn't systemic bias here, but your argument is simply that you wanted the polls to be more accurate and you wanted the media to write better articles about uncertainty. There's no rigorous definition of "systemic bias" here that I can even try to prove through data, all you've done is post links. You seem to be more angry at the media coverage than the actual model, but that's not the same as the model being incorrect.

Anyway I think there's no more for us to gain here by talking. Personally, I never trust the media on anything even somewhat mathematical. They can't even get pop science right, how can they get something as important as an election statistical model correct.

>That is what each of these statistical models did, yes. And the actual outcomes fell into these confidence intervals.

The CI is due to sampling error, not model error. If the error of the estimate is due to sampling error, the estimate should be randomly distributed about true value. When the estimate is consistently biased in one direction, that's modelling error, which the CI does not capture.

> If the error of the estimate is due to sampling error

What does "estimate" mean here? Gelman's model is a Bayesian one, and 538 uses a Markov Chain model. In these instances, what would the "estimate" be? In a frequentist model, yes, you come up with an ML (or MAP or such) estimate, and if the ML estimate is incorrect, then there probably is an issue with the model, but neither of these models use a single estimate. Bayesian methods are all about modelling a posterior, and so the CI is "just" finding which parts of the posterior centered around the median contain the area of your CI.

I'm not saying that there isn't model error or sampling error or both. I'm just saying we don't know what caused it yet.

> Accurate, valid, trusted polls don't have these flaw

Yes, they do. Because (among many other reasons) humans have a choice whether or not to respond, you can't do an ideal random sample subject to only sampling error for a poll. All polls have non-sampling error on top of sampling error, it is impossible not to.

when polls don't match up with reality, as they didn't in 2016, the pollsters have a responsibility to re-calibrate the way they conduct the poll. Ask different questions, find new ways of obtaining respondents from all demographics, adjust raw data, etc. A professional pollster doesn't just get to say, hey, some people didn't want to talk to me ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

> when polls don't match up with reality, as they didn't in 2016, the pollsters have a responsibility to re-calibrate the way they conduct the poll.

Pollsters do that for continuously, and there were definite recalibrations in the wake of 2016.

OTOH, the conditions which produce non-sampling errors aren't static, and it's impossible to reliably even measure the aggregate of non-sampling error in any particular event (because sampling error exists, and while it's statistical distribution can be computed the actual error attributable to it in a by particular event can't be, so you never no how much actual error is due to non-sampling error much less any particular source of non-sampling error.)

"There are unavoidable, expected, sampling errors which are, by definition, random."

This is false, if you think sampling errors are "by definition random" you don't understand polling.

Which is fine, just accept that you don't and dig into the literature or move on.

I'm not sure that's quite fair. They do write some excellent retrospectives and admit when they made mistakes, at least more so than almost any other news outlet I've seen:

https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-real-story-of-2016/

https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/how-i-acted-like-a-pund...

https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/what-i-got-wrong-in-201...

https://fivethirtyeight.com/videos/what-harry-got-wrong-in-2...

I have noticed them getting a bit more defensive recently which is irritating, but I think they are honest. There's only so much "garbage in garbage out" they can compensate for. If this ends up at +74 EV, which is where it looks to be heading, it'll be "Z=-.6" prediction (not actually normally distributed, but it's the easy calculation) prediction, meaning 27% of the outcomes were more Trump. It's not great, but I appreciate them giving a realistic model.

Thanks for these, I've been following it for last few months.

Nate Silver still makes fun of Betting odds: https://twitter.com/NateSilver538/status/1325186985988935680

I don't see him posting how the Bettfair was way more accurate than his polls.

I also get that Nate Silver doesnt poll himself, but he aggreates polling information, assign grades and mixes it into his formula. I just have zero trust in it. It's not like we get to test his predictions often. 1 sample size every 4 years.

Biden got out to around $4-$5 during election night. I wouldn’t put much weight in the betting when it appeared to fail to account for the expected composition of postal votes. Trump should have been at best a slight favorite before the effect of the postals started showing in the counts.

And why do you think they failed to provide an accurate probability estimate?

If I tell you that the odds of your dice roll being a 6 is only 16%, and you roll a 6, does that mean I failed to provide an accurate probability estimate?

The only way to judge the accuracy of a probabilistic model, is by quantifying the weighted error across numerous predictions. Not by looking at two yes/no outcomes. This is the exact point they are trying to get across, which you wrote off as annoying.

You do raise an interesting point about the betting markets - I too am very curious about whether they have a better track record than people like Nate Silver. Looking forward to someone analyzing their relative accuracy over a large sample of independent elections.

I saw predictit.org swing from pro Biden the morning of the election, to Trump in the afternoon, to Biden the next morning, so it seemed they were as confused as anyone.

They also didn't seem very aware that mail votes (leaning Biden) would likely be counted after in person votes (leaning Trump), which 538 had been predicting would cause a temporary pro-Trump lean for ages.

If you roll that same die 10 times and you get a 6 each time, then we can say that your probability estimate was wrong. But that's what happened with the polling of these states. The fact that the estimates consistently overestimated the Biden vote points towards a bias in the model used to estimate likely voters. If this were just a matter of the margin of error at work, each pull at the lever (each state) should be randomly distributed around the estimate. But that wasn't the case.

> If you roll that same die 10 times and you get a 6 each time, then we can say that your probability estimate was wrong. But that's what happened with the polling of these states.

The 538 model is explicitly based on the assumption that the state-polling errors are correlated to one another to some extent. Ie, if Trump performs better-than-expected in OH, he will likely perform better-than-expected in FL as well. This is why they rated Trump's chances as being 0.1, not 0.1^8. Given how polling works, this is exactly the right assumption to make.

Hence my earlier comment that if you want to evaluate the accuracy of 538 or any other model, you need to evaluate it across numerous different elections/events, over an extended period of time. Not a single day of elections in a single country.

This is kind of missing the point. The issue is the bias in the state-level polls. 538's model is to predict the winner of the election based on state polling data from other sources. The state level predictions are just averages of polls presumably weighted by quality. But this averaging cannot remove bias in the polls if that same bias is in many polls.

538 is a poll aggregator, not a pollster. If the polls are systemically wrong, which is what is being alleged above, there is <explicative> all that 538 can do to fix that.

Yes, I’ve been following 538 for a while now. They also grade each pollster.

The point is - 538’s input is a bunch of polls, their output is a prediction. Whether they do the polls or aggregate them is not relevant - they’re analysts whose job is to provide accurate estimates.

You can’t shift the blame on inaccurate underlying polls - Nate has time and again said, they look at many aspects in their estimates. Not just polls.

They look at many aspects at the beginning of the race. By the end these other aspects, the “fundamentals”, are purposefully dialed down to 0 and all that remains is an aggregate of polls. This is based on a theory that polls should be more accurate the closer you get to Election Day because voters have less time people have to change their minds. If those polls are systemically wrong, then there is nothing 538 can do to fix that; it’s a literal garbage in garbage out moment.

Looking at trends, which is easy to do on real clear politics, you could have seen the Senate was going to be extremely close, and the presidency, while not the blowout everyone expected thanks to 538, would still favor Biden. Here's one forecast that was arguably closer than 538: https://www.270towin.com/

The polls did tighten at the end, but you can't just look at a snapshot (even near the end) to account for the trend. In all of these states the polls narrowed in some, but the final results were within MoE:

FL: https://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/2020/president/fl/f...

PA: https://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/2020/president/pa/p...

NV: https://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/2020/president/nv/n...

AZ: https://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/2020/president/az/a...

GA: https://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/2020/president/ga/g...

NC: https://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/2020/president/nc/n...

In Iowa the Des Moines Register poll had Trump at +7, which is within MoE, the rest were garbage: https://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/2020/president/ia/i...

In Ohio, none of polls were within MoE, so all of the polls there were garbage: https://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/2020/president/oh/o...

For the Senate I think North Carolina was wrong everywhere I looked, but 75/25 for Democratic control at 538 was the most wrong I think: https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/final-2020-senate-forec... https://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/2020/senate/2020_el... https://www.270towin.com/2020-senate-election/consensus-2020...

You can go state by state[1] to see which polls were more/less accurate within MoE compared to the final result and the trends in each state. 538 had a better chance of Biden winning by 400+! EVs [2], than the 306 he's likely to win with. It's this distribution that could have been better at accounting for severe polling errors in some states.

538 did do CYA posts[3], but here while bringing forward the error from 2016 in Ohio seems right, it still projects a win of 335+ EVs. Optimistic for Biden is the kind way of saying what the final 538 projection were, severely more wrong than individual polls is more accurate. If their distribution in [2] was better, I would be more willing to give them a pass.

[1] click on the state: https://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/2020/president/2020...

[2] "Every outcome in our simulations" https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/2020-election-forecast/

[3] "What if polls are as wrong as 2016? Biden still wins" https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/trump-can-still-win-but... https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/im-here-to-remind-you-t...

538 does make adjustments based on what they think are biases in individual polls. So they can't blame it all on their sources. They've taken on some responsibility to evaluate those sources and adjust their model accordingly. The polls had significant bias, and 538 failed to fully adjust for it.

I am reminded of all the times in the last four years (really my entire adult life) where during policy discussions of any magnitude the ultimate “kill” for an idea is “but it’s only popular with $small_number of the vote” or “but poll after poll shows it as a losing position.” It’s used as a cudgel to push out things that would actually make people feel their government is doing things with impunity. Donald Trump’s approval rating rarely if ever dipped below ~43% (with the usual and huge error bars) and consequently republicans reported they couldn’t go against him ever because of the polls. “Spending political capital” is a concept where a ruling party takes unpopular actions/enacts unpopular law because it’ll only push their approvals toward their long run averages.

I think this needs to be a serious topic of discussion. After this administration, “governing by polling firm” seems disingenuous at best and outright detrimental to all involved.

There definitely seems to have been systemic error. Note though that many of these states are likely to rise by 0.5-1.0% as they finish counting ballots.

And its actually much worse in most of the states that voted for Trump. IIRC MO was +8ish Trump in the polling and ended up +16 in the election

Obviously, the focus is on the presidential polling, but I wonder if polling is off by the same amount when there are polls regarding what Americans want or think about any given topic.

There are tons of sources of systematic error in a "strange year" election plus a "nontraditional incumbent".

One of the most plausible ones mentioned by Nate was the fact that people who wfh weré more likely to be reached by pollsters this year, and may skew D.

I wonder if fear of being outed as a Trump supporter prevents pro-Trump people from responding to these polls, contributing to the skew towards Biden.

There's definitely a demographic who voted for Trump, but aren't open about it for social reasons.

That wouldn't explain why the polls were off in the Maine Senate race by 10 points though...

One thing I found interesting about the final polling averages was that they were much more correct about Biden's share of the vote, even when they were very wrong about the margin itself (since these polls don't add to 100%, that's possible). See below for the 538 polling average vs. the current NYT tally (% for Biden):

PA: 50.2% vs 49.7%

FL: 49.1% vs 47.8%

TX: 47.4% vs 46.3%

OH: 46.8% vs 45.2%

IA: 46.3% vs 44.9%

NC: 48.9% vs 48.6%

WI: 52.1% vs 49.5%

MI: 51.2% vs 50.5%

GA: 48.5% vs 49.3%

AZ: 48.7% vs 48.9%

NV: 49.7% vs 49.9%

Most are within ~1% or so (some for Biden, some for Trump) with some outliers being Wisconsin (-2.6%), Ohio (-1.6%) and Iowa (-1.4%) in Trump's favor still not being so far off (relative to margins of error).

I'm not sure what that "missing" bit in the polls really means (undecided?) but it seems the issue was that that bit of the electorate ended up going entirely for Trump in many places.

(edit: had the PA 538 # wrong)

That's really interesting, I hadn't sliced it that way yet.

I know FiveThirtyEight allocates undecideds evenly - if 8% respond undecided they assume 4% will break Biden and 4% will break Trump. In one of the podcasts they discussed this assumption and it's what they have found to be the most accurate historically.

We might be seeing a shift towards that no longer being true - maybe 75% break red and 25% break blue now.

Edit: Also, It looks like Jorgensen (Libertarian) significantly underperformed her polling (~3% > ~1%) in the first few states I spot checked. If those voters broke for Trump, that makes up about 2% of the error. That'd take a lot more in depth checking though.

Probably worth noting that the asymmetric break of the undecideds in 2016 was what won the election for Trump. There were a lot of undecided voters and a lot of them decided for Trump late in the process so models that assumed a traditional 50-50 split were wrong.

It breaks against the least popular. Clinton was a known unpopular. Now that everyone knows Trump, he was the least popular.

Or they were decided and weren't forthright about it.

But you didn't actually show the margin of error. In any case, I think I'd take this argument more seriously in an article of its own, rather than on a back-and-forth forum like this. Not enough opportunities to request and provide context.

This exactly. If there's one thing all my physics and math teachers burned into my head, it's that a number without an error is meaningless.

Florida for examples may be off by 8 points, but 538 gave Trump a 1/3 chance of winning, so it was well within the error. What people don't realize is that the error on polls are pretty damn big, and elections in modern times have been extremely close. Like most of the swing states come down to under 100k votes / 1%. It's insane how close these rates are, and no polls will ever have any chance at predicting things like that.

You wasted your efforts by comparing a point estimate of a probability distribution with the actual outcome of the single election day.

Not only that, 538 gave Trump a 1/3 chance of winning Florida, so it's not a surprise at all, and all things considered now that the votes are almost final, 1/10 chance for Trump to win seems reasonable. But as you mention, there's no way to figure out what the true probability was.

The bigger mistake here though is looking at the mean and ignoring the error on those values. 538 is fairly conservative in their calculations and their error bars are pretty big, so almost all of these results are well within their error bars.

At least in the circles I’m familiar with, there is open discussion about faking answers to pollsters because of how much the media is distrusted.

The problem is even these have narrowed as votes have counted. PA might be ~1 point victory. Many of these have shrunk. We can't really say what the 'actual' is until all the votes are counted.

The polls showed that Biden would win Florida by 2.2%, and in fact he lost by 3.3%. Is 5% within the normal error margin?

There is no reason that polls would be significantly different from the final vote results in most circumstances, if they are competently run.

https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/polls/florida/

What does "competent" mean if none is competent? Are engineers incompetent because they can't put a person on Mars?

Sure, if some engineers told you "we are putting this person on Mars with a 99.9 probability", and the rocket in fact reaches Venus, the engineers are incompetent.

Also, polling in most European countries doesn't go this far wrong, on almost all polls. So it's not like "accurate polling is impossible", it's just the polls in the US that seem to have some problem (though there have been some spectacular failures in other countries as well, which itself may lead to some thoughts on the value of polls in general).

> polling in most European countries doesn't go this far wrong, on almost all polls.

Brexit and UK elections would like to have a word with you...

Polling everywhere sucks. Pick a country and chances are it either has no polling to speak of or else it has the same problems.

YouGov are pretty good, mostly because they grew up in the Internet Age.

But I agree with your general point.

> There is no reason that polls would be significantly different from the final vote results in most circumstances, if they are competently run.

There is lots of reason.

If you could wave your magic wand and get a representative sample of voters in your poll you would be right, but you can't. Instead you do something like call people on a telephone, get a sample of people who both answer the telephone and who give answers you think indicate they are likely to vote. That sample isn't going to be at all representative of the voting population, so you take your best guess at what the actual voting population looks like, and how representative each of the people in your sample is of the voting population, and weight it accordingly.

Your best guess at the actual voting population is probably wrong. Your best guess at how representative each person in your sample is of the actual voting population is wrong. Your doing things like assuming that every <race> person with <education level> votes similarly regardless of whether or not they answer the telephone and respond to pollsters because you really just don't have a better option.

Then why are they repeated ad nauseam?

Polling is hard and the result are likely non-representative. Great! Then don’t display them to the public and have pollsters in interviews acting as if their insight is in any way valuable to most people. They’re either incompetently wrong or, worse, intentionally manipulative.

Just because something exists doesn’t mean it has value in the wrong context.

Just because something isn't perfect doesn't mean it has no value. Polls communicate experts best guess at how the vote is going to turn out based on the data they have collected. It's likely to be a lot more accurate than a non-experts guess, or even the guess of an expert without any data. It's also not even possible to share the raw data because of privacy concerns.

The forecasts you see on sites like 538 and the economist are even better, because it doesn't just communicate experts best guess (democrats win by +7), but experts best guess at how accurate that guess is too (something like democrats win by +7 +- 6, except in a lot more detail and nuance).

On HN the catchphrase for this is basically "don't let perfect be the enemy of good".

Note: I made up the numbers in this post.

@gpm what I’m arguing isn’t for replacing good with perfect. I’m saying these don’t make it to the level of good. They provide no relevant or valuable information to the public.

If weather forecasters were wrong nearly 100% of the time, would they provide value? If a hurricane was approaching and they couldn’t predict probable paths within any margin of error, would they provide any value.

really though, what tangible value do polls provide anyway? i get that the polling over the last few years hasn't been great, but i don't really understand why everyone's so upset about it. did anyone actually make or change decisions based on these polls? they're just predictions anyway.

for instance, in your example, a hurricane's path directly affects citizens of cities that lie on that path—do they need to prepare to leave their homes, etc.? but is anyone actually basing their decision to vote or who to vote for on the polls in such a way that it significantly affects the outcome?

> what tangible value do polls provide anyway

I live in Canada but am working for an American country. I am considering if/when I want to move to the US, they informed me about the likely outcome of this election, which influenced my plans a non trivial amount (not a huge amount either, covid dominates in the planning process, but a non-zero amount).

For many people it can influence how they vote. If you're in a state with a potential to change the outcome of the election you are more likely to vote "strategically", i.e. vote for one of the two most popular candidates instead of vote for a third party that you prefer. On the flip side if you're voting in a non-competitive race you are much more likely to vote for a candidate who is unlikely to win in order to better indicate your preferences (i.e. you should be more likely to vote libertarian/green/...).

For many people who wins an election affects there careers going forward, in the US in particular a large number of people are fired/hired based on the election. Even if you're not in that position your industry might get more or less government funding, if you're a government contractor the projects you are working on might or might not be in danger of getting cancelled, and so on and so forth. Having better information earlier makes it easier to plan your life.

The US election is one of the most significant worldwide events that happens every 4 years, the idea that being able to better predict it is not valuable is... insane.

you definitely make some good points. i realized a few things i didn't think about after posting as well.

i guess i was thinking more along the lines of, most of the time i personally don't think you should be choosing a presidential candidate based on predictions of who may or may not win. even some of your examples are more centered on the ultimate outcome of the election and how to plan for it; i really think people whose lives could be affected that drastically should be planning ahead for that situation anyway.

nonetheless, i agree they do have some value, and perhaps i should have clarified my line of thinking more clearly.

If a weather forecaster can predict the temperature next week to within a few degrees and can tell you when they are sure it will rain, when they are sure it will be sunny, and provide a good guess as to rain or shine on most of the other days you would consider that person a good weather forecaster.

Do you expect the weather report for the next week to nail the temperature of every day next week to within 1 degree?

The pollsters can tell you if a hurricane is coming, they can tell you when the weather might shift significantly (albeit not be absolutely certain about which direction it is shifting) and they can give you a very good idea of what to expect even if they do not get the exact temp for each day correct.

You obviously have no understanding of either polling or statistics. This is like saying that if computer programmers were not incompetent we would not have bugs in programs, but since they all obviously do not know what they are doing we have a modern society held together with chewing gum and string because programmers are too dumb to get it right.

I think it's clear that people being polled are not representative of those who are voting. Trump has eother managed to appeal to people resistant to being polled or has managed to disengage people that are being polled. Whatever your views on the man, it's remarkable.

What's more surprising to me is that he can do it consistently and that no one has seemingly appealed to these people before. Given that these are almost election winning demographics, it's odd that no one has spent more time on understanding these people.

It's not within the normal margin of how off polling averages tend to be. (Though every once in a while you'll get an abnormal miss)

But it is definitely within the margin of error for many individual polls, which often have a MoE > 2.5%.

If the error skews in one specific direction for all the polls, then I don't think you can just excuse the polls by saying they're in the margin of error.

This is some kind of non-trivial process problem.

> I really have no idea where this idea that the polls failed comes from.

For one, Andrew Gelman (professor of statistics and political science at Columbia University). Who knows more about the topic than anyone here in this HN discussion.

https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2020/11/04/dont-kid-y...

He may know a lot about the topic, but has little experience in actually modeling elections. He also has skin in the game and an incentive to make sure everyone knows that his miss was completely not his fault and was in fact due to failures by someone else, someone over there who you don't know, yes, she lives in Canada...

So what statistical mistakes did this lead to in his analysis?

People in this thread might be interested in this podcast episode: https://www.iheart.com/podcast/105-stuff-you-should-know-269...

They discuss a lot of the things brought up here and go into details about the actual mechanics of calling people, etc. It's an easy listen.

It was very very bad up and down the ballot. No shit one of our clients their poll was - i'm rounding here because this is my real name - +15%. They barely won <1%.

I wish pollsters would move towards very very large digital samples. You can't get a 15 minute survey but head-to-head you can get a huge sample for not a lot of money. And don't try to weight it to what you THINK the turnout will be. Break out likely voter or not. Do not add any inference or opinion or 'math'

All digital surveys skew heavily to a younger demographic and heavily male. You have basically captured the political opinions of the fraction of the potential electorate least likely to vote. How exactly is that worthwhile?

I don't buy that, and even if I did the flip would be worse if you look phone contact rates.

I've seen some good very large digital surveys. We do some - geared towards measuring ad recall/lift - and I find them valuable, especially a giant sample on only two recall + head to head questions

You can always ask for gender/age and weight it but that's part of what I see as the problem. so many 'traditional' surveys i see make fairly large adjustments, lots of 'looking back' at past turnout and over fitting based on personal bias. Especially when weighting from very small sub-sample xtab e.g. hispanics. im not a pollster and that's just my still fairly-insider / polling adjacent insight

Another problem with digital surveys is most of the firms do opt-in panels, like having people register to take surveys and get paid on mechanical turk. and then they weight from there. I think this is a problem. The surveys we do run inside of mobile ads, similar to Google / FB Brand Lift surveys they go after those who saw the ads or a truly random sample, not a small biased group of survey panel

Slapping +/- 5% on top of a prediction that is systematically off by ~5% isn't "in the margin of error", it's just simply off. For one prediction, two predictions, no problem. They fall somewhere in this range with probability distribution (usually a Bell curve around the mean). But for hundreds, if not thousands, of polls to be so systematically off, it is not "within the margin of error" or a statistical fluke. If it was, you would expect a normal distribution around the mean of the polls. The mean was completely off.

Put simply, it was sampling bias. Pollsters screwed up. They either sampled the wrong voters, the wrong areas, mispredicted who would turn out, or voters did not accurately report who they planned to vote for. Garbage in, garbage out.

You can try to correct for sampling bias, but if you are blind to it, as your comment pushes more people to be, then you will fail.

Right, but the job of 538 is exactly to deal with that, and they do take into account the fact that errors are correlated, so if one poll is off, chances are they all are. That's why their predictions are fairly conservative. They gave Florida a 1/3 chance for Trump and 1/10 for the presidency. Both those numbers make sense.

Now you can argue that there's little utility if the error bars are so big, and you may have a point. The bigger issue here is that modern elections have been extremely close, and unfortunately we cannot get polling accurate enough.

I feel like everyone who's criticing these polls is forgetting one thing: COVID. These polls can only be as good as historical elections, and there really is not a lot of data for US elections during pandemics.

It might be representative... It's just that people didn't want to say they're voting for trump.

Nate Silver gave Biden a 90% chance of winning, citing 3-4 tossup and 3-4 likely states. I don't see how his predictions don't look reasonable. Silver gave Trump a 27% last election - that's a very reachable percentage . Polls have considerable margin for error. It's standard for people to take a poll result as an absolute prediction and then rail against any error but that's not the fault of the poll itself. [2]

[1]https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/2020-election-forecast/

[2]https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/what-pollsters-have-cha...

3-4 point polling errors are relatively normal, definitely not shocking. That's why the best forecast models still gave Trump a nonzero chance of winning even though the polls showed Biden up by 8+ points.

Polling is really hard. There are fundamental problems with it that are impossible to fully solve. It's frankly amazing that they get as close as they do.

Biden was already ultimately declared the victor.

Couldn't the problem be that polling is just numeromancy dressed up in fancy math?

The problem that has appeared again is that without a representative sample of information gathered, it doesn't matter how fancy your models are, you will not have accurate results. And quantifying how unrepresentative your sample is basically impossible to figure out in this situation.

> quantifying how unrepresentative your sample is basically impossible

Yeah, so... numeromancy.

Maybe they should poll about what the person will vote, but rather what the persons opinions are in general and then estimate based on that who will they vote for.

I am betting Facebook or Google would be able to better calculate the outcome than any polling firm. Bring in all the data they collect on each internet user, I am sure they can model the likelihood of voting and where the user is leaning.

I'm on the nerd side too, but I was quite surprised. Sampling isn't the only source of error in election polling - people also change their minds. In this election, people decided who they were going to vote for historically early - the lowest portion of people in the history of exit polls indicated they decided in the week before the election. In theory, this effect should reduce the width of the probability distribution, and yet, the polls were off again, in the same direction as they are always off, by a little bit more than average.

A little scrutiny here is worthwhile. In 2016, for example, the polls were off in part because pollsters weighted the black demographic in proportion to their voting behavior in 2008 and 2012 (when a black candidate was running, boosting turnout). The actual 2016 black turnout looked more similar to 2004 or 2000 - other elections where a black candidate wasn't running. Though I haven't dived into the 2020 polling data, it wouldn't surprise me if a similar effect were at play.

It's also become noticeable harder to do polling. Once upon a time, everybody had a landline, so random dialing worked really well. Now, some people have more phones than others, and people are increasingly less willing to talk to pollsters, increasing the error rate.

These are all important things to talk about - when you dismiss it as "oh yeah, polls are never perfect," you prematurely shut down the conversation. Don't let perfect be the enemy of the good. The polls could be better and it's important to talk about how.

There is also "what polls directly measure" and "what we infer from them".

Besides the usual adjustments for likely voter models, we also do things like infer how people will vote in House and Senate elections based on Presidential polling, because we do a lot more Presidential polling than down ballot, because money.

So one early thing that seems to have happened this year (and again, we are still early in the process to be making final verdicts in "what happened" retrospectives) is that people split their ballot more than anticipated, which means that the inferences we were making about down ballot races based on Presidential performance were off.

So not quite a polling error, but an example of uncertainty that may not have been correctly taken into account in forecasting.

<< These are all important things to talk about - when you dismiss it as "oh yeah, polls are never perfect," you prematurely shut down the conversation. Don't let perfect be the enemy of the good. The polls could be better and it's important to talk about how.

I think the complaint is that here the polls were not just imperfect. They were at best, misleading raising questions over methodology ( lessons, apparently, not learned in 2016 ), wishful thinking, and their usefulness, or, at worst, attempts at influencing desired income.

I can absolutely agree that polling is not an exact science, but now it is twice in a row that polling science has grossly miscalculated the mood of the nation.

I really want to know what went wrong with the polls (again). Shy Trump voter doesn’t explain how wrong the polls were about Graham or Collins, outside of even the margin of error.

Accurate polls are important to running campaigns and to legislative positions. Selzer got her polls right in Iowa and she posited that she knew the local electorate better than other pollsters so she weighted correctly. Maybe Trafalgar Group has a better method or maybe it just weights GOP voters more heavily (we don’t know, it won’t disclose its methods). Or maybe Trump just breaks polling and the polls will be fine next time. Whatever the reason, I’d like to know, but I’m not sure we ever will.

I grew up in a right wing province of Austria and saw that sort of wrong polling throughout my youth — which is why I wasn't surprised the slightest about things going as they did.

It boils down to: a fraction of the electorate will vote for $bigotcandidate but would never ever admit it to anyone outside the voting booth, because they know it is wrong. They will tell people they will vote for $notbigotcandidate, but vote for him nonetheless.

This fraction is not insignificant and you cannot easily represent it in polls without guessing the effect. In my home province it eas consistently around 10 to 15% over a decade.

I don’t see how that explains the Collins/Gideon race, but I’m not a Mainer. Anyone here from Maine can chime in why a Mainer would lie about voting for Gideon?

Bigots turned out. And lean Collins.

My same question. OK you can be claim to be a "good Republican" and vote Biden but (R) down ballot. Why were Senate and House races also wrong? Why did Lindsey Graham win by so much when the polls didn't give him that lead? In South Carolina, it's ok to say you'll vote for Graham.

The campaigns do not rely on the publicly available poll data for the reasons you pointed out - they need accurate polling in order to make serious decisions about resources. They pay polling companies to get accurate polls and they keep this data private.

The publicly available polls are done for free by polling companies or by news organizations. Unfortunately some of these companies apparently have an agenda to push. So they skew their sample away from what the likely voters are to get the result they want for propaganda purposes.

I think that the rise of Nate Silver has ironically made this situation worse. He advocates taking an average of polls to get a true view of the situation. So if you are skewing you poll to get a certain outcome and you know the poll will be averaged, you need to warp your results even further.

Ok, disclaimer time - I don't have any inside knowledge or real evidence of any of the above. It does seem to fit however. I can't explain why it seems all the distorting is to make the Dems lead seem bigger than it is - that is, why aren't there pollers on the other side of the aisle doing the same thing?

So you'll have to decide for yourself if there is any merit to the above theory.

Biden's campaign said their polling showed the race as closer than the public polling. It also doesn't do good to have too positive polling if it suppresses turnout. And it doesn't do the pollster's reputations any good to be consistently wrong.

I've heard several hypotheses, but I don't have anyway to test them. They all seem to have merit.

The issue with your assertion is that it doesn't account for all the times the polls are right. See most mid-term elections.

I think we have to seriously consider that Trump just breaks things that otherwise would be working within reason.

What you're saying is that any result with a non-zero chance of happening should be unsurprising to us, because it was still in the realm of possibility? If that's the case, what use are polls? What makes an election forecast based on polls more valuable than a coin flip?

Your coin flip analogy is spot on. But instead of a 1 in 2 probability, Trump had a 1 in 10 probability of winning. We knew this probability precisely because of polling data (and historical error).

This wasn’t some rare weird outcome. This was probably a standard deviation or so closer to Trump in a forecast. Perfectly normal thing to happen.

Sure, the model had value precisely because it said that even if Trump did better than the polls suggested, he would likely still lose due to the paths of victory Biden had. That said, the polls have shown, in many cases, poor predictive behavior of actual votes, and as such, we should not just brush this off by quoting the distribution of outcomes.

Results fall on a spectrum from surprising to unsurprising based on the modeled prediction and confidence.

Polls are astrological race science, and the reason you'll never be able to convince anyone of this is adequately covered by the book When Prophecy Fails. I've come to think that their bias is only slightly ideological, but instead springs more from a self-serving impulse to mirror the current beliefs of the audience most likely to believe in polls i.e. people overly impressed by credentials. They enjoy the sheer volume of numbers, rather than their actual usefulness.

Alternate phrasings of identical questions asked in polls creates differences in outcome vastly larger than the effects they claim to detect. Somehow Nate Silver managed to get rich by selling synthetic CDOs of arbitrary polls (to people with his identical political outlook.)

The only real poll is to ask the same questions, in the same way, as the ballot sheet does. Ideally these should be asked as people are entering or leaving the voting booth, and people should be paid for their responses, in order not to bias yourself towards bored loudmouths with nothing to do. This would be good for accuracy, not for usefulness in anything but generating a suspicion of election fraud.

Instead, they're trying to figure out what percentage of black people go to the polls in Missouri, and pretending that the self-selected black voter has more in common politically with the general black phone answerer than the Missouri voter. Relying on that arbitrary assumption is the entire basis of their field.

edit: I haven't read https://site.pennpress.org/aha-2021/9780812250046/race-and-t... yet, but I heard an interview with the author around the time that it came out, and it's another hidden history of a field that has completely unearned legitimacy. "Political Science" might largely be considered an outgrowth of scientific racism.

I think it's more fundamental than numeracy. If the polls suggest there is a 2/3 probability you are going to win an election, but you lose, does that mean the polls were wrong? What if the probability was 9/10?

I think the problem is trying to make sense of outliers and uncertainty, and that, in an election with 150M+ variables, you will end up with a result that isn't quite what anyone predicted. In other words: it's not numeracy, it's epistemology.

Great comment, agreed. The wonderful books from Nassim Taleb ‘Black Swan’ & ‘Fooled by Randomness’ touch on this in a way that forever changed my thinking.

‘We just can’t predict’.

Fivethirtyeight's polling averaging model underestimated Trump in all the swing states. Trump wine 2-3 states predicted for Biden, and 0 vice versa. States that Biden had a supposedly strong lead in turned out to be statistical ties in the official vote. The direction bias in the polls (about 20 of 25) is obvious, it's not symmetric random error.

To which you then have to ask: 1) were the discrepancies within the margin of error? and 2) to what extent are you justified in critiquing the polls based on a sample size of one?

I understand that the voting percentage we saw nationally was within the margin of error that 538 predicted, and that the specific configuration of electoral votes we saw was also one of the outcomes considered by the models.

Modeling correlated polling errors is basically what 538's models are all about. They model how far off the polls could end up being from the actual result based on past elections.

The polls are never 100% accurate. The pollsters have to estimate how many of each type of voter will actually show up to vote and what the response rate for each type of voter was. It is not an exact science.

Polls should say: “we’re 2/3 confident you will win” and not “there’s a 2/3 probability you will win”. The uncertainty is epistemological; it’s not describing a stochastic process.

You could also fit the same data with "people polled thought they could vote until their vote was preferentially suppressed". So the polls will never match outcomes. And that it happened in the same direction two cycles in a row leads credence.

(I do not know why the forecasts are wrong, but I don't see why Parent is at all justified in his statement).

if you're a data nerd, how can you NOT be shocked by so many results falling far outside the confidence interval (often multiple sigmas), and all in the same direction?

Well this measures how many people are willing to admit they would vote for Trump which is not surprisingly a lower number than people who will vote for him in an unobserved secret vote.

Even if the pollsters are the most neutral nonjudgmental people on earth there will still be a fraction of the electorate that will (irrationally) shy away from telling them the truth.

This effect is certainly real.

Ummm, absolutely not. Pollsters universally stated they either had "adjusted their models" after being embarrassed in 2016, or that the "hidden Trump voter" was a myth (usually combined with "Trump fans won't shut up about how much they support him"). Poll results were repeatedly presented as forecasts of actual election results.

I grew up in a right wing Austrian province which over a decade consistently polled 10 to 15% wrong (in favour of the right wing candidate).

I know those people in person. They are people who will tell even their spouse they vote the left wing candidate, but after the 6th beer they will tell you how they really want the strong guy in charge (note: Hitler is from Austria, voting the rightwing guy can still be a taboo for certain people).

So these people do exist. If it is just them who make up the difference — no idea, but they exist.

I'm not saying such people don't exist -- I'm saying pollsters either claimed to have adjusted the models to account for this phenomenon, or the pollsters claimed they don't exist.

There certainly were some skeptics of the polls, but these skeptics were generally marginalized or dismissed.

The point is, most media outlets who reported poll results did so with the assumption that the poll results would reflect the actual results -- NOT that the polls results needed to be adjusted.

I don't think they accounted for it. These are people you can't poll

There was one small polling company who claimed they had a methodology:

instead of asking directly who someone would vote for they asked a number of other questions first to warm them up etc.

They predicted way more Trump votes - and were summarily ridiculed by mainstream pollsters I think.

It's clear now that Shy Trump Voters existed. Some opinion pages trafficked in arguments against their existence. I think of them in terms that our Austrian friend described. Some pollsters were better at accounting for them. I avoid "most media outlets" language and try to look at the data.

What would you expect of a pollster? "Sorry, we are currently unable to provide satisfyingly accurate polls so we close shop for this election?"

That's a rather defeatist attitude. Perhaps be a bit more creative in how you ask the questions? Find new ways to interact with a more diverse group of people? Take larger samples?

Further, the media could refuse to echo consistently unreliable poll results. Ultimately the media loses when people can't trust what's being reported.

Right, but given how infrequently elections occur, how do you receive the feedback loop to iterate on your models? The reason why statisticians and ML folk like to get huge datasets is that it helps them refine their models. Elections occur every 4 years and often reflect very different political circumstances from previous races. Perhaps if we had continuous polling, then pollsters and models could become more accurate, but as it stands now, most of these models are based on historical data.

Five Thirty Eights' "snake graph", which hasn't changed since before election day, accounted for poll error successfully and predicted exactly which states would go blue and which would go red, along with which several states were uncertain. Some of the uncertains went red, others blue. Florida was the only outlier in precisely how red it went.

Everytime I read a comment like this I think of that line from Dumb and Dumber:

“What are the chances of a guy like you and a girl like me... ending up together?”

“Not good”

“Not good like one in a hundred?”

“I'd say more like one in a million.”

“So you're you’re saying there's a chance!”

I know enough about probability distributions and modeling to know you can improve your models to lower that uncertainty.

And sorry, you are the Lloyd Christmas in this one.

Statistics can be pretty unintuitive. On top of that, most people have never learned any statistics.

Whats even more frustrating is recognizing the population difference in day of voters and mail in votes, expecting a "blue shift" as votes are counted, and then watching pundits chime in on Tuesday about surprising results.

As far as I can tell the most surprising result was Trump's popularity among Cuban Floridians.

Once Biden's team let Trump paint him as socialist I was not surprised to see the Cubanos go Trump (or the Venezuelans for the same reason) but I will be interested to see some of the breakdowns of the Puerto Rican vote in FL and some of the Central American Latino vote in Texas; I am betting there is going to be a reasonably large gender difference in some of those groups.

Cubans are anti-Castro Republican. The young generation of pollsters forgot that Cubans aren't just "generic Hispanic".

You're picking the easiest number to misread - the overall "chance of being elected", which doesn't really mean anything.

Much more interesting are the direct results predictions, especially per state where they matter most. Those are polls that give a particular result with a +- confidence interval. If the polls were to any extent competently done, you expect the result to be well within that margin of error.

The reality though has been that the results have been well outside the margin of error, sometimes multiple sigmas from the actual result - that is simply unacceptable for a poll. The only conclusion should be that polling data can be completely ignored, as it doesn't seem to have any clear relationship with the final results.

Individual polls were sometimes outside the margin, but collectively the polls were not far off the mark and collectively they were within the margin of error. This is why sites like 538 were able to model the various outcomes with some degree of certainty and ONCE AGAIN manage to get results within the range of expected probabilities. You really seem to have a hard time understanding both polling and probability and in particular the relationship between sample size and error. I suggest a bit more research.

Dude, I really don't get why you're being so gung ho on this. The errors on the individual polls were way out of line with the actual results.

When we regularise these results like 538 or the Economist did, we get slightly better results, but they were still not particularly accurate.

This is a real problem, and not one that we should be ignoring. I gave the polling companies a pass after 2016, but that this happened again is extremely concerning.

> This is why sites like 538 were able to model the various outcomes with some degree of certainty and ONCE AGAIN manage to get results within the range of expected probabilities.

But they were super close to the edges of the intervals. Like the most expected number of electoral votes for Biden was 380-400, which is not what happened.

> You really seem to have a hard time understanding both polling and probability and in particular the relationship between sample size and error. I suggest a bit more research.

Please don't be dismissive of other people. Many people (including people who do stuff like this every day) were very surprised by the results. We definitely shouldn't tar and feather the pollsters, but I think it would be great if we could get an understanding of why the polls appear to have been systematically biased.

To be fair, we still don't know the loss of votes through mail-in voting. Mail-in voting is more convenient which would likely increase participation, but missing signatures, naked ballots, late or undelivered mail, etc can prevent those ballots from being counted.

When there is a major difference in voting patterns between the two political parties, then polls may not actually be inaccurate. In this case, Democrats chose mail-in voting and Republicans, by and large, chose in-person after being directed by the president.

Also, some percentage of mail-in ballots may not have reached their destination because of possible election interference through reduced post office efficiency--in particular, fewer mail sorting machines, lower hours, deprioritized mails, etc.

In short, the polls don't take into account election interference in the post office or unsuccessful delivery. If most people from both parties were voting in-person, maybe we might have had more parity between the polls and election results.

As an outsider all I can think is that this is an issue with the US media. The easy story is talking about the latest poll. The more difficult, but actually useful story, is focusing on the policies being put forward by each side.

> Forecasts give us probability distributions based on historical polling error data.

... and a lot of assumptions about the supposed underlying probability spaces.

I am pretty certain Facebook has the data to crunch very accurate predictions in elections large and small.

Based on what? I think part of the problem with our politics these days is confusing social media engagement / metrics (specifically twitter) with national sentiment. Seems like there's a large mass of unobserved "silent" Americans out there.

I don't get why people care so much about predictions vs actual results in case of presidential elections in the US. The rules look like they were designed for maximum entertainment and sudden changes. The fact that you can win with less votes. When the other person already has 250 electors, but then on the last second you flip Florida or Pennsylvania with a few thousand votes and bam! you are the president!

That's why people love watching your elections so much. Or maybe also because of the fallout in their countries.

>Forecasts give us probability distributions based on historical polling error data.

They would give you a probability distribution if they were truly random samples. But in reality, response rates are very low, and pollsters make up for this using demographic weighting and modeling - so the results don't actually represent any real population, but rather are extrapolated from people who respond onto a hypothetical population that the pollster thinks is likely to vote. This is why they are spectacularly and systematically off, more and more over time. It's not just variance.

For me the bottomline of the Trump administration is that he has started zero new wars, sparing hundreds of thousands of innocent lives. As an outsider I hope that the US will not go back to its foreign military interventions.

That is good, but counts for very little when he has helped sow the seeds of numerous other wars, especially by rolling back most climate change fights.

He got lucky with foreign policy, and he did start a war against immigrants and people whose skin color is not white in the USA itself, led by Stephen Miller.

How high is the death toll, how many cities where obliterated?

Entering the country illegally makes you a criminal. Trump got 40 percent of the Hispanic vote.

Latino vote is currently responsible for almost all of the house seat flips for republicans, especially in CA.

> Entering the country illegally makes you a criminal.

If you define "criminal" as "any person who has committed a crime", and "crime" as "any illegal act that can be punished by law", then yes.

By that definition, everyone who has ever received a parking ticket is a criminal too, though.

Seems more sensible to reserve this loaded term (in US context) for the violent crimes and property crimes the FBI releases statistics on.

> If you define "criminal" as "any person who has committed a crime", and "crime" as "any illegal act that can be punished by law", then yes.

A criminal is a person who commits a crime.

It is possible, by ceasing to commit crimes and making restitution to society, to return to a state of non-criminality. But while one is still committing a crime, no amount of hand-waving or pearl clutching can make a non-criminal out of someone who is actively committing a crime.

For an illegal immigrant, this would mean either lawful settlement or deportation. Until an illegal immigrant either earns the right to settle or leaves the country, that person is still a criminal.

To carry with the driving violation analogy, if you've ever gone above the speed limit but not been ticketed, then you are still a criminal. You have not ceased committing that crime.

Assuming you've stopped speeding, you have ceased committing the crime, but you have not made restitution. There's a difference.

I know people who systematically drive over the speed limit. I disapprove of it, but I wouldn't call them criminals.

You can justify doing that by being sufficiently pedantic about definitions, but I don't think you gain anything in the public debate by lumping "people who speed" in the same category as burglars, murderers, etc. In most discussions, it's not productive to view these people as belonging to the same group.

Yes, people who systematically drive over the speed limit are criminals.

Obviously, criminality is a spectrum. We can debate the seriousness of violating speed limit laws, but the violations are still violations.

Our disagreement is not in reasoning but in axioms. Your deduction based on the dictionary definition of "criminal" is valid (I say dictionary definition and not legal definition because, afaik, "criminal" is not a legal term).

But I don't accept dictionaries as the ultimate authority of the meaning of words, just a handy guide. The meaning of a word is whatever people tend to understand that word as. I cannot prove this on the spot, since I'd have to invest time into organizing a survey, but I'm fairly confident that, if you ask a thousand people whether someone who drives over the speed limit is a criminal, a majority of them would say "no" (phrasing of the question will matter probably though).

You can insist on the dictionary being the ultimate source of truth, that is fine. But all that achieves is setting yourself up for gratuitous, avoidable miscommunications. If your theory of language makes communication harder, it seems to undermine the point of language.

What do we call someone who breaks laws, then? We already have other words to designate serious offenders, like "felon" or "convict". And we have offense-specific terms, like "murderer" or "rapist".

The word "criminal" might connote a gravity that offends your sensibilities, but it's accurate. The disconnect arises because modern man sees himself as mostly above the law: Some offenses aren't offenses because (nearly) everyone commits them. We all (hopefully) learn from a young age that this is preposterous: "If everyone jumped off a bridge, would you?"

I think you'll find that honoring the actual meaning of words makes communication easier, not harder.

Crossing the country "border" is simply a misdemeanor(like driving without insurance). But if you're a refugee there is no "illegal" way to cross. You can cross where ever then once you make it over you can apply for refugee status.

He said criminal, not felon. A misdemeanor is a class of crimes.

Are the lives saved before or after including the hundreds of thousands of covid related deaths?

The Syrian proxy war killed 500,000 Syrians. The war in Iraq killed 1 million.

Trump has not created the virus and followed the independent advice of Dr. Fauci. The UK, Spain and Belgium (all with the advantage of socialized healthcare) did even worse judging by per capita deaths. So he can't be that bad. I also think its quite disingenuous to compare his handling of the virus to the suffering and deaths caused by wars that only serve to establish economic and power advantages.

> and followed the independent advice of Dr. Fauci

Care to point out to me where he did this? As far as I can tell, he wants to fire Fauci, has continuously disregarded his advice, and loves undermining him:

* https://www.cbsnews.com/news/trump-rally-fire-fauci-chants-a...

* https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2020/06/25/trumps-du...

* https://www.foxnews.com/politics/trump-wears-face-mask-in-pu... (note the date on this one-- 11 july)

* https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/19/us/politics/trump-fauci-c...

* https://apnews.com/article/00a1dc6f5932c9fe778ee5e9cabacc71

What moral calculus allows deaths from a pandemic, even if the by-product of negligence and mismanagement, to be placed on the same moral plane as deaths from bombs, drones, tanks and bullets, or the displacement of tens of millions of people from the War on Terror, or the slave markets and anarchy that still persist after the NATO bombing of Libya championed by Hillary Clinton and Samantha Power, or the world’s worst humanitarian crisis from the U.S.-supported bombing campaign of Yemen that began under Obama?

- Glenn Greenwald

It's not about morality, but about responsibility.

I'd say he failed to start any wars because he was just beyond incompetent...

People are dying from Covid in every country, regardless of who's in charge and what the approach is. Maybe I'm just crazy, but I really don't think that people would just magically stop dying under Biden.

New Zealand’s most recent registered Covid death was September 16th: https://covid19.who.int/region/wpro/country/nz

Mongolia has zero in total: https://covid19.who.int/region/wpro/country/mn

Even China is doing pretty well, with a current daily rate in the low single digits, compared to the hundreds to low thousands of the USA and the similarly poor performance of European and South American countries: https://covid19.who.int/region/wpro/country/cn

I'm 38 and Trump is the first president in my lifetime to not start another war. It is a big achievement.

Which war did Bill Clinton start again?

He tossed a few rockets around https://jacobinmag.com/2016/10/bill-clinton-al-shifa-sudan-b...

So did Trump, so if you are just looking at that and not, say, the Balkans, I'm not sure why Trump gets any extra credit here.

Of course, there's probably some dispute over whether intervening to prevent genocide, either in general or in the specific manner it actually occurred under Clinton in the Balkans, is really a negative.

He definitely didn't start it, but there were US missiles landing on at least 3 continents. I was a child at the time, but it was such big news that I still remember two of those occasions.

Kosovo war was US led (not opposing it, but definitely under Clinton)

Here he boasts that he did want to start many but the Republicans kept blocking him: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UbUAzGzTh_g

Or Obama, for that matter?

How good is your context of Libya and how it effected Syria?

> Which war did Bill Clinton start again?

Generally, the US/NATO-led interventions in the Balkans, most notably the US-led NATO-Serbia war, after explicit Congressional disapproval.

Though I suppose those could be excluded since they were interventions in existing conflicts.

He didn't, and neither did Obama if we're going to give Trump credit for this.

The 2011 military intervention in Libya happened under Obama. It was led by France and UK, with US support, and wouldn't have happened if Obama had not green-lighted the operation. 10 years later the country is still in the middle of a civil war, de facto cut in two opposing camps that each control roughly half of the country.

Of course, compared to Iraq invasion it was a small scale operation, but is still generally considered Obama responsibility (although of course primarily Sarkozy and Cameron responsibility).

Well he did serve half as long as the others, and we did come pretty close to a few. I don't think it's a very good metric regardless though, because it depends hugely on external factors and world politics which the President doesn't have as much control over. As war-mongering as Bush may have been, 9/11 was an external force. If something similar would've happened during Trump's presidency on US ground, I have zero doubt he would've started another war.

Iraq had what to do with 9/11? Not the excuse, what did it actually have to do with 9/11, as compared to say Saudi Arabia.

The media got mad when Trump wouldn't attack Syria, and said using missiles made him seem Presidential. Makes you wonder what the media and the rest really want.

Trump assassinated the top general of a sovereign state. He could have easily started WW3.

And more or less on a whim, to the shock of his advisors.

> I'm 38 and Trump is the first president in my lifetime to not start another war. It is a big achievement.

If you were 4 years old today, Trump still would only be the second President in your lifetime not to start another war.

The 34 prior years may or may not change that depending on whether you look at starting armed conflict or starting US involvement in the conflict.

He did however increase the number of drone strikes and other skirmishes in the middle east and Africa.

I can also tell you that many people in the middle east are sad to see Trump leave. His strong stance on Iran and some of the new alliances and shakeups in the region regarding Israel, though possibly done through some brute force, have certainly changed the status quo, possibly for the better.

Just yesterday Trump administration sanctioned Gibran Bassil, a corrupt Lebanese politician who is very close with Hezbollah. I hope Biden has the same sense to chase these guys down...

Certainly not the Kurds.

> His strong stance on Iran

In other words, you just like the side of the war that he picked.

Well, you can't please everyone - you gotta pick a side. Iran's track record of spending money across the region to foment wars is quite clear... Are all sides saints in these struggles? - certainly not... But I pick the lesser of the evils...

As if Israel and Saudi Arabia aren't spending even more money and fomenting their own wars. The fact is that Obama's Iran deal could have been a shakeup of the middle east and led to lasting peace. With Trump's tilting everything towards Israel and Saudi Arabia I don't see any end game for Iran besides catastrophe and potentially war. Maybe the idea is to oppress Iran for decades with superior weapons and money like Israel has done to Palestine. But even if they are able to pull that off it is an evil strategy.

Mohammed bin Salman is certainly sad as well.

Would it reassure you to know that the foreign military interventions never actually stopped? https://theintercept.com/2020/10/29/trump-yemen-war-civilian...

Bottom line or at least some silver lining?

One doesn't have to declare war to wage it.

https://www.businessinsider.com/trump-have-bombed-yemen-more...

Also he also didn't take Covid seriously, thus helping contribute to hundreds of thousands of people dying? It didn't have to be a political issue.

Political administrations are big: failures in some areas don’t nullify successes in other areas.

It's not so simple, I think, to say that by avoiding war he saved lives.

The US withdrew from Syria, and it does appear to me that for a moment that were a sense of morality from Trump there, he genuinely did not like the idea that lives would be lost as a consequence of his actions. That is commendable, though perhaps something that should have been considered in advance of such a situation rather than reactively.

But what was the consequence of not intervening? It created a vacuum, into which stepped many military powers, and many people have died or been displaced. We also have to consider the long-term consequences of an isolationist foreign policy.

There is a balance to be found between war-mongering and exerting influence to shape the world positively. Particularly, you have to avoid leaving a vacuum that can be exploited.

At the least we can say he didn't start an arbitrary new war, and that is a small but significant positive.

Can we have a conversation about broader implications of the increasing power in the public discourse of Twitter et al.? I’m no Trump supporter but I do wonder if the tables were turned and Twitter e.g. turned Biden’s page into a wall of hidden tweets because of something it disagreed with (there are enough grievances with Big Tech from both sides).

Do people think this is isolated (because Trump is, well, Trump) or there’s a broader tendency here?

Trump's recent tweets that were flagged by Twitter weren't disagreements, they were antidemocratic.

Censoring the elected president is inherently anti democratic.

A warning is not censorship.

There is no democracy on a privately owned platform. Trump can say what he wants, but Twitter absolutely has a choice what, if anything, they allow to be published on their platform.

FWIW, Trump's time on Twitter is winding down. The only reason he hasn't received the ban-hammer from Twitter is his unique position as an elected official. January 20th shortly after noon, he will no longer exist on Twitter.

> There is no democracy on a privately owned platform.

Interesting. Would the right-wing be better off if Twitter were a government-owned entity, thus ensuring that their right to free speech would always allow unfettered access? Would we ever be able to convince them to trust the government enough that that was actually the case? Would they be able to overcome their impulse in favor of privatization over nationalization to allow something like that to happen?

> There is no democracy on a privately owned platform.

So, do you support net neutrality?

It's the ISP's platform, they can do what they want with it... right?

No it isn't. I'm quite sure you know it isn't.

Being _unable_ to censor the president is what would be anti-democratic. Only in authoritarian regimes would a leader be able to force private companies to spread their message.

In a democratic country, you have the freedom to choose what you want to support and not support.

Authoritarianism and Democracy are not opposing ideas.

But what gives Twitter the power to dictate what is right and what is wrong?

If he doesn't like it Trump can start his own site where he can say whatever he wants. There's no reason Twitter can't moderate his posts however they see fit, and in fact his position as elected official shielded him from most normal consequences of his behavior.

Consider how judges around the country have responded to his campaign's legal filings, it's not like Twitter was out on a limb here.

That I totally agree. Twitter is a private company, after all. In the meantime, Twitter is editorializing, and they should not enjoy Section 230.

What's an example in your mind of a case where someone can remove content and retain Section 230 immunity?

Illegal content, in however the courts have agreed what 'illegal' means. Also spam, to what a reasonable person would consider spam -- and a political opinion isn't spam.

removing is not editorializing.

Editorializing is twitter reading the tweet, deciding whether it is true or false, and then showing their decision to the end user together with the tweet.

It is somewhat similar to choosing a title for a article, even if you leave the content unchanged you can significantly change the message or the effect by choosing an appropriate title.

In this context twitter is not simply recommending accounts you might like, or refusing to deliver tweets, they are actually engaging with the speech of the user.

As an analogy consider someone that retweets and article discussing some crimes. this person post a link and says: "I can't believe Person A is actually a murderer", in this case regardless of the article content the poster is exposed to a potential lawsuit in case Person A can prove its innocence.

Twitter is closer to this example that to simply choosing to remove content.

(specifically this does not apply to the removed trump tweets)

>Editorializing is twitter reading the tweet, deciding whether it is true or false, and then showing their decision to the end user together with the tweet.

Nope, that is simply not what editorializing means, in any sense of the word.

Twitter stating a categorically true fact or linking to a resource that debunks factually incorrect statements is not editorializing because they are not giving an opinion. They are adding context with verifiable truths. Which, again, not editorializing because stating a truth is not an opinion.

I'm sure you can dream up all sorts of hypotheticals that makes this sound problematic, such as implying twitter are the ones deciding something is true or false. They don't need to decide that, they just need to recognise a statement as false and then add clarification. If Trump's tweets had any kind of ambiguity then maybe what you say has credence, but that isn't the reality of the situation.

Prepending a warning with twitter decision is editorializing. The fact that they _intend_ to state objective truth is not relevant.

I my example so did the user that shared an article on a murder.

Now, I believe twitter was careful enough not to do anything too stupid, and we all can imagine that Trump's tweet might have been quite extreme. But fact checking in-place is editorializing.

All of these networks and forums would be >99.9999% spam if they couldn't do editorial discretion. And they have almost all long taken down anti-Semitic posts, etc. so they don't turn into a cesspool of hate.

Section 230 does not make any difference in a case like this. What section 230 protects them from is failing to take down harmful things.

For taking down harmful things, they are just as liable under 230 as they would have been before 230, namely not liable.

Well they have the platform, so they have the power. But more substantively: by applying universal norms such as "lying is wrong" they don't have to make moral judgments, just factual evaluations.

What if the truth of a statement takes 6 months to suss out?

Wouldn't practicality dictate we err on the side of caution, meaning the statement is allowed before it's blocked?

Because the alternative situation is, something that NEEDS to get out never does only because it takes so long to prove.

They didn't dictate what was "right and what was wrong". The put disclaimers on objectively factually false statements.

They did this with Palestinian tweets. Are you okay with that too?

They won't answer.

Censorship cuts both ways.

I don't really understand why people think twitter posts would contain "facts" or "truth" at all...

Imho they are all just opinions(edit: , and/or statements used to influence).

Yup. And censoring opinions from a specific group should be considered as editorializing.

It wasn't right/wrong, it was true/false.

There's a case to be made that Twitter has taken on some of the old role of the press by calling out obviously factually incorrect statements.

I'm all for this. But I'd like to see it formalised in law with criminal penalties for anyone, in any position of public influence, who wilfully tries to mislead the public.

What is true and false? We do not live in a binary world. There are nuances. Facebook recently flagged Palestinian speech. Are Palestinians true/false to object to their position in the world?

The specific example of Trumps behavior in question is objectively false.

Lets not talk about two different situations at the same time. It is perfectly possible to make an appropriate decision and then an inappropriate one; one does not necessarily obviate the other.

Censorship is the issue at hand. It cuts both ways and if you advocate for it now, it will certainly bite you in the future.

Trump wasn't censored though? So what are you discussing?

This is Twitter as a company and the people running it choosing what they feel is right or wrong. We can endlessly argue if they should do it, but it is well within their rights to do so anyway.

100% agree with that.

"They were so busy asking if they could they didn't stop to question if they should."

Literally the constitution. It's part of their freedom of expression.

Freedom of speech must have limits.

The classic analogy is that a person shouldn't be allowed to shout "FIRE" and thereby cause panic in a crowded theater, when there is no such fire. The right of the one person to (falsely) speak is outweighed by the right of the many people present to their own safety.

Trump saying "I WON THIS ELECTION, BY A LOT!" [1] is clearly equivalent to shouting "FIRE". He has not won the election, he does not have more popular votes or more electoral college votes, and he has presented no proof or substantive argument to contradict this narrative.

That Twitter should put a warning label on statements from powerful people that are objectively false is really the least they can do. To let Trump spread lies without any comment before now has been wholly irresponsible. I wish that Twitter didn't provide a platform for misinformation in the first place.

[1] https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/13250998450450718...

The limits you're talking about have always been enforced by governments because, ya know, the people agreed those were reasonable. We actually get a say in what our standards of speech actually are.

Not an unelected king who rules by fiat on a platform used by 10's or hundreds of millions of people.

I'd like to point out that "shouting fire in a crowded theater" is a rhetorical analogy that was invented to justify the suppression of legitimate political speech. (Namely to silence opposition to the draft.)

That's true, and was obviously an overreach in 1919. That it was dialed back in 1969 to limit banning speech likely to incite a riot is much more reasonable to my mind.

I do not think it is unreasonable to assume Trump stating he had won was actually an attempt to incite riots and looting. He seems to really enjoy chaos. Into the history books by hook or crook.

> Trump saying "I WON THIS ELECTION, BY A LOT!" [1] is clearly equivalent to shouting "FIRE".

No, it’s not equivalent at all because it doesn’t present any immediate danger. The reason yelling “fire” is a problem is not because it’s a lie, it’s because it requires immediate and possibly dangerous behavior (evacuate as quickly as possible).

You're right that it doesn't present an immediate danger on the order of seconds or minutes in the same way as my analogy.

However, I personally believe that his false speech does present an immediate danger to the public on the order of days or weeks.

There was a bomb threat in Philly yesterday. His speech is dangerous and he should be shut down if it is inciting similar violence and factually false (which it is.) There are armed protestors in Airzona outside of poll counting places:

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-election-protests-ari...

That is dangerous and is not protected by the first amendment.

That's a very American point of view that recently displayed it's weaknesses in France the last few years.

I wish Hacker News would do the same... Any lie in the name of "sarcasm" which is not explicitly labeled such should be flagged. There is too much of a chance of translation issues not making it clear that the lie is intended for "humor".

You can flag sarcasm or admonish the joker by pointing out the rules against snark. I often do that as a matter of public service.

Unfortunately Twitter's fact checking is the best solution we have so far. If you have a better idea, go build it :)

"Disagreements" and "antidemocratic" aren't mutually exclusive categories.

I don't know that the /worst/ time to start a conversation about ending the practice of voting for office is when you're losing an elected office, but it's pretty bad.

The story about Hunter Biden wasn’t anti-Democratic. Tabloid fodder, but not anti-Democratic.

Didn't it just turn out not to be true?

No, the story simply had very little evidence and so had no definitive claims, but for now there is no evidence that those email where planted by foreign agents nor that the content of the laptop was falsified (for example while the Biden campaign dismissed the story they never claimed the emails to be false).

Moreover a witness that was part of that email thread confirmed the conclusion reached in the original story.

Twitter didn't block that post for that reason. Also it wasn't on Trump's account, it was the NY Post which is, as you say, a tabloid.

As you can see here, he posted about it and there is no warning label:

https://twitter.com/realdonaldtrump/status/13178254844958801...

That was blocked for privacy violations. And Twitter allowed discussion of the story, just not hotlinks to the story itself which was publishing stolen private content.

Can we not disagree about the value of democracy?

We all live in a society that functions the way it does (for good and bad) because we have some shared foundational beliefs in something like democracy. While I have mixed opinions about digital censorship in general, it should not be surprising for a (quasi)democratic society that values free speech to silence those in power who would encourage large groups to question those core values.

This is especially true since western society regularly tries to interpret and judge intent along with what people say, and it has judged that Trump's intent is self-serving and not an honest disagreement, and as a result it has deemed it at least somewhat acceptable to censor him.

This isn't some philosophy or political science class. We are a Constitutional Republic which is a fancy way of saying that we are a type of democracy. One which the POTUS swore an oath to uphold.

Why is it inherently good? If we import 50 million poor people what do you think would appeal to them? Why wouldn't large groups just vote themselves access to other people's wealth? If 51% of people vote to steer a ship into an iceberg should this be accepted because of democracy?

Democracy is a religion, look at Singapore and China and compare them to the West.

>they were antidemocratic.

And "antidemocratic" gets defined by, well, Twitter.

It feels like twitter staff are (ab)using the popularity of its users to promote their own agenda. That is not right and will probably have implications about their relationship with Article 230 (which IIRC assumes "good faith"). It's not fair to other biased media, which are legally liable for what they publish.

https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20200531/23325444617/hello...

this is what i m talking about

> any action voluntarily taken in good faith to restrict access to or availability of material that the provider or user considers to be obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, excessively violent, harassing, or otherwise objectionable, whether or not such material is constitutionally protected; or

The article I linked specifically addresses why that isn't a concern.

I think the shift to watch will be whether Trump's tactic of out-and-out lying takes deeper roots, particularly among Republicans or more broadly.

It’s hard to think of a realistic example of the type of misinformation that is damaging to our society and democracy that Joe Biden could post. I think we need to acknowledge the unique threat that Trump is/was and stop both sides-ing this.

The democrats spent the last 4 years saying Trump stole the election by colluding with Russia, and twitter didn't take any of that down.

The difference is that there is actually hard evidence and convictions supporting that, as opposed to the Trump campaign just making it up as they go along.

Very poor argument really, think about it.

What about all those people that claimed to have definitive proofs on twitter and on television and then it turned out that they had no knowledge of the facts?

The broad statements might have some supporting fact but along the way some (Brian Stelter I think) have theorized that Trump was a Russian agent since the soviet union.

I don't doubt that Biden won, but it's not like there's zero evidence for voter fraud. A USPS employee was recently arrested for trying to take absentee ballots out of the country, another in PA said that he was told to back date ballots received after the election so they could still be counted, and they've also found ballots in the trash that were mostly for Trump. He's exaggerating, but he's not just making things up either.

With 150 million ballots both sides could easily find individuals that may have had legitimate issues with voting. As to something systematic they don’t seem to have found anything.

Sure, but just listing those headlines without any details is quite reductive.

That USPS employee had a full bag of over 800 pieces of mail, 3 of which were ballots [1]

I haven’t been able to find a specific story about ballots in the trash after Election Day. I did find a story from NJ [2] and one from KY [2] about USPS dumping mail in the trash, and some of that mail was empty ballots being sent out to voters. Do you have the specific story you are talking about?

The PA employee wasn’t asked to backdate ballots, he was asked to collect ballots arriving after Nov 3 in a separate bin, and he feared that his bosses would backdate them [4]. This was also in a town of 5000 people. Here is what he said:

“On Wednesday the fourth, we checked in at the time clock,” the anonymous postal worker told Project Veritas chief James O’Keefe. “The postmaster then told us that if we were to find any ballots on our routes that day, we were to collect them, keep them separate in a hod, which is what we call our plastic bins, bring them back, and then we would put them in another hod and then they would send them to be counted.”

“The postmaster (James Malia) and the supervisor (William Wood) did not say that we’re going to, we’re going to backdate them,” the whistleblower clarifies, but “I was firmly of the belief that they were going to be backdated. We’re always hit with the Hatch Act. You know, you can’t talk about politics, you can’t influence people. On one occasion, the postmaster James Malia had gone, had attacked a carrier who had expressed support for Trump.”

...says he overheard Malia chide Wood for having “postmarked one of the ballots for the fourth, instead of the third, because they were supposed to put them for third”.

[1] https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/new-york-mailman-allege...

[2] https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2020/10/07/usps...

[3] https://www.wlky.com/article/us-postal-worker-fired-after-mo...

[4] https://www.lifesitenews.com/news/another-whistleblower-alle...

Can anyone actually refute this instead of downvoting it? It's a really important point. Sorry to "both sides" it but I also think there's a good chance that if Democrats were making allegations of voter fraud it'd be trending, not flagged.

Sure, I refer you to the body of evidence presented at the impeachment trial of Donald Trump that demonstrated that he has worked with foreign governments to illegally influence US elections.

The impeachment was not over the 2016 election.

I point to Mueller report which looked for collusion between the Trump campaign and foreign countries and found none.

That's just it, though. The Mueller report found tons of collusion and obstruction of justice. It deliberately referred those to the Congress.

I challenge your assertion that the report found no collusion. You have not read the unredacted report nor has anyone outside of a select few in govt

They certainly never indicted anyone for it.

That's not true either, the investigation resulted in 34 indictments.

indictments for...

Americans were indicted for lying to Congress, lying to the FBI, witness tampering, and a few other crimes related to inconsistent testimonies and lies, etc. And of course a bunch of Russian nationals were "indicted" for "crimes against the United States" type things but nobody is under the illusion they'll actually be prosecuted.

Exactly, they only remove false stuff.

The bipartisan Senate report pretty much confirmed that Russia orchestrated a campaign to benefit Trump.

At the very least that is the basis for a fair accusation, and of course the eventual impeachment for further improprieties which was bipartisan.

The Charlottesville Hoax was one that Biden posted, and was very damaging in my opinion.

It’s a bit of a stretch but imagine if China bought Twitter for some reason:

Joe Biden: We stand with independent Taiwan. Fact check: This statement is false. Taiwan is part of China.

Does this hypothetical not give you chills?

Nope. Twitter is a product. If it becomes China’s mouthpiece, you can point your browser to a different URL.

Network effects are a thing. You personally could, but you can’t do anything about hundreds of millions who won’t.

I don't think Jack Dorsey would do that to a Democratic candidate.

If said candidate was also challenging the existing power structures in this country, they would.

Citation needed. A term like power structures is just lazy thinking.

Citation for my belief in a hypothetical? Sorry, not possible.

Wow, a self-burn. Those are rare.

Neither do I, but I think that's because Democratic candidates for some reason don't have the same penchant for misinformation and incitement.

Whatever their justification, it is obvious that there is absolutely going to be a tendency to do this with anyone who is even half as much of an outsider as Trump. The notion that these watchmen are simply protecting us from “lies” is a naive delusion. And yes, regardless of your politics, that is not a good thing for citizens.

If the 'outsider' does nothing but lie, threaten, and harass opponents then I think Twitter will continue to do it job and suppress the assholes. If you happen to be a political ally of the asshole then I guess it sucks to be you.

This kind of bullying (from either side) leads directly to war.

“The First Amendment is first for a reason. Second Amendment is just in case the First one doesn't work out.”

- Chappelle

Reminder: "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances."

I don't see twitter mentioned.

Shall we convene a panel with myself, Dave Chappelle, and you, and debate the meaning of “First one not working out”? You’re completely ignoring my and his intended meaning, which is that restricting speech pushes people toward violence.

In Germany, a while ago, absolute free speech in the form of hate and blatant lies unleashed an amount of violence that, for the history of humanity, has never been seen. You can choose to ignore that and see the world in black and white.

This is one of the worst reductio-ad-Hitlers I’ve ever seen. The Nazi party was a minority party throughout, they used violence to seize power, and they certainly did not allow free speech at any time during their rule.

Hitler used blatant lies, hate, stoke fear and division and used the weapons of liberal democracy and turn them against it to destroy it from within. Contrary to what you say, he didn't took power through violent means. His party was elected to the Reishstag and he was then nominated chancelor. Of course, I don't compare Trumpism to Nazism. We are not there yet. But your argument that giving context to Trumps blalant lies (I hope we agree on the lying part) like twitter do is leading to violence is an absolutist position that is very far from the liberal ideals of the founders.

The Nazi party was the second largest in the 1930 elections and became the largest party in parliament in 1932. They didn't need to use violence to size power when they could cut a deal with the Centre (Catholic) party and the Conservative party. The ones who went to violence first was the KPD (communist party) who were losing votes and members of parliament for years; of course when Moscow told them that the Social Democrats were the enemy they spurned an offer to work together against the Nazis at a time when the two of them together had more members of parliament than the Nazis. No need to use violence to sieze power when your opponents are either stupid or greedy.

You need to at least learn the history of the period if you are going to try to play this game.

Gee, where is an easy place to learn about the history of this period?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nazi_Party

> Hitler saw the party as a revolutionary organisation, whose aim was the overthrow of the Weimar Republic, which he saw as controlled by the socialists, Jews and the "November criminals" who had betrayed the German soldiers in 1918. The SA ("storm troopers", also known as "Brownshirts") were founded as a party militia in 1921 and began violent attacks on other parties.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beer_Hall_Putsch

> Approximately two thousand Nazis were marching to the Feldherrnhalle, in the city centre, when they were confronted by a police cordon, which resulted in the deaths of 16 Nazi party members and four police officers.

I guess history is difficult when you only learn it through random-walk in Wikipedia. The Nazis were not in government in the 20s when this feeble attempt occurred. In fact, they were a relatively unknown regional party at this point. After imprisonment for the Beer-Hall Putsch, during which he wrote Mein Kampf, Hitler emerged better-known and prepared to plan. Over the following years they worked to become a legitimate party, entered government, and did not actually need to engage in direct violence to attain the absolute control that was desired.

> I guess history is difficult when you only learn it through random-walk in Wikipedia.

Please cut the smug attitude. I’m trying my best not to engage with this kind of low-brow personal attack.

> Over the following years they worked to become a legitimate party, entered government, and did not actually need to engage in direct violence to attain the absolute control that was desired.

This is just flat wrong. You’re ignoring the violent intimidations of the SA during the entire decade from 1920-1930.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturmabteilung

> Throughout the 1920s and into the 1930s, members of the SA were often involved in street fights, called Zusammenstöße (collisions), with members of the Communist Party (KPD).

This. This is the problem. You refuse to acknowledge a simple fact. Discussion is thus impossible.

To say the Nazis simply "used violence to seize power" is extremely reductive.

It's also well known that the Nazis were (at least monetarily) backed by Big Business & the wealthy capitalists at the time who were afraid of the rising popularity of Communism, as well as the threat of Soviet Russia. This included but was not limited to even American companies that happened to have offices in Germany (e.g. IBM). You can bet that money was used for anti-Semitic propaganda (which could deflect unhappiness towards the corporations to be aimed with the Jewish), and bringing this back to Free Speech, you can bet that this was allowed because of unmitigated free speech at the time.

> Weimar Germany did have hate-speech laws, and they were applied quite frequently. The assertion that Nazi propaganda played a significant role in mobilizing anti-Jewish sentiment is, of course, irrefutable. But to claim that the Holocaust could have been prevented if only anti-Semitic speech and Nazi propaganda had been banned has little basis in reality. Leading Nazis such as Joseph Goebbels, Theodor Fritsch, and Julius Streicher were all prosecuted for anti-Semitic speech. Streicher served two prison sentences. Rather than deterring the Nazis and countering anti-Semitism, the many court cases served as effective public-relations machinery, affording Streicher the kind of attention he would never have found in a climate of a free and open debate. In the years from 1923 to 1933, Der Stürmer [Streicher's newspaper] was either confiscated or editors taken to court on no fewer than thirty-six occasions. The more charges Streicher faced, the greater became the admiration of his supporters. The courts became an important platform for Streicher's campaign against the Jews. In the words of a present-day civil-rights campaigner, pre-Hitler Germany had laws very much like the anti-hate laws of today, and they were enforced with some vigor. As history so painfully testifies, this type of legislation proved ineffectual on the one occasion when there was a real argument for it.

Source: https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/copenhagen-speech-v...

Based on what I'm seeing, unrestricted real-time social media (with "likes" and "retweets" and easy commenting) appears to have led to serious violence in some parts of the world. Perhaps based on the tendency to amplify rumours, or even bad jokes, until they are widely believed regardless of truth.

In places where it hasn't resulted in obvious violence, it appears to be pushing people towards polarisation and distress, with violence looking plausible if that continues.

We have a real dilemma around this one. It may be that certain forms of "speech" that have emerged in modern society also push people towards violence.

Our risk models are irreconcilable, and I can’t see us coming to agreement on this. Hopefully we can coexist in peace, but if not I’ll be fighting for the other side.

With the slow "CCP"-ifciation of US tech platforms… the distinction between entities that incorporate under the jurisdiction of a government and the government that outsources lots of work to said companies is kind of a philosophical one.

War has already started… and it's not as simple as pretty lines drawn on maps to demarcate sides… or ballots dropped off for whose favorite candidate.

The first amendment protects a natural right, a right we all have, one we are NOT supposed to trample on each other. The 1st comes out of the framers ensuring that the government respects an already-existing right - it does not create one.

That right, then, cannot be upheld if half the country believes it's ok to silence the other half.

There's a huge value disconnect here and that's the fundamental problem. What one CAN do and what one SHOULD do are very different things and I think people's pragmatism is blinding them to how this will work out for people 100 years from now.

> That right, then, cannot be upheld if half the country believes it's ok to silence the other half.

I don't understand this. Donald Trump can say whatever he wants. Alex Jones can say whatever he wants. Why are you saying that their rights are being trampled? Why paint them as victims? As it happen, the right to speak is not a right to be heard and Trump's supporters can hear him as much as they want. Twitter decided that it would not be through their product.

If I invite a bunch of friends at my place and one of them start spewing hatred and lies, I'll kick him out. He can continue in the street as far as I am concerned. Just not in my house... What right were denied here?

I never heard those arguments a few years back when Fox news used to invite liberals on their show just to cut them in the middle of a sentence because they didn't like what they were saying. It infuriated me alright. But I never went as far as to think it was illegal.

Do you propose that Twitter should be forced by the government not to give context to tweets? It seems that the supreme court disagreed with that idea when they decided that a company cannot be forced to sell a cake to a gay couple.

> What one CAN do and what one SHOULD do are very different things and I think people's pragmatism is blinding them to how this will work out for people 100 years from now.

I completely agree with you. The President of the United States CAN instill doubt into the very heart of democracy using all the cynicism and lies he can muster. But SHOULD he do it? What I am saying is that between the theoretical threats of having a private company exercising its right to manage its products in its own way and the president of a country going for a power grab, the urgency, to me, seems pretty clear.

Let's agree to disagree.

I don't disagree but I also think that the best way to expose a lie is to push it into the full light of the sun, not try to stuff it into the basement. If someone is going to make a fool of himself, let him.

I would tend to agree with this. What I am worried is that Trump has been making a fool of himself for the last 74 years. Yet, more than 70.000.000 people voted for him. So there must be something wrong about our assumption...

We have had more than a decade of social media and internet message boards to learn that this whole 'expose the lie' myth promulgated mostly by free speech absolutists turns out to be complete bullshit. Masses of people are dumb, easily manipulated mobs whether they are in the public square or in some online echo chamber. The truth will be buried in a pile of a thousand lies.

A keystone of leftist psychology that "the others" are dumb. This leads directly to "fact checking" and ultimately memory holing information that the masses are "too dumb" to see. This idea that one is correct in deciding what history others can see is a form of mental illness; _throughly_ anchored in human history.

The Wayback Machie is the latest 1984 example: https://www.zerohedge.com/technology/information-war-interne...

(note yc already shadow bands 0h links by not allowing comments on submissions, this (yc) is an awesome place, it's sad really)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24406518

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23495333

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23486135

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21823044

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20623177

I'll be honest, I don't see your post as a reply to anything I said... so I'll just leave all this as it is.

Stop looking at right now, today, this week. Look forward. Look forward to when you are old; look forward beyond your lifetime; look forward to when this time in history has been forgotten by the cultural memory, to when the transitory arguments of today, this afternoon, or this year, have been forgotten; and ask yourself what kind of world you don't want to see, even if it means you ruefully admit it makes things harder now.

That introspection has been lost and probably, the human race won't survive this period if we don't figure it out.

> It seems that the supreme court disagreed with that idea when they decided that a company cannot be forced to sell a cake to a gay couple.

That is not what the Supreme Court decided. The only decision they made was that the Colorado Civil Rights Commission didn't apply religious neutrality to the case, and reversed the Commission's decision[1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Masterpiece_Cakeshop_v._Colora...

I think that while it may seem like a slippery slope at first, it is what we need. I think it's actually quite similar to the immune system analogy in the comment above. We need to have democratic participants in a democratic process. Our immune system needs to repel the undemocratic elements in some capacity.

Admittedly the question becomes how we can in a fair manner judge what ideas in which context can have such a dangerous impact as to be non-democratic.

We all have to reflect how close fascism and other kinds of ideologies always are just beneath the surface, and that we are all susceptible of falling on that train it isn't specifically another group that is.

I think the harder problem is not the binary cases but the shades of gray.

Want to ban Nazi's? I wont disagree, most people wont.

Want to ban group X which is fighting with group Y in a tit-for-tat skirmish over decades? How do you decide who is right? How do you decide truth?

What about cases where someone has done something bad in response to something bad done earlier? Do you ban one side? The other? Both? Does the side with more political/status power decide who gets banned?

> Want to ban group X which is fighting with group Y in a tit-for-tat skirmish over decades? How do you decide who is right? How do you decide truth?

I think there is a difference between ‘right vs wrong’ and ‘factually correct vs incorrect’.

Platforms like Twitter will rarely be in a position to decide right/wrong, because in many opposed discussion both sides will use the platform.

On the factual correctness, platforms can more easily take a stance in high impact cases. I would assume that they’d have out the same warnings on Biden’s Twitter if he had said ‘I won’ on Tuesday.

That leaves a challenge: how do you decide what’s a fact? For example on the vote count. Most outlets say the reported figures are fact, but it implies trusting the process of counting and reporting. Removing that implied trust means others can take ‘there is fraud!’ as fact just as well.

Twitter seems to use the mainstream media (eg AP predicting the election outcome) as a base of trust (and so do I). But I’ve come to realize that once you don’t trust the media, it is easy to believe in another set of facts (that are true for you), and suddenly (to you) it seems Twitter is censoring.

I hope people will find and trust each other again.

>> That leaves a challenge: how do you decide what’s a fact? For example on the vote count. Most outlets say the reported figures are fact, but it implies trusting the process of counting and reporting. Removing that implied trust means others can take ‘there is fraud!’ as fact just as well.

>> Twitter seems to use the mainstream media (eg AP predicting the election outcome) as a base of trust (and so do I). But I’ve come to realize that once you don’t trust the media, it is easy to believe in another set of facts (that are true for you), and suddenly (to you) it seems Twitter is censoring.

I'm glad you brought up the case of the election. It is a harder question for social media to arbitrate centrally. For example, "There is Fraud" could be true or false, and certainly somewhere you'll find fraud making the statement both true in fact and false in spirit. Then, there is the dark matter of everything the newspaper doesnt even cover -- US newspapers only regularly cover US news, allies, key areas of the world, and major events. Imagine a dairy-farmer trade war between two asian nations -- unlikely to be covered, so what is the truth? For that matter, imagine the civil rights of small minorities in the US -- depending on the minority group, unlikely to be covered even by major us newspapers.

Let me give you a harder example now. Anything to do spanning two sovereign nations, especially one involving war, civilian casualties, or war crimes. Pick your example: Russia/Ukraine, China/Taiwan, India/Pakistan, Yemen/Saudi Arabia. Both sides will have their national own newspapers which will support their own country. Which side does Twitter take?

This reminds me of the episode of Mythic Quest where they decided they wanted to ban Nazis--but then they started asking, "Who else should we ban?" The committee ended up with a horrifyingly-unwieldy list of hate/predatory groups. They felt it was just too many, so they put them all into a bracket and voted--Nazis still won.

By the time the meeting was over, the engineers had figured out a way to flag all the Nazis and just moved them all to their own instance. Problem solved.

Trump is making blatant baseless claims and accusations. That gets you a Twitter timeout. Other people receive similar treatment. (Congresswoman Majorie Taylor Greene’s Twitter page is entirely censored because all she does is spread QAnon conspiracy theories.) The solution is to just stop spreading disinformation.

The problem with that is that mainstream press outlets such as Bloomberg spread disinformation and don’t get censored.

Your premise is wrong. Twitter's actions weren't as a result of something it disagreed with. Your comment/thought illustrates one of the REAL root problems ... and that is we are living in a state of two apparent states of "factual reality". Unfortunately this is not possible. There is only one set of facts. Until we can return to that, we will be repeating similar scenarios.

In other words, there is nothing inappropriate about Twitter putting disclaimers on objectively factually incorrect statements.

I’m sorry but how do you reconcile your second paragraph’s criticism of the coexistence of two factual realities and your last paragraph in which you simply pick the one you happen to personally favor?

Data supports one of those two realities. Joe Biden is President-Elect.

The reality is that he's not. Not yet, since the Electors haven't gone to the Electoral College and still won't for a long time. In between now and then there will be court challenges.

Will those challenges change the ultimate outcome? Almost certainly not. But it's still a fact that Biden is not the President-Elect.

Should Twitter fact check people calling him the President-Elect? IMO, probably but only to look unbiased. Will they? No, because they don't care about looking biased despite 70M+ Americans siding with Trump.

It's not "biased" and never has been to project a winner based on statistical data. But if we're sticking to a statistical conclusion, how do you think Biden should be described at this point?

There is essentially no basis in history or law to believe that Biden will not take office, unless he dies before inauguration. There are no credible legal theories by which he will not be elected.

I don't think it's biased either. That's why I didn't say they should do it to be unbiased, but to look unbiased.

People are really not taking the loss of faith of 70M Americans as seriously as they aught to.

What should "people" do? The loss of faith is driven by four years of the President lying day in, day out. There have been plenty of voices throughout speaking up for truth and institutional respect, but they're baselessly attacked at the highest levels.

Because the question was not in good faith in the first place because the exact opposite is actually true: Twitter has bent the rules to no end in an effort to keep from banning Trump despite his constant breaking of the their rules.

I think you misunderstand. Its the co-existance of two claimed factual realities. You simply pick the one which is the factual reality, which relies on looking at facts.

If someone says 'the election is rigged', the least they have to do is produce evidence. In the absence of that evidence, that's not a factual statement.

Echo chambers, algorithmic recommendations, and powerful filters all but guarantee multiple realities for different people. If all you see are facts X, Y, and Z, then those facts are as real and true as someone else's facts A, B, and C. I have family members and friends who live in seemingly totally alternate universes, dominated by what I see as conspiracy theories, pseudoscience, and a cultural persecution complex. But as they describe it: it's I who live in a media-manufactured alternate reality characterized by trust in institutions, corruption, and a false belief in science and data.

What everyone is missing is: both universes might as well be correct, to the observer. It's like measuring what speed someone is going in two different relativistic frames of reference. You can both be right and come up with different numbers. It's a tough problem to solve. We can't solve it by just pointing at the out-groups and saying "ha-ha how stupid are they for believing in rubbish!" They are just not going to be convinced by someone who believe a totally different set of facts.

I am strongly anti-Trump and pro truth and reasonably pro Jack Dorsey and don’t disagree with anything you say except — I’m not sure why Jack Dorsey should get to decide what’s true just because he invented a social media platform

Jack didn’t decide what’s true, in fact lies are posted to Twitter by users everyday.

He just decided that these particular lies are too unreasonable for him to help spread them.

"Jack didn’t decide what’s true"

It's a little bit naive to think that the truth is easily discerned by any individual, it's always a matter of shades.

'Stole the Election' can mean many different things in many different contexts, not literally election fraud.

I detest Donald Trump and don't much like Jack Dorsey, but he should not be in a position to arbiter the truth.

I'm very thankful he censored Trump on the eve of the election, not thankful he banned the Post, and very worried about the future.

We probably need regulations over this.

The free speech people have to come to terms with the fact that the big mediums have always been filtered, and it only takes one insane president to start a civil war, that the truth among the plebes is 'Whatever their Ideologue Says' and so there needs to be credibility in the system.

The anti-Trump crowd who are happy with the censoring need to realize how dangerous of a game this is.

Twitter and FB need to set up a completely independent public board, with established guidelines and public oversight to manage these things..

He's not deciding. Just observing and reacting.

I would expect them to have a team actually doing this in a more principled fashion, instead of Jack Dorsey calling the shot from his ivory tower.

At some point you're gonna have to trust an authoritative source. Whether that is APNews or NYT or straight from the government website.

The question of "Who gets to decide the truth" is extremely tiring to refute - someone has always had the authoritative voice is determining what's true and what's not. You're shifting the burden of truth from one source to the other until there is no one you can trust.

Statement: Foo is Bar. [1]

[1] Source Baz.

You then need to argue, why does Baz gets to decide what's true or not? This goes on ad-infinitum.

By asking "Who gets to decide the truth", you're essentially saying "Why should I trust anyone?" and by that logic "I cannot trust anyone, so everything must be false." The society's fabric is based on trust in institutions. Whether it is government, an independent news source or whatever.

How about I get to decide who to trust instead of Twitter, Reddit, etc censoring people and deciding for me?

Perhaps you'll go to another source, say ABC news? You can ask them the same thing "Hey ABC news, why are you guys deciding the truth for me?".

Literally every source you will use, your own argument will falsify it.

Okay, so are you supportive of Twitter censoring political speech? Or should we be given the opportunity to view information and decide for ourselves what is bullshit and what isn’t? Anyone who believes everything they see on Twitter is beyond being helped by Jack’s censorship.

I didn't say that. "Decide for ourselves" - oh boy, good luck in the era of deep fakes, lies and misinformation.

I do agree with you on one thing - I don't think we should blindly trust Twitter. I am arguing that before censorship, they need to provide a solid source of truth.

A journalistic establishment with clear editorial control and clear liability for libel, etc. is not the same thing as a publishing platform.

Fair point, how do you think we need to control rampant misinformation?

I don't feel the need to control others' speech.

As far as better information, diversity in viewpoint in journalistic within organizations will help. News that starts within a bubble is probably more distorted.

The social media problem is harder, but giving users ultimate control on how to filter fake news is important. Otherwise, social media companies should express editorial positions and advertise editorial services as a core part of their offerings, then consumers and content creators would have clear signals about biases in how information is curated on their platforms.

The difference though is that society is largely aware that newspaper editors have opinions and biases and act as gatekeepers and the editors themselves largely acknowledge their roles as gatekeepers. In tech we still try pretend that these companies aren't gatekeepers and the CEOs adamantly insist that they're largely neutral platforms. That's why it's hard to trust tech as an authoritative source.

I would be fine with Twitter censoring but providing an authoritative source (such as APNews) that justifies their censorship. Transparency is better.

I guess I am more concerned about people harping on "Well, I don't trust APNews, why do they get to decide on truth." One can go down a conspiratorial path pretty quickly when theyve already made up their mind to not trust anyone or trust their favorite source that supports their arguments and emotional state.

When you click the blue warning on the tweet, it does exactly that...?

I didn't know. Not on twitter as much, I'll inquire further.

Just go on Donald Trump's Twitter feed, and click on all the various warnings...(also note that none were "censored"--some just have a warning appended, and others were hidden by default with a warning, and you have to click it to see the tweet.)

That's actually pretty funny, I did click on that warning on some voter fraud allegations and here is what it said:

    What you need to know
    - Voter fraud of any type is incredibly rare in the US, according to The Associated Press and Reuters
    - US officials say the 2020 US election will be more secure than the 2016 US presidential election
    - US officials confirm that foreign governments are trying to influence the US election, but that foreign governments' interference is mostly relegated to launching misinformation campaigns
    - Experts say US elections are 'resilient'

And then it lists some articles, that just like the tl;dr version above, did not disprove anything that was actually being said in tweets labeled with these warnings.

It's really bad. Laughably bad. It might only confirms your biases if you already believe that the allegations are false, but if you haven't formed an opinion yet - I assure you, no one is ever going to be convinced by this. A lot of people are now treating those factcheckers as a complete joke that cannot be taken seriously. But I don't know, this is just what I noticed by observing this entire thing, make of it what you will.

It's high time we stopped pretending that and understood that even neutrality is, itself, a stance (i.e. there are criteria determining what is "neutral," and those criteria are chosen by the platform).

> At some point you're gonna have to trust an authoritative source. Whether that is APNews or NYT or straight from the government website.

Would you really teach your children "trust the New York Times and whatever the government says"? When both said Iraq had WMDs, did you believe them? In a perfect world we could all look at the source material (photos, videos, data, etc.) ourselves to figure out reality and there would be uncensorable platforms for individuals to call out corruption and reach the masses. This was the original promise of the internet and social media! Sadly the authoritarian left is insistent on defining "reality" and relishes censoring dissenting facts or opinions. Facebook and Twitter wields their "fact checking" and censorship on a might-is-right basis, which disenfranchises 50% of the population and is seriously incendiary to civil discourse.

I am talking about authoritative source of truth. Not arguing which specific source.

Right. But evidence is more trustworthy than authority.

I am terrified of the idea that the common public of 70 million people that voted for Trump did not have the basic skills to determine what's true and what's not from the evidence. They've been constantly fed lies - as we speak about election fraud. They're provided with plenty of evidence, they choose to not believe.

If you think about the world where 80% of the people are religious, who throw away evidence in favor of faith; you're in for a dark future.

Pompous comments like this only drive people further away. Evidence being presented by a biased media is not evidence to be trusted. MSM “science” and “facts” are just as much a religion as Catholicism.

If I’m presented evidence from someone that has routinely lied to me, called me names, destroyed my career, and shipped my job prospects overseas, I’m not believing a single word they say.

I am saying I don't believe in authoritative sources of truth. All the "wrong" people out there don't enter into it when I am reading news. I look for facts that can be and have been validated.

And it's important to have humility about being right about everything. You don't have to go back far to find folks on the left excited about the prospects for Venezuela. Now, it's possible to find scapegoats, but it does explain some of the right-wing perspective on fake news. If the left and the media had to see a country basically collapse to call the Venezuelan government problematic, what do you call the reporting and debate points before that? "Factual" doesn't cut it.

The fact that you're getting downvoted on such a simple, objectively true statement shows the blatant bias of the HN crowd.

What’s the distinction between evidence and authority in practical sense?

Vaccine efficacy according to FDA says it’s 90%. ~~~~> Authority.

Paper published by FDA shows data ~~~~> Evidence.

Right?

Who wrote the paper and who collected the data? Some authority.

> When both said Iraq had WMDs, did you believe them?

Biden voted for the Iraq War and 70 million people just installed him as President so we can go back to the glorious way things were before. Certainly the billionaire elites, deep state, globalists, big tech, pro war Democrats and Republicans, big business (which loves infinite cheap labor), China - they're all thrilled with where this goes next.

I wonder if all the people cheering for Biden (including the Europeans) will be offering apologies when Biden & Co. start the next round of wars, as we return to the ways things were pre-Trump. Biden's brain is jello, so somebody else is going to be steering the ship the next few years until he steps down for health reasons to set up Harris to run for re-election in 2024 running as the incumbent. Zero chance Biden's health holds up against the rigors of the job given how much he has collapsed mentally in the past four years (the stress of the job will make it that much worse).

As an American, I'm increasingly interested in leaving the country. Not specifically because of Trump or Biden, but because of everything, the general direction of the country, the imploding culture, the partisan venom, the fiscal disaster, the superpower globalism (including the war machine), the disastrous immigration policies. The US is fundamentally broken and will not be repaired, it's only going to get worse as real authoritarianism rises on both sides (socialism and fascism, both of which require extreme political violence, a small taste of which we've just recently been getting). The future of the US is Brazil, with more money. Canada is looking very nice (sane immigration policies, national selfishness regarding their priorities, no war machine, spending allocated effectively (the US spends more of its economy on its mediocre welfare state than Canada does and gets a lot less for it), a stable culture, and national civility).

Why would you say that anyone else should decide what's true on his platform? Twitter isn't even so popular that you can say it has a monopoly of any sort. There are plenty of alternative services, and no significant barriers to starting a new one. I guarantee that if the president of the United States was to say "From now on I'm only posting on my blog" then that blog would become very popular.

I don't think it's as black and white as you say. "I won the presidency" could, in theory, be a true statement, even if it comes before the counting is complete and we haven't yet determined its veracity. "There was fraud" could, in fact, be true, even if the evidence to prove it is not forthcoming.

Ultimately, Twitter censors things it doesn't think are healthy for its platform. I think that's within its rights, but I don't think it's by any means objective.

Twitter doesn't point out what's true. They point out what's under dispute.

> I’m not sure why Jack Dorsey should get to decide what’s true just because he invented a social media platform

That's the fundamental misalignment of understanding in this era: he doesn't. He gets to decide what his platform hosts and how he spins it. The determiner of truth is, as it has always been, the audience.

> I’m not sure why Jack Dorsey should get to decide what’s true just because he invented a social media platform

A social media platform is a publisher, if it encourages news to be disseminated through its networks then it should be held to the same scrutiny.

Some might cry - well this is impossible! I can tweet anything and a stranger can share it, how can I cope with that volume etc... well, then you have to choose:

if you want to be a broadcaster, then you must obey the law and not broadcast propaganda or blatant falsehoods.

If you do not want to censor or edit, then you must stop being a broadcaster, that is you must limit the reach of that material, so that a person may only communicate it to their friend and not further in the same way as an ordinary conversation in person, by telephone, or text message would work.

What about Twitter/Facebook disclaimers on Palestinian speech? Where do you draw the line?

If Twitter could make money in China would flagging Human Rights Campaign be okay?

You're arguing from a presumption that truth doesn't exist or doesn't/won't matter, and a lot of us disagree with that notion.

I disagree with deploying tools of autocrats to control speech. How incredibly lame.

I wonder how you'll feel when they do this to you or someone you care about.

I don't quite understand the epistemic certainty people have that such weapons will never be turned against them, especially when history so dramatically demonstrates the opposite.

The entire Twitter platform seems totalitarian and a societal bad. Why would you ever want a billboard for your passing thoughts that literally not only can be read by a huge audience but will be read by a huge audience? Oh sure it’s great if you’re promoting something. But there’s clearly a reason beyond basic privacy to want your messages only readable by select few.

I’ve been out of social media for years and never quite ‘got’ twitter. From the outside, it seems like it’s having a totalitarian effect on society. What you say will be widely viewed - and “judged.”

On that my friend we 100% agree. Widening the window of discussion, I would view it as a 100x societal good for Twitter itself and anything that pretends to it, to disappear.

I do not accept Twitter as my authority on what is objectively factual correct.

Do you?

> There is only one set of facts.

But what is that set of facts?

Twitter felt no need to censor the Steele dossier for years despite it being a politically-funded piece of nonsense.

> In other words, there is nothing inappropriate about Twitter putting disclaimers on objectively factually incorrect statements.

Not necessarily inappropriate, but it might be ineffective. I don't know if this has already occurred but I'd bet a great deal of money that those click-through warnings about blatant or dangerous falsehoods will become a badge of honor among twitter conservatives, if they haven't already.

Who will watch the watchers?

Twitter made plenty of controversial decisions during these days https://twitter.com/DavidShafer/status/1324537971215863808

It's not just Twitter, it's the media in general. When I watch CNBC, and they decide to stop airing the President's presser because he's lying, that says to me that the media believes that they should do the thinking for me. That says a lot about how they view the public.

We're building a world where "think for yourself" means "defer your thinking to Trusted Sources™", which is not a world that I support.

EDIT>> s/CNN/CNBC

Some of the networks wisely determined that the speech was unfounded, baseless, and harmful. News networks do not need to be a spigot for outright lies and fabrication.

Sorry, I want to know what my public servants are saying. How we can we make sure they are serving us if their words are being hidden from us?

The party will take care of that for you. Shhh.

Wasn't it streamed by the White House itself as well?

Should every TV station be required to air every public servant's statements? Surely going to the source isn't too big of a burden for most.

it's not every tv station in question it's about news stations covering the election. 'every public servant' is not in question.. it's about the current president of the USA

How can you make sure they are serving you if he doesn't hold press conferences for hundreds of days?

And you do. There wasn't anything of substance said in the part of the speech that wasn't aired.

Feel free to watch the whole thing. No one is stopping you.

There is a difference between censorship and moderation. Trump was literally trolling on CNBC's platform, and they chose to confront that.

Watch it on CSPAN. That's what CSPAN is for, showing complete government events without interruption or editorializing.

People that have a working brain shouldn't care what networks think or determine. Those networks must limit themselves to neutrally reporting the news and let the people make up their minds.

This election has proven that US, but also Western-European media are extremely biased and see themselves as the arbiters of truth. Reading German media I noticed - without exaggeration - that Trump was getting worse press than actual real dictators. Mainstream German newspapers had articles where they invited mental health specialists to speculate on what mental afflictions Trump might be suffering from.

Extremely unethical show from the mainstream media.

Suppose Trump’s rant of inflammatory lies had gone on for 90 minutes; would CNN, Fox, et al., reasonably be expected to air it all? What if the president had called for terroristic acts against his opponents, show that in its entirety without editorializing as well?

Cutting off in the middle of the speech is not editorializing, it's essentially censorship of the elected president of the USA. Obviously he wasn't calling for terrorist attacks on anyone, let's not get ridiculous.

It would be censorship if the unaired part of the speech had more content. That was not the case.

Yes--it's not as if Donald set forth his case in a preamble, then bolstered that case with logic and evidence, brick by brick. He started with "there was massive fraud, big fraud" and ended with "I'm hearing there was so much fraud and cheating." But there was no evidence, only hand-waving and bluster.

>see themselves as the arbiters of truth

They are at some level. Of course, a newspaper isn't going to present all sources as being of equal authority. If someone is spouting nonsense at some point you cut them off.

I agree with you, but I think that I also get the opposite PoV.

Sure, it happened to Trump this time because it was telling lies.

But imagine what would happen if they did the same to a president who was telling truths that the network didn’t like.

It’s about the power that allows the act, not the act itself.

The media clearly has power. And it's not wrong to observe that the mainstream English language media tends to be associated with a certain class, worldview, and educational system.

On the other hand, there has never been an era when individuals had as much ability to male their voices heard or, for better or worse, such diversity of news (and "news") sources.

There's also the fact that Twitter is a platform and not a publication. And there are certainly questions of what happens when dominant platforms that control access to eyeballs start regulating what people can people can publish there according to reality as it exists for the tech world.

> Those networks must limit themselves to neutrally reporting the news and let the people make up their minds.

Why? Not only has this never been the case, it is also strictly impossible to report news with zero bias, because the world is a messy place with a lot of concurrent things happening and media has to weave a mostly linear story from that. There's no algorithmic way to do that.

Imagine a large protest. Most people protest peacefully. A small group of protestors riot. The police are there too. Mostly they just watch, but some of them engage with protestors who they suspect of rioting, and some of those cops use arguably excessive violence.

You're making the TV news bulletin, you have footage of all of these sub-events. You have to decide how much time to allocate to each of the sub-events. You have a big responsibility, because the amount of attention you pay to each of them may influence public opinion. Do you focus on the peaceful protest? Or on the rioting? Or on the police violence? What's the "objectively" right amount of time to spend on each of these sub-events?

> You have to decide how much time to allocate to each of the sub-events.

I'm not sure what the "right" amount of time is; that's an incredibly difficult thing to determine--probably impossible in fact. But I certainly, trivially, know what the "wrong" amount of time would be: zero. If a reporter doesn't find some non-zero balance between those three perspectives, they have utterly failed in their role as a journalist. Eliding any of those events doesn't reduce bias, it effectively maximizes it.

Even that is an untenable position, I think. You can't report on every event in the world, or even on everything that happens in the context of a particular event. So you need some sort of "noteworthiness" measure, and that is _guaranteed_ to be informed by what you personally care about.

My point is that while it's impossible to reduce bias to zero, we're supposed to have well-known measures in place to fight against bias as much as possible. If a judge is friends with a plaintiff, they're supposed to disclose that fact and recuse themselves from the case, no matter how strongly they feel they could remain impartial. Government is structured into separate branches that each control/overrule the other, so that bias on one side can be tempered by the other.

With regards to journalism, the obvious rule is that you're supposed to impartially talk to both sides: the priest and the skeptic, the corporation and the union, the president and the challenger, the victim and the rapist. I'm not complaining that people aren't doing what they're supposed to be doing perfectly; I'm complaining that world-class news organizations with (formerly, I guess) serious credibility like the NY Times are blatantly not even trying to be objective anymore. They're not following basic, basic rules of journalism that literally children know to do (and would be penalized on their homework for not doing). For example, how is it reasonable to run a story like, "celebrity X sparks outrage on twitter with racist/sexist/transphobic/whatever tweet", without ever printing or even linking to what X actually said! How can you run a story on the response to some event without any context on the event itself?

Obviously they can't be perfectly neutral, but that should be the goal and the standards by which they're measured.

We're not at the point where networks allocate less time to certain topics, we're at the point where media organizations have decided that for certain topics there is one and only one valid opinion and they're telling people how to think. This is essentially propaganda.

> Those networks must limit themselves to neutrally reporting the news and let the people make up their minds.

Impartial coverage is important, but neutral reporting is dangerous. Good journalism requires analyzing evidence, not treating all opposing views as equal (false balance).

When evidence is clear (such as in the case of the safety of vaccinations, the role humans play in climate change, etc.), "neutral reporting" can be misleading or even damaging.

It's the responsibility of journalists to help their audience understand view points, but that doesn't require giving them equal weight.

For example, in the case of vaccinations it's important to acknowledge that vaccinations were at one point believed to be linked to developmental disorders, that the study which did so has been debunked, and that the consensus of the medical community is now clear: there is no link between vaccines and autism.

The same holds true in the context of an election. For example, journalists should be (and, in many case, are) explaining that while some believe that votes were cast or counted illegally, no evidence of this has been presented. While it appeared that Biden "took the lead" after election day, this was an illusion resulting from the way in which the Republican legislatures in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania caused votes to be counted: they did not allow counting of mail ballots to begin earlier, despite knowing that record numbers would be received this year, and despite knowing that mail ballots would favor Democrats. While convincing reasons were presented for these decisions, such as earlier counting posing problems for volunteer election inspectors, it had predictable effects on the time period over votes were tallied and it is disingenuous for Trump to refer to these as "surprise ballot dumps" and either willfully ignorant or intentionally misleading for him to attempt to claim victory on election night before these ballots had been counted.

Here's the problem :

Most mainstream media has been pushing the well known hoax about "fine people on both sides" being about white supremacists for far too long to have much credibility left when wanting to point out others unfounded, baseless and harmful lies.

They should be able to pause throughout and offer analysis or not run it altogether, if they are a news organization and not a propaganda organ.

Cnn is liable for their content though. Twitter isn't

Are you trying to suggest that if a news network interviews someone, and that person lies, the network is responsible?

lies are not illegal. if what the person says is illegal though, a publisher can be sued and face the same liability

What does this have to do with CNBC discontinuing Trump's press conference? Do you think he said something illegal?

No. I just answered your question and pointed out that there's a big difference in the legal protections offered to twitter. What twitter did is borderline ethical, it would have been more honest to ban trump rather than plaster his tweets with their own opinion of them.

What are you talking about? CNN aired the president's presser in full without stopping it; I know because I watched it live on CNN. Are you mixing up CNN with other networks?

My mistake, it was CNBC[0]

0. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=012BzDoFqiY

Ultimately at some point trump won't be president. Should the media continue to show his press conferences then? So that voters can choose which president they listen to, the actual one or the fake one?

> We're building a world where "think for yourself" means "defer your thinking to Trusted Sources™", which is not a world that I support.

"defer your thinking to Trusted Sources" is the world we're coming from. Our incoherent polarization is a result of the traditional authorities having been routed around (and then leaning into their own demise). We've apparently got an awfully long road ahead of us to get to a world where everyone is actually thinking for themselves, as demonstrated by how readily blatant lies spread when they're politically and personally comforting.

That's always been true of the media in general. The publisher of the NYT presumably said something (years ago) to the effect of "We don't give people what they want; we give them what they should have." Arguably there are far fewer or more porous gatekeepers today relative to the historic norm--for better or worse.

Its fascinating. I'd never think the most important person in the world would have their tweets hidden. I'm quite impressed with how they did it. Though if I really liked Trump I could feel hard done by.

If you haven't see its worth a look. https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump

Statements fall on a spectrum between pure opinion and incontrovertible, undisputed fact. Somewhere along there is a threshold where it's no longer about agreeing with something.

I'd say it's impossible to do a perfect job of finding that threshold, but I think Twitter has done a decent job of it with Trump's tweets.

But yes, as it stands right now, it is in their hands and we are relying on them to do a good job of it when they decide to.

"because of something it disagreed with" is a mischaracterization of "because of provable falsehoods dangerous to public safety, and democracy".

A President with a massive angry following with guns, tweeting falsehoods about the lack of integrity of the electoral process (And I don't mean the vague things, I mean the explicitly false things like his party not having access to view vote count processes, which they do) is about as close as you can get to yelling "FIRE" in a crowded theater on the internet.

Not only is it Twitter's prerogative to act accordingly, I'd go further and say it is their ethical duty.

And yes, if Biden did the equivalent "from the other side", Twitter would act in exactly the same way.

Please give us an example of a Tweet from Trump that was removed and that was just remotely debatable.

There are a few parts to your question. Can I find anything salvageable in the flagged statements that he made on Twitter? Definitely not, I’m pissed off we elected someone who thinks it’s OK to say things like that in public. I think Colbert said it best: Trump doing those things puts an eternal stain on the Office of Presidency; now among the things Presidents of the US have done, being subjected to Internet moderation is one of them. This was unimaginable merely a decade ago. Trump forced Twitter’s hand here, but now we live in a world where that precedent exists.

Am I excited that We the People are delegating the decisions what speech to amplify or not to fickle private companies? It’s hard for me to get behind that. Something just feels very wrong about this idea.

The president is human and a civilian just like the rest of us shlubs. Don't forget that.

I don't know what you mean by "civilian." In my life, that typically means "not in the military."

But being President of the US makes one the Commander in Chief. That's the highest military position we have in this country.

Don't take my word for it

https://www.law.cornell.edu/constitution-conan/article-2/sec...

Not only this, but the offices of the SECDEF and secretaries of each service branch are also led by civilians, to which the JCS report. There are strict limits to the number of positions in those offices that can be filled by uniformed officers.

Thank you. That was informative.

I remain confused as to why you worded your remark the way you did. And that was my real point, which I feel like I didn't make clear.

You're welcome, sorry if I came across strangely.

It's just that I think people forget that the office of the President, while important, is a civilian executive position. It is unlike Chief Justice, or a 3* General, which require lifetime commitments to achieve.

I believe it was intentional that the office of the President to be public and administrative, more like that of a mayor than of a king.

And that's what we shouldn't lose sight of.

I looked up shlub and the internet told me it means talentless, unattractive or boorish person.

I fundamentally cannot agree with your seeming dismissal of his responsibility to comport himself a certain way in public while he holds office.

Oh!

Well I agree with you there about the office demanding a certain level of, uh, Presidentialness. Whether on social media or not.

I was just being hyperbolic about your typical blue-check twitter user coupled with a (possibly unhealthy) sprinkling of self-deprecation.

Ah. I see.

Self deprecating humor is fraught with problems under the best of circumstances. (It's a bad habit I'm trying to break for myself.)

Thanks for clarifying everything so nicely. It's been nice talking with you.

These companies are as important as we consider them to be.

And just a few reminders: 1. His messages are still visible. 2. Even if they were not, he could still deliver his message in a thousand different ways, I mean he's constantly over the phone with Fox'n'Friends.

Since America exists, you've always had people commenting and criticizing what elected officials are doing and saying. Do you want to shut twitter's right to free speech? Do you realize that you are taking a position of: "A member of government should not be questioned by a private party". Do you realized how fearful people who disagrees with you can be by hearing this argument?

The guy is literally going for a power grab. "Stand up and stand by"... I really think that those who are worried about democracy because of what Twitter is doing are focusing on the wrong thing here. And to be honest, I find it harder and harder to believe they do it in good faith... That is what I am worried about.

We treat large companies differently from small ones all the time (antitrust, too big to fail, etc.), so I don’t see imposing extra restrictions on something where so much public discourse is happening as too extreme. If it causes smaller competitors to spring up, so much the better.

Realize that I’m not arguing that Twitter should be compelled to never flag anything. Just if they do maybe there needs to be a consistent set of laws with due process to appeal the decisions.

Here’s a thought experiment: what if say China were to acquire a majority stake in Twitter and downright forbid any disagreeable statement about Taiwan? The fact that this sale would probably not be allowed in the first place for national security reasons should give another hint that something about Twitter is unusual.

As for arguing in good faith, when do you think is a good time to have this conversation? It’s great that it worked out for good this time. Sure, let’s wait until he’s safely out of office first. But I think that’s exactly the time to think through this carefully, and not when it’s too late and these powers are used against something you agree with. History is full of examples of failing to think through long term consequences while focussing on the imminent danger.

Twitter didnt hide Trump's tweets because they disagreed, the hid them because they were unsubstantiated falsehoods, that could have a deleterious effect on peoples faith in the process itself. They would have hidden Biden's too, if he did something along those lines.

How famous does one have to be to get this special treatment? Or is it just for political candidates?

(I'm firmly in the "Their platform, their rules" camp, so I agree that Twitter CAN do this, I'm really just curious as to why people think they SHOULD).

> How famous does one have to be to get this special treatment? Or is it just for political candidates?

The special treatment is placing the warning instead of banning them. But you have to be important enough that executives think applying the standard policy to you would be a bad idea.

Proven lies that are trying to kill the democratic election process should be hidden by default.

It's not even censorship, they are all there still and anyone can read them.

But proven lies need to be called out. Freedom of the press allows us to call out politicians on their lies.

Maybe we should have federally refulated aocial media then, or the social media version of PBS.

Then we as a democracy could decide via legislation and law what is approrpriate and what is not.

Broader tendency for sure, look at the Alexandra Ocasio tweet asking for a list of Trump "enablers". The future is scary

I definitely think this is the future. And other countries are wise to take note, and consider very carefully the threat Twitter poses to their sovereignty.

It's exceedingly likely that American liberals will tell you what to do, and pat themselves on the back.

It's a ridiculous and absurd stretch to say that Twitter poses any threat to American sovereignty but Trump claiming an election he lost isn't a threat to that same sovereignty.

I wonder how much public opinion was impacted by Trump's tweets (one way or the other). I also wonder the magnitude of the impact of Twitter's actions. I sort of also wonder why some public figures are subject to fact checking and others are not.

Censoring really ought to be driven by the individual, not the platform. By getting involved in censoring certain parties, Twitter is implying here (whether intentionally or not) that its platform is a source of truth. That's a horrifying notion on its own. If anything my trust in Twitter (what little I had) is basically gone. It has nothing to do with politics. The minute a social media platform starts meddling with user content (especially the content of public figures, especially especially the current POTUS, whoever he is), I no longer believe anything I see on the platform.

It's hard enough to know what to believe without questioning the authenticity of people's statements.

My Facebook account was recently restricted from 'complex entities interactions' a week before the election until November 28, with no explanation as to why, and an error thrown whenever I click a link to contest the restrictions (for lack of a better term).

Thus far, it seems to mean that I can't follow, comment, post, or dm on/with groups or facebook pages. I cannot create events, pages, or new groups.

I can only post to my timeline, dm my friends, or comment on my friend's posts.

I do not post, or comment on Facebook, though I am a member of a number of politically engaged and activist facebook groups on the fringes for the purposes of having access to on the ground primary sources.

I have a number of friends active on the right who received a similar set of restrictions, ending on the same day. They're used to these kinds of restrictions, comment often, and thought nothing of it. This is typical of facebook to them.

More unexpectedly, and in my opinion a disturbing development in an already unsettling moderation regime, a number of second-order contacts (friends of friends and coworkers) who work as left and progressive organizers/activists (not liberals, progressives and leftists) also received the same levels of restriction.

This was accompanied by the removal of quite a few fringe activist and political pages, the most infamous which comes to my mind being 'God Emperor Trump', a large meme page that had significant reach during the 2016 election.

I don't think this is circumstantially unique. This is a preview. Assuming recounts and court challenges go Biden's way, I believe we're looking at a future where social media uses the tools they've developed over the past four years to enforce a bipartisan moderate consensus over their user-bases, restricting any populist, revolutionary, or potentially dangers speech or users that might produce it.

The activist left has largely been shielded by its circumstantial alliance with the DNC establishment and its allied institutions, given their mutual opposition to the Trump administration.

The populist right has partially been shielded by the implicit threat of Trump's executive authority.

Libertarians (I'm including the Boogaloo movement, and many lockdown protests under this umbrella) have had no such cover, and in my limited experience I've seen entire networks of users and pages been scrubbed off the platform over the past two years with little fanfare, and largely as a product of their affiliations. I believe their experience will be mirrored on the left and the right going forward.

The censorship is getting scary. I'm recently permabanned from reddit for being too progressive. I shouldn't have criticized mayor Pete for his takes on M4A on the politics sub. Both ends of the spectrum are being deplatformed.

This is tangential, but I'm quite suprised at the personality cult that's developed around Buttigieg. It's quite small, but nonetheless impressive for someone so milquetoast. I've always dismissed him as a gay Beto O'rourke, but clearly there's something I've missed.

People are tired of old white dudes as politicians. They want...young white dudes.

The trend where large Internet platforms control political content propagation will intensify, and prevail in the end. Elites all over the world will not easily cede control of important narratives, which they wield in traditional media (news paper, TVs). For me, deleting COVID misinformation is ok. Blocking Trump's tweet on the election results is a bit more dubious (why not leave it to the people to judge, which are given the right to vote anyway?). And we will see more of these in the coming years.

The way you phrase it is as intellectually dishonest as it gets. Twitter didn't hide tweets they disagreed with, they hid tweets from a public official who cast doubt on the election process with no shred of evidence and acted in a responsible manner. With additional security on his account, there's are also additional responsibilities and since he didn't care, they had to interfere. They didn't delete anything, they didn't remove anything, they just made it perfectly clear that there's no proof to his allegations. That's responsible behavior and something that should have come way sooner.

Interesting fact I noticed: If Biden is to take the presidency after the Electoral Collage voted that would make him the oldest president to take office yet, also interesting that wikipedia already marked Biden as president-elect [0].

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_presidents_of_the_Unit...

Futher, Donald Trump's wikipedia page is currently fully-locked, a rare classification for a wikipedia page. Biden is currently only under extended-confirmed protection.

Of course this is necessary but one of my favorite pasttimes is to look at vandalism changes in the history, and I would have loved to see some of the stuff people came up with on either side.

If you look at the protection log and follow the links, the request which led to that full protection is interesting: "Temporary full protection: The article is going crazy with everyone trying to add their version to the lead. There is so much edit conflicting it took me eight tries to bring the article back to a neutral version. Would anyone consider a few hours of full protection to let things calm down?"

Sounds about right, I might have a gander just because - bound to have some gold nuggets of crazy to peruse!

Just to add for the curious, the wiki on "President-elect of the United States" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/President-elect_of_the_United_...

It would also make him the only person from the Silent Generation [0] to ever be elected President of the United States. As Biden is at the very youngest end of the generation, he will likely remain the only one.

[0] Using the Strauss-Howe definitions of generations https://www.lifecourse.com/about/method/the-generational-con...

Edit: Silents were born 1925-1942. Just thought I should mention it here so you don't have to click the link. Biden was born in November 1942, so he's just before the cutoff.

It's chilling how nobody born between 1924 and 1942 (or 1946 if Biden doesn't count yet) became the President or even tbe candidate of any major political party during a US election.

Maybe people who grew up during the Great Depression had less opportunities? Or maybe baby boomers born right after the war overcame the silent generation in influence by numbers.

I think part of it was also how long the G.I. Generation stuck around. At the time when you'd expect to start seeing Silent presidents, Reagan won election as the then-oldest person to have ever been elected president and was popular enough he had two terms and got his VP elected afterwards. If Reagan's first term had flopped (or maybe even if he'd never run at all, though that's really speculative), we would've gotten President Mondale in 1984. Or we might have seen a Silent as early as 1980 if Ted Kennedy won his primary challenge.

I think we're starting to see a similar phenomenon with Generation X being pushed out by long-lived Boomers and even a couple of Silents, but at least we had Obama (born 1961, so he barely counts) in between Boomers.

With that said, it's not for lack of trying that we haven't had a Silent president. Aside from the aforementioned Mondale and Kennedy's attempt, we've also had Michael Dukakis and John McCain as major-party nominees, the only third-party candidate who had a chance in Ross Perot, plus Bernie Sanders was a major contender and runner-up for the Democratic nomination twice.

A few minutes of wikipedia-ing and found Walter Mondale, born 1928.

Undoubtedly a significant consideration for VP choice (Harris in this case) is the statistical likelihood that a 78-82 year old might pass away from natural causes some time in the next four years.

I didn't like how both VP candidates dodged that question in the debates. It's a legitimate concern.

Why?

The concession plan is clear, and everyone knows the vice president of whoever wins. I don't see the problem.

It looks like that page has gone back and forth a few times and is leaning toward not listing Biden yet.

An article on the steps Wikipedia was taking two weeks ago around the election. https://www.wired.com/story/wikipedias-plan-to-resist-electi...

This suggests that experienced editors have reached consensus regarding the likely outcome of the election.

Further, Biden will be older when entering the office, than the next-older, Reagan, was when -leaving- the office.-

Also, of course, Kamala Harris makes history as first woman of color elected US vicepresident.-

Biden has already changed his Twitter bio to "president-elect": - https://twitter.com/joebiden

First woman of color, but not first "person of color" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Curtis

Assuming that "significant non-european ancestry" is the determining line here.

This is inaccurate. The next older upon entering office, after Joe Biden, will have been Donald Trump.

Biden: 77 years, 353 days

Trump: 70 years, 220 days

Reagan: 69 years, 349 days

This almost certainly makes him a one term President. Harris is the one to watch for 2024.

There will be three, no, four living ex-presidents younger than the current president, Biden (77).

Barak Obama (59) Bill Clinton (74) George W. Bush (74) edit: Donald Trump (74)

Losing really did a number on Trump...

You forgot Donald Trump (74?)

Three US presidents born in a 4 month period in 1946.

[edit] - You have to be 35 or older to be president, which for people born in 1946 would be 1981. Clinton was president for 8 years, Bush for 8, Trump for 4, so 20. For the majority of the time since people born in 1946 were eligible to be president, they have been.

Bill Clinton looks the most frail out of those (including Biden)

> also interesting that wikipedia already marked Biden as president-elect

It has long been standard to refer to candidates as President-Elect once one the results of the election of electors is reasonably clear. One might argue that it is not technically accurate until after the Congress tallies the votes of the Electoral College and announces the result of that tally, but it is the long accepted usage and the use of it to refer to Biden at this point is in no way noteworthy or a deviation from what long-established practice.

This is actually, in any jurisdiction, what I take the most issues with: presidential systems headed by practically very soon-to-be-dead men. I have changed with age; surely the flexibility, inventiveness, and power an individual can constructively wield on his own is highly impacteded by age. Half-dead men should retire, not take office, or consult, at the utmost.

This fact is more illustrative of whatever divide the US is under than anything else. It's generational conflict. And face it, the American president is not of any generation that has yet to build their future. A waxy president who is full of thought and reflection might not be the wise emperor who is still mighty enough to control the backstabbing theatre that is politics.

Effectively, in terms of foreign policy, I think nothing, absolutely nothing will change. From a non-American point of view, Trump did nothing too different from what Clinton would have done, and a Biden will not do something too different from what a Trump would do. Or do what he is told, for that matter.

Other countries take different approaches. China’s Communist Party requires leaders to retire at 68 (unless you are Xi Jinping):

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/02/world/asia/xi-jinping-chi...

And he would be 85 by the end of a second term, in theory. Not incredibly reassuring numbers.

[This has been hinted at in various threads but I'm stating it clearly here]

A fundamental cause of political polarisation is social media. Tech platforms incentivised by advertising to increase engagement have (probably mostly inadvertently) become manipulation engines that have destabilised democracies.

I think at this moment in time the tech community should take pause to consider what we have done. We started with heady ideals and hopes, especially for the internet, but we have veered a long way from that vision.

As engineers, we have great power in this world. For the foreseeable future, our skills will be highly in demand and shape the future of humanity, in every area of society - from finance to health, from entertainment to politics.

If you work for a social media company, or a search engine, or any company that is reliant on adtech or high engagement for its income, then I implore you to think long and hard about how your actions may have contributed to bringing us to this point, and whether it is possible to change the course of your organisation or it would be better to leave.

More positively, the large social media networks are now entrenched corporations, and they have lost the advantages that startups confer. With sufficient imagination and hard work there are many opportunities to disrupt those companies with the compelling mission of making the world a better, not a worse, place.

Hint: 'Personalized' algorithms simply mean tailored to one's biases. As in Google will show liberals only liberal articles, and conservatives conservative articles.

I think there's an important distinction between recommendation algorithms, which is how I'd describe what you're referring to, and _algorithms designed to maximise engagement_.

Recommendation algorithms try to provide content that you'll enjoy, like new movies to watch.

Engagement algorithms will try to find content that keeps you engaged, even if that means enraging you. They don't just exploit biases, rather they exploit what triggers you.

And therein lies the problem, algorithms can't tell if you click and spend time with something because you enjoy it, or because it enraged you.

I absolutely agree this is an issue, but I honestly think it even transcends social media algorithms. Well, for one thing, the news media is just as much to blame, pushing clickbait and stories that induce the most rage. The next step is, regardless of social media sites, people tend to share said stories far more, so it's a vicious circle. I think any large connected social media site, regardless of the algorithms, will lead to a similar result.

It's amazing. My friends on the left think the only reason for voting trump is racism, and friends on the right think the only reason for voting biden is socialism.

Where did all the intellect go?

The social dilemma documentary I think is very useful. It feels like social media bubbles are a large component, although of course there have been many contentious elections in the past.

Being centrist I can relate to parts of both sides but my experience is they both dislike centrists.

I appreciate your centrist views!

I think the loss of nuance to our political discussions is a disaster ...and I only see it getting worse. I believe there are good ideas on both sides of the aisle, but often feel like the only one with that viewpoint.

How can we fix this?

Well, nuance is not an exclusively centrist quality. There’s nuance in radical thinking as well

I'm not sure that has changed that much. There's always been a component of politics that's tribal in nature, and it takes a lot to overcome that inertia. It's not unlike sports, where people will root for the local team, even though there's not much that's local about the team other than the name.

You can see that behavior for example around the ACA. It's obviously inspired by Mitt Romney's Massachusetts health care reform, so you'd think the Republicans would be all in favor of it. Yet at the federal level, since it was pitched by the Democrats, the Republicans are against it.

The thing is: your friends aren’t completely wrong, in that their are loud racists that support Trump, and loud socialists that support Biden.

But they aren’t the majority of either party. It’s just our media that amplifies their voices.

The socialists that support Biden do so with noses held and muttering about "liberals".

Even your view of left/right being a spectrum is a woefully inadequate model. In reality political parties sit on at least two dimensions, as shown by the political compass. People who can only think in terms of left/right, red/blue, etc simply shouldn't be voting.

Yeah, but left/right is a big part of what differentiates political parties. It's like the first factor in a PCA decomposition.

I would love to see a decent PCA decomposition if you've got one. The way Left/Right is defined seems pretty arbitrary and varies a lot between cultures.

It changes over time too. I learnt that it was about economic policy, but today it's some weird mixture of economic policy, progressive vs conservative, liberal vs totalitarian etc. For example, in the US right now it would be totally normal to label someone who doesn't support gay rights as "right wing". Left/right have essentially become buckets where certain arbitrary issues end up residing.

If you want to bring in rigorous analysis you have to first define what left/right even is. Is it economic policy? You really think the biggest thing that differentiates red/blue is economic policy? They both sit firmly on the right.

Any nuance is met with vitriol.

Explaining why taxes, redistribution of wealth, and allowing government to oversee certain services is actually beneficial to a market is a sure fire way to get called out as a communist and radical leftist.

Pointing out why historically, conservatives were deadset against abortion —in order to have a more productive discussion using pure history, not Bannon-style nonsense—is met with a absolute refusal to acknowledge the evidence.

Having a nuanced view makes no friends and just generates suspicion by all sides.

Secretly, I like it.

Why have conservatives been historically against abortion?

They haven't. It's a political alliance with the anti-abortion crowd. The 1976 Republican party platform was the first to include a stance on abortion.

They haven't been, in the long view. Historically abortion was a Catholic issue, and sometimes liberal Protestant[1]. It generally wasn't an issue for Evangelicals, who were also mainly on the political left. Then in the late 60s the teenage son of a popular Evangelical pastor/author[2] became concerned for the rights of the unborn, convinced his father to take that message to the masses, it worked, and Republicans figured out that it would be a way to build a new coalition.

If you look at the extreme countercultures of the 60s, you see one side who hated "the system" that produced mass affluence, but loved the fruits of it. The other side loved the system, but hated the fruits. So one way to look at it is as a sort of political shibboleth indicating that you were definitely on one side and not the other.

[1] https://books.google.com/books?id=cf5RFWIMJugC&pg=PA42&lpg=P...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francis_Schaeffer

US evangelicals had a mix of indifference or outright support. However it’s a mistake to confuse “conservatism” with religious organizations and even a party.

The anti-abortion position needs to be looked at in the context of eugenics, https://courses.lumenlearning.com/culturalanthropology/chapt...

That it really took off in the 1960s+ isn’t surprising with Nazi death camps fresh in everyone’s mind, leaving a very bad impression with anything tied to eugenics and its proponents.

While I don’t agree that abortion is equivalent to eugenics—-sorry, if my wife were to die otherwise I’d choose abortion—much of the revulsion has its moral roots in the argument against eugenics.

> sorry, if my wife were to die otherwise I’d choose abortion—much of the revulsion has its moral roots in the argument against eugenics.

As far as I know that case isn't even considered abortion by any mainstream pro-life organization.

I was surprised they didn't mention this case until I realized it didn't even count in their view.

This is true.

Some pro lifers want zero exceptions, but it’s extremist.

I’ve answered elsewhere, but note that conservativism isn’t one and the same as the Republican party; nor is it the same as the evangelical crowd.

But tl;dr; answer: Modern abortion has its roots with a founder who was also strong advocate for eugenics.

She was a product of her time and really believed she was advocating for improvement of society, but the ideas took a dark turn.

The only notable opposition were from the conservative religious circles; but as noted even there the record is spotty.

Still, credit where credit is due.

Whether more modern evangelicals are rooted from the same opposition is irrelevant.

What is the (or your) intellectual analysis?

This is a false equivalency because voting for Trump in 2020 is a demonstration of complicity with a years-long record of racist rhetoric and policies while it’s simply laughable that a Biden administration would implement anything as redistributive as the New Deal, much less hiring true socialists in the administration.

I blame Fox News for getting away with a decade of bad-faith claims of socialism towards things like mortgage assistance or Pre-K education.

> a years-long record of racist policies

Trump gained significant ground among racial minorities. So...IDK how to square that with your characterization of his 4 years of policies.

PS. Lest you think the right has a monopoly on racism, I point you no further than California's attempted repeal of discrimination law (Prop 209).

This is the same sort of inflated rhetoric/tribalism the grandparent was speaking of.

Trump received 8% of the votes of black people.

12% according to NY Times [1], double what he got in 2016 [2].

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/11/03/us/elections/...

[2] https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2018/08/09/an-examinati...

Proves only gullibility has no racial boundaries.

So what you’re saying is the minorities who voted for Trump are just dumb?

Kind of racist to say that, no?

Oh, no, not _all_ who voted for Trump are dumb.

It would be a mistake to take some % increase as general approval from a demographic. If the demographic already had very little support prior, all it shows is that wasn't as bad as expected. In this case, Trump's policy having fewer discriminatory outcomes than expected doesn't mean they aren't racist. That's not to offer additional commentary on if him or his policy is racist, but that increase in support doesn't contradict the possibility.

> all it shows is that wasn't as bad as expected

Yes.

Areas with the highest covid death rates voted for trump does that mean his covid policy was sound? Minorities like many vote against their own interest. Good people on both sides. I will give you the prison reform thing but that was Kushner and trump later expressed regret for it, and it was pandering.

Death rates from coronavirus (COVID-19) in the United States as of November 6, 2020, by state ( https://www.statista.com/statistics/1109011/coronavirus-covi...)

Top 5:

New Jersey New York Massachusetts Connecticut Louisiana

sure. 4 years of trump are to blame for racist rhetoric but surely not 47 years of biden. trump is not the problem he is the one that made the problem more visible. racism was always there.

You just proved the OPs point. Well done.

Being a centrist doesn't magically save you from being in an information bubble.

>Being centrist I can relate to parts of both sides but my experience is they both dislike centrists.

Is Biden not a centrist? He seems to be a right-of-center christian democrat like Merkel for example.

He is, in European terms. The US is on a completely different scale.

Is it even meaningful to speak of centrism in a US context?

Not really. The US has turned "centrism" into a swear word. But that's kind of the point and why calling Biden centre-right is, eh. He's a Democrat; most Democrats are centre-right and most progressives are centre-left. Such is the left wing of the USA.

I’ll add one doesn’t have to be a centrist by any means to choose intellect over tribalism. The “left”, the “right”, and the “none of the above” can all achieve it too if they spend less time on media driven depictions and more on deeply exploring the issues.

Centrists have it easier because they naturally see positive aspects of both sides, and that is exactly what is needed. If one can’t put themselves in the shoes of the other side and find a few strong legitimate and logical reasons they can connect with, then they really don’t understand what they are even fighting. You should be able to argue the other side. The reasons are there, and emotion only serves to blind us to them.

I think when there is common set of facts that could be agreed upon that might be possible.

The rejection of basic facts, outright lies and contempt of science. I don't know how you can have a discourse in that environment.

> My friends on the left think the only reason for voting trump is racism […]

While saying the "only" reason is too strong, there have a number of studies showing it was a key factor:

* https://doi.org/10.1017/S1049096518000367

* https://doi.org/10.1177%2F0002716218811309

* https://doi.org/10.1086/700001

* https://doi.org/10.1080/17457289.2018.1441844

* https://doi.org/10.1080/07393148.2017.1378296

* https://doi.org/10.1093/poq/nfx048

* PDF: http://acme.highpoint.edu/~msetzler/Why_Did_Women_Vote_for_D...

That's clearly why he did so much better with minorities this time then 2016 right?

Voters vote against their own self-interests all the time. It does not invalidate the OP's point.

And people can't vote against their interests, be mislead or be straight up wrong. Isn't that just falling for demagoguery in the end? It's not like the electorate is truly informed in the US.

The people who voted for Trump are not all racists. But the racists probably did vote for Trump.

> CN was measured in Wave 4 using a five-item version of the Collective Narcissism Scale (Golec de Zavala et al. 2009; Golec de Zavala, Cichocka, and Bilewicz 2013). The items were: “If the United States had a major say in the world, the world would be a much better place,” “The United States deserves special treatment,” “It really makes me angry when others criticize the United States,” “Not many people seem to fully understand the importance of the United States,” and “I will never be satisfied until the United States gets the recognition it deserves.” All items used a seven-point scale ranging from strongly disagree (1) to strongly agree (7).

I dunno, that doesn't sound sound to me, and people tend to draw bold conclusions from such matters.

I've seen quite a lot of such papers, proving that "conservatives are knowing liberals better than vice versa" or similar, but diving into methodology it seems like people are trying to exacerbate what the data says.

People voting for Trump are regular blue collar workers loosing from globalization. Hence they want walls. I don't think there is any good in demonizing them.

> People voting for Trump are regular blue collar workers loosing from globalization. Hence they want walls. I don't think there is any good in demonizing them.

Noted:

> Of course, these two explanations are not mutually exclusive. Both may have some validity. Moreover, as Michael Tesler has argued, economic anxiety and discontent among white voters in 2016 appear to be closely connected to racial resentment. His analysis of survey data indicate that many white voters, especially those without college degrees, believe that racial minorities and immigrants have been favored by government policies while their own communities have been neglected, especially during the Obama years (Tesler 2016b). The Trump campaign explicitly connected these issues by arguing that illegal immigrants were taking jobs away from American citizens and reducing wages for American workers.

> To sort out these competing explanations, we test the hypothesis that Trump’s surge among white working class voters, compared with previous GOP presidential candidates, was due to his explicit appeal to white racial resentment and ethno-nationalism. Thus, Trump’s campaign may have helped to politicize these attitudes, identifying them with a political party, especially among less educated white voters who tend to be less attentive to political campaigns and therefore less aware of differences between candidates on racial and other issues (Tesler 2016c). To test this hypothesis, we can compare the correlations between scores on the racial resentment scale and relative ratings of the Republican and Democratic presidential candidates on the feeling thermometer scale over time among white voters with and without college degrees.

* https://doi.org/10.1177%2F0002716218811309

> racial resentment scale

I didn't find methodology of this, so I looked for it. As a European, I'm appalled. This is how you define racism, really?

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

> The racial resentment scale has been criticized for not separating racism from ideas like conservatism or individualism. Some political scientists have attributed Republicans' higher resentment scores to the fact that they typically favor less government intervention

Well that's not surprising considering the nature of the questions. Damn your notion of racism is strange, Americans.

it comes almost from an angle of "not enough empathy" and painting individualism as a byproduct of broader narcissism complex

america want to succeed but only if every moral decision is followed. realistically this is almost never enforced and people act amorally all the time even if doing so somewhat altruistically

>> Some political scientists have attributed Republicans' higher resentment scores to the fact that they typically favor less government intervention

> Well that's not surprising considering the nature of the questions. Damn your notion of racism is strange, Americans.

"Government intervention" may be a codeword for social programs, which are often viewed in a certain way:

> Here, we integrate prior work to develop and test a theory of how perceived macro-level trends in racial standing shape whites’ views of welfare policy. We argue that when whites perceive threats to their relative advantage in the racial status hierarchy, their resentment of minorities increases. This increased resentment in turn leads whites to withdraw support for welfare programs when they perceive these programs to primarily benefit minorities.

* https://academic.oup.com/sf/article/97/2/793/5002999

* https://doi.org/10.1093/sf/soy046

Some books on this:

> Wetts and Willer are hardly the first scholars to argue that racial animus is a powerful factor motivating opposition to social spending and redistribution in the US. Jill Quadagno’s The Color of Welfare in 1994 and Martin Gilens’s Why Americans Hate Welfare in 1999 credited racial factors — in particular, stereotypes of black people as lazy and overly dependent on government aid — with substantially reducing support for welfare spending since the war on poverty began in the 1960s.

* https://www.vox.com/2018/6/7/17426968/white-racism-welfare-c...

>"Government intervention" may be a codeword for social programs

Yeah, are you sure that racism is about opposing welfare and quotas? Not thinking that other people are inherently inferior or malicious due to their race, but that there should be no affirmative action.

That sounds like a ill-minded umbrella term to me, invented to call people you don't like racist.

> racial animus is a powerful factor motivating opposition to social spending and redistribution

It's not a surprise if you define racial animus as being against welfare.

https://cpb-us-e1.wpmucdn.com/you.stonybrook.edu/dist/f/1052...

> Consistent with the expectations of new racism researchers, resentment accounted for racial bias in support of the experimental college scholar-ship program examined in this study, reinforcing its role as a measure of racial prejudice. But these effects were confined to self-identified liberals. Racial resentment did not explain racially biased program support among conservatives and was not linked to other negative racial attitudes among them. This leaves the concept of racial resentment in real doubt. If resentment measures prejudice among liberals but not conservatives it cannot function successfully as a broad measure of racial prejudice.

anti-black racism has (and continues to be) woven into the fabric of American society. That's not an understatement, our cities are often built in ways that harmed racial minorities. When there are, quite literally, "racist bridges" in the US, not to mention the anti-black histories of everything from Central park to the US highway system, it's not clear why that is a bad definition.

> People voting for Trump are regular blue collar workers loosing from globalization. Hence they want walls. I don't think there is any good in demonizing them.

I agree with this, but there’s a bit that I don’t understand about their mindset. If they think they’ve lost their job to an immigrant who’s willing to work harder for less money, how does less government involvement make it better? You can’t just ban immigrants and solve the problem because the real problem is a system that allows exploitative labor practices. By American standards those immigrant workers are also getting a bad deal and the people doing the exploiting aren’t going to stop unless someone forces them to.

I think the reason you see people latching on to Trump is because they think all politicians want to maintain the status quo and they think Trump will break it. I understand the sentiment, but Trump didn’t really DO anything to help them. All he seems to do IMO is assign blame and talk about how things should be. It’s easy to say “we have the greatest plan” or “everyone should live in a mansion”, but it’s really hard to actually have the greatest plan and to implement it or to build everyone a mansion.

It’s really sad because I think middle class America is being disenfranchised and there’s a near majority of people who’ve been convinced it’s the fault of poor, “lazy moochers” rather than the wealthy capturing and hoarding all of our productivity gains over the past 40 years.

I think there should be common ground in wanting to get rid of the part of the government that serves the interests of the wealthy at the expense of the middle class. It’s just a matter of understanding the sides are wealthy vs everyone else, not right vs left.

> If they think they’ve lost their job to an immigrant who’s willing to work harder for less money, how does less government involvement make it better?

I'm not sure they want less government. Walls are built by governments, tariffs are protectionist measure. They want neo-mercantilism, which Trump is embodiment of.

> but Trump didn’t really DO anything to help them.

Oh, he started a big trade war with the gravest enemy stealing their jobs. I think he also imposed more strict immigration policy, but I'm not sure.

> capturing and hoarding all of our productivity gains over the past 40 years

I think that's wrong. Your productivity gains are mostly due to technology and rise of Asia. Asians and tech companies reaped the productivity gains accordingly. I mean, even eastern europeans like myself saw an extraordinary increase in standards of living.

> middle class America is being disenfranchised

> I think there should be common ground in wanting to get rid of the part of the government that serves the interests of the wealthy

I don't think that's your problem, and I don't expect american future to be good.

First, I think your political system is broken due to Duverger's law. Hence you have a political system where people have to adjust their views according to politicians' stances, and not vice versa. Lack of competition leads to corruption, regulatory captures etc etc, and I doubt that such system would find a will to reform itself.

Second, your wealthy already pay quite a lot of taxes, unlike Europe, where there is regressive VAT and high income tax for the middle class, and middle class is the main fiscal contributor. Hence your politician more concerned about well-being of those who affects budget the most. There is nothing strange here, and this kind of corporatism wouldn't heal itself as well.

I think that the root of your problem is not malicious rich whom Americans like to demonize so much, but broken beyond repair political system and unfair tax burden: politicians are more free to act as they will facing no pressure and competition, politicians strive to please big biz which is the main contributor to the budget. I'm really curious how you'll deal with that, if you'll manage to.

> I think that's wrong. Your productivity gains are mostly due to technology and rise of Asia.

IMO the average person hasn’t gotten enough of the gains from tech and it’s one of the things that worries me. As automation accelerates we can’t tolerate a handful of elites reaping all the benefits from that.

I don’t know much about the USA tax system. I’m Canadian. We pay high taxes and I don’t have a problem with it. In general though, I think the wealthy elite in the world have been capturing a disproportionate amount of the wealth / productivity gains since the 80s.

I also think the rewards for “success” are way too high for CEOs, etc.. They claim to be irreplaceable, but whenever something bad happens and they get called before Congress they act like they barely know more than the janitor. I think their only real value is in knowing all the other rich people.

I believe in capitalism and think hard work needs to be rewarded, but that the rewards are skewed too much. Once you have 100x the standard of living of the average person in the wealthiest countries in the world I think that should be enough. Everything else is just pure greed.

>> My friends on the left think the only reason for voting trump is racism […]

> While saying the "only" reason is too strong, there have a number of studies showing it was a key factor

I'm not going to read all those links, so hopefully you ordered them by compelling-ness.

A racial demographic agreeing politically is different from racism. The black vote is fairly united on the opinion that Democrats offer a better option for black people. That isn't classed as 'racists voting for democrats'. Ditto hispanics. It follows that whites are voting as a racial block doesn't mean that whites are racist. And if they think Democrat policies noticeably favour blacks and hispanics then they are probably right, because that is what the blacks/hispanics think.

The study is fine, but it doesn't support "they're voting that way because they are racist".

Definitely appreciate your contribution to the discussion.

Just a suggestion.

Maybe consider reducing the number of links, and posting the citation adjacent so we can see the title of the paper, and what journal it was published in before clicking. A brief tl;dr from the abstract would be magnificent as well.

Otherwise I'm just sort of taking on faith that whatever you posted will be worth the time to click on, and there's like 7 links there, so I'm just not gonna.

Yeah, there's a lot of really dumb straw-manning going on.

A good phrase I ran into is "strategic empathy". Like Sun Tzu teaches:

"If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle."

Sadly, humans seem allergic to this kind of thinking. As Orwell writes in "Notes on Nationalism":

"The nationalist does not go on the principle of simply ganging up with the strongest side. On the contrary, having picked his side, he persuades himself that it is the strongest, and is able to stick to his belief even when the facts are overwhelmingly against him. Nationalism is power hunger tempered by self-deception. Every nationalist is capable of the most flagrant dishonesty, but he is also – since he is conscious of serving something bigger than himself – unshakeably certain of being in the right."

The smart (if mistaken) reasons to vote Trump were always trade and the Democratic Party's abandonment of Labor.

And Republicans, on the other hand, who think Biden is a socialist are delusional.

It's possible, though, that people aren't as dumb as they seem. For an individual, pretending not to empathize with the opposition is probably safer in a tribalized society. So perhaps that's what we're really witnessing.

It’s not Biden who is considered the socialist, it’s Kamala, and the concern by the right is that Biden - on his way in - is already on his way out.

The term socialist had no meaning in the US. It's just slander from the right and has been for over a century.

In any case, Biden was called a socialist before he picked his VP. e.g.

https://mobile.twitter.com/realdonaldtrump/status/1241717700...

> the Democratic Party's abandonment of Labor.

The Democratic Party didn't abandon labor. Labor and the electorate abandoned the Democratic Party. Starved for funding and votes, the Democratic Party moved right and embraced neoliberalism. Mondale was pro-labor. He was crushed by Reagan in 1984.

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

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right-to-work_law

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

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_United_States...

https://www.nytimes.com/1984/01/22/magazine/labor-s-gamble-o...

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

Thanks for the mention of Orwell’s notes on nationalism. I just read it and it is remarkably relevant, even if the movements used as examples aren’t.

As a European it was incomprehensible to me why anyone would vote for trump as I had only received the straw man version of Trump through my local media. But when traveling the U.S. early 2016 I had the good fortune of spending a few hours on a bus with two trump voters and having them explain their hopes for a trump presidency, and it no longer seemed irrational. The hope that having no loyalties or obligations to the political powers that be he could actually have policies which benefited regular people seemed reasonable. There is a fair argument to be made his actual economic policies have indeed mostly benefited Americans, so someone voting just based on the economy would not be irrational in choosing Trump.

Still, he’s Donald Trump, and a bully. I don’t think I could ever be convinced to ignore all the other stuff to the degree of voting for him. I can understand those who outright dismiss him and anyone aligned with him without seriously trying to engage with their arguments.

It's probably because so called centrists don't stand for much of anything beyond trying to gain a social edge by pretending they're above it all when they aren't. It's an excuse to attempt to distill belief systems into a very narrow point of view precisely like you've described with the whole "only reason" nonsense. I'd really appreciate it if one could describe why they consider themselves one since it's totally meaningless to me when someone self identifies as a centrist.

Just like in marketing it's all about how you frame a question to a person. Realistically most people share common beliefs at the fundamental level in what they want to see out of the power structures in our society. In other words, the vast majority of people in this country want to improve upon their material conditions. The rest of the circlejerk is just grifting.

>"...I'd really appreciate it if one could describe why they consider themselves one since it's totally meaningless to me when someone self identifies as a centrist."

Why would they care whether it has a meaning to you. They care about their own beliefs.

A couple of ideas: (1) Centrism is situational. One might think that the status quo is objectively reasonably close to the ideal, in terms of the general way society is arranged even if there are many imperfections. (2) Centrism is technocratic. If you don't favour a lurch to the left or right, it would make sense to want efficient improvements to how things are run - accepting good ideas regardless of which area of the political compass they come from, bipartisan support for policies on their merits.

Based on the above, centrism (and indeed, being centre-left or centre-right) seems viable as a real belief that people can hold, not some strategy to appear above it all for social benefit, or as a stratagem used by someone actually highly partisan. A centrist's goals could be directly met by encouraging trial of different ideas across the political spectrum, and consistent meta-level rules rather than tribalist thinking. Trying to rise above the bunfighting isn't the benefit of centrist views, it's a necessity to enable the things they want to achieve.

I'll sometimes self-identify as a centrist in that I notice two increasingly radicalized extremes that spend most of there energy screaming at each other. You might think I'm doing that to "gain a social edge" but the truth is I just don't like screaming.

Do you live in SV? That might have something to do with it. I have plenty of friends on the right and left who don't think in absolutes.

> My friends on the left think the only reason for voting trump is racism, and friends on the right think the only reason for voting biden is socialism. Where did all the intellect go?

Why don't you ask them?

Because they go insane and get very angry. I've learnt not to ask.

A good technique for that is to encourage people to follow their own logic (by asking some simple questions if necessary) until they notice themselves that they arrive at absurdities.

It didn't end well for the guy who famously did that https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socrates#Death

It's going alright for Sacha Baron Cohen, though I'm not sure how much he is still using it ;)

I don't believe that Trump is a racist. I believe that Trump is a Trumpist. I believe that he lacks the capacity to hold any real beliefs outside of his own self-interest, even twisted and depraved ones. He panders to racists, along with other segments like Evangelicals, not because he believes in their cause but because they give him what he wants: praise and power. But to think that Trumpism is about race is deeply, tragically, missing the point.

If we want to understand and get to the root of what just happened for the past 4 years, the left needs to step back and seriously reconsider its assumptions.

Totally agree.

I disagree wholeheartedly. You’ve described Trumpism in terms of “what goes on in Donald Trump’s head.” I think very few people ultimately care about this. Instead, most people interpret “Trumpism” as what his followers believe. And I can see little argument that there’s a much stronger thread of white primacy in his statements and followers than anyone else.

It seems to be everywhere (even on the top rated comment here). Biden himself is dismissed as being not left enough by a lot the online population from what I can see.

Because he wasn't the the fashionable choice for Democratic nomination (Sanders) he's reduced to being just an old guy who isn't Trump but is in the right party without anyone even bothering to even read his Wikipedia page or look up some of his speeches on youtube.

He's a passionate politician and an empathic speaker who has the experience to be a realist and appeal to republican voters too. He's exactly what is needed right now.

Sanders wouldn't have had a chance to get in, but even if he did he would just polarise things even further.

> Sanders wouldn't have had a chance to get in, but even if he did he would just polarise things even further.

According to this Fox News poll[1], much of Bernie Sanders' platform would resonate with voters more so than Biden's platform.

[1] https://imgur.com/a/YxxnynP

> Where did all the intellect go?

It's hard to have an intellectual debate in 120-character snippets on platforms that promote outrage over reason.

Was 140, now is 280.

The bigger issue is retweet culture which pushes clickbait and anger inducing content.

> Where did all the intellect go?

I think that's the key point. Decades of undermining the education system, plus many other problems such as "big money lobbying" is likely what led to such extremisms.

You know... the key metric of "education" used to be "what percentage of your population can read and write". By that measure, the US is fairly "educated". However, just like the value of each dollar goes down as the economy grows (i.e. inflation), I think it's important to apply a similar idea to education; just as the access to information increases, the value of _only_ being able to read and write is no longer enough to be considered as "educated".

You can’t seriously be arguing that everyone has been made so stupid by the education system as evidenced by the fact that they don’t agree with you. This is akin to categorically sweeping away the wisdom of the last generation because of leaded gasoline.

New rule: if you’re going to disparage the other side and call them stupid, you have to find two nice things to say about their side.

The US education system is failing, pretty badly. This is not a new grievance. Whether that causes or contributes to is probably unproven, but it's hard to think it doesn't.

It doesn't mean that all trump supporters are uneducated. But they do have a tendency to be uneducated. All the trump supporters I know are in that camp either for their extremist/nazi views, or due to misinformation, or for financial reasons. Those first two groups highly favor the uneducated.

Let me rephrase. One attribute the education system should provide students is the ability to think critically. By being able to think critically, a person should be able to have the capacity to see and understand the arguments on both sides. From there, a healthy debate can commence on which policy is better.

Keep in mind my previous comment is in response to the original post, which talks about people on both sides having the "extreme mindset", i.e.:

> It's amazing. My friends on the left think the only reason for voting trump is racism, and friends on the right think the only reason for voting biden is socialism.

Indeed, maybe I was wrong in suggesting that the poor education system is what caused this issue. But regardless, the ability to think critically is an important attribute, and I do believe extremisms are caused, in part, by the lack of it.

"Critical thinking" is not a generic, universally transferable skill. It is highly domain-specific. One can possess "critical thinking skills" when it comes to solving software design problems but be absolutely clueless about public policy.

It might be more accurate to say that Americans need a better standard of education for history and civics.

It's not about them agreeing, but when people can't understand basic statistics or when people no longer even believe science, scientists and the scientific method, then yes it is the education system. Do you think it's a coincidence that there's a significant gap between how educated people are and which party they vote for?

Starting to feel that the only way out of it is to remove the «Winner takes it all», to let more political parties participate. And the one with majority, by uniting them, get the president.

The thing with the racism and Trump is it's part of his platform. You have to think it's ok to vote for him. There is no half measure of racism.

Was there ever intellect? Or we more generally selected gentlemen as politicians and we stepped out of that with Trump?

There absolutely was. I highly recommend watching the Gore Vidal vs William Buckley Jr debates. Both Vidal and Buckley were extremely well spoken and reasoned in their arguments. I wonder if Buckley and Goldwater are weeping over Trump as their political successor.

I'm not talking about the political actors, I'm talking about the electorate. To some degree, the politicians will do what resonates. The difference is that for most of our history you pretty much had to be a gentleman to even consider the senate or presidency. (I mean that classically, not in the misogynistic sense.) It was probably Bill Clinton and then Trump that have demonstrated that the masses will gladly elect a non-gentleman and Trump has really leaned in to the lowest common denominator politics. That combined with self-selecting media. It's potent. You basically can distill the different tribal voices down to a vote for socialism or a vote for racism and it's sad to say but it worked pretty damn well and we had one of the biggest turnouts ever.

Perhaps. I'm not sure because I haven't seen enough research on this point, but I do find it plausible that as the barrier to entry has lowered, the gentility of the candidates has decreased. Thanks for the food for thought.

(We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25017543. There's nothing wrong with it - the thread is just too top heavy)

disclaimer: I'm not American, but I'm from the UK which has similar issues on a smaller scale.

The thing is, as a leftist I used to be able to have conversations with conservatives. We had different values, but a largely shared understanding of reality. That gave a common basis for contrast and discussion.

Now, that's gone. My biased perception is that the worst of it started on the right: a ways back Fox started creating a bubble of alternative reality, and that's been hugely amplified with the arrival of social media. I started struggling to communicate in meaningful ways. More recently I've found myself fact checking my own community more often than I used to - I wonder if Trump has sent leftists crazy in the same way that Obama did the right ;-).

> Now, that's gone

Check out r/Libertarian sometime. After it was radicalized by self-professed fascist moderators and turned into a pro-Trump meme board, the admin stepped in and installed a moderation team that spent time coming up with rules to prevent the subreddit from being overrun by authoritarians again. They added legitimate left-libertarian[1] moderators, and there are left-libertarians users that post there.

I bring it up because it is the only conservative space I've seen that doesn't end up posting helicopter ride[2] memes at people they perceive to be even slightly to the left of them.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Left-libertarianism

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_flights

Thanks, I'll give it a look!

It seems the "windows of acceptable opinions" have gotten narrower (acceptable in a given social clique); I think the reason is that our social medias are so open - we talk not directly to a few people we trust, but our outbursts are visible to a wide circle or even public. This leads to self-censorship.

I agree. In general I identify as very progressive (especially by US standards), but I hold some opinions that are somewhat outside of the leftist norm, and I'm more or less completely unwilling to discuss them online as I don't trust that I will be treated in good faith.

The sad thing here is that I'm genuinely open to having my opinions changed, and have a history of changing my view in response to argument in the past. But can't have my view changed if I'm too scared to even have the discussion ;-).

Sometimes I think I’m the only person in Canada that wants a carbon tax and pipelines at the same time :-(

I'd say MSNBC was just as complicit as Fox over the decades.

In 2009, they purposefully cropped video of the main protester outside an Obama town-hall meeting to only show his back and slung rifle, and then used the footage to immediately launch into a panel discussion positing that the primary motivation for the protests against Obama was racial animus. The protester was black.

Here is the footage (paired with another incident of egregious misreporting in 1992): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fvBQDHqdCck

I'm not going to tell you that there aren't issues on the other channels, but the sheer volume of manipulation on Fox is utterly overwhelming. Imperfect as it is I don't really think MSNBC compares.

Just remember that it's always easier to see the manipulation and bias the your political opponents are doing to their own side, than the ones your own leaders are doing to you.

What do you mean by centrist? America doesn’t really have a left-wing political group, certainly not in any mainstream way. Obama referred to himself as a Reagan Republican and Biden is even more right-leaning. Even figures like AOC and Bernie Sanders are extremely anodyne, not at all “left wing” just barely more liberal than American centrists.

The “centrist” view in America is extremely far to the right, which then allows factions like Trump’s to be far right to deeply fascist, racist extremes (this is not hyperbole, Trump is dangerously fascist) and yet still act like he’s just “on the right” because “centrist” positions in the US are themselves so deeply far right already.

The US really urgently needs more mainstream far left politicians, instead of nearly-Republican examples like Harris, Warren, Biden, Buttigieg, etc. AOC & Sanders are the closest, but by no means do they represent views that are anywhere near being a healthy “far left” ideology to help draw a compromise from the far right and towards a healthier centrist position.

“Centrist” in the US would at least be on the fence of letting individual own assault rifles, withdrawing federal funds for abortion, reducing the EPA and decommitting from international agreements on climate change, granting large tax breaks to corporations, eliminating social welfare programs for oppressed classes of people (in ways that overtly hurt the poor, minorities and women), and creating a legal chasm blocking any road to universal medical care, all while buying into jingoistic ideas about America being the best and dehumanizing other groups like immigrants and foreigners.

That’s the centrist position in the US. When anything further left is even suggested, the socialism boogeyman is drummed up and huge populations of people will vote against it for no other reason than “socialism bad.”

Any sense of acting like there’s a benign Republican core of ideas around states’ rights or lower taxes to be discussed in good faith is just gobsmackingly wrong about the US. That is just simply a falsehood.

What passes for middle of the road, “good faith” centrist discussion is deeply far right already, and “both-sides-ism” where “liberals claiming all Trump voters are racist” is disingenuously used to act like it’s “the same as” the behavior of the American far right is both completely wrong and contributing to the problem.

Using what "left" and "center" mean in other countries to compare to American politics is pointless.

There are clear left and right viewpoints in the US with centrist usually being a fiscally conservative and socially liberal mix of policies.

There is no longer a core of fiscally conservative but socially liberal citizens, that just does not exist.

I also reject the premise of your first point. It doesn’t matter what the current within-country standard for left and right are, that’s useless semantics. All that matters is outcomes in peoples’ lives.

A personal right to own assault rifles or limit federal funds for abortion (even if only for fiscal or states’ rights reasons) is emphatically far right in the sense of overall outcomes for lives, it does not matter what within-country label someone might want to call it by.

If the labels are now useless semantics than what was the point of your original comment?

> "far right in the sense of overall outcomes for lives"

What's this even mean? You're now redefining the term into something entirely different.

I did not say labels are meaningless. I said taking labels that have meanings, like far right vs far left, and trying to redefine them (semantic games) to be relative to some arbitrary standard within a single country (like saying “fiscal conservative but social liberal is “centrist” in the US” when in fact it all hinges on the fine points of those positions) is not helpful or useful.

Political labels (not within-country labels at a point in time) can be useful. Far right and far left have long-developed meanings in terms of broad policies they endorse and those policies have meanings in terms of the actual measurable impact on lives and human flourishing.

I feel your comment is not in good faith at all. Saying something like “what does this even mean” as a rhetorical deflection tactic when my comment was perfectly clear is very uncharitable and additionally it’s not contributing any new arguments or information, you’re just acting like the premise is unclear, but for no acceptable reason.

The labels referring to political parties within a specific country will have meanings within that same context.

> "to be relative to some arbitrary standard"

That's what you were doing by saying the left isn't actually the left. Why? The left has a clear definition in the USA. You are redefining it for some reason.

> "Far right and far left have ... meanings in terms of the actual measurable impact on lives and human flourishing."

Yes, both extremes are generally terrible for lives. Was that the point? Otherwise no, I don't know what you mean. Perhaps you can answer instead of deflecting.

You’re still seemingly deliberately misrepresenting and not engaging with my point and just disingenuously deflecting by appealing to increasingly abstract meta debates about relative definitions.

It doesn’t matter if the labels of right or left would have context within the colloquial definitions within a country and I am not “redefining” them by saying those reference points don’t matter.

There’s a superseding context in which far right and far left already have well understood definitions in terms of terminal values and how their policies map to those values. That exists outside of any given country or political unit.

> “The left has a clear definition in the USA.”

Uhhh no. That is not a reasonable thing to say. For example, Trump campaigned on the idea that Kamala Harris is extremely far left, but most people who identify as far left see her as basically just slightly left of center.

The idea there is a clear “left” in the US is itself a pure Republican propaganda construction just so it can paint Democrat candidates as “evil socialists” no matter their actual policies or how they map to the superseding notion of left-leaning politics.

Biden for example would have been a solid, firm Republican candidate ~35 years ago, even if running on a Democratic ticket.

My main point is that “center” in the US is already very far Republican-leaning and has shifted increasingly towards the right wing in the past 30 years, to the point that a very, very right-leaning Democrat like Biden is now sensationalized as being “far left” in election propaganda.

There is not actually any mainstream political group in the US that is really “far left” in the sense of offering a counterbalancing policy initiative that Republicans would have to significantly compromise away from their right wing core in order to engage with. Such a thing does not exist in the US.

You can play games of redefining words if you want and pretend like whatever position is occupied by the Democratic party thus, by definition, represents the “left” and thus represents a ideological separation from “the right” but it would just be falsely shifting definitions, it wouldn’t make “centrist” in the US to be any less far-right-leaning that what it really, actually is.

> Biden for example would have been a solid, firm Republican candidate ~35 years ago, even if running on a Democratic ticket.

35 years ago the parties were a lot closer together because the Republican Party hadn't taken its jaunt into extremism that started in the 1990s, but, no Biden—who was then then to the right of his current position, was a solid Democrat then, though, like Clinton, part of the conservative Democratic Leadership Councl.

I agree with you. I think we’re saying the same thing. 35 years ago Biden would have been pretty close to a centrist candidate, pretty close to a milquetoast Republican at that time, despite being in the Democratic party.

While Biden may have ideologically shifted left a small bit (changed views on criminal justice, climate policy), he’s still very close to the same point on the political spectrum he occupied 35 years ago. But now, because of the slide to extremism of the Republican party, Biden is suddenly caricatured as a socialist, far left boogeyman.

That’s not a function of the US Democratic party actually being far left leaning. It isn’t. It’s an expression of increasingly extreme far right positions of Republicans to shift the entire discussion massively to the right and redefine the center.

Any system where you define the center in such a way that Joe Biden is “far left” is a complete far right propaganda machine divorced of any acceptable or realistic definition of “centrists” or far left.

Why do you keep saying the labels don't matter than insist on using labels to say these parties and candidates are something else? The redefinitions are coming from you. So far you've offered three variations: (1) Left-vs-right as based on "outcomes of lives", (2) as opposed to 35 years ago, and (3) as opposed to some international comparison.

The first makes no sense and still lacks any explanation. The other two are arbitrary.

These parties are left-vs-right as of 2020 American politics. The definitions are dependent on the context of the time and place because politics change over time. They are also relative to each other; Left means left of the right, and vice versa. And center means in the middle of both. It's the current era that determines where the spectrum is actually anchored.

Why are you so insistent on using some other scale to label everything differently? What purpose does that serve? Is that not meaningless semantics?

> “ Why do you keep saying the labels don't matter than insist on using labels to say these parties and candidates are something else?”

I didn’t say these things. I have already provided more than adequate detailed explanations on all of these points.

> "It doesn’t matter if the labels of right or left would have context ... I am ... saying those reference points don’t matter."

> "but it would just be falsely shifting definitions, it wouldn’t make ... to be any less [than] what it really, actually is."

Alright then, since you claim to know what everything "really" is while overruling all the context then there's clearly no more discussion to be had.

Yes, agreed, if you are willing to discuss in good faith we could resume the discussion, but that seems very unlikely given your comments so far.

If all you do is try rhetorical deflection by repeatedly saying previous comments weren’t clear when by any reasonable standard they were clear, you’re just arguing with yourself in an echo chamber and it’s not productive for people to engage with you.

You aren’t engaging with the clearly explained positions of my comments, you’re merely splicing quotes out of context and acting like you are entitled to question definitions of basic, widely agreed terms. Claiming subjectivity and confusion over definitions and then disingenuously acting like the other party is the one that’s changing definitions is not a valid argument. You’re just writing a lot of inflammatory verbiage to drum up confusion and selectively quote earlier comments to act like the position they represent isn’t consistent or clear even though it is.

Looking in your comment history it seems you have a very strong habit of doing this in many threads, often with a clear agenda favoring US right-leaning politics, so the most reasonable conclusion I can see is that you are trying to inflame confusion and derail otherwise valid points by converting them into endless semantic arguments about definitions just to support your existing biases.

You're saying X is actually Y based on a different context. I keep asking you why you skip context and only use Y and you have no answer other than to say it's different from X and is the "real" answer. This is, quite literally, redefining the terms to support your bias. Why are you so insistent on saying there is "no real left" in the USA when there clearly is? Who cares about these outdated global definitions? You're disagreeing with the entire country to do what exactly?

I take great care in my discussions to be as objective and concise as possible, while focusing on the actual arguments and asking questions to get to the root of the matter. You clearly haven't read my thousands of comments on this site if you think otherwise. However I find that you constantly use the same "good faith" excuse every time. Why is that? If your position can't be clearly communicated and so easily breaks down under light questioning, then it's a failure of your position.

But since this isn't going anywhere, I'll end it here.

> So far you've offered three variations: (1) Left-vs-right as based on "outcomes of lives", (2) as opposed to 35 years ago, and (3) as opposed to some international comparison.

The very obvious point is that by using any consistent definition of left and right, either time-locked, global, or otherwise, the US doesn't have anything resembling a far-left party.

> Why are you so insistent on using some other scale to label everything differently? What purpose does that serve? Is that not meaningless semantics?

It forces people to recognize the extreme rightward shift in politics, and therefore the idea that appealing "to the center" is in fact an appeal to regress further to the right. This is something those on the right vehemently want to avoid admitting, since it prevents them from painting themselves as victims.

> "using any consistent definition"

Those definitions aren't consistent, they're just different because the context is different. It's like general relativity, left vs right only exist in relation to something else.

> "forces people to recognize the extreme rightward shift in politics"

This is just strange. Politics change all the time in every dimension, just like people's values and opinions. Clinton was a Democrat who wanted strong borders and now the modern left wants open borders. Isn't that a shift to the left?

Everyone is aware that politics change over time. Nobody needs to recognize anything other than the policies and parties they identify with and want to have. If you can't discuss the policies and must use a party definition from decades ago then I don't see how this is anything but "painting [yourselves] as victims".

> Those definitions aren't consistent, they're just different because the context is different. It's like general relativity, left vs right only exist in relation to something else.

Yes, and the US Republican party is extremely far right, so labelling other parties solely in relation to US politics is not useful for discussing like actual political ideology.

It is, however, useful if you want to paint mainstream European political ideologies as socialism.

> Everyone is aware that politics change over time.

Then recognize that and be willing to have a discussion about politics in relation to time. If you refuse to engage with someone who points out that a political party or idea is not actual far left in the grand scheme of things, you are refusing to recognize the larger context.

In general, its difficult to have conversations without consistent definitions, and if the Republican party can change the definition of "left" by moving further to the right, this makes discussion of left politics hard, so people interested in discussing leftist politics have to reject that definition to have productive conversations.

If you don't want to have productive conversations with those people, that's your choice. But say that, don't claim they're being disingenuous.

> Clinton was a Democrat who wanted strong borders and now the modern left wants open borders. Isn't that a shift to the left?

Depending on exactly what you mean by "open borders", Sanders, who is conventionally considered left-of-the-median Democrat, wants less open borders than the democratic party as a whole. He's for freedom of movement of people, but for more tariffs and economic protectionism than the democratic party.

Trump and Sanders are actually sort of unique in this regard. Conventional Democrats and Republicans both favor free trade, although perhaps for different reasons. Trump, being anti-globalization does not, and Sander, being pro-labor, does not.

> "is extremely far right"

Again, in relation to what? It's the right, as according to current American politics because that's the context.

> "points out that a political party or idea is not actual far left in the grand scheme of things"

There is no "grand scheme" of things, you just picked a different context. Things would be different still if we went back to the Civil War or Ancient Greece.

> "productive conversations with those people, that's your choice. But say that, don't claim they're being disingenuous."

I'm not, I'm asking simple questions that go unanswered. The only reasoning I received was that you want people to recognize a shift. But since you claimed that the shift was being "ignored" as marketing and propaganda, isn't highlighting that shift effectively the same? I find it more so actually since politics changed naturally so it's the activist position to claim what the parties "really" are based on a selection from the past.

And immigration refers to people, not trade. Clinton made this speech [1] in 1995, but if any Democrat made the same speech today they would be vilified. That shows the left hasn't shifted to the right at all, they shifted even more to the left.

1. https://www.c-span.org/video/?c4804493/user-clip-president-c...

> Again, in relation to what? It's the right, as according to current American politics because that's the context.

The world. Historical American politics. A larger context. I'm repeating myself and you're ignoring it. Please stop asking questions that have already been answered. If you have objections to using a larger context, state them, but don't pretend I didn't answer your question already.

> Things would be different still if we went back to the Civil War or Ancient Greece.

Yes. You can pick specific contexts in which the modern american republican party was downright progressive. But you have to cherrypick those contexts, as you just did. Saying "world politics today" is a fairly objective measure, is it not? I mean there are even parties in Europe that are right-of-the-Republicans, so it isn't as though they're the furthest right. It's just that the Europeans call those parties fascist, and in some cases the parties embrace that label. Here people get annoyed when you do that.

> I'm not, I'm asking simple questions that go unanswered. The only reasoning I received was that you want people to recognize a shift. But since you claimed that the shift was being "ignored" as marketing and propaganda, isn't highlighting that shift effectively the same?

You're still ignoring it, and we're still discussing semantics, not politics. Do you want to have a productive conversation, or do you want to keep avoiding discussion of actual policies?

> I find it more so actually since politics changed naturally so it's the activist position to claim what the parties "really" are based on a selection from the past.

I can't parse this.

> And immigration refers to people, not trade. Clinton made this speech [1] in 1995, but if any Democrat made the same speech today they would be vilified. That shows the left hasn't shifted to the right at all, they shifted even more to the left.

This is the first time you said the word "immigration". I'm done.

US individuals cant own assault rifles without special federal permits.

But belief they should be allowed to own them is quite widespread among Republicans / Libertarians.

https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/10/22/facts-about...

> “ Other proposals bring out stark partisan rifts. Democrats, for example, are much more likely than Republicans to favor banning assault-style weapons (88% vs. 50%) and high-capacity magazines (87% vs. 54%).”

You can also see in the charts in that link that even though a modest majority of all Americans believes there should be stricter gun laws, it is driven drastically by how dominant that view is among Democrats (86%) vs Republicans (where 69% say current gun laws are OK or are already too strict).

I only chose this topic because it refutes the falsehood that there’s some core of reasonable centrists in America - there’s totally not. Many issues are like this example of gun laws where it is extremely partisan and where one version of the extreme partisan divide is usually considered “centrist” (for example, belief that gun laws are mostly OK as-is, which is a really right wing belief but is seen as “centrist”) but it actually belies America being heavily shifted to the far right by default, so it’s not really center.

It's truly scary watching how viral the conspiracies in this election go in minutes on Twitter/FB. One side wants to find "fraud" so any clip someone posts out of context becomes proof and spreads like wildfire.

As a complete outsider,I watched the politics and conservative subreddits respectively as the election unfolded.

It's of course anecdotal, but after watching that with my own eyes I would find it very hard to believe that those links, threads and comments were developing organically.

For example, the conservative subreddit went from following the election to having the front page fully filled with claims of election fraud in matter of literal minutes, with sources coming from a million places at the same time.

Just like magic, suddenly the election being rigged went from a crazy idea to incontestable fact, and now for many people that's what happened, clear as day.

It was extremely scary to see,I still don't know what to make of it.

Social media is now a primary target for foreign election interference, I'm sure that's a major cause. In 2016 Russia targeted Clinton and supported Trump. But they also generally tried to increase division. One ugly thing about that is disinformation campaigns would actually get support from some Americans.

The House is Democratically controlled, but Republicans control the senate, so there's bipartisan agreement on this. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/17/technology/indictment-rus...

https://www.intelligence.senate.gov/sites/default/files/docu...

https://intelligence.house.gov/social-media-content/

My main worry is that this is in the US and it's being handled poorly already. A country with great resources where these companies are based and somewhat governed. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_elections_in_2020

How many Cameroonian experts do the US based tech giants have to combat misinformation there?

Conservatives were saying Trump’s margins would have to be big enough that Dems couldn’t steal it well before election day. It was never a “crazy idea”, it’s been on their minds since the push for vote by mail.

I empathize more with your right-leaning friends. The extremes of the right (racists, nazis, white supremacists, etc) are kept very much in check by taboo. The extremes of the left (socialism, communism, collectivism, and the new Woke cult) are not.

Anecdotally, I not only do not work with any of the former, but can't imagine a workplace that would suffer them. At the same time, I work with multiple people that are proud, self-proclaimed members of the latter group.

If you think about why the former are taboo and the latter aren't (at least in your mind), something obvious should happen.

And as a european, I can tell you with high degree of certainty that absolutely zero of your friends or workmates are actually socialists or communists. It's possible they embrace socialist ideals, as Sanders does, but Sanders is at best a moderate left-wing here in europe.

You folks in the US developed a weird hatred of the word "socialism", equating it with the ridiculous dictatorial ideals of Stalin, Castro etc. But although socialism has a hard time working, that doesn't mean some of its ideas don't work in a democracy.

Here in europe, "free health care" is not socialism. It's a human right. Human rights are fun, you should try them.

I don't think something that requires others to labor can ever be a right. I would call that slavery.

What exactly is your impression of how socialized healthcare works, here in Europe?

Are you under the hallucination that I'm required to offer my services to the government so others can receive their surgery?

This is your problem, you have associated "socialism" with slavery, ergo you refuse to hear any arguments that has the word "social" in it because it's automatically bad by association.

Maybe start to accept that your fellow Americans don't actually want slavery, but maybe are instead unhappy with the completely fucking absurd and insane private health insurance system?

It is truly mind boggling, the mental jumps some of you folks are ready to make, to arrive at the conclusion that your life would be made worse were you to take example from countries that have it better than you. Because God forbid the US isn't number 1 in everything.

Take a free market society with no taxes. There is no slavery there.

Now add 100% taxes. That's full-blown slavery.

Now cut the taxes to 50%. That's 50% slavery.

A zero-percent tax, to my knowledge, does not make an effective society. Society functions because it is comprised of individuals overall working together.

Like, seriously, you can't keep using public infrastructure and services and think taxes are slavery. The amount of shit you use daily that is funded by your taxes, hell, that is funded by my taxes as well from across the globe, is unreal. You would have to go find some virgin island and live off the land of you were to take this ridiculous argument to its logical conclusion.

And you're probably paying for private insurance right now. Either because you have to, or because your employer makes you. A socialized healthcare system would be more efficient and fair on everyone, you included. How do I know? I had to have sinusoidal surgery two years ago and didn't have to run a fucking indigogo campaign to pay for it.

Increasing taxes is not increasing slavery.

Decreasing taxes is not reducing slavery.

Socialized healthcare is not slavery.

Why are you drawing an equivalence between "murder all non-white people" and "give power to the working class"?

It's amazing to me that you frame it that way and probably think you're doing so in good faith.

Anyway, I'm reasonably confident that if we tallied the deaths resulting from racism and collectivism, collectivism would win handily.

You framed it that way, look at the words you chose: racism, Nazism, white supremacy. The overarching ideal of all that can very simply be summarized as "non-white people shouldn't exist". The ideal of collectivism is "power to the people."

You took the worst possible interpretation of the former and the best possible interpretation of the latter. In what world do you think anyone believes this was done in good faith?

I already told you in the other thread that you have a different definition of socialism than the people you're talking to.

It's not bad faith. You need to accept you are working off a different vocabulary. Your shitty media abuses this to stoke the divide.

Neither definition is more correct, but it stands to reason that people arguing in favour of "socialism in politics" aren't Stalinists, for fucks sake. If anyone tells you that, they are trying to rile you up. And if you believe them, you're a fool.

What's the best possible interpretation of Nazism, white supremacy, and racism?

Best possible? Someone could probably do better, but off the top of my head, "if we aggregate metrics from populations using a sampling method other than a uniform random distribution, we should expect to see differences" probably approximates it.

What is the worst possible interpretation of socialism, communism, collectivism, and the new Woke cult?

Well if you vote for Trump you like what he says or it doesn't bother you enough, then that speaks volumes. Like when he called Mexicans rapists/murderers/drug dealers, or when he made fun of a disabled reporter, or said a women was too ugly to rape. Trump is just a horrible person. I'm German, a and left wing European.(I used to live in the US also). I don't like democrats politically. But if I could have, I would've voted for them as I view them not as destructive as republicans. But, even if Trump was as left as Sanders, one of the few American politicians I actually like, I wouldn't vote for him.

> Like when he called Mexicans rapists/murderers/drug dealer

I think this validates OP's point. He never said all Mexicans are rapists etc, he was speaking about border security and describing the people illegally entering the country through the Southern Border. One of many soundbites spun into a scandal by the media and used to dehumanize him.

His supporters understood what he meant, his detractors took the media spin hook, line, and sinker.

"They aren't sending their best". Yes, your description of this is accurate.

News does this all the time to generate outrage, both left and right leaning, and I absolutely HATE it. Particularly in the Trump and "fake news" era because it leaves them incredibly vulnerable to the criticism. "See! The fake-news, always lying!". Makes it easy to discredit their larger, more serious reporting by picking on these smaller transgressions.

> He never said all Mexicans are rapists etc, he was speaking about border security and describing the people illegally entering the country through the Southern Border.

He didn't say it, he insinuated it.

Is that really so different?

No he didn't. This is exactly the kind of straw-manning that your GP was talking about.

> 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.

Yes he did.

Did you read the quote you just posted? It says "And some, I assume, are good people." As in "not literally all of them are rapists".

Do you appreciate the inevitable outcome of this sort of speech is that people, whether they are Mexican or not, whether they are legal immigrants or not, so long as they fit into some deranged category, will meet more violence in their day-to-day lives?

It's not racist because of the exact words said, it's racist because of the obvious consequences. There are ways to talk about difficult issues. Trump empowered the worst people to come out from hiding.

The hook, line, and sinker is when he said, "and some, I assume, are good people." It's tantamount to, "I'm not racist. I have a black friend."

No. It’s that each side lets these things slide.

Many countries let a little socialism slide, with great results.

A little racism should never be allowed to slide. Racism is disgusting.

Biden’s focus ought to be making sure a crazy person like Trump is never elected again and that if he is, that government institutions cannot be abused the way they were under Trump.

It should be made easier to prosecute a president for illegal activity.

Things like showing tax returns should be formalized.

New regulation needs to be put in place to limit the spread of falsehoods and conspiracy theories over facts.

Social media currently benefit economically from this and that has to stop. The economic incentive to spread crazy and extremist ideas has to be removed.

> It should be made easier to prosecute a president for illegal activity.

It’s already easy. The House made their case and the Senate disagreed. The same thing happens in real court (prosecution makes a case and jury disagrees). It absolutely should not be so easy that the house alone can remove the president with a simple majority.

> Things like showing tax returns should be formalized.

Why? Anything really insidious isn’t going to be on a return anyway. And if it’s required for the President, why not literally every other government position?

It probably should be required for any government position where the holder of the office is expected to exercise their own individual discretion. The Federal government won’t grant a security clearance to individuals that owe substantial amounts of money, especially to foreigners, or who have deep personal ties to foreigners or ownership stakes in foreign businesses. I for one would like to know whether candidates would be eligible for a security clearance (though of course the President themself is not subject to most rules about classified information).

I doubt tax returns would’ve stopped trump from winning in 2016. Ultimately the will of the people should prevail; that’s what a democracy is.

Perhaps, but though the Constitution lists only minimal requirements for the presidency it's clear that the authors had the belief that the will of the people should be curtailed in plenty of circumstances.

Trump was never taken to court because the position of the Justice Department is that the President is above the law. That could be changed.

The Senate was not equivalent to a jury since juries do not generally have the same incentives to pervert justice that the Senate did.

> ...why not literally every other government position?

The President has dramatically more power than almost any other government position. That being said, I could see it being required for Supreme Court justices and members of Congress.

court... over what?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21153531

Obstruction of justice

Specifically?

> The House made their case and the Senate disagreed.

That is ignoring the open partisanship displayed by the Senate. The Republicans openly admitted they would be giving the impeachment process a fair hearing.

And to be fair, I doubt the Democrats would have done any different had the positions been reversed.

I'm not sure there's a better solution. I'm not sure you want an "impartisan" non-elected body to make a decision as fundamental as removing the President from office.

I think it's safe to say that one of the major reasons Trump won, was because he was hailed as some mastermind business person, who'd "run America like a business".

That mantra started with Mitt Romney, but he ran against a strong candidate - so it never really took off.

But then it turns out, Trump is a really weak businessman, with almost 4 decades of bankruptcies and crushing debt to his name. His business failings have been known forever, but his personal debt is new information.

Normal people joining any position which requires security clearance can get denied, on basis of relatively small consumer debt. Why? Because it makes you risky, and susceptible of corruption.

Based in his personal debt alone, Trump would never, ever get any security clearance of any kind.

Also, letting the senate decide seems like a broken system when it's absolutely clear that both sides will pick party of country, any day of the week.

If anything, the Trump administration has been the great stress-test of how things work in practice. Better to patch up the system now, than to wait for the next smarter and more cunning wannabe-dictator.

> Based in his personal debt alone, Trump would never, ever get any security clearance of any kind.

Nobody cares. Obama wouldn’t have gotten clearance because he smoked pot.

Personally I think we are watching the slow death of the USA. May be from France I am not getting all the subtle details about the situation on the ground but the country seems to be completely divided.

There is almost nothing now that holds America coherent as a country. It has too much variance to form a sensible cluster. It went from a basically almost racially homogeneous, English speaking, Christian - with a lot of flavours I recognise but still - and ideologically united country to a multi racial, multi confessional, and now in some part multilingual with radically opposing views and interests country.

There is more in common on many points between Estonia and Ireland than between California and Arkansas.

Trumpism was not an outlier but an indication of how strong the centrifugal forces became...

> Personally I think we are watching the slow death of the USA. May be from France I am not getting all the subtle details about the situation on the ground but the country seems to be completely divided.

I live in Washington DC and completely agree with you. The division has only been getting worse for years.

Most of the country is not divided at all. There are differences of opinion sure, but not some kind of epic division. The media likes to focus on the extremes because they make the most noise and say the craziest things.

Democrat representatives recently voiced an analysis that the crazy extreme minority of the party cost them seats in the House because the majority of voters don't want extremes or crazy.

This just isn't true. The US has been a multiracial nation for most of its history due to the country's enormous population of enslaved and eventually emancipated black people combined with an extraordinarily liberal immigration system. The US's diversity is one of the things that differentiates it from nearly every European country. It's a good thing.

You using the Irish as an example is totally bizarre to me because they barely get along with the English (who are mostly also white and Christian). The Troubles were not that long ago and represent a level of political violence between different cultural groups that the US hasn't seen in a very long time.

It went from a basically almost racially homogeneous, English speaking, Christian - with a lot of flavours I recognise but still - and ideologically united country to a multi racial, multi confessional, and now in some part multilingual with radically opposing views and interests country.

At no point in America's history was it ideologically united. It was divided from the very beginning; our founding document itself was the product of a compromise between two mutually exclusive governmental ideals.

There is more in common on many points between Estonia and Ireland than between California and Arkansas.

I doubt that very much. Arkansans and Californians speak the same language, eat the same food, watch the same shows and movies, listen to the same music, learn the same history. There are ideological differences, sure, but those ideological differences are the same as you see in other countries, including Estonia and Ireland.

There have been predictions of the slow death of the US since the 60’s.

I won’t hold my breath.

I've heard this take from many in the EU, sounds like it's being pushed explicitly by media there.

Any student of US history can tell you that the current events are not especially indicative of the "death of the USA" or some such, and proposing that view just shows the hyped up fearmongering lens though which US events are portrayed to the world

What saddens me, is that by the standards of corporate world Trump didn't do anything extraordinary. He was running a country in a style of a mediocre corporate executive. Same type of an executive that, for example, resulted in The Boeing Company suffering losses and having fleets grounded. But nothing special, really. Think "Uber" type of a corporate culture. Or "WeWork". Used to run a country.

It is no wonder, the likely result is 400k+ deaths and a worst downturn in a century. And one doesn't need to look further than Taiwan or South Korea, to see that it was not inevitable and preventable by good governance.

A wish for good governance. Less cynicism. And a shift of culture in both politics and corporate world that doesn't allow for such disasters.

Trump would not have lasted as CEO more than a few months. Such blatant lying and bullshitting just does not fly in a corporation with a board. He only sat atop Trump empire for so long because there was no one but him running the show.

It's almost like the roles of government, such as medical access, social security and law enforcement, should not be run as a business

One of the things this election, and the last four years, has shown me, is the impact of technology on our political discourse. It hasn't been a "good" insight.

Federal Election records indicate that the leadership of technology companies overwhelmingly supported a set of values that their employees appear to just as overwhelmingly reject. That dissonance is really quite remarkable.

I see one of the fundamental challenges facing the new administration is how to address this. I am not a fan of government regulation, more of a "let the markets decide" kind of guy. I recognize however there is a systemic risk where the technology "owner" can exploit it to harm society in a way that was previously impossible.

While the country has focused on disinformation and hate speech, consider a company that controls, in real time, the self-driving software in a car. Such a technology, if weaponized, to could kill hundreds of thousands of people. Or it could be weaponize to kill select people who were in the intersection of riding in a self-driven car and in disfavor by the company that really controls that car.

Early on in my career I chose not to work for military contractors who were the "big" employers in Los Angeles at the time I graduated from college. They were clearly engaged in finding clever, or at least more effective, ways to kill people and that wasn't where I wanted to spend my time. But what about someone working on self driving? It saves lives by avoiding some of the things end up resulting in crashes. But it also provides an opportunity for great evil.

Do we trust the person in charge to not be evil? Companies change and while they might declare their intentions when they are growing, what happens when they are on top? Sometimes those quaint notions get cast aside when being a little bit evil makes what you're trying to do that much easier or maybe that much more profitable.

What is the appropriate response, in a democracy, to a small number of people controlling a potential weapon that can destroy that democracy? Sadly this is no longer an idle question.

I don't have any answers here, just more questions.

> Such a technology, if weaponized, to could kill hundreds of thousands of people.

Try and drive a Tesla through a red light or through a person that it clearly sees. Try and drive a Tesla fast without being in it. It just doesn't work.

On the other hand, nothing stops someone from attaching a simple remote control system to a regular truck and driving through a crowd of people.

Nothing stops someone from making an aimbot for a machine gun. That can kill a lot of people fast.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6QcfZGDvHU8

Interestingly I avoided injury by a Tesla which was approaching the intersection I was crossing and the driver was distracted. I heard the tire screech and looked over to see a driver clearly panicked both because they realized they nearly hit someone and there phone was now nowhere to be found.

That is a great thing.

But what if someone inside of TESLA, the folks who write the software and send it over the air to your car, decided to add their own "feature" to the car such that they could override the safety system with a network packet, or a text message to the car. That person would be in a position to tell the car to ignore its safety systems and kill its occupant.

It is kind of a staple of dystopian fiction, but now that we're getting closer to having that software out there in real time, the question becomes less fiction and more "What would have to be true for that to happen?"

The change here is cars that are always connected to the Internet and have command authority over all of the systems in the car. Before if you wanted to alter the software controlling a car you took it to a dealer, or a mod-shop, but now it just shows up in your car. What sort of insider threat programs does Tesla have? What sort of controls are their on releases? Do third parties have any opportunity to audit everything in the code? What happens if Elon orders an employee to put some code in? Do they do it? Do they report it?

And not to pick on Tesla here, the same goes for GM/Cruise and Waymo right? ALL self driving systems that are currently in development have full control of the car, an always connected component, and a dynamic software update capability. Should it be required they also have a mechanical switch that forces manual control without any means of circumventing the switch in software? That would have to come as a government regulation right? And then what happens when someone steals the Waymo van by throwing the switch and driving away with it?

Hopefully that gives you a sense of where my head is here in these questions.

Our society is built on Trust. You have to trust your bank to keep your money in your name and allow you to withdraw when you want it. You have to trust that the fire truck will come when you have a fire. You have to trust that your neighbours won’t randomly wake up one day become zombies thirsty for your blood.

Same way you ought to trust, but not blind trust. Trust but verify.

I think the self driving game will be won with someone who as a transparency mindset. Here’s the car. Here’s the software, here’s the guarantee that it hasn’t been modified and here’s the extensive tests that we’ve run on it, verified by 3rd parties vouching for its safety and quality.

Same with any technology company. You win by making solid technology backed with real rigorous testing vouched by trusted 3rd parties and general public.

I agree with you. For folks reading along, there is an entire discipline around this stuff, it is call vulnerability analysis and surety systems. There are a lot of good papers published by Sandia National Laboratory on these topics. They were responsible for developing the US surety system around access to nuclear weapons[1]. When I worked at Sun they gave a talk at an e-comerce payment processing forum that Sun was participating in to discuss how you approach the problem of securing something in presence of known and unknown bad actors.

In particular they discussed the systems around banking which prevent your bank from stealing your money from you. A topic that I found quite interesting.

But one of the things that has always stuck with me was the discussion of the trade-off between the "cost of effort" to "actualize" a vulnerability. It is the difference between having something that could be done in theory versus having doing it having a high enough payoff to actually do it. When you look at things like dye packs in money and silent alarms and time locked safes, those are parts of a system that minimize the amount of money you can expect to make off with in a bank robbery. They are part of a surety system that is protecting the money in the bank. And they don't make it impossible to rob the bank, they make the likely-hood that you'll have enough profit from it to risk it low enough that people don't do it.

[1] They are designed, in part, to prevent anyone from detonating a US nuclear device without specific authorization from the President.

I don’t think this is a good argument. Taking actions that influence people is sketchy but legal (eg FB allowing disinformation) but actually turning self driving cars into death machines is just ... not something I see as being possible, and goes into crazy conspiracy zone for me. There are a ton of regulations around the safety of passengers, which are likely to be expanded to include self driving tech as well.

Do you also worry about Boeing flight control software, nuclear reactor software, or XRay machine software?

Generally I don't. That said, reading the various reports on the 737-MAX suggests that Boeing has some work to do in this regard.

While all of the examples you give could conceivably be attached to the Internet, none of them update their core software over the Internet. That would be a non-starter for the agencies that regulate them. When I see things like "autopilot updates" delivered to a Tesla as an update, it feels to me that self driving is an example of a technology that is 'running ahead' of the regulators at the moment.

Consider Facebook, which is a popular bad guy here[1]. There have been "crank" bulletin board systems since the 70's at least, and before that with HAM radio operators riling each other up over various perceived slights and insults. In 2016 we got to see that with a precision advertisement targeting system, and way more insights into people than ever existed before, companies like Cambridge Analytica could precisely target individuals who were susceptible to a particular line of reasoning. CA essentially offered Radicalization As a Service. We are still dealing with that to this day. Was there any reason to worry about BBS software? Not when it was a self selecting group. But when the BBS became a billion BBSes all hosted on the same platform with clear insights into the demographics, fears, and hopes of all of those BBSes at once, that was something new. And it changed the risk profile and was weaponized against people.

It has always been desirable for groups to find somewhat like minded people in order to form a group for collective action. That is the 'demand' side of the question, but before Facebook it wasn't economic to do that at scale. With Facebook it did become economic to do that, and it gave anyone a new capability. Not all of those people have (or had) people's best interest at heart and so we get the bad as well as the good.

Prior to self driving cars with over the air updates, continuous network connectivity, and full access to all systems on a car, has their been the capability (actualized or not) for someone anywhere in the world to target a specific car and take control away from the driver. The previous poster child, for vehicles anyway, were cars with computers that controlled things like engine starting/stopping and brakes. One issue was that you had to be near the car to know which one you wanted to attack. Self driving cars finesse that by giving you an interior camera view. It is a different realm of problem.

[1] I don't consider Facebook a bad actor per se, I believe that the forces that motivate them (page engagement, ad clicks, ad sales, etc) find ways to be serviced. And those ways are not constrained by ethics.

All of the self driving car research will eventually be used to make self-driving tanks and other automated weapons of war. All technological innovation ends up being used for war eventually; it's just a question of whether the military or the public gets to use it first.

Whatever his style, Trump didn't start any wars during his term. Lets see if Biden will do as well.

Pushed the US closer to civil war though. Isn’t that worse?

how?

Lots of ways

Some would say its better. I guess it depends on your perspective.

I had an impression this strong division already started during Obama presidency. Probably in the aftermath of 2008 crisis.

Ironically Trump was one of the major pushers of the birther story.

This. The 2008 collapse converted large populations of young, rural and urban middle-class people into wage slaves, while both the Bush and Obama administrations printed money to prop up the financial institutions whose behavior caused the collapse. This propped up the stock market nicely, which kept retireees happy, but inflated away any assets and wage growth younger people might have seen.

The real trick, though, was the MSM and social media using bubbles and doubletalk to convince those angry un-/under-employed urban and rural folks that they should blame each other.

From that, you got the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street and (the angry seeds of) the alt-right and the populist left.

The trade war?

I mean we were somewhat fortunate Iran's missile strike didn't cause any deaths.

The only reason is because we are politically smart enough not to call them "wars" any more. He's personally responsible for the wholesale slaughter of people in Yemen - something Biden said he'd put an end to.

it isn't really politics though. the term war has legal meaning that will invoke actions and rulings from treatied allies and the UN. if you call it a war, the world gets involved, if you call it a strategic campaign, every gets the option to turn. their heads and not get involved if they so choose

That sounds precisely like politics.

More importantly, since we’re talking about the United States, the President can’t actually start wars. Congress declares war. So mincing words about whether the President has technically started a “war” is vacuous. No President ever has.

Given that context it’s easy to understand that people using the term War in the modern day to discuss the actions of a US President are not referring to the technical meaning of the term.

The Saudi War on Yemen started in 2015, before Trump was even elected. How is he responsible for it?

'lghh did not say Trump was involved in starting the war in Yemen. And yet he is still responsible for a lot that has happened in Yemen, both through directly through U.S. actions and indirectly through U.S. support of Saudi operations.

The Saudi military is using American bombs dropped by American planes flown by pilots trained by Americans and serviced by American mechanics. U.S. Congress has attempted to reduce American involvement by blocking arms deals and invoking the War Powers Resolution, but Trump has bypassed or vetoed those attempts. He's a big fan of selling arms to the Saudis because he has said those sales create "over a million jobs" in America.

Further reading:

https://airwars.org/news-and-investigations/trump-in-yemen-n...

> Reported civilian deaths tracked by Airwars in 2017 significantly outstripped alleged deaths in any year during the Obama presidency

https://airwars.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/Eroding-Trans...

> limited comparison of officially declared US actions supports the understanding that US military strikes in Yemen increased precipitously in the first year of the Trump presidency

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

https://www.whitehouse.gov/articles/president-trump-king-sal...

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/13/world/middleeast/trump-we...

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-saudi-arms/defying-co...

> The Trump administration informed congressional committees that it will go ahead with 22 military sales to the Saudis, United Arab Emirates and Jordan, infuriating lawmakers by circumventing a long-standing precedent for congressional review of major weapons sales.

> Members of Congress had been blocking sales of offensive military equipment to Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates for months, angry about the huge civilian toll from their air campaign in Yemen

https://apnews.com/article/1b17cee217b344d8a3a03642139fb606

> President Donald Trump vetoed a resolution passed by Congress to end U.S. military assistance in Saudi Arabia’s war in Yemen.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/06/us/politics/trump-civilia...

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/12/us/politics/trump-loosen-...

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/21/us/politics/trump-drone-s...

> The Trump administration is preparing to dismantle key Obama-era limits on drone strikes and commando raids outside conventional battlefields

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2018/10/22/trumps-cl...

How does this election relate to the 2000 election when all media called Gore the winner, but then in December, Bush became the president elect?

https://www.forbes.com/sites/jonathanponciano/2020/11/04/the...

"On election night, it was unclear who had won, with the electoral votes of the state of Florida still undecided. The returns showed that Bush had won Florida by such a close margin that state law required a recount. A month-long series of legal battles led to the highly controversial 5–4 Supreme Court decision Bush v. Gore, which ended the recount."

Can this happen again this time?

A few differences:

* In 2000 it was one tipping-point state. Here, Biden has multiple states putting him over the top.

* The margin in those states is larger than in Florida. The final official Florida count gave the victory to Bush by 537 votes.

* 2000 involved a recount of legitimately questionable ballots. Trump's legal cases (thus far) have been judged by experts to be far less serious.

* Trump (so far) is not challenging enough ballots to give him the lead in the tipping-point state.

2000 also had the "hanging chads" issue and confusing ballots that potentially caused people to choose a different candidate from what they wanted.

Yes, at least in theory. The simple reason is that in the end not the media, but the courts will decide.

I think this is all anyone is really asking for.

As yet, no court is adjudicating an issue that impacts a large number of ballots.

State election systems will decide the election.

Most are asking for the people to decide.

And if the people truly and directly got to decide the president, this post would have been made on Wednesday morning.

That's not realistic because the fate of the country would be decided by a handful of cities, all sharing a same culture.

Having lived in 3 different cities let me tell you: they ain't got anything close to the same culture. Seattle, NY, and Atlanta are as disparate physically as culturally.

And the majority of Americans don't want a rural minority dictating the "fate of the country" either.

Courts do not typically decide elections.

Bush v Gore ordered that the recount be stopped.

And that was an atypical event, unique in American history.

No. Biden is likely to win across multiple states by a large margin, notably in PA where he is above the point that would require a recount.

No. For the many reasons others have noted and the elimination of the "hanging chad". [0]

[0]https://www.npr.org/2018/11/12/666812854/the-florida-recount...

The big difference is that 2000 revolved around a disputed recount, in a race with a margin of fewer than 1000 votes. There will be recounts in this race, but:

(1) There's no reason to believe they'll change the outcome much (recounts in 2016 didn't) --- states have learned since 2000 and have moved away from faulty ballot designs.

(2) The recounts will be occurring in multiple states, and Trump needs to sweep them.

(3) The margins in those recounts are much bigger than in 2000 --- tens of thousands of votes, not hundreds.

Look at it logically. Bush was ahead by 537 votes. The court wrangling happened for so long and there were so many delays that it was impossible to do a recount in time for the legally mandated date of certification.

Biden is ahead here. Even if you remove PA or AZ, he'd still have enough electoral votes to win.

He's going to be President. The only person who doesn't get that at this point is Trump, and everyone around him is just bowing to his whims.

What do you mean "all media called Gore the winner"? I can't find any evidence of that. According to Wikipedia [1], "on November 8 ... the networks declared that Bush had carried Florida and therefore been elected president. ... after all votes were counted, ... the networks retracted their declarations that Bush had won Florida and the presidency".

Also, note that Gore privately conceded the election that night, but retracted it after further counting due to the <1000 vote margin.

So in fact major networks (including CNN, ABC, FOX) initially called Bush the winner, but retracted that afterwards due to the possibility of a recount.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2000_United_States_presidentia...

Amount of misinformation coming out is really concerning. SharpieGate, fake videos of ballot stuffing, more votes than registered voters etc.

How do you determine what is misinfo and what isn’t? Honest question.

Trust cooroborated stories across multiple competing and ideologically different institutions.

Here https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/aponline/20001108/apon...

Those networks called Florida for Gore, not the whole election.

One and the same though.

No, not at the time of retraction.

The media also called Tilden over Hayes in 1876 and Dewey over Truman in the 1940s. Its almost as if they're not the ones to decide the winner of an election.

It's more nuanced than that. Gore wanted some select counties recounted, bush wanted no counties recounted, but if there was going to be a rexound then bush wanted the whole state recounted. In the end the SCbrules that the 14th amendment said that including votes with "hanging Chad's" and other clear intent required the whole state to be recounted. Gore conceeded because there wasn't enough time and he believed that a whole state recount wouldn't have favored him in the end. History reflects that it may have been a bad strategy for Gore to try and recount just some counties because he may well have won if he argued for a state wide recount from the beginning.

The biggest factor in Florida is that the ballot marking system that Florida used at that time was extremely prone to failure, especially with regards to machine reading of ballots (which itself could cause an apparent mark on the ballot!). This means that trying to divine whether or not a ballot recorded an intent to vote for a candidate can be subjective and depends on the exact standard you want to use, which Florida didn't specify (and the Florida Supreme Court ruled was ultimately too vague).

Since 2000, most states have switched to optical scan ballots as their paper records. These ballots have much lower error rates, closer to 1 error per million votes. I don't think there's been a single race using optical scan ballots where a recount actually caused a winner to switch.

Another thing that complicated this was that the way you punched the ballot resulted in the chad going into a waste bin. Those waste bins would fill up to the point where it would physically prevent you from being able to punch out your chad.

That election and SCOTUS ruling was a mess, and as a consequence did a lot of damage to this countries institutions.

The sad part is that the popular vote has a much cleaner margin, and going forward this is what medias should report if people want change.

The Associated Press, who called the election this year, and who has been calling US elections since 1848, didn't call the election for either side in 2000:

"AP did not call the closely contested race in 2000 between George W. Bush and Al Gore – we stood behind our assessment that the margin in Florida made it too close to call."

https://www.ap.org/en-us/topics/politics/elections/how-we-ca...

Skimming through this thread, it certainly verges on flame - but I'd just like to remind you all that officially, Biden hasn't won yet. Several (not all) media outlets have called the race, and it sure looks like he will; but the elections haven't yet been certified. With the coming legal challenges, it looks a lot like 2000. Patience.

It really does not. Florida was the deciding factor and was an extremely small margin we don’t see here.

Because the results are very close and several lawsuits are ongoing over the election outcome in several battlefield states, it’s more and more clear that this election will be settled through the judicial system.

The results were very close in Florida as in less than a thousand votes. All of the states here the difference is nowhere near that. Recounts typically change vote counts by less than these amounts. I do not think the judicial system will decide this. In fact, I believe their impact will be near zero.

> The results were very close in Florida as in less than a thousand votes.

This is incorrect. And it’s crazy you would be this wrong without anyone already correcting you.

FL is 300-400,000 apart

I’m referring to the 2000 election. I’m comparing and contrasting those results with the 2020 election, of which we see no similarity.

I believe this was clear with context, as we are discussing the possibility of this election being decided in court.

The sentiment of mutual understanding accross polticial lines expressed in many comments here is beautiful.

However, let's not forget that on election night the current US president clearly proved his staunchest critics right.

What might have happened if Fox News had adopted his "stolen election" narrative?

This is, quite literally, how autocratic strongmen destroy their countries for personal gain. There's more than enough historical precedent from around the world to know the playbook.

This is literally the biggest surprise for me this election. That Murdoch withheld the coup.

While Murdoch holds and supports the spread of staunchly conservative views, I don't think he wants to go down in the history books as attempting to plunge the US into dictatorship.

How would Trump winning the election be plunging the US into a dictatorship?

It's not about the scenario where Trump actually wins the electoral vote. It's about Biden actually winning the electoral vote, but Fox, Trump, and right wing media sowing enough doubt in half the country that a "coup" is taking place and Biden isn't lawfully President and that their supporters need to support the "legitimate" President by any means necessary.

You seem to have no idea Fox and establishment GOP hate Trump and want him to lose.

I watched Fox News all morning yesterday. I couldn’t believe how much it resembled the other networks.

The GOP is also relatively mum. I’m thinking that I’m some sense, many of these folks are secretly hoping for the end of Trumpism, that a more normal GOP may return.

> secretly

... this has been something the left has failed to understand for 5 years at now.

THE GOP NEVER WANTED TRUMP. Why do you think the DNC has “super delegates”? Exactly to prevent what Trump did.

The establishment GOP hates Trump as much as anyone on “the left”.

That’s been a constant annoyance to me when people conflate the two.

If you have someone that routines trashes the GOP... they should be positive to neutral about Trump.

> THE GOP NEVER WANTED TRUMP. Why do you think the DNC has “super delegates”? Exactly to prevent what Trump did.

Well, no, the superdelegates are principally (solely, now that post-2016 their first ballkt voting powers have been limited to situations where they don't matter) to prevent an extended convention battle in the event of a failure of a clear majority.

The GOP tried to avoid the same problem without superdelegates by building a system that creates a strong artificial majority out of plurality support, to force a quick decision for the early leader (which Trump benefited from, because the establishment didn't really have it's act together to effectively push a clearly preferred candidate at the outset, and ended up chasing the early leaders tail the whole election with a succession of different favored alternatives.)

> The establishment GOP hates Trump as much as anyone on “the left”.

The old GOP establishment might. The party-in-government (GOP members in elective office don't), the evidence of which is them staying in the Party when Trump took it over. For dissatisfaction with a party for more mild than what the left has for Trump, officeholders leave and become independents or even flip to the other party; if establishment members of the GOP in government hated Trump even with 1/10th the fury the Left has for Trump, or even that the center-right Democratic establishment does, they'd have all left, and either become independents, joined the Democrats or, given how many of them there would be if it really was the whole establishment, formed their own party.

Instead, they immediately dropped most of their pre-nomination complaints and jumped on board, because while he might not be their favorite, he's a devil they have no real problem living and working with.

I've always felt that the Trump presidency served as an effective form of "Chaos Engineering". Regardless of your views of Trump's politics, his administration and method of leadership has exposed a lot of flaws in how our government has been designed and engineered.

The postmortem of the last 4 years should be analyzed deeply in order to identify the weak points in the infrastructure of our government in order to make improvements.

Trump has been a very effective chaos monkey.

It is very strange how he, a master manipulator, missed the obvious danger Covid could cause to his presidency. I mean, really?

You can’t bully a virus or subject it to social pressure

but you can use it to escalate executive powers beyond reasonable limits, like many governors did or like the previous two administrations did for the war on terror.

Any illusion Trump was a master negotiator is blown away by listening to Bob Woodward's interviews. He almost incriminates himself, for free, over the phone apparently purely because he wants Woodward to write a better book this time.

Dude's a carnival barker. He's great at working up the crowds, but that seems to be his only talent. Combined with his obvious deficiencies in other aspects of leadership.

That's because he's not a master manipulator: he is aggressive and lucky.

His actions were aggressive: just not against covid. He sought to shift blame onto local governments and claim glory for himself.

This is an example of what a "career politician" would've easily used to their advantage, and handled well.

> This is an example of what a "career politician" would've easily used to their advantage, and handled well.

I’m not so sure about that. There aren’t a hell of a lot of politicians who have handled it well in my view. There are a few and they are lauded for their efforts, but it’s not common. Have you any examples?

Do you have a source for your uncertainty?

The number of politicians handling the pandemic badly.

I would say Andrew Cuomo has handled it decently as a public health crisis, and handled it very well as a means to improve his reputation.

A lot of people have this image of that there exists these perfect villainous masterminds who always know the truth and always say exactly what benefits them, but in the pragmatic universe of real people and limited intelligence, always knowing exactly what to say somehow comes at the expense of always knowing what's actually happening.

Bad poker players do this a lot. You bully and bully and bully, everyone folds, and your stack grows. You win little pots because the opponents don't like the risk. You win bigger pots because they think they have a chance, but you throw lots of chips in and act confident. Eventually some situation comes along where you've run up the pot, but there's no way people will fold.

Covid probably looked like just another thing to him in the early days.

The electoral danger wasn't COVID -- sicknesses and pandemics haven't decided elections in the past, I doubt they do now -- the #1 danger to any incumbent is economic depression: Carter, HW Bush.

I think Trump was very aware of that fact, whether or not he responded in the right way.

You say that like the pandemic and the economic situation this year were entirely unconnected. If the situation would have been handled with more care in the beginning instead of downplaying it, it likely wouldn't have had the economic effect that it did.

I passed no judgment about the effectiveness of Trump's actions.

Just my confidence he was fully aware that the pandemic-affected economy would be an enormous issue (in fact I believe he was hyper-aware...perhaps overly so).

Rereading your initial comment, I can see what you meant.

It still seems strange to me to claim that "X isn't the danger, Y is", if X is a possible cause of Y. That's like people claiming "heart attacks are not what kills people, it's stopped oxygen supply to the brain that does". Sure, it's in a way factually correct, but what's the point in ignore the cause if you know about it?

My point is that Trump was indeed aware of the danger to his election odds that a pandemic-related depression would cause, which is why he opposed lockdowns.

You might disagree with that action, but there's no question he knew (and was motivated by) the threat to his campaign.

He claimed to be able to shoot someone on 5th Avenue and still get elected. OTOH, Covid could have been his 9-11 moment, with just a teensy bit of effort the resident of the Oval Office could come out a hero, just don’t screw it up.

OTOOH someone in that circle, who did have a 9-11 moment and didn’t screw it up, waited until years later to piss away their credibility. So perhaps the president got some really bad advice.

COVID-19 presented a pat situation, so to speak, for Trump administration. No good moves whichever way to go. Imposing quarantine measures would be going against the very much support base, who not only oppose it, they subverted this into a principle point of distinction synonymous to freedom.

Approving a more substantial aid to people and businesses would go along the lines of "entitlements".

Both of such choices would also align Trump's administration, and by extension the Republicans, with the opposition - something made unthinkable in the current climate.

If anything, COVID-19 underscored more the perhaps cliche saying that "Divided we fall". The strategies that play into devisiveness can only provide a situational advantage; for lasting changes there needs to be unity.

It's a herculean task to unite a nation in the current state of polarisation.

Perhaps people could stand back for a moment and ask themselves what or who is it there that makes people so intolerably polarised; is there a vision that could move the nation forward, define challenges that call for such a united power to overcome them?

I don't think he missed it. IIRC he was appropriately briefed early enough. I just think he vastly underestimated how bad it would be, and once he realized he was wrong, he brand of machismo prevented him from actual showing a strong virus response.

Even during the peak, his team was still trying to play political games (by denying "blue states" federal resources to show it was democratic mismanagement). I think, if he truly made a strong showing (or was at least consistent in his message) he would have blown out Biden.

Trump literally would've won had he had sent free red MAGA masks to every American in March/April.

It was the perfect missed opportunity

He did one better, by signing the stimulus checks and branding the CDC guideline mailer. If those stimulus checks kept coming, I think he'd have won handily.

I tend to agree, and I think that is also why no such further checks were issued. Pelosi would not let Trump have that win, at the expense of the people's wellbeing, and the play worked. Not sure how supporters justify that with all the talk of empathy... maybe "it was worth it in the long run"?

This is not accurate. The HEROES Act was passed by Pelosi and the House of Representatives in May, and it would have included stimulus checks. It was never brought to a vote in the Senate.

https://www.cnbc.com/2020/08/06/heres-how-much-you-could-get...

The thing is he could also have done a macho move by ordering a huge lockdown, have military on the streets, but control the message the way he normally does: claim he was in early, say the economy would have been worse if he hadn't, blame China, point fingers at BLM for defying his orders, and so on.

That seems to fit just as well with his playbook, he just went for the wrong pill.

I think huge lockdowns would have pissed off his base to a greater degree than it would have reassured wavering conservatives. But just shutting up and making sure that his name was on the stimulus checks would have been enough to see him home.

So, assume Trump had a huge lockdown and put military on the streets, trashing the economy, running roughshod over the states, and playing into every narrative about being a totalitarian. Then what? We know from countries in Europe tha tried lockdowns that Covid would just be back in full force by the time of the election. It'd make him look both dictatorial and ineffective, a self-proclamed germophobe that tried to send an army to fight a virus and lost, a paper tiger.

In Europe, it went way down before coming back strongly. In the US, it just stayed big and grew.

The thing about doing something is you can always claim what you did was necessary. It's asymmetric. Do nothing, and if the problem doesn't go away you're an idiot. Do something, and if the same thing happens you can claim it would have been worse if you hadn't. There's always some example somewhere you can abuse to say whatever you want.

Whether someone did badly depends on expectations about how it would have gone if they had done otherwise. Like in sports, you judged less harshly if you lose to the favourite. If you let the "otherwise" happen, people complain that you let it happen.

"Something must be done. This is something. Therefore it must be done."

Note I'm saying nothing at all about what ought to be done about the virus, just how to handle the PR.

>trashing the economy,

The economy, or by Trump's barometer, the stock market, would have been fine. The Fed juiced the economy and then some, SPY is currently trading at pre-COVID all time highs.

Secondly, it's much harder to pin the blame on ~230,000 Americans dead to negligence if Trump actually took some action. Even if COVID came back in full force, you could then say that we have successfully flattened the curve and are now much better at treating the virus.

Great leaders often work entirely from hunches and gut feeling. I think his whole life he did that and so far he got away with it. So along comes COVID and he simply went with his hunch even in the face of an overwhelming amount of contrary scientific and medical evidence.

I actually think it could have been a great opportunity for him. Generally speaking most leader's approval goes up when they handle a national crisis.

He could have made a fortune on masks with his name and campaign slogans on them, too.

Instead, 237k Americans died and 1,500+ die every from COVID, and many Americans are following his lead by not wearing masks.

There was reporting recently were he followed Kushners plan to open the economy and lay the blame for spreading covid at the feet of the state governors for poor implementation. That "blaming the governors" part never really happened that I saw.

That might be the case actually. I do not buy simplistic explanations about being a simpleton bully and such.

He didn't miss Covid, he had a plan, but it wasn't the right plan. To be honest, no one could make plans, only bets.

He wanted to use the pandemic as a way to boost nationalism. The evil virus from China vs America's freedom. Turned out, China handled the situation pretty well and blaming them for everything turned out more difficult than expected. And America didn't deliver, the drug industry couldn't find a treatment, and worse, one of the most effective mitigations, masks, rely on imports from China.

Had an American lab found an effective treatment, had a convincing argument been found against China, the situation would have been different for the elections. But how could one know? Trump just lost his bet.

Yeah. The laws of the land largely assume the president is fundamentally a good actor with the nation's best interests at heart, which I think was sometimes the case with Trump and sometimes not.

We should require a fuller disclosure of a candidate's finances before we allow them to serve. Trump may be deeply in debt to foreign powers. He may not be. We do not know. That is a problem, and it should not be a partisan issue. It is mind-blowing that anybody is okay with not knowing. Let's not let that happen again. That should be the easiest law/amendment to pass, ever. (Of course it won't be)

We obviously have legal machinery in place to remove a president if the need arises, but it is necessarily slow and ineffective.

His term also (further) exposed big flaws in the way we put people on the Supreme Court. We should go back to the old system of a 2/3 majority required. No more 50/50 simple majority, as the Democrats instituted a while back. I find that a disaster.

The old 2/3 majority generally ensured that people who were competent centrists got onto the court. Both parties were equally happy with the candidates... or at least equally unhappy!

> His term also (further) exposed big flaws in the way we put people on the Supreme Court. We should go back to the old system of a 2/3 majority required. No more 50/50 simple majority, as the Democrats instituted a while back. I find that a disaster.

Senate Republicans were the ones who lowered the requirement for Supreme Court confirmations to a simple majority, not the Democrats[0]. Senate Democrats had reduced the threshold for presidential appointments excluding the Supreme Court as a result of chronic filibustering by the Republican congress during Obama’s term[1].

I agree with you that something needs to be done about SCOTUS nominations. It’s clear to me that the stakes are currently way too high. Turning the court into a political football has created an incredibly dangerous situation that risks undermining its authority and the rule of law.

[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/06/us/politics/neil-gorsuch-...

[1] https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/factcheck/2020/10/01/fac...

make no mistake, trump did nothing intentionally for the nation's best interests, because he was unable to see beyond himself. he's the quintessential selfish actor, and that behavior has been repudiated by the electorate at large.

He was chaotic and ineffectual and mostly focused on dumb peeves. But I do think he got some good ideas through the conventional “wisdom”. His execution on everything was poor.

  Good new ideas:

Focus on China as an existential threat to US hegemony.

Just freaking get out of the Middle East already.

Globalization has not been good for the working and middle class.

Depends on where you draw the line on the working class; if anything the working class worldwide has exploded as more people have left poverty in the past 20 years than in the past 100.

Globalization has been awful for the working class in the developed world.

Not disagreeing but curious what metrics you’re using to gauge progress

Outsourcing manufacturing from a country with labor and environmental regulations to a place where they treat workers like slaves and treat the environment like a trash can would be an example.

Saying it’s immoral is one thing that I can agree with. But that’s different than objectively showing how it makes their lives worse. I’m looking for actual metrics like a decline in life expectancy, income, etc.

Just to be clear I’m not on one side or the other because I’m relatively ignorant on the topic. Just looking for evidence

Losing your job because it was outsourced is pretty objectively bad. You can go try to find another job in the same industry but all the competing companies are going to be looking at doing the same thing because they have to compete on margins and their competition just reduced their labor cost by a factor of 2 to 10.

I don't know what evidence for this would look like except for all the goods that are manufactured overseas that used to be manufactured domestically. I'm not making a statistical argument. I'm making an argument based on life experience and inference. Although life expectancy in the US is declining. Wages are stagnant but that's an aggregate over the population. If a 30-year-old worker loses their job and an 18-year-old worker gets hired in a different industry for the same "real wage" then that looks like no change from the perspective of population statistics.

Yes, but that’s talking to the original point I thought you were attempting to refute. I think there’s a lot of case to be made that globalization is a net negative for US workers, but the point being made was that it may also be a net positive for non-US workers. I (perhaps wrongly) assumed your comments about exporting pollution etc. was that it was a net negative in the non-US as well

I think its bad for Earthlings because it pollutes the planet and its bad for the people who lost their jobs because they can maybe afford to replace their consumer goods with crap made overseas but not save for retirement and its bad for the people overseas because they work in factories with no labor protections to make stuff for people in other countries that they cannot themselves afford. I think the whole thing is bad but inevitable.

It makes their lives worse because it puts the workers in competition with workers in those other countries.

Since you asked for metrics, here is a site for working remotely as a freelancer [1]. You'll quickly notice the pay rates are abysmal. $7/hr for a three.js developer. $250 (or lower, possibly as low s $30) to make a fully functional & tested app on android+iphone (would normally take an entire dev team probably well over 1 or 2 weeks).

These are rates below minimum wage for highly technical skills.

This is even more true for hardware too but it's hard to quantify, because e.g. you can't just compare the price of buying capacitors wholesale from Shenzhen with the price of buying capacitors wholesale from Cleveland, because Cleveland doesn't manufacture capacitors.

However, I do have some data (though it's not the most sophisticatedly obtained). Sticking with capacitors as a benchmark, I was expecting there to be 0 US companies manufacturing capacitors, but apparently there are 7 [2]. In contrast, there are apparently 228 Chinese companies manufacturing capacitors [3].

All of this is just to say it's pretty clear that globalization has moved these jobs overseas (and significantly dropped the market rate for those who remain local).

[1] https://www.freelancer.com/jobs/ [2] https://www.company-list.org/capacitors_in_united_states.htm... [3] https://www.company-list.org/capacitors_in_china.html

I agree with this but think it misses the actual point. To paraphrase a popular pundit, “People need to realize that things that are bad for the US may not be bad for the world.”

To clarify the point, the US largely rode a post-WW2 manufacturing boom for a couple generations where the relative quality of life for US citizens disproportionately outpaced other countries. Globalization has started to erase that disparity. So while it’s bad for the US middle and working classes it’s largely benefited pulling people out of poverty for other nations, exemplified by China. The irony is that much of this is driven by the US’s addiction to cheap shit.

I’m only saying the above because I think people are confusing the discussion, not because I think that it’s the best long term strategy

Ah, gotcha. Then I did miss the point.

I do think it's benefited other nations, but -- getting more into personal opinion -- I also think the "help other nations" argument is mostly used to justify cheapening wages. If companies were paying foreign workers the same rates that they would have paid US workers I'd be more empathetic to the argument. But something about the fact that the top 90th percentile of Americans has seen huge gains in the last 40 years, while the middle to bottom percentile has seen neutral or losses [1] raises flags to me that the push towards globalization was selfishly motivated. I know it's a huge inference to say the stagnating wages are caused by globalization, but realistically I would say it's the combination of outsourced labor/manufacturing, immigration, rise of women in the workforce, rise of minorities in the workforce, and automation. Most of these are positive changes, but I still think the average blue collar worker suffered a cost that the hyper-wealthy elite did not, so at the moment I don't see the push for globalization as a very selfless initiative.

[1] https://fas.org/sgp/crs/misc/R45090.pdf

Yes, 100%. I don’t think it was an altruistic motive on either side. The US was acting on behalf of the monied interests and counties like China were acting to become a more dominant economy on the world stage. The fact that it lifted so many out of poverty was a by-product. What I think will be interesting is how China handles a burgeoning middle class that may want a more freedoms as their numbers grow

Agreed, very interested to see how this plays out as well.

Yes but we have to decide if they are the only ones that matter.

Is it right, or wise in the long term, to use our position of power to stop the growth of wealth in non-developed countries? On the other hand, do we have any sort of obligation to elevate the standards of living of people in non-developed countries, especially when it may impact the standards of people living in our borders?

There is a moral question to be answered, especially given our purported system of values and the way in which the wealthy and wealthy countries came to be as such.

I'm not staking out a position or trying to shame anyone. I'm just saying I think it is the underlying question we should be thinking about to decide how we judge globalization and its effects.

Globalization is good in the aggregate but it does affect negatively some communities. The solution is not to stop globalization but to implement public policies to counter the negative effects.

It's not the purpose of the elected representatives of the US to advance the interests of people outside the US to the detriment of US citizens.

Think about this: countries when during elections riot on the streets happen, the incumbing foment a civil war and refuse to admit he's lost the elections, are usually bombed by USA.

They usually are not bombed by the USA. Most countries sort out their own affairs in these kinds of things (witness Brazil) -- in the absence of extended disorder and open warfare.

They didn't need to, they have their men there and hid many former Nazi officials

> The 1964 Brazilian coup d'état (Portuguese: Golpe de estado no Brasil em 1964 or, more colloquially, golpe de 64) was a series of events in Brazil from March 31 to April 1 that led to the overthrow of President João Goulart by members of the Brazilian Armed Forces, supported by the United States government.The coup put an end to the government of Goulart (also known as 'Jango'), a member of the Brazilian Labour Party [...] although a moderate nationalist, Goulart was accused of being a communist by right-wing militants, he was unable to take office [...] The coup brought to Brazil a military regime politically aligned to the interests of the United States government. This regime lasted until 1985, when Neves was indirectly elected the first civilian president of Brazil since the 1960 elections.

The usual same old story.

It's the same thing they did to Lula.

But you're right, bombed was an exaggeration on my part, they usually invade or send weapons and cavalry

So I am not sure what you are suggesting here for the USA...that other countries should help us by inserting infiltrators or something like that?

I suggest they stop meddling with other nations internal affairs and stop complaining if large parts of the world are challenging their self appointed role of hegemonic country and are calling them out for their past crimes

Colonization through military power is not hegemony, is tyranny

This is all good as far as it goes.

There's something upsetting and sad about this approach to the world.

In 100 years we’ll say the same thing when Planet Earth says “it’s not our responsibility to promote the interests of the Mars people”. People just inherently suck.

I'm not saying it's a bad thing for Americans to do things for other people in a way that costs them something, even something considerable; but it is certainly strange for their government to do so by moving jobs abroad and otherwise promoting the interests of the working class of other countries as the comment I was replying to mentions.

Why? National mutual self-interest is probably the single most long-term stable and historically workable approach to foreign policy, economics, and so forth that I can think of.

It's not an approach to the world. The US government isn't a beneficient association that is organized to make things better for people in other countries at the expense of US citizens -- it's not an aid organization or a charity or something like that. The interests of non-citizens don't have any representation in it (it's like every other government in that regard) -- it's just the wrong organization to do something like that.

Fundamentally, their purpose is to win reelection campaigns while upholding the US constitution

If advancing the interests of people outside the US to the detriment of US citizens accomplishes that, it's well within their purpose.

Presumably "the US working class". Globalization has enriched the wealthiest Americans and the global poor at the expense of working Americans, and that's a pretty awful charity program IMO.

Also: He didn't start yet another new war.

He did however through incompetence and neglect see more Amerians die from Covid during his tenure than a whole lot of wars.

As a brown person we are thankful for not being bombed.

You must not live in Yemen.

The Trump admin has performed more drone strikes than the Obama admin. The difference is transparency.

https://chicago.suntimes.com/news/2019/5/8/18619206/under-do...

American death rates are similar to many Western European countries.

Lower than the UK and Spain, a bit higher than Italy and France.

Given New York City's very high rate, how would a person find out what the US w/o NYC compares?

US deaths: 234,034 US population: 330,052,960 Death rate per million: 709

US deaths minus NY: 200,248 NY population: 310,674,858 Death rate per million: 644

You'd have to remove NJ and Connecticut (the top three states) to make much of a difference.

Not just that, you'd be comparing with countries that also have major cities that are particularly badly affected and have not removed those figures from their total.

Thank you.

Which points to a terrible handling of COVID19 by Trump. Given the low population density of the US, the rate should be similar to other low density areas like e.g. Norway and Finland, yet it is more than 10x higher.

The US has numbers comparable to high density countries with extensive use of public transport. That is just terrible outcomes for a country where everybody drives and live far apart.

US is a mix of High and Low Density, you can not just take the national population and divide by land mass to come up with how things "should have gone" with covid

Nor is is really fair to even judge the Federal response to it at all, as under our system of government health care is largely a State matter not a federal one.

Remember the United States is a Republic of 50 States, joined together under a common Defense and Monetary system.

I don't for see large scale changes in policy under a Biden Presidency, you may get stronger messaging but power of the President is largely limited outside of dispersing money, and maybe requiring manufacturers to make certain things if there is a national shortage

Masks Mandates, Lock Downs, etc will still fall under the purview of State Governors as this how our constitution divides the powers of the government

What’s the point of a government or a monetary and defence system if it doesn’t help protect health? Surely keeping citizens alive and well is about the most basic role of a government?

You would have to provide a stronger definition of what you mean by "help protect health"

If you mean full on authoritarian rules where by the government arbitrarily decides by executive fiat who is allowed to work, leave their home, engage in commerce, or other wise gather in any way for months.

I would say no that is not a proper role of a government in a free society that has any respect for civil or human rights...

Where are you getting those numbers? I am looking at https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/ and see only Spain at a higher death per capita of the countries you listed. Even so, I don't think anyone is pointing to the UK and saying they did it right! And the US has a 20% higher per capita death rate than France, which I would call more than "a bit higher."

Recently, France has been reporting about half as many cases as the entire USA despite its smaller population, and last I checked their testing wasn't even as widespread as in the US. Their numbers keep going up too. I wouldn't rely on their death rate remaining lower.

This link, which sources data from Johns Hopkins University.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/1104709/coronavirus-deat...

I have no idea where the worldometers.info data is coming from.

Regardless of small differences, painting Covid-19 as a uniquely American problem stemming from American politics is silly. No countries have performed particularly well, despite trying everything from strict lockdowns to no response at all. East and South East Asia is outperforming, but that likely has more to do with past exposures and disease resistance than it is due to policy difference.

> No countries have performed particularly well, despite trying everything from strict lockdowns to no response at all.

South Korea, Vietnam, Australia, Taiwan and New Zealand would seem to be examples countries that have minimises deaths.

You clearly responded before reading the entire comment.

If it is past exposures and disease resistence, how do you explain early spread in Wuhan? Why does Aus/NZ enjoy natural immunity but not Indonesia? Quarantines are effective against all infectious diseases and have been for centuries, why do you assume they were not effective in places like China and Vietnam? Where is the evidence that disease resistance plays any role?

uh what, more likely because disease resistance? places like SK absolutely are doing well because of policy difference. Restricting access in, robust contact tracing, phased levels of lockdown that are clear and unified.

Some of these would never work in the US due to gov't structure and just the culture of people (privacy rights), but to discount American politics is a stretch. The entire debacle has been a war on misinformation from the top down.

Cf https://covid.observer/per-million/#failed for a more comprehensive list.

US is over twice Canada's mortality per capita. Trump did a deadly job in handling Corona.

IMHO that means that if the U.S. actually had a federal response, if, you know, the Trump administration was actually trying to use the federal government to help the country, that our numbers would be lower.

Which, considering the wealth and expertise of the United States, makes a sort of sense.

At least those other nations are actually making an effort, and not denying science and spreading false, destructive information.

Despair deaths will be off the charts as people are unable to return to work: we never should have locked down.

A lock down which is properly implemented can work, with the most recent success being Australia. I’m in New Zealand and we are likely to have open borders with other clear areas in the not-too-distant future. Time will tell what the cost in dollars and lives looks like with various strategies (or lack thereof), but so far NZ’s approach seems a good choice.

I'm going to ask this in a sincere hope of getting an answer, regardless of how flip it sounds:

What specifically did Trump fail to do that you feel he should have done with regard to Covid? Keeping in mind that the US is a constitutional republic and does not have a lot of the same legal tools to compel people to do things en masse that other nations do.

Trump's most underrated feat during his presidency. We will see how Biden fare on that, starting the count on two (?).

Like many things in a presidency; this is clearly partially - probably largely - guided by external developments. Sure, the president gets more say that anybody else, but I'm skeptical you can ascribe too much blame (or glory) to the outcomes here; at best you can look at the details, and see if in a given situation (ideally in retrospect) a president made the right choices.

I don't think Trump was tested in this area, and I don't think most wars were trivially the fault of the presidencies they were started in (sure, some exceptions like the most recent iraq may jump to mind). I mean, "just don't participate" is also equivalent to ceding influence to whoever feels like a bit of shelling would do them good, so that's not always a good choice - under the assumption that the US (and world) was well served by some measure of imposed order.

Course, maybe I'm misinterpreting who had agency in those situations - do you think it's largely presidents' at fault for for the post-WWII military engagements?

Which is, for an US president, an almost unbelievable thing. Especially since he could have used the Iranian missile attacks on US bases to start a war there. He should get a peace Nobel prize for his actions towards world stability, which also includes his efforts to discuss with North Korea (official visit there!) and the arms sell to Taiwan.

He lucked out that his actions in Iran didn't start one.

I guess it’s luck to a degree, but I regard it more as calling Iran’s bluff. There is no defense for their overt funding and leadership of destabilizing terrorism in the region (as evidenced). They have been to war before, it’s not “luck” that they didn’t decide to commit suicide this time. They cannot afford war, and had they started, fighting a coalition of the US, Israel, Saudi Arabia, and a few others would not be good for them, even if Russia or China decided to float them for a while. It would have resulted in a horrible, horrible outcome for the people of Iran, and say what you want about the Theocracy but it’s not that dumb.

Wars are no longer called wars. The US is much more involved in the civilian slaughter happening in Yemen, we just don't call it a "war" to save face. Don't call this a victory for him, he'll rest in hell for the damage he's done here alone.

The Yemen thing is a war and called that. Just not a US war. Wikipedia has it as "Yemeni Civil War (2014–present)". "The conflict has been widely seen as an extension of the Iran–Saudi Arabia proxy conflict." And then the US gets roped in as mates of the Saudis and enemies of the Iranians but it's not really a US thing and on the go before Donald got in there.

Yes, but we are not "involved" in the war, we are just _involved_ in the war. And I personally don't care if it was there when Trump took office, I care about what Trump did with it.

Isn't it congress that starts wars?

Only four times in the history of the country. So, effectively, no.

The meaning of Congress’ authority to declare war has been clarified (or changed) over time to mean that Congress provides oversight to the Executive branch’s proactive use of the military. Despite that, though, I think it is still fair to say that the US can effectively not go to war if Congress is not agreeable to it unofficially, as the US hasn’t ever had a situation where its president authorized military use that Congress substantially and seriously opposed.

See the War Powers Act to get an idea of the modern framework for governing war in the US: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_Powers_Resolution

> Also: He didn't start yet another new war.

He didn't, but he did abandon the Kurds:

* https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/trum...

* https://www.cato.org/publications/commentary/yes-donald-trum...

Helping his Turkish buddy to be able to go after them.

Not yet he hasn't but don't count your chickens.

None of those ideas are new, and, he didnt really do anything constructive in any of those areas. But yeah those thoughts are worth thinking :)

US hegemony is already gone.

Who has replaced the US in this regard?

I think you can make a strong case US hegemony may be in decline, but it’s harder to claim it’s gone

China's Belt and Road program seems to be establishing a competitor hegemony in the eastern sphere of influence, rather than directly replacing the US. They're building a lot of infrastructure in Africa, expanding their already massive supply chain and working effectively towards surviving a disconnection from the West.

I agree that US hegemony isn't gone yet, but we've lost so much of our manufacturing and materials sourcing that we'll soon need them more than they need us.

> Who has replaced the US in this regard?

Why do you assume it was/will be replaced?

It could go back to the laissez-faire system that was present when all the European powers were running around basically doing anything they wanted. (It should be noted that the US wasn't as isolationist as the propaganda would have you believe: how else did they get pre-revolution Cuba, PR, Guam, Hawaii, etc.?)

I think these systems align to a certain power dynamic. Because of national sovereignty, its already as close to a laissez faire approach as you can get, yet there’s a hierarchy across virtually any dimension you want to measure. So if the US loses, for example, its economic hegemony another country will take its place. Same with military or any other measure.

I don’t think the US has been isolationist since before the Spanish American war.

The US eleven aircraft carrier battle groups tend to disagree.

Sitting ducks, more of aliablity today.

People always allude to this, and it's true an adversary could (probably, maybe) sink one aircraft carrier. That same adversary wouldn't sink a second.

Back in reality, it's true [China] could ... sink 15 aircraft carriers [in an hour].

That same adversary wouldn't sink a second [15 carriers in the next hour . . . 'cos they'll all be sunk]

https://thediplomat.com/2020/09/pentagon-releases-annual-chi...

> Back in reality, it's true [China] could ... sink 15 aircraft carriers [in an hour].

That is unlikely. The Chinese military relies on a combination of overwhelming manpower and tactical positioning, not aircraft superiority and tactical missile deployment (although they are equipping with more and more ballistic missiles). This puts the US at a distinct advantage in almost every conflict with the Chinese military. This includes the South Seas.

The presence of the 5 US carriers* off Singapore has deterred the staged Chinese invasion force for the last few months

https://www.stripes.com/news/pacific/china-sends-two-aircraf... - 3 carriers sent.

2 More were sent by Trump in September (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mvgKgLVPckA). .

I was going to say China would use submarines for such, but they don't appear to have many (in contrast to USA) [1]. My next consideration would be China's red team (APT) but I'm unsure about aircraft carriers being hackable. I mean, it'd make a great fiction novel, perhaps a sequel to Cryptonomicon. Where does China's military strength lie?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_submarine_classes_in_s...

Just leave some derelict ships adrift; USA navy will run into them.

How are those battle ship groups funded? Foreign debt? When was the last time the US had a balanced budget?

Having a nice battleship group does little for the average american public.

"Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities. It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population. It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some fifty miles of concrete pavement. We pay for a single fighter with a half-million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people. . . . This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron." Eisenhower

Globalization has lifted billions from poverty. While it didn't benefit the US middle class in a direct, more money in their pockets way, it did likely prevent horrific wars that ravaged the world in the last century. It's bad business to nuke your customers. So the US middle class did benefit from not being drafted into the global mega-conflicts we avoided.

Also, why is US hegemony a good thing? What good is it for the 96% of the world that is not the US? Does it even benefit anyone outside the US ruling class?

> Also, why is US hegemony a good thing? What good is it for the 96% of the world that is not the US? Does it even benefit anyone outside the US ruling class?

As you alluded to in the previous paragraph, it's good for people because it means we're not participating in the kind of horrific wars that ravaged the world in the century before. And the US has been far less extractive than previous global hegemons. (So in that sense it's worse for US citizens, but better for the rest of the world)

Now, everything is a tradeoff, and perhaps this particular tradeoff hasn't been worth it. But there are most certainly good things that US hegemony has given the world.

Is it true?

https://www.newyorker.com/news/our-columnists/how-trump-brou...

Trump brought war on US soil, Americans VS other Americans, is it better?

I have no idea how this is relevant to a comment on US hegemony. Is this the comment you meant to reply to?

If you mean to say that BLM in the US is comparable to the great wars of the 19th and 20th centuries, I'd say that you're off by a factor of a million in deaths.

Well it is relevant because US egemony is dead.

And it was about time.

Also: US Has Killed More Than 20 Million People in 37 “Victim Nations” Since World War II

https://www.globalresearch.ca/us-has-killed-more-than-20-mil...

"Here's a benefit that US hegemony provides"

"But what about BLM and domestic conflict, US hegemony is dead, and the US has killed a lot of people overseas"

I still don't see the connection.

The US hegemony hasn't provided any benefit to anybody, except if you count millions of dead people as a benefit.

Did the impoverishment of the middle class happen before, after, or during the US hegemony?

Did the large scale wars of the past 30 years happen before, after or during US hegemony?

Did the international terrorism escalation happen bwfore, after or during the US hegemony?

The west especially is poorer and less safe.

Trump was simply the final nail in the coffin.

I think people are just connecting dots here.

I really hope Biden will realise it.

"To the families and friends of these victims it makes little difference whether the causes were U.S. military action, proxy military forces, the provision of U.S. military supplies or advisors, or other ways, such as economic pressures applied by our nation."

"The U.S. is responsible for between 1 and 1.8 million deaths during the war between the Soviet Union and Afghanistan, by luring the Soviet Union into invading that nation."

"Over the years we have repeatedly heard about the Khmer Rouge’s role in the deaths of millions in Cambodia without any acknowledgement being made this mass killing was made possible by the the U.S. bombing of that nation which destabilized it by death , injuries, hunger and dislocation of its people. So the U.S. bears responsibility not only for the deaths from the bombings but also for those resulting from the activities of the Khmer Rouge – a total of about 2.5 million people. Even when Vietnam latrer invaded Cambodia in 1979 the CIA was still supporting the Khmer Rouge."

"Some people estimate that the number of Cuban forces killed range from 2,000, to 4,000. Another estimate is that 1,800 Cuban forces were killed on an open highway by napalm. This appears to have been a precursor of the Highway of Death in Iraq in 1991 when U.S. forces mercilessly annihilated large numbers of Iraqis on a highway."

"Between 8,000 and 12,000 Nepalese have died since a civil war broke out in 1996. The death rate, according to Foreign Policy in Focus, sharply increased with the arrival of almost 8,400 American M-16 submachine guns (950 rpm) and U.S. advisers. Nepal is 85 percent rural and badly in need of land reform. Not surprisingly 42 % of its people live below the poverty level."

"Yugoslavia was a socialist federation of several republics. Since it refused to be closely tied to the Soviet Union during the Cold War, it gained some suport from the U.S. But when the Soviet Union dissolved, Yugoslavia’s usefulness to the U.S. ended, and the U.S and Germany worked to convert its socialist economy to a capitalist one by a process primarily of dividing and conquering. There were ethnic and religious differences between various parts of Yugoslavia which were manipulated by the U.S. to cause several wars which resulted in the dissolution of that country. From the early 1990s until now Yugoslavia split into several independent nations whose lowered income, along with CIA connivance, has made it a pawn in the hands of capitalist countries. (1) The dissolution of Yugoslavia was caused primarily by the U.S."

"Let us put this in historical perspective: the commemoration of the War to End All Wars acknowledges that 15 million lives were lost in the course of World War I (1914-18)." [But see the 1917-1919 flu pandemic, which may have started in the United States, making the US directly responsible for the deaths of 50 million people.]

Probably they'll realise it one day, in the future, when some other country will treat them like they did

I'm pretty sure mcguire was quoting from that link to show how absurd it is, not to agree with it.

I know what he was doing

But we all know that "behind a joke there's always the truth"

I still hope USA will understand what kind of criminal state they have been and still are.

No hard feelings, just hope for them to learn and be better in the future

> US Has Killed More Than 20 Million People in 37 “Victim Nations” Since World War II

Even if that article was remotely accurate (it isn't, see mcguire's comment), the kinds of wars that we fought before the US's new world order could produce that number of casualties in a single year (1942, 1945), so U.S. hegemony would still be a massive improvement. It's a massive improvement even over the two-pole world, as a quick glance at the battle deaths over time graph [1] shows.

[1] https://www.vox.com/2015/6/23/8832311/war-casualties-600-yea...

Wow, you are arguing against a study by citing Vox

Just WOW

OK, let's make it easy for you

---

VIETNAMESE AND INDOCHINA WAR: A TOTAL OF 5.5 MILLION DEAD

THE VIETNAM WAR - 3.8 MILLION DEAD

1.7 MILLION MORE DEAD IN THE CAMBODIAN, KHMER ROUGE GENOCIDE

Source for death toll: Necrometrics and British Medical Journal, 2008

---

TOTAL IRAQI'S KILLED IN AMERIAN WARS (1990-PRESENT) - 3 MILLION IRAQI SANCTIONS: 1.7 MILLION TOTAL DEAD [1]

500,000 CHILDREN DEAD [2][3]

Source:

[1] Behind the War on Terror. Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed. 2003.

[2] Food and Agricultural Organization Study (1995)

[3] Iraq Sanctions Kill Children, U.N Reports (New York Times, 1995

---

Just these major events account to more than 10 million deaths

And they stop at the first gulf war

There are many more years to cover

Good luck denying that

> 1942, 1945

The massive improvement from 80 years ago happened even in third World countries run by warlord (financed by the US)

So what?

Can we not have another 80 years of US hegemony and compare the results?

Is it asking too much?

It's how science works: the US hegemony experiment is done and the results are meh, we ended up with Trump, now let's try something else and let's try not to bet on the wrong horse this time, ok guys?

> you're off by a factor of a million in deaths.

Well, it that's true it means that wars started by US have only caused less than fifty deaths...

Given that the war in Afghanistan alone caused between 500.0000 and 800.000 deaths (depending on the source), the factor is more probably around 2 to 1

> Over 111,000 Afghans, including civilians, soldiers and militants, are estimated to have been killed in the conflict. The Cost of War project estimated that the number who have died through indirect causes related to the war may be as high as 360,000 additional people based on a ratio of indirect to direct deaths in contemporary conflicts. These numbers do not include those who have died in Pakistan

You’re questioning if it’s better to kill other families at scale than kill our own family members (thus far) in edge cases?

Nietzsche said, “in times of peace a warlike nation turns on itself”.

The US does not have military hegemony as it shares it with the Russia (both have enough nukes to wipe out each other and the rest of the world). China would probably come to this stage soon as well.

Being economic hegemon (again likely to be challenged by China) is obviously good for the US but the rest of the world might not share this view for the large part.

> Also, why is US hegemony a good thing? What good is it for the 96% of the world that is not the US?

To paraphrase Churchill: "The US hegemony is the worst hegemony for the world, except for all the other hegemonies."

The US retreating into isolationism would likely open up a vacuum eagerly filled in by less, well, liberal-minded states. The globalization you describe was pushed by the US-EU-(Japan/India/etc.) alliance, with the US's armed forced being the big stick in case someone would object. At least this is my current understanding.

That’s correct. This was the only way for the world to pay for WWII and for the US to stem the tide of communism and Stalin’s Russia. Now that the Cold War is over, the US middle class isn’t sure it wants to foot the bill for maintaining this system that no longer seems to provide it much benefit and, in fact, has seemed to harm it. I think the world will see a decent amount of chaos as the US pulls back from protecting global trade routes. Unless all of the other countries of the world want to agree to a global socialistic society, I think the US will likely focus on building back its manufacturing base, opening and maintaining markets for those goods to flow to, reducing the Medicare and Social Security overhead so that this isolationist system can actually survive, and then politics will be focused on traditional values vs progressive ideas. Of course the internet will make this conversation much messier than it used to be in the pre-WWII days.

I’m interested to see how the shifting demographics affect this conversation. The three biggest things that shaped history are demographics, geography, and information flow. Two of these three are going to be significantly different since the last time the US moved towards isolationism.

>"...with the US's armed forced being the big stick in case someone would object..."

Yup having big stick lets one tell the rest of the world to shut up and do what the're told to do. Nice example of democracy and mutual respect in action.

> Nice example of democracy and mutual respect in action.

Is that supposed to be a back-handed way of making a point? I don't understand what those things have to do with global stability.

Someone will be the de facto world police by force, now that the technology to utilize energy is so efficient. This situation has nothing to do with some sort of (USA-centered) Politically Correct philosophy. This situation is the eventuality of our time.

>"...Someone will be the de facto world police by force..."

>"...This situation is the eventuality of our time."

This it what you say. I disagree.

The laws of the world are enforced through violence. It's the ultimate power when it comes down to it, so yes, if you want maintain peace then you must also have the capacity to engage the most violence.

This is how peace is kept, regardless of how you feel about it. More importantly, power fills a vacuum, and the choices in the absence of the USA are not exactly better for the world.

>"The laws of the world are enforced through violence. It's the ultimate power when it comes down to it"

And the sky is blue. Everyone including my cat knows it. Of course one with the biggest club gets to write the laws and to ignore those when it suits. Just stop pretending to be a knight in a shining armor. And being not as shitty as some others is not a reason to claim high moral ground.

I believe America is the best country in the world with the strongest ideals. American is not only not as bad as others, it's also better.

You're free to believe something else of course, but then again most people have no perspective or experience of the suffering and violence in the world while they throw out these casual statements about how terrible America is.

America has many things I admire. And yes it is better than many countries. And some countries are better than the US. The US had also done a lot of awful things to other countries and killed/maimed/made destitute/etc way too many people. I do not see what is so casual about this.

And given the rival hegemony is the Chinese I think I prefer the US one. The CCP is not so hot on the democracy and human rights stuff.

> Also, why is US hegemony a good thing?

> Globalization has lifted billions from poverty.

There, I reordered things for you to answer your own question. :)

That's what bothers me with the world at the moment, we have powerful states fighting for their hegemony (sometimes with nuclear weapons), not thinking at all about the earth as a unified place full with people and not citizen of whatever country.

> "Also, why is US hegemony a good thing?"

If you review history, large wars broke out between the major powers vying for dominance on a regular basis in the 19th and early 20th century, culminating in the First and Second World Wars. For all the negatives of what the US has done with its military since then, they're not a hundredth as bad as what went on before by any objective measure.

The Pax Americana has been good for stability and with stability comes prosperity. If the United States truly gave up its hegemony and turned isolationist, you'd see a resurgence of rearmament and jockeying for power among nations, inevitably followed by a new era of war after war.

What Pax Americana? The US has been in multiple wars every single year[1] since the end of World War II.

Not to mention the Cold War, which only stayed cold because of the nukes holding both sides back.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wars_involving_the_Uni...

Rome was involved in multiple periphery wars during the "Pax Romana" as well. Instead, the historical term refers to internal peace within the empire.

Pax Americana usually means the same thing, though the borders of the empire are a little less clear.

Complete BS. The US has unilaterally kneecapped the U.N. and every other international organization capable of facilitating a fair world order. We don’t need the US to build a fair world order, contrary to the neocon ‘Pax Americana’ crap. Honestly I was surprised to see that phrase in a hacker news comment.

I'm a European lefty, and I always hated the American imperialism. I was kinda happy about Trump talking about pulling out of all the foreign wars.

Then I thought about it a bit more, and realised (and the last four years have shown) that if America withdraw, the Russians and the Chinese will move right in, and while I'm not a major fan of American imperialism, I'm even less of a fan of the Russian or Chinese flavours.

And the US built the UN and all the other multilateral organisations post WW2, so yeah they work for the US, but they're also pretty good for everyone else.

The UN only "works" because everybody understands that either you do what the US wants or you have a problem. Now? As terrible as the US is, I don't see how a country like China having the space to expand its influence is a good thing, considering the CCP's values compared to the West's values.

> For all the negatives of what the US has done with its military since then, they're not a hundredth as bad as what went on before by any objective measure.

I owe that to hundreds of years of human progression and development, not to the US.

> Also, why is US hegemony a good thing?

You yourself just wrote a the answer: it prevents wars.

The US does not prevent wars. It is a cause of most of the wars in modern times. It has done something like 100 military invasions. Toppled countless democratically elected leaders and undermined democracies.

US hegemony is to set be the US, not to serve the world.

Yes, that's the argument, in a hegemony (usa or otherwise), wars basically only happen when the hegemon wants them to, and the hegemon has so much soft power its rare that they want them to, and when it does happen its small scale.

The end result is ordinary people get caught up in less wars because politically war is much more rarely the right answer (either you're too politically weak to start one, or if you are the hegemon you just give people the evil eye and they usually shutup)

That doesn't make it a utopia, just a world with less war dead.

Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq might disagree. It did prevent, possibly, wars in Europe.

Vietnam was the US standing to a foreign power trying to take over. It is not a war on the nation, but a war on an aggressive faction. Same for Korea really.

The Vietnamese fought for freedom from colonialism. The got that from the French, almost, until the US intervened. The only aggressive factions were the French and the US.

Korea was different, and also backed by the UN. But even there things aren't as clear cut as you imply. North Korea had yet to turn into the Kim-led hard core Stalinist regime.

Saying the Vietnamese fought for "freedom from colonialism" implies that this was a war waged by the US on the entire country.

It was, wasn't it? Even every neighboring country if memory serves well. With a total disregard for civilians.

Is there a reason you ommitted the working class from your comment? I find it odd you're addressing everything the parent said except for how globalization affects the working class.

Globalization transfer middle class jobs/wealth out of America allowing the upper class to gain a larger share of the profit, relying on the state to support the growing lower class but without a large middle class tax base.

Don’t you see the problem here?

Well said

Historically the amount of people in "middle class" was very low.

Globalisation allowed it to grow, but i don't think isolation fixes any problem if every country starts doing that.

No particular fan of the current administration here, nor do I disagree with you much.

But you have to understand, the shift of manufacturing from the US has just devastated the economies of entire regions. You have children fleeing where their families have lived for generations. I'm convinced a factor in opiates getting a toehold in these areas was due to people going on disability to try to stay economically afloat, and getting prescribed painkillers as cover for faked injuries or in recovery for real but unneccessary surgeries (I have no proof, just anecdata).

US hegemony was good for them. It helped payed their mortgages and their kids' tuitions. It's easy to magnanimous when you aren't the one losing your house or kids aren't ODing from fentanyl. And the resentment is real when you see new grads at Google or Facebook making 10 times what you make, or CEOs making 1000 times what you make.

edit: the president did little, if anything to help their situation and channeled that resentment for his own benefit. It is a matter of national security that we all fix this and I hope the new administration will prioritize it.

> I'm convinced a factor in opiates getting a toehold in these areas was due to people going on disability to try to stay economically afloat, and getting prescribed painkillers as cover for faked injuries or in recovery for real but unneccessary surgeries (I have no proof, just anecdata).

IME it's less about disability fraud and more about treatment of the physical injuries sustained from blue-collar work. Those faking it are the ones with enough foresight to sell their pills to others.

But you are otherwise right from what I've seen; the opiates are addictive, the demands of the job do not lessen (they only increase) and the rest writes itself.

Of course you are right. It can be hard work and takes a toll on the body. I know this directly. I didn't mean to imply it was all fraud, and apologize if it came off that way.

The people in those regions you mentioned are largely conservative. By that measure, isn't their issue with the Free-Market system which they prostrate themselves at the altar of? Conservatives also cite laws as being something that should be left up to the states. And they say that marginalized groups should simply move if they don't like the laws of the state they are in. So isn't the system working as they desired since people are leaving places they don't find suitable?

The free market only works within nations where the mobility of labor is on par with the mobility of capital.

It never is and never has been. But that doesn't stop people from invoking it in modern society repeatedly. And I would argue that people leaving these economically dead zones IS representative of labor meeting capital in terms of mobility.

The Rust Belt didn’t need to be an economic zone, politicians made it that way.

They were union and democrat, and when the jobs left, they looked for someone to blame. I think most people can agree it's a complicated situation. But a lot of them really, really hate NAFTA and there's a reason for the post-Clinton shifts in the midwest. At this point, you have people stewing in partisan radio or tv all day. It takes a very strong person to resist that influence. Most of us wouldn't.

Almost everyone just wants to be safe, happy, economically secure, and the same for their kids. That transcends nationality, religion, or party. I think trying to frame it around economic policy reversed the way the mindset was bootstrapped.

The function of both parties is to convince their constituents to believe in policies against their own interests.

As someone not steeped in it, I think the charitable interpretation is that these people like working a job for the dignity of supporting themselves. The jobs went away, but the desire for that dignity hasn't. So social welfare policies remain uninteresting. In fact any top-down analysis sets off their "government handout" detectors, so they're left pining for the age before the need for labor dried up.

IMO a lot could have been done (and perhaps could still be) by decreasing the definition of full time work. With technological progress, offshoring, and women entering the workforce, full time employment should be around 10-15 hours per week. It's a radical departure from the status quo, but that's due to progress being held back so long. Instead we're stuck between a rock and a hard place with an economy tuned to force people into working 40+ hours a week, but little actual work to do.

(BTW the work in cities is more about communication, so the same trend manifests itself as the creation of non-producing bullshit jobs. There is less financial pain, but similar existential pain)

> the president did little, if anything to help their situation and channeled that resentment for his own benefit.

False claim

Provide a counterpoint.

Trade war with China.

I think the result of the trade war is not that great. Trade deficit with China actually went up.

Trade deficit increased > 50%... Bad execution as usual.

I think Obama's strategy of a trading block with Asia was much smarter/efficient.

> Also, why is US hegemony a good thing? What good is it for the 96% of the world that is not the US? Does it even benefit anyone outside the US ruling class.

I’m from Bangladesh. The US backed world order has been amazing for the country. The World Bank and IMF have helped countries like Bangladesh modernize their economies, and they’re US-led institutions.

As the US pulls out, China displaces it. In Bangladesh, Chinese investment is flowing in, along with middle eastern culture. Neither of those things are good in my opinion.

I don’t think the US needs to continue footing the bill alone. But the other western powers don’t seem interested in helping. When I think about what I want the future of Bangladesh to look like in 50 years, I want it to be basically like the US or Canada, only with different food and religious holidays and movies and literature. And that seemed like the future in the 1990s, but it’s getting cloudy today.

This. US isolationism along with its "take my $ and going home" attitude to global institutions in order to court "one world government" conspiracists has created myriad political vacuums such as this. It would be nice if we weren't dealing with a poorly-handled pandemic and consequential economic crisis that will take all our attention for the next 3 years. But I'm optimistic that we will develop an outward-thinking foreign policy before the end of this presidency.

The important question is when does it end, the economists that promoted globalization have come forward and admitted that it hurt the US more than planned.

Does it only end when the US population is in the state that the poor Chinese, et al. farmers were in before we accepted this globalism?

At some point we have to stop and say, "OK, we gave you a leg up now let's spend a few decades and rebuild our own country". This is not what is proposed by Democrat politicians, they propose we continue to transfer wealth (in many forms) to other countries and fill the income gap that is produced with social welfare programs.

>Also, why is US hegemony a good thing?

Maybe if you live in US you can afford to not care, but I live in a weak, poor, corrupted country. For us it's either US, Russia (now) or China (in the long run) and I prefer US after all.

I second that US policy in American continent has been very infective that still hundreds of thousands migrate to US because their countries hasnt been developed. Let's take aside Civil war in Guatemala, Salvador and Nicaragua. Migrants flood because their local governments can't produce jobs not guarantee basic safety. US trains armies and send equipment through the PPP plan which got not results. Trump idea was to stop migration and the delegation of responsability back which results in basic jobs available for americans, force those countries to develop and at the end you can help them with investment in infrastructure with private money no government tax payer money.

US hegemony is also called Pax Americana. A global peace that has lasted for an average lifetime now.

Would you prefer China or Russia instead?

I'm not sure those are new ideas, people have wanted to get out of the middle east since even the bush era, and china has been increasing its sphere of influence and on the road to be second super power for a while now. Similarly whether or not globalization is good for the working class or just makes the rich get richer has been publicly debated the entire time i have been alive.

I think the main difference is that trump decided to take tactical action on these positions without regards for the strategic long term consequences, which other presidents have been unwilling to do (except the globalisation point, i think most previous really liked globalisation and werent just worried about the consequences)

A dimension we under-appreciate is how much fail we’ve been tolerating for decades.

The quest to keep NK from going nuclear started decades ago and spanned administrations from both parties, and finally failed miserably and objectively before Trump got into office. This, despite all best efforts from the best minds. The status quo was hardly a defensible glide path.

Similarly, we’ve been after real change in the Mideast for decades across multiple admins from both parties. We’ve never had movement. I’m not saying that the Abraham Accords fix everything, but getting four nations to finally recognize the right of Israel to exist and engage in trade and cultural exchange is certainly visible change. Energy independence also helps lessen our conflict of interest there. That’s visible change that was seemingly unobtainium for decades. Circumstance and technology have their role in this, but there are also specific policy and regulatory frameworks that will make or break this new path over coming years.

China.. I think there’s consensus that Kissinger’s laissez faire approach to opening China has not produced the intended outcome. Basically we’ve taken a totalitarian and repressive state and made them a rich totalitarian and repressive state.

So point being that the status quo - the unmovable track our foreign policy was on for decades regardless of president - was due for a shake up. It will be interesting to see what Biden does - revert to old paths, or take advantage of the new paths?

> Similarly, we’ve been after real change in the Mideast for decades across multiple admins from both parties. We’ve never had movement.

Have to go back a little further than that, the romans also wanted change in the middle east and didn't have much luck.

> Basically we’ve taken a totalitarian and repressive state and made them a rich totalitarian and repressive state.

I'd say under trump we have taken a rich toltalitarian and reppressive state and turned them into a rich toltalitarian/reppressive state with new friends in high places.

Just because something is a change does not make it a change for the better. Maybe the previous policy was trying to hold back the tide and failing. Opening the floodgates is a change, but i'm not sure its a good change, even if holding back the tide was a failure on slow motion.

Are you saying any of the above policy shifts (NK, CN, Mideast) have opened the floodgates on something bad relative to the preceding policies? Or is this just a theoretical point? At worst they’ve done nothing (NK). I can cite several overdue improvements in Mideast and China policy though.

By “we” I mean the United States, and by real change by last several admins, I’m of course referring to attempts to break the stalemate between Israel and the other ME nations after the wars (six years, etc), not world wars. Necessarily time-bound. Not sure what Romans have to do with this unless you’re making a point about futility? The Romans certainly impacted the near East for hundreds of years, right?

The end of US egemony could be good for the middle class outside of the US, especially South America and the Middle East.

Not saying it will, but that during the unrivaled US egemony after the end of the cold war things have been worse for the middle/poor segment of society, especially in the west.

Could be a coincidence, could be bad luck, could be a correlation.

True, it's important to remember that every president for the last couple decades except Trump has involved us in some new armed conflict, mostly with poor results for the country. I hope that Biden will continue on this front where Trump left off.

I hope it is true but doesn’t seem likely. Biden did support war with Iraq, and seems cut from the same cloth as Obama / Clinton / etc.

Doesn't mean much to me. We, the public (including people like Biden, and allies of USA) were deceived by the Bush government and its lackeys (Cheney, Rumsfeld, etc) concerning WMDs in Iraq. That not only deceived the American public; the deception included Congress as well. My government (The Netherlands) got lied to as well about WMDs. We ended up with our right-wing government supporting the war in Iraq politically, but not military. I remember protesting against this war, on the streets in Amsterdam. Something I hardly ever did in my life, btw.

For reference, see the movie Vice (2018) which is basically a third party account on Dick Cheney's biography. Scooter Libby, who got sentenced due to Plamegate due to leaking Plame's name while she was an active CIA asset on foreign ground (a retaliation move), as well. He got his sentence commuted by Bush and got fully pardoned by Trump. Why? I don't believe there's a valid justification. Nepotism 101.

Btw, while Obama did a fair amount of drone strikes, was vigilant on leaks, and probably knew all about NSA's ops before Snowden leaked, he did inherit a mess from Bush. After Obama, Trump did an ample amount of drone strikes (tho we need to put both into context as drone strikes are a new technology), and while Trump did not start a war in the traditional sense he escalated enough foreign relations including NATO and other treaties like WTO, Middle East (ISIS being partly a mess USA made with Iraq invasion), China (trade conflict), Iran (killing of Suleimani). Trump was a nationalist, and an egocentric one at that, who did not follow conventional scientific consensus on e.g. climate change. I'm all for freedom and opinion, but denying an important truth which is going to affect all of humanity if we don't act Soon (tm), is dangerous. Especially for people like me who live under the sea level (Amsterdam, The Netherlands). I'm so utterly relieved that Trump is gone. Senate isn't decided yet AFAIK, but I am not anti Republican by definition, and I believe dialogue is the way forward. Dialogue based on rationalization, facts, and science though; ie. not lies, denial, deception.

Trump was rhetorically against climate change but in large part simply because he prefers to use simple words that resonate with the majority. But the policies were primarily aimed at helping the working class - stopping job drain from coal areas (doesn’t actually work, because of economics), preventing fuel price rises (not actually that popular, they tried that in France as well but got massive working class protests) and national security (promoting US and EU energy self-sufficiency means we need to rely less on unstable undemocratic regimes in the Middle East and Russia)

Tax cuts for the ultra rich (who really don't need more money to get about, as they only have gotten more rich while middle class gets marginalized [1] [2]) don't help the working class. Worker's rights, unionization, higher minimum wage, legalization to help hard working in gig economy -- these directly help a working class in a divide and conquer society as it is.

Dividing was his creed. Trump had a lot of hot air about helping Joe Sixpack, ie. rhetoric and short-term gains. On the long-term, climate change affects us all. Including the working class. We've seen some appetizers in the form of drought and massive fires. Reaction? Denial, cause he can't figure a way to profit from it.

There's ways to profit from climate change. Its a lack of willpower and lack of inventive thinking to not opt for it, and unfortunately the world can't afford to ignore it any longer.

[1] https://www.pewresearch.org/global/2017/04/24/middle-class-f...

[2] https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/

And not just by accident. This has always been Trumps policy and election promise.

I'm looking forward to Trump's caustic personality leaving the equation so we can finally talk about these things in a more neutral way. A lot of people, myself included, cannot look past Trump's obvious flaws despite some of his ideas(at least the overall direction, maybe not the execution) being worth considering.

You think this will happen? The political right have openly embraced demagoguery, authoritarianism, disinformation, and a scorched-earth, because-we-can style of politics. The media have embraced the outrage-factory model for improving as revenues. The electorate have committed to becoming single issue voters. And finally, who benefits the most from this quagmire? The corporate elite who fear the threat of government intervention in free markets.

Many of your goals could be accomplished by transitioning to a carbon-negative (positive?) economy that captures more carbon than it emits.

Energy independence helps us avoid relying on chinese solar panels and middle eastern oil.

Building carbon capture infrastructure in the US means the jobs would be here. Delaying means eventually pumping unprecedented amounts of money into whatever other country gets there first (probably China).

> Focus on China as an existential threat to US hegemony.

Phrasing it that way is unfair. Trump held China accountable for its mercantilist trade practices.

>Globalization has not been good for the working and middle class.

This seems overly simplistic. Globalization has led to a drop in the cost of many goods as well as multiple new markets for US industries.

I think there's a reasonable argument to be made that the spoils of globalization have not been shared as fairly as they should of, but imo that's way more linked to other policies (like tax rates & spending)

Except number of troops in the middle east is the same. Just moved from Iraq and Afghanistan to Saudi Arabia.

> Just freaking get out of the Middle East already.

I think this is the biggest place where he said one thing, then immediately did another. We are involved in the Middle East as we ever were, and much much more so with more disastrous effects in places like Yemen. The US' involvement in Yemen should be enough to laugh Trump offstage any time he talks about "getting out of the middle east".

Please please please don't let him off the hook for this by saying he had "good ideas" here when he was talking out of one side of his mouth while civilian families are being slaughtered.

You could also point out that he has abandoned the kurds in Syria (Rojava), where they are losing ground against the turkish army and their jihadist mercenaries. They are about to ethnically cleanse the region, with dramatic consequences for the autonomous zone that has developed a seemingly fair democracy.

The military branch of the PYD party was crucial during the fight against ISIS. Leaving them to die in Erdogan's hands is tragic.

“As we ever were” - I’m not sure what you mean by that. We’ve been involved in the Middle East substantially since oil exploration there started showing results.

Energy independence from the ME is a reliable quality by which the US (and others) will care less about the region. But this also means leaving the regional developed powers to manage the area with greater and greater autonomy (e.g. Israel and SA).

To that end, we are arguably less “involved” today. Our dependence on that oil and our direct action involvement there are directly related.

By the numbers, we are less involved than in, say, 2005 if the US body count is the metric. If civilian deaths are the metric, Iraq’s numbers have fallen off a cliff since 2017 [0]. I would guess the same for Syria but don’t have data at hand.

It’s tough to want it both ways - asking the US to intervene for peace but not spill any blood. If the ME tells us anything, it’s that peace does not come from doing nothing - it is not the region’s default state given the cultural animosities. Stability seems the best chance for civilian peace there. The US is increasingly delegating or abdicating that role to the most friendly options available.

How would you prefer that the trajectory change? More direct “peacekeeping” involvement? Total abandonment while watching a regional death match play out?

[0] https://www.statista.com/statistics/269729/documented-civili...

Open borders to all refugees (and literally everyone else)and make is as easy as possible for those under repressive regimes to leave. Other than that, continue to trade with the country for basically everything except weapons or anything that could be used to make weapons.

This is also how I feel about China and Hong Kong, NK, how I would have felt under WW2/Germany, and how I would feel basically every other foreign policy incident.

Open our borders or borders of other ME countries?

If you mean our borders, you know that’s untenable, and so not a serious conversation.

> Focus on China as an existential threat to US hegemony

This was already being done. That was the whole point of the end of the Obama admins shift to Asia strategy.

> Just freaking get out of the Middle East already.

Troop levels are the same today as they were in 2020. And I also don't think this is a novel idea, everyone wants out, but you have to do it in a way that doesn't leave us in a worst situation than just staying, and that is ridiculously hard. Nature abhors a vacuum.

> Globalization has not been good for the working and middle class.

This is a mixed bag. Look around and tell me that the general middle class American is worst off than they were in any other decade of modern America. We live safer, cleaner lives. What we don't feel is security, which is a consequence of 40 years of treating the government as an entity that is the problem, and not an entity that can be the solution.

Look around and tell me that the general middle class American is worst off than they were in any other decade of modern America.

https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/

Thanks for the link. I guess I was born in a time (early 80s) where populism was on an all time low. However, the Cold War did exist, and that caused FUD as well (though that term partly unfairly de-legitimizes the realistic fear). So populism, it has been on the rise ever since I became an adult. I wasn't around yet, but what I believe happened was Reagan. War on Drugs. Reaction to the counter-culture, by marginalizing these minorities. If you remember Adam Curtis' series The Power Of Nightmares, already a new threat was on the verge when the Cold War was over. And that threat was exploited on for greed and profit, at the expense of the common men and common women (the soldiers).

> Look around and tell me that the general middle class American is worst off than they were in any other decade of modern America

Funny, my whole generation has basically given up on basics like owning a house completely. But we got cool tech gadgets so it all evens out?

That isn't a consequence of globalization. I don't want to downplay the seriousness of this, because I agree that is a problem, but not one caused by globalization, but rather NIMBYism. And this goes into my point about security and government.

Even more so, by Federal Reserve ongoing policy of extremely low interest rates. If the long bond yielded 5% you'd see MUCH lower real estate appreciation, and if it got there quickly, prices would certainly drop significantly.

With that said, there are plenty of affordable places to move to, they just aren't super sexy and cool. But even San Francisco and Brooklyn were completely uncool not that long ago.

Some would say that outsourcing labor overseas has contributed to this.

>This was already being done. That was the whole point of the end of the Obama admins shift to Asia strategy.

Exactly. You can do this the smart way, by gathering partners and encircling China with something like the TPP, or you can do it the dumb way, by picking stupid playground fights.

One is effective and the other is just for show.

> Look around and tell me that the general middle class American is worst off than they were in any other decade of modern America

They're not even close to being as well off as they were up until the ~80's - 90's.

Also space policy. Trump-Pence space policy has been tremendously successful.

Wasn't the previous admin already focused on China / the Pacific region already? I do have to agree on the last point, so. And I say that as a globalist, free trade proponent and a supply chain guy. So in a sense, globalization is my job. And while a lot of people, also in developing countries, have profited from globalization, we all have to find ways to adopt the way we do things to get of the less than good parts.

I do think that a lot of people had these things on their agenda already. We didn't need Trump to come to these conclusions. Because he might have gotten the issues right, but didn't really understand them nor did he care about solutions.

Also, he didn't get out of the Middle East, he just picked a side. Not sure what that means for the region.

Not a fan of the current (soon to be previous) admin, but I have to acknowledge that a direct approach on China has been more effective than the last 3 decades of Asian pivots ( Bill Clinton tried focusing on China as well ).

American politics has brief focus windows, direct action has more impact than vague "pivots" or "focuses" which last about as long as the next crisis.

Short term, sure. But as we saw, US admins and foreign policy changes fast enough, max after 8 years. Being they only super power carries the responsibility to keep things stable. That means consistency, direct action of one single admin can very well the opposite of that. Especially when the other party plays the long game.

I would be inclined to agree, if Trump had any strategy behind that. His policies, or rather lack thereof, don't support that. I'd say he just stumbled around and got lucky once. And even that has to be seen.

The US hegemony exists because we have projected military force across the world, and our companies are the primary driver of globalization. Leaving the Middle East would end any dream of bringing those regions under the western umbrella (as has been successfully done in S. Korea and Japan). Ending globalization would end the thing that has made US corporations uniquely successful, and which makes US economic sanctions so strong.

And focusing on China as the new red scare would (is already?) simply result in a new Cold War, to nobody's benefit.

I personally don't think the US has any business being hegemon (feel free to check my post history), but if your primary interest is maintaining the position of the US from ~1992-2016, then your best bet is to maintain the foreign and economic policy of those times, which is basically what Biden is promising to do.

It appears that we will go from "chaotic and ineffectual" to just ineffectual. Assuming that Republicans maintain control of the Senate, he can suggest all the leftist ideas he wants, but nothing will get done.

What concerns me is that just as Trump's election encouraged the proliferation of racism, Biden's election will encourage the proliferation of cancel/woke culture, which will lead to even more division than we have under Trump.

I agree that Trump is right that something more needed to be done with China. But like most of what he did, his execution was terrible. His need to take credit and inability to work with anyone wouldn’t let him get out of his own way. Hopefully Biden takes the idea and works with legislation and our allies to put more pressure on China.

Globalization and isolation have two sides, neither of which is all pro or con.

The much maligned TPP was aimed right at China. It was big business friendly, but it also encouraged the other large economies in the Pacific to align themselves with the US instead of China.

> He was chaotic and ineffectual and mostly focused on dumb peeves. But I do think he got some good ideas through the conventional “wisdom”. His execution on everything was poor.

Ineffectual? I’d argue he’s one of the most consequential Presidents of the past 100 years.

He reshaped the federal bench, confirmed a 6-3 majority on the SCOTUS, overhauled the tax code, negotiated multiple Middle East peace deals, repealed and replaced NAFTA, and didn’t start a single foreign war.

His impact on the US political system will be felt for generations. Compare that to 8 years of Obama that can’t point to any meaningful accomplishment.

Globalization is demonized but it's a natural consequence of technology. It's easier than ever to work with production facilities around the world. We can't stop businesses from exploring more efficient production. But we can and should level the playing field. One contributor to the difference in wages for manufacturing employees is the lack of regulations and protections for workers in countries like China. Treaties that support trade are one way to level the playing field. TPP had a bunch of bad stuff in it too, so perhaps not a net win.

Actually, focusing on attacking china is a big mistake of this admin. It accelerates the decline of US hegemony as we know it. The best strategy for US is to maintain the current world order with China. Only the weaker countries "behind" US/China, e.g. India/Japan/Vietnam/Taiwan, would want the two countries to fight it out so they can benefit. And there are people in the US who believe a trade and technology war with china is easy to win, which are proven wrong.

That is a great analogy. I hope lawmakers patch all those holes, because you are right.

Good man must stress test the system. Thats goodwill.

I worry that the people in charge of fixing the systems are also the ones that benefit most from it being broken. At least with the Chaos Monkey, no one is on the monkey's side.

I would disagree on this point. I believe the constitution and judiciary have been very effective against Trump's attempts to go around Congress. Lots of people are criticising the USA's political system but remember it is the UNITED STATES. The federal system of government and the electoral college system are by built-in features. The senate system of 2 senators per state and the electoral college are fantastic features to provide additional stability across a vast and diverse geography.

As a non american, the way people describe american judges by their partisan leanings seems really messsed up to me. I would describe that as not how a judicary should work.

Read up on Italian courts and prosecutors for some perspective.

I'm not particularly familar with italy's judiciary and nothing popped out in a quick skim of the wikipedia article, but if you're saying that there are countries that are worse, i don't doubt it. Being not the worst is not the same as being good or being ok.

Italian here.

Could you explain what you actually mean?

Our justice system is a sovereign power and doesn't depend on executive power, but is completely independent from it.

Only the partisans describe judges likes that. Judges do have leanings, but it's mostly about jurisprudence, like more originalism, or believing the interpretation should consider the intent of the legislator, or lean towards where society in general is leaning.

These are unavoidable aspects of being a supreme court judge, since you are also deciding what the law means and entails.

There was literally a media freak out over the apointment of Amy Barrett because people thought trump was stacking the court in his favour. I don't know how true that is, but its clear that a significant portion of americans believe it (belief that the court is political is damaging in itself even if it wasn't true).

If court picks weren't political, political parties wouldn't fight to their last breath for them.

Most judges actually are non-partisan-decide-based-on-law type. But they simply are not favoured.

Consider that sanders made it a litmus test for his supreme court nominees to overrule an unpopular court decision. Most judges would avoid at a politician demanding this, as it defeats the purpose of a judiciary.

People describe the judges that way, but in reality at least ones at the Supreme Court level tend to be apolitical.

They may have very strong views on what framework a judge should use to interpret the law, but they usually will not push their own political agenda.

If that were true, there would not be such huge political fights over judges. As it stands, conservative judges tend to vote one way, liberal judges tend to vote another.

That is not the impression my reading about various cases has left me with.

I can't point you to specific cases - I can only say that what has really stood out to me is that the justices do mostly seem to have well-defined interpretive frameworks, and that they work from those.

I can think of an exception, but my experience has generally been that it's the case.

Except he appointed a bunch of justices up and down the spectrum and will have influenced this for many years to come..

I think Trump's picks for justices are no different than what some generic Republican President would have picked. In choosing justices, he basically just followed the advice of the conservative legal establishment (Federalist Society, etc). His choices were judicial conservatives, but generic judicial conservatives not Trumpists.

It was pretty shortsighted when Democrats removed the filibuster from judicial confirmations in 2014 to try and ram through judges in Obama’s final years.

> Democrats removed the filibuster

Remember that Mitch McConnell, once he had the majority, stopped processing federal judge nominees from Obama for two years.

* https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/article/how-mcconnell-and...

* https://www.politico.com/story/2016/07/mitch-mcconnell-judge...

This also assume that McConnell wouldn't have just done the same. Remember that this is the same fellow that said both "no appointments in an election year" to "we're appointing with less that 30 days until the election".

McConnell is a political nihilist:

> It was already becoming clear that, in the political world of Mitch McConnell, convictions and campaign pledges were fungible things, easily tossed aside. Throughout his career, as the Republican Party veered right, and then further right, McConnell moved with it. “It’s always been about power, the political game, and it’s never been about the core values that drive political life,” John Yarmuth, Kentucky’s lone Democratic congressman, told Alec MacGillis, author of the 2014 McConnell biography The Cynic. “There has never been anything that interested him other than winning elections.”

* https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/mitc...

> “Trump is about winning the day, or even the hour. McConnell plays the long game. He’s sensitive to the political realities. His North Star is continuing as Majority Leader—it’s really the only thing for him. He’s patient, sly, and will obfuscate to make less apparent the ways he’s moving toward a goal.” The two men also have different political orientations: “Trump is a populist—he’s not just anti-élitist, he’s anti-institutionalist.” As for McConnell, “no one with a straight face would ever call him a populist—Trump came to drain the swamp, and now he’s working with the biggest swamp creature of them all.”

* https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/04/20/how-mitch-mcco...

Remember McConnell (and the GOP) were also all about austerity during Obama's terms (when economy could have used economic stimulus). Then, when Trump got in, it was all about tax cuts which caused all sorts of deficit/debt issues—when the economy did not need any help (2017).

The senate system of 2 senators per state and the electoral college are fantastic features to provide additional stability across a vast and diverse geography.

And yet, the United States does not preach this model when helping to propagate democracy abroad. Tellingly, they don't include:

- first past the post elections,

- bicameral legislative branches, or

- electoral colleges.

We're operating on a model that our own State Department discourages other countries from adopting.

> We're operating on a model that our own State Department discourages other countries from adopting.

Do you have a source for that?

Especially the point about bicameralism? I think in a federal system, having something like the US or Australian Senate's is useful in it prevents the smaller states from being dominated by the bigger ones. Leaving smaller states feeling politically powerless can encourage separatist/independence movements and threaten the long-term viability of the country.

Sure do. Amanda Taub, for the NYT.

https://messaging-custom-newsletters.nytimes.com/template/oa...

Edit: here's a reprint in case that first link (from an NYT email newsletter) doesn't work:

http://www.barcelonaradical.net/info/12380/the-democracy-ref...

Leaving smaller states feeling politically powerless can encourage separatist/independence movements and threaten the long-term viability of the country.

Do you have a source for that? Proportional representation does seem to solve for it. See also: far right parties gaining seats in Germany.

Their views get heard (if not enacted), no one secedes, and the system remains stable.

There is no incompatibility between having proportional representation and having bicameralism. Federally, Australia has preferential voting (instant-runoff voting) in the House of Representatives and single transferrable vote is used to elect 12 senators for each state (only 6 in a normal election, the full 12 only get re-elected in a special "double dissolution" election, which the government is allowed to order to break a deadlock between the two houses). You mention Germany, which is a bicameral system as well (the Bundesrat).

For the benefits of federal bicameralism, consider the UK – England has almost 85% of the population, and so in a purely one-person-one-vote system will always outvote the other three constituent countries. The UK does have bicameralism, but non-federal – the House of Lords does not directly represent the constituent countries, and does not provide a mechanism to block an English majority – the majority of the House of Lords is English too. And I think this is one of the major factors driving the Scottish independence movement. If the UK had a system more like Australia – with an upper house providing equal representation to each part of the country, regardless of population, and with constitutional referendums requiring a double majority to pass (both a majority of the national population, and also a majority of the population in a majority of the states) – then I don't think the Scottish independence movement would have anywhere near as much steam as it has.

I do hope that the experience of this election will build bipartisan support to nationalize federal elections. Personally, I'd love to see an end to the electoral college, but I can't see Republicans supporting that loss of leverage since their last two non-incumbent wins have lost the popular vote.

I think it would be a very bad idea to nationalize federal elections. Right now, each state chooses how they run their elections. Some states (like Maine) have chosen to use ranked choice voting while others use first past the post.

Nationalizing elections would basically cement first past the post as our permanent voting system forever since it's extremely unlikely you could convince everyone in the U.S. to change to a new one at once.

> The senate system of 2 senators per state and the electoral college are fantastic features to provide additional stability across a vast and diverse geography.

It's interesting that you see it that way. From my perspective, it's something that was originally designed with fairly good intentions, that is now being abused by the minority to impose their will upon everyone.

Let's not forget that Democrats have won the popular vote in all but one presidential election this century. And that the Senate's structure has allowed the party representing a minority of Americans to reshape the federal judiciary for years to come. (And unless a rabbit gets pulled out of a hat somewhere, they'll still have outsized control over judicial confirmations for at least the next 2 years.)

I'm all for preventing the tyranny of the majority, but these features of US government haven't resulted in moderation, they've resulted in tyranny of the minority.

It wasn't even that well-intentioned. It was a necessary concession to Southern slaveholders. It's always been anti-majoritarian.

There's also an hypothesis/theory that the Second Amendment was similar in origins:

* https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/09/the-ori...

* https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/24/opinion/second-amendment-...

Slavery wasn’t the only issue that mattered at the founding of the US, and this type of framing is the is revisionism found in things like the NYT’s 1619 project. The EC was well intentioned as a mechanism for federalism and forming a coalition of states that could retain their own self determination (and continue to do so today) while also being part of the union. It spans all issues and policies. And frankly it makes a lot of sense. Otherwise you will have lots of disenfranchised places and cultures and the union would fall apart.

No, of course it wasn't, but I also didn't say that. You're reading revisionism into a statement that is very nearly too short to contain any.

You're also misreading it: my comment was about the Senate, not the electoral college. And I left out the part about how the Senate was explicitly anti-democratic, not just anti-majoritarian, in that it was originally elected by legislators and not the people.

Weren’t the main concessions made to Southern slaveholders items like the 3/5 compromise? The senate’s distribution on the other hand would benefit states like Rhode Island, New Jersey, etc...

> "I'm all for preventing the tyranny of the majority, but these features of US government haven't resulted in moderation, they've resulted in tyranny of the minority."

The alternative is effectively disenfranchising rural areas. Remember that whole "no taxation without representation" thing a couple of centuries ago and how badly that turned out? Rural areas are where all the food, agricultural and mineral resources of the United States are produced, not to mention the source of the majority of its armed forces, so trying to disenfranchise them isn't going to end well.

And the minority isn't small either: the last time I checked, even in archetypically left-leaning California, about 1/3 of the vote went to Trump; for the other two west coast states, the tally was closer to 40%.

The answer, of course, is to focus on uniting the nation, not division, even if it means not all the changes people want happen as quickly as they would prefer. "Politics is the art of the possible" after all.

Rural areas are not disenfranchised in the House though. If anything they're still over-represented because the House hasn't been allowed to scale with population.

I see the winner take all situation for electoral college votes as disenfranchising minority views.

Both for the urban areas in "red" states and the rural areas in "blue" states.

But they aren’t taxed without representation. In fact they are subsidized heavily. The very opposite.

Translation: all votes are equal, but rural votes are more equal than others.

Therefore it's "just" for a house, senate, and president representing a minority of Americans to raise taxes on urban Americans (70% of the economy), refuse to fund our infrastructure (HSR and the gateway project), and impose their religious beliefs on us.

These self serving arguments aren't convincing anyone. What urban America has actually heard over the last four years is that "when you have the voted, you do what you want," a lesson we have taken to heart.

I don’t think this is a tyrant of the minority but rather an appropriate averaging of influenced - it is federalism working healthily. Different places, with different people and cultures, need autonomy and self determination if they are willing to join a union of states. Otherwise why would they take part in the union and give up their ways of life and laws and cultures? The mechanisms for making the union palatable to all are found in how we apportion senators and in the electoral college. I think this IS moderation.

I don't see how anyone can argue for the electoral college as a feature in our modern times. Our Senate and the electoral college were designed in order to get support from colonies to form the new USA. It worked well for that purpose.

We have entirely different goals now. We should be aiming for fair elections in which one person's vote is equal to any other's regardless of the state they reside. The electoral college is downright repulsive once you realize how unfairly it treats citizens in more populated states compared to those in less populated states.

The electoral college now has the potential of pulling the union apart. If California and New York see a few more elections in which their citizens' votes are discounted, resulting in popular vote winners losing the presidency, then it would be logical for them to secede. They can take their massive economies and accompanying tax dollars and leave this system behind, as it should've been a long time ago.

The reality of the power balance the opposite of what you’re saying, in my opinion. Places like CA and NY have incredible influence and power even with the electoral college. The calls for one person’s vote being equal to others nationally is just a virtuous rhetorical argument to justify a power grab that would take power away from places which already have diminished influence.

The reality is that different locations have different ways of life and culture and politics, and therefore self determination must be supported through some mechanisms (like the electoral college) for a federal union to make sense and for those peoples to feel represented. If we are undoing that we need to also give states the option to secede and go their own way, since this union would simply mean the end of their way of life.

This talk of disenfranchising areas feels bizarre to me. Areas can’t be enfranchised or disenfranchised; only people can. And right now people in more populous areas are less enfranchised than people from rural areas. That has led to minority rule and should not rightly be allowed to stand.

The constitution declares that the president is elected by the states, not by the people directly. The electoral college serves to moderate the influence of dense population areas.

On a straight popular vote basis, the large urban centers in a handful of states would select the president. Their interests and motivations will necessarily be different from rural areas.

The electoral college gives populous states proportionally more influence, as they have more congressional representatives and thus more electoral votes. But it serves to balance that against the interests of less populated states, which are also part of the country and should not be considered completely irrelevant in the process.

Why stop at the electoral college then? The same logic can be applied to both houses.

Hell it's the same way in parliamentary systems.

This is a feature of any indirect vote.

Removing electoral college would remove all the interesting stuff about campaigning. Campaigns would focus on large urban areas and no one would set foot in sparsely populated areas.

I always feel that we are highly inclined to promote a voting system which would help the side we support.

> The senate system of 2 senators per state and the electoral college are fantastic features to provide additional stability across a vast and diverse geography.

What's interesting, and in defense of the electoral college, these three actually pick the winner in very different ways, making it harder for a single party to take control, and requiring some amount of compromise. If we just used popular vote for choosing the president, they're more likely to be the same party as the one controlling the House.

Other countries handle it just fine with popular votes.

E.g., South Korea has a presidential election every 5 years, congressional election every 4 years, and gubernatorial(?) election every 4 years (staggered in the middle between congressional elections). In this way, a government losing popular support quickly finds itself surrounded by elected officers from opposing parties.

What happens at the federal level when the two elections sync-up every 20 years?

Well last time it happened (2012) the conservative party won the congress in April 2012 and then went on to win the presidential election in December ... the elected person was Park Geun-Hye, widely considered the worst leader in decades, and was impeached among corruption scandal four years later.

Maybe that's an argument for staggering elections even more regularly, or maybe it's just one of those coincidences pundits love to talk about, I don't know. :)

I'm not sure at what scale this makes a difference, but South Korea has a population somewhat larger than California in a landmass a little bigger than Indiana. The US constitution obviously wasn't designed with 300M people and 50 states in-mind, but it's larger and more diverse than South Korea, so it probably needs to be governed differently. It's like how having states in Singapore would be silly, just at a different scale. I do think what system of elected government makes the most sense for a given country based on size, population density, population concentration, and other factors is actually an interesting question.

For example, in impeachment trials, you might expect partisanship to affect the final vote but for the trial itself to still be thorough, complete, etc. In practice, apparently this doesn't happen if the party is still basically loyal to the president.

I guess it's not surprising. If they already know how they're going to vote, it can only damage the president and the senators to expose any facts that go against that.

Maybe in a case where the president did something even more extreme, it wouldn't work this way. But the sequence appears to be that the president's party would first decide they want him out, then do the trial to make it happen, not the other way around.

All historic impeachment votes were (edit: almost entirely) along partisan lines: Clinton, Trump, and Johnson.

Nixon was potentially going to be bipartisan, which is why he resigned first — so we’ll never know for sure.

Trump's wasn't by partisan lines, Romney voted for it.

You are correct, but at 48/52 with his vote joining the democrats it’s as close to partisan as one can get without it being complete.

Not exactly true. In every trial in the senate, the guilty votes come exclusively from one side, but the not guilty votes are historically slightly more bipartisan. For both Clinton and Johnson, all the guilty votes came from republicans, while all senate democrats and a handful of republicans voted not guilty. Trump's impeachment trial was unique in that it was a straight party line vote. Nixon almost certainly would have been impeached (the Democrats had a large majority in the house), and a large number of republican senators were expected to vote guilty (which would have been unique). He may have been able to escape a conviction in the senate, but the evidence was pretty damning and the American public would have been furious. In some sense his resignation was the only way to salvage the Republican Party.

> votes were (edit: almost entirely) along partisan lines

As I said (I thought clearly), I'm not talking about the final vote. I'm talking about the trial stuff that happens before it.

For example, whether any witnesses are called. In Trump's impeachment trial they decided witnesses weren't necessary (https://www.npr.org/2020/01/31/801589634/sen-alexander-expla...).

Also, when Clinton was impeached, it was a Republican-majority Senate impeaching a Democratic president. So not really comparable to when it's the same party for both as with Trump. Of course they went through all the steps in the trial for Clinton because that Senate wanted to impeach (and probably wanted as much damaging evidence to come to light as possible).

I thought the same thing. Expose our system to an inept wannabe despot. Hopefully the system is antifragile and this will make it much harder for a more serious and competent future one.

I've actually had a related but perhaps converse opinion: it's demonstrated the resilience of our government. A lot of people have been noting his authoritarian tendencies and expressing concern that he might refuse to acknowledge election results, and while that appears to be the case, there's no indication that he will have his way (apart from legal proceedings, which are a perfectly democratic [albeit petulant] way to contest election results). In some countries, a president demanding a stop to vote counting might get their way, but that didn't happen here, and it's good to know that for the endless flack (some fair and some not) America and Americans get, we still have a robust political system.

Just curious, can you Please give some examples of his authoritarian tendencies?

Demanding a stop to vote counting mid-election.

I want to live in a country where we accept the results of a democratic process instead of spreading conspiracy theories, and yes, that goes for the Russia collusion conspiracy theories and the general "we're going to burn this mf-er to the ground if the election doesn't go our way" sentiments as well.

The reasoning on the demand to stop vote counts was to delay until they could get legal observers in to validate the process, not a bid to stop the entire process altogether.

There were already Republican observers in NV (as per state law) and in PA, including Philadelphia. The argument lawyers are making in Philadelphia is basically incoherent. See the excerpts from the court transcript for PA case.

That's not true. Regrettably we have the nationally televised words of the president on the matter:

This is a fraud on the American public. This is an embarrassment to our country. We were getting ready to win this election. Frankly, we did win this election. We did win this election. So our goal now is to ensure the integrity for the good of this nation. This is a very big moment. This is a major fraud in our nation. We want the law to be used in a proper manner. So we’ll be going to the US Supreme Court. We want all voting to stop. We don’t want them to find any ballots at four o’clock in the morning and add them to the list. Okay? It’s a very sad moment. To me this is a very sad moment and we will win this. And as far as I’m concerned, we already have won it.

https://www.rev.com/blog/transcripts/donald-trump-2020-elect...

So, so often people only hear what they want to hear. From what we've witnessed over recent times, such thinking is so prevalent that it has to be a part of the human condition.

Of course, they had observers in place already, so this was a transparent effort to delay and create ambiguity.

100% not true. Legal observers were in all places, and Trumps lawyers had to admit it in court when they said a ‘non-zero’ number were present. Most counting places even live streamed the count.

I think this is probably one of the most secure elections ever executed.

I would recommend finding a news archive of the last 4 years and just watching him?

threatening to shoot looters

cult of personality, attacking the press, denying everything, attacking the legitimacy of our voting system, creating division by refusing to unify people, shouting "law & order" to position himself as the only solution against chaos, inciting young supporters to push his agenda with more violence (akin to hitler youth), etc.

Exactly.

Nearly all of the press and social media companies worked together to fight and censor him and he’s the authoritarian one for calling them out on it?

By creating division you mean sending in troops to end riots that were burning down businesses, beating people, and spreading the virus all in the name of dubious claims of police brutality?

The rioters caused real violence that really happened. What did Trump’s supporters do that is violent on that level?

Imagine if there was a truly incompetent and corrupt president, not Trump of course, then what would the media landscape look like?

Is it any different?

Trump talks like an authoritarian, but his actual actions have been mainly to reduce the power of a central government, like appointing federalist judges, dismantling federal departments, etc. So the opposite of what an authoritarian would do.

>So the opposite of what an authoritarian would do.

I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but that's not entirely right.

Authoritarians aim to centralize power to themselves. By removing other sources of power, their power grows. An authoritarian's ultimate goal in the US is to remove all checks and balances they can.

In comparison a libertarian aims to remove non-centeral government, like laws that effect small towns, schools and police forces in small towns, and so on, though each libertarian voter aims to remove different things, so not to mislead: Not all libertarians want to remove police, or schools, or roads, or whatever else. What you will not hear is a libertarian wanting to remove congress or another form of checks and balance.

But ceding authority to states cuts against that argument again, as it's no longer full centralization, yes?

That's a good point. Removing centralized laws so there is more autonomy for individual states is one thing, which is not removing checks and balances. I overlooked that on the libertarian part of the comment.

Unfortunately, Trump did not go around removing centralized laws, or any I know of at least. Everything he did has more to do with a power grab as best I can tell.

This is an interesting point, but he's also done and said a number of things that indicate a level of comfort with his supporters committing violence that is entirely inappropriate for a leader of a democracy, and suggests that he wants a paramilitary loyal to him. Those are exactly the actions of an authoritarian. "Stand back and stand by"

There's also been a focus on personal loyalty in high office that is also unseemly in a democracy, and has caused problems for the USA in the past too.

I suspect that his choosing of those judges was a combination of him listening to his handlers when they (rightfully) told him big portion of his base was only in it for the judges combined with the assumed belief on Trumps part that any judges he appointed to show him loyalty in any legal situation (they won't).

He constantly flouted the reigning oligopoly in the media-industry-military complex.

One particularly scary one is 60 minutes recorded footage of rally of Trump supporters, where many of them on their Trump flags had fascist symbolism. 60 minutes did not say a word about this, as the topic they were covering was different, but regardless, this spiked a fear of fascism growing in America.

In response instead of addressing this growing anti-american anti-democratic minority, the term anti-fascist or antifa was created. The idea is if anti-fascism can be associated with riots, protestors, and other scary negative fear based topics, the second anyone raises a concern about fascism, supporters will unconsciously turn a blind eye, because antifa has a negative anti-american sting in their unconscious now. I'm surprised such word smithing like that works, and frankly I'm scared it does work. I'm terrified that not only Trump but Fox and other groups would rally behind not only supporting fascist movements, but invent a boogyman as a way to make the topic of fascism partisan and questionable. If that's not unamerican I don't know what is.

The pandemic, if anything, has proved the "authoritarian" diagnosis to be false. Authoritarians love to have an excuse to lock everyone up in their homes and decide from on high which businesses will be allowed to operate. Trump OTOH was like "math is tough; let the states handle it!"

I think that's oversimplifying. The fact that Trump is not a full-blown authoritarian, or is bad at it, is compatible with his expression of a number of authoritarian values.

This is true, but it emphasizes the difference between marketing and reality. Trump's evocation of authoritarian imagery has been uncorrelated with genuine threats of increased authoritarianism in USA. These threats do exist, but focusing attention on Trump has been a distraction from genuinely opposing them.

His preference was to sacrifice the lives of Americans in order to save the economy, that feels pretty authoritarian to me.

If you're still confused about this, check out what Orban is doing in Hungary in response to the pandemic. That's an authoritarian.

Tear-gassing protestors for a photo-op.

One particularly scary one is 60 minutes recorded footage of rally of Trump supporters, where many of them on their Trump flags had fascist symbolism. This spiked a fear of fascism growing in America.

In response instead of addressing this growing anti-american anti-democratic minority, instead the news decided to associate anti-fascism with riots, protestors, and other scary negative fear based topics. Now the second anyone raises a concern about fascism, supporters will unconsciously turn a blind eye. I'm surprised such word smithing like that works, and frankly I'm scared it does work. I'm terrified that different conservative groups rallied behind not only fascist movements, but invented a boogyman term for it like antifa as a way to make the topic of fascism partisan and questionable. If that's not anti-democratic and unamerican I don't know what is.

I think the interregnum period will be chocked full of rightwingers lashing out at the country and people in general. People that know Trump supporters know that there was a lot of identity wrapped up in his presidency, and see it cut down to one term is going to set them off.

Yeah, just like there was a whole bunch of people going crazy four years ago, when Trump got elected.

America is extremely divided, and I'm not sure that it's going to recover from this (which I personally, as a foreigner, find very very sad).

>America is extremely divided, and I'm not sure that it's going to recover from this

Sadly without re-regulating the news it isn't, or some large trauma that brings the entire country temporarily together.

In the US we historically had similar problems, so something called the fairness doctrine was created. It was a law that required news give equal airtime for opposing views. This way no matter where you got your news you'd get the full truth, not half truths as the current American populous is getting.

> Just curious, can you Please give some examples of his authoritarian tendencies?

Do you have a source for this question?

What do you mean? I just hear people say he is authoritarian without giving any examples. I just like to see examples of what they are thinking.

He said on stage multiple times that he can do whatever he wants thanks to article 2.

way too much for one comment.

https://www.businessinsider.com/authoritarianism-experts-say...

https://www.latimes.com/world-nation/story/2020-09-10/trump-...

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/nov/01/democracy-fasc...

> (apart from legal proceedings, which are a perfectly democratic [albeit petulant] way to contest election results)

Bush vs. Gore in Florida 2000 comes to mind.

It's worth taking a look at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2000_United_States_presidentia...

It's really not clear who should have won. There are different outcomes from different groups with different, but reasonable, interpretations of what the voter intended.

I was too young to understand it at the time, but now I realise how difficult of a situation that was.

It's hard too see through all of the partisanship at the time.

BBC is reporting that he has already told his staff to begin logistical preparations to hand over to Biden. He disagrees with the results, he will do lawsuits, but it doesn't look like he'll do anything more than that. So far, that proves all the naysayers wrong who accused him of trying to not transfer power when not re-elected.

To be fair, he did say “There won’t be a transfer, frankly. There will be a continuation.”

quietly making preparations doesn't outweigh repeatedly and incessantly lying to public about the operation of and outcome of the election, nor sending his supporters to attack vote-counting stations.

I'll believe it when it's said and done. As of now, nothing has changed to his day-to-day, his life is continuing on as if the election happens. As everything winds down, and it sets in that he will be vulnerable to the investigations from NY along with loans coming due that he simply can't pay he may lash out. I've felt the interregnum period will be the most dangerous for the country, moreso than the previous 3+ years.

I don't think anybody reasonably believed president Trump would have actually not relinquished power if he formally lost the election. What he was accused of however, is trying to play nasty with votes, and trying to undermine the legitimacy of his loss. To put it another way: it's not that he wouldn't transfer power, but rather that he's willing to play dirty to try not to transfer power.

The reason why it was never realistic to believe he wouldn't step aside is simply that he does not have the support to pull that off; it's essentially a kind of civil war but one he (and any other president) would likely lose almost instantly - as long as it's clear he lost the election.

And that's why it's so insidious to undermine the election, because that will eventually pave the way to actually ignore election outcomes. Even today, I suspect in all the partisan posturing some voters may have come away with the honest impression that there really was a stolen election. Since democracy hinges on the losing side accepting that loss, action that undermine that are quite problematic.

President Trump's action so far, both before the election and after, are entirely in line with the accusations against him; in essence: he's willing to undermine democracy to try and hold on to power.

Had the election been closer, it's conceivable he might really have engineered some legal shenanigans to try and steal the election. And if he had been backed in that (which isn't entirely impossible, because some of the toss-up states have republican-appointed courts, republican legislatures, and republican governors, and of course the heavily tilted supreme court now), then things would have gotten dicey. In that situation, just like in other strong-man democracies, the outcome of the election would have been rigged. Would democrats have backed down? Or would they have disputed the elections, even though formally they lost them? That's the kind of thing that breaks a democracy; because both backing down and confrontation are terrible outcomes.

To their credit - because that's how it's supposed to work in a democracy - those toss-up states did not seriously try to steal votes (although the vote-segregation thing is pretty close). And of course we don't know Trump would really have stolen the election, given the opportunity, since it never arose. But we can see that he took all possible steps in that direction at least; and that's something the US needs to deal with in the future for the sake of stability. It ended well this time; it might not every time.

I agree it has demonstrated resilience, a positive thing indeed. But I think it's good to consider what would happen in other countries should a character like Trump be elected. In Canada, a polarizing character like Trump would be exceedingly unlikely to form a majority government. As a minority government, they would be subject to "no-confidence" votes regularly. When a government passes a budget for example, if the budget does not pass the house, the government automatically crumbles and an election is called. Additionally, as the prime minister is simply the head of the party, his vote carries no more weight than other members, and he can be fired by his own party at any time.

A lot of checks and balances are baked into a multi-party system. One inherent advantage is less polarization, as there are more parties to represent the various views of the people. However, there are of course a lot of improvements that could be made to the Canadian governance system (ditching first past the post for example), but I do believe this style of government is more resilient than the US system.

At the same time, our government has not, and will likely not, be put to the test by someone like Trump. It is commendable that the US system has withstood what many feared could be the start of the downfall of democracy in the US.

I really wish that a failed impeachment would result in new elections for the House and President. Seems like the only logical conclusion when the democratic chamber of the legislature and the pseudo-democratic executive are at odds.

... and senate above all; definitely. In fact, I'd argue it you had to reelect any one seat of power in the event of a failed impeachment, it should be the senate above the president or house.

I mean, it's never going to happen due to constitutional constraints, but really the very existence of the senate is rather problematic, because it's elections are so very different from those of the house+presidency; the votes are very much non-proportional.

And while non-proportionality is not in and of itself really all that bad - I mean, it's bad in that it's so visibly unfair that it slightly undermines the point of democracy (it makes it look a little hypocritical), but the actual impact of said unfairness (as opposed to perception thereof) isn't really all that problematic; many things in the world aren't 100% fair.

No, the real problem isn't the non-proportionality, it's the gridlock that arises from having so very different electoral systems. That gridlock exacerbates issues with partisanship, because it makes it attractive to play brinkmanship games; and of course gridlock isn't harmless anyhow. The system would be more stable if house, senate and presidency had similar elector biases; regardless of fairness.

Really though, parliamentary systems are in this regard simply better. Having the equivalent of the president serve at the mercy of parliament doesn't make the job at all irrelevant (just look at other democracies), but it does put to bed nonsense like failed impeachments - because it's not about crimes, even in the US; it's simply about political support - and it should be clear whether the president has it, or not - and the current system is almost designed to turn it into a nasty political battle that's simply divisive.

The only situation in which impeachment in the current system is not divisive is when house, senate and president are in the same parties hands - and hey, that's basically a parliamentary system right there!

But why should Senate have to be reelected? This would give opportunity to a House controlled by one party to force reelection of Senate which might be controlled by the other party.

I don't think reelection should be forced, impeachments are not done often and I feel there is no need to protect against it (it wasn't a big deal this time around).

US is in a strange situation where a sitting president is almost impossible to unseat, but that may be seen as a positive characteristic. It allows US to be much more focused and stable in its foreign policy.

Let's be clear this is all an extreme hypothetical, right? And there are all kind of reasons not to do this; to be sure - I don't want to claim it's somehow a good idea to do this; just that in the context of discussion at this point - i.e. given that you retain the current structure of power separation, and the current voting schemes, and decide to call for fresh elections on a failed impeachment, then that there is a case to be made to reelect the entire senate as opposed to president or house. However, that precondition is an extreme hypothetical.

The reason to favor the senate over the president is clear: if they truly believe the president still should retain political support, the president isn't the you should force into a new election.

The reason to favor the senate over the house (if forced to pick just one by this hypothetical) is that the senate is the odd one out here in electoral support, and to make it harder for them to play political games with this choice; i.e. it's in their interest to pick a stance that is supported by voters, because if they don't they'll answer to them. It's also the most impactful reelection to force, because those elections are otherwise spaced the furthest apart. Essentially: by giving the house more power and the senate less, you're inching closer towards the greater stability of a parliamentary system, and additionally it has the most impact because the senate is the least frequently reelected normally. The house really should have supremacy over both senate and president; and it's OK to check that supremacy with voters to make an unleashed house suffer the consequences (because a house that really did abuse this power is still up for reelection quite quickly, and results from the senate election would be very publicly visible).

To be clear; it's just a hypothetical. It'd be better if the senate were simply dissolved, or relegated to a more advisory role as it is elsewhere, or merged into the house, and better if presidents were elected by congress, not directly - but given the hypothetical of just one releection to force, I think there is an argument to be made that a senate relection would have the most impact on the impeachment process.

To be clear: I don't think the US president being hard to unseat is a feature; that's a design flaw. Other democracies have stable foreign policies to, even when just a simple majority in the equivalent of the house is enough to immediately unseat the equivalent of the president, with no recourse to the senate at all. In fact, other democracies seem to have a more stable foreign and domestic policy, because there's less infighting and less need for hyper-speed policy making in the rare moments without gridlock; none of that "but we can't approve that deal because currently the house or the senate aren't in the hands of the same party as the president". The decision-making capability of a parliamentary government isn't perfect, but it's less likely to gridlock for long periods of time.

It also means there's no hope of any party of trying to blockade the other should they lose, so there's more incentive to seek consensus beforehand because they simply won't be able to force anything should an election ever go the other way. And there's more potential cost for reversing previous governments policies, because what's to stop a future government from playing that same game? As it is currently, a party can risk being quite confrontational, knowing that a trifecta isn't all that likely in general. There's a good chance any controversial policy made will stick around simply because there's a good chance future governments will be gridlocked for a good while; worth risking that gamble. If governments knew that a future government could reliably overturn any policy they made, they'd be more careful choosing partisan pet projects, especially those without clear popular support.

It's hard to answer everything so I'll just focus on a few key aspects.

Wouldn't forcing senate reelection in case of failed impeachment allow the party that controls the house to force that reelection?

Let's say Party A controls the house while Party B controls the Senate and the Presidency. If Party A wants, they would be able to send impeachment to trial without real reason and then by the fact that Senate didn't convict you would get a reelection of Senate.

Way I see it, this would allow manipulation of the election process. In my mind, it would be much more logical that the House has to be reelected as they pushed forward an impeachment that was not convicted upon. This would make it so that House would not bring forward frivolous impeachments as they would have their own positions on the line.

About unseating a president, I understand your point. I agree to a degree. A sitting president can be limited in power by the fact he doesn't control the legislative branch. This may seem less optimal but it has a couple of advantages. Executive branch can keep on working within the confines allowed to them, without having to juggle for political support in the parliament. This allows the President to keep working with little regard to losing his position. This is especially good for military or foreign affairs as they can work on this with little to no political support.

Right, but that's a plus - that's more how it works in other democracies; the equivalent of the house having the upper hand; essentially impeachment at that point turns into a milder form of a vote of no confidence. It's still milder than in other countries, because the senate gets a vote at all.

Framing this as if any of the legal constructs (house, senate, presidency) is reasonable, and thus needs to perhaps be punished for abuse of power is I believe pointless. Impeachment is not about right or wrong, it's about political support (I mean, just look at those almost completely party-line votes in house and senate recently!)

For American democracy to start working again - which has nothing to do with fairness, mind you - the power hierarchy needs to clearly weed out obstructionism; and where obstructionism is possible or even valuable as a kind of common sense sanity-check, either side involved needs to be elected or appointed on the same electoral basis (because the other option is political powerplay, rendering the whole point of things like impeachment moot, as it is today).

Pick two: A government that can govern, or elections with differing structures (essentially ensuring various branches will fight simply as a form of party politics, not based on merit), or equal branches of government, where one (plain majority) cannot remove the other.

You can't have all three.

Aside, the idea that the presidency is stable because it's decoupled from congressional support is not born out by simple comparison to other countries. Quite the opposite: by splitting powers like that, foreign actors need to consider internal US politics to a large degree. Stability would be greater if a simple majority in the house had the ability to appoint a new president at a whim - not because whims are stable, but because that shapes the back and forth of political powerplay, and thus renders the house responsible for the presidencies errors, which is how it works in other countries. Countries don't tend to reappoint prime ministers all that often, especially if a coalition is involved, because not only is that likely to be punished by voters, it's quite hard to form coalitions if you break support like that. That's not to say that a coalition of microscopic parties would be a great idea for the US by the way; just that small steps in that direction would increase stability.

I think it’s a feature that we have one house of Congress elected “fast” and the other house elected “slow”. It permits a following of changes in public consciousness without having the entire federal government banging off opposing poles frequently.

(Un- [or loosely] related, I also think there are benefits from gridlock, forcing a certain level of consensus for those things that have to happen federally but leaving most federal things relatively stable over time.)

Sure, that makes sense! Having a fast and slow cycle isn't a bad idea. The problem is rather that the slow cycle has too much power, and additionally uses a different electoral system from the fast cycle, so it's not just an extra brake on overly-radical mistakes, it's a potentially long-term gridlock.

If at least senate "districts" were equivalent to house "districts" (i.e. all state-based or all more regional, and both equivalently proportional), then it would be very unlikely to have long-term gridlock; instead a senate would simply serve as braking mechanism during electoral upheaval, and that's perhaps a valuable feature.

We've seen what happens when a Trump figure is elected in the UK: there are no real checks and balances. Once an electoral majority was achieved, anything is possible, including a bill to specifically authorize law enforcement to commit crimes.

On the other hand, Biden has come out backing Ireland. Which is good for sanity and bad for Johnson.

Decentralization, and distributed power is key to the US System

People need to remember that, no matter who is in power.

The problem is both republicans and democrats "forget" this when they are in power so they attempt to consolidate it, and believe that consolidation grand the virtuous

Then when they are out of power, the "other side" using that power become "corrupt and immoral"

Just like the irony that in 2016 the US electron system was so fragile that Russia stole it, at least that is what he heard for the last 4 years, but now that democrats have won the US Election system is as strong as Plymouth Rock and unwavering in face of people trying to steal it...

//for the record I do not think the election was stolen in either 2016 or 2020.....

I feel like that resilience was draining away. He'd already subverted the DOJ and the supreme court. One more term probably would have sealed it.

+1 my thoughts as well. He's been a stellar QA, stress testing various facets of government, politics, and media.

That's true. I've been kinda shocked to discover how much our system depends on entirely voluntary norms. It's not nearly as resilient to determined attack as I'd always thought.

It also exposed how we've kicked the can down the road with North Korea and China (having to work with local businesses, forced IP transfers, and IP theft). Not that his approaches to either were all that productive; with China in particular, a lot of traditional US allies have similar gripes, so it'd be easy to build a coalition, but not when you're also engaged in a trade war with them.

What flaws did the Trump administration demonstrate that weren’t already obviously flaws? Did we actually get new information about previously hidden flaws?

That's like saying that a machine gun wasn't more deadly because we already had rifles. Trump made a number of major expansions in claims of executive power: spending money which Congress had allocated for different purposes, claiming immunity to legal investigation, using the DOJ to defend him against civil suits predating his run for office, simply putting people in positions which require Congressional approval, claiming that he could override state health authority decisions related to the pandemic, trying to zero out taxes which he doesn't agree with, etc. He didn't get away with all of it but that Unitary Executive theory is a really big shift away from the American system of government and it happened by fiat rather than some kind of reasoned legislative process.

Put more simply, Trump managed to find a position strong enough that he lost the support of even John Yoo, who felt that the President had authority to order torture.

https://www.npr.org/2017/02/08/514049685/former-defender-of-...

This reminds me of a story about when Kurt Gödel, who had fled Nazi persecution of Jews in Austria, went to apply for US Citizenship.

In the taxi, on the way to the citizenship hearing, Gödel excitedly told his friend Albert Einstein that he intended to talk at the hearing of a flaw he had discovered in the US Constitution that could allow a dictatorship to take over.

Einstein managed to convince Gödel not to talk about that at the citizenship hearing, and just answer to questions.

But perhaps Gödel wasn't so wrong.

Could you elaborate on this "flaw?"

It's answered in this Quora question.

https://www.quora.com/Does-the-American-Constitution-allow-f...

It hinges on the fact that Electors in the Electoral College don't have to follow the popular vote.

" the legislators can change the state law to require Electors to vote for the President regardless of the popular vote."

It was supposedly intended to avoid populism, but given that the electors are likely to be just as influenced by a populist leader as anyone else, it seems like it assumes a level of care picking the electors that isn't really reasonable.

Given rule changes (around punishing electors if they vote against who they are supposed to), and the recent way that electors did and didn't vote during the last few elections, it's clear that the system has no value now.

"It was supposedly intended to avoid populism"

Populism?

You mean democracy?

Judge for yourself

"It was equally desirable, that the immediate election should be made by men most capable of analyzing the qualities adapted to the station, and acting under circumstances favorable to deliberation, and to a judicious combination of all the reasons and inducements which were proper to govern their choice. A small number of persons, selected by their fellow-citizens from the general mass, will be most likely to possess the information and discernment requisite to such complicated investigations. It was also peculiarly desirable to afford as little opportunity as possible to tumult and disorder. This evil was not least to be dreaded in the election of a magistrate, who was to have so important an agency in the administration of the government as the President of the United States. But the precautions which have been so happily concerted in the system under consideration, promise an effectual security against this mischief...

Talents for low intrigue, and the little arts of popularity, may alone suffice to elevate a man to the first honors in a single State; but it will require other talents, and a different kind of merit, to establish him in the esteem and confidence of the whole Union, or of so considerable a portion of it as would be necessary to make him a successful candidate for the distinguished office of President of the United States."

Federalist 68

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2010183

For me, the icing on the cake was the press conference at Four Seasons Landscaping.

Someone made a silly mistake in the booking, but either nobody noticed, or couldn't be bothered to correct it, or dared not be the one to tell Trump the mistake had been made. So the President (staff? apparently not him) gives a final press conference in the parking lot of a suburban store. It would be like watching the Emperor of Japan surrender in a dinghy because somebody brought the wrong Missouri.

Unforced error. Abandonment of dignity. Refusal to acknowledge the situation. Hallmarks of the administration.

(News accuracy notice: while it appears to have been an official press conference only Guiliani was actually there and not Trump himself)

I didn't know about this - thank you. I am overdosing on schadenfreude.

One thing I would like to tell democrats now that you are WINNERS. And I mean it with all well being. Is that I think you should really not focus on your opponent but on your own candidate and party. We are all just humans in the end.

I love to think that it's because 1) nobody else would take them 2) the campaign is out of money so this is the only Four Seasons they could afford.

Really so what? This obsession with dignity in politics is peasant, like most of them are half ass decent.

It's kind of a hallmark of diplomacy. Leadership should not be as uncouth as the peasantry.

Dividing into 'leadership and peasantry' is not my kind of leader. Of the people, for the people is what I expect.

But "you" don't vote that way

I was not saying we should only elect our most insulated and inbred. Joe Sixpack is a perfectly valid candidate.

The point is that when negotiations are at stake, you want an actual diplomat at the table, not an insult comic. If Joe Sixpack can keep his shit together enough to avert a war, feel free to elect him.

This is a fascinating comment that really speaks volumes.

I would be very interested to know your life history.

How do behave when you go to Church? To a funeral? Out to dinner? To work in the office? It's just recognizing that not every occasion is a wrestling match.

Politics is about persuasion. You catch more flies with honey than vinegar.

Thanks, I couldn't have said that better myself. I'm no guru. We just seem to have lost touch with why we even have democratically-elected leaders in the first place.

I mean, there's been a literal duel in the Senate and brawls in the House... so what do I know? Democracy is messy business.

https://www.cop.senate.gov/artandhistory/history/minute/Duel...

https://history.house.gov/Historical-Highlights/1851-1900/Th...

Was he there? I watched for a few minutes and it just seemed like it was Guliani bringing poll watchers to say how they felt their rights to observe was infringed.

Apparently not, so I've made an edit.

"Book it at the Four Season", "No, not that one", "Yes, the random landscaping company".

I personally cannot tell if it was intentional. Trump has held a lot of events at businesses that I wouldn't traditionally expect to hold the event. The name overlap is very interesting, though.

This Philadelphia Inquirer journalist says that the hotel was announced first, but then it was changed https://twitter.com/jeremyrroebuck/status/132509276171710464...

I honestly wonder if it was originally booked at the Four Seasons hotel, but Trump vetoed that idea because of his stake in Trump Hotels.

Very likely

Or the Four Seasons wouldn't/couldn't take the booking.

then why not book in a Trump Hotel in the first place?

Hanlon's razor tells that it was a stupid mistake

"final" press conference - just so that you're not disapointed later, but Trump is president until 20th of january, so he has some time yet to make announcements when he wants to.

> the weak points in the infrastructure of our government

You're not wrong, but:

> But I go on this great republican principle, that the people will have virtue and intelligence to select men of virtue and wisdom. Is there no virtue among us? If there be not, we are in a wretched situation. No theoretical checks--no form of government can render us secure. To suppose that any form of government will secure liberty or happiness without any virtue in the people, is a chimerical idea. If there be sufficient virtue and intelligence in the community, it will be exercised in the selection of these men. So that we do not depend on their virtue, or put confidence in our rulers, but in the people who are to choose them.

* James Madison, 20 June 1788, Papers 11:163

Or as his contemporary French lawyer / philosopher Joseph de Maistre said: Toute nation a le gouvernement qu'elle mérite (Every nation gets the government it deserves)

> Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.

* https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/H._L._Mencken#Notes_on_Democra...

> The postmortem of the last 4 years

I don't think the US will have the time for a "post-mortem", this is not a bug that just disappeared/was solved because Trump is no longer president. More people voted for him in 2020 than they did in 2016, the racist things that he has said and done have not come out of no-where, he had (and still has) a strong support behind him, and that support won't disappear over night.

He probably received a lot of votes from liberals like myself who see China as the greatest threat the world is facing today, and were thus forced to vote against our interests (since Biden has a history of being pro-China and even said he would end Trump’s China tariffs during the campaign).

I mean Trump's China tariffs have been paid for by Americans. Because that's how tariffs work.

Have they deterred business with China in favor of moving that business back to America? Or have they just passed the price along to the American consumer?

I agree that China is a big threat, but trade wars is a bad way to address it. History has shown that the US pretty much always ends up losing in a trade war. Mind you, I don't know what the right solution is, but I do know that trade war is not it.

Sometimes it’s necessary to make sacrifices to try to stop an evil regime. This is one of those times, and besides war then there’s no other solution besides trying to isolate China from the rest of the world and hurt their economy. Trump went a long way towards achieving that goal.

It would of course be ideal if EU and all democratic countries got together, but they (just like Biden) unfortunately have no interest in doing so. Biden believe that it’s USA’s self-interest to see China prosper.

The way to deal with China through legislation and working with our allies because it has to be a long term process. Tariffs and photo ops like FoxConn in WI did nothing hinder China.

The allies, just like Biden, have no interest in standing up to China. Tariffs definitely work, because if they’re high enough then companies will be forced to leave to setup shop elsewhere (such as Vietnam).

You can also see that China’s GDP growth (in 2019) was the lowest it’s been since 1990 (2020 will no doubt be much lower), and their reputation around the world is at an all-time low.

It’s also worth noting that the administration did a lot more to stand up to China besides tariffs (but tariffs that force companies to leave will of course hurt them the most).

>Regardless of your views of Trump's politics, his administration and method of leadership has exposed a lot of flaws in how our government has been designed and engineered.

Chief among which was allowing the election of someone like Trump to begin with.

The DNC is as much or more at fault here than anyone else.

They have some fault, yes, but not more fault than the Republicans for selecting him, or the American people, or the electoral college or first past the post voting. At the end of the day, all the DNC did was bet on the wrong horse.

Someone like Trump shouldn't have been a viable option regardless of who the Democrats put up.

I don’t think that’s at all obvious. An ineffectual chaos monkey for 4 more years is arguably better than an effective leader implementing Very Bad policies that we will be stuck with for generations. I didn’t vote for Trump, but I can sympathize with that position.

I accept that people will disagree, especially on Hacker News, but I don't consider the willful sabotage of government "just in case" to be a valid form of political exercise. I'm not aware of anything in Hillary Clinton's platform that in hindsight would have made Trump look like the better alternative, or that would have potentially spelled multi-generational disaster.

Hillary was extremely in favor of the Trans-Pacific Partnership, which was regarded as a very bad deal here on HN. She came out as skeptical of it during her campaign, but that was hard to believe given that she was responsible for it under the Obama administration.

She wanted to strengthen Obamacare, but was against a single-payer option. I'm sure people will quibble, but I'm confident health premiums would have gone up faster under Hillary.

Hillary Clinton was in bed with Wall St firms. A Clinton presidency would have risked undoing a lot of the regulatory protections that have been put in place after the dot-com and 2007 financial collapses.

Compared with Trump, Hillary Clinton is tremendously China-friendly. She would not have countered Xi's expansionist policies.

On more niche (but IMHO important) issues like space policy, Trump-Pence has actually been extremely good, better than any president in living memory. Hillary, on the other hand, considered expenditures on space to be a waste of money.

-----

There are plenty of arguments a reasonable person can come up with for not wanting a Hillary Clinton presidency in 2016, with or without the advantage of hindsight. Only through a deeply blue-tinted partisan lens could you say a Hillary term would have been objectively better on all accounts.

As I said way up thread, the DNC is as much at fault as anyone else for continuing to field deeply unpopular and uninspiring candidates, while simultaneously ignoring working class concerns.

>There are plenty of arguments a reasonable person can come up with for not wanting a Hillary Clinton presidency in 2016, with or without the advantage of hindsight.

Sure. But voting for a "chaos monkey" isn't reasonable. It's not as if Republicans would have been happy with another Democratic candidate, and they had an entire field of their own to choose from, and they chose to vote in Nero to watch Rome burn.

> they chose to vote in Nero to watch Rome burn.

I don’t know if you noticed, but out democratic institutions have remained intact.

I don’t appreciate my country being held hostage to extortive tactics: “vote for my candidate—the other guy is a literal Nazi!”

It is not game-theoretic optimal to give into extortion, because things will gradually trend in worse and worse directions. Sometimes a protest vote to the system itself is required to reduce the long term damage.

>I don’t appreciate my country being held hostage to extortive tactics: “vote for my candidate—the other guy is a literal Nazi!”

As opposed to "vote for my candidate - Hillary is a literal blood drinking serial killing baby raping illuminati whore who will start World War 3!"

or "vote for my candidate - Joe Biden is a pedophile with extreme dementia, and we don't know exactly what his son is into but it's probably pretty awful?"

I mean, at least the people calling Trump racist can point to a large pile of circumstantial evidence to back it up. It's hard to believe that is "extortionate" and "holding the country hostage" but not Pizzagate, QAnon, and Stop the Steal vigilantes.

I distinctly remember a tweet from 4 years ago, "this presidency will be a test of our institutions and counter powers".

Well, this did not go _well_.

I wish a lot of luck to the Biden administration, there is a lot to rebuild. I might disagree on tons of policy topics with him but at the very least I can completely agree that he lives up to what should be the bare minimum for any president : respect the rule of law, be the president of all americans, not just the ones who voted for you, etc

Biden says the right things, as experienced politicians do. Let's withold judgment until we see what he does.

Your comments seem fine, but could you please stop creating accounts for every few comments you post? We ban accounts that do that. This is in the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.

You needn't use your real name, of course, but for HN to be a community, users need some identity for other users to relate to. Otherwise we may as well have no usernames and no community, and that would be a different kind of forum. https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...

what's more interesting in the discussion is how much attention trump is still getting, rather than the winner, biden. we're more relieved by trump leaving than biden entering. trump being such a poor leader still overshadows how mediocre biden is.

it's still uncertain what biden will be doing, other than occupying the white house, of any substance for the next 4 years. he talks a lot about unity, but isn't reputed to be a unifying force, so that seems an unlikely pillar of his presidency. he recites a litany of standard democratic policy positions, but without any real conviction (even "bidencare" is clichéd already).

does he do anything to moderate political and economic consolidations that have been so detrimental to prosperity and unity over (at least) the last 40 years? doubtful, unfortunately.

Except for the things he broke that cannot be repaired. The people dead from COVID. The children separated from their parents.

What a cold and callus interpretation of a man that did real damage to thousands of people.

"Trump has been a very effective chaos monkey"

I'm still in shock over how Trump actually managed to get into power. To me, it's still unclear why so many actually voted for him (it woke me up as to how a large percentage of the American electorate actually thinks, and for me that's a worry).

You're right, the chaos Trump's created has seen a paradigm shift in the way politics is carried out everywhere, and that's likely not a bad thing. Often things need to get worse before a wake-up call turns them around for the better. We'll wait and see.

Trump's initial success, the lemming-like addiction to smartphones/Facebook mania, and the swathes and swathes of crazy, mad and irresponsible behaviour I've seen over the last seven or eight months in response to COVID-19 has truly shaken my view of humanity. I used to think we humans were smarter than we actually are.

> To me, it's still unclear why so many actually voted for him

Voting in the US, especially in general elections, is mostly about tribal identity, which explains a lot of that part of Trump's election, and he was largely a political unknown who's campaign was ambiguous enough that people could read what they want into it (By 2020, that last part was no longer true, obviously.) In the 2016 primary, he had the ambiguity factor, celebrity, the Republican establishment having trouble figuring out what he was doing, and a Republican Primary system designed to turn early pluralities into commanding delegate leads to avoid long primary fights which backfired spectacularly for the establishment.

In 2016 I put the result down to the general disenchantment in many democratic countries with democracy generally - similar to the 'logic' behind brexit.

That I can understand but it's the relative closeness of the vote in this election that surprised me.

Earlier I was looking at a live online polling update with maps of both state and popular vote figures. The popular vote map was detailed enough for me to drill down to county level and finer. In states like Ohio, N Dakota and Nebraska with sparce populations and high overall Republican vote one would occasionally (but not infrequently) come across small settlements of 500/1000 or so only 20/50 miles apart where the vote in one was say D-70%, R-28%, Lib-2% and the other almost exactly the opposite with Lib remaining the same at about 2%.

This seems to backup your tribal identity point very well. Given that these settlements likely have only trees or farmland between them the figures are actually quite startling. I took into account that some may have been Native American reservations (which I've not yet ruled out), so I resampled in other states with low populations such as Vermont and New Hampshire and found similar instances (of course, with these latter instances the overall state figures had the Democrats in the majority).

These demographics are fascinating to say the least and I'm going to revisit them again shortly.

Trump got into power because he was hailed as a genius business person who would transform the country like a good business person would transform a failing company.

People bought into it, because he's probably the most exposed businessman in America - through his brand name, and media appearances.

Furthermore, he was "hard" on certain populist topics like immigration, as well as conservative on more mainstream topics, like taxes, foreign affairs, etc.

And on the very top of that, the fringes of democratic voters didn't bond with Hilary Clinton getting ushered in as the presidential candidate.

Even Trump didn't believe he'd win in 2016.

Chaos Engineering only works if the next administration is willing to work on the underlying problems, rather than just preventing next Chaos Monkey event.

E.g. imagine after using Chaos Monkey to demonstrate the flaws in structure, instead you just fire the people that made it in the first place.

I'm not holding my breath for that one. Lot of Dems campaign sponsors don't want to fix those issues.

Indeed.

He was completely incompetent in everything he tried to do. Imagine how bad it would be, if he was actually competent. There is a good chance someone exactly like him can come along in the future, except more competent - that is scary to think about

This x10000%. I've been telling my friends this for years that I'm angry at trump but I'm genuinely afraid for the next more refined iteration of him.

Hopefully this four years will encourage us not to put our guards down again.

We can celebrate now, but we need to remember that almost 70 million people voted for him, this time. After seeing him on the job for nearly four years :(

There is a lot of work left to do

unfortunately unless we fix the ills that he exposed those that want to exploit it will be far more competent at enabling fascism.

Okay, but... next time, please do not give Chaos Monkey the nuclear launch codes?

I believe it genuinely was touch and go a few times there.

> Regardless of your views of Trump's politics, his administration and method of leadership has exposed a lot of flaws in how our government has been designed and engineered.

> The postmortem of the last 4 years should be analyzed deeply in order to identify the weak points in the infrastructure of our government in order to make improvements.

In many cases a thoughtful analysis will reveal that the "flaw" that was exposed was that a particular function of government required good people being elected and good people being appointed. In those cases it might be a mistake to attempt to update the design or structure of government, when the solution is a lot simpler.

I think see what you are saying, but your framing to me supports a dangerously wrong idea that seems to have a lot of currency . Trump is not some sort of wild outside anomaly, his gaining power is more of an emergent property.

Chaos monkey is intentionally outside the system, poking at it. Trump isn't this.

Shouldn't we wait for the states to go through , in some cases, mandatory recounts and certification of the results and then the actual electoral college vote after any legal appeals?

History has shown that recounts rarely change anything beyond a few hundredths of a percent, if that (see: Florida 2000). The margins are wide enough, and there are enough states that tipped blue, that it is extremely unlikely as a matter of pure mathematics that there would be any change in outcome -- even if Trump's fans were granted every legal challenge on their wishlist.

Courts are generally loath to grant relief when the outcome wouldn't change. ("Void as moot.")

They would have to get thousands of votes tossed out which no judge is going to do. That would really leave a bad stain on the election that both parties rely on.

No, that’s never been a requirement for news media. California was called within 10 minutes of polls closing because it was expected to be a mathematical improbability of a Republican win in that state. Whenever a state gets called (and inevitably therefore the presidency), it is done because the math nerds at the media organizations put the odds of the other party winning outside the realm of what can realistically be achieved in the opinion of the analysts. There is no legal requirement to be eventually correct in your calls.

Why Alaska wasn’t called as fast then?

Many remote communities, where votes must be delivered by plane or sled. Alaska is absolutely huge.

Is this your first election? This has never been the case before (even in 2000 when the media got it wrong due to Florida). Why would or should it be the case now?

Are we just going to pretend like this election was not different from every other election? Something very unique occurred in this election and I don't appreciate the media and leaders declaring a winner when the other candidate is still contesting it. Why shouldn't we wait to be certain?

Leaders across the world are congratulating Biden and accepting the results. All of the US media is accepting the results. Even Fox News accepted the results. Most of the GOP is accepting the results.

One man-child's tantrum does not a country make. The few in power that are sticking with Trump right now are absolutely deluded. His voters are simply misinformed, but will accept the truth soon enough.

The results of the election are already certain. They've been certain for days, DDHQ (non-partisan) called them a long time ago and they were slow to do so. It is through an abundance of caution that news outlets waited to get past .5% margin in PA to call the results.

It doesn't matter that Trump is contesting the results. He has lost all semblance of support (a miracle he had any in the first place). He was golfing when the results were being announced, I don't think even he cares that much; he's just scared and trying to cling to power.

So no, we should not treat Trump differently: We should treat him as we would anyone throwing a tantrum like he does: Dismiss it and ignore it. The courts are dismissing it (8 cases lost/dismissed out of 8 filed), and the media is ignoring it. As long as the election is fair (which it was), and the results are correct (which they are), Biden is President. Let it be.

> Leaders across the world are congratulating Biden and accepting the results. All of the US media is accepting the results. Even Fox News accepted the results. Most of the GOP is accepting the results.

Regardless about how you feel about this election, consensus does not determine election results, the law does, and the result of the application of the law is decided by a handful of people, none of whom you just listed.

It doesn't matter.

The fact that Biden has been widely accepted as the next president is extremely important. That means nobody in the world views these claims of election fraud etc as legitimate.

Meanwhile you have trump crying out on Twitter "I WON THIS ELECTION BY A LOT" and nobody believes him.

Your recounts and certifications will find Biden has won. Given the current numbers, that is pretty definitive; a recount may slightly change them but that doesn't matter much.

That is why it's pretty safe to say, Biden is the next president, period. Kind of like it's safe to say the sun will set today and rise tomorrow. Sure, it might not, but at this point if it doesn't, we have bigger fish to fry than "the media was wrong".

100% but the media is free to project a winner at any time.

I didn’t vote (both candidates were too conservative for me) but I’m deeply suspicious of the results and would like as much verification as possible.

A big problem that divides us is property renters versus owners: owners have spent the last several decades restricting access to property, and that's now raised the cost of the most productive metro areas to unacceptable levels: https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2012/03/the-ren... Many millions of people, especially but not exclusively the young, have in effect been gated out of prosperity.

Matt Yglesias's new book One Billion Americans has a good discussion of the issue: https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/08/one-billion-american..., even if you don't buy his population-based premise.

Until we can free our land markets, we're going to have a lot of political problems caused by people who (correctly) feel they can't afford to live.

It's been bizarre to watch this develop, and yet somehow urbanization accelerates anyway.

The more technology and communication humanity develops, the more it clusters into small pieces of land with exorbitant rents.

Something just seems off.

This same problem does not exist in many places where urbanization is much further along than it is here, which would lead me to question whether it was the primary factor at work.

Mind sharing an example?

What place has large cities lacking residents with low standards of living?

The issue isn't low standards of living in dense US cities but the lack of affordable housing. If you want an international example of providing affordable housing in an area with very high property values, Singapore accomplishes this with the government-run HDB apartments.

I think the inefficiency is distance?

If I want a fancy beer from Holy Mountain, I need to live close to it, or make big travel plans to get there. The same applies for each thing I might want to do. Living nearby lots of other people minimizes my distance to each of those things, so I avoid wasting money and time on travel.

Yes. Hence the popularity of #vanlife and #tinyhouse.

it is free market at work. private property rights is the cornerstone of capitalism and free market. if you want land for all, then its no longer capitalism.

land/property ownership is not a right. access to housing for those who cant afford it should be provided by the govt. many countries do this. at least in california, high property values is favoured by the govt because it is a sure source of property taxes.

a lot of issues can be sorted if high rise affordable housing can be built outside expensive zipcodes and create a good public transport network.* instead, (here in ca), they are building 'affordable housing' inside the most expensive zipcodes and increasing toll roads and hiking tolls...and not improving public transport systems. looks like this is what the govt wants.

*we just wasted money on it.. with no regards for the millions and millions raised in bonds by voters who trusted those whom they elected: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_High-Speed_Rail

US capitalism is based on the government taking land away from people that aren't developing, and giving it to new owners though.

That's the argument people give for why it's ok for the US to have taken land from the indigenous peoples at least. I think it's reasonable for the government to seize any property that has only been used for collecting rents within some timespan, and reallocate it to somebody who wants to make actual use of the land

An elected government seizing private property is not democratic in any way, sense or form, IMO.

That is an incorrect framing of the problem. People do not want land, they want residential units. Strong demand can be handled by building up. Making it possible to build up where land values are high would solve a lot of problems.

California high speed rail is a different, specific, and complex system to evaluate. Just to throw out one major issue there is increasing demand for travel between LA and SF but capacity of existing roads, air corridors, railways, and ferries is already approaching fundamental limits. Space for roads is limited so the only other real option is more airports everywhere which might end up being necessary either way.

People want to own residential units. Ownership is and should be more expensive than occupancy.

A residential unit also needs power, sewer, water, schools, fire dept, police dept, parks and recreation, sanitation and other services, transportation, commerce, infrastructure and roads. And staff to run all this. Building up vertically on a x30 multiplier doesn’t mean that city can provide all the services and access resources to service the multiplier effect of said parcel of land. This is why high density cities end up being unaffordable.

If high density cities are built up to accommodate more affordable homes and below market value homes, the residents effectively pay negative taxes by benefitting more from the city than they pay in as taxes. The math doesn’t work out. If it did, we would have more townships with high density as well as affordability..and cost of living going down. But in my observation,such things never happen. At least from the data I had collated from Bay Area cities. I would love to be proved wrong.

The only way..as I see it..high density home ownership can be feasible is if we have clustered communities between 150-300 households and each of the homes comes with assured employment. It’s closer to ‘company towns’ or military townships.

> Building up vertically on a x30 multiplier doesn’t mean that city can provide all the services and access resources to service the multiplier effect of said parcel of land.

You're right, all the services are more expensive per square foot of land. But, it's more efficient per person, and per square foot of property, to provide those services in a smaller area. Cities are more expensive because of simple supply and demand: a lot of people want to live there, and there's a limited amount of property.

Weird, right?

You would think this would be front and center in any election, next to the destruction of quality jobs that prevented the same young people from getting on a good career path. And yet, the two gigantic elephants remain entirely unobserved.

I am seriously perplexed.

Young people don't make up that large a portion of the voter base in swing states.

Is it fair if people can be restricted from competing in the property markets by people who faced no such restrictions themselves when acquiring that land capital. Zoning licensing, etc.

The elephant in the room is that for most people the majority of their net worth is tied up in housing (property) and as interest rates drop the nominal value of this property increases way faster than the nominal wages of labor. This property can then be used to create information insensitive debt that ignores any notion of liquidity at an artificially higher nominal value. This debt is then used to pay wage-labor who increasingly cannot acquire property themselves. At the end of the day, only real property is wealth (land, ip rights, equity, collectibles, and machinery) and labor is denied the opportunity to earn a larger share of property themselves. Any solution is politically difficult.

I agree that there is an issue with housing being so inaccessible to labor. In my city, even with a six figure salary, it's hard to buy something alone. You increasingly need two six figure plus salaries to make it work. IMO, part of the problem is that everyone views housing as an investment. People trade real estate like trading cards. We forget that homes have a more fundamental purpose (to house people).

If you can't afford a home, as a way to get your foot in the door, you can buy ETFs on the stock market. You can also buy REITs as a way to invest in real estate. There are even diversified REIT ETFs. It's like being a landlord, you get paid dividends, but you don't have to lift a finger. If someone has some money on the side but can't yet afford property, this is a relatively safe way to get into investing and the real estate market IMO.

The unfortunate difference though is that mortgage rates are subsidized by the government, interest rates are kept artificially low. If you get a mortgage to buy a property, it's effectively leveraged investing. You pay a small downpayment (as low as 10% nowadays) and you're basically investing with someone else's money. You can't do that with REITs. Nobody will lend you 10X your downpayment at 2% interest to buy ETFs. If you can't afford to own property, you are denied this leveraged investing opportunity.

Personally, as a condo owner, I would be OK with condo prices not going up. As prices increases, so do my taxes. I can just invest in the stock market. I don't need my home to be an investment, I just need it to be a comfortable place to live.

It would be cool if Georgism or at least Land Value taxes made a bigger come back. My hopes are low after seeing Prop 15 fail in California though. I think we're sadly not even close to the breaking point. It will probably require the proportion of renters:owners to increase among older people.

Thanks for the valiant attempts to keep this discussion from devolving into a full-fledged dumpster fire.

1. The US, by the most generally accepted definition, has had continuous governance as a democracy since 1788. Just one more election, and not the most contentious or momentous by a long shot.

2. Current reported spread in votes between D and R are pretty slim, 75.0M v. 70.7M Wikipedia 11PM EST 11/7.

3. Whatever your partisan opinion, at least 70M American adults, 48.5% of those voting, disagree with you and think you’re an idiot. Try not to confirm the fact with your comments.

4. Challenging the validity of the voting process is a time-honored tradition during tight races. Stop sounding like newbies. This is the only time that the validity of the electoral process gets enough visibility to figure out if anything’s broke. Seriously broke? See 1.

5. A paper trail is a beautiful thing.

6. And what a wonderfully fertile field these comments are for use as examples of propaganda, inflammatory rhetoric and logical fallacies. Wish I was teaching a course right about now. Timely for the application of manure on fields too...

7. It would be nice if the mods kept the discussion away from an r/politics-ization of HN. The sides are pretty obvious and enforcing an arbitrary quota of half blue hurrah/half red hurrah would lead to a better flow and balance. Heavy-handed, but appropriate in these few cases IMHO.

The brilliant, stupid, wise, foolish, angry, mellow, old, young, rich, poor, naive, cynical, kind, nasty, sophisticated, brutish American people have spoken. Whether you agree with the results or not, it’s a beautiful thing.

> enforcing an arbitrary quota of half blue hurrah/half red hurrah would lead to a better flow and balance

Very fine people on both sides.

I feel HN has a decent balance of world events and tech. This is one of those occasions where I do want to engage in a conversation and hear the diversity of opinions.

Sure, obvious flame wars ought to be banned, but I’ve learned a ton about the strategy of different candidates and how it panned out. Various hypothesis on why things went a certain way and the permutations of what-if scenarios.

As you say, it’s a beautiful thing.

This is a really good post for the most part, but I strongly disagree with

> enforcing an arbitrary quota of half blue hurrah/half red hurrah would lead to a better flow and balance

This forum isn’t meant to represent the American electorate. We’re a global community of hackers with unique interests and values, and there’s no reason why we should be forced to reflect a divided America if we ourselves are not nearly as divided.

I agree. While I haven't read through all of this discussion so perhaps I'm missing the dumpster fire, I've found that HN in general is much more accepting of contrary opinions than anywhere else I hang out online. (as long as they're presented respectfully and any controversial claims are argued coherently, especially with data)

Political viewpoints are a point of marginalisation, and if we believe in creating inclusive communities, the same should apply to politics. We elevate the viewpoints of minorities in tech, and I would love to see us not draw the line at politics.

> Whatever your partisan opinion, at least 70M American adults, 48.5% of those voting, disagree with you and think you’re an idiot.

This is a site for hackers - people with a special affinity for technology, science, building things, and solving problems.

Openly supporting a president who gleefully ignores the advice of scientists and bans immigrants from Muslim countries is inherently harmful to the work of hackers not to mention life on this planet.

To pretend both sides have equal merit just because large numbers of people exist on each is dishonest.

1. Does continuous governance include a civil war? This wasn’t the most contentious election seeing as a previous one of ours did in fact lead to civil war, but it wasn’t “just one more election.” I reckon this election brought us closer to civil war than any since Lincoln. And whereas the trouble of Lincoln’s time was necessary for the moral growth of our nation, Trump has provoked our current discord merely to aid his dictatorial intents. The democracy was nearly lost. It may still be. But at least now we have a chance. If that’s not momentous I don’t know what is.

A voting system needs to be accurate but it also needs to inspire confidence. I think the U.S. failed on the latter point. Let me be clear that I don't think this affected the outcome, only the confidence in the outcome.

Mail-in voting has existed for a long time, but it is being done at a larger scale and in new ways and new places. It was a mistake to do it during such a contentious election. Covid is not a good enough reason: it's easy enough to drop the ballot in a county box so the secretary of state has a chain of custody for all valid ballots. I would actually prefer voter ID as well as people standing there to do a brief check. In addition to preventing fraud, it also helps remind voters if they forgot to sign or something.

Also, I think it needs to be said that a lot of people hate Trump. Hate can cause people to do things that they would never imagine doing otherwise, like election fraud. It doesn't need to be a conspiracy... just a lot of individuals doing small stuff (post office employees throwing away likely Trump ballots, etc.).

And it doesn't help that the map looked quite red on the day of the election, and that the poll numbers were WAY off, and that the media was rooting for Biden. It all just erodes confidence.

have any links to real evidence of widespread fraud that would affect the outcome?

They said the same thing about NSA surveillance before Snowden

And then Snowden provided evidence. What are you getting at here?

I have many links to evidence that there are real people out there who are convinced that there was election fraud. Whether there actually was any is immaterial; the mere appearance of fraud is bad enough.

cool, where are the links? if you want to go on about appearance of wrongdoing, there's been plenty of that the last 4 years. in fact, the president was impeached for it

People are convinced because Trump tries to convince them using lies and deception.

Do you really think the right solution as a reward for those lies is to make it harder to vote?

I specifically said I don't think any of this affected the outcome, but it's also about the confidence. I know many people who do belive there was some manipulation here, and I don't think it's necessary. Not just Trump-die-hards, but people who just think it looks suspicious. We could have done more to avoid those suspicions.

> would actually prefer voter ID as well as people standing there to do a brief check. In addition to preventing fraud, it also helps remind voters if they forgot to sign or something.

I’m just unsure why you would want to make it harder for people to vote.

I’m honestly uninformed on this, apart from being from Australia which has compulsory voting without voter ID and there’s no issues, but have there actually be scenarios where there’s been fraud instances where showing ID would have resolved things? Has voter ID shown to help more people vote around the world?

I don't see ID as a major barrier to voting, but it adds confidence to the system.

I received two ballots, one for me and one for some previous tenant. I marked the other one "return to sender" and put it in the mailbox. But someone else could have pretty easily just voted twice.

Maybe that would be caught by some other mechanism? Maybe people just don't do that? But it still adds confidence and I don't really see a downside.

Maybe it doesn't need to be a super secure ID, but something would be reassuring.

If people do that on a large enough scale there will be collisions (i.e. the previous tenant will want to vote themselves, leading to this scheme unraveling real quick and no easy way for you to hide this fraud since you are living at one of the previous addresses of that last tenant.)

This cannot influence elections meaningfully and it is nonsensical to state that.

> But someone else could have pretty easily just voted twice.

No they could not have. Every vote is checked off against the voter registration rolls. The Board of Elections knows when you have voted. You should volunteer for your local board of elections next election. Maybe it will give you more confidence in the system.

To vote get excess votes, you have to first commit voter registration fraud or vote for people you know will not vote. And you have to do it in large enough numbers to make a difference. And you have to assume only one party engages in fraud. Also, it’s a felony to commit voter fraud.

Voter ID is an attempt to fix a problem that doesn’t exist in the real world. Meanwhile, it suppresses votes.

There’s a large amount of “cure” work that’s occurring right now by both parties throughout the country because of votes that weren’t counted due to all sorts of innocuous mistakes people make. It’s thousands of ballots in some places. Meanwhile fraud? There’s no there there.

My brother helped to cure ballots in Florida because people forgot a signature. Someone has to go to their house and get them to sign an affidavit that they voted.

There’s cure efforts in NC for provisional ballots for things like the DMV failing to forward a registration to the Board of Elections. Or someone who voted in the wrong precinct by accident.

These are all valid votes that won’t be counted due to a mistake by the voter unless someone contacts them and helps them to provide the documentation necessary to the BOE to validate their vote.

Stop spouting nonsense about fraud and volunteer for your local election board or your party.

So if this person didn't bother to update their voter registration, then maybe they didn't bother to vote either. In which case the person who gets their ballot can vote for them (illegally) and it will match their registration.

There's still signature matching. I didn't say it's impossible. It's just virtually impossible to do at enough scale to matter w/o getting caught and evidence of it occurring doesn't exist. The GOP has looked for it really, really hard.

https://apnews.com/article/f5f6a73b2af546ee97816bb35e82c18d

The vast majority of people are both a) honest; and b) not going to risk a felony just to cast a single fraudulent vote.

I can't prove a negative here, so if your argument is that it happens and it's impossible to detect or we just aren't looking hard enough, I don't know what to tell you.

Meanwhile, voter suppression and disenfranchisement exists! It's right there to see. A higher voter turnout would reduce the impact of any single fraudulent vote.

https://www.npr.org/2020/09/13/912519039/a-look-at-voter-sup...

https://www.aclu.org/other/oppose-voter-id-legislation-fact-...

The most recent fraud attempt I'm aware of, the culprit got caught. They were collecting absentee ballots and then not returning them. (NC no longer publishes who's requested an absentee ballot till after the election to make this harder to do.)

https://www.npr.org/2019/07/30/746800630/north-carolina-gop-...

I'm not asking you prove a negative and I am not even saying fraud happens at any significant scale. I am just saying that confidence in the system is important, and we could have done better on that axis.

There are a lot of people I know who are saying (in a casual, let's-not-start-a-war-over-this tone) essentially "yeah, it was tilted to get Trump out, but no surprise there, and Trump will never prove it". We really could have done a lot to make the situation better.

FWIW I think my state did a pretty good job, but it's not a swing state.

> "yeah, it was tilted to get Trump out, but no surprise there, and Trump will never prove it"

That’s cognitive dissonance at work.

The GOP has a structural advantage in the EC, the Senate, the House, and legislatures across the country[1,2]. Despite the GOP candidate having won the popular vote for the nPresident once out of the last eight (now nine) elections, they control six of nine seats on the SCOTUS. Despite Trump having a single term in office, he’s appointed 30% of the Federal judiciary with judges who are on average several years younger than the judges Obama appointed.

If anyone has reason to complain about tilt, it’s Democrats. Trump lost the popular vote by four million votes. I know it’s only the EC that matters, but that doesn’t make the system any less fair.

Trump voters are complaining about a tilted field that exists only in their imaginations. In reality, the electoral process in the U.S. currently favors the GOP.

1. A particularly egregious example is here in NC where the GOP won 50% of the vote in 2018 but secured 10 of 13 districts.

2. https://insideelections.com/news/article/the-gops-long-term-...

Also, in 2016, Trump's margins:

- MI: 10,704 votes.

- PA: 44,292 votes.

- WI: 22,748 votes.

He lost the popular vote by nearly 3M votes. That's with an assist from Russia and Comey.

Despite all that, Clinton conceded the next day. She called Trump and congratulated him. She gave a gracious concession speech saying things like "We have seen that our nation is more deeply divided than we thought. But I still believe in America and I always will. And if you do, then we must accept this result and then look to the future. Donald Trump is going to be our president. We owe him an open mind and the chance to lead. Our constitutional democracy enshrines the peaceful transfer of power and we don't just respect that, we cherish it. It also enshrines other things; the rule of law, the principle that we are all equal in rights and dignity, freedom of worship and expression. We respect and cherish these values too and we must defend them."

No one accused Trump of fraud at the ballot box. She didn't seek to undermine the democratic process. She graciously accepted defeat to a man who had been threatening to lock her up.

Lastly, he was the incumbent this year. That's such an advantage that the incumbent has lost only five times in a hundred years.

The field was definitely tilted this election as in the last, but it was in Trump's favor both times.

Adding any barrier is bad enough.

It needs to be easier to vote, not harder.

> I would actually prefer voter ID

Unsubstantiated fear mongering erodes confidence.

The opposite side of this coin is voter suppression. A vote suppressed is exactly as bad as a fraudulent vote. But, I think I'm in the minority on the voter ID opinion, and I want people to be confident in democracy, so I hope we can come to a compromise.

I'll vote for voter ID if you vote for expanding access to voting. Make election day a holiday. Make issuance of voter IDs automatic. Switch to no-excuse absentee ballots everywhere. Expand early voting options.

p.s. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voting_rights_in_the_United_St...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voter_impersonation_(United_St...

Suppression has and continues to be an actual problem. Even in just this election:

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/florida-felon-voting-rights-pay...

Late edit: Downvotes. Hysterical. Wonder if it’s the vote suppression advocates or the folks who disagree with voter ID. No fans of compromise?

I've always wanted strong voter verification/ID but also massive voter turnout efforts. I haven't found many people with a similar take.

> I'll vote for voter ID if you vote for expanding access to voting. Make election day a holiday. Make issuance of voter IDs automatic. Switch to no-excuse absentee ballots everywhere. Expand early voting options.

I support all of this. And let's also make sure people who are voting are eligible to do so.

We should trust but verify the results. The basis of facts should be settled in the following:

1. Select all ballots that were sent to the same address - or sent to the same Post Office (grouping all PO Boxes by post office). ^ Here you are trying to see if there is systemic voting behaviors out of the ordinary -- i.e. did 10+ ballots go to one address.

2. Select all ballots that were sent to an alternate address than the voter registration. ^ This is a general query -- select a sample set of these and confirm with the registered voter that they did indeed receive a mail in ballot.

3. If above is inconclusive, select all registered voters that requested a mail in ballot against the 2017-2018 Equifax Data to determine if correlations occur.

4. Select all ballots that were the voter did not vote in the last X elections (there are political consultancies that provide information on who NOT to waste your time on because they do not vote), did these people request a mail in ballot? Were these ballots sent to an alternate address?

For clarification [1], if one were armed with a SSN or DL and a previous address, one could request a ballot on behalf of another person AND have that ballot redirected to a location of their choosing... including a PO Box. The form is included here for reference.

[1] https://www.votespa.com/Register-to-Vote/Documents/PADOS_Mai...

EDIT: just so you know, I think both of them did things like this. I want my d%mn democracy back.

The actual scale of the audit of 100 million ballots is an insane cost with extensive time. The verification is built into the system. Key features include: states conducting their own elections, paper ballots being required, ballots need to have a chain of custody to be valid, and counting is done in a transparent and continuously audited manner.

Making lists and centralized techniques are a Bad Idea and exactly what authoritarian regimes go about doing.

Voting fraud on the scale required to influence a US election is not possible due to voting registration requirements. Registering any significant amount of fake people is not feasible, and if you are trying to cast the votes of any significant number of real people you will quickly have a collision with someone who actually does intend on voting, leading to an investigation and the whole scheme unraveling.

Voter registration + signature checks + investigating duplicate ballots is a robust system for ensuring that systematic voting fraud can only achieve a small result without being overwhelmingly likely to be caught. If the election had actually come down to a margin of a few thousand votes in a single state it might have been worth the resources to do a deep-dive, but with the margins that occurred we can be certain that voting fraud did not influence the result.

The claims I've seen were:

* dead people "voted" in the election

* late votes by mail were stamped with a fictive past date

Anyway, I don't see why you're so comfortable with election fraud as long as it doesn't influence the result. There is no way to know if fraud happened and what scale this happened at without doing this so-called "deep-dive" you mention.

No one is comfortable with election fraud. Election Fraud is a well researched problem (by republicans too), and it's been shown again and again that it is an incredibly small problem. You are talking about a couple thousand confirmed cases [1] in elections where tens of millions of votes were cast. Claims of election fraud are not new.

A bigger problem is voter suppression, through ever growing extraneous requirements (such as Harris County, a population of 5 million, only have 1 ballot drop off, due to a law to prevent more than one drop off per county). Voter supression however does not get anywhere near the same amount of attention.

[1] https://www.heritage.org/voterfraud

The election boards of each of the 50 States and the District of Columbia do in fact conduct regular audits, and frequently purge voter rolls of registered voters that have been sufficiently inactive as to be suspected of having died or moved out of the state. You may have read about such events in previous months in the national news.

I don’t see why I would care much if there is voting fraud if I can be certain that it did not influence the result. What does it harm me if an election decided by a margin of tens of thousands of votes had some few hundreds or even thousands of illegitimate ballots cast? It’s a tiny amount of noise in a very strong signal. It’s easy for a state to estimate what percentage of the vote could possibly have been fraudulent, and when the signal seems to be at risk of being lost in the noise there is a robust process of signal recovery. But recounts are expensive and a waste of time and resources when they are not needed.

Ten thousand votes does not seem to me like a strong signal. If you look at popular vote, there is a 4m discrepency. Asuming all the results are legitimate, that's maybe 2-4% of the voters that agree more with one than the other.

It is grotesque to call 2% a strong signal.

As for voter fraud, I'm curious how you think it is insignificant without an audit. And even if it was, shouldn't the fraudsters be prosecuted?

> It is grotesque to call 2% a strong signal.

It's a pretty strong signal of who won the election, given that we know that submission of fraudulent ballots doesn't work at scale.

> As for voter fraud, I'm curious how you think it is insignificant without an audit.

In is audited, continuously, by the fact that voters have to be registered and can't vote twice. Voter rolls are regularly audited by state election commissions to remove people who have died and/or moved out of the state, and there's no evidence of a non-negligible number of fake people making their way onto voter registration rolls. When two ballots are returned for the same person, or if a ballot is returned for someone who is known to be dead, etc, it prompts an investigation into how that happened. Not every registered voter votes, but by and large people register to vote because they intend to vote, so it's infeasible for a systematic effort to submit fraudulent ballots to avoid colliding with the real votes of the people being impersonated.

> And even if it was, shouldn't the fraudsters be prosecuted?

They are prosecuted.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/12/01/0-...

And really, "grotesque"? That seems pretty rude.

>And really, "grotesque"? That seems pretty rude.

Did not mean it that way, my apologies. It was meant to be an hyperbole

>They are prosecuted.

You were suggesting not conducting an audit so they could not be prosecuted if we don't know who they are

>Not every registered voter votes, but by and large people register to vote because they intend to vote, so it's infeasible for a systematic effort to submit fraudulent ballots to avoid colliding with the real votes of the people being impersonated.

From what I have seen, only ~65% of registered voters usually vote. I am not convinced that impersonating part of that 35% is infeasible. There are also other ways to manipulate votes than to submit a ballot and hope the person does not vote, e.g. you could collude with UPS to lose ballots, buy votes, replace valid ballots/votes, etc.

EDIT: Take Wisconsin as an example. There is a 20k difference between the two candidates. 20k is ~0.6% of the 3.2m voters that voted (whereas the parent post stated 10k which is a very small signal)

> You were suggesting not conducting an audit so they could not be prosecuted if we don't know who they are.

I think there may have been a misunderstanding here. Up the thread I was explaining why systematic auditing isn’t done at the time of the election when the margin is large.

Audits are done systematically in the time between elections, to run down irregularities like the ones linked above, and to ready the registered voter rolls for the next election. Audits are also done during recounts, which happen if the margin is small enough that fraud could have tipped the election result.

During the election itself reliance is on validation. Ballots are mailed out only to registered voters, USPS mail-tracking tracks each ballot to ensure that it was delivered to the voter’s registered address, returned ballots have their signatures checked, and duplicate votes are detected.

There are definitely many other ways to defraud the election other than committing voter fraud. Hacking voting machines or the tabulating process itself is a concerning possibility. But this election I haven’t seen any accusations that this occurred, only accusations of illegitimate ballot submissions.

Both of those claims are likely based on this Steve Bannon funded study of voter fraud: http://g-a-i.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/Voter-Fraud-Fina...

Data analysis would indicate that the DOB for many voters are over a 100 years old. Even as mentioned in this very report, that's because of a technical bug. DOB wasn't required, and when it was, the system used something like 0000 as the birthdate. The report dismissed these findings, but it seems either the media or general public has still been running with it.

Finally, it's worth noting the study itself is highly inaccurate: https://electionupdates.caltech.edu/2017/09/11/report-on-vot...

(edit: updated original link of study to g-a-i, this study is also mirrored on whitehouse.gov)

Great — so let’s just run the queries so I can go to sleep

It’ll happen, but nobody’s going to hold up on calling the election, certifying results, and choosing electors in the meantime.

Yep. That's what scares me a bit - you don't want to find this out after all the endorphins and emotions solidify sides.

Well, there aren’t going to be any surprises. It’s not like voter fraud is an actual problem in the United States.

Because you say so?

Because it only seemed to effect the person incapable of handling a loss. Why arent losing congress people claiming their races were defrauded aswell?

Actually if you look at the counties and Representative races there’s much to cheer about on the side I believe you are implying — it’s just a few locations they are calling into question that swing states, not rep races. .

[0] https://www.270towin.com/2020-election-results-live/house/dq...

> Voting fraud on the scale required to influence a US election is not possible due to voting registration requirements.

Im not from the US, but my understanding of the alleged fraud is that due to coronavirus many states sent every registered voter a blank ballot (where in the past they explicitely had to request a ballot) and that, again allegedly, some people would habe been able to obtain such blank ballots and vote for their prefered candidate?

I’ll lead off by mentioning that some states already voted by mail and have for many years. So if there were a problem with this approach that enabled mass voter fraud we would be well aware by now.

The “blank ballots” are not blank in the sense that they are interchangeable. Each ballot sent out is the specific ballot of a specific person. It’s certainly possible that some ballots were stolen from their intended recipients and mailed back with forged signatures, but what’s important is whether this could have been done on a mass scale to influence the election result. And the answer to that is no. A coordinated effort to fraudulently return enough ballots to matter would require large-scale raiding of mailboxes to steal ballots, or stealing ballots in mass quantity soon after they were put into the postal system by each state’s election commission. The former is impossible, as it would require an organization comparable in size to the postal service to be able to go house by house stealing ballots as they were delivered, and it would be obvious that it was occurring. The latter is easy to detect and trivial to rectify.

In both cases, the fraud would be detected as soon as anyone who hadn’t received their ballot went to their state’s election website and requested another ballot and were informed that their ballot had been delivered and returned.

I'll post this scenario here again just to get your opinion on it -- you have good thoughts.

Here's the scenario as it plays now: many 'grassroots' movements are reified when a bus comes to pick a group of people up, hands them a template ballot of who to vote for, then brings them to the polls to vote, and finally ends the ride with a dinner and party back at the place.

First, this is legal, at least where I'm from, and is a common way to 'get out the vote.'

Second, this implicitly has a built in rate-limiter because I need the physical voter to be present and to go into the booth alone.

However! This time, I don't have to bus you to the polls... I can host a party at my house to request all of your ballots come to me, where I fill them out and copy your signature from the party / event. OR I do this over the course of a few months, and still have all the ballots directed to me, still copy your signature from the form we filled out together. Or even worse, I use hacked data to request a ballot on your behalf because you never show up to the polls anyway.

To me, that's an extreme vulnerability -- that means beyond it not being rate limited, the physical person is no longer needed to fill out their own ballot. Not only this... there was always the chance someone could go 'off script' and vote for who they wanted for and just get the free meal. Now, they are guaranteed to be the way you wanted because you filled them out.

^ I've known people go on buses to get meals and vote 'off script'

And finally, the reason 'this hasn't happened until now' is because most mail in voting was for absentee voting (in the battle ground states) and never done at this scale where you could have a whole community request ballots to one address almost undetected. (yes this is detectable post-fact, but damage is done and intent is there on both sides.)

Oregon, Washington, Colorado, and Utah have voted by mail and sent a ballot to every registered voter for years. No signs so far that this has been abused to facilitate the sort of coordinated large scale fraud that you’re concerned about. Though there’s some evidence that it leads to closer matches between the votes of married partners compared to in-person voting, which is very concerning for for similar reasons! But spousal vote coercion is not new and by most definitions is not a form of voter fraud. I dream that someday we will be able to introduce a voting system that can ensure ballot secrecy even in these scenarios, but sadly the technology isn’t there yet. (Side note - this is why taking a picture of your ballot in a voting booth is illegal. It prevents being able to prove how you voted.)

Ballots are delivered to the legal address of each registered voter. A state election board is going to notice (and maybe call the fire marshal haha) if 1,000 people all suddenly announced that they are moving into the same house. The premise that neither the state nor the people having their legal address surreptitiously changed would notice isn’t a realistic cause for concern.

It is hard to find evidence of abuse when practically every attempt to look into it is met with refusal and/or claims that it is not probable.

Ah yes, the classic: no evidence is proof that it is being covered up.

I just presented the queries for first amounts of evidence — you have to let the search occur.

If none turn up — whole heartily agree, all clean, send it up to the losers to shut the hell up.

When it comes to fraud, obtaining a ballot is as easy as obtaining a bank check, for example. It's legal (in my state, anyway) for various parties to distribute them, and you could print your own, if you had the right paper. (You'd be in hot water if your ballot wasn't the exact document the state distributes - it's a crime to distribute a ballot that's prepopulated with the user's data, for example)

The security features of the process do not depend on mail-in ballots being unique or scarce.

The important thing that has to be avoided if you want to perpetrate voter fraud is accidentally submitting a ballot for someone who actually votes themselves. Given that most registered voters do in fact vote it's not a workable approach to just print out ballots and submit them, you also need a reason to believe that the targeted voter isn't going to vote, such as having intercepted their ballot.

In principle you could inconvenience a lot of people by sending in fake ballots randomly, lots of them, and forcing those people to cast provisional ballots when they try to vote in person. And whoever didn't show up, you'd have a decent chance of getting the vote in if you could approximate their signature.

In practice this doesn't happen, I just assume because it's easy to detect, it's a felony that comes with a prison sentence (and a lot of people would be looking for you) and because it actually creates a lot of problems for whichever candidate receives the votes.

I think an alternate scenario, where ballots are sent to a lot of people with the voter's name and address information "helpfully" prepopulated on the form, incorrectly, is perhaps slightly more of a threat. In this case people are at risk of casting a ballot that will be rejected and their board of elections might or might not notify them there's a problem. Sending prepopulated ballots is illegal where I live because an organization trying to be helpful in this way could inadvertently disenfranchise people by mistake with a bad list, but there's the other risk as well.

Again, easy to detect and a crime, and I don't think it's been a problem here.

Voting in the USA is such a joke for it being a first world country. One would expect blockchain based systems or at least a cryptographically based system to exist. The fact that they don't even have a national voter ID. Like seriously how much does it cost to have one and give it for free to every person? Poorer countries have done so with more success. The calls arguing voter suppression are the dumbest, if you are not smart enough to get a card and vote, then maybe that vote should not count.

It is certainly true that the US is frequently behind the curve of other first world nations on government deployment of new technology. This is largely because of 2 reasons. Reason #1, the US historically is frequently the first place technologies are deployed on a wide scale, and as a result the US generally has the earliest and thus the worst version of everything. Reason #2, the US system of federated States introduces great friction into any system requiring a central authority.

The absence of a national voter ID program perfectly exemplifies this. The US has an election system that works sufficiently well, so there’s no major impetus to overhaul how voters vote. And the US Federal government doesn’t even have a list of all US citizens. In fact, no such list even exists. Moreover, a lack of any existing documentation that a person is a citizen does not necessarily mean that they are not a citizen due to birthright citizenship or citizenship automatically inherited from parents.

Concerns about voter suppression induced by the introduction of a national voter ID are completely legitimate. The US Federal government lacks the capacity to ensure that every eligible voter is delivered an ID (lacking a list of all citizens), so the burden to acquire one falls on the individual. If this costs money, then it constitutes an unconstitutional poll tax. And in any case, since the Federal government is incapable of handling such a responsibility it would fall to the individual states, some of which have demonstrated historically that they will act to make the process arbitrarily difficult for individuals that the sitting state legislature would prefer do not vote.

Schoefield’s third law of computing. Elections need to be long, painful, effortful processes. Automating it is a bad idea. An optimal robot-slave humanity would minmax to humans’ only jobs being checking ballots and saying hello.

This election came down basically to three counties in two states.

It would also explain irregularities with those counties when compared to other counties with very similar demographics.

Your answer shows a lack of imagination in regards to how fraud might be perpetuated in this situation.

As our election systems come to depend on electronic solutions the attack surface increases significantly.

Sure, sure, but that's a completely separate topic from voter fraud. And it's also not something I've heard anyone alleging happened in the 2020 election.

This was not done after the 2016 elections. Why should such a procedure be adopted now? Are there any indications of widespread fraud / miscounting / etc. ?

There was never any “cover” to hide behind — we never really did much mail in voting as a people (absentee mostly).

Now the pandemic is cover enough to hide a few thousand with ease.

I’m confused. People who count ballots only count ballots they issue. Sending in 50k ballots they didn’t issue would result in 50k ballots they didn’t issue getting thrown out. Where is there room for concern for fraud?

A few states have been all mail-in for years. 10s of millions of votes were cast by mail in 2016 and 2018. There were certainly more this year, but only like 4-5x.

(It helps that the most populous state is mostly mail-in).

HN is throttling me, so here's some more info:

https://www.ncsl.org/research/elections-and-campaigns/absent... and https://electproject.github.io/Early-Vote-2020G/index.html have most of the info you want.

CO, DC, HI, OR, UT, and WA are vote by mail for all elections. CA was sort of doing VBM in 2016, but it's more committed to it now. This year, NJ, VT, and NV were also vote by mail as one time things. So in prior years there were more than 30 million mail ballots, and AZ, CA, CO, FL, MI, OH, OR, and WA had more than a million mail votes cast (though some of those were likely classified as absentee in MI and OH).

Can you please cite the states that are all-mail in please? I've been checking SOS websites and have not run across this in the states I've checked...

Edit:

Thank you both (below, too) for the info. Yeah, so for the states that default mail ballots (WA, OR, CO), I don't see an issue as these states have used this method previously.

What I'm focusing on are states that moved from 'vote by mail optional' -- to 'vote by mail, nearly default because of a recent pandemic.' Which changes the nature and security of the Ballot Request System in each of these states.

Normal implicit controls around ballot requests are out of the window in this new 'mail-in majority' culture. Refer to my 'bussing' example above.

Washington, Oregon, Colorado all have universal mail-in where every registered voter automatically gets a ballot in the mail (though you can still drop off your ballot, or vote in person). California is _largely_ mail-in but I don't think it's universal...

> we never really did much mail in voting as a people (absentee mostly).

That is false. An official report of the US Elections Assistance Commission:

https://www.eac.gov/sites/default/files/eac_assets/1/6/2016_...

says that, in 2016, 23.7% of ballots were mailed in.

Good fellow, are you really going to say the mail in ballot ratio is the same in a pandemic and not in a pandemic?

That fact is selective on a national scale — if you looked at states, the mail in vs in person ratio is standard deviations away from the norm.

> Good fellow, are you really going to say the mail in ballot ratio is the same in a pandemic and not in a pandemic?

I didn't say that.

Do you realize how fucking hard it is to influence elections by ballot shenanigans?

Do you realize how much fucking power is at play here?

This just doesn't happen. This has been a cause celebre of one party in the use for more than a decade and they have found on the order of a dozen proven examples of voter fraud.

https://www.brennancenter.org/sites/default/files/analysis/B... has hard data.

The problem, which doesn't require citation as it has been in the news for weeks, is partisan voter suppression, disenfranchisement (DC, Puerto Rico, Guam), and gerrymandering.

Every single thing you have suggested has been investigated and have found something on the order of 1* 10^-4 % rates of occurrence.

To remind everyone, there was a lawsuit to disenfranchise over 100,000 voters in Texas because of disagreement in how their ballots were submitted. Not recounted, not rechecked. Summarily tossed out. > 1000 times more people would have been effected by this one incident than there were provable instances of voter fraud (most of which was based on confusion by elderly). Limited voting hours, closures of voting stations so common they are accepted now but they are outrageous.

This is leaving aside the well documented actions of DeJoy during his time with the USPS. I would also like to see an investigation with subpoena of communications of of the company that caused delays in the printing/mailing of PA absentee ballots https://www.wkyc.com/article/news/politics/elections/clevela... and tracing the threatening robocall campaign in swing states: https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/11/03/robocal...

The US doesn't have a voting integrity issue, it has a voting suppression issue.

edit: just another example of the egregious attempts at disenfranchising voters: https://ktar.com/story/3681236/elections-officials-lawyer-ca...

> The US doesn't have a voting integrity issue, it has a voting suppression issue.

While I whole heartedly agree, I’m concerned how we arrived here. There have been no new additional controls put in place to ensure a dramatic shift in the voter culture (from majority in person to mail in), did not expose vulnerabilities previously unused.

The amount of votes submitted via a given method hasn't changed that methods vulnerability. Given how much money is invested into elections to propel a candidate to victory you can be almost guaranteed that any weakness that could have been exploited has likely already been identified, exploited and patched or is sufficiently difficult prove (i.e it's not ballot based) as to be continue to be used.

i.e the ballot counting system is like iOS and a reliable way of getting fraudualent ballots counted is an iOS sandbox 0day. It's so insanely valuable that everyone is hunting for it and huge resources are deployed to protect it.

On the other hand other attacks like voter suppression, propaganda, social media manipulation are sufficiently hard to prove or patch they continue to be used.

Interesting frame -- I see your point.

Very quickly, I'm not speaking to the Ballot Counting System - I'm speaking to the Ballot Request System. The Request requires information that could be obtained from an individual and rerouted to a centralized operation to fill in the ballot for the person.

It is akin to what happens in some states where some folks are bussed to the polls and given a ballot pre-filled by a trusted member in their community and told to follow the ballot template and we will all go get dinner afterward.

However, in the case of the mail in ballot, the physical voter is no longer required, leveraging the efforts of one person beyond the previous systems limitations: i.e. bus size, trip time, etc.

^ Real life example of the previous exploit -- that is legal if done correctly.

Back to the point: the BRS had an implicit control in place previously... as in, if we see a ton of mail in requests in one location, we should probably check that out. Now that control is invalidated because of the pandemic... thus removing an implicit control without recreating a control to achieve parity (the recreated control for me is the queries I laid out above).

I am not seeing how the request system is vulnerable. As I understand it there is a register of absentee voters, ballots are generated (sometimes with privacy sleeves/envelopes etc) and printed with barcodes that tie ballots back to a specific voter ID up until the point that information is separated for counting.

Given knowledge of how that system works and controls put around it I doubt any such vulnerabilities could exist that could be found by statistical analysis that isn't already being done...

I also think you missed the point of my last sentence which is that you could consider the actual ballot system a lot like AES or any other cryto system you might be familiar with.

Cracking the crypto system is stupidly hard because a ton of time was invested making that so. Instead attacking the stuff -around- the crypto system is likely to prove much more fruitful. i.e social engineering, side channel attacks

In the same way the attacks I listed above elicit the desired effect (a certain candidate having an unfair advantage) but without attacking the actual ballot system itself (which is likely far too difficult).

Essentially it's a case of lower hanging fruit, you don't need voter fraud to "steal" an election.

Thanks for having such a great conversation on this --

> I am not seeing how the request system is vulnerable.

Here's the scenario: I obtain your SSN, Name and Address to request your ballot to my address (either in the bussing example through your explicit permission or through the nefarious example like using Equifax 2017-2018 Data), then I fill it in at my address, and then mailed it in.

(Edit: to be clear, you have only provided the information to start the ballot process, or I obtained it nefariously, and submitted a ballot without your presence and pen to paper)

That's not a vulnerability? I guess I have a weird definition... I'm saying that's not what I expect when I hear someone 'voted.'

That's a vulnerability, but there's no evidence it happens in any scale.

If it did happen in any scale, people would notice because the victim of fraud, when they tried to vote, would be notified that their ballot was duplicated or already mailed in. Also, note that the address ballots go to is the voter's registered address, and many ballots going to the same address would be noticed.

Anyway. This sort of vulnerability really does exist all over real human systems, and in reality it mostly doesn't matter. People usually don't do this sort of fraud en masse.

Online vulnerabilities can be exploited at scale easily by a single malicious actor, but human vulnerabilities, like dine-and-dash, or package theft, etc, are much more rare. They're illegal, which discourages most people, and to do any of them at scale, you need a lot of people... and one of those people is likely to report it. The human factor makes scaling it up much harder.

Intercepting a lot of voter ballots either requires them all to go to the same address (which will get noticed), or for you to steal them from many addresses (which won't scale easily per above and will be noticed). Either of those schemes will be noticed when a voter attempts to actually vote.

The vendors do not inspire confidence. Some machines in Michigan crashed due to a bad update on Election Day. Why do we allow secretive, proprietary machines where untested and unaudited updates can be pushed at any time? To be clear, I don’t think there was any foul play, but it just reeks of incompetence and we are putting all the trust on them.

https://www.politico.com/news/2020/11/04/georgia-election-ma...

There's no way to have a safe voting system without trust in the government and how states operate. There's just no way that, as a citizen, you can verify your vote. It's all in sybil attacks: how do you identify one person in the first place? You need strong cryptography tied to each citizen, and you need to trust the government that they are not creating fictive citizens.

> Select all ballots that were the voter did not vote in the last X elections

I don’t think there’s anything inherently suspicious about voting for the first time in a long time (or ever). This election was incredibly charged, so you would expect to see more people voting than usual.

I just want to push back strongly on the idea that a vote is suspicious just because that voter doesn’t typically vote. It’s a soft form of voter suppression, in a way - and we should be conscious to encourage everyone to vote, regardless of how long it’s been.

—

As an anecdote - I encouraged my family to vote, and some of them did: some of them for the first time in a very long time. I also served as an election judge and registered more than one person to vote on Election Day, including one person who told me they’d never bothered to vote before. But their votes were valid, and don’t deserve to be treated as suspicious.

So yeah, totally agree there will be outliers, but it’s definitely a focused sample set that tests the hypothesis well.

It’s complex, with a ton of fractaled placed to hide (day of registrations, first time voters etc)

Did you ask for this in 2016, 2012 or 2008 too? Just curious. Shouldn't we also make sure that certain Republican voters did not vote in multiple states or counties?

I don’t think your question is serious, right? Were we in a pandemic that statistically shifted the voter habits of a large amount of Americans from in person, physically gated process to a highly leveragable, mail in ballot process in those years?

As for 2008, 2010, 2012, 2014, 2016, 2018, and 2020 (there is much power outside of a presidential election) — the bus example is the current status quo and has been used for ages and accepted as the norm — that’s been the “worst/best (whatever your virtue signal tells you) way to influence an election.

If you’d like to have an honest discussion about it - I’d love to, I’m very seriously in the camp that votes are votes and every single one should be counted no matter how they arrived to the polls.

> highly leveragable, mail in ballot process

It isn't. Mail in ballots have been the status quo in many states for decades.

The most common problem with mail in ballots has been rejection from unverified signatures, which in some cases is arguably an instance of voter suppression.

> Mail in ballots have been the status quo in many states for decades.

Let’s focus on the battle ground states - not all states - and let’s specifically look at PA for a moment. Because of the electoral college, the statement that nationwide and some states we have used mail in ballots before is irrelevant.

So in 2018 PA had 200k absentee ballots - the mail-in ballot process [0].

In 2016 PA, and specifically Philly, had fewer absentee ballots requested than 2008 or 2012 [1] with around 18k for that metro.

In 2020, 2.6 million mail in ballots were requested 3 weeks before the election [2].

So you tell me, what really looks like the status quo? 2.6m ballots or around 200k. Physics would call this an order or magnitude difference, no? That would directly contradict that mail in ballots for PA are a status quo... and if you looked at the rest of the battle ground states, you will find similar evidence that mail in was never the preferred or dominate form of voting in the metros and battle ground counties.

[0]https://whyy.org/articles/pa-rejected-twice-as-many-absentee...

[1] https://www.phillymag.com/news/2016/11/02/absentee-ballot-re...

[2] https://www.post-gazette.com/local/2020/10/13/Pennsylvania-m...

My point is that the mail in ballot process itself is proven as not "leverageable", as you insinuated it to be.

The fact that the status quo changed was expected. It was predicted during the very first stages of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Your insinuation is that because Pennsylvania is experiencing a surge of mail in ballots that its mail in ballot process is somehow vulnerable to be heavily abused, even though it is essentially a verbatim copy of what other states have been using - without abuse - for decades.

The country may be divided. But those divisions are manufactured and exacerbated over the last 4 years by a made-for-TV president.

I couldn't help but think, in looking at various TV news channels this past week, that this is all sport. Big numbers on the score board and the play-by-play constantly flashing on the screens. We're the spectators, and the politicians are players on the field. Trump played the field better than anyone.

I hope that a new president and a new administration can show the USA that the division is not as deep and worrisome as is portrayed. We're actually all rooting for the same things here.

Trump is as much a product of the divisiveness as a cause. People initially took a shine to him because he was a "fighter". They saw a conflict already and wanted a fully willing combatant as a surrogate.

A couple weeks before the 2016 election Michael Moore (who I’m typically not big a fan of) had one of the best reads on why Trump would and ultimately did win that election. I've been politically homeless for a while now but still registered Republican as is almost all of my family. Moore's points directly map to my conversations with them better than any other explanation I've seen on the Internet.:

https://youtu.be/vMm5HfxNXY4

I think it's important to keep in mind that Trump winning the primaries in 2016 was essentially a repudiation of the entire Republican incumbency by a good portion of their base.

Just about every general "reason Trump would win" for last election looks pretty dumb with this election.

Because basically all those arguments remain true - yet Trump didn't win. These aren't argument for why Trump would win. They were arguments for why Trump has some purchase. The reason Trump won was the elites go so sloppy they let him win, they let their garbage boogieman alternative become the choice because they were addicted to having that kind of creep as their opposition.

And Michael Moore's argument in particular is crap among these. Homeless factory workers aren't Trump's base, family construction companies are his base - I see them regularly. The well-off but not college educated.

There's obviously some weirdly obsessed people out there getting air time but on the macro scale 2020's election was not-Biden vs not-Trump.

Precisely. Fortunately, it appears most of the country is ready to move on and accept Biden as President. My friends and family who are conservative are happy it’s over, and completely fine with the results. As cliche as it is, they accept that the people have spoken. The majesty of democratic voting and peaceful transfer of power is something beautiful to behold.

Hopefully Trump can accept the results sooner rather than later. His instinct to fight at all costs is not serving him well in this situation. Fortunately, it’s futile. As someone said in one of the debates, it’s not up to him whether he gets to stay, it’s up to us.

I hope the the next 4 years are more unified than the last 4.

You could be right, but I'm not really seeing a lot of evidence that "most of the country is ready to move on and accept Biden as President." Not seeing a lot of those Trump rally-goers suddenly deciding that Biden is OK. In fact what I see is a lot of Trump supporters outraged about what they believe is shaping up to be a stolen election. And a lot of comments to the effect that Trump is not Nixon (1960).

I’m confident they are a tiny yet loud minority. I hope I’m not proven wrong.

I know too many of those people in my personal life to believe that they are a tiny minority. Trump has built himself an effective cult following. People turn off their brains in order to follow him and start to believe most of what he says. They'll say that they understand that he's a liar, bu then still believe the lies. It's frustrating to watch it happen.

My pet theory is similar, but slightly more nuanced, and comes from my history of being harshly bullied in middle school.

The group dynamics of bullying are pretty straightforward. There will always be bullies at the top who want to cement their status by showing their power as a bully. To get a significant group of people to go along with the bullying, however, (think everyone laughing along when the bully makes fun of someone) that group needs to be really unsure of their place in the social hierarchy. They know bullying is wrong but at that point are somewhat terrified of ending up on the wrong side of the bullying. That's why you see so much bullying in middle school, where kids are usually just starting to find their place in the social hierarchy.

I think in the US (and many Western democracies) there is currently so much unease about economics, about finding a good, and more importantly, stable job, that the situation is ripe for a bully to come along and take advantage of people's general worries about their place in the world to think "better for me to be a bully myself than to be the person that ends up on the bottom of the totem pole". Think of the crowd laughing along when Trump mocked a reporter with cerebral palsy.

When you couple this with large, structural racial changes in the US, it's not hard to see how Trump was able to take advantage.

Trump was attempting to fix the broken H1-B Visa system, raising the wages that one must earn which is only a start.

H1-B Visa, by law, is only for those jobs where there are no Americans to fill the role, eg. theoretical physicist PhD with masters in data science.

But firms and hospitals use this to get foreigners at cheaper wages to supplant Americans from their jobs from programmers to doctors (MDs).

Biden, Schumer, Harris, all wish to make the job market and wages worse for American STEM workers/doctors (MDs).

During the 2016 primaries, when Disney CEO Bob Iger replaced about 200 American STEM workers with H1-B Visa abuse replacements, it was Trump and Sanders who complained vociferously about the illegal use of H1-B, which the Obama DOJ did nothing about, perhaps because Clinton received a $100,000 donation from the same Bob Iger for the Hilary Victory Fund.

Trump recently fired the CEO of the federal TVA for attempting to replace 200 American STEM workers H1-B Visa abuse foreigners and then made an exec order to prohibit any federal agency from doing so.

Biden, Schumer want to increase the number of H1-B Visas (Schumer wants to triple them). VP (and former Sen Harris) was Democratic sponsor of senate bill S.386 which seeks to double the number of Indians who get green cards.

The moves of Trump helps Americans. The moves of Biden, Schumer, Harris harms Americans.

Those are the facts, irrefutable, as have been presented above. So, ask yourself, do I want an American President that give in to donors like Bob Iger and brings more foreigners into the country or do I want someone like Trump, who cannot be bribed and does what is best for Americans and not foreigners.

You do realize that once those people get green cards, they are a good ways down the path toward being American, right? Immigration is economically very good for the US, as well.

None of this things matters, or will bring people together. These are minor issues compare to those who living on minimum wages, and without health insurance.

You should check all the red counties that voted for Trump and education level plus medium income. Compare that to the blue counties.

At least one reason why there’s division is because the left keeps pointing at education, and that Trumps supporters “lack any”. Regardless of the facts, it’s insulting. You are also implying that you go to school and learn to be liberal. Brainwashed is another word for this which is considered conspiracy theory. You’re also assuming that the entirety of present company is “educated”. Assuming this means college degree, this is most definitely not true on HN.

So, to what benefit do you or anybody have to point out the education level of any voter?

> None of this things matters, or will bring people together. These are minor issues

Ok, I'm about as far from a Trump supporter as one can get, but think about how this comment sounds to people on the other side. You just outright dismissed a fairly big topic that this person views as important.

> VP (and former Sen Harris) was Democratic sponsor of senate bill S.386 which seeks to double the number of Indians who get green cards.

Is that something that you perceive as bad or negative? Please explain why that is the case.

> We're actually all rooting for the same things here.

It's not helping anything to pretend this is true. For example, consider the spectrum of reactions you witness among your peers, not to mention on social media, the next time there's a high profile killing of an unarmed person of color by police officers. I don't think woo, it's great that we all want the same things is the feeling you're going to get.

Indeed. Historically I would have said conservatives in the US wanted the same thing (increased prosperity for all), and just had different ideas on how that was achieved.

Under Trump, it has become clear that they (edit: Republicans) want something fundamentally different: to do better than other groups of people. They care more about hurting those they disagree with than making things better for anyone.

You were right in the past. The people who want to “drink libtard tears” are a small minority, a mirror image of people on the left who want to throw Republicans into re-education camps.

It’s curious how many conclusions people draw from a binary choice on a ballot.

> re-education camps

Aka schools? Honestly, what do you do with people making $40k / year who think they’re going to be affected by tax on earnings over $400k, going to pay tax on the sale of their primary residence, and going to be affected by the estate tax?

There are a lot of people that can’t seem to figure out they aren’t rich and are never going to be.

Except that is a false equivalency, every Republican voter backed a candidate who ran on that platform and policy.

Yes, there will always be a few people at the extremes of any movement. It is very different when they control the movement.

They may have seen it as the "least-bad" option rather than actively wanting what Trump was offering, but honestly that distinction doesn't matter if they are willing to support that level of harm. You don't get to vote for Trump and claim you aren't in that group. If you enabled him, you own his policy.

Republicans just elected a congressman who addressed the world after the election by saying "Cry more, lib." [1] I question whether Democrats elected anyone advocating sending Republicans to reeducation camps.

[1] https://www.citizen-times.com/story/news/local/2020/11/04/cr...

I'm a US citizen, a self-identified conservative, and I cannot stand Trump (or the fact that on average, conservatives voted for him).

Not all conservatives fit your described profile.

This is true, I probably should have specified "Republicans" in the second half. Edited.

Yeah. It seems like a lot of people think they deserve to be filthy rich with a large servant class working for them. The economics of it just don’t work though. It takes a lot of working people to sustain the lifestyle of one rich person.

Your peers might be wondering why the only killings that become high profile, are those of people of color.

Are you trying to cast doubt on the imbalance in the occurrence of these killings? That seems naive if I assume the best of intentions.

Could you quantify that imbalance? How many are killed by police, compared to the number of committed homicides (used as proxy for rate of legitimate police interventions), by race?

I am not going to reply to this because it’s a frustratingly crass response that lives up to the stereotypes of engineers. Is it that hard to believe that even in legitimate police interventions they are much more likely to use deadly force with a black person? “Black men are about 2.5 times more likely to be killed by police over the life course than are white men.” https://www.pnas.org/content/116/34/16793

For the benefit of readers less willing to selectively ignore statistics: non-Hispanic whites are 2.4x more likely than blacks to be killed by police (2.7x more if counting only unarmed deaths), per committed homicide. Sources:

https://mappingpoliceviolence.org/nationaltrends

https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2018/crime-in-the-u.s.-...

That was just an example of a controversial topic. I mentioned a spectrum of opinions that were observable amongst peers and on social media, and that is certainly one.

(The premises are false enough that it feels less like a "peers" opinion and more like a "social media rando who needs attention" opinion, but I guess that distinction illustrates the original point.)

I guess it’s true, at least from many of these comments, that many people really want division. They seem to need division to qualify what are otherwise extreme or unbalanced opinions.

That sort of division seems to have cost one party the White House and the other a lot of seats in Congress.

I have no idea what you mean. "Division" (whatever that means) seems to be something you care about, based on your other comments, but I have literally no idea what you're driving at.

I disagree. I see a narcissist and a buffoon when I look at Trump, but none of his behavior validates anything close to the crazed response we see from the primarily left-leaning mainstream media.

It's been a constant stream of catastrophizing from them for the last four years. It was like this during the Bush years as well, though they do seem to have perfected it.

What would have to be true in order for you to feel that the media response to Trump’s presidency has been appropriate?

Well, they've been presenting him as a fascist authoritarian for four years, so if that were true I'd be inclined to believe their response was appropriate.

Trump actively campaigned as the "law and order" president.

That is, by definition, fascist and authoritarian.

He was repeatedly asked if he would support the peaceful transfer of power if he lost, and he repeatedly refused to do so. That’s pretty much as authoritarian as you get.

This is such a blatantly false framing that it's impossible for me to believe you're presenting it in good faith.

It's pretty much the standard interpretation.

https://foreignpolicy.com/2020/09/24/trump-transition-us-ele...

I am very interested in seeing a “good faith” framing of his statements on the topic from you. Can you provide one?

Not GP commenter, but here's one: The "will you support a peaceful transition of power" question is designed to elicit a response which could be quoted out of context in an article inevitably headlined "Trump predicts his own election defeat; already musing about transfer of power to his Democratic challenger". For any politician to answer a question posed this way would be disaster. Trump's unique problem is that he simply refuses to answer the question rather than giving a non-answer with the appearance of substance. Whether this is by choice or because he can't pull off that common trick is perhaps debatable.

(Before downvoting/flagging, please recognize that this answer is not exclusive of other explanations such as "Trump really does have dictatorial ambitions". I take no position on such non-falsifiable claims.)

This is very similar to George W Bush's "fool me twice... I won't get fooled again" gaffe. Had he completed the quote properly he could never have escaped the clips of saying "shame on me" taken out of context (remember this is before the days of deepfakes; now it would matter much less). This was predictably spun as "Dubya is stupid!" but frankly to recognize mid-quip the minefield he was about to step in is a feat beyond the average person. Of course the difference is (again) that unlike Bush, Trump really leaves open the possibility that he really is incompetent as opposed to the 5-dimensional chess that anyone supporting him really hopes he's playing.

The only reason he was asked this question in the first place is because there was good reason to doubt that he would support a peaceful transition - doubt that is well founded as we now see.

Maybe hes smart enough not to answer the question - the problem is that it should never have needed to be asked.

> The "will you support a peaceful transition of power" question is designed to elicit a response which could be quoted out of context in an article inevitably headlined "Trump predicts his own election defeat

Then why wasn't Biden asked the same question? Or anyone else? If this was just a gaffe factory then surely it would be a staple of the presidential interview genre, no?

But it's not. Only Trump got asked that. Ever, as far as I know. And the reason isn't because we were looking for a gaffe but because there was (AND REMAINS!) significant doubt as to whether he would support a peaceful transition of power.

I mean, the current circumstances right now disprove the theory you just proposed. Read his twitter feed, for goodness sake.

> Then why wasn't Biden asked the same question? Or anyone else? If this was just a gaffe factory then surely it would be a staple of the presidential interview genre, no?

That doesn't even make sense! Biden isn't the sitting POTUS. The question "will you support a peaceful transition of power" only makes sense when asked of a sitting POTUS, not an incoming POTUS. Biden doesn't currently have any power which he's required to transmit to Trump!

I know TDS can be a powerful effect, but surely you're not asking me to believe (or to take seriously) that there's someone else other than Trump who currently holds the position of POTUS.

Just today: the president has begun purging the defense department, the attorney general has rolled back rules about interference in in-progress elections, and the majority leader has signaled support for overturning the election.

Would you care to revisit your priors as to whether or not it was appropriate to ask Trump about his support for a peaceful transfer of power?

> This is such a blatantly false framing that it's impossible for me to believe you're presenting it in good faith.

Listen to his responses again. I don't know how you can interpret it any other way.

September 2020: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oR8oIitE6mI

October 2016: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cP0G4vJ5OMw

Edit: Found a September 2016 one where he does say he will support the transfer of power - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XRJ8TLCZdnI

I don't understand your position here at all. Trump is currently doing everything he can to thwart a peaceful transition of power. The fact that he is such an ineffectual buffoon is the only reason he is not succeeding.

For me, Trump trying to use the Justice Dept to investigate his enemies and thwart investigations of his friends is so beyond the pale, way beyond what any president, Republican or Democrat, has ever done that I am shocked people can think this was not a big deal. I mean, that extreme abuse of power is banana republic, end of Rome-type shit.

Put it another way: I firmly believe if a time traveler from, say, 2010 just showed up to see Trump's autocratic desires that they'd be horrified; we've just gotten used to Trump's extreme abuses. Heck, it's become something of a new favorite pastime of mine to look at Trump's own tweet storms circa 2012 and see how 2012 Trump would be condemning 2020 Trump in the harshest possible terms.

Is it appropriate now he’s declaring the democratic election invalid?

That’s what fascism is, you realise?

This really cuts to the heart of it; what does it take to get someone to change their views, when the facts don’t work?

Even if you disagree with a democratic agenda, how can you in good conscience continue to support someone who is blatantly acting like a fascist dictator right now?

I personally find it easy to distinguish Trump, who I consider an waste of air, and the GOP, who has an agenda I can appreciate.

Why is that so difficult to do?

When vote counts suddenly stop and then overnight the opponent starts surging, people tend to assume foul play is at hand. This is how it happens everywhere where an actual authoritarian cheats to stay in power, for instance: https://twitter.com/ajplus/status/1186630753523818502. For you to not understand something like this is grounds for people to question the validity of elections all over the world means that you don't understand much about the world, let alone what's happening in your own country. And I speak about this as a non-American who's simply watching it. You're being brainwashed by your media into believing things that aren't true.

The vote count turn is unsurprising since the in-person ballots could be quickly tallied while the mail-in ballots had to be hand-counted.

The reason the two types of balloting had such a difference in party-support is that the President in the Republican party had been telling his supporters not to use mail-in balloting because it would be rife with fraud. People took him at his word on that side of the political divide, so there's a resulting bias in the likely candidate supported by the mail-in ballots.

Hand counted, in the middle of the night, with no poll watchers around...

The PA, WI, MI GOP state legislatures refused to process mail in ballots before hand which is why it took so long. Look at Florida who voted R and counted their mail in ballots before Election Day and were able to report results that night. It was manufactured by GOP state legislatures to sow doubt.

Sources:

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.foxnews.com/politics/pennsy...

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.forbes.com/sites/alisondurk...

https://www.npr.org/2020/11/04/931136905/we-ll-be-working-24...

Also worth pointing out that in the case of Florida the exact opposite happened and the original count was Biden winning handily but as the panhandle started being added the election swung the other way to Trump. It's not like the big shift in results was unexpected, as soon as the results for Miami-Dade came in even though Biden had a large lead the NY Times election needle immediately swung hard to Trump because they knew the lead would be wiped out by in person voting.

Funny how Trump isn't complaining about the exact same thing happening when it winds up helping him.

Additionally poll watchers were involved in the entire process, if you read what the Trump campaign lawyers said in court

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.cbsnews.com/amp/news/fact-c...

There's a reason why countries like France and many others have banned mail-in ballots. When those ballots keep being found day after day and the vote counting keeps going and going without end, until the right candidate wins, people will say its fraudulent. There's nothing you can say or do about it because that's just how it will go. You should want to prevent the voting process from looking fraudulent at all. There should be no doubts about it. The only thing you can do to achieve that is preventing that kind of voting from taking place to great degrees in the first place, which I believe Trump wanted to do but his opponents didn't.

> When those ballots keep being found day after day and the vote counting keeps going and going without end, until the right candidate wins, people will say its fraudulent.

This is not what is happening, and if anything, in Pennsylvania in particular, the Republican legislature is responsible for this situation. PA is one of only a few states that does not allow processing mailed ballots until election day (i.e. they can't even open the envelopes). The Democratic governor asked to change the law to allow counting of ballots before election day, precisely so you wouldn't get into this situation, and the Republican legislature refused.

When I say "the right candidate" I don't mean Biden specifically. If Trump now suddenly starts overtaking in multiple states with the ballots that are still being counted, people opposed to him will also find it suspicious and be unhappy with those results. The overall point is that this kind of voting shouldn't be allowed to this degree in the first place because it only generates doubt no matter who wins. As for the PA situation, yes, that's true, but the process I described is happening or happened in multiple states, not just there.

This. I'm more alarmed and afraid that investigation into all of the allegations his campaign is bringing up will be handled lightly or handwaved as a waste of time, where nothing less than a full blown addressing and running down of every accusation should be done. I don't care who wins in the end. I care that the processes integrity is maintained at all cost. Doubt with regards to the voting process is not something any Republic can afford.

Trump made allegations about the last election as well, then followed up with his own investigation which found no evidence. Then he spent the last few months ginning up distrust of mail in ballots and instead of offering help to states to scale up their voting infrastructure he instead appointed DeJoy to head USPS who destroys sorting machines and slows down the mail.

Now he throws as many lawsuits as he can about the voting process with zero evidence. His suits are being thrown out because they are frivolous and lack credibility.

Doubt with regards to the voting process is being sown by a single person and we shouldn't doubt our institutions just because someone is screaming loudly with no evidence.

I'd still be championing the need to investigate if Trump won, and it was Biden's team calling out the discrepancies.

Admittedly, I'm still trying to track down some more info on the rumored last minute software update in Georgia I believe it was and some more info on some rather interesting age demographics.

I don't doubt that if there was an election to pique voter mobilization, it'd be this one. I just know I'd sleep more soundly knowing some of the numerical strangeness rumored to be going on was looked into wholeheartedly.

Because of the hyper-distributed nature of American elections, those with doubts can often walk down the street (or catch a bus) to the elections office, start talking to people, and find out how the process works.

Also because of the hyper-distributed nature of American elections, that's a much better way to understand how they work in one's town than to look at national news about what's happening in Miami-Dade County. If you're not a citizen of Florida (much less a resident of Miami-Dade), you might as well ask how elections are run in Germany; it'll apply about as much to how they run in your town.

Everyone knew for months ahead that this is how the votes would play out in those particular states. Nothing strange happened.

If he believes it is invalid, I'm not sure what else I'd expect him to say.

The fact that the left has been absolutely out of their minds with hatred for the man for the last four years makes it very, very difficult for people to easily trust that they are not engaging in impropriety during the election. Their motto for removing him is essentially "At any cost" at this point.

I'm not sure why you're framing his actions or words along the lines of "fascist dictator". This is simply a continuation of the vitriolic rhetoric I've been trying to combat for years now. It's crazed, and I do not understand why you - someone who can write clearly enough that you must be intelligent - cannot see it. It's rhetoric like that that is driving so many people to distrust you.

Trump will challenge the election results in court and succeed or fail. It's as simple as that. Personally, I hope it's a failure because I don't want there to have been any impropriety. If that's the case, Trump is done. There is no fascism. There is no dictator. Please stop catastrophizing.

>If he believes

This is the problem - Trump is a moron and everything he believe is suspect.

He believes he had the largest inaugural crowds ever, even after PHOTOGRAPHIC evidence proves otherwise. He believes his administration accomplished more in the first 100 days than any other one in US History. He believes COVID is a conspiracy, fading away, we've rounded the corner, doctors and hospitals are faking numbers to make money, the fake media only talks about it to hurt him and it will stop after the election. Etc.

>I'm not sure why you're framing his actions or words along the lines of "fascist dictator".

He has called for jailing or imprisonment of his political enemies, suggested the election system is rife with fraud, order troops to suppress free speech, had federal agents snatch people off the streets, tried to get other countries to smear his opponents before they got aid from the US, etc. The GOP ran a political convention when HALF of the the speakers were his relatives and advanced no agenda. If he were the President of some banana republic, we would say that is expected in a failing state led by a fascist dictator. I mean the convention alone is bordering on the type of stuff North Korea would stage.

It's not just that he's going to challenge the result in court. Please, go listen to his words- they're on YouTube. Read his tweets.

He's saying things like that he would win if it weren't for all of the illegal votes being counted. That "bad things" are happening in Pennsylvania as his lead was closing. He said, months ago, that he didn't think votes should be counted after election day, which is absolutely absurd.

He's literally trying to sow doubt about the election process and trying to make people think that Biden closing and overcoming a vote gap is suspicious, when it was totally expected.

I don't throw the term around lightly, but I don't know what else to call a blatant undermining of democracy like that other than fascism. Maybe we can discuss whether or not fascism is all that bad, but I find no way you can argue in good faith that what he's saying about the election is "ho-hum. Nothing to see here."

He has also casually suggested being president for more than 2 terms. I find that to be a statement in poor taste, at best. While the constitution is a living document by virtue of amendments, it stinks of aspirations for being dictator-for-life (when being spoken by a sitting president).

He did everything in his power to make sure this election would be a catastrophe (but failed, to the credit of Republican and Democratic state governments).

Now, he’s refusing to accept the results of the election.

He has appointed self-proclaimed facists and neo-Nazis to his inner circle.

His apparently illegal secret police force illegally detained protestors over the objections of the state governments that had legal jurisdiction over the protests.

He said he rushed the appointment of an additional judge to the supreme court so he would have enough votes to overturn the election results.

People claim he wants to be a “fascist dictator” because these are just recent examples of his four year concerted effort to dismantle our democracy.

He did all of these things in the open. There’s no “catastophizing” here. These are all, well-documented, uncontested facts. Most are documented by multiple videos of him, and members of his administration speaking about them. There are dozens of other examples of this behavior, also all well-documented.

Fortunately, it looks like he failed, and will soon be a former president.

> Trump will challenge the election results in court and succeed or fail. It's as simple as that. Personally, I hope it's a failure because I don't want there to have been any impropriety. If that's the case, Trump is done. There is no fascism. There is no dictator.

It's not “as simple as that.”

He's made baseless claims about the security of mail-based voting, suggested that shifts in tallies are the results of illegal votes — instead of a predictable effect of preventing counties from tallying ballots until election day, and clearly and unequivocally claimed that he has won the election and that any other outcome must be a result of fraud.

Working to create the appearance of fraud and then pointing to the situation as evidence is problematic, even if it is not ultimately successful.

> It’s crazed...

I hear you, and I know what you mean.

...but, I don’t think you can reasonably claim that now, even if, perhaps, you could previously.

I’m not trying to convince anyone; I’m just saying, for me, looking at what is happening right now, I cannot argue that the behaviour Trump is displaying is a) inappropriate for the potus, and b) scarily like what you would expect from a “fascist dictator”.

I can’t disagree with you more strongly than this: regardless of what has happened in the past, what is happening right now is NOT a continuation of the last four years of leftist media agenda.

notable fascist al gore.

> Well, they've been presenting him as a fascist authoritarian for four years

He literally called them the "enemies of the state". He routinely calls for the prosecution of his political enemies, and has apparently directed his own Department of Justice to that effect.

I mean, sure, it's true that he may not "be" a fascist authoritarian. But he sure acts like one. Is it wrong to report that?

he said "enemies of the people"

Oh yes, that makes it ok then. Carry on...

Trump said he would only accept the result of an election if he wins it, way back in 2016[0]; he has a pattern of firing anyone who doesn’t do or say exactly what he wants, especially when it comes to persecuting his perceived enemies[1]; he’s used his presidential power to commute the sentences of members of his personal circle who are tried and convicted of crimes[2]; he’s called into question, without evidence, the integrity of American elections[3], since even before he was the president[4]; he constantly attacks the credibility of the free press[5][6], more recently questioning even the reporting of Fox News[7][8]; he bypasses congressional checks on his appointments[9]; he has deployed the military against peaceful protesters and threatened to violate the Posse Comitatus Act[10]; his White House is being investigated for politicising the FDA and CDC[11]; last month he authorised a new executive order that would enable him to more easily fire government employees[12]; he refused to just say that he would commit to a peaceful transfer of power if he loses[13].

If this is not sufficient evidence that Trump is a proto-fascist authoritarian, what more would be needed, in your mind, to meet that bar? Or, perhaps putting it another way, can you explain to me how all of this stuff is cool and normal and not a clear pattern of proto-fascist authoritarianism?

I did my best here to source examples from multiple media outlets in order to try to mitigate against the paradox that your main complaint is that the media is distorting the truth. Once someone decides that, not just one source, but the entire media apparatus is lying, it’s incredibly difficult to source information in a way which is acceptable—which is why a free press is so important, and why it’s particularly dangerous that Trump and his party have been spending so much energy on undermining it.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KQJzt48wXbA

[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/all-the-presidents-d...

[2] https://www.nytimes.com/article/trump-pardons-commutations.h...

[3] https://nypost.com/2020/11/05/trump-to-speak-from-white-hous...

[4] https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/international/worl...

[5] https://www.cbsnews.com/news/lesley-stahl-donald-trump-said-...

[6] https://cpj.org/reports/2020/04/trump-media-attacks-credibil...

[7] https://www.thewrap.com/trump-attacks-fox-election-day/

[8] https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/trump-attacks-fox-ne...

[9] https://www.npr.org/2020/03/09/813577462/how-trump-has-fille...

[10] https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/trump-mobilizes-mili...

[11] https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politic...

[12] https://www.globalgovernmentforum.com/trump-extend-hire-fire...

[13] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xZ2AvqLSjSs

I think Trump has many character flaws (and that's putting it lightly), did many not-so-good things, etc. It is fine that this is highlighted by the mainstream media.

My main problem is that the same treatment is not applied to the democrats. This means that in order to find similar stories from the other side, one needs to start (1) reading extremist-leaning news. These also contain many half-truths and outright lies, so on top of that one has to (2) try to verify themselves the veracity of those claims. Most people don't have the time to do that (obviously), so they stop at the first step.

Have you not been watching? They literally manufactured a Russia collusion story and then spent 4 years beating Trump over the head with it. Then they orchestrated a hijacking of the Democratic primary to prevent Bernie from being on the ticket. Trump is a despicable human, to a degree only surpassed by the folks running and representing American media.

I see russian bots commenting on Facebook all day every day for the last 4 years. Today one glitched and commented on a completely unrelated post under the name "hispanics for Trump" on a post for a car.

Russian bots... the lefts favorite cop out argument of 2020. Please provide an example, otherwise your claims are nothing but rhetoric.

This is HNN.

It's everywhere online https://krebsonsecurity.com/2017/08/twitter-bots-use-likes-r...

You seriously believe it hasn't happened?

Dude, there actually are Twitter bots every where. I see multiple accounts posting the same exact tweet over and over. You look at their profile and its a obvious its manufactured history. Have you even tried looking?

Krebs has an article with evidence on this phenomena as well: https://krebsonsecurity.com/tag/twitter-bots/

Edit: Specifically https://krebsonsecurity.com/2017/08/twitter-bots-use-likes-r...

So that is your Russiagate story? That is the collision we spent 4 years talking about?

You're getting down-voted without anyone else actually providing a rebuttal. But what you're saying matches, roughly, my understanding of what happened. Perhaps their issue is with the way it is phrased, sounding sort of like rhetoric.

So I'll add because I'm more or less with you: I'm sincerely confused how we can spend years alleging Russian interference and now that on a really close election, with contention over the way the ballots were counted, it's being called by the media without presenting doubt despite polling being pretty off? The inconsistency is concerning, in my opinion. What am I not understanding?

If I'd introduced a new system in at work (my understanding is the mass mail-in ballots are new at this scale, but please correct me if I'm wrong) and was testing it and it gave a weird result, I'd at least double check it.

The downvoting could also be because I asked a very basic question and they responded to it with a non sequitur that did not even attempt to answer the question.

There is no contention over how the ballots were counted. There are allegations which have been repeatedly thrown out or debunked by judges and press across the country, including those friendly to the parties making said allegations.

So I’d say that’s what you’re not understanding, though I’m puzzled as to how you could have missed it if you spent any time looking into it at all, since every reputable source has reported the rebuttals right alongside the allegations.

There is no question in this election. The margins are not close. They are not surprising. They were not even terribly unexpected. The only party alleging any of those things is the party that has repeatedly eschewed facts for 4 years and longer. The one that has repeatedly pushed useless investigations that they themselves conclude are baseless. And in fact it’s not even the whole party, it’s mostly the parts of the party working directly for the loser.

Does that help clarify your confusion?

Yes, that helps, thank you. I'd read of some officials denying it, but the information around judges is new to me and I will explore it further.

Who do you consider to be reputable sources? I will include them in my reading.

I'm also interested in why it was necessary to refer to the president as a "loser." I thought your point stood without it and all that did was clue me in on the possibility of bias in the rest of the response. Staunch supporters would likely discard your reasoning entirely because of it.

FWIW, I read that part in the non-insulting context, like as in "loser" versus "victor".

Oh, thank you. I can see that now. Perhaps that is how they meant it.

I did indeed mean loser as the opposite of victor, as mentioned in the sibling response, rather than as an ad hominem.

Reputability-wise I focused on the American press in general (Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, NYT, etc). My main through-line during the week was following the 538 live blog, which did a good job of linking out to a variety of sources as several of the cases unfolded during the week. A decent summary is the one at https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/election-2020-trump-campaign... . You'll find the legal challenges so far are largely about technicalities rather than actual allegations of voter fraud, despite claims otherwise, and that the ones that have been heard have mostly either been dismissed or they have resulted in minor adjustments to procedures, at times to the frustration of the presiding judge (finding in-person recounting of the proceedings requires digging deeper than the above article).

Not featuring in the legal proceedings are other allegations, such as those that certain people who were supposedly deceased had submitted votes. These have mostly turned out to be clerical errors, many of which were already fixed but hadn't necessarily propagated to the systems that the allegers were looking at. As a bonus, here's a 538 feature from 2016, when the groundwork for this kind of argument was once again being laid just in case now-president Trump lost: https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/voter-fraud-is-very-rar... .

Because the polling majorly favored Biden and the results showed far more Trump votes than anticipated could rationally be interpreted to mean that mail-in ballots were flawed in a way that favored Trump.

I'm not claiming this is the case but providing an example of how subjective and spinnable any set of facts can be made.

Taking your question in good faith, it's because the argument isn't that "Russian interference" happened. It's that the argument is "Russian interference in favor of Trump" happened. So clearly, if Biden won, the belief isn't that Russia helped Biden, it's that Biden's victory was able to overcome whatever interference was still trying affect things in favor of Trump.

For those who don't recall, Russia had big reasons to endorse Trump over Hillary in 2016: Hillary was bellicose about Russia and Syria, to the point where people echoed worries she'd plunge us into "WW3". That, compared with Trump's contrarian sympathies toward Russia and irreverence about the U.S.'s moral highground (and conservatism AND clear, probable incompetence) of course motivated Russia to support him.

They also hoped that he would come to the table and legitimize Russia as a fellow superpower and usher in a new era of diplomatic relations. The fact that Trump utterly failed to do that probably chilled Russia's interest in the 2020 election though.

China has good reason to endorse Biden; should we assume that Biden has colluded with China in efforts to “hack” our election (whatever tf that means)?

Not solely because of motive, no. You'd need evidence, which is different than motive. Russia having a motive wasn't the only reason to suspect collusion, either.

"if it is what you say it is, i love it" is a real thing they admitted to and all the proof you need that the story is in no way "manufactured"

Manufactured? you should really read the Mueller report and see that there was plenty of wrongdoing. Saying it was manufactured is pretending like all of the evidence, meetings, etc... didn't happen.

Comments like these reinforce my conviction that comment threads like these are ultimately useless.

I believe that an exchange of views is possible in a way that will be illuminating to both "sides", but it just isn't possible in a forum like this.

"They literally manufactured a Russia collusion story" is an assertion presented as fact. It obviously has a very deep argument behind it that has convinced the author. But given the context of the discussion, it's impossible for the author to explain why he thinks that is true, in a way for a counterpart to verify and explore.

Similarly, those on the other side who believe the Russia collusion isn't a "manufactured story" also have very deep arguments that can't be included here.

It's the same with "orchestrating a hijacking of the Democratic primary". It's an assertion that comes across as completely ridiculous to people who don't believe it, based off of counter arguments that are also very deep having to do with the intricacies of how the primaries work.

And so then of course the conclusion is that Trump is bad but the media is worse, based off of those previous two assertions being true. And the discussion goes absolutely nowhere.

I am literally highly interested in the thinking behind why the Russia collusion story is manufactured, and how the Democratic primary is hijacked. Yes because I believe those conclusions are false, but I want to respectfully explore where in the argument I think it falls down. But to do it would take a long exchange, probably with time in between to research, that just isn't supported by forums like this.

he would've have actually had to consolidate power in any kind of meaningful way instead of simply bumbling through the logical continuation of bush/obama policies while being undermined by the intel community/ his own generals and the the gop itself every time he tried to do anything that broke from neocon consensus. his own justices even repudiated him. ironically, an actual fascist would've used the pandemic as his own reichstag fire, seized power & curtailed liberties to effectively contain the virus instead of simply mismanaging a dysfunctional, under supplied & under funded federal health apparatus that effectively let the states just do whatever. italy had tanks in the streets, south korea and taiwan created invasive ethically dubious surveillance programs to control movement. the actual white supremacists are mad that trump didn't do exactly that.

aside from the bizarre alternative-universe psychodrama that corporate media has been airing for the past years, trump in reality was basically just unremarkable and incompetent.

I agree Trump is much more of a "proof of concept" of how an actual fascist could operate. Instead, as you say, he is blisteringly incompetent and lazy. Remember he accidentally became president when all he wanted was to build a hotel in Moscow.

His tweets clearly show the mindset of someone who wants to use levers of power which are massively beyond his constitutional powers (shut down the media, overthrow elections, imprison critics). But he had neither the energy or the political skill to accomplish any of that. What he did have was the ability to convince millions of people that the US government should be turned over to a TV reality clown.

His inaction and obfuscation caused thousands and thousands of people to die from COVID.

He publicly condoned shooting unarmed protesters, and let his DOJ kidnap people in unmarked vans.

He left the Paris climate accords.

These are catastrophic.

For seven weeks in 2017 it was the official policy of our government to remove migrant children of all ages from their parents and house them in a cage. Even now the inevitable bureaucratic messups have lost some of these kids; it's possible these families will literally never be whole again. Everyone has their own horrors I guess, but this was what did it for me.

Obama started this.

https://www.nbcnews.com/storyline/immigration-border-crisis/...

> The idea that this is simply a continuation of an Obama-era practice is "preposterous," said Denise Gilman, director of the Immigration Clinic at the University of Texas Law School. "There were occasionally instances where you would find a separated family — maybe like one every six months to a year — and that was usually because there had been some actual individualized concern that there was a trafficking situation or that the parent wasn’t actually the parent."

> Once custody concerns were resolved, "there was pretty immediately reunification," Gilman told NBC News. "There were not 2,000 kids in two months — it’s not the same universe," she added.

That's not to say that the Obama administration didn't do some other cruel things to migrant families in an effort to deter them. Some of which got smacked back down by the courts, too. But separating families as a matter of policy was not one of those policies.

Total nonsense. Europe has just as many if not more cases. The idea that another president would have made any difference is pure wishful thinking.

There are many countries that have completely contained COVID, on multiple continents. It is not "wishful thinking" to follow in the footsteps of many other countries. If we could do as well as the African countries that we assisted with past Ebola outbreaks, we would have saved so many lives.

Great I can't wait for Biden to stop it.

To stop the virus, we need to treat it as a bigger enemy than we do each other. And it may be too late now, the easy time to stop it was at the beginning, when it would have taken far less mobilization and resources. Now, no matter how hard we clamp down it will remain in pockets.

I do not believe that Biden is capable of enacting any policy that will lead to the (simple) social behaviors that can stop the disease in its tracks. He can do some policy on the edges.

But if we do stop the virus, it won't be because of Biden, it will be because of the actions of a huge number of people, across the political spectrum, and a grand unification of people. We will need to build a massive virus stopping machine, and such projects are never the result of one person, anymore than the space shuttle being attributable to a single person.

I think it's possible, but I do not think it's likely.

I really don't get this constant "he didn't do anything" and "it's too late" talking points.

Nancy Pelosi was walking around Chinatown in SF after it was well known that there was an outbreak going on overseas.

The NYC department of health advised that it was perfectly safe to attend Chinese New Year celebrations shortly after.

When POTUS stopped international travel earlier than the media decided it was a legitimate issue, his political opponents called him a racist. Then you'll argue, "but but the nyc outbreaks trace to Europe!!" And I'll argue back that China has industrial factories in Italy, and ask you how the virus got to Italy/Europe in the first place. And you still won't get it. It's like the left just constant ignores common sense and hides behind reddit-teir "you got a source for that" nerdery.

All of this happened less than a year ago. It is well within living memory.

As a scientist, it causes me immense pain to see these types of points trotted out as having any sort of relevance to stopping the spread of Covid19.

Literally nothing you said here has any relevance to effective policy for stopping Covid19. Nothing. Somehow, in our modern society, you have been able to consume a very large diet of information, and have been misinformed about its basic suitability as information.

There's only one way to stop this thing: by paying attention to evidence and our best understanding, and to put aside our silly political games that have not bearing on reality. Or worse, political games that think they are the reality.

I hope that as part of the healing process, science starts having a seat at the table in these discussions.

https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/trump-fire-pandemic-team/

You're seriously going to claim that the US wouldn't have had a better response to a pandemic had they actually had a pandemic response team?

Seems like the claim that this pandemic response team would have made a difference is the assertion that needs to be proven. I'm not terribly convinced that a bit more beurocracy would have made any difference at all.

You're not sure a team full of scientists who are experts in infectious diseases could've come up with a better plan than doing absolutely nothing? Or lying to the public about the severity of the disease? Or refusing to issue a national mask mandate? Or shutting down travel... only to China, not Europe who was also having a massive outbreak? Or flying people home on a commercial flight without any sort of precautions taken to separate them from the rest of the passengers?

You really think that would've all played out the same? I assume you didn't vote for Trump, and your opinion is based in facts and logic, and not a misguided attempt at defending his laughably embarrassing attempts at downplaying a pandemic ravaging our nation.

PS: Where's that vaccine he promised? Or were you one of the ones that thought the virus was just going to "magically disappear" after the election?

Well the WHO did such a great bang up job on letting the world know the severity, I'm sure this team would have also "followed the science" and decided it wasn't a threat either. This is government employees you are thinking that are going to do a competent job.

Under Obama, the pandemic response team that Trump disbanded stopped SARSv1 (COVID is also known as SARSv2) from spreading out of China under essentially identical circumstances.

They also stopped Ebola from spreading, which is at least an order of magnitude worse than COVID.

That team operated internationally with the cooperation of local governments. When it was disbanded, many people warned the administration that it was leaving a huge public health gap, and that the decision would result in unchecked pandemics.

We’re lucky to have ended up with a COVID pandemic, and not something much worse.

> They also stopped Ebola from spreading, which is at least an order of magnitude worse than COVID.

Pure unmitigated ignorance.

Define worse. Ebola is much deadlier, but its kind of hard to spread a virus that causes you to bleed from your face.

Ebola’s R value is 2, which is enough to create large outbreaks if left unchecked.

The death rate is 50%, which is 100x higher than COVID’s 0.5% (which has been lowered to 0.125% with improved hospital care).

In the absence of a coordinated pandemic response, I count that as “worse”.

Many problems with your comment. First SARS occurred in 2003 before Obama. It was stopped primarily because it does not spread asymptomatically. SARS-COV-2 does. That is the difference.

You left out being impeached for blackmailing a friendly country for military aid so they would dig up dirt on his rival. Also, gutting federal agencies like the EPA, silencing reports from national labs which were critical of the coal industry, and installing Dejoy as head of the Postal Service who immediately had mail equipment destroyed directly before an election which was known to most likely have large amounts of mail in ballots. Not to mention Dejoy has large stock in companies that would profit from the destruction of the Postal Service.

Edit: forgot to say numerous people close to him and his campaign have gone to jail. Steve Bannon, Michael Cohen, Paul Manafort, Roger Stone...etc.

What do you think of what happened with the Steele Dossier?

A better question: what do you think happened with the Steele Dossier? A campaign funding opposition research isn't a problem. That the Dossier may or may not have lead to a legitimate intelligence case being opened against a Trump associate also isn't a problem. John McCain hand delivered it to the FBI. There is no fruit of the poisoned tree here.

That you don't see that something is wrong when an intelligence agency fabricates fake evidence in order to advance a political agenda against other parts of it's own government is chilling.

>fabricates fake evidence

Source? Sounds like conspiratorial nonsense.

sure.

glen greenwald: http://archive.is/58vqu

matt taibbi: https://archive.li/acKAO

While those articles certainly highlight serious problems in spying oversight and a reckless FBI, they do not support your characterization of "fabricated fake evidence in order to advance a political agenda". For example, the pee tape doesn't represent even a majority of the potentially damaging information. While the FBI probably overstated the trustworthiness of the document, those articles don't claim the document itself was an outright fabrication or that none of the claims had any credibility.

You're splitting the line quite finely

I think "what does this have to do with Trump's numerous crimes?". What a strange question to ask.

the whole thread doesn't have a lot of focus, but the OP posted about "The country may be divided. But those divisions are manufactured and exacerbated over the last 4 years by a made-for-TV president." So the context here is about division in the country and investigation of what is either causing that and/or causing people to feel like that.

Trump destroyed the United States' Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty with Russia. Without the treaty, Russia and USA can make as many nuclear bombs as they want, as long as they say they will only use them on intermediate-range missiles.

This single action by Trump imperils all of humanity.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intermediate-Range_Nuclear_For...

https://foreignpolicy.com/2019/08/02/what-does-the-demise-of...

None of it? We'll even ignore the easy ones like violating the emoluments clause and blatant nepotism.

Withholding aid to Puerto Rico. Calling for the governor of Michigan to be locked up for implementing covid restrictions then refusing to condemn the folks that attempted to kidnap her.

Charlottesville. Sending in Federal Police to kidnap folks in Portland. Refusing to impose sanctions on Russia that had bipartisan support. Refusing to condemn Russia for assassinating citizens of other nations with chemical weapons. Jamaal kashoggi. Saluting North Korean soldiers. Outright telling governor's he was withholding Federal aid unless they did him favors. Etc, etc, etc. "left-leaning media" has absolutely nothing to do with his train wreck of a presidency.

I don't think he managed to go a single month over the last 4 years without violating the Constitution.

At least there were actual catastrophes caused by Bush. Under Trump it was conspiracy theories about Russian collusion.

So covid response wasn't a catastrophe? Ok

I'm not sure if it was, really. What's the baseline? If Biden was President, how many people would have died instead? More than 0, right?

The United States has structural issues, many of them features and not bugs, that make a coordinated effort to suppress a contagious virus basically impossible. Biden never made the case for what he would have done different; he didn't really have to.

That's the thing about a crisis. When your opponent is in charge during a crisis, you can always say he was incompetent, and no one can prove that you're wrong.

There were recent headlines on a study done that estimated unnecessary deaths; deaths that wouldn't have happened had we had a reasonable response. Should be easy to find.

I know we're in like, mystical "follow the science" land, but any study on this matter can really only make projections based on a model.

It certainly can't say what Biden would have called a "reasonable response" at the time, whether he would have followed through on it, etc. We actually know what Biden was saying to do in the early days of the pandemic, and Trump's earliest actions were roundly criticized by Democrats.

My theory is that if Trump had come out hard for lockdown early on, Republicans would be pro-lockdown and Democrats would be anti-lockdown. I view the partisan divide on COVID handling as...well, purely partisan.

The WHO recently said the lockdowns Biden says he's bringing back were causing more harm than good. That should be easy to find.

The early CDC tests, during the period we might have been able to maintain contact tracing, were faulty. A different president wouldn't have changed that.

Republicans didn't embrace masks, but it's unlikely a Democrat president would've done a better job convincing them.

In my opinion Trump's worst fault here is that he lacks the temperament for one of the most important things we needed: fireside chats. Trump is a pretty good hype man, cheering on good times, but abysmal at the somber tough message delivery we needed.

FWIW, I searched for your first point, and the first google result was https://www.forbes.com/sites/brucelee/2020/10/13/who-warning...

Which implies your summary of the point is based off of one of the several misreadings out there.

The mainstream media provide unlimited and free ads to Trump. Trump is a savvy marketer. He plays the mainstream media like a fiddle. The outrageous remarks he said or tweeted are reported relentlessly by the mainstream media. The way I see it is that whatever Trump said or tweeted are like campaign ads. What the mainstream media have been doing is nothing but playing campaign ads with rebuttals. The relationship between Trump and the mainstream media is pretty symbiotic.

The things that the mainstream media have not reported enough is his corruption and incompetency. Instead, they constantly chase after his remarks. I will give you an example. The way USPS is undermined is nothing but sabotage. Trump and his officials claimed that they run USPS like business. The mainstream media simply reported it along this frame. However, no reasonable business would run like what they did to USPS. Besides, the moment they claimed that they would revert the changes, the mainstream simply reported what they said. No, they didn't revert their changes. By reading mainstream media news casually, we wouldn't know that USPS was sabotaged. Many people think that Trump administration simply tried to run USPS like business but they decided not to due to opposition. The reality is that USPS was sabotaged and the damage is done.

I'm not sure what you are referring to as the mainstream media. There were weeks of articles about USPS and how there were problems. There were years of reporting about collusion and corruption with regard to Russia and other scandals. Whether you were looking at Fox or at NY Times or WaPo or CNN or whatever, whether it was for or against, there was neverending coverage about the Trump scandal of the week, and that Trump's explanations were BS. The problem wasn't lack or reporting or criticizing Trump, it was that there was always a new scandal every week that needed coverage.

I refer to virtually all outlets except the conservative ones (e.g. the ones you listed except Fox). As I said, the problem with the coverage is that it is based on their framing, i.e. running USPS like a business. There are so many articles about whether USPS should be run like a business because of this framing. This is a false permise. Trump administration simply co-opted "business" for sabotage. Mainstream media fell into the trap. By arguing whether USPS should be run like business leads to the impression that Trump administration was running USPS like a business. Also, there are many articles in which if we read beyond headlines, we would find comments from opponents of Trump that Trump administration sabotaging USPS. This is merely both-side-ism at work. To learn the truth, one needs to already distrust Trump and disregard their statements.

Then, all of a sudden Trump administration said that they would suspend/revert the changes. The mainstream media all rushed to report the statements, even though they were lies. There were no reporting of similar scale once the lies were uncovered. This is also the reason why Bill Barr was able to destroy Mueller's investigation - by first lying that there was no wrongdoings to gain enormous coverage and then escape scrutiny when truth was uncovered due to subdue coverage. As I also said, the mainstream media knew that Trump administration lies consistently. They should really ignore what they said and simply report what they do and don't do.

In summary, the mainstream media are really poor in conveying the big picture because Trump administration successfully hacks them and because they are unable to adapt to this adversary.

>. I will give you an example. The way USPS is undermined is nothing but sabotage.

The post office was not sabotaged. They're foundering because mail volume has dropped to half its peak and they haven't been able to downsize their operations fast enough to keep making money.

The media and the Democrats spent the last year chasing this wild conspiracy theory about the USPS throwing the election for Trump. It never ever made any sense and, indeed, there's no evidence that mail in ballots were tampered with on any large scale.

> ... none of his behavior validates anything close to the crazed response we see from the primarily left-leaning mainstream media.

Yeah no ... at this point if you honestly still believe that, we have to agree to disagree, and I'm glad that more people in America disagree with you than agree with you.

> It's been a constant stream of catastrophizing from them for the last four years.

I've looked at a few definitions, and I don't see how it's an accurate description of what's happening here.

For example: “Catastrophizing is a cognitive distortion that prompts people to jump to the worst possible conclusion, usually with very limited information or objective reason to despair. When a situation is upsetting, but not necessarily catastrophic, they still feel like they are in the midst of a crisis.” (https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/basics/catastrophizing)

We have experienced “great damage or suffering” (i.e., catastrophes), not merely upsetting situations. The media hasn't been catastrophizing; they've been reporting about catastrophes.

What are the "catastrophes" that you have experienced (disregarding COVID which is a world catastrophe)?

> It's been a constant stream of catastrophizing from them for the last four years. It was like this during the Bush years as well, though they do seem to have perfected it.

And the Republicans did the same thing with Obama, which is why he is so reviled among the right. The pendulum swings harder at each cycle, and how people still cannot see how thoroughly they're being manipulated by their party of choice continues to astound me. I get the tribalism, and I get the basic cognitive gears at play, but it takes only a modicum of self awareness and attempted empathy to understand the other side enough to open up the door to doubt, and only the tiniest degree of curiosity to find more nuanced understanding of issues at play. I do see this in some places, but I see ignorant partisan propaganda far more, and the pendulum swings ever harder.

The devil is the one we make, seemingly blind to the ingredients we carelessly continue to throw into the cauldron that will continue to produce them, even as one group rejoices that the latest one has been defeated.

The guy had armies of white supremacist supporters and advisers. He told right-wing extremists to “stand by” on national TV.

Every time you gloss over this, you give a pass to it and to those who knew about it and supported him anyway.

And Biden has a history of being pro-China, and have made it clear that he wants to end Trump’s China tariffs and treat China like we did during the Obama/Biden administration. I’d say that’s far worse, and I wager the hundreds of millions, if not billions, of people suffering from the hands of the CCP agree.

President Trump was not working against China's human right violations either. I don't think a change of US leadership is going to make much of an impact on their quality of life one way or another.

Just to be clear, you are saying that having favorable trade policies with China is worse than directly associating the presidency with actual white supremacists? Really?

It may very well be why is it so surprising? What Trump was doing is just playing politics to a group of stupid people. On the other hand pro-China policies have potential to destroy the social fabric of this country for generations. (I am a Bernie guy do not be so quick to judge)

As opposed to Biden's belligerent life-long racism, which the left universally goes a great distance out of its way to ignore?

Even Kamala Harris called him a racist. She did her best to run away from that after it was no longer convenient of course.

See: Biden's statements on "a racial jungle," segregation, busing, and how he didn't want his children going to desegregated schools.

See: Biden's support of the crime bill that specifically targeted and locked up a million black people.

See: Biden's past friendships and associations with 'former' KKK memembers like Robert Byrd (someone he considered a good friend and mentor). Byrd was one of the most vile pieces of scum elected to the US Government in the past century. How's that for associating with white supremacists?

See: Biden's racist statements about Obama prior to the 2008 election.

You know, people can change. Some do, and some flatly refuse to.

Obama also worked with senator Byrd. Byrd was no perfect but he disavowed his relationship with the KKK. This kind of self correction and compromise is what has always held our country's politics and made it different than other's. Obama said it better:

"Listening to Senator Byrd I felt with full force all the essential contradictions of me in this new place, with its marble busts, its arcane traditions, its memories and its ghosts. I pondered the fact that, according to his own autobiography, Senator Byrd had received his first taste of leadership in his early twenties, as a member of the Raleigh County Ku Klux Klan, an association that he had long disavowed, an error he attributed—no doubt correctly—to the time and place in which he'd been raised, but which continued to surface as an issue throughout his career. I thought about how he had joined other giants of the Senate, like J. William Fulbright of Arkansas and Richard Russell of Georgia, in Southern resistance to civil rights legislation. I wondered if this would matter to the liberals who now lionized Senator Byrd for his principled opposition to the Iraq War resolution—the MoveOn.org crowd, the heirs of the political counterculture the senator had spent much of his career disdaining.

I wondered if it should matter. Senator Byrd's life—like most of ours—has been the struggle of warring impulses, a twining of darkness and light. And in that sense I realized that he really was a proper emblem for the Senate, whose rules and design reflect the grand compromise of America's founding: the bargain between Northern states and Southern states, the Senate's role as a guardian against the passions of the moment, a defender of minority rights and state sovereignty, but also a tool to protect the wealthy from the rabble, and assure slaveholders of noninterference with their peculiar institution. Stamped into the very fiber of the Senate, within its genetic code, was the same contest between power and principle that characterized America as a whole, a lasting expression of that great debate among a few brilliant, flawed men that had concluded with the creation of a form of government unique in its genius—yet blind to the whip and the chain."

> Byrd was no perfect but he disavowed his relationship with the KKK.

All is forgiven by the establishment if you’re a good boy and toe the line.

If it's not forgiven you fight and accomplish nothing and divide further. That's what we have seen the last 4 years.

That's why being a politician takes some skill.

The democratic party is the impeached the president during his last year, over circumstantial claims that didn't pan out. It was at that point that the gloves came off. Game set match.

Hillary Clinton herself has said so, something along the lines of "you must fight like your life depends on it for your values." The left was doing it, now the right is doing it.

> That's why being a politician takes some skill.

The only skill required is managing to pull the cover over the eyes of your constituents while you take money from invested interests.

He also directly denounced white supremacy, many times, in fact:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bd0cMmBvqWc&feature=youtu.be...

https://streamable.com/sr9o2s

Are you equating support for trade with the PRC with... white nationalism?

I think that Obama was far far harder on China than Trump. Trump gave up any semblance of influence in the region, and China has gained massive power due to the absence of US leadership in the area. The tariffs are a pointless show that have done nothing to weaken China in the least. If Biden follows Obama's direction we will gain far more geopolitical power in the region, but it will be impossible to regain all the ground that we have lost on the international stage due to Trump's general weakness and unwillingness to engage in basic statecraft.

Trump's weakening of the US's global influence and dissolving its alliance with the EU has been the greatest gift to China in a generation. All China wants is to be an unchallenged world power.

>Every time you gloss over this, you give a pass to it and to those who knew about it and supported him anyway.

I feel this unique cherry picking of obviously terrible stances by President Trump is used to undermine so many trump supporters who chose to vote for him for a myriad of reasons.

Its discouraging to see

The point is it should be a disqualifier. There is nothing that can convince me to vote for a person who endorses white supremacists. I cannot compromise on equal rights for all humans.

He disavowed white supremacists, KKK, Proud Boys, etc. several times:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bd0cMmBvqWc (4:10 is him denouncing Proud Boys, for example)

https://streamable.com/sr9o2s

yes, certainly he did. He also refused to.

He takes both sides of lots of issues. You could make a page-a-day calendar out of quotes where he has taken opposite sides on an issue.

It's a strategic decision, and it's very effective. The white nationalists can look at what he says and say "ah, he wants us to stand by. Sure, later he'll disavow us, but I got the message. wink wink." And then the people who oppose white nationalism can say "see, he disavowed it, so that clarifies everything - nothing he said before meant what it sounded like."

This is not mere cherry picking, these are actual statements, far outside the norm of any other politician at the national stage, that have resulted in violence and even death in the United States.

How can you be discouraged by acknowledging the full spectrum of what this president has encouraged? What are you willing to sweep under the rug to white wash clearly bad behavior?

What I fail to understand, as a foreigner, is how someone can vote for a president who is an outright liar. Look no further than his last tweets as of right now. He is denying that he has lost and is insisting that there are illegal things happening (I'm not saying there aren't, but I will go the extra mile and say he has lost it and that only a manchild would say otherwise -- this manchild).

I could not go to bed with a clear mind knowing that I voted for a lying disgusting piece of trash, even if that meant that I was voting for the one whose policies I "agreed with the most".

I guess I _get_ it if you view politics as sports. Sports fans (in the EU) will support their club to death. The president of a football club can be corrupt and they will still probably back them so that they can back the club.

In both cases, these are twisted, unhealthy stances.

I really cannot fathom how so many Americans can vote for this piece of trash human being. I don't think all these people are bigots, racists or idiots; I simply cannot understand how someone can be comfortable with having a piece of shit as the face of the country.

I used to love America and the idea of going to it. I used to think it was lead by hardworking (albeit maybe _too_ hardworking) people. I used to think that maybe healthcare wasn't "that" important because it was _AMERICA_. I can't think like that anymore because a very significant part of the country chooses to be portrayed by an _objectively and openly racist, sexist bigot_.

Heck, I think I'm right leaning on most stuff in life, but I could never ever carry a straight face knowing I contributed to this disaster.

I would rather vote blank (I'm a strong believer in doing just that), against the system, than vote "for" a pig so as to not "vote" for the opposition (a typical argument used by trump "non-supporters who vote for him"). At least the opposition wouldn't put America to shame in such a magnitude. In my country America is now used as an example of what not to be, what not to do. We tolerate its undeniable leadership in the world; we no longer worship it or look at it as somewhat of a better society. It used to be the other way around. What happened, America?

US politics is structurally messed up and there will be more escalating drama in the coming years/decades that will definitely leak internationally. With mechanical issues like the electoral college being deeply flawed, to more innate issues of the system like the two party system reducing the entirety of politics in the USA to an adversarial binary, it will just get more polarized and ensure the disenfranchisement of even more people than now. This is a minor win in a sinking ship, IMO.

The thing that will leak internationally is the rapid and unsustainable increase in the US debt. The political shuffling is just rearranging the deck chairs in comparison.

Nationalism and authoritarianism is a thing. It’s all over the world. Like the surges of salafist movements in the ME every few decades, the same is true in with democracies.

The question is whether it is an outlier or the norm. I’m old enough to remember when racism and anti-semitism was common, then not (at least vocally).

America is a diverse culture. Why Euros are confused about it, they haven’t studied history. How would a country like the US would turn out as when Puritans, Calvinists, Scots-Irish and whatever other rejects from Europe were sent or fled from their homelands?

We got the best and we got the worst.

>>. What I fail to understand, as a foreigner, is how someone can vote for a president who is an outright liar. Look no further than his last tweets as of right now.

I don't fully understand it myself, but as it's been explained to me by trump supporters is: "don't listen to what he says, look at all the good policy, look at how hard he is on China, look at how many jobs there were pre covid, etc etc". Whether or not you see his policy as good, some people do, and they are willing to overlook his madness because they think he is achieving good things. (actions speak louder than words, etc) Some of his supports do bring up his appointing of tons of federal judges, and this what I would probably consider the most valid reason for voting for him (if one is aligned to a more conservative viewpoint), as his judges are more likely to enforce (or not) the laws that align with "traditional" republican political ideals, and that's the what matters to the voters.

Or also because they've always voted R, and Biden= socialism (which is worse than satan worship according to some people's moral codes..), or Biden= Let our cites get burnt down by rioters. This goes back to the, it's easier to vote against someone than for someone. And now that I put this all in words, this second justification is probably what I heard the most during trumps 4 years, some peoples defense of trump always came down to, "but hillary would be way worse". Some level of cognitive dissonance definitely plays into it.

Also having some subset of the population support a populist, pathologically lying sociopath is not necessarily a new or uniquely American problem. It's just that the problems seem to be amplified when they are American, cuz everyone is watching.

> What I fail to understand, as a foreigner, is how someone can vote for a president who is an outright liar.

You had two choices of which both were horrid. Which bad choice do you pick and if they are both that bad is the distinction significant?

>What I fail to understand, as a foreigner, is how someone can vote for a president who is an outright liar

Politicians are liars by definition. It is part of the job description. More people abstained than voted for either candidate.

>What I fail to understand, as a foreigner, is how someone can vote for a president who is an outright liar.

American politicians lie through their teeth as a matter of fact. No one gets or delivers anything they campaign on. This is by design. However, I'm still in your camp as well. I can't understand it at all. He didn't get off the first week of his campaign before I was dead refusing to vote for him.

However, I couldn't vote for his opponents either, which is where I think a lot of people get caught out, and where I think we have a real weakness in our system. That someone like him even got to that point is a testament that apparently anyone can do it. Just be a bull headed, pathologically lying charlatan and find a way to insert yourself in the nations political apparatus when the time is right.

After Trump getting elected once and then somewhat close again, I look at the US as a could be a dictatorship soon country.

Someone like Trump but instead being a bring person, could have won the elections I think, and then, via internet surveillance, find the opposition and fabricate charges and put in prison? Combined with maybe forcing FB to show only ads pro one party?

As of now, and 2 hours ago (according to the timestamp on your post) Trump is technically correct. The best kind of correct. He hasn't lost. Votes are still being counted in something like 10 states, as ridiculous as that sounds.

Contrary to popular belief, the AP doesn't decide who is elected president. Shocking, I know.

And your point is?

My point is... responding, in particular, to the very first line of the post that I replied to.

No he isn't technically correct. He said he has won by a lot, which isn't true.

Our president not only condones white supremacist groups but dreams about harness their hate and violence. If noticing the somehow undermines Trump supporters that’s not cherrypicking it’s justice.

If you chose to vote for Trump because of his economic policies and the benefits it would get you, you chose money over the safety of your fellow citizens. You felt your fellow non white citizens were less important than your 401k. That when white nationalists were chanting “Jews will not replace us” and the president would not condemn them you stood by him.

There is a massive list of horrible things this president has done. Many acts of fraud through out his entire life. An open child rape court case. Through all of this they have supported him. It’s not one cherry picked example. Trump supporters have nothing to hold up anymore. If you are one, look yourself in the mirror and say “I have been a terrible human being and American citizen, but I will work to be better”.

Trump supporters don’t deserve sympathy or respect. Trump supporting republicans need to earn that.

Trump lost support among whites and gained support among black, latino, asian voters [1]. Whatever it is that is going on is not as simple as you make it sound. Personally, I think Democrats need to simply stop talking as much about race and gender. Trump being an asshole about the topic doesn't mean that people care. Most people don't want to hear it. As another example, CA prop 16 was also voted down, in a minority-majority state.

1. https://www.brookings.edu/research/2020-exit-polls-show-a-sc...

Democrats have been very bad at elections. This election shouldn’t have been this close.

Nothing changes the issues with Trump. People looked at Trump as a candidate and decided to vote for him regardless of all those things about him, and for that they chose to privatize themselves over the nation and their fellow countrymen.

>they chose to privatize themselves over the nation and their fellow countrymen.

Incorrect from their point of view. They saw him as a lesser threat to stability through his policy decisions. I know, because I asked. Further, it is hard to argue with the results when you had Democrat cities getting burnt to the ground and there being no effort put into curtailing it which philosophy of leadership would genuinely lead to a safer polis.

In fact, many of them voted that way, because they thought it was better for the country.

Demonization and dehumanization of the other side gets you either nowhere, or in an increasingly bad place. I strongly advise against it.

>Democrat cities

Large cities usually lean Democratic. This is like saying "cities run by male mayors." It's the statistical reality, but not necessarily related.

Which city burned to the ground?

NYTimes gives a much better overview of who voted for whom by demographics: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/11/03/us/elections/...

Trump getting 12% of the black vote in 2020 is up from the 8% he did in in 2016. That sounds like going from really low to not as but still really low.

I don’t think Democrats would be taking so much about race and gender if Trump wasn’t dog whistling so much.

I'm no fan of Trump, and I have no evidence, only opinions. But, maybe not all Black people are huge fans of the activist wing supported by many Blacks and other minorities? Seems like that could explain him getting more votes, by more actively pushing back against it.

> I'm no fan of Trump, and I have no evidence, only opinions. But, maybe not all Black people are huge fans of the activist wing supported by many Blacks and other minorities?

The activist wing was defeated in the primary, and wasn't an option they were presented with. Many blacks are not supportive of the centrist wing and it's devotion to the interests of corporate capital and it near-total-absence of a working-class message, which, when it's the only thing around, makes right-wing economic populism, which does center around working class economic messaging (even if those of us on the progressive side might see it as both an ineffective platform if genuinely pursued, and much of it also a dishonest mirage being dangled as a manipulation strategy), if not exactly attractive—especially when visibly associated with virulent, violent racism—possibly seem the lesser near-term evil.

Obviously, or he wouldn’t have gotten 12% of their vote. In 2016, he got a statistical 0% of the black female vote (not sure about 2020), so that percent is probably a lot higher for black males (eg 24% if he got 0% of their vote again this year). I’m not sure what to make of that.

Edit: according to https://www.vox.com/2020/11/7/21551364/white-trump-voters-20...

Trump gained 4 points each for the black male and female vote, that would put him somewhere around 16, though I’m not sure what that article’s basis was. Still, those are starting from really low numbers to begin with, a lot of it could just be noise.

As non-white person I find the average white liberal MORE racist than your stereotypical redneck/Trump Follower.The last one is in your face, but most of the time the racism comes from ignorance or fear, cure them and you will go a long way to diminish it.

The white liberal is way different, they see themselves basically as a superior person, the summit of human ethical achievement. They interject themselves into minority problems to show how much "they care" but 99% the acts are only to "virtue-signal", when push come to shove they will quickly align with any policy that makes their life easier, no matter the impact on the world.

More insidiously, the supposed tolerance and open-mindeness are very quickly thrown out of the window once a minority sub-group fail to align to their worldview. See for example the vitriolic insults received by Cubans/Venezuelans in Florida just because they "dared" to vote for Trump.

If I were to live in America, I think I would happier and more accepted among the "racist rednecks" in Idaho or Alabama that among the NY/SF liberal crowd.

>If I were to live in America, I think I would happier and more accepted among the "racist rednecks" in Idaho or Alabama that among the NY/SF liberal crowd.

Since you don’t live in America, you have absolutely no idea what you’re talking about and you should stop talking like you do.

The world is big my friend, I dont live in America but I do know plenty of Americans. Your comment reinforce my point instead of refuting it.

I'm sorry but you still have no idea what you're talking about. 'I know some Americans' doesn't cut it. Unless you've lived in Trump country for a while there's no way you've met enough hard core Trump supporting rednecks to make any kind of accurate generalization about them.

>Your comment reinforce my point instead of refuting it.

I live in one of the reddest states in the nation and come from a family full of those Alabama rednecks you talk about, and I voted Republican in every election before 2016. If you think I represent the liberal elite, you're dead wrong.

Good luck trying to get along with the rednecks you're talking about. Most of them don't want you here, and if they had their preferred immigration policy you wouldn't be allowed in. Many of the family members I talked about wouldn't even allow you to marry a person outside your race, and they'd prefer if schools were still segregated. Though they'd never say that to an outsider's face. And the majority of them outright support requiring Muslims to register with the government so they can be tracked.

This has nothing to do with the South btw, it's more of an urban rural divide.

I live in America, am a foreign-born naturalized US citizen, and I agree with them completely. Your comment is another example of the moral superiority and insults aimed at anyone who questions this soft-bigotry from the left.

Ironically, living in America usually means you have no idea about the level of violence, racism and suffering around the world, and lack much of the perspective of immigrants who sacrifice so much to move here.

live in a bright red state and the Alabama red necks make up a large percentage of my family.

Believe me if you lived in a small town with them you’d change your mind about which type of racism you prefer pretty quickly.

> Ironically, living in America usually means you have no idea about the level of violence, racism and suffering around the world, and lack much of the perspective of immigrants who sacrifice so much to move here.

It’s interesting you bring that up because if you come from a “shit hole” country, you wouldn’t even be allowed to be here if those voters had their way.

There are almost 8 billion people in the world. Even if 1% are bad, that's 80 million people. You're definitely going to encounter some, but America has way better quality of life because of the strong mix of cultures that mitigate such problems. Some "rednecks" in a small town is not indicative of the entire country, nor would you rather live in another country where that's the national norm.

The issue with immigration has been stopping illegal entry and ensuring the rest are valuable contributors to society. Nobody is stopped because of their national origin, nor has that ever been proposed. The USA still continues its green card lottery system which gives out many free slots every year. Very few countries come anywhere close to matching the immigration strength or desire of the USA.

> Some "rednecks" in a small town is not indicative of the entire country,

Neither is some asshole liberal you ran into once. Nor is the caricature of "Liberal elites" you read about in the National Review.

>nor would you rather live in another country where that's the national norm.

Who said I'd rather live in another country. You seem to be having the argument you'd like to be having rather than actually participating in a conversation.

>The issue with immigration policy has been stopping illegal entry and ensuring the rest are valuable contributors to society.

I'm sorry but if you aren't considered part of the in group, White Trump supporters won't admit this to you, but as a group they are terrified by the demographic changes in the country. Fear that their culture is being erased is the primary impetus behind their call for decreased immigration. Law and order, and calling for a points base immigration system is simply more palatable than outright calling for only letting in Whites.

>Nobody is stopped because of their national origin, nor has that ever been proposed.

Trump has instituted Travel bans multiple times. During his campaign he called for "a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States until our country's representatives can figure out what is going on." He also reportedly said "Haiti? Why do we want people from Haiti here? Why do we want these people from all these shithole countries here? We should have more people from places like Norway.”

His advisors and and multiple national Republican politicians have said they are afraid that White birth rates are lower than immigrant birth rates.

>The USA still continues its green card lottery system which gives out many free slots every year. Very few countries come anywhere close to matching the immigration strength or desire of the USA.

Again this isn't from lack of trying. Trump isn't a dictator, there are limits to what he could accomplish in 4 years.

I dont know if you realize, but the way you talk and behave here is doing nothing to strengthen your argument.

Maybe because your entire argument boils down to “Actually the people that say they want to end racism are the real American racists. The straight up racists aren’t that bad. I know I really don’t have much experience to base that claim on but I know some American liberals on the internet.”

If you make claims like that, people on the internet who have experience with actual racists will call you on your shit. They will attack you because you are acting like a complete ass. And then you will sit around smugly using those attacks to build on your confirmation bias.

Ever wonder why you keep attracting liberal assholes? If you meet an asshole in the morning, you met an asshole. If you meet assholes all day long, you’re the asshole.

Yes, because the "people that say they want to end racism" are doing far more racist things like changing laws to take race into account, something that you're accusing the "rednecks" of attempting to do.

1. The person I'm replying to has never lived here so they have no idea what they're talking about.

2. Group A systematically robbed and cheated Group B for centuries. Now that Group B has some political power and legal protections, Group A wants to pretend that "they can't see color."

Despite the fact that Group B has 1/10th the household wealth of Group A, are more likely to be arrested for committing the same crimes, receive harsher sentences for the same convictions, are much less likely to receive callbacks for job interviews, less likely to be hired for jobs they are equally qualified for, less likely to be approved for mortgages, less likely to be rented to, their dialect is considered linguistically inferior to Group A's, they are less likely to be picked up by a cab, and their children are even disciplined more harshly in fricking kindergarten.

Can you not understand how Group B isn't thrilled with the status quo with Group A's insistence that "they can't see color."

>something that you're accusing the "rednecks" of attempting to do.

1. They don't need to change laws to take race into account, because the system already does that for them.

2. Every single Trump supporting "redneck" I know supported the Muslim ban. And nearly every single Trump supporting "redneck" I know supported requiring Muslims to register with the government for tracking. According to survey's about 10% of them don't approve of mixed race marriages. And I guarantee from personal experience that the real number is much higher than that.

The only reason they don't get to enact the laws they want to, and the only reason they are afraid to publicly espouse their racist beliefs is because of the hard work of those left leaning Americans you despise.

Those left leaning American's you hate so much are the only reason most non white immigrants are even allowed to be in this country in the first place. The majority of my family doesn't even support birthright citizenship and would remove any non white citizens who's parents haven't been in this country more than a few generations if they could.

1) I live here so I know what I'm talking about. Either way, anecdotes are useless.

2) What is this nonsense about group A and B? Are we responsible for our ancestors? Are you prepared to say everyone in group B is responsible for any and all harm they collectively do? The answer is no, you would elect to treat people as individuals instead, so it seems it's you that treat the different groups differently by assigning collectively responsibility to only one of them.

3) "can't see color" is absolutely the correct way forward. We've spent decades proving that what you look like has nothing to do with your talents, motivations, interests, passions and character. We will never progress forward if you continue to discriminate and treat people by the very characteristic you claim is being used to discriminate.

4) The system is nothing but laws. Anything else would be up to how a specific individual deals with those laws, which is a problem with that person and not the system.

5) Anecdotes are useless. The travel ban is not what you claim it was, but perhaps you should look at how members of that religion handle racism first. You won't find any multiculturalism there, that's for sure. As a foreign-born naturalized US citizen, I don't support birthright citizenship either. It's unique to only the US and Canada, not the norm, and repealing it would solve many problems.

6) I don't hate left-leaning American's. This is your projection, clouded by your bias and judgement. I only hate policies that enact the very discrimination they aim to solve, created by people who are ignorant in the problems they aim to fix while ignoring all consequences of those solutions and further blocking any potential discussion or feedback.

7) No, the modern left is not responsible for any of that. America is a melting pot and has been for centuries. This is not some new development, it existed for generations before you and there are no serious attempts to stop it. Again you keep using anecdotes to say a few people are representative of the whole. Is there a country without criminals? Does that mean we all commit crime? Clearly not, so why don't we look at what actually is the reality instead.

Do you think that systemic racism exists? That is do you believe Black people when they tell you their life is harder because they are Black. Do you believe that job interviewers discriminate against Black sounding names? Do you believe that Black people receive harsher prison sentences all else being equal? Do you believe that Black people have a harder time renting homes? Because there's hard evidence to back up every single one of those claims.

All of those issues and more combine to create a reinforcing feedback loop that creates a permanent lower class within our society, that erodes trust in institutions, increases crime and, directly impacts our economic development.

What specifically do you propose we do to end that feedback loop?

2. This isn't about blame. It's about ameliorating an issue that harms all of us. And it's only indirectly about our ancestors. There are people alive today who were directly harmed by the laws that were put in place by the municipalities, states, and the country they live in today. People who were never compensated for that harm.

3. Pretending that you "don't see color" is an absurd response. Of course you do. Everyone does and everyone has implicit biases. The key is to recognize those biases, and sometimes to consciously correct for them.

4. > The system is nothing but laws.

That is naïve to the point of absurdity. I'm sure if you think about it you can come up with a few counter examples.

5. If anecdotes are useless, why do you keep brining them up?

> The travel ban is not what you claim it was, but perhaps you should look at how members of that religion handle racism first.

The travel ban that Trump called for during the campaign that won him votes was much more expansive than what was actually enacted. He also suggested that we should register all Muslims.

A survey in 2016 said that 40% of Americans called for a registry of Muslims, the results were heavily correlated with party affiliation. I'm going to give you 1 guess on which party favored registering Muslims.

>but perhaps you should look at how members of that religion handle racism first. You won't find any multiculturalism there, that's for sure.

What happened to treating people as individuals not as part of a group?

6. >It's unique to only the US and Canada, not the norm, and repealing it would solve many problems.

I thought the US was an amazing unique melting pot? There are many conservative and liberal argument for how the melting pot is helped by birthright citizenship.

https://www.cato.org/publications/commentary/birthright-citi...

7. You really need to read a bit more history if you think this is true. Look up the 1965 immigration act.

> America is a melting pot and has been for centuries.

The Chinese exclusion act, and country based immigration quotas favoring European countries were the norm through most of that time.

>there are no serious attempts to stop it.

Here's a conversation between Steven Bannon and Stephen Miller (Trump's current lead advisor on immigration) --------------------------------- “Isn’t the beating heart of this problem, the real beating heart of it, of what we gotta get sorted here, not illegal immigration?” Bannon asked Miller. “As horrific as that is, and it’s horrific, don’t we have a problem? We’ve looked the other way on this legal immigration that’s kinda overwhelmed the country?”

Bannon goes on to decry the “oligarchs” of Silicon Valley and Washington and call the number of immigrants in the United States “scary.”

Miller’s response is affirmation: “The history of America is that an immigration-on period is followed by an immigration-off period,” he said. -----------------------------------

Bannon and Miller are both obsessed with preserving "western"(European) culture. If you aren't from a European country, you very likely would not have been allowed here had Steven Miller been in power when you immigrated.

> Ever wonder why you keep attracting liberal assholes? If you meet an asshole in the morning, you met an asshole. If you meet assholes all day long, you’re the asshole.

The fact you say that without even a hint of self-awareness is amusing. You seem to have unresolved anger issues by the way you approach the discussion with people who disagree with you. All in all you seem a very unpleasant fellow so I wouldn't propagandize too much your supposed liberal values. Nobody will believe them.

That’s an interesting debate tactic you have there. Walk into a discussion full of smugness and unearned confidence. Resolutely make generalizations about hundreds of millions of people with no more evidence than “you have some internet friends”. And clutch your pearls like a self satisfied concern troll when you get called an asshole.

You really sound a lot like your imagined liberal bogeymen with your patronizing concern my friend.

Thank you for saying this.

No, you wouldn’t and it would be extremely clear. Reality is not changing because of anyone wishful thinking. I sincerely hope that you would never live in such environment, you may regret very very much your view. Maybe you are not aware, but to me it looks like that you are similar to a turkey hoping for thanksgiving. Actually you remind me of that black guy that was critical about BLM and was adamant that he never had any problem with the police because he respected the law. He was shot and killed by the police: https://www.newsweek.com/jonathan-price-defended-cops-facebo... . If I were you I would be very careful about what you wish for, you’ll never know, maybe at some point your wish will be granted sadly.

Instead of the “white man’s burden” it’s now the “white liberals burden” to save all these brown people who don’t know enough to save themselves.

There was an article a few days ago that claimed Trump’s increase in minority support was because the minorities were racist too.

I mean, that’s just lazy thinking.

Except it's not... I grew up in a lower middle class, majority hispanic town in California and the racism towards black people and even their own race is very prevalent. Unsurprisingly, we had a few trump caravans drive through our town in the past few months.

Assuming that the reason people hold other opinions that differ from yours is because they are bad people, is just lazy thinking.

As a non-white person that actually lives in the US, this couldn't be further from the truth. You're comparing the ideologically extreme liberal to the moderate conservative. I've visited enough states and experienced enough racism to know that it isn't a matter of "curing their fear". But sure, keep making the same baseless claims that far right leaning media make.

The simple fact that a comment made you compare me to "the far right leaning media" (Which one is that btw?, even Fox went extremely anti-Trump) says a lot about your tolerance. Ahi nos vemos mijo.

As a non-white person that also actually lives in the US, your comment couldn't be further from the truth.

America, the land of opportunity, is an incredible place for all cultures, and the best of its kind in the world. If you're looking for utopia, you won't find it anywhere, but this is nowhere near the hell you claim it to be. I would advise you experience what racism really is like when it's the entire nation and government like in the Middle East or even countries like Japan. Maybe that perspective would help.

>America, the land of opportunity, is an incredible place for all cultures, and the best of its kind in the world. If you're looking for utopia, you won't find it anywhere, but this is nowhere near the hell you claim it to be. I would advise you experience what racism really is like when it's the entire nation and government like in the Middle East or even countries like Japan. Maybe that perspective would help.

Stop trying argue with strawmen. No one is saying that America is more racist than the middle east. It is in fact possible to be less racist than Saudi Arabia and still have racist elements.

The context of this discussion is about comparative racism between different segments of the American population. It has nothing to do with America's international position on the racism scale.

And we're saying that we would rather deal with a tiny number of outright racists (who can be re-educated or ignored) than the vast pernicious soft bigotry and racism of the modern left that is infecting everything from academia to science. It's a classic case of "the road to hell is paved with good intentions" and the complete refusal to even discuss it is a major problem.

Are you having a problem following the conversation, or do you just purposely respond to completely different points than those made in the thread you reply to?

Choosing candidates based on how well you think they’ll manage the economy is not a matter of just choosing one’s 401k over other priorities. Bad economies, especially in formerly prosperous countries, tend to lead to many much more obviously horrible things. In many ways, you can tie the rise of Hitler to the economic devastation of Germany in the aftermath of WW1. The Great Depression had some powerful effects in the US, as well - fascist and communist candidates gained a lot more traction than they had previously.

Not to say that Trump was the man for the job on any of this, just that you shouldn’t wave away people’s prioritizing of a strong economy as greed driven.

This constant obsession with race and skin color from Trump opponents is why many minority citizens voted for him in the first place.

If your entire statement breaks down at the existence of the first non-white Trump supporter than your position isn't as accurate or valid as you think.

That’s not how arguments work. There’s plenty who care more about themselves then others, regardless of skin color, race or gender. There’s the concept of f yours got mine. Also Trump just kept saying socialist even though that was so far removed from anything truthful, but people hear socialist and think that must be bad.

That's how most people vote, on all sides, and they have no responsibility to vote any other way. That's how democracy works.

Yet you clearly made a statement of all of his voters as choosing one thing over another. Perhaps you should revise that then, according to your new statement.

We have to find a way to come together and just assuming half the country is terrible doesn't lead anywhere good.

Reasons people might support Trump in spite of his many many shortcomings:

Trump has generated a middle east peace deal with UAE, Saudi etc. recognizing Israel which helps pave the way for stability in the region.

We have not entering any new proxy wars during his reign.

Trump banned lobbyists from the white house (although this one turned out to be a net negative because then the much of the white house staff members became defacto lobbyists--for instance Michael Cohen was paid around 10 million from various fortune 500 companies to help bring their interests to the president)

His stance on not murdering babies (which is how many prolife members see abortion, your mileage may vary--I am pro choice myself).

Trump has appointed many "true conservative" judges, so if you consider judicial appointments extremely important and are conservative you might support him for that reason.

What about the fact that Richard Spencer, who started and led the Jews will not replace us rally and was the leader of the white nationalist movement at Charlottesville is now a CNN contributor and endorsed Biden. And the fact the president did condemn them, repeatedly.

Trump passed the most comprehensive criminal justice reform bills of the last 20 years.

2020 Trump has the best percentage of vote share among republican presidential candidates from Hispanics, Jews, and African Americans of the past 50 years so maybe he isn't quite as racist as he seems.

You could believe that school choice is the most important civil rights issue of our time.

You think that the government has not right to be mandating lockdowns, school closures, etc. And have seen many instances of overreach from democrats.

Very low trust in the media and other "ruling" elites whom Trump seems to be constantly embattled.

There are of course lots of reasons to support Biden.

As VP he oversaw a very successfully timeframe of American history, with economic growth, political and social stability.

Trump has a tendency to say many things which are dog whistles/outright racist.

Trump speaks about women in derogatory ways.

Instead of bailing out local governments and schools during the coronavirus, Trump was pumping money into large corporations.

Biden takes climate change seriously. We are likely to see a green new deal.

Biden is likely to increase social safety nets during a time which is likely filled with economic uncertainty.

Biden isn't doing saber rattling with China threatening a second cold war.

Biden/Obama created a peace deal with Iran with the potential to bring stability to the region.

Its hard to judge policy, but Biden's character is much much more appealing than Trump's.

Biden is likely to bring a sense of dignity back to the office.

Biden is not a divisive figure and can help heal the country.

Biden is likely to bring police reform.

Trumps response to the coronavirus has been terrible. He basically left it up to the states instead of showing leadership. Moreover he was constantly spouting whatever nonsense it was that he was spouting.

Biden is likely to try and do something about the growing inequality in the country.

Biden has shown he can lead competently.

It's hard because conservatives and liberals tend to not only have differing personality traits, they tend to have underlying philosophies, priorities and thought patterns (personal anecdote not science). But we have to find ways to love each other despite our differences. Much love, I hope Biden does great things for the country and the next four years are prosperous, full of love and happy.

This is the content we need to see on the news. They are supposed to present us with these facts, not the story.

It's hard to understand China through the lens of a western upbringing (as I'm sure is the case vice versa).

Sabre rattling with China. I'm no expert but have spent 15 years doing business in China.

A very firm position is the only one they respect (although they will claim otherwise). If you offer them concessions they will take them and at the same time respect you less. In many western countries concessions are met with good favour. This is rarely the case in China in my experience.

> Trump has generated a middle east peace deal with UAE, Saudi etc. recognizing Israel which helps pave the way for stability in the region.

No, Trump had virtually nothing to do with that...

Anyone with even a passing familiarity of the Gulf region knows that the UAE and Israel have not been at war. On the contrary, the countries have had diplomatic relations under the table for quite some time now. The UAE even hosted an unofficial Israeli embassy at IRENA in Abu Dhabi.

The reason why full diplomatic relations took so long is that the UAE government had to gradually prepare the populace for the announcement. Everything else was in place way before Trump became president.

So why was it announced that way? My guess: Trump claimed that he brokered this “deal” to earn brownie points with Americans, and the Emiratis/Israelis got to earn points with Trump. Win-win.

Well stated. And in fact many of the things Trump has done, I would support. But I can't get past his worst characteristics.

My money, my family, and my health is far more important to me than my fellow citizens, and especially my fellow “non citizens”.

This whole comment thread shows divisions won't be going away anytime soon.

That reminds me of the McGregor’s legacy joke (a bit vulgar but https://www.reddit.com/r/Jokes/comments/feuz6/whats_that_jok...). The gist is that people are noted for the horrible/crazy/strange things they’ve done, even if they’ve done other things as well (eg Hitler is never going to be noted for his work on animal rights and vegetarianism).

What valid reason brings you to vote for a racist? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racial_views_of_Donald_Trump

Certainly, even the semblance of Trump's association with white supremacy is reason enough for him to go. We saw this evil rear its head in Charlottesville and elsewhere.

But my point is, I very much doubt this is representative of 100% of the Republican electorate. I think its probably something like way less than 1%.

Trump's implicit support of them elevated and amplified them and made them much bigger than they really are.

It's far far more than 1%. Vast legions of his supporters cite him saying things that others are not willing to, and that all comes down to his racist views.

It takes a special sort of doublethink to not acknowledge which views he states that no other politician is willing to say.

Agree, pulling a number out of my backside it feels like at least 10% of the country have some sort of white supremacist leanings.

It really doesn't take that many engaged voters to dominate a conversation if it's allowed. 99.5% of the republican base will vote for anyone with an R next to their title.

I think that’s true of both parties

When you have an openly racist candidate, shouldn’t that outweigh a voters political party loyalty? Cause that’s basic human decency.

> I very much doubt this is representative of 100% of the Republican electorate. I think its probably something like way less than 1%.

Maybe or maybe not, but 100% of the people that voted for Trump were, by definition, willing to tolerate his white supremacy ... otherwise they wouldn't have voted for him.

People who voted for Trump believed that what Biden represented was worse than what Trump was represented. Personally, I think they were terribly wrong.

Is someone gonna explain the flaw in my logic here?

You do know Biden gave the eulogy for a klansman right? The hypocrisy from the left is thick.

That's misleading / false: https://apnews.com/article/fact-checking-afs:Content:9545480...

It isn't false at all. Byrd was a KKK member and Biden did speak at his funeral. It's in no way false or misleading.

It's misleading because Byrd renounced his beliefs. The NAACP says: "Senator Byrd reflects the transformative power of this nation. Senator Byrd went from being an active member of the KKK to a being a stalwart supporter of the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act and many other pieces of seminal legislation that advanced the civil rights and liberties of our country."

You didn't read the linked article, did you? Byrd changed his ways and was even praised by the NAACP for his capacity to change:

  “Senator Byrd reflects the transformative power of this
  nation,” read a statement by NAACP president Ben Jealous.
  “Senator Byrd went from being an active member of the KKK
  to a being a stalwart supporter of the Civil Rights Act,
  the Voting Rights Act and many other pieces of seminal
  legislation that advanced the civil rights and liberties of
  our country.”

It may not be false to say that Biden spoke at Byrd's funeral, but it's definitely misleading to call it hypocrisy.

>But my point is, I very much doubt this is representative of 100% of the Republican electorate. I think its probably something like way less than 1%.

Some people just want the trains to run on time. I understand that. However sometimes there are more important issues. In those instances it is hard to see people ignore those issues in favor of the train schedule.

Many of the people that voted for him, "support" him only by means of rejection of the other side.

If you are against one party, you will vote for the other. The feeling of being against something is generally much stronger than the feeling of support.

This is not just a Trump issue but a bipartisan one, as I wager most of the 75 million that voted for Biden, simply voted against Trump and the GOP as well.

I think the true evil here is the two party system, where people have no outlet to express and advance anything more nuanced than us vs them mentality. But I don’t think that will change any time soon, if ever...

Eliminating first past the post is necessary if we want >2 parties. Maine just started doing ranked choice, maybe others will follow.

Australia has ranked choice and we also have a 2-party system for all intents and purposes. I don't think ranked choice is the answer, but the voting system (mixed-member proportional) used in New Zealand and Germany seems to be doing a much better job of getting a good variety of voices in their respective legislatures.

That is certainly true, and the downsides of a two-party system are not small. On the other hand, multi-party systems have a tendency to build less stable governments, which was one of the reasons for the downfall of the Weimacher Republik and the rise of the NSDAP.

With the addition of more parties to the German political spectrum, building coalitions has been harder in recent years, forcing essentially the two most central mainstream parties, CDU/CSU and SPD, to build a "great coalition". The problem of this is that people not happy with the results necessarily have to vote more extreme, and we did see a lot of protest votes, swinging from the very-left Die Linke to the ultra-right Afd, for example.

Observing the political process in the US, it seems that the primaries leave the final candidates always somewhat worse for wear, maybe more so on the Democrat side than on the Republican side (Infighting seems to be a worldwide phenomenon more prevalent on the left). By necessity, most winning candidates must then do a dance from the more extreme positions they expressed to win the primaries to the center. This is almost by construction, as the voters in the primaries will almost always be more extreme than the voters in the presidential election, even if reduced to those which would consider to vote for the party in the first place.

The idea of a grand coalition _seems_ odd, because I think we’re all accustomed to our major political parties fighting rather than cooperating, but if they can work together isn’t that a rejection of extremism on both sides and an embrace of centrism, which, perhaps, is what the German majority actually want? I know very little about German politics so I’m just asking the question here - but I’m genuinely curious, what’s the downside?

For short term, I think these coalitions can work. But there are two problems: First, in a normal big party/small party coalition, the small party typically has a very specific agenda. For example the Green party with environment protection. So it's easy to make a combined program: The program of the big party + that special thing. With two "we do everything" parties, where each party wants to appear as "having made their mark", it's much harder to combine to a big program. And because everybody wants to leave their mark, there is a lot of fighting, so that in the next election, you can rule alone or with a small party, so you'll have more power.

Second: There will always be people not happy with the government. Maybe because they really got handed the short stick, or because they just tend to pick the short stick. That is true even if they are better off than before, just if other people are more better off, people will not be happy. These people want to vote for an opposition. Who should they vote for? They can only go to an extreme party.

> There will always be people not happy with the government.

> Who should they vote for? They can only go to an extreme party.

That is what extremists want you to believe. But the belief that both big parties are corrupt exists in the USA as well, and it helped Trump. The fact of the matter is, if you are unhappy with what a grand coalition does, you can still vote for the party that you agree more with to have it gain more power next time around. Only if you believe that cooperation and compromise themself are bad things, you have to vote extreme.

That is easy to observe in German politics. Yes, some people vote for the party they agree with more, but many do not. This has nothing to do with "the party is corrupt", but with "the party doesn't do what I want them to do".

> That is certainly true, and the downsides of a two-party system are not small. On the other hand, multi-party systems have a tendency to build less stable governments, which was one of the reasons for the downfall of the Weimacher Republik and the rise of the NSDAP.

I'm no longer convinced that this is a good argument, given that a two-party system just gave rise to the Trump party over the past four years - and it was 'rejected' by a mere ~60,000 votes in a country of 350 million.

> On the other hand, multi-party systems have a tendency to build less stable governments,

That's the popular myth, based largely on a combination of conflation of parliamentary and multiparty systems (the two have no essential connection) and the fact that parliamentary systems tend to use different language around a government/administration than presidential systems do.

Measured by either cabinet or head of government turnover rates, multiparty parliamentary systems among established democracies are more stable than the US.

> which was one of the reasons for the downfall of the Weimacher Republik and the rise of the NSDAP.

Two party systems have at least as much problem (really, more) forming moderate-to-opposing extreme coalitions against extremists from one side, which is how extremists of the Right have progressively hijacked a major party in the US, with nothing like the level of externally-imposed stress that produced the NSDAP in Germany. [0] At least in a multiparty system, forming a coalition across tribal identity boundaries formed by party labels is expected.

[0] see, https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2020/10/31/the-repu...

Americans for some reason have fixated on FPTP as the cause of the two-party system and hope RCV/IRV will extract them from it.

The basis of a two-party system is actually single-member electorates. Because each seat can only have one representative and the economics of campaigning and organising make it hard for a third party to make appreciable inroads.

Australia's Parliament demonstrates the differences: the House of Representatives is composed of single-member electorates and is dominated by the two major political organisations (and this is for the good, as the government is formed in the House and a two-party system almost guarantees that a government can be formed and sustained easily after each election). The Senate, by contrast, is composed of multi-member electorates, one for each state, elected on a proportional basis. While the major parties typically have the largest share between them, the nature of a proportional multi-member electorate is that it creates more room for minor parties to obtain one or two seats.

RCV/IRV does not this promote more moderate candidates, from any given party.

Thanks for the thoughtful response. I agree that there are other structural challenges in the way of making additional parties really viable. My theory is that changing from FPTP would sort of break the ice and allow other parties to gain momentum, normalize the idea of other parties not being totally fringe, and maybe pave the way for some other enabling changes once it’s no longer strategically a terrible idea to vote for the candidates you prefer but almost certainly won’t win. It’s not the only change that would help, to be sure.

Why do Canada and the UK have more than two viable parties when they use FPTP?

Because people are failing to vote strategically. In Canada the 3 party system even more heavily favors the right (Conservatives), as our center-left parties (NDP, Liberal) are very similar and split the vote. In strategic elections this narrows considerably.

We also have a parliamentary system, where these parties can make coalitions and essentially pool votes, which softens (but doesn't eliminate) the need for strategic voting.

Canada has 5 parties. Bloc, lib, con, ndp and green not to mention another protest right party. A few years ago the cons were split into two parties.

Rarely outside of BC does lib-ndp vote split work in the con favour and often works the other way for the lib in Quebec with the bloc.

The ndp and lib seem like they are progressive and the idea that one should vote for the other to block the cons misses the differences. And your vote is worth a few dollars so vote for what you want... because funding matters.

That sounds more like an eventually 2-party system which hasn’t reached equilibrium yet. Granted, I know zilch about the rest of the voting system.

Neither Canada or the UK have a separate executive chamber that they vote for. The PM and his cabinet is 'just' a set of MPs that their own party delegated executive responsibility to.

POTUS, on the other hand, is personally entrusted with substantial levels of power.

It's very dubious as to whether the UK per se can be said to have "more than two viable parties".

The constituent countries each have a nationalist bloc that will often be successful in local government but not really at the UK level unless whoever is running the UK as a whole is antagonistic to the nationalist position. This results in silliness like Wrexham (which is technically over the border into Wales but nobody there speaks the Welsh language) being required to have Welsh-speaking bureaucrats and signs in Welsh even though the most likely language you'd hear there besides English is... Polish. Why do this? A few million quid on symbolic gestures defuses Welsh nationalism, cheap at twice the price.

But those nationalists won't work together and have almost nothing to say about the UK's larger politics. The closest is probably either the Scottish Nationals objecting to the consequences of Brexit (since Scotland didn't vote for it, and it destroys at least one of the claimed benefits of voting against independence for Scotland in its previous referrendum) or the DUP (a Northern Irish party which opposes Irish independence and is closely affiliated with the Conservative Party) offering a Confidence & Supply deal to keep the Tories in power.

Beyond that, there's the Liberal Democrats, but they aren't very big, and the only time Brits gave enough Lib Dem MPs the nod, they were obliged to throw their lot in with the Tories†, who aren't stupid and used this to ensure most of the blame for the resulting Tory policies landed on Lib Dem MPs who promptly lost in droves. They are nowhere close to being a "viable party" in the sense of able to govern, though they do have majorities in some local governments.

And then what, one Green MP? I mean, she's competent, her policies make sense, all credit to her, but on her own she is not a "viable party" in that sense. Her constituents (Brighton) are going to vote for her because they trend hippier than most of the UK (also gayer, but I don't think the Green Party is especially pro-LGBTQ), because she's good at her job and incumbents are always harder to defeat but that doesn't result in a Green UK government, just one MP.

So no, really there are two viable parties, the Conservative and Unionist Party (Conservatives, "Tories") or the Labour Party. I think they're both a bit screwed because they both subscribe to beliefs about the importance of Work and I believe we're at the end of the era in which the capability of humans to do Work is necessary or perhaps even relevant to prosperity.

† The existence of numerous smaller groups some of which I did not mention means that the Liberal Democrats could not have formed a working coalition with Labour, because that coalition would lack the votes to beat a "No Confidence" motion from Tories and other rival parties, forcing fresh elections. With the Conservatives they had more than enough, so the only alternative to a Tory coalition was fresh elections. In hindsight that would have been the correct choice perhaps, but wisdom at the time was that the one thing voters hated more than the other party was elections, so never force fresh elections unless you're confident you can win them.

Wrt Canada, because of Quebec. The bloc has an alignment that's neither liberal or conservative, and Quebec has a huge amount of seats.

Agreed, plurality voting has to go. St. Louis just adopted approval voting [1] which is even better than ranked choice voting (no need to rank and avoids the non-monotonic problem of RCV). So things are looking up!

[1] https://stlapproves.org/

All systems lead to two party systems. Even countries with multiparty system, turn into two major parties with dozens of fringe parties. These fringe parties do nothing more than splitting votes, forming coalition when one of the major party didn’t win majority typically creating unstable governments.

The current New Zealand government is the first in 26 years of MMP where a party gained a majority alone. The previous was made up of 3 very different minority parties. In every other election, the largest has sought the support of smaller parties to govern. I can’t speak for other countries, but MMP has not lead to instability here.

> All systems lead to two party systems

I don't think that's true at all:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Assembly_(Switzerland)

It’s not true - it just seems inevitable when you’re within the 1 person, 1 vote and winner take all system of the US.

If you believe that someone voting for whom they believe in is splitting the vote, then you don't believe in democracy right? You are thinking like a marketing strategist it sounds like.

Score Voting where candidates are given a score 0-99 transcends bicameralism when averages are taken, similar to scores in the Olympics. And it is the superset of all voting methods.

Parliament seat count for parties in Finland [0]:

40, 38, 38, 31, 20, 16, 10, 5, 1, 1

The 4th largest party with 31 seats was the largest one in the previous parliament.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parliament_of_Finland

> I think the true evil here is the two party system, where people have no outlet to express and advance anything more nuanced than us vs them mentality. But I don’t think that will change any time soon, if ever...

I don't think that's necessarily because of the two party system. I think it's more a result of a period of extreme partisanship/polarization reflected through a two party system.

As recently as a few decades ago, you still had significant numbers of conservative Democrats and liberal Republicans in office, and I feel that helped a lot with bipartisanship. Maybe it was a mistake to get rid of stuff like congressional earmarks, which maybe took pressure off officeholders to be so ideologically strident and combative.

> I think the true evil here is the two party system

America has had a two-party system for 200 years. Has it been this polarized for most of those 200 years?

For a significant portion of that time, quite possibly. In the lead up to the Civil War, there were many debates about ending slavery through the 1820’s and 30’s. There were even mini wars over the issue in the 1850’s, and then the actual event beginning in the 1860’s. This was then followed by a new subjugation of free people in the South beginning in 1875 and the Jim Crow period. During this post Civil War period is the ongoing Wars with Native Americans to expand the land of the US (though this was supported by both parties mostly). Then women’s suffrage coming to a head 1920’s (along with huge issues related to the ban on alcohol at the same time). Also during this period is a huge debate going on between banks and farmers during the Great Depression. Then following WWII the beginning of demands for equal rights in the South to get rid of Jim Crow, gaining major steam in the 50’s and 60’s, and then being joined with Women’s liberation.

And then we come to the huge divide that starts more recently during the Bush administration and the demand for LGBTQ equal rights (brewing strongly since the ‘70s) and more recently a revisiting of policing and criminal justice which brings us to today. There are periods where the divide seems to ebb and flow. Probably 10-20 year spans, and then a recognition by the greater community that things remain unfair for various groups.

It’s hard to say, but let’s say more than 50% of American history is a divide of some sort on various issues. Is it due to two parties? Or do the parties coalesce around the issues that are brewing at the most extreme boiling points? Or worse, do the two parties use various issues as wedges to create divide where one might not otherwise exist? (All of this is from my own memory and study, so I’m sure there are major things I’ve glossed over or missed not being an expert in the area)

This assumes party identification and party goals are arbitrary.

That might be true in some cases (at least if “arbitrary” includes accidents of biography and consequent trust), but I suspect there are more supporters of both parties who actually identify with the explicit platform goals or projected values than there are people who are only against the other party.

I will go further here: the idea that there is a mass of people out there waiting to support a third party that would somehow better represent Americans is entirely without merit. How can you tell? Simple. Watch primaries. Any spoiler effect should be weak there. You can feel free to cast your ballot for whoever you like most without worrying that the candidate from the party you like the least will win without you supporting your second least.

But in spite of that freedom... we still see third party primary participation that’s multiple orders of magnitude down from primary participation focused on the big two.

I think the most straightforward explanation for this is that a vanishing fraction of Americans are ever likely to support more than two parties.

You're underestimating the total number of people who just associate themselves with a party arbitrarily and vote down the party line IMO - but even ignoring that I disagree that people wouldn't vote for third parties if they were truly viable alternatives. A LOT of people in the Republican party in fact are repulsed by Trump; and there is also an obvious distinction in the Democratic party between AOC/Bernie-style progressive factions, and centrists and moderates in the party like what Biden represents. The super-crowded Democratic primaries made that pretty clear.

I think the big problem with the system as it stands is that people rightfully understand that if they vote for a third party candidate, that candidate is a) guaranteed to lose, b) guaranteed to be unable to enact any change in government without having a literal majority in the senate, and c) guaranteed to steal votes from a candidate who you may not love but is the lesser of two evils (plenty of libertarians do not agree with Biden much at all, but would rather have him than Trump/vice versa, and then vote down the party lines to avoid disaster).

Third party votes are often cast as a waste of a vote - and I don't blame people for thinking that way, because the system encourages it.

> This assumes party identification and party goals are arbitrary.

No, it just assumes (which is true) that people care about different aspects of the party platform. All over the developed world, people on both sides of the aisle want to reduce immigration. Left-leaning parties in Denmark and New Zealand (the beloved Jacinda Ardern) campaigned and won on platforms calling for reduced immigration. Mainstream center-left politicians like Macron have shifted to calling for increased integration.

In the U.S., that left has radicalized that debate. Democrats have dismissed all such concerns are racist. The moderate candidate Democrats ran didn't push back on any of that or acknowledge there was a legitimate debate to be had over immigration levels. And nearly everyone who ran in the Democratic primary embraced far-left positions such as decriminalizing illegal immigration and universal healthcare for undocumented immigrants--positions only 1-2 EU countries have embraced. (Due to a lack of any pushback on those positions from Biden, it was easier to get those primary positions to stick to him.) Biden wouldn't even take the completely mainstream Democratic position of condemning illegal immigration and calling for secure borders, which Obama embraced.

At that point, what do you do? A party isn't a single person or policy position; its an entire ideology (and the Democratic Party has become increasingly ideological).

I will go further here: the idea that there is a mass of people out there waiting to support a third party that would somehow better represent Americans is entirely without merit

A huge number of Americans are socially conservative and economically liberal and there is currently no party that really supports that point of view.

https://www.storybench.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/polcom...

>"support" him only by means of rejection of the other side.

It's more than that. He hurts them. He is their kryptonite. A shiv in their side. Blocking the other side from enacting their agenda is one thing, and any republican can do that. he causes liberal tears, and they love it. It's like voting for poison ivy instead of sidewalks made of ice. They dont like him, they like the pain he causes others. And by extension that makes him admirable, despite not actually giving two anythings about him as a person.

So they rejected someone with a plan to control the virus and address climate change? Cool.

I am personally more aligned with ideas more progressive then Biden, so I certainly don't think people rejecting control of the virus and addressing climate change is "cool".

But when people are effectively given a binary choice, they will simply side with whomever aligns against the direction they don't like. It's not cool, but if we claim that all those choosing that direction are endorsing Trump, we're saying that there's no democratic choice whatsoever for those that recognize his failures.

In my opinion, there is something wrong with the two-party system much more so than there is something wrong with "republicans".

I agree with the two party system being terrible, and wish the Dems had a more progressive candidate, but Trump’s effects on the democratic process and the climate and COVID deaths needed to be stopped.

True. On that point, let us celebrate that this episode is over.

Thank you for spelling it out for people. The seeming binary choice is part of the cause for all this. First election of Trump was a real cry that some seem to have forgotten. I am genuinely not sure how this is simply glossed over and simply explained as 'racism','anti-science',or w/e. I still remember driving through Ohio and seeing signs along the lines of 'Help us Trump' pre-2016.

And the simple reality is that until it is addressed, we will have a non-zero chance of another Trump or Trump-like candidate in the future. Worse, we will have a candidate, who is much, much smarter, who saw all the new avenues and the ways things could be done..

Instead, we have this weird sports event with confused crowd cheering equivalent of 'my team won'. It is fucking depressing. I may be bitter, because I genuinely hate sports too.

I rejected someone who voted for wars every time one was on the table.

https://www.wral.com/fact-check-did-biden-support-wars-in-ir...

https://www.factcheck.org/2016/02/donald-trump-and-the-iraq-...

the other guy supported at least some of those wars publicly also. But since he parachuted into politics, who knows how he felt about these things until it was convenient to have an opinion favorable to his base.

Yes, having a president who did not start a single war for the first time since Reagan is "favorable" to a voter such as myself. And last time I voted specifically against this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6DXDU48RHLU. There are now _slave markets_ in Libya: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2S2qtGisT34

Does motivation matter? If a voter claims that they are casting a "protest vote", and that vote contributes towards some outcome, why should we believe that they didn't actually support that outcome?

Hacker News political discussions are worthless because we are not allowed to explore the possibility that people sometimes act in bad faith.

Boo to this, if you're against one party, abstain from voting for it.

Ask your self, how against the democratic platform do you need to be in order to justify affirming this guy?

Spoil your ballot.

When you seek the consensus of 150M voters you're never going to get the one you really want. There was a stark difference in tone and policy and voters made their intentions very clear. People who voted for Trump meant it. Look back to 2016 when they elevated Trump above other GOP options. They could have had a generic conservative who would oppose liberalism but govern with at least a modicum of dignity and professionalism and they declined.

Indeed, I noticed many of the people dancing in the streets had signs saying "no more trump" as Robert Heinlein said "If you are part of a society that votes, then do so. There may be no candidates and no measures you want to vote for ... but there are certain to be ones you want to vote against. In case of doubt, vote against. By this rule you will rarely go wrong."

This has made me think... I think a lot of the Trump supporters are against many of the things he's doing just because "at least it's not the dems". I think democrat voters will turn a blind eye on an incredible amount of things because "at least it's not Trump".

Trump got more support this year among every demographic but one—white males.

This opinion that Trump is a white supremacist, is just that... an opinion. Very few of his supporters saw him as a white supremacist. Trump disavowed white supremacy many times. This is divisive language is something I’m glad to see Biden avoiding, so far.

> Trump disavowed white supremacy many times.

Source? (Preferably in the form of a video, since there is a lot of misinformation about this, and he explicitly espoused white supremacy on live TV during the first presidential debate of 2020.)

https://www.factcheck.org/2020/02/trump-has-condemned-white-...

The fact that the whole racist and white supremacist trope gets pushed around this much means that the media has been very effective at lying to entire populace. Think about what else they may have lied about.

Ah yes, I must’ve been hearing things all those years ago when Trump called for a “complete and total shutdown of Muslims entering the country”. Extremely non-racist thing to say. Get over yourself.

Islam is a religion, not a race.

It was 7 counties identified by the previous admin as high risk. Lots of Muslims were still allowed to enter. I should know, I’m middle eastern myself.

I read your link carefully. He never actually condemns white nationalists. He agrees they should be condemned, but never actually condemns them.

There is one exception: A press release he clearly did not write condemns white supremacy.

Again, during the debates (after all the examples cited in that article), he again refused to condemn white supremacy, even when Fox’s Chris Wallace handed the opportunity as a soft ball, and even when Biden reduced it to a simple yes/no answer for him by naming a group to condemn.

All he had to say is “I condemn the Proud Boys” (or any other group he could name).

In the most visible public forum available to him, he chose not to do so, which is the same as condoning them all.

He does condemn them directly (several times), see the videos I linked above in reaction to your initial comment.

As Chris Wallace is asking him Trump says “sure” three times. He’s interrupting, which is unfortunate, but the goal posts on this have moved endlessly. I’ve never seen you, hedora, condemn white supremacy. Does that mean you support it? By the way, if you condemn it, I’m going to be the arbiter on whether you did it well enough or if you’re still tarnished in the court of public opinion.

Honestly I expect more from HN than to fall into Kafkaesque arguments about these things but perhaps the problem lies within my own expectations.

https://youtu.be/ihHyMOPQ55M

He disavowed white supremacists, KKK, Proud Boys, etc. several times:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bd0cMmBvqWc (4:10 is him denouncing Proud Boys, for example)

https://streamable.com/sr9o2s

1) Observe that the country is divided

2) Make a divisive statement accusing the other side of creating division

3) Throw racism and identity politics into the mix, that always helps

4) Repeat as necessary

"Trump Is Losing Ground With White Voters But Gaining Among Black And Hispanic Americans" https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/trump-is-losing-ground-...

Yes he now has 8% of the African American vote up from 6%. It’s remarkable you can find 92-94% of such a large and diverse diaspora that agrees you’re a bad fit.

The increase in the support levels among Latinx is definitely more substantial, and likely has to do with the fact that the right wing has been ginning up fear around “socialism” to a group historically seriously injured by it. (Bearing in mind of course that the definition of socialism which has caused harm in Latin America is the state owning the means of production, and there is absolutely unequivocally zero support for that among Democrats — who range from center-right to at most a flavor of social democrat).

That's fine. People can hold different opinions. Accusing people who disagree of being racist isn't just divisive, it is nonsensical.

Who are these voters racist against?

The premise makes even less sense if you're calling out divisive rhetoric.

One thing that I found really interesting is the way right wing television is explaining to the public how Trump cannot possibly be racist because he has African-American voters. This is the same way you can’t be racist because if have a black friend.

This cuts both ways as you point out. People vote for all sorts of reasons, and people are willing to overlook racism because they have higher priority issues. Just because the president is a racist doesn’t necessarily make you racist for voting for him. It just means you have things you consider more important.

Having African American voters doesn’t make you somehow not a racist, and voting for a racist doesn’t necessarily make you one. That’s how far the American political system has fallen.

Having a white person who wears their compassion on their sleeve call you racist or 'not black' for a refusal to cosign their hatred of Trump takes the cake. Hard to get over that one.

Mere indifference has become controversial.

Not a good look for sure. I’ll wait and judge him by what he does in the next four years though.

That kind of ignorance is nothing compared to literally forcing migrant women to have hysterectomies along the southern border. That’s a different kind of racism. [1]

[1] https://www.npr.org/2020/09/16/913398383/whistleblower-alleg...

> the definition of socialism which has caused harm in Latin America is the state owning the means of production, and there is absolutely unequivocally zero support for that among Democrats

A fundamental tenet of ownership is having control of it and the proceeds from it. It's not just the name on the masthead.

And once more literally no democrats count even a little bit as socialists. That notwithstanding it’s utterly disingenuous to equate social democrats with Maduro. The kind of “socialism” espoused by democrats is further right than substantially all of Europe, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. Far from failed, folks there enjoy a general higher standard of living than Americans.

> literally no democrats count even a little bit as socialists

1. taxation takes the proceeds from the property - the higher the taxes, the more socialist.

2. Rent control.

3. California specifies the gender makeup of boards of directors.

4. Single payer health care.

There are lots more, these are just examples. You can argue that the benefits of such abrogation makes it worthwhile, but they are socialism. The more of them, the more socialist.

> Far from failed, folks there enjoy a general higher standard of living than Americans.

The US then shouldn't be such a popular destination for immigrants looking for opportunity.

With reference to the definition of socialism: “any of various economic and political theories advocating collective or governmental ownership and administration of the means of production and distribution of goods”

1. taxation takes the proceeds from the property - the higher the taxes, the more socialist.

Not a socialist issue, for instance Donald trump raised taxes by capping the SLPT deductions, and imo has nothing to do with the state owning the means of production.

2. Rent control.

Not a federal or Democratic Party policy issue, just a stupid approach to control cost of living. The real answer is just supply and demand, and to permit building. This isn’t partisan it’s bad policy and has nothing to do with the means of production.

3. California specifies the gender makeup of boards of directors.

That has nothing to do with the means of production and isn’t a federal issue.

4. Single payer health care.

Not a left vs right issue IMO any more than a socialized fire department or police department are socialist. This is evident in the fact both democrats and republicans love Medicare which is literal socialized medicine for folks over 65.

My personal opinion is that medical care does not fall under “means of production” and should instead fall under basic infrastructure which supports and facilitates the private ownership of the means of production.

> The US then shouldn't be such a popular destination for immigrants looking for opportunity.

This doesn’t prove or disprove anything. People often come to the US hoping they will do better than average. I suggested on average folks are better off elsewhere and your statement doesn’t prove or disprove that. Worse, immigration was basically wholesale suspended.

> Not a socialist issue

Trump doesn't define what socialism is or is not. Taxes are a taking of the proceeds of an enterprise, the more taken the more the owner is defacto the government.

> Not a federal or Democratic Party policy issue

It's local and state Democratic policy, and it certainly is socialistic.

> That has nothing to do with the means of production

Of course it is. It applies to business and how they are run.

> Not a left vs right issue

Of course it is. It comes from the left.

> This doesn’t prove or disprove anything.

Requiring them to all be wrong should perhaps give pause.

Anyway, you're clearly focused on federal socialism. So I'll bring up Biden's plan to spend $2 trillion on all kinds of centrally planned economic initiatives, such as electric car chargers all over the place. The government has tried central planning of energy production and distribution before, back in the 70's. The DOE decided, for each and every gas station in America, how much gas it was allowed to sell. It was a disaster - gas lines and shortages everywhere. This all ended overnight with Reagan's first Executive Order.

And I mean literally overnight the gas lines disappeared and never returned. I remember it well, it was wonderful not to have to plan for an hour wait for gas. The DOE proved simply incapable of putting gas where people needed it.

Do you believe Biden's central economic planners will put the charging stations in the optimal place? I don't. But I suppose we'll see. In any case, it's still $2 trillion worth of socialism.

> This is evident in the fact both democrats and republicans love Medicare which is literal socialized medicine for folks over 65.

Of course Medicare is socialism. You are pushing the idea that Republican actions define socialism. I disagree - socialism is an economic system, and is not defined by who implements it.

By the way, I'd be a greener President than Biden. But I'd use market based solutions, as using a carrot is cheaper and more effective than the stick.

For example, a carbon tax is a market based solution.

I thought taxation was socialism :)

Thanks for reading my posts carefully :-)

First off, the government needs revenue to function. It has to tax something to get it. Taxing pollution "internalizes the externalities" and serves two goals - providing revenue for the government, and discouraging pollution.

Isn't that better than discouraging productive behavior?

> Trump doesn't define what socialism is or is not. Taxes are a taking of the proceeds of an enterprise, the more taken the more the owner is de facto the government.

In a socialist society there is no concept of individual property and therefore no concept of taxation. The concept of taxation is unique to a capitalist society. Beyond that, I'd say that what the taxes are used for defines whether it leans socialist or not.

Further, I disagree, taking the proceeds does not exert control or ownership until the level is substantially higher than it is now. Either way, a business' income apportionment doesn't matter as much these days thanks to the rise of equity.

> [Rent Control] It's local and state Democratic policy, and it certainly is socialistic.

Rent control is interesting, as I firmly disagree with it -- for being bad policy. I can see how this policy diminishes the value of personal property, though I could get behind it if it worked. The most effective approach I've seen that strengthens private property rights while also providing for the average citizen is the Singapore HDB model. [1] 78% of Singaporeans live in HDB government housing, and the rest have zero government imposition whatsoever.

> [California Gender Law] Of course it is. It applies to business and how they are run.

This is a state issue, as you pointed out. I will say though, that I tend to subdivide regulations into "for the greater good" type redistributive regulation (which I think you could make a claim is socialist leaning in a mixed economy), and "capturing externalities" regulation. The free market has shown a total inability to capture externalities, and as such, certain classes of regulation are required for a property functioning market economy. IMO doing so actually net strengthens property rights.

> [Single Payer] "It comes from the left"

I mean, agree to disagree on this one. I see it as the same degree of socialist as a DMV, police station or fire station. A necessity for a functioning free-market economy, and not a business. I believe having a socialized healthcare system strengthens private property ownership, private enterprise and the free market on the whole.

> Do you believe Biden's central economic planners will put the charging stations in the optimal place? I don't.

I don't believe Biden will have "central economic planners" -- the Democrat's will do the same thing government always does in the US. Find a private company, and have them do it.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_housing_in_Singapore

> The free market has shown a total inability to capture externalities

Yeah, which is why I regularly propose taxes on pollution to "internalize the externalities".

Free market capitalism requires a functioning government, at the least to provide protection of our rights and enforcement of contracts. This requires police, a court system, and a military to defend it all.

Single payer health care is not a necessity for a functioning free market economy, any more than the government must run collective farms.

> Find a private company, and have them do it.

Government contracting is not free market, and suffers from most of the ills of the government doing it directly.

> I don't believe Biden will have "central economic planners"

Of course Biden will. You can't oversee $2 trillion in spending otherwise.

> Single payer health care is not a necessity for a functioning free market economy, any more than the government must run collective farms.

See this is where we disagree. I believe healthcare is necessary for a an functioning capitalist system to exist. I do not describe the existing setup as functional.

To be fair, a lot of that harm was caused by the US reacting to the state owning the means of production

Yep for sure, remember how Chiquita had the CIA start the 40 year long civil war in Guatemala? Then the CEO walked out of his 40th story office window in the Pan Am building in New York.

He had “white supremacist advisors?”

To call Stephen Miller a white supremacist is probably actually an understatement. Same goes for Steve Bannon:

Yeah; Bannon just got banned from social media for calling for Fauci’s (and someone else’s) beheading.

Miller has published neo-Nazi propaganda in the recent past. I think he’s the one who says Hitler’s chief of propaganda is his primary role model, but I might have him confused with someone else in Trump’s inner circle.

Steve Bannon and Stephen Miller

Seriously?

Yes.

There is real evidence of Steve Miller being a white supremacist; notably, emails have leaked where he warmly cited _Camp Of The Saints_. Reportedly, Miller was instrumental in the Trump policy of using family separation as a deliberately deterrence rather than a grotesque expediency. The burden on accusations against Miller has probably shifted towards his defenders.

Bannon is a goblin but I preemptively concede that there's not much evidence of his problems being racialized. But Miller you can't say that about.

No he didn’t. This is a lie allowed to continue unabated and it’s done an incredible amount of damage to just simple civil dialogue in this country.

Nah, he did. Matter of public record.

He didn’t. Any person honest with themselves will admit to this.

I lean more conservative and had my own issues with Trump and his presidency, but I looked at his policy, words, and his actions. I still voted for him because I felt he aligned with the policies I wanted to move towards.

Falling into such a blatant lie about his racism though exposes any person that keeps repeating it as intellectually weak, easily manipulated, and wholly dishonest.

Frankly, I’m disappointed to see it repeated and upvoted on Hacker News. I come here to see intellectual comments and discussion, not low brow Twitter and Reddit garbage.

Why do you think he didn't? Is it that you didn't see that interview with him, and you cannot believe he'd say such things?

Personally I listened to when he said "stand back, stand by".

I'm no trump fam, but I think he's too dumb to notice the subtlety on those words

It's just more inane rambling

he does ramble a lot. but it's way past the point of subtlety

good people on both sides? STIll saying the Central Park Five are guilty - originally paying to advocate the death penalty? Being the #1 pusher of Obama birther-ism? and so so so much more here is just one list of the worse: https://www.vox.com/2016/7/25/12270880/donald-trump-racist-r...

>but I looked at his policy, words, and his actions. I still voted for him because I felt he aligned with the policies I wanted to move towards.

You mean like actively refusing and convincing ~half the country NOT to wear masks? Even though the worst case scenario is.. you are wearing the mask and it doesn't help?

Trump himself said he thinks wearing a mask looks weak. And that's why he didn't want to do it.

So, instead of being a LEADER and leading by example- wearing a mask. He made it into a political issue because he thinks people looks weak doing it. And has no doubt cost peoples lives by CONVINCING others not to wear masks. To this day (in his recent rallies) it's the same damn thing.

I mean, I can go on and on about the CHARACTER of Trump, but let's leave it at one.

You sound like someone who is like "eh I like his policies so he can act however the hell he wants and that's OK".

THAT is what you and I can never agree on.

This is basically the liberal version of "he won't condemn Islamic terrorism." Guilt by association.

Which part of the statement are you disputing? That he didn't say "stand by"? That the proud boys aren't right-wing extremists? That the meaning of "stand by" was somehow misconstrued?

For what it's worth, here's how the proud boys interpreted the comment: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/29/us/trump-proud-boys-biden...

It’s the constant moving of the goal posts and redefinitions.

Is the argument that Trump is racist or right wing? They aren’t the same.

You can argue Proud Boys are right wing if viewing it in relation to Antifa for instance, but they aren’t racists. They are pretty diverse as a group, they just may not hold your values.

KKK and Neo Nazis are not right wing, but they are very racist. Both organizations are historically tied into the democrat party.

It’s the constant conflating of the two that has twisted up people into pretzels and turned this argument into pure trash honestly.

Trump is not going to align with your political values if you are left, but it doesn’t make him a racist.

He pardoned Sheriff Joe Arpaio. Who was specifically in jail for refusing to stop racially targeting minorities for police harassment.

You can't pretend there isn't systemic racism, and that Trump isn't racist, when he is doing things like that.

There is no other way to interpret that action.

There are many reasons for such actions, and many ways to interpret them, you just chose one(s) that suits your agenda.

Please elaborate on the many non-racist reasons for pardoning Joe Arpaio who was convicted specifically for racist actions.

In what world is that not an overt endorsement of Joe Arpaio's Racism?

So now we are at the point that reality is part of an agenda?

Has the democratic party been involved with nazis or neo nazis since the 60s? Is that a meaningful point when they all swapped over to the republican party?

The right courted the racists. The racists might not be inherently right wing, but the modern right actively seeks their support and will do what the racists want in exchange for tax cuts and forcing women to keep parasites

The left is on the side of critical race theory, the most racist ideology on the planet today.

Trump is a racist. It’s a fact: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racial_views_of_Donald_Trump . If you are trying to mud the waters, maybe because you don’t want to think that you voted for a racist, it still doesn’t change reality.

> It’s the constant moving of the goal posts and redefinitions. > > Is the argument that Trump is racist or right wing? They aren’t the same.

I see three points in the "grandparent" comment:

1. “The guy had armies of white supremacist supporters and advisers.”

2. “He told right-wing extremists to “stand by” on national TV.”

3. “Every time you gloss over this, you give a pass to it and to those who knew about it and supported him anyway.”

I would consider these the arguments being discussed in this comment tree, not "Trump is racist" or "Trump is ... right wing".

> You can argue Proud Boys are right wing if viewing it in relation to Antifa for instance, but they aren’t racists. They are pretty diverse as a group, they just may not hold your values.

I don't think that even the proud boys would dispute a label of "right wing".

I don't really know how to respond to the claim that they aren't racists. Gavin McInnes is on the record with NBC in 2017 as saying "I’m not a fan of Islam. I think it’s fair to call me Islamophobic." and Islamophobia is anti-Muslim racism.

More recently, Enrique Tarrio has said they're not racist, but they've just gotten more careful with how they express their racism; they use dog whistles and veiled references.

If you look through archives of their early 2019-era merch store, you'll see things like multiple versions of the "Honkler" incarnation of Pepe the Frog — commonly used as a neo-nazi dog whistle, a picture of a black silhouette with the caption "Don't monkey this up, America!" — a reference to the racial slur that Ron DeSantis experienced backlash for using in late 2018, references to lynching, references to QAnon, and a joke about Muhammad being a Pedophile. (You'll also find a pile of sexist and transphobic content.)

> KKK and Neo Nazis are not right wing, but they are very racist.

From the wikipedia page on Neo-Nazism: "Neo-Nazism is considered a particular form of far-right politics and right-wing extremism." (citing: https://www.verfassungsschutz.de/en/fields-of-work/right-win...)

How about the fact that the "leader" of this proud boys LARP group identifies as afro-cuban and grew up in Miami. How delusional can you be to think that they are a white supremacist group? More processed media taken at face value by consumers.

A prominent German politician and his cabinet were hardly blonde-blue-eyed Aryan uber-mensch, but hypocrisy and lack of logic has never been much of an obstacle for racists.

It's quite possible to be a jew and an anti-semite, a woman and a misogynist, and a non-white white supremacist. It's easy, actually - just define an out-group that, for some contrived bullshit reason or other, doesn't include you.

The leader of the proud boys is black.

I have no idea if that is true or not, but it is irrelevant because it is quite possible for black people to be racist and also to take part in anti-black racism.

The proud boys leaders name is Enrique Tario, he's afro-hispanic I believe. Regardless, the proud boys appear to be a multiracial group of Western chauvinists, believing that Western ideas and culture are superior. Progressives seem to believe that Western = white, and that is how they make the leap to white supremacy in this context. Whether Western is about ideas vs skin color isn't a debate I'm interested in, just wanted to provide context.

> Progressives seem to believe that Western = white, and that is how they make the leap to white supremacy in this context.

I'll note that my comment did not directly link proud boys to "white supremacy". Instead, I (and the comment I replied to) used "right-wing extremists". I think that's an accurate description that does not require an assumption that "Western = white".

I agree that's what you said. Conversely, Trump was asked about them specifically in the context of white supremacy.

For anyone curious about their beliefs:

https://proudboysusa.com/tenets/

Minimal Government

Maximum Freedom

Anti-Political Correctness

Anti-Drug War

Closed Borders

Anti-Racial Guilt

Anti-Racism

Pro-Free Speech (1st Amendment)

Pro-Gun Rights (2nd Amendment)

Glorifying the Entrepreneur

Venerating the Housewife

Reinstating a Spirit of Western Chauvinism

I have seen my fair share of brown neo nazis down here in Brazil, so I don't believe that's relevant.

Please say more about the point you're making. On the surface, it's not clear how it relates to anything I said in the comment to which you've replied.

honestly there's nothing really that 'extreme' about them. they are just crusty retards.

Could you provide some sort of source or citation for this? The Southern Poverty Law Center, Anti-Defamation League, and FBI all seem to consider them extremist.

the ADL also thinks a cartoon frog is a hate symbol, they are not a serious organization. plenty has been written about the problems with the SPLC. as for the FBI? that story has a lot to do with framing,

>https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2018/12/08/fbi-says-pr...

>https://www.opb.org/news/article/portland-fbi-proud-boys-cla...

“In that briefing there was a slide that talked about the Proud Boys,” Cannon said.

The slide was intended to characterize the potential for violence from individual members of the Proud Boys, according to Cannon, and not to address the group as a whole.

“There have been instances where self-identified Proud Boys have been violent,” he said. “We do not intend and we do not designate groups, especially broad national groups, as extremists.”

generally speaking i tend to assume that feds have and always have keep a close watch on pretty much any sizeable right-leaning organization, most especially ones that are frequently involved in street violence with other organizations. maybe this is the legacy of ruby ridge and timothy mcveigh, maybe it just looks good on a quarterly review. but even aside from that you can find plenty of accounts over the years from BLM and occupy activists about being surveilled. how many of these are credible? it is hard to say. we do know that there has been a large injection of funds for the purpose of increased surveillance following months of blm related riots

>https://theintercept.com/2020/09/13/police-surveillance- technology-operation-legend/

personally i believe the fbi that went after the black panthers and mlk is not materially different from the fbi of today and should be treated with heavy skepticism no matter what your political leanings.

Let's try this differently: what would you accept as evidence that they are extremists? What evidence can you cite that they are not?

first we need to establish an operable definition of what is considered 'extreme'. were those of us who participated in the occupy movement extremists? many of the people involved had very strong anti government leanings, there were regular clashes with law enforcement, activists were subjected to surveillance efforts. is greenpeace extremist? what about animal rights activists? both have certainly engaged in far more concerted, adversarial and questionably legal efforts for their causes than a bunch of cringey and belligerent migapedes who offend the cultural sensibilities of coastal bloggers.

this becomes a problem as well, proud boys have been involved in violence... against other groups who were also actively seeking to enforce street violence. is this the result of a concerted campaign or does a group founded around crudity and bravado attract absolute knuckledragging choads who are likely to get into fistfights?

I agree that "stand by" does sound problematic, but I would let is slide as a slip up, given that the moderator asked whether he will tell them to "stand down" -- it's an easy mistake to make (and talking about slip ups, Joe Biden has more than enough of them as well).

You can see Donald Trump denouncing Proud Boys here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bd0cMmBvqWc&feature=youtu.be...

I'm glad it's not just me who thinks this. I think Trump is an absolutely foul human being, but "stand by, stand back" was clearly a fumbled response to the moderator's request that he call on them to "stand down".

Painting it as some siren call for white supremacist supporters to rise up and take the nation by force is just as disingenuous and hypocritical as Trump himself.

The next day, he was asked point-blank by reporters what he meant and whether he misspoke. His response was to:

1. Say that he didn't know who the Proud Boys are. Even the most generous interpretation of this doesn't look good. He was asked to denounce them during the debate and either (a) attempted to do so (fumbling the response) without knowing who they were or (b) it was an intentional dodge — and either way, he didn't follow up with his staff to learn more.

2. Say that they need to "stand down" and "let law enforcement do their work", but not condemn them (i.e., still fall short of the ask during the debate, when given a chance to correct the fumbled response).

3. Dodge an explicit question about whether he misspoke when he said "stand by" (again, failing to fully correct the fumbled response).

4. Continue to shift away from criticism of right-wing groups to left-wing groups.

https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefings-statements/remarks-pres...

> Painting it as some siren call for white supremacist supporters to rise up and take the nation by force is just as disingenuous and hypocritical as Trump himself.

When right-wing groups interpret it as a siren call and he fails to unequivocally correct that interpretation, it's not disingenuous to be concerned.

That just simply reinforces my view that Trump is just a childish buffoon who will never admit he made a mistake about anything, and is incapable or unwilling to give a straight answer to any question.

He's the type of person that screams until he's blue in the face that water isn't wet, simply because someone not on Team Trump said that it is. That doesn't mean he's some secret conspiratorial white supremacist talking in code. It just means he's a juvenile idiot.

I'm not saying that the second is somehow better than the first. It's not. They're both equally despicable and I have zero respect for Trump being the former. But it's equally reprehensible to have a crowd on the sidelines chomping at the bit to exaggerate, fabricate or concoct stories, simply because they don't like someone.

It's "he's not our guy, so the end justifies the means", and it's an incredibly disturbing trend that goes beyond Trump.

> That doesn't mean he's some secret conspiratorial white supremacist talking in code.

> ...

> But it's equally reprehensible to have a crowd on the sidelines chomping at the bit to exaggerate, fabricate or concoct stories, simply because they don't like someone.

I'm confused. Where in this comment chain does what you describe seem to be happening? The closest I can find is the great-great-great-great grandparent, which states “The guy had armies of white supremacist supporters and advisers. He told right-wing extremists to “stand by” on national TV.”

From my perspective, the key here is that right-wing extremists interpreted his words as code — and he refused to correct that interpretation. From the point of view of the extremists, it was intentional, and that's enough to embolden them.

Even though it was likely the result of a mistake and stubbornness, it was damaging to the country and the impacts are worth acknowledging.

At this risk of taking a bit of a tangent: it's not as if this is the only time his carelessness with his words and stubbornness to correct the way they were interpreted caused problems. In those cases too, we need to acknowledge both the cause and the effect. Accidentally causing damage and intentionally causing damage are distinct problems, but they're both problems — especially when you're the leader of a country.

> I'm confused. Where in this comment chain does what you describe seem to be happening? The closest I can find is the great-great-great-great grandparent, which states “The guy had armies of white supremacist supporters and advisers. He told right-wing extremists to “stand by” on national TV.”

There was torrential, indignant outcry on my Twitter feed that Trump was literally sending the message to armed white supremacist militias to standby and that they would be called upon to take arms shortly.

But even that GP comment is a good example. "He told right-wing extremists to stand by" - is a partial truth at best. Either way, it's misleading. Why did GP choose the words "stand by" and omit the words "stand back"? Because s/he wanted to paint Trump as a racist, and the latter didn't fit the narrative. It's intellectually dishonest.

> At this risk of taking a bit of a tangent: it's not as if this is the only time his carelessness with his words and stubbornness to correct the way they were interpreted caused problems. In those cases too, we need to acknowledge both the cause and the effect. Accidentally causing damage and intentionally causing damage are distinct problems, but they're both problems — especially when you're the leader of a country.

In this respect, I agree completely. I'm not saying that puerile stubborness is somehow any better than militant white supremacy. If his speaking carelessly causes issues, it is certainly his responsibility to undeniably, unconditionally refute it.

My gripe is with the continual exaggeration, misrepresentation and outright misinformation from the anti-Trump brigade. Any facts which don't fit the narrative are conveniently discarded. It's not limited to Trump, either. Countless people described the Kenosha shooter as firing indiscriminately and unprovoked into a crowd, which is a patently absurd distortion of reality. Or the complete fiction that Nick Sandmann (the kid in the MAGA hat) approached the Native American guy and start making racist taunts.

Many Anti-Trumpers are hypocritically engaging in exactly the same dishonest behaviour as Trump/Trumpists. Frankly, I don't believe anything I read any more, and that's an absolute travesty.

I'd be more willing to let is slide as a slip up if not for the surrounding context — both during the debate, and during the days following.

The whole premise of the question (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qIHhB1ZMV_o) was his criticism of Biden for not specifically calling out antifa and other left-wing extremist groups, and whether he'd be willing to "condemn white supremacists and militia groups" and "say that they need to stand down and not add to the violence".

Mistake or not, he didn't condemn the proud boys during the debate. If it was his intent to do so, when it became clear that large portions of the country misunderstood his remarks — including the proud boys themselves — he should have clearly communicated his intended message, instead of dodging questions about his remarks for 2 days. (See, e.g., https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefings-statements/remarks-pres...)

Isn't it amazing when a "white supremacist" improves his vote share of _every_ minority demographic (getting the highest share of GOP minority vote since the 60s), and does worse with white men. A goddamn miracle. This is the same guy who received awards from black community organizations before he ran, and had a black girlfriend for a while.

https://www.nbcnews.com/think/opinion/trump-vote-rising-amon...

Yes. It is pretty amazing.

Yeah, an increase to 8% of the African American population from 6% is definitely a miracle. He's clearly a figure of black activism now.

For a "white supremacist" it is. For a GOP candidate it is, too - we haven't seen anything like this for 60 years. I mean, another explanation is maybe you've been gaslit by the press, but that's a "conspiracy theory", right?

“Thousands of men of Jewish descent and hundreds of what the Nazis called ‘full Jews’ served in the military with Hitler’s knowledge. The Nazis allowed these men to serve but at the same time exterminated their families,” Rigg said. [1]

Did the former German soldiers of Jewish heritage gaslit this journalist too? Or am I being gaslit by the journalist? So many layers!

[1] https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1996-12-24-mn-12209-...

Yes, the fact that you reached for Hitler to compare to the guy whose daughter and son in law are Jewish, and for whom there are _parades_ held in Tel Aviv does indicate you're rather severely gaslit.

https://www.theyeshivaworld.com/news/headlines-breaking-stor...

I reached for the nazi comparison simply because it's apt, not because I think he or his supporters are Nazis themselves. That just feels like you're projecting your own expectations onto me which makes me think you're just a debate lord. Hopefully I'm wrong :)

Nah just a bunch of Facebook trolls who convinced 49% of Americans to vote for him .

These things you say aren't even true. He's condemned white supremacists at least 27 times. Listen to the entire speech post Charlottesville speech. You are an example of the problem you just believe what you hear with out checking out facts. Trump has a lot of faults. Stop making stuff up. Also you might want to look at the "white" supremacists proud boy membership roles you might be surprised at how diverse it is.

Go look at the polling for issues and ballout provisions that passed. The US isn't as divided as you think it is.

For example, these Fox News voter analysis results (and the screenshots themselves) are really something. Relatively major consensus on things like climate, renewable energy, healthcare, etc.

https://twitter.com/existentialfish/status/13237520320004505...

Fox News is considered liberal by most on the right these days. Using it as a poll for where the right stands is irresponsible at best.

Well that was inevitable with the removal of some of their more prominent sexual predators.

And yet another reason for the division right here.

This is kind of hilarious to me. Fox News is unwilling to completely ignore reality and thus it is "liberal" these days.

More like there’s better. Fox isn’t fair and balanced and never really was and they started getting sensational. The right doesn’t want a soap opera for news.

A recent example with when they called AZ by blindly listening to AP when anybody that knows basic math could see a large chunk of votes still remaining. When you prove you can’t be trusted you lose your audience.

Go look at how polls are extrapolated. Specifically give me the exact formula and raw data so I can confirm it myself, like we do in other such situations. You won’t find it. Stop trusting polls.

I lie to or hang up on pollsters every time they reach out to me. I don't trust them, and I don't know who they contract under. They often ask leading questions, regardless. If I ran into an exit pollster, I would've told them I wrote in Ross Perot.

I started doing this a couple years ago, when I was called up, and asked to take a survey. The young woman on the other end was very polite, and the questions at first seemed reasonable. The further I went into the survey, the more nakedly leading its questions became, clearly meant to support Republican talking points. I told her I was done, hung up,and since then I've only given false answers to political survey calls.

If my representative wants my opinion, they can host a town hall, or reach out to me directly. I'll send an email or call their office if there's an issue I care about.

If our politicians know nothing, and receive bad data, then they'll either cross their fingers and be more straight about their convictions, or be badly disappointed whenever they try to pander.

Given how flawed the polling for this presidency turned out to be, I don't think we should be relying on them as much for argumentation. Frankly, I am genuinely aggravated over how little was learned since 2016.

We are one country that's been divided by a news media telling us what to believe. Look no further than the dead wrong "polling data" -- again -- to see there's an agenda playing out in our hands and living rooms. If you still believe what you see on MSM, I've got a bridge to sell you.

We don't talk to others anymore. We tweet, we Facebook, we Instagram, we believe what we read on screens and we've made companies feeding us what we want to hear rich.

There is a game being played, you've just missed the players.

> Look no further than the dead wrong "polling data" -- again -- to see there's an agenda playing out in our hands and living rooms.

I think this is a tired, lazy argument. First, while the polls were skewed they actually weren't that wrong, and many of the differences are magnified by the fact that the electoral college forces us to chop up one large poll (the national results) into lots of small ones (the states) where statistically you're likely to see more variance no matter what. And as for the skew, the generally accepted explanation that it's easier to poll urban, more highly educated people than rural, lower educated people makes much more sense than there being some coordinated conspiracy.

Don't kid yourself. The polls were dead wrong, they predicted Joe Biden would win an overwhelming popular vote. Believing otherwise is naive.

There is no "generally accepted explanation" for the polling skew, let alone one as obvious as "it's easier to poll highly educated, urban voters than lesser educated rural voter". Believing pollsters are dumb enough to not consider this when conducting polls is lazy thinking.

> The polls were dead wrong, they predicted Joe Biden would win an overwhelming popular vote.

But Biden did win an overwhelming popular vote.

The fact that's your lone point of dispute is reassuring. Thank you.

He's up over 4 million votes. Glad you are reassured.

"lone"? That was the only point you made about how the polls were right or wrong! They disputed all of your one point(s).

> The polls were dead wrong, they predicted Joe Biden would win an overwhelming popular vote.

Major poll-based forecasts (which not only aggregate polls but incorporate modelling of non-sampling error in polls, which only report sampling error in the margin of error) were not “dead wrong” (naively looking at polls as predictions might be dead wrong, but the fact that polls don't work that way is why poll-based forecasts like 538 exist.) The low end of the 80% confidence interval (the 95% CI is what is usually used to state a “margin of error” when a CI isn't explicitly identified and would be much wider) for the 538 forecast for Biden’s vote share was ~50.9%. His actual vote share at current count is ~50.7%.

Results a hair outside the 80% CI doesn't indicate that a forecast is “dead wrong”.

EDIT: While I think 538 has made some progress in simplifying it's reporting to help deal with this, aside from deliberate misinformation (which is a substantial factor in the “criticism”), I think the main problem remains that people really, really don't grasp uncertainty even when it's shoved in their face, and are prone to criticize something for not being a precise oracle even when it's expected error range is prominently presented.

He's up over 4 million votes, though?

In an election with (currently) 146,592,751 votes. I'm sorry but 4 million is _not_ "overwhelming". It's a difference of less than 3% of total voters.

That very much depends on how much of those original 146 odd million votes are 'mobile', and with the way people vote straight 'R' or 'D' for life the margins are a lot thinner than you might expect. > 40% of both parties voters would never in a lifetime vote for the other party no matter how terrible the candidate for 'their' party.

Point taken.

Division was manufactured when Trump became president? So what do you propose as the reason for why he became president in the first place? Who is responsible for that?

Generally speaking, I would agree with you. However, it's important to remember that there is great economic angst in the United States. Workers' wages have remained relatively flat for 40 years, despite accelerating productivity and inflation.

Unless a Biden administration can begin to heal and make whole America's large working class, the angst will continue to grow and eventually boil over.

> We're actually all rooting for the same things here.

I don't think you understand half the country.

The people who most see division are those most looking for it.

The people that think everyone is (and should be!) just like them are the most delusional and insulting.

Who is that?

The division is manufactured by both political parties. It’s naive to think anything has changed.

To extend your analogy, the players on the field only have so much they can do--Trump included. Might be worth asking who is in the owner's box, who is betting on the game, and why are we in the stands cheering so aggressively for either side in the first place.

With Trump out in January, I hope more people are critical and skeptical of the various institutions in our country that wield the actual power. For a more in depth analysis, would highly recommend Glenn Greenwald's take: https://greenwald.substack.com/p/no-matter-the-liberal-metri...

What division? Nobody I know, in person, goes to protests or stops talking to each other because of how they vote. I literally mean nobody. No division. The most extreme is that some people I know cry when an election doesn’t go their way and then their friends make fun of them.

Division is a perception created by keyboard warriors and news that needs something to report on and the rest of us find crazy people entertaining. If you turn the news off and step away from social media the artificial insanity goes away.

I do understand some major metros have witnessed massive protests this year with large scale property destruction. From the outside looking in it looks like communities with a lack of diversity and severe economic stratification. I say that because I live in a major metro that experienced none of that insanity and this major city is either or about to be the most diverse major US city and is very healthy economically.

> Nobody I know, in person, goes to protests or stops talking to each other because of how they vote.

Good for you. But some of us have friends who will literally die if the ACA is repealed, so, yes, I have cut people out out of my life for supporting the Republicans.

Then the division, according to you, is self inflicted.

Self-inflicted? No. The cutoff at that point is merely formalizing the destruction of social niceties already achieved by supporting people who literally want to kill one of my friends.

You are, according to you, destroying relationships intentionally over a difference of opinion. Isn’t that the very definition of intolerance?

This is a difference of basic morality, not 'opinion'.

Wow. This is an unbelievable sentiment by a normal, plugged in American citizen. I'm absolutely positive that the vast majority of American's have had massively strained relationships due to politics in the past 5 years, issues that weren't there before.

That sounds like a baseless assumption. On what data do you come to that conclusion? I heard people express the same nonsense during the Bush years and it was just as absurd then. If anything it’s crazy people cutting themselves off.

I mean there's countless anecdotes, which is not good data, but its something. Many, many people (many people are saying..) have noted how crazily divided we have been in the past 5 years. And my above comment got a bunch of upvotes in the last hour so there's more anecdotal evidence I guess.

If it’s on social media then it has to be true. Logical fallacies don’t increase in validity merely because an echo chamber grows or else everything mentioned in r/thedonald could never be a lie.

A small collection of keyboard warriors see division because they want to. Without something to ground their baseless opinions they becomes just as absurd as they appear outside their echo chamber.

Coincidentally my same opinion is also well upvoted in a different thread. That doesn’t make it more of anything.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25018920

I honestly don't know if Trump did this or just unleashed it. The thing that has kept me up at night isn't Trump himself but the millions of people who think he's the most qualified person to be president.

We aren’t all rooting for fascism. Speak for yourself.

Trump has changed American politics forever and we'll see that in the years to come.

we can not look at Trump as a single element, its part of a larger ecosystem, across the globe, propelled by heavy polarization, digital illiteracy and echo chambers.

Of course not, but he was the one that ended up being the president.

Here's an ignorant statement I truly believe in: social networks have ruined the world. They will be our downfall in fact. What we're seeing now is just the beginning.

They're by far the scariest product of the wonderful, world-changing invention called the Internet.

I am in agreement. The web was envisioned as a utopian place where information could flow freely, watering humanity to grow enlightened.

But it turned out that on the web, misinformation is cheaper to produce than true information, individuals—no matter how independently-minded—are no match for corporate and state actors that have vastly more resources and motivation to manipulate, and tribal identity is more powerful than abstract ideals.

What have we wrought?

I don't think social networks are "evil" because of malice. They're evil because of our flaws as human beings. Of our biases. Social networks just amplify and exploit the way we think so mostly negative thoughts and emotions get amplified in an ever-expanding echo chamber [1] We get angrier, more polarised, more isolated in our tribe and cliques. If there has ever been an instrument of the Devil himself to sow discord on this planet, this is it.

1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rE3j_RHkqJc

Exactly, Trump was just a symptom and a lightning rod. The GOP and their supporters is where the true problems lie.

Trump was nothing without their support. The focus on Trump is wrong I think, don't let yourself be distracted by him.

That's a stupid things to say. You're saying there's a problem with 50% of the population.

Don't fall for this kind of simplistic arguments. It's not helpful at all. Things are way more complex than that.

Meh, there are definitely problems that exist in 50+% of the population. To claim otherwise is either to ignore history or to claim that we in the modern day have broken free of the trend. Either is more stupid and unhelpful than recognizing that the trend existed and continued to exist. Was it not a problem when the majority of the population was illiterate, or in the 1920’s when the majority of the population got their information from news sources that were wholesale fabrications?

Besides, Trump voters appear to constitute something like 22% of the US population. That’s less than half of 50%.

I think that the motivations of those GOP people, the people that back them (the wealthy donors) and also the electorate are really, really terrible.

You can say exactly the same about the new "left". Eg: "if anyone disagree in the slightest with me is attacking me and he is a nazi"

And the "right" calls everyone a socialist. In particular, the Trump campaign on Latinos in Florida almost universally echoed the message of "Biden == Socialism" for the past few weeks.

* Individual mandate? Socialism

* Tax increases? Socialism

* Environmental policies? Socialism

I think Fox News has been more of the issue than Trump.

Fox and all the mass media. Pure partisan garbage. Goebbels would be so proud.

Party realignments do happen. Trump did that to a certain extent, but what happens next will be up to others.

> Kamala Harris also made history as the first Black woman to become vice president, an achievement that comes as the U.S. faces a reckoning on racial justice. The California senator, who is also the first person of South Asian descent elected to the vice presidency, will become the highest-ranking woman ever to serve in government, four years after Trump defeated Hillary Clinton.

Can someone explain that last sentence to a non-American? Doesn't it simply reduce the whole paragraph to 'first female VP'? Or does it mean 'first female senator to go on to government, but not the first including non-senators', in which case.. uh-ok, is that significant?

Just seems like it's slicing her up into as many 'firsts' as possible.

You are slicing her up not the article. It is simply stating that no woman has ever achieved a ranking as high as she did and it also happens to be a woman of color. I don't think it's that hard to understand, is it? Also, this is indeed significant because it puts hope to so many woman and woman of color that they can achieve it too and not be afraid of be who they are in America.

I'm not, maybe I haven't explained clearly, because you've just repeated the 'a ranking as high' bit that I don't understand rather than answering it. Does it refer to her having been a senator, or to now being VP?

From what you're saying, I think it's that she's first female VP and also happens to be black and also happens to have a South Asian background?

I don't have an agenda here, I just didn't understand that paragraph, and, if I'm correct in my understanding above, think it was written in just about the most confusing way possible.

Coming from the outside it might be easier to work forwards to the statement instead of backwards from it:

All vice presidents (2nd highest executive position) and presidents (highest executive position) up until this point have been white males with the exception of former president Barack Obama who was a black male and former vice president Charles Curtis who was native american male. Kamala Harris is a black/asian female who looks to be the next vice president.

Hopefully that helps :).

To be as clear as I can, it's specifically:

> will become the highest-ranking woman ever to serve in government,

that confuses me. Is she to be the first female VP? Or does 'highest ranking woman' refer to her present position in the senate?

I think I understand now that it's the former. It just seems strange to me to lead with the more specific 'firsts'. I would have written something more like:

> Kamala Harris also makes history as the first female Vice President, and, notably at a time when the US faces a reckoning in racial justice, a black woman, and the first of South Asian descent.

(Borrowing phrasing and emphasis from the original nevertheless, since I understand they may be more relevant in the US than they perhaps are to me.)

I just honestly didn't realise from that paragraph originally that she was the first woman entirely. It was sort of there, but so hidden that I thought I was wrong.

There are kind of these two exceptions (below in links), in addition to the ones noted above. Diversity at the highest level of government isn't exactly a strong suit for the US.

https://www.history.co.uk/articles/edith-wilson-america-s-fi...

https://www.thoughtco.com/americas-only-gay-president-336794...

It says "will become", so your first interpretation is correct.

It could also say 'will become the most South Asian woman ever to...', doesn't mean that she has only now become South Asian.

'highest-ranking woman ever to serve in government' just makes it sound like her 'high-ranking' is independent of her serving in government to me. Especially given that it's a bigger more general milestone than the preceding sentences.

It might help to know that the perceived ranking is President >> VP > US Senator. Though a “more honest” ranking would be President > US Senator > VP (since they only ever vote in ties in the senate or sit around until the sitting President can’t serve.)

But if you read the constitution of the US, it’s more like SCOTUS > House Speaker > President > Senate leader > US Senator >> US House Rep. And then there’s the state governments. The ranking of the House Speaker is because that person actually has the power of the pen and can in large part dictate what happens. The genius move is all the rules and political factors make being the House Speaker essentially destroy a politicians political clout, standing - everything. The oddball is that you don’t have to be an elected official to be voted in as House Speaker - you just have to get a majority support in the House and not be otherwise disqualified (I.e. no former 2-term Presidents).

The makeup of the US government does not reflect it's population. Harris wasn't the first female VP candidate to run for a major party. Geraldine Ferraro was the first, and Palin also ran in 08. Being a minority candidate doesn't mean they are qualified, but the lack of diversity in the US government is a huge problem. About 50% of America are women, and a large portion of America is not white. That's not represented by our government. Those firsts are important.

That's fair enough, I just think if it were me I'd be thinking 'geeze can I just be VP like every white man before me?' - but who am I to whitemansplain how she/people who feel affinity should feel :)

My comment above though was mostly just that from that quoted paragraph I was pretty confused, if I now understand correctly it starts with more specific 'accomplishments' (if finally getting that representation can be called one) and then generalises massively to a much broader category, in a vague way that makes it sound like nothing or more specific than where it started.

I don't know, maybe it's just my reading.

What I’m really curious about now is how the GOP are going to position itself wrt Trump and his rhetoric and claims when he’s no longer in office.

In a sense, this was a bit of a worst-case scenario for the GOP. Trump is out of office and wounded, but not destroyed and so able to try to play kingmaker from the sidelines. A large, centrist portion of the GOP would probably have liked to see the end of Trump, but now they are going to have to wait for his conviction and imprisonment to finally be rid of him. Some will try to claim the mantle of racist-in-chief but Trump is a jealous god and will now allow another to steal focus from him, so I expect some rather petty knife-fights for a year or two while Trump goes through a few state trials but eventually some minimum security prison will finally take the phone out of his tiny hands (or at least force him to hoop it if he wants to tweet...)

I think this is the ideal outcome for the GOP elite. They have the senate and SC and the white house is about to stop being a liability to them. They’re thrilled to not pass any legislation for the next X years

Is it confirmed they have senate majority?

They do not yet have a majority. The Alaska race is still being counted and two Georgia seats are going to run-off. If the Dems win two of those three they control the Senate.

Who?

In six months time people will be denouncing photos where they appear with him as "fake news".

Maybe it's not true, but I feel as a whole that basically everything the GOP stands for is 'out of fashion'.

I feel that Trump and the current GOP was a last ditch effort to let the old traditions grab control by any means (even illegal or immoral) necessary to kill abortion, put the gays back in the closet, and so on.

I can't imagine that younger people, for who things like homosexuality, transsexuality are totally fine, who are not encumbered with religious traditions, can even contemplate voting for that kind of worldview from a bygone era.

But maybe I'm wrong.

40% of young people supported Trump in this election according to exit polls.

From a long way away, and well clear of the slings and arrows that Americans are suffering, I would like to take a fleeting moment to wish you all well.

I do think that after such a president it behoves the winners of this election to have a long hard think as to why the result was so close.

Your nation's people deserve a rest from the division you are suffering. Go well and take the opportunity to set a course that is both good for you and worthy of your immense wealth and power.

Being a centrist, I can definitely understand the desire for more conservative policies, and a rejection of more liberal policies. What has been tough for me personally, though, is to see a person as amoral as Trump get so much support. I DO agree that Trump has done some good things, things that before him neither the left nor the right was willing to do in a substantial way (mainly his forcing a re-evaluation of our relationship with China). But his utter (and ongoing) disregard for our democratic system, his incessant lying, the fact that all he cares about is loyalty to him but gives no loyalty in return, the insane narcissism, treating the Justice Dept. like his personal legal firm, etc., etc.. I just find it disgusting on every level.

That said, the recent Sam Harris podcast really helped me understand his appeal. And I hope (but am not hopeful) that the left tries to mend their ways by refraining from pushing (mainly white, straight men, but also others, like the religious) many further from the Democratic party.

I really detest the conservative vs. liberal duality.

Conservatism is not comparable to liberalism. They are not alternatives. It just means a desire to maintain the status quo. The opposite of conservatism is progressivism, not liberalism.

In fact most Republicans in the US are liberal-democrats.

I mean, I don't disagree with you, but I feel you are missing my primary point, which is that I have no problem with people that have a strong preference for current Republican policy positions (or, on the flip side, Democratic).

My problem is that Trump is just a man of such awful character that it hurts to see how many supported him, regardless of policy preferences. I have never felt this way about any previous president, Republican or Democrat.

When considering a person of "awful character," a lot of people make the rational decision to nonetheless value the benefit of 320 million people as more important than retribution against that one person, if that person's policies benefit the rest.

But that's my point - a huge percentage of Trump supporters (not all, but probably a majority) don't support Trump for his policy positions. Indeed, there are large numbers of people who voted Republican in the past who love Trump despite the fact that Trump has done a complete 180 on policy items that used to be core Republican positions: support of free trade and being against protectionism and tariffs, support for foreign wars, containment of Russia, etc.

Most support for Trump is at a deep, emotional level (to be fair, strong support for leadership usually is).

There was certainly an "anyone but Hillary" contingent, but I think you'll find by actually talking to these people that the venn diagram overlap between that circle and the "actually likes Trump's policies" circle is about 99%.

A lot of the points you mentioned are points that people who were not Left, have come to move past on the Right. The Right has changed. Trump does support free trade - if the US is not taken advantage of. Foreign wars are something everyone's tired of. Russia as a major threat is not something people take seriously, unless it's used to influence people against Trump. Etc.

Many on the right would classify the points you mentioned as "neocon" or "neoliberal," something they've always been uncomfortable with and seen as an infection of the party and had to grudgingly accept without alternative, until Trump.

Support for Trump is at a deep, emotional level for many. But certainly not in spite of his policy positions. If anything, his policy positions reinforce that emotion for most of his supporters.

The people most in need of good policy, at the price of an acceptable nonchalance regarding a president's mere presentability - minorities - made their voices heard by voting for Trump. Every single minority demographic voted in higher numbers for Trump this election over last. The only demographic to vote for him less? White men. And that made the difference.

The privileged have the benefit of being able to vote based on presentability. The rest of the population cannot afford to in the same way.

Thank you for your thoughtful response.

> The people most in need of good policy, at the price of an acceptable nonchalance regarding a president's mere presentability - minorities - made their voices heard by voting for Trump. Every single minority demographic voted in higher numbers for Trump this election over last. The only demographic to vote for him less? White men. And that made the difference.

Can you share your source for this? (this is not a challenge, I'm genuinely interested in digging deeper into the data myself)

This thread:

https://twitter.com/CharlesMBlow/status/1323975456668979200

Which pulls its insights from this article:

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/11/03/us/elections/...

"The black male vote for trump increased from 13% in 2016 to 18% this year"

"The black female vote for Trump doubled from 4% in 2016 to 8% this year"

"Exit polls show a majority of white women voting for Trump. (Important note: Pew analysis of actual votes in 2016 showed that it wasn’t a majority but was a plurality.)"

"The percentage of LGBT voting for Trump doubled from 2016"

"The percentage of Latinos and Asians voting for Trump increased from 2016"

I feel like you're glossing over the fact that minority groups still voted overwhelmingly against Trump, just slightly less overwhelmingly than before.

It is certainly something to recognize, that minorities generally held up that pattern. But the point I'm trying to make is about how peoples' minds changed after 4 years of experiencing an actual Trump presidency. Minorities moved towards him, and only white men moved away. That seems quite notable to me.

I think it's less notable than the media is making it out to be. In 2016, Trump was an unknown quantity to minorities. It was presumed that as a conservative xenophobe with racially charged rhetoric he was a monstrous individual, and people voted on that mere presumption. In 2020 the majority people of color still believed that he was unsuitable, and hence voted accordingly. But people's lives are not monolithic. Some minorities, regardless of group, prospered on a personal level over the past 4 years. They did better, their families did better, they were not dissatisfied with their lives under Trump. For some of those people, that personal reality took priority over what some call "tribal" politics. So they voted for more of the same.

It's for basically that reason that incumbent politicians are usually favored to win. As long as people's lives go generally okay, they want to stick with the devil they know.

> I think it's less notable than the media is making it out to be.

Really? From my perspective, the media has not noted it at all. I had to notice it in a Twitter stream before it disappeared down my feed forever, to know these statistics. It seems more notable than zero, and therefore to me more notable than the media is making it out to be.

I don't disagree with the rest of your comment. Peoples' lives were determined to be better under Trump, so they voted to keep it. Privileged people with the benefit of discounting quality of life bumps that were significant to others but insignificant to themselves, were more likely to vote based on appearances.

That is fascinating. Could you point me towards some of his policies that benefit minorities? Genuinely interested. I'm also in agreement with you that most people who vote for Trump do so in spite of his character, not because of it.

A good amount of people of color remember that Joe Biden was behind the 1995 three-strikes bill that heavily penalized nuisance crime, that he was behind the 2005 bankruptcy bill that made it impossible to have student loans written off in bankruptcy, and he was vice president in 2008 when Obama let the banks off with taps on the wrist after wrecking the economy. Oh, yes, the War On Drugs, too. Lots of people with a prison sentence over some marijuana.

It's not that Trump had a track record of doing things that benefitted non-white people, it's that Biden has a sustained track record of actually causing serious harm and people have not forgotten.

This makes more sense to me than beaner's argument that minorities think they will directly benefit from Trump's policies. Also bear in mind that Trump previously fought against a Clinton, and the Clintons are supposed to be specifically popular among some ethnic minorities.

You can start with these two:

- First Step Act [0]

- Platinum Plan for Black America [1]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Step_Act

[1] https://cdn.donaldjtrump.com/public-files/press_assets/presi...

The massive turnout efforts likely had something to do with this.

For instance if black men who support Republicans very grudgingly (enough not to vote say) are swept up in a broader wash of getting all black men to vote more, you’d see that pattern.

Another reading of the data is that these were votes against Biden/Harris or protest votes against the Democratic party for their lack of more aggressive action on racial justice.

Or it’s all of these things. One of the thing about every 4 year elections is it’s hard to interpret trend data. Especially not 5 days later.

> For instance if black men who support Republicans very grudgingly (enough not to vote say) are swept up in a broader wash of getting all black men to vote more, you’d see that pattern

Why? There is no reason for this assertion. There are equally likely begrudging black democrats, and higher turnout doesn't necessarily lean towards a side. You'd expect higher numbers in equal proportions on both sides, all else being equal.

> Another reading of the data is that these were votes against Biden/Harris or protest votes against the Democratic party for their lack of more aggressive action on racial justice

Yes. Away from Biden is functionally equivalent to towards Trump if that's how the votes were placed. That's saying what I'm saying, in part

It is probably to mistake to lump together different minority groups as I imagine the issues that move them are very diverse.

I am not sure that the increases say much about Trump's actual policies outside of his stance on shutdowns and Covid which has had a tremendous negative effect on the Economy.

I think a certain segment of the population probably saw Biden as too much of an insider who will deliver more of the same.

I am not lumping them together at all. The statistic is more specifically interesting about white men than about other demographics. That the other groups moved in unison speaks to a deeper, more fundamental and more universally-applicable quality of life analysis for all Americans under Trump. The situation shows that things like low unemployment have broad appeal, and can overcome identity politics. Strangely, however, that overcoming is more true for the minorities themselves than for the supposed systemic promulgators of oppression!

The whites are having identity shouting matches with each other while the minorities they supposedly are trying to be considerate of, move in the opposite direction.

> core Republican positions: support of free trade and being against protectionism and tariffs

This is not the case, as (or at least has not been since Reagan) there have been 2 main tools of regulating/restricting foreign imports by Republicans: Tariffs and Quotas. Both have different tradeoffs.

Reagan was heavily in favor of quotas instead of tariffs: https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/10/i-am-a-tariff-man-com...

Reagan CEA economist Steve Hanke added:

“the share of American imports covered by some sort of trade restriction soared under ‘free-trader’ Reagan, moving from only 8 percent in 1975 to 21 percent by 1984.”

Perhaps it's often been that way in the USA (and elsewhere).

The outsiders make the progress.

Reading https://www.amazon.com/Renegade-History-United-States/dp/141...

"A Renegade History of the United States" by Thaddeus Russell

Political designations are contextual, not universal. Liberals call themselves liberals and most people in the country understand what that means. Definitions used in other countries are irrelevant.

They are really not contextual. Americans need to understand each others perspectives if they hope to ever come together. Understanding the political philosophies of liberalism, democratism, socialism, fascism, and anarchism is important. Those philosophies don't change from one country to the next, even if they translate into different sets of policies.

If the "same" philosophy results in different policies when applied in different countries, that to me lends more credence to their contextuality.

Different countries can have different challenges and circumstances facing them. The philosophy is framework to draft policies from, not a blueprint for how to run a community.

when you say "Amoral" some facts backing it up would be appreciated for the sake of the debate.

I honestly don't believe this is a serious question, and anyone paying any attention over the last 4 years couldn't believe it is a serious question either.

But to humor you, here is a good summary from Olivia Troye, former Republican member of the White House Covid task force and aid to Pence: https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2020/10/olivia-troye-whi...

Basically, Trump's only concern about Covid was how it would affect his re-election chances. And this isn't just some "disgruntled staffer". Basically everything she says backs up Trump's own public pronouncements of only seeing Covid as some politically motivated attack, instead of one of the most serious threats facing our nation in decades.

Trump has been extremely transparent that he only views events as how they will help or hurt him. That's a very fair definition of amoral to me.

>"...Trump has been extremely transparent that he only views events as how they will help or hurt him"

I'd say that this is the default behavior of majority of the population. Politicians do it probably even more. They just do not admit it.

that is the scary thing that debate is not allowed. biden voted laws that he is now opposed how is it not viewing event as how it will help or hurt him?

People change, and politicians are still beholden to their public. Where's the contradiction in that?

same for fracking right he changed his mind in a few month, same for black people that his laws and kamala harris jailed for small possession while she was joking on radio that of course she was smoking weed because she was jamaican.

the contradiction is that you give a pass for some people but not for donald trump only by pure political opinion.

Yeah... because Biden and Harris are retracting on bad policy, while, _at best_ Trump became an outgoing racist out of political convenience.

This is the viewpoint that confuses me, depending on what you mean by “default” behaviour. Do you think the everyday altruism displayed by people are exceptions? Or do you believe those people aren’t actually being nice to you/others and have ulterior motives? Such a viewpoint must make the world look like a very sad place indeed.

You may argue that altruism is actually in self-interest, by making you feel good, but that’s circular logic[1].

[1] en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychological_egoism#Circularity

>"Do you think the everyday altruism displayed by people are exceptions"

Not exceptions but ratio of altruistic vs self-centric actions would be I think less than 1%. That is based on my life time experience. Maybe somebody else has better one.

As for the world being a sad place: well it is. The amount of people in need is staggering.

The point of politicians and especially leaders is that they are supposed to represent a group of people, and represent their best interests, not their own. If you just want to boost your own interests, then go into business and leave public service to those who are better suited to it.

> Trump's only concern about Covid was

This is fake news. Trump was one of the first Western leaders that reacted to COVID, closing the borders to China back in February. He was relentlessly mocked as a result, accused of being racist.

Edit: looks like some people disagree with facts.

https://www.factcheck.org/2020/04/trumps-snowballing-china-t...

> On Jan. 31, the Trump administration declared a public health emergency for the novel coronavirus and announced travel restrictions to and from China, effective Feb. 2.

Your own reference proves it’s anything but fake news. That link states right off the bat that banning travel was virtually useless. He’s on record with Bob Woodward talking about how he knew the virus is serious but he wanted to avoid ‘panic’. If Trump spent a fraction of the energy he’s devoting to without any proof undermining our voting he would have been re-elected free and clear.

The often-repeated claim was that he didn’t do anything, that he ignored or downplayed it. That isn’t true.

Its true that the problem was virtually unsolvable regardless of policy for pretty much every Western country (except a few small / sparsely populated islands), the virus started spreading way before it was detected, but that’s hindsight.

> or downplayed it. That isn’t true.

Donald Trump is literally on tape with Bob Woodward saying he deliberately downplayed it.

Slowing down the testing. Children in cages. Family separation.

that is very factual indeed. children in cages and family separation are not a trump policy but an american policy and obama and previous president did it too.

that leaves us with covid testing. On June 21st, White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McAnany was asked to verify if Trump had ordered testing to be slowed down. She responded, “No, he has not directed that. Any suggestion that testing has been curtailed is not rooted in fact.” She added, “The president was trying to expose what the media often times does, they ignore the fact that the US has more cases because we have more testing.” She added, “It’s a fact the media readily ignores.”

When asked to clarify that the comment Trump made about slowing down testing wasn’t true, McEnany responded, “It was a comment that he made in jest, a comment he made in passing, specifically with regard to the media coverage...when you test more people, you find more cases.” so not a fact.

see. im probably gonna be downvoted for this because people are not factual and just hate the guy and while there are reasons to hate him they need to be concrete and real

"children in cages" is just reductive way of saying 'a policy of forced family separation'. It's seems pretty apparent that cruelty is a key part of Trump's immigration policy when you have his lawyers arguing in court that soap and toothpaste aren't requisite for sanitary conditions.

> family separation are not a trump policy

Yes, In the last 4 years while Trump was in charge it was. He had enough time and political resources and green light at senate. Could have stopped it at any time. He didn't.

Obama did not separate asylum seeking families as policy. Child migrants who came here alone were processed like other migrants. Separating small children from their families is, in my opinion, a moral abomination. The justification for this policy was to deter migration by punishing them and their children. It's wrong.

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

> Obama did not separate asylum seeking families as policy. Child migrants who came here alone were processed like other migrants.

No, that isn't how it works. The policy is that children gets torn away from their family if the family gets prosecuted for a crime. That policy existed long before Trump. The only thing that changed under Trump was removal of lenience against parents, meaning parents now got prosecuted at same rate as other border crossers.

> children in cages and family separation are not a trump policy but an american policy and obama and previous president did it too.

This is completely false. Family separation was never a policy of any administration until Trump.

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

here are the picture of the peace nobel price winner putting kids in cage:

https://dailycaller.com/2018/06/19/photos-obama-immigration-...

> Children in cages.

This is fake news. This was Obama-era policy (or at least started with Obama).

https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/obama-build-cages-immigran...

Everyone knows you're here in bad faith. Try harder.

actually im here rooting for the idea that one should judge every man same. which is clearly not what is happening in america seeing how we give up discussing any sensitive topics about biden and harris more than despicable past on how they treated minorities vs donald trump. why do you think donald trump got more minorities votes this year than in 2016?

I'm sorry I didn't realize Biden and Harris took out full page ads calling for the death of innocent black men and still to this day refuse to apologize.

> when you say "Amoral" some facts backing it up would be appreciated

It depends on the definition of amoral that each one has

For many people, dating porn stars while married would be a good definition... but some adults have open marriages, that's true.

Most people in the planet would say that snatching babies from their parents (and basically laughing about it) is definitely amoral. Double bonus if you do it while accusing other to conspire to kidnap children without showing any proof of that.

And telling citizens for months to go out unprotected in the middle of a potentially lethal disease, when you are fully aware of the danger and after more than 200.000 people died for this disease, is not much better.

> left tries to mend their ways by refraining from pushing (mainly white, straight men, but also others, like the religious) many further from the Democratic party.

Genuine question: how can this be done without giving up on the people who don't match that description?

You can support people of color without actively denigrating straight white men.

Or, you know, we could stop focusing on race, gender and sexuality so fucking much.

The most important thing about a person in 2020 is their race it seems. Followed closely by their gender and sexual orientation. That is what needs to change.

Does this mean giving up on attempting to prosecute police officers who murder citizens?

> The most important thing about a person in 2020 is their race it seems. Followed closely by their gender and sexual orientation

All US presidents (until Obama!) have been straight white guys. Was that a coincidence, or was it in fact vitally important in their election?

Joe Biden won the primary because he was the least divisive. White men have no "cards" to play. They can't play the LGBT card, the race card or the gender card - so they by default have the biggest tent. Until we stop with identity politics it will always be this way.

Biggest tent that contains only straight white guys? Are you suer that's the biggest possible tent rather than one which contains everyone?

I don't think that's a "debating in good faith" interpretation of the parent comment, which was clearly talking about moving beyond identity politics. That is, if you demand on identity politics, the "identity" that is going to be the biggest is the US for the near future is straight white people. If you really do want the biggest possible tent, as you suggest, we'll likely need to move beyond identity politics.

If you hang out in LGBT and general non-conforming circles, you will realize that the white male position is the societal default, and it is nowhere near neutral - it is assumed to be only by those who have never realized that there are other possible default positions.

Some white men are beginning to see that their bubble is breaking.

What is the 'white male position'?

If this argument was moved to, say, Nigeria, would there be a problematic 'black male position' there?

Expectations about what constitutes being qualified for leadership positions. The automatic deferring to old men as authority figures over other people (trans people have direct experience). The way most many carry out competition. The idea of stoic sternness as being the ideal. Tone and voice.

Trans people who express themselves as male have a ton of interesting anecdotes about how they were suddenly seen as more competent just for being men.

Is this exclusive to white society?

If anything the whole macho leadership thing is even more apparent in less developed places.

Yes absolutely. Mugabe of Zimbabwe is well known for illegitimately taking land from white farmers and forcefully redistributing it, and has been repeatedly called out for this. We shouldn't be surprised that when a President has more to do with Mugabe than Reagan that he will be called out on it.

> Does this mean giving up on attempting to prosecute police officers who murder citizens?

I'm not sure how your response there follows at all from the GP's comment of "You can support people of color without actively denigrating straight white men", and indeed I feel like this is a clear example of what I'm thinking about.

It follows because "supporting people of color" is an empty statement if it isn't backed by policies, some of which are quite different from the status quo.

The truth is you can't support people of color without having straight white men feel denigrated. Because as soon as you support people of color the straight white men show up with tiki torches shouting about how they won't be replaced. Equality is not acceptable for these people.

Or you could just support people instead.

Not "Black Lives Matter" but "stop Police Violence". Not "Believe All Women" but "Believe Victims". Not "Affirmative action for non-white non-Asians" but "Affirmative action for the poor" (hint: every discrimination is positive for someone and negative for someone else).

I'm a straight white man (of a certain age) and support for people of colour doesn't make me feel denigrated... Two points we are not all the same... and really we aren't a we at all!

I mean so am I. Obviously I'm talking about the ones that feel denigrated, which is enough to get Trump elected.

> All US presidents have been straight white guys

Obama is not white

.. I can't believe I made that mistake, and the first reply didn't notice.

Sometimes simplifying 98% to "all" is valid.

That is the million dollar question, and honestly I don't really know, but would love insightful discussion on this topic.

I thought the Sam Harris podcast really hit the nail on the head. The messaging from the left for the past 10-15 years has really had very little to offer straight, white men at a psychological level. The rhetoric is pretty constant around wanting more diversity as a first, primary goal (meaning fewer straight white men), constant talk of privilege (you should be ashamed not just for trying to take pride in your own accomplishments, but you're guilty of your parents' and grandparents' sins as well), hyper-vigilance against language that has even the slightest resemblance to a color or culture (no more master branch for you), doing things once seen as "manly" is now filtered through the lens of "toxic masculinity".

And to be clear, I don't even disagree with many of these ideas. But in a democracy why should we be shocked when people vote in their own selfish interest?

But like, Harris is not exactly eager to care about my psychological needs - I am woman. Instead, he would mock my wish to not be looked down or not be reminded that i an lesser half the time.

The toxic masculinity thing is milder then everything i listened about feminity and anything feminine growing up. And plus it is tempered by boys are actually better thing that definitely still exist.

> Instead, he would mock my wish to not be looked down or not be reminded that i an lesser half the time.

I'm taking this as clear evidence you have never listened to a Sam Harris podcast.

I’d love to see an AOC/O’Rourke ticket sometime in the future. Both sides could do with a culling of the old and an infusion of new blood.

Ermm, I read parent's comment as an appeal to moderation. I'm not sure how AOC is going to help anything?

> And I hope (but am not hopeful) that the left tries to mend their ways by refraining from pushing many (mainly white, straight men, but also others, like the religious) further from the Democratic party.

>> Both sides could do with a culling of the old and an infusion of new blood.

Don't know if I could have come up with a better example of the unhelpful language I'm talking about if I tried. Why would some white guy, say, in his 50s want to be on board with your "culling of the old" rhetoric?

I already said culling was a bad word for what I wanted to convey: I meant kicking out the old guard with new capable, smart, energized younger people who haven’t been bought by lobbyists yet or resigned themselves to campaigning most of the time they’re in office to just stay in office.

I had a Lyft driver on a business trip in Pennsylvania recently who was a very nice fellow. He was immunocompromised, worried about COVID, and said he hated Trump's character.

And yet, he said he was voting for Trump. Why? Because Joe Biden was a pedophile whose son f~~ked underage Chinese children and took money from a Ukranian dictator to influence US policy.

He saw Biden as more amoral than Trump. I think this is a significant demographic block that's been ignored, because the media class doesn't really meet with people of these sort. He was extremely convinced, and I'm sure he really believed it. He really seemed upset about the moral quandary of voting for Trump vs. voting for a pedophile.

The media class is not ignoring these people. It's getting really rich feeding them this poison. The media class consists of more than just a few large center-left outlets.

Fair point. I was surprised at my blind spot, which I think I have because my media consumption consists mostly of the centrist media outlets you refer to.

I never realized how influential Bitchute QAnon believers are or One America News Network is either (mainly due to social media algorithms running haywire).

Tristan Harris of the Social Dilemma made some really great points to this effect on his podcast episode with Joe Rogan: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OaTKaHKCAFg.

The media is not center left. Neoconservatise(Fox) and neoliberal(CNN/NYT) are different shades of right. We are watching different points of view of right wing politics argue. Wall street vs petrochemical companies vs SV, etc... all jostling for position. And all of these people with quite a bit of overlapping interests but slightly different focus i.e. foreign intervention but should the pentagon focus on M.E. destabilization or for African and S.A. lithium?

This is the first time the NYT are pictured as neoliberal. That, or I've been living under a rock.

Remember: the thing about neoliberalism is that it ain't new, and it ain't liberal.

NYT follows the narrative supportive of the corporate agenda writ large, not because of an active choice about what it does write about, but because of the glaringly newsworthy things it ignores: like ongoing imperialism and terrorism committed by the US all over the world. This is true for most all major news orgs in the US.

You’re not alone.

His statements don’t line up with the ruckus after the Tom Cotton op-Ed or Bari Weiss’s departure.

Does supporting far right coups and writing context free puff pieces like this(constantly)[1] after a massive turnout for the very left wing party that the NYT railed against seem center left? Or, their uncritical push for the war in Iraq. Or their complete silence on the United State's role in Yemen etc... They write articles like this weekly, if that is not neoliberal then what is it?

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/09/world/americas/evo-morale...

> Why? Because Joe Biden was a pedophile whose son f~~ked underage Chinese children and took money from a Ukranian dictator to influence US policy.

In other words, voting for Trump because "samy is my hero." :)

Could there be a class action lawsuit against the various companies whose recommendation engines hijacked people's attention to recommend and reinforce this garbage?

Edit: clarification

> Could there be a class action lawsuit against the various companies whose recommendation engines hijacked people's attention to recommend and reinforce this garbage?

I think this thought is spot on. The usual defense is "but free speech!". Which would boil down to: "such is human nature". But I don't believe that's the problem. The problem may indeed be selection and amplification mechanisms like recommendation engines tuned to divert max. attention to the medium, masterfully exploiting the vulnerabilities of the human psyche as evolution formed it. The rest is collateral damage which nobody seems to feel responsible for. Not a sustainable situation.

A good legal question is whether the selection/rejection of content by an algorithm tuned to provide financial benefit to the platform would be considered "editorial control".

If there were a dead simple filter where the user could pick friend groups, tags and sorting criteria to tune their feed this would not be an issue. Reddit, for instance seems relatively simple in that respect- the presentation is a function of the subreddit and the votes.

But once the algorithm is driven by sponsorships, monetization opportunities, and opaque surveillance data then the control of the presentation shifts from user to platform. One could argue that this should creates some liability on the part of the platform.

If the editor of a publication was monetarily compensated for publishing lucrative slander, in a manner designed to maximize its credibility with certain audiences, and it resulted in harm to people then they arguable could be held responsible. If the editor claimed that an algorithm decided to publish it and the publication developed the algorithm I don't think it would make them less responsible.

> Could there be a class action lawsuit against the various companies whose recommendation engines hijacked people's attention to recommend and reinforce this garbage?

People like to hand-wring about "the algorithm", but then they seem to fall short[1] of understanding that exposure, impressions, and engagement are sold to the highest bidders on social media platforms. Not only that, the platforms allow fine-grained targeting of users based on tomes of data collected on them.

These recommender systems don't just hijack people's attentions as a side effect of increasing engagement, it is by design in pathologically manipulative and anti-user way.

It isn't a coincidence that those with money and an agenda[2] can inject money into social media platforms and have their content spread like wildfire.

[1] https://kelleycotter.com//wp-content/uploads/2020/02/IJoC_Al...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Mercer#Brexit

Carl Sagan had a good, relevant story in his "Why we need to understand science":

I read it in one of his books, but this is the only good version I can find online.

PDF: http://plaza.ufl.edu/trishak/Carl%20Sagan%20-%20Why%20We%20N...

>> From Parade Magazine, September 10, 1989 – As I got off the plane, he was waiting for me, holding up a sign with my name on it. I was on my way to a conference of scientists and TV broadcasters, and the organizers had kindly sent a driver.

>> "Do you mind if I ask you a question?" He said as we waited for my bag. "Isn't it confusing to have the same name as that science guy?"

>> It took me a moment to understand. Was he pulling my leg? "I am that science guy," I said. He smiled. "Sorry. That's my problem. I thought it was yours too." He put out his hand. "My name is William F. Buckley." (Well, his name wasn't exactly William F. Buckley, but he did have the name of a contentious TV interviewer, for which he doubtless took a lot of good-natured ribbing.)

>> As we settled into the car for the long drive, he told me he was glad I was "that science guy" -- he had so many questions to ask about science. Would I mind? And so we got to talking. But not about science. He wanted to discuss UFOs, "channeling" (a way to hear what's on the minds of dead people -- not much it turns out), crystals, astrology ... He introduced each subject with real enthusiasm, and each time I had to disappoint him: "The evidence is crummy," I kept saying. "There's a much simpler explanation." As we drove on through the rain, I could see him getting glummer. I was attacking not just pseudoscience but also a facet of his inner life.

>> And yet there is so much in real science that's equally exciting, more mysterious, a greater intellectual challenge--as well as being a lot closer to the truth. Did he know about the molecular building blocks of life sitting out there in the cold tenuous gas between the stars? Had he heard of the footprints of our ancestors found in 4-mil-lion-year-old volcanic ash? What about the raising of the Himalayas when India went crashing into Asia? Or how viruses subvert cells, or the radio search for extraterrestrial intelligence or the ancient civilization of Ebla? Mr. "Buckley" -- well-spoken, intelligent, curious -- had heard virtually nothing of modem science. He wanted to know about science. It's just that all the science got filtered out before it reached him. What the society permitted to trickle through was mainly pretense and confusion. And it had never taught him how to distinguish real science from the cheap imitation.

He does touch children very inappropriately. And YouTube actively pushes those videos to the very back of search. They're more difficult to find and they're creepy. They don't prove anything, but they're not good.

There is plenty of real hard evidence than Hunter was used to peddle influence and spread corruption, and the media completed censored all of that information, from one of the oldest newspapers in the country:

https://battlepenguin.com/tech/the-solution-to-big-tech-isnt...

This should trouble everyone.

No doubt the whole matter isn't clean. At those upper echelons I think it's very hard to not be corrupt.

Joe Biden's touchiness does bother me, as does the Hunter Biden story. But I don't think that's anywhere near what my driver was talking about, and I also don't think Trump is better when it comes to sexually inappropriate behaviour or corruption.

My driver also brought up Pizzagate and other such (nearly unequivocally) debunked conspiracy theories, which makes me suspicious of his reasoning capabilities.

> by refraining from pushing (mainly white, straight men, but also others, like the religious) many further from the Democratic party.

According to these Fox News polls[1], that shouldn't be a problem given their views.

This election also saw a drop in white male support for Trump.

[1] https://imgur.com/a/YxxnynP

Am I missing something? That imgur gallery has a bunch of polls but I don't see anything about a drop in white male support for Trump.

The left just made a white straight religious man president.

Those who feel they're being pushed out are actually leaving voluntarily because they don't like that others are being allowed in.

I just realized that Trump could become presidential candidate again in 2024 for a second term. So it might not be over yet.

Zero chance the Republican Party would endorse someone who lost a national election. Arizona Republicans are no-doubt regretting putting a one-time loser in a position to lose yet again.[0]

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martha_McSally

There was zero chance they'd have nominated Trump in 2016 too, at first. Maybe it's hard to remember what a joke he was at the beginning, and even through most of the campaign. I'd say the chances are much higher than zero that the pro-Trump base would win him the nomination again if he ran. It's easy to imagine him pulling media stunts for the next 4 years in preparation for just that.

I think Trump did two things in 2016:

- He gave hope to blue-collar workers, mostly white but not exclusively, who increasingly felt left behind by globalism and the tech-centric economy. This let him steal votes from Democrats as people wanted to try something different. Trump's rhetoric was tailored to them("drain the swamp", immigration crackdowns, economic warfare, etc).

- He fired up the right-wing base of the party and got them to show up at the polls. This caused increased enthusiasm and helped drive turnout of all GOP leaning voters I believe.

Also, let's not forget that Hillary Clinton, rightly or wrongly, was just not a very likeable candidate with broad appeal. She did win the popular vote, but as we all know that is meaningless.

Now we've had 4 years to see what Trump was capable of. His primary opponents will be able to point to his record instead of just his promises. I don't think Trump will come back for another round. He'll be too old in 4 years, and won't want to risk being a loser again. Also, don't forget that he has pending legal and financial issues to sort out after his presidency is over.

I suspect you will see someone else, maybe someone from the Trump family, run again with a Trump-like platform. They may very well win if the Democrats can't recalibrate their platform to appeal to more voters in electorally important states. I'm seeing a lot of wishful thinking regarding getting rid of the electoral college and it is frankly laughable. It's not happening anytime in the next 50 years. Small states will never give up that power. The best you could do is convince GOP leaders in 'purpling' states like TX to opt for a proportional assignment strategy to rob the Dems of the entire block of electoral votes once the state goes fully blue.

I think people would be disappointed by the Biden presidency. He cant do anything to fight globalization. The wages will average out world over. Rich countries will be the first to face the worst of it.

This will support a authotorian wave in the coming few years. They will just need to attack from the left.

I think Donald Trump is about to become a "Kingmaker."

Trump TV.

He's going to broadcast his message 24 hours a day. Attacking everything Democrats do, attacking every Republican who reaches across the aisle.

He'll have on everyone who agrees with him.

This may be on OAN, or he'll make his own new channel.

Remember when liberals laughed that the'd love it if Donald Trump ran for President?

What if he started a new political party?

I mean, on the face of it, people would say, yes, draw votes away from Republicans.

But... What if they start winning elections at the state level, and then in Congress, and on?

If I were Rupert Murdoch, I'd be negotiating to set this up right now.

If I were Donald Trump, I wouldn't let anyone else own any of it. I'd let them advertise.

Trump running would be their worst nightmare and a boon for Democrats. Very old, super-unfiltered and record-breaking as the first national candidate to run from prison (not out of the question). He could easily be the Ross Perot version 2.0 that nobody wants.

Trump did better in the election than predicted, and he has a very solid base. Without Covid the outcome might have been different.

That being said, I hope that you are right.

Has a US president ever won (or even ran for) a non-consecutive term?

I googled it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grover_Cleveland

Only Grover Cleveland.

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

Yes, Grover Cleveland

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grover_Cleveland

Grover Cleavland

Yes, Grover Cleveland.

Grover Cleveland won the popular vote 3 times in a row but lost the Electoral Vote in the middle.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grover_Cleveland

More recently than Cleveland, Theodore Roosevelt ran for a third term, as a third-party candidate, four years after leaving office.

He came second.

So could you. I'm not sure what your point is? That is about the most ridiculous statement ever.

Career republican politicians HATE TRUMP whether they admit it or not. They had to put up with it, and kiss his ass, and fuck them for it. But they aren't stupid.

Trump is done. If you honestly think he has any chance after this is over I don't think you have been paying attention over the years.

I wonder what will happen to Trump now though, isn't he at risk of going to prison?

I wouldn't bet on more than a few weeks of prison time, if that.

Powerful people won't let powerful people go to prison because it threatens their own position as untouchable. Don't count on it.

I don't think the USA has anything like Brazil's "Clean Record Act" (Lei da Ficha Limpa), but it's not unlikely that, once Trump leaves the presidency, he will face several lawsuits, and the outcome of these lawsuits might lead to him not being able to become a candidate for a while.

Which News Outlets Have Called the Presidential Race:

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/11/03/upshot/networ...

First thing I am going to do is submit my resume for open tech leadership and policy positions in the new administration. If you are in a position with experience and financial comfort to serve your country with regards to science and technology, the Biden administration will almost certainly be a great place to land. Look for policy and leadership positions in the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy.

I'll be submitting my resume and cover letter just as soon as the transition team site opens.

For a site full of engineers I'm surprised to see the discussion center on partisan politics, talking points, unsourced claims and demands for sources, bickering over every detail, when what I'd want to talk about among technical people is the fact that Biden hasn't actually won, based on the rules of the system. He claimed he won. So did Trump. Neither are backed by anything tangible, yet. It looks like the PA AG has called for a statewide audit of votes, several court orders have been issued in several states, including Michigan and Wisconsin, there are lawsuits in several jurisdictions, and recounts in Georgia and Nevada are going to start soon. Notice how I'm not saying the lawsuits and accusations are founded, because I'd like to talk about the system.

This is far from over. You could have votes invalidated. This is only over when the electors travel to DC and 270+ vote for one person. That could be halted. You could see the house delegations vote, you could see state or federal courts rule, you could even see some state legislative bodies make decisions on it.

It takes a lot more than a claim of victory and a news organization calling it for an election to be over, and I'd expect a bunch of very smart people to know that.

I'm not sure why you think people don't realize this.

It is well-established tradition for both news organizations to call races and the apparent loser to concede, well in advance of December 14th.

Biden's lead in both the electoral votes and the state margins means that in order for Trump to win, he would need to flip multiple states. Recounts typically only move a few hundred votes, and his legal challenges haven't seen any traction.

So yes, it's technically not over yet, but it is incredibly unlikely to have any other outcome.

> This is only over when the electors travel to DC

The electors do not, in fact, travel to DC, at all. [0]

> and 270+ vote for one person.

If you are going to be excessively legalistic, it's not over until the electoral votes are reviewed, judged, tallied, and reported by Congress. On the other hand, by design, by law, and by established practice, in various combinations for the various components, pretty much all of that process after the public vote and tallying is ministerial rather than discretionary; and the established practices for transition of power in an open seat or incumbent defeat situation very much rely on proceeding based on the known outcome before all the various ministerial acts are completed.

[0] https://www.archives.gov/electoral-college/roles#meeting “On the first Monday after the second Wednesday in December, the electors meet in their respective States to cast their votes for President and Vice President of the United States.” [emphasis added]

As a european outsider I see big social media (Twitter, FB, Reddit etc.) as the loser here, no matter the president.

- Dems already hated them because they were "complying" with the right/far right. Not enough removal, deplatforming etc.

- Reps also hated them because of all the removal and deplatforming, "free speech" problems etc. Then HN replies with the "They are a private company so they can do whatever they want" > which leads the conundrum when Google banning accounts and the whole site gets upset about it. [0]

Just the week before the election Vice had an article, "Facebook Has Always Been Right-Wing Media" [1]. It was aptly removed from here but shows the upcoming struggle which I think as I said above will be much worse for social media sites

Interesting times for sure.

0, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24965432

1, https://www.vice.com/en/article/n7vvwq/facebook-has-always-b...

You should add the 4 years of "Russian control over social media" narrative which has suddenly disappeared

I'm glad we got Trump out of the white house. But I'm still skeptical.

The growing divide and threat of civil war ( not going to happen btw ) are nothing compared to what will happen in the next 50 years of we do not have a green new deal.

Climate change, and its little brother over fishing and unchecked exploitation of our environment, is an existential threat to the human race. Bernie took it seriously. Warren took it seriously. I'm not convinced the new establishment takes it seriously. We need radical action YESTERDAY. More business as usual is not going to cut it.

Furthermore, the new administration doesn't believe in Medicare for all. They plan to do nothing about the currently broken system which causes 40% of people who are diagnosed with cancer to spend their entire life savings and often go bankrupt as a result of something that is not at all their fault.

Democrats down ballot got massacred, well progressive policies like decriminalization of drugs, and raising the minimum wage passed with large margins.

I'm glad we won but this was a mess and we're still not getting towards where we actually need to be: preventing the apocalypse

Preventing the apocalypse is not going to happen with just the US pursuing green tech, so its a moot point. We have to get the rest of the world on board, and that's simply not going to happen because there will always be a country that wants to improve the lives of their citizens, and thereby want to climb up the economic ladder, and as such will seek the advantages to be gleaned from the disproportionately more powerful fossil fuel.

Sorry to be such a pessimist, but there's nothing that's going to stop climate change except the free market agreeing to pursue sustainability. Politics has no power here. Its just a bad strategy that puts anyone who pursues green tech at an economic disadvantage, a sort of prisoners dilemma. Anything else is just fantasizing that we live in a non competitive world.

My advice: move to a colder state.

> there's nothing that's going to stop climate change except the free market agreeing to pursue sustainability.

That is exactly the attitude that got us into this situation in the first place.

The free market will NEVER voluntarily choose compliance costs. The value simply isn't there.

The free market is an engine to optimise profit. That's it. All other considerations are secondary.

While there is a market niche for "ethical products", that is ultimately (and somewhat ironically) unsustainable without regulation.

If I start a business behaving ethically, using renewable energy, paying my employees and suppliers a fair wage, etc... my only hope is that I can attract a niche market that will pay a premium for that. But history has shown us that is simply not the case.

Regulation levels the playing field. Otherwise, we would still have child labour, weekend work, dangerous working conditions, etc.

As for the argument that other countries will ignore this: 1: other countries AREN'T ignoring this. The US is the one that pulled out of Paris 2: The US is the still the biggest economy in the world. If the US government imposed regulations that all business must act in a sustainable fashion (including the supply chain) the rest of the world would have to follow through.

> The free market is an engine to optimize profit

Agreed.

> Regulation levels the playing field.

Only for the parties playing on that field.

> Otherwise, we would still have child labor, weekend work, dangerous working conditions, etc.

We still do, in countries that don't play on that field.

> If the US government imposed regulations that all business must act in a sustainable fashion (including the supply chain) the rest of the world would have to follow through.

And where exactly is the rest of the world buying its supplies from? Where were the things inside your home, inside your pockets, on your body made? Only the minority of wealthy people buy ethically produced goods.

Disobeying the free market creates inefficiencies in supply and demand which are always taken advantage of. You don't fight the free market, its an equation that can't be changed. You forget the black market exists in which regulations by definition have no domain. Are the goods you bought off amazon suddenly in compliance with US regulations just because you as a US citizen bought them? No, not at all, yet you and millions of americans buy these goods.

Cheaper energy always means cheaper production costs. In the end its up to the side who puts up the regulations to pay for that inefficiency. And we will most definitely be paying for it one way or another whether its through taxes, job losses, currency devaluation, quality of life, meanwhile someone somewhere will take advantage of lower costs to production and put that carbon into the atmosphere. I'm not in denial of climate change, I just don't believe policy will save us from it. Its like trying to put a fence around a forest fire.

> You don't fight the free market, its an equation that can't be changed.

Nonsense. Of course it can.

Buy any leaded petrol lately? Aerosols with CFCs? Landmines?

Why? Because nobody wants those things. The companies that made them liked them because they were more profitable than the alternatives (see also: labour laws, etc), but people just wanted transportation and deodorant.

> Cheaper energy always means cheaper production costs. Absolutely, and a capitalist system will force companies to that cheaper energy to compete. That's not a criticism, that's a statement of fact.

So how do you fix that? Make renewables cheaper through government investment and make fossil fuels more expensive through taxes, etc.

It's not rocket science.

That isn't to say it's easy. It's not. It's probably the single greatest challenge humanity has faced.

But we cannot simply pray to the invisible hand to save us. It really doesn't care.

Here's a dark thought. If Trump really did win the election legimately, and there really was widespread voter fraud, play out how both sides would react. Consider that Biden has already been declared president-elect by the media. We may be weeks away from civil war and not even realize it. Of course, I think this is a big if, but it's a scary thought.

Congratulations to the President-elect, and to the government workers and volunteers at all levels who tirelessly worked around the clock to ensure our elections were free and fair.

I think these next few weeks is a time for reflection, so that all of us can work hard to create the future we want. Wishing everyone well and to breathe in and out regularly, it's been a stressful year.

This isn’t and end, it’s a new beginning. Talk is cheap, and if Biden wants to heal the nation he’s going to need to walk the line between disparate groups. Go back to first principles on what it means to be an American, adapt it for 2020, and make more room at the table for people who will debate and compromise instead of point and shame.

Why is this up to Biden? Why didn't Trump do this over four years?

Because, saying "look at the other guy" isn't a solution

It's up to Biden because this is the hand he's been dealt. He doesn't get to cry "no fair, Trump should have done this" and sit on his hands.

As my mom told my brother and I: I don’t care who started it. I care who ends it.

Just curious. Does anyone have a reasonable response to the following contention:

Trump claims to have engineered the world's greatest economy, but in fact he has just benefitted from the Fed holding rates artificially low in spite of an ongoing economic expansion. In other words, he's taking credit for something he essentially had no hand in.

It's more complicated than that.

For example, rates were lower under Obama and the economy didn't perform as well.

But -- the truth is, presidents just don't matter as much as we think they do when it comes to the economy.

His tax cuts, coupled with loosening energy regulations, led to a great deal more buying power for US consumers. Gasoline, heating oil, coal (clean) for electricity generation have the US a net exporter of energy for the first time in decades. Energy costs plummeted, putting more $ in consumer pockets.

That drove the economy to new heights. The US Unemployment rate was at all-time lows prior to the pandemic. Even now, it are already back into the 'marginally acceptable' range at 6.9%.

When you look at countries that are unified and act as a cohesive state such as Switzerland, Korea, Norway, or Singapore, what they have in common is culture.

Los Angeles is nothing like Wichita. Beverly Hills is nothing like Miami. Multiculturalism produces many great subjects such as art, food, music, dance, poetry and great looking kids. But with amazing advantages comes equal disadvantages. These include racial tensions, religious tensions, political tensions, and gender identity strife.

Biden will probably fail at unifying our country though I hope not. How do you unify those who appreciate civil war monuments and "Dukes of Hazard" reruns with BLM supporters and Cardi B music videos?

The only way the United states would come together would be by way of a terrible unifying threat that scares the hell out of the nation or a "Grand White Swan" payout like universal basic income.

I kind of entirely disagree with the your read on the situation. The struggles that America has aren't that it doesn't have a common culture, the struggles are that it has too many veto points in its political process so it is extremely difficult for popular majorities to execute on a political vision, and it is extremely difficult for the population of the country to hold their leaders accountable when the multiple veto points lead to a diffusion of responsibility. The struggle we have is that popular majorities cannot enact their policy preferences, and then do not receive electoral feedback based on the policies they enact. America doesn't need a common culture, it needs a better feedback loop for things to go from idea -> popular will -> political power -> policy change -> impact on the people.

This ^ 100%. Sure the election process may be democratic but the way bills and laws are passed are not. The power is in a handful of people who don’t represent the will of people. Instead we’ll see painful 4 years where things get blocked on the merit of “Democrats wrote this bill therefore it must be rejected and vice versa”.

Neither Switzerland nor Singapore has a unified culture. People from German speaking Zurich are not the same as french Speaking Geneva or Bern. Likewise for Singapore there is a community of Tamils, Malays, Chinese etc. I grew up in extremely multicultural environment and can assure you that there were no identity issues. These issues popup once class/money imbalance pops up.

At the root of it all is wealth disparity. The rest of it is just a facade.

My biggest concern is how seemingly so many conservative people are becoming huge conspiracy theorists. I don't mean normal conspiracy theories like there being something more behind the JFK assassination, but like QAnon, Bill Gates injecting people with microchips, Pizzagate, etc. A lot of people in my own family in a rather backwards state believe that stuff. It's making me completely lose faith in this country and I'm seriously considering getting out because of this widespread idiocy.

How do you even begin to "meet in the middle" or have reasonable conversations with people who believe in that stuff?

edit: Don't really understand why this was de-nested from the original parent comment down to the third-fourth page :/

Interestingly, it's not just conservatives. I'm in the UK, and some of the circles I move in are a bit "hippy" (and thus not conservative/right wing at all) and some of those folks are absolutely lapping it up. It is bewildering to see.

Fascinating. What kind of stuff? The whole qanon deal?

In Finland, QAnon is known to gain support in yoga studios and among people who are into wellness and alternative medicine.

https://www.is.fi/menaiset/ilmiot/art-2000006672495.html

Not so much that (I think Q has thus far been mainly a US phenomenon, though it _is_ making inroads here apparently), but mainly I'm seeing stuff around covid being a hoax and/or a control ploy, forced vaccinations, tracking chip injections, Agenda 21, Bill Gates, etc. — all that stuff. It sort of makes sense in a group of people tending to favour "natural" stuff (some of whom were also antivax tbh) but it's been surprising how far it's gone, and how fast, with some of them.

Yes I'm in the UK too. I have family members who believe the whole Bill Gates mircochip injections, 5G causing COVID, anti-vax nonsence. My experience is people who loose control of their own lives (job lose, health, etc) seem to grip onto all these conspiracies, as if to try and explain their bad luck.

It’s interesting to see how it swings the same way again. I hear the ‘masks are bad’ mantra from both the most right, and most left wing components of people I know.

> I hear the ‘masks are bad’ mantra from both the most right, and most left wing components of people I know.

"Masks are bad" was the official government policy in Nordic countries up until August. And still is in Sweden.

Right, it's infected the anti-vax and supplements community.

Of course. These conspiracies depend on how schizotypical people are. People who are more “fantasy prone” are more likely to believe in magic, the supernatural, aliens and various other kinds of woo. It’s hardly surprising that hippie types should be included - what is the fundamental difference between believing in crystal healing and laylines and believing qanon? There’s no rational basis for either.

It was baffling listening to an SF tech worker in 2016 try to convince me Pizzagate was real.

Not much different to the democrats after the last election and Russia. Turns out everyone reaches for conspiracies when they would rather not change their world view.

I agree the Russia thing was way overplayed (even though Russia did run a propaganda campaign, which all evidence does point to, actual American people were still voting for Trump). I don't think it really holds a candle to the batshit craziness of QAnon though.

Not my president people are everybit as unhinged as qanon people. They unironically said Trump was a kgb asset who Putin was controlling.

Again, if we found out that some Democrat staffer had stuffed a ballot for their guy it wouldn't mean that the vicotry for Biden was fraudulent. It would mean that one single operative committed fraud and probably had no wider impact.

I'd even go as far as saying that it would be far more dangerous than the fsb posting memes.

I'm sure you can point to individual wackos but what is there that has the same scale and impact as Qanon? It's a very unique thing, and it's almost exclusively affecting conservatives.

Russia gate, if anything its even more unhinged because it was on national news instead of blogs. It is one of those things that even a year later everyone involved is keeping really quiet about given how embarrassing it is to have believed it.

I'm not sure what exactly you're talking about. It's now well established that Russia did interfere in the elections with the goal to promote a Trump victory. The only thing not conclusive was active and intentful collaboration with Russia from Trump. But it's very normal to want to open an investigation into Russia's meddling.

> Mueller concluded that Russian interference was "sweeping and systematic" and "violated U.S. criminal law", and he indicted twenty-six Russian citizens and three Russian organizations. The investigation also led to indictments and convictions of Trump campaign officials and associated Americans

> The Republican-led Senate Intelligence Committee submitted the first in their five-volume 1,313-page report in July 2019 in which they concluded that the January 2017 intelligence community assessment alleging Russian interference was "coherent and well-constructed".

> The Russian government interfered in the 2016 U.S. presidential election with the goals of harming the campaign of Hillary Clinton, boosting the candidacy of Donald Trump, and increasing political and social discord in the United States. According to U.S. intelligence agencies, the operation was ordered directly by Russian President Vladimir Putin

> Several individuals connected to Russia contacted various Trump campaign associates, offering business opportunities to the Trump Organization and proferring damaging information on Clinton.

Here's the thing, I don't even know what to make of it. Sure, Trump didn't seek.out Russian help actively or ask them to do any of this, but Russia still interfered in a way to promote his election. Now hard to say how much that helped him win, but it's hard to standby and think... Ya I guess this is fine? Shouldn't we do something to stop this from happening again? And why didn't Trump do anything about it? Shouldn't he say something like ... Well I believe I would have won even without their help, but this is unacceptable and we need to put in place measures to make sure Russia and other foreign powers can no longer meddle in US elections?

How are you measuring the scale and impact of Qanon? And lets not forget about the red baiting of Tulsi Gabbard.

Do you know the QAnon stuff? It's on a different scale, more in-line with scientology:

> QAnon's adherents, while seeing Trump as a flawed Christian, also view him as a messiah sent by God.

> there is a worldwide cabal of Satan-worshiping pedophiles who rule the world, essentially, and they control everything

> Followers of QAnon also believe that there is an imminent event known as "The Storm", when thousands of members of the cabal will be arrested and possibly sent to Guantanamo Bay prison or to face military tribunals, and the U.S. military will brutally take over the country.[3] The result will be salvation and utopia on earth.

In comparison to believing that a business man with multiple accusations of corruptions and financial crime, might be collaborating with Russia for his personal gain?

There is, of course, actual smoke on the Russia issue.

- It's unambiguously true that Russia helped Trump get elected in 2016. Even the Republican Senate acknowledges this.

- Trump's campaign had various (documented) unsavoury links with Russia.

- Mueller didn't clear Trump of collusion with Russia, and indeed stated that the (clear) obstruction prevented a full investigation of the topic.

- Trump himself has been extraordinarily soft on Russia, while burning relationships with traditional allies.

- Trump is also pretty effusive in his praise of Putin - dictator of a geopolitical enemy and all-round bad dude.

None of this is speculative - it's all backed up by the facts. This is not to say that Trump is a KGB asset, but it's not hard to see why people might see indications in that direction and take it a step too far. Honestly my personal view is it's highly unlikely - if he was a Russian asset it's likely our intelligence agencies would have known in advance and done something about it. Personally my view is simply that Trump wishes to be an autocrat, and admires other autocrats.

The Q stuff, the Bill Gates microchip stuff, on the other hand, is just completely out of left field.

That's not a conspiracy theory, both in that it actually happened, and it's not even that unusual for governments to mess with foreign elections if they feel they can get away with it.

There are two things that people who do not want Trump to have ever been a president mix up and pretend are equivalent.

One is the fact that every country interferes with the elections of every other country. The other is that the fsb was so wildly successful at it they changed the result of the 2016 election.

The two have nothing to do with each other and mentioning the first when I'm talking about the second is deeply disingenuous.

Stop trying to both sides the idea there is a pedophile ring of shadowy Democrats that actually control the government and the fact that Russia interfered and ran misinformation campaigns to influence the election.

You can argue about how effective you think those campaigns were in their influence but you're just trying to muddy the conversation if you are trying to make them out to be equivalently valid or equivalently ridiculous.

Please read what I actually said.

Thank you.

Well let's think this out for a minute, a extremely well connected liberal billionaire with a island was found out to be a pedofile and peddeling underage women to politicians. So much so that while it has not been proven their is a mountain of evidence that the British Crown was a solicitor. This has been extracted to a global cabal of pedofiles.

Conversely, we know that the russians ran bot farms and did various other unscrupulous activities during the election. Yet nobody involved with Trump was implicated in what the Russians did. The evidence was well vetted and there was a through investigation on the subject matter, further, the Steele Dossier was proven to be a hit piece. This has been extracted to Trump is a KGB agent or under the influence and direct control of the Kremlin. Yet both are not on the equivalent on the conspiracy theory scale?

Are you trying to both sides about Donald's best friend? The guy he has been filmed and photographed with on multiple occasions?

Not sure what you are asking, but my point was both sides are just as willing to extract truth into the realm of conspiracy.

Please don't try to construe that as somehow me proclaiming my admiration for Trump. Sure Donald was friends with him, and most certainly he lied about his affiliation with him and distanced himself from him, but that is not the focus of my post.

My focus was to highlight the rabid denialism that is rampant on both sides and both sides thinking they are the norm and the other guys are the extremist.

I think people wanted it to be true because they didn't want to believe a man like Trump could be elected President of the United States normally.

I do think the rise of social media has opened up the ability for foreign countries to influence people's beliefs regarding an election, much more than they could in the past (although it's not a new phenomenon and the US is guilty of it as well).

But I also think the 2020 election also helped prove that it's not just foreign influence that can make people vote for someone like Trump, they're perfectly capable of coming to that conclusion on their own. There wasn't just social media influencing this time, they could see with their own eyes what Trump was doing the past four years, not just speculation, and still decided they wanted to support him.

> The two have nothing to do with each other and mentioning the first when I'm talking about the second is deeply disingenuous.

That Russia interfered in US elections has nothing to do with how successful Russia was in interfering with US elections, huh? Amazing logic there.

Those two things aren't equivalent, but the former is a component of the latter. Pretending that they're unrelated is bizarre.

> The other is that the fsb was so wildly successful at it they changes the result of the 2016 election.

I mean, we know that Russia pushed Trump hard. Probably it wasn't enough to sway the election, but it's more than a little disingenuous to pretend that this is equivalent to "Hillary has a satanic pedophile ring" or "Bill Gates is injecting tracker 5G vaccines into people", where they're completely fabricated.

I think you can make a pretty strong claim that without the email leaks, Hillary would have won. Thus making Russia hacks and leaks of her emails directly responsible for the push to presidency.

And here we are. Four years later, a victory and still knee deep in conspiracy land why the loss was a fluke caused by evil doers against the righteous and noble Hilary.

You're projecting quite a lot here. There is a large number of Americans who obviously support Trump, you most likely, and about 47% of them it seems in fact. That said, the prior elections were really close, with Trump even losing the popular vote, so it's really no stretch to think that it didn't take much to tip the scales one way or another, no conspiracy here, just elementary observation.

Russia hacked Democratic email accounts and trickled them out to WikiLeaks. They set up troll farms to promote pro-Trump narratives.

The Republican-led Senate Intelligence Committee characterized this as "The Russian government directed extensive activity, beginning in at least 2014 and carrying into at least 2017, against U.S. election infrastructure at the state and local level."

That was unusual. "Every country interferes with the elections of every other country" is disingenuous. And thinking maybe that there's more that might have happened there that went undiscovered is not even close to the same level as thinking that Wayfair is facilitating child trafficking.

From my perspective, the two things that people mix up are: A. Russia interfering with the election. B. Trump welcoming Russia's interference.

For me, (B) is significant regardless of whether the interference was impactful — and bringing up (B) in response to (A) does not seem disingenuous.

> The other is that the fsb was so wildly successful at it they changes the result of the 2016 election.

Do you have examples of people believing this?

There are replies in this thread that are saying Clinton II lost because of the emails being leaked.

There is a theory that Trump conspired with Russia. That is a conspiracy theory. There is evidence that Russia wanted Trump to win and they helped him do that. There is no evidence that Trump conspired with Russia. Those two are different things, yet many still believe that Trump conspired with Russia.

During his 2016 campaign, Trump asked Russia to release Hillary Clinton's emails. As president, he met with Putin in secrecy with no other officials present and went as far as destroying the interpreter's notes. These are a few prominent examples of his utterly bizarre behavior towards Russia.

I'm inclined to believe Trump is simply stupid and admires Putin as the kind of strongman he desperately wanted to be, but he certainly stoked the theories with his own behavior.

It is true that immediately after the election, there was a "Russia hacked the election" narrative that many partisans were latching on to to explain an unexpected Trump victory.

I think the primary distinction is that democratic politicians and "thought-leaders" (or wtv term is better suited for influential partisans) quickly dismissed the fact that the actual democratic institutions were compromised (that is to say, the integrity of the vote was compromised, or that ballots didn't represent vote intention), but rather the claim quite quickly became that an influence campaign was supported by foreign powers, and the Trump campaign was happy to profit from it, if not colluding with said nation-state actors.

So, you're entirely correct that we have a tendency to seek out the narrative that best affirms our priors, but whether that tendency is legitimised depends on our institutions and the people we put in places of authority.

The whole Russia thing went deep into conspiracy theory territory even before the 2016 election. The part that astounded me was the conspiracy theory about Trump being in secret communication with a Russian bank (and, for some reason, a US healthcare provider) via DNS. It was rejected by multiple outlets before a partisan rag ran with it, and made no sense on multiple levels - we were supposed to believe Trump got some subcountractors of subcontractors who he had no reason to trust to set up a communication channel so poor he'd need another, better communication channel just to agree what the messages meant, giving them the ability to blow the whole scheme and tying those communications to himself for no reason in the process, and they somehow went along with it and kept their mouths shut, and that this made more sense than email servers doing DNS lookups as the result of having received ordinary marketing emails for Trump hotels like you'd pretty much expect them to do.

And yet, this didn't stop the Clinton campaign demanding the FBI investigate it from her official Twitter account, and that demand going viral. Not only that, when the New York Times pushed back against this nuttery in the weakest way possible by reporting that the FBI had looked at the claims and concluded all the evidence pointed to it being the result of ordinary junk emails, their reader's editor pushed back, there was a boycott, and they eventually admitted it was a mistake and they wouldn't do it again. People are probably still holding this against the New York Times even now, and the theory got resurrected later by publications which should know better.

I'm tired of this false statement being peddled.

The FBI, CIA, and republican-led Senate Committee on Intelligence have all produced extensive volumes of documentation of Russian interference in the 2016 election.

If you're referring specifically to accusations of collusion between Trump and Russia, the core accusation was that he and his administration were playing the role of the useful idiot, being plied and influenced by Russia to the detriment of American interests.

The idea that he was intentionally working with Russia in a direct manner may has always been a misleading straw man.

This is affecting me, too. I see immediate family members (especially older generation) unable to distinguish sources of truth. It makes me reconsider China's state-run propaganda system filtering what people are allowed to see/hear. Perhaps western civilization swings too far towards individualism when railing against the value of groups & institutions digesting information first.

Chinese people cannot have a say on things like Xinjiang in their own country because of the influence of the party over their media ecosystem. We can improve ours significantly, undoubtedly, but I would look more towards Europe than China for alternatives. Germany spent years Nazi proofing their system and so far the results have been not bad.

You're right that in Germany the Nazi problem is now negligible, but the real problem we face is extreme Islamofascist groups (to use Macron's words). In France, Macron banned the Gray Wolves, a Turkish ultra-nationalist group.

But Germany faces a very big problem with the Turkish-nationalist population. Probably more of a threat than France, given that the Turkish population in Germany is upwards of 9%. Even Turkish-German politicians are now calling for a ban on the Gray Wolves and other such extreme organizations (see https://www.msn.com/en-za/news/other/german-lawmakers-urge-b...).

While this ban may go through, the problem of radical Islam will remain a persistent threat in Europe.

I don't know that there's any clear-cut way to avoid extremism while also preserving freedom.

But don't state-run information filters exploit the gullibility flaw, not alleviate it? In other words, how do you tell?

If you look at how the elections were conducted with county level governments effectively counting vote tallies without any serious claims of errors, that may offer a hint as to what might work: stronger local sources of news and journalism.

Social media ravaged the local news industry and exposed every hick town to the insanity of conspiracy theories. Better regulation of social media, investing in local news and journalism may be one way to allow towns to get back sources of information that they trust and believe.

In fact instead of the stupid “everyone learn to code” pipe dreams, more investments in local journalism may help revitalize smaller towns to a certain extent. Local journalists focus and investigate local issues; they improve the quality of state services.

My 90 year old man had a burglary here in the U.K. while she was at home. They didn’t get anything, a neighbour scared them off.

She was obviously shocked about it.

Rumours spread on the local Facebook group and was picked up by the local paper who ran a story two week later.

My Nan then read about how lots of things had been stolen from her house and now believes the paper, not the reality she had lived.

If people are willing to believe what they are told third hand rather than what they know themselves, what hope is there?

Seems like a lot of these problems stem from a failing education system. Teach kids critical thinking and scientific literacy and about media bias. Seems more important ever to teach kids that they shouldn't believe everything the see at face value. Easier said than done I suppose

Exactly this - but this is why conservatives routinely defund education.

I'm very inclined to believe, but I personally know a couple of medical doctors who are 100% into the theories. And I imagine lots of other people also know well-educated individuals with the same beliefs.

I don't know if education is enough. People seem to decide at some point what they believe, and then back all evidence into either it supports their beliefs, or the evidence is fake.

Doctors have a very narrow area of training.

Are you saying we need even more education than what doctors currently attain?

Or are you agreeing with my underlying point that education doesn't matter and won't help here?

I think GP is saying that we need _different_ education, not necessarily "more". It could be more if the new stuff was added in, or it could be the same amount if it replaces something else. The total amount of education isn't super relevant, and it's a bit misleading up claim that teaching anything other than what is already part of a medical school curriculum means you're requiring students to learn "more than a doctor".

For a more concrete example, I have never gone to graduate school; my education ended after finishing my undergrad. By any reasonable measure, I received "less" education than a doctor, who presumably completed an undergrad like me but also medical school afterwards. However, I almost certainly learned certain things that most doctors didn't in my computer science education, like how a compiler or operating system is written. If instead of those computer science courses I took courses dealing with media literacy and how to recognize bias, I still would have "less" education than a doctor.

...coupled with a wide path of respect and influence. It makes them powerful in both good and bad situations

I think the original commenter meant that at no point of your educational career do we teach things like distinguishing facts in the media - and while there is relation to learning about the scientific method as a doctor, it could be made clearer.

My point is that my experience has been that assholes are going to be assholes regardless of how much you educate them. We see this now where those with no education and very little wealth are out there saying "Trump isn't hurting the right people."

It doesn't matter the level of education someone has in that scenario - they've already decided on an "us vs them" mentality and will believe what they want to justify their actions.

There are very well-educated, well-informed, and critically-minded white supremacists - they use that knowledge and intelligence to further their racism. No amount of education will help them.

They've already decided they want to hurt other people, and just take all evidence and back it into either "supports my stance of hurting others" or "this is fake."

I think we're spending too much time on the pity party of the uneducated. That if they just had the chance of the college dream, they'd open their eyes and want to help others. I think the vast majority have already decided on their tribe, and we as a society need to be aware of this and structure accordingly rather than insult these groups by saying they're just stupid or misinformed. They know exactly what they're doing and are more than happy to achieve their goals because the ends justify the means.

> Seems like a lot of these problems stem from a failing education system. Teach kids critical thinking and scientific literacy and media bias. Seems more important ever to teach kids that they shouldn't believe everything the see at face value. Easier said than done I suppose

No education is perfect. Even if those things are taught (which I'm pretty sure they are already at some level), there will still be loads of people that:

1) didn't pay attention in school, or didn't absorb the lessons;

2) don't have the ability to apply the lessons;

3) forgot the lessons (esp. if they previously spent a lot of time in a sane media environment where the lessons were less necessary);

4) found it too much trouble to apply the lessons consistently, and let their guard down;

5) found the emotional content of the conspiracy was just too tempting; or

6) encountered a evolved conspiracy theory that found a way around their (years old) lessons.

Here’s a provocative argument that “media literacy” won’t help: https://points.datasociety.net/you-think-you-want-media-lite...

Yeah, it's really weird.

My dad is an old guard conservative, and he's flabbergasted at the embrace of Trump and all these conspiracy theories and people going, "MY FREEEEDOM!!" instead of wearing a mask.

Where would you go? Conspiracy theories aren't unique to the us.

I was thinking Switzerland. Other European countries are also enticing, and I'm actually completely fine with the higher taxes, but less fine with the substantially lower wages for software engineering.

I am sure there are conspiracy theories everywhere but it feels like even some of the crazier ones are becoming mainstream in the US. I worry that staying here too long is playing chicken against the possibility of a crazy+competent person taking advantage of the conspiracy theories in ways Trump couldn't fully do.

You might check out this related comment before jumping ship: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25020778

Yeah, like I said surely there are conspiracy theorists everywhere and the "hippy granola" conspiracy theorists are a group I'm familiar with in the US (usually these are the "holistic medicine", anti-vaccine, unschooling, etc. people). I remember traveling through Germany and seeing tons of alternative medicine physician offices, and was surprised to learn in a lot of European countries you can actually use the socialized/public health systems to pay these "physicians", which I would find infuriating if it were my tax dollars going to that. But that's a bit of a digression. What's important to me is the scale and impact of the delusion moreso than the fact there are at least some deluded people.

Actually, at least in Germany the physicians you saw are still proper educated and certified doctors. They also are typically grounded very much on fundamental health education (although I'm certain there are exceptions). Many of them I suspect are using the whole alternative medicine more as an advertisement or a distinguishing factor, and the main thing they do might be prescripe acupuncture instead of pain meds. At least that was the experience I had when I went to one (I didn't seek him out specifically, it was just the closest one where I could get an appointment quickly).

Stop worrying. There have been popular conspiracy theories for ages. Aliens abducted by the CIA, JFK assassination, Moon landing hoax, 9/11 truthers, Illuminati, chemtrails, 5G, and the biggest one of all that you'll never escape from - religions. It's OK that people have different beliefs from you. You probably believe in some things, even dangerous things, that are obviously wrong too without realizing it.

People worrying about Qanon might just be suffering from selection and recency biases. If you don't quantify it and compare it to other conspiracy theories that you already tolerate, it might be an illusion. So much of this culture war stuff seems to be driven by those biases and complete failure to understand the scale of anything. Using instead, the frequency of news report and social media posts to estimate how popular an idea is.

The mania that these wild fabrications create in the US is... particular.

People are credulous of falsehood and don't seem able to apply critical thinking. Maybe these collective delusions help the deluded groups in some way... or serve the needs of a power structure.

In a sea of readily-available information with no way to qualify it, people gravitate towards concepts they can understand and that fit within their ideological framework.

If we're in the Information Age, why is information literacy not as important as literacy itself?

What’s hilarious with your position is that your “side”, the liberals, is perceived to be immune the conspiracy theories. For example, like how QAnon is widely believed throughout the conservative community. https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2020/03/30/qanons-cons...

OP is talking about their own family

I am not conservative.

Actually that study just shows that people have not heard about the term Qanon. I actually believe that left leaning voters are more familiar with the term. I suspect it hardly gets mentioned on fox news for example. The more interesting thing would have been to ask about some of the theories from Qanon and to scale them likely to unlikely similar to the other questions.

The second difference between Qanon and some of the previous conspiracy theories (on both sides) is that we have several republicans quite openly supporting some of those theories, and even the president retweeting qanon theories. That's why people are saying it seems to becoming mainstream.

Did the president merely tap into this simmering sentiment, or did he inflame it?

Recently, Glenn Greenwald wrote about the reluctance of large news organizations to even mention the Hunter Biden laptop story.

https://greenwald.substack.com/p/my-resignation-from-the-int...

As someone who sees this story as hard to believe for a number of reasons, the broad resolve among large news organization to avoid that story raises some serious questions in my mind.

This is not how the press is supposed to work. And it's definitely not how the press reacted to the Steele Dossier, which has similar problems with provenance of information and motivation.

That kind of environment in which the press seems to take sides makes fertile ground for conspiracy theories. If you can't trust the press to be unbiased, then how can you believe anything they say? Along comes someone who claims to have all the answers and away you go, full speed to QAnon Station.

A lot of people believe the Russia investigation was in fact its own form of conspiracy theory, cooked up by a party outraged that it lost an election it thought it had in the bag.

The conspiracy theory for the conspiracy theory is that his campaign owns/runs Q. Q is responsible for many of the other conspiracy theories following that.

In my opinion everyone needs to cool down. America is polarized over being correct, not being happy.

Q is Jim Watkins, or perhaps someone close to him. He's the one who owns the site that Q (now, after the Christchurch shooting) posts "drops" on.

I seriously doubt anyone from Trump's orbit is involved. Qanon was a huge thorn in their side.

I'm confused as to your intent here. The Hunter Biden laptop story was one of those QAnon conspiracy theories.

And thus the problem: There's no objective distinction between a "conspiracy theory" and a legitimate investigation.

So we have one side saying "You're caught up in conspiracy theories!" and the other saying "You're censoring the truth!"

How do you solve that?

You teach effective critical thinking in schools nationwide for a couple of decades.

You encourage empathy for those you disagree with.

You tolerate intolerant people (but not their intolerant views)

You dig deeper and tell everyone what you found. For the laptop story there was nothing to be found.

Verification takes time, when someone dumps a ton of information publicly and exclaims it is true there is no avoiding some people believing it no matter what happens.

If we are afraid about censoring that being transparent about what is censored and verifying it afterwards can help with that.

However I don't think there is a true solve to misinformation. Lies are catchier than the truth after all.

As terms, 'conspiracy theory' and 'fact' both feel loaded today.

I wonder whether reverting to more neutral labelling would held create a less heated dialogue? Founded and unfounded, for example.

I think of the Hunter Biden laptop story as being a lame Swiftboating slimy character assassination that isn't exactly a new thing in politics. Qanon is a different beast altogether because it stokes this really paranoid "they're all against you" mentality that a large portion of the population seems to have been increasingly susceptible to in recent years.

I’d argue that they’re not entirely wrong. The lives and problems of rural Americans are dramatically different than urban Americans, and given the all-or-nothing nature of the system, neither side is well represented when the other has power.

QAnon is obviously garbage, but it’s a symptom of a broken system that can’t effectively represent the entire population, and not just one half.

No? Nobody was saying Hunter Biden ran a pedo ring with abductions and body doubles replacing key national figures.

It's real-world verifiable that Hunter Biden made 600k/yr for several years for a foreign gas company while his dad was VP and involved in pressuring domestic politics in that country.

And so we come back to GP's point: If mainstream media is calling everything that's not politically advantageous for the dems a "conspiracy theory", then they lose credibility. If everything's a conspiracy theory, nothing is.

For one thing, the Steele dossier was hinted at but not actually released during the election. That's understandable, as it was a piece of opposition research. I read that the Steele dossier was delivered to the press for a while before Buzzfeed leaked it. Then it was discussed as news.

The news organizations were sitting on the document and afterward they said they were verifying its claims.

So, why should news organizations give credit to a story whose primary source is a very out of scope Rudy and even the editor who wrote the initial story wouldn't pen their name to it because when they even tried doing basic preliminary journalism to confirm any part of the story that they were left with zippo and the only reason it had to be written is that their bosses wanted it?

The only serious question about it would be that who in their right mind would believe a story that Hunter flew across the US from CA to NY to use some shifty $35 hole in the wall laptop repair place, drop off a pile of laptops, fly home, completely forget about them, the owner then decided to dive through personal data and found "bad things", instead of taking them to the FBI or police, decided that Rudy Giuliani needed them, which then Rudy sat on them for a few months before letting anyone know. Oh, and the mere possession and non-reporting of the "bad things" on the laptop are a felony in and of itself. Wow... interesting that actual journalists wouldn't even give the story the time of day.

Do you expect CNN to do daily breaking news segments on how Sandy Hook wasn't fiction because some right wing radio opinionist is still spouting off daily that the dead kids were actors?

The Steele dossier came from an information agent with a background of competent and viable information and journalists worked on vetting the information before sending any out.

Er except we’ve DKIM validated some of the emails, and they’re concerning in their own right. It’s worth the media at least asking some tough questions about Hunter. If you ignore the conspiracy theory aspects of all of this, the raw facts themselves are still concerning enough to ask questions.

They've validated 1. of the emails, not "some": https://github.com/robertdavidgraham/hunter-dkim

And frankly, possession of a single legitimate email's source text, for an intermediate-profile individual from a corporate account, doesn't somehow prove anything else (which again: is zilch - nothing else about this story is verifiable - it reeks of an intelligence op, especially since Rudy Giuliani is known by the FBI to be routinely in contact with known Russian intelligence operatives).

> the owner then decided to dive through personal data and found "bad things"

There are certainly some issues with the story. But later on there were photos of Hunter Biden released that certainly depicted what I would describe as "bad things" (those things being drugs).

So pictures do exist that you can lookup yourself. Unless you are going to go conspiracy theory about it, and say that the photos, that you can see yourself, are faked.

So... In retrospect, even if not everything related to the story is accurate, or there were some problems with it, we can now all but confirm that at least something was released that is not "fake news", and that came from this story.

> "bad things" (those things being drugs).

And this is yet another comment made by what I would describe as a "bad person".

I think it is reasonably uncontroversial that many people believe drugs to be some sort of scandal.

But regardless, it is uncontroversial that a large amount of people would describe pictures of someone doing hard drugs as "bad things".

The Steele dossier was opposition research and turned out to be largely baseless. And we know that with some certainty because there was a huge investigation in to it.

The Biden laptop "scandal" is probably also opposition research and probably also baseless. The response to it is rather contrasting though.

A strong tie between Hunter Biden, James Biden and China is not a news. It was before the laptop become a thing. Read some CNN news on 2019 and 2018, when the water is not that hot. CNN still pose some doubt on Hunter Biden's stance and potential corruption.

For example, Hunter Biden has invested a China company called Face++, which later to be a core technology to surveillance on Uygur.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/12/business/cefc-biden-china...

Patrick Ho, a former Hong Kong official being charged for corruption in US, being accuse of bribing Africa leader for allowing China's Energy company to exploit natural resource in Africa, which is part of the One Belt and One Road grand plan in China. Basically a form of colonialism from China.

The interesting part is right here. When Patrick Ho is on charged, who he called for a help? It is Hunter Biden. Hunter Biden's business partner in China is Ye Jianming, who is the boss of Patrick Ho. Ye Jianming is now "disappeared" or under investigation in CCP because Patrick Ho's arrested and Ye Jianming's operation has failed.

You can seach the keyword here. Those story are in CNN, New York Times etc.

It is pretty strange for the mainstream media to completely ignore the story when they have the same doubt on two years ago.

Tha laptop? It could be a cover-up for a whist-blower. The information could be true or fake. But even without the laptop, there are many evidence that Hunter Biden using his father's name involving in many corruption. And no one asked a question about his father's involvement on that? In fact, Joe Biden has seen Hunter Biden's China customer during the diplomatic visit to China.

If the mainstream media cannot be trusted, then it would be the best catalyst for conspiracy theory. In fact, the bias in the media has strengthened the polarization in the country even more.

So the core problem with most of the complaints about it is that nothing substantial ever came out implicating Joe Biden in any way. Some people claimed there was evidence but none was presented.

The news as a whole shrugging off a story about Hunter Biden makes perfect sense, it wasn't about Joe except in so far and Hunter might have name dropped him.

Even worse the people have been watching the media fibbing to them nonstop for 20+ years, since Iraq at least.

This is how you get people like Alex Jones. People see the lie, start looking for the truth and here is guy saying "I'll tell you what is really going on!" and if they weave a coherent soundings story (which the media fails to do... they just move on to the next talking point) people take it as reality.

No matter how you feel politically the media is a big part of the divide issues in the U.S today. They have behaved horribly irresponsibly.

You cannot hold the media accountable for the lies of republicans? Modern media is profit-based and just reports on who said what. Unfortunately, this is not enough to keep people informed. And nobody can claim absolute truth anyways, though facts do exist and need to be recognized.

Who said anything about Republicans? I specifically mention the Iraq war.

No, that's not what media has been doing. And these are the results we get.

This isn't a partisan statement but a simple statement of cause and effect.

Iraq war was initiated by Republicans, despite world-wide protests and lack of evidence of WMDs.

True, but entirely irrelevant to the point being made.

Did you not read the post you respond to or are you just engaged in shallow partisan trolling? I can't decide.

If you'd like to ignore my point it's fine. But it's how it is. It's reality.

You failed to assert a backed-up argument about media though. They just report on events and opinions. Don't blame the mirror.

We now see maybe reporting people blatantly lying can be dangerous to democracy itself. There's no question which side is most manipulative, cynical and lying. It is classic psychopathic behaviour to blame others for own failings with baseless accusations. Fortunately we don't exist to serve the ego of one, and there's no basic right to provide a platform for lying and division.

If we fail to address lies, any side can turn on its own population without those checks and balances. It is never enough to tolerate abuse and lies, as humanity witnessed before.

If this was your point to, explaining in your own words may help.

> This is not how the press is supposed to work.

It really is. As a former journalist, I can tell you a lot of crackpot stories come across our desks. We look at them, will see if the evidence can ‘stand up’ the story - if not, it gets spiked.

I think you raise a good point here, but one that is essentially invalidated by years of journalism that's mostly funded and managed by people with a lot of interest in the political discourse.

Very little of "the press" or "journalism" that reaches the true majority of people can be considered much more than entertainment television. Not only that, they have very clear goals, partisan alignments, and deals to own up to.

My point being, this picture of "the press" is not new nor is it simple to unravel, especially because a lot of the coverage we see, and how it's done, depends on a multitude of factors.

Let's take, for example, your point about the Hunter Biden story and let's allow ourselves to conjecture for a moment.

In a "press" state such as the one I described above, a big part of the "news media" is running amok with the story regardless of having little to no evidence to back it up. On the other hand, the world is still spinning and news that are noteworthy are still coming out. One might even say people should know about these things.

What's one to do in face of such situation? Do we expect that the "news media" devote all focus to arguing the conspiracy theory, which will most likely boost the conversation around it, or should we expect the "news media" to focus on things that can actually be proven, assessed, researched?

Of course, this is one narrow example that only scratches the surface of something that, like I said, is very complex. But I do believe that, considering the current environment, it's more harmful to debate the conspiracy stories than to ignore them. Consider any other conspiracy theory that you ever heard of. Would it be beneficial for anyone to have constant debate on television about whether or not the Earth is round, or if men have been to the Moon, etc.

I’d say Trump tapped into the sentiment of conspiracy theories by adding many of his own.

But in Europe, America have always been bigger and crazier, so it’s not a big surprise to hear about the conspiracy theories.

Hopefully the US can now move forward in a positive and constructive way, but the two-party system does seem to get in the way of improving things. Either you’re for or against, without any real middle ground.

If Biden can overcome that he is already on his way to become a great president.

What is coverage of the Hunter Biden story supposed to say? Rudy Guiliani claims he has a laptop that has some emails but refuses to produce the laptop. There is no way a news organization can verify the claims, and the claim itself is just hearsay.

The reason it hasn't been covered is because there is nothing a news organization can publish about it. Fox News passed on it. It is most likely simply bullshit.

Large news organizations did run stories. They investigated, found no corroborating evidence, and ran boring stories to that effect. Glenn Greenwald also investigated and found no corroborating evidence, but he hated that some people might take the lack of a smoking gun as evidence that there was no corruption connected to Biden, so he thought the media should use this shady, unlikely, as-yet-unsubstantiated story as a titillating hook to talk really loudly about all the possible ways that Biden and his son might be corrupt.

I can kind of see his point, since everybody in Washington seems to regard Hunter Biden as a completely unexceptional person of no particular merit who makes huge amounts of money because of who his father is, and that should be a scandal, though more a general scandal about the system than about the Bidens specifically.

On the other hand, that's no excuse to make a huge news story out of an unsubstantiated story fed to the media by partisan operatives a few weeks before an election. If they did that, these stories would arise before every election, and part of the political contest between the parties would be competing to come up with the best juicy lies. Considering what a free buffet that would be for the media, I'm honestly surprised that they managed to refrain.

> Glenn Greenwald

What is going on with him? I started following him in ~1997 when Salon.com was a burgeoning news site. He's taken some pretty extreme views since (essentially) expatriating.

Hunter Biden wasn't running for president. He's an adult responsible for his own choices. If he were trying to profit off his father he'd hardly be the first child to attempt to do so - that probably applies to a third of congress.

For some reason I just can't get the thought out of my head that if this were a kooky story about a rando laptop repair shop in San Francisco that claimed it had Ivanka's laptops with proof she was doing something nefarious you wouldn't have any of these same qualms about the news media treating it skeptically.

It's not as if other countries are lands of gold and honey... I live in Europe, and there are also anti-lockdown Covid-skeptics around here screaming "The goverment has turned authoritarian and is slowly turning us into sheep!" (luckily they're in the minority). And surely they are or will be vaccine-skeptics.

It seems truth has become subjective. I tried to talk to a QAnon-spouting girl and posted links to Snopes or The Guardian. She said, "Well, MSM is owned by the Rottschilds so you can't rely on them to tell the truth.". I never asked where she read this, but she probably would've replied she figured this out by reading some random Wordpress blog or watching some nutter on YouTube.

I thought "So, you believe those sources and think my sources are lying?!?". But wait, from her point of view, this sentence is also true! One could try asking them to check the reputation of their sources or dig deeper, but it seems this is an exercise in futility. When there are actual doctors arguing against Covid restrictions or publishing flawed studies on hydroxychloroquine, how do we trust who is reputable? (I'm talking about Didier Raoult, who now also has conspiracy theorists championing him as someone the French government "ousted" because he wasn't towing the party line).

Then again, there are utterly stupid conspiracy theories like the Wayfair one: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-53416247 ; the idea that secret cabals would use publicly accessible online shops to traffic children is laughable, but the people who believe this sort of thing doesn't get that the real human traffickers (is a sad fact that they're out there) probably knows how to communicate in secret.

> "The goverment has turned authoritarian and is slowly turning us into sheep!"

You don't need to be "covid-skeptic" to say that, I say the same thing simply because I'm strongly libertarian. It also highly depends on the value system, e.g. if you're young and healthy you might think the marginally increased chance of complications because of this virus isn't worth delaying your life for months or years.

Also, Snopes and the Guardian (along with most other MSM and fact-checking sites) have pushed enough biases, falsehoods and conspiracy theories to be completely untrustworthy.

If you're young and healthy and have fast reaction times drive a large safe vehicle you might think the marginally increased chance of injury because of a crash is not worth delaying your journey by driving at a limited speed or obeying stop lights. but now everybody's driving fast and on the wrong side of the road and zooming through red lights and nobody gets anywhere faster safely because you have to slow down at every intersection and check if a car is coming. Lock down isn't delaying people's lives it's ensuring there's a society for those lives to continue in.

That's actually a really good analogy. We don't say "drive at 5 km/h to save lives", just like we shouldn't say "only be at home, work or in the store to save lives". There's a middle ground, which in addition is consistent with freedom (don't wanna die? don't drive, don't party during a pandemic)

> I'm strongly libertarian

Ah, labels, I don't find them helpful because everyone seems to understand political labels differently. What does this label mean to you? To me it means someone who would be quite dead after he gets the systen he wants, because he would end up eating tainted meat and drinking poisoned water, because, in my imagination the libertarian mindset is "Geez, government controlling my food? how dare they?".

So I end up rolling my eyes at anyone calling themselves this label...

Exactly, it’s a confusing label. I’m a strong believer in rules that prevent market inefficiencies, e.g. against misleading advertising, some sensible health regulations, ... but most of those rules affect corporations not people (and I don’t think corporations have any rights, the society allows them to exist).

People should be mostly free, including to eat poison (as long as they actually want to and are not mislead into it).

I think we now have a propaganda apparatus that folks in the past could not even have dreamt of. I fear that this will take us to a very dark place.

I do have some hope that the more extreme conspiracies pass in time and don’t permanently damage the psyche of those involved. Growing up in the Bible Belt during the Satanic Panic, I was legit afraid of being caught and sacrificed by satanists after a friend’s dad had us watch a movie about the “Pagan Invasion”. Satanists out to kidnap kids for ritual sacrifice was a Big Fucking Deal that many people actually believed —- Paradise Lost is a good documentary from that wave of hysteria.

I know of very few people that are terrified of satanists any longer.

Q seems to be a direct continuation of the satanist panic. Not only are the satanists real, but they control the government, rape children, drink their blood etc. etc.

Communication has become weaponised. It either helps the cause, or hinders it. The content is irrelevant.

It actually is an interesting topic to look at the history of Blood Libel and see the Satanic Panic and QAnon as the evolved/remixed version with different actors.

I think with the advent of the internet, things are shifting away from ritual murder to sexual exploitation of minors as the big fear, but “that group of people you don’t like is out to get your children” is quite the enduring narrative.

"One man's modus ponens is another man's modus tollens."

Someone who was e.g. raised as a Christian, and then concluded that some of the stories they were told in Sunday School were lies, is likely to treat an appeal to religious authority as evidence against a claim. Even in domains where Christian groups have been effective in practice.

The same can be said about mainstream media or science.

In the short term, it's practically impossible to reach such people without identifying somewhere they're actually right in their rejection of the mainstream narrative, and gaining their trust by recognizing that. Only with that trust do you have a shot of being listened to when you point out where they overcorrected against the mainstream narrative.

In the longer term, it would really help if some key mainstream narratives became more accurate. Without that, "getting out of the country" may actually become the best option for an increasing number of people.

I think the size of these groups are greatly exaggerated by social media.

Conspiracy theorists have always existed and are practically harmless.

Sure there are incidents that occur, but likewise, 1000 people a month die from falling down the stairs. It's just not a problem in the grand scheme of things.

There are members of the US House of Representatives which believe in the QAnon conspiracy theory now (Marjorie Taylor Greene). Sure it's just one representative among hundreds, but that shows it's not a deal breaker and might even have widespread popular support.

Don't forget that Hillary Clinton complained about 'vast right-wing conspiracies' publicly on multiple occasions. The talk of conspiracies is not unique to one side.

I see the conspiracy theories as substitutes for more concrete reasons why people feel so divided and under attack. Recalling back to research done on conflicts between groups, the most strongest way tensions and fear are created is when people displays different symbols representing difference in values, unclear and uncertain definitions of identities and groups, and large difference in social and economic status being highly visible and displayed. Get people afraid with a strong dose of us vs them and people will latch onto any theory that will explain that emotional state regardless if some are true and some are false.

The best way to meet in the middle would be to do the opposite to those triggers and then talk to them.

> How do you even begin to "meet in the middle" or have reasonable conversations with people who believe in that stuff?

This is the Overton Window on steroids. I've struggled to put aside my partisanship in discussions with different opinions, I have trouble even when the other person is being rational and informed, but to go against flat-out-batshit-insanity?

How did that happen? Did we just assume people always want to be smarter, and that was wrong?

My view is this is because at its core human brain has evolved to not reject reality however weird it may be (bear with me), The problem is that when 'facts' are presented in form of live media (audio, video) the chances of it being interpreted as 'reality' by our adaptive brain as reality is high.. because you just saw & heard it, there in very little space there to inject intellectual discretion there, and even if you do you still have to have a special case for 'that reality'.

the best counter to fake news IMO is to not consume any news in a narrated form unless its from a really trusted source & I mean invite-home-and-fireside-chat trusted. I prefer reading news to this. the other benefit is that you can read at your own pace instead of the narrators pace so you have better chance of not missing crucial detail. Second is free is bad, my take away after last election cycle was we need to pay for the news. I got NYT & wapo sub and have not cancelled it since. Just these two things, paying for the news and reading it helps me keep this conspiracy BS at bay.

You can have the bravery to understand that there are nuggets of truth in even what you may consider the crazier conspiracy theories, and then to follow up with researching and understanding psychological operations both the history and current extent therefor (of what we know), so that you can come to the table both with a) uncomfortable to you facts, and b) knowledge of how those psyops are used on the populace (which in particular gives one a better understanding/empathy with those who buy into xyz).

The media told everyone not in the conspiracy realm about how pizzagate was false, and it likely is, but only to an extent. But wait, I can feel the recoil already, just a moment. For those of us in the conspiracy realm, who know about the real use of children for blackmail operations mostly by intelligence agencies but also by organized crime, pizzagate suddenly becomes much more plausible (note I didn't say real). It's not a popular position because most people simply don't want to know how dark the world really is. The framing of Epstein as some one off independent abuser is actually part of the coverup of just one middle manager in one of said blackmail rings. He ran girls, others run boys. Top level politicians and businessmen are targets for leverage. If you balk at even this assertion just because of the "crazy by association" to pizzagate, take the time to lookup: The Dutroux Affair, aka Belgiums X-Files, The Franklin Scandal, the Finders Scandal, Roy Cohn (Trumps mentor)... as just a start. Also note: wikipedia will not provide good information on these kinds of topics. If one were to look at the entry for the Franklin Scandal without digging further, one would probably walk away thinking it was a hoax, which isn't the truth at all.

On the topic of psyops, one of the most used techniques is called the "limited hangout". I usually use the flat earth conspiracy as an example of this. Of course it is quite assinine, and should generally just be ignored as such, an analysis will show that those who talk about it (I would posit are often not organic), also talk about much more legitimate conspiracy theories. The intent is to make the more legitimate conspiracy theories discredited as crazy by association. Qanon is such an operation. It took what could have been a movement against the blackmail networks that have infiltrated and compromised huge amounts of business and politicians on both sides of the isle, and turned it into a partisan, quasi-religious outlet that goes nowhere, but always promises something is about to happen (keeping the partipants hopeful and distracted from more meaningful action) with the added side-bonus of being one of the best honeypots for metadata on those types in existence.

The Bill Gates topic is another good example. It's easy to kneejerk dismiss those concerns as they sound quite outlandish... but again, there is at least a modicum of truth, or rather, a handful of reasons people should be much more skeptical of the intentions of Bill Gates on the topic. For example, Bill Gates had quite an extensive relationship with Jeffrey Epstein, something a cursory search on the topic from mainstream sources will give nothing more than a passing mention. He had a relatively sordid relationship with the pharma industry in India, one worth digging into. On the "microchip" thing, another great example. Gate's related foundations and companies have openly talked about the quantum dot system, which is just readable markers to identify who has had a particular vaccine, and have actively partnered with the pentagon and darpa, and the ID2020 program is being tested on newborns in Bangladesh and homelss people in Austin, TX already. Those kinds of assocation alone are enough to at least empathize and understand where those who then take that and buy into the microchips story are coming from. So while it's untrue that the Gate's linked programs intend to put microchips in, the talk of digital certificates linked to biometrics such as quantum dot scare people, and then combine that with the fact that DARPA and the pentagon have been investigating such microchips, along with a history of medically experimenting on humans without consent, it's easy to see the jump to conclusions being made.

Given the huge amount of propaganda being heaped on the American public from all sides then, I think you should reconsider judging so harshly those who have fallen victim to that propaganda, and instead should focus on the purveyors and originators of that propaganda. To be frank, I also find this disproportionate judging of people in the current day to be very unprincipled also. We can invade countries illegally, murder hundreds of thousands of people abroad... and crickets... but talk about how the same engine that did that abroad is now turning it's eye of sauron back towards us, inward, and you must be a batshit crazy conspiracy theorist. To just now be losing faith in America/it's people is myopic at best. Try to judge a bit less, and exercise a bit more empathy and even sympathy for those who have fallen for the untrue (which is literally all of us, to some degree), and understand the outlandish might not be as unplausible as you might think, and you will be on a better path to engaging genuinely with such people.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r-GppBpUeYg

A well intentioned question: in your view, were the various conspiracy theories about Barack Obama that went variously unopposed, weakly opposed, or openly embraced by mainstream conservatives depending on who you asked, "normal" conspiracies or crazy conspiracies?

People who believe Obama was born in Kenya, who believe George Soros funds every leftist cause on the planet, or... you know the stuff... are believing things that are both nutty and really obviously false. Is that stuff really any less nutty than the QAnon stuff?

I guess I feel like that maximum level of craziness isn't really new.

I don't think I realized just how much this was wearing on me. I know there's steps to go before this is irrefutable, but the weight lifted is palpable and I didn't really think it would be given how many troubles we still face. I sincerely hope this is a step towards a healthier country. And for those that did not like Trump, but weren't thrilled with Biden, I hope Biden is a stepping stone towards even better candidates.

I'd like to open a slightly different topic here which stems though from the elections of the past 20 years. Wouldn't be a big take away now the reform of the Elector College and the shift to a direct vote from the people ?

As a nonUS citizen from a country in which the head of state is being elected directly from the people, I find it very unsettling that there have been cases in which the president in US elections was running behind in popular votes and by a big amount of votes, which almost happened here. I've tried to research it a bit but I couldn't still understand why especially since the House and Senate members are elected by popular vote already

I'd appreciate any insights here

Nah. A popular vote is like two wolves and a lamb voting on what's for dinner.

System's working as intended.

Your metaphor cuts both ways. Electoral college is like 3 lambs and 2 wolves voting for what's for dinner. Lambs live in one state and wolves live in two states. Wolves win even though they are numerically the minority.

Your metaphor simply exposes a risk of any sort of majority rules, it's not specific to popular vote systems.

> System's working as intended.

The System didn't anticipate the maturation of the political landscape into a steady-state of two enormously wealthy parties that exclude any disrupters, and thereby between them decide what's selectable for dinner from a menu of two choices. Do you want that lamb with mint sauce or without?

Not once on electoral coverage did I see votes for independent or third-party candidates listed.

It's similar to the European Parliament, in that small member states have a small advantage over populous member states.

The whole point is to prevent Germany and France (or New York and California) from dominating everything.

Do not be mistaken, popular vote was one of the options considered at the beginning of the USA. It was not due to the potential for fraud. So even today, the electoral college serves as a safeguard when there is reason to believe the popular vote has been tainted. The current media narrative is there is no hard evidence, but what other evidence other than video, sworn affidavits is required? Do not be too quick to call it for Biden, not withstanding the popular vote, this probably will drag on until December despite the media attempts to end it quickly.

The electoral college had nothing to do with fraud. It was a check against a misinformed populace, or a candidate that died. Both of those things have been made irrelevant by faithless elector laws. It now serves basically only as a bias towards republicans, as the founders of this country chose to value land over people.

The end of this video[0] explains some of the historic context:

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OUS9mM8Xbbw

The Constitution of the United States is a document written to preserve co-equal sovereignty of a bunch of states that wanted to be closer to nations than provinces, while avoiding the then-very-apparent risk of centralized absolute governing authority.

The framers of the Constitution didn't get everything right, but it's very useful to keep that perspective in mind when trying to understand the form of the US government.

If you take the perspective of states as sovereign, with federation between them, then the Electoral College starts to make a lot more sense. The goal was to preserve the power of a state in the federal government, as much as to represent the collection of people from all states - both concepts were critical. The idea is that people from the nation deserve representation and that each state (and the people from that state as a sub-population) deserve representation.

If federation of states is a core concept of the subdivision of governing responsibility, then it makes sense to build a system that ensures each state has meaningful weight in the governance of that federation.

None of this is an argument for or against the Electoral College, nor should it be interpreted as arguing for the correctness/effectiveness/righteousness/morality of the institution. It is simply an attempt to share perspective to help understand why the system is the way it is.

As originally defined, the House of Representatives was the only piece of the federal government intended to directly represent the people of the nation. Senators were originally chosen by state legislatures. The Senate was intended to represent the states, not the people directly.

The Electoral College was an intermediary to represent both the states and the people - as a compromise, it has many failings that seem obvious today. There is no federal mandate as to how a state's electors choose to cast their votes. Each state is responsible for regulating its own voting - this includes how people vote and how electors are chosen and how those electors vote. It is mere happenstance that the majority of states have a winner-takes-all allotment strategy for their electors. Maine and Nebraska notably assign their electors proportionally.

It is also interesting to note that the tie-breaking mechanism for an Electoral College tie devolves to the House, not with one vote per representative, but with one vote per state. This is another example of the concept that states are a concept deserving of representation.

The US is not and was never supposed to be a popular vote democracy. The founding fathers recognized the dangers of populism and subsequently made sure that the government is a republic.

>The founding fathers recognized the dangers of populism and subsequently made sure that the government is a republic.

Yeah, umm... about that...

Trump, for all his bluster, is not really a populist in any serious sense of the word. True populism doesn't exist in a state with a balance of powers. For example, Caesar was a populist (Populares).

Michael Barbaro: So this winner-take-all system, this is not something envisioned by the framers. It seems like it kind of came to us in a pretty haphazard way.

Jesse Wegman: Right. People like to imagine that the system that we used today was handed down to us from the framers. And in fact, the framers didn’t talk at all about the winner-take-all rule. It didn’t come up at the convention. And when they saw it start to be adopted in the states in the early 1800s, they were horrified. James Madison, the man we think of as the father of the Constitution, tried to pass a constitutional amendment prohibiting the use of winner-take-all rule because he saw how corrosive it was to erase up to half of voters in the state.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/22/podcasts/the-daily/electo...

It'd be nice to discuss whether the benford's law analysis can be reasonably applied to election returns, but any mention of it is flagged by the thought police.

Is it flagged? Mostly, I think people just don't care that much because Benford's law is a curious pattern that applies to some kinds of numbers some of the time, so it's interesting as a first diagnostic of fraud, but without an argument of why it applies to this particular kind of data, and without further investigation of what might be causing the irregularity, it's not a smoking gun by any means.

Thanks for the link.

There was a good post here with a link to all of the meme'ing trump claims of statistical anomalies (benford's law, turnout numbers, president vs senate party differences, etc.). Was going to reply to it but upon submitting it was gone / flagged.

I'm so glad it's stinking over. I might even read non-tech news again.

The Trump presidency put a spotlight on the damage that can be done by a combination of:

- Concerted attempts by press and others to create a filter bubbles

- An electorate that's unwilling to look outside their preferred bubbles

Those problems don't go away with a new president. What's the solution? How do we prevent the next election cycle from being worse?

Revising our electoral system to change the incentives for political parties and politicians would be an approach. Winner-take-all on a state by state basis with single-party primaries produce candidates who are far from the median voter and then campaign to drum up support among their party base. Universal primary systems encourage candidates with broader appeal outside of their party to end up as the party nominee, who then have a much easier time running a general election campaign on appealing to opposition party voters rather than being forced by the positions they took in their primary to campaign only to boost turnout among their existing base.

Something that should be addressed as soon as possible is reducing the capacity of foreign actors to influence politics through organized trolling.

There has been a lot of gaslighting around this issue, but the fact is that the United States has been protected by two vast oceans for its entire history, but it opened a conduit into its heartland for foreign mischief-makers through Facebook and Twitter. Whether it helped Trump or not in 2016 (frankly, I think it probably did but it's exhausting to debate this so I won't) it does represent a gaping hole in America's defenses.

Until this election, there seemed to be a clear pattern (in the English speaking world anyway) that allowed one to reliably predict the winner of an election by seeing which side the trolls supported.

There are no First Amendment protections for Russian/Iranian/Macedonian click or troll farms. Detecting VPNs and other attempts to conceal traffic is not an insurmountable technical challenge, yet it isn't done consistently.

The seductive "Arab Spring" approach to letting free speech run rampant on social media turned out to be a mirage. Not only was the Arab Spring reversed in Egypt, based on my discussions with Egyptians, Facebook was turned into a tool of repression after the counter-revolution took hold.

(Yes, the irony of posting this from a throwaway account doesn't escape me, but there's a difference between clearly anonymous speech, and speech that misrepresents its source).

As a Hongkonger I am more worry about a) the problem of USA infrastructures due to the split. The nearly 50% vote for trump this time ... and b) the external resolve and attention paid to Asia especially Taiwan. I did note it is Clinton that sent in 2 aircraft carriers for Taiwan last time, which unlike hk is not yet that much a lost case.

For Hong Kong, I do not have much hope but given it is not much of hope to begin with, fight on beyond the last stand.

Best wish for USA and Taiwan, whilst I can still send message.

I wonder what Biden is going to do about the coronavirus. Trumps denials don’t work but the things people expect Biden to do (mask mandates etc.) aren’t a magical solution either.

Well not now that it's progressed too far.

Full lockdown and masks would have worked just as well in America as it worked here in Asia if it was enforced quickly and with high adherence to the rules.

(worth mentioning everyone is -still- wearing masks here in Thailand every day and have been since early March)

Ironically a virus that began in Asia is now a Western problem because of inaction and/or lack of decisiveness.

Whatever the merit of the early masks and lockdowns strategy, the options Biden has do not include them, that ship has sailed. He’ll have to make do with the options he does have.

Still probably means masks in 100% of public contexts, contact tracing and widespread testing. Similar to Japans approach.

But yeah, Trump really fucking screwed the pooch on this so it's going to be an uphill battle and many will die or economy will need to suffer a massive ~2 month lockdown.

If a middling approach is used then likely get the worst of both worlds, rolling regional lockdowns causing multiple blows to businesses, many more dead etc.

I don't envy his task, Trump has effectively made it impossible by completely disregarding the pandemic playbook.

Mask mandate is not a magical solution, however it will significantly reduce the spread.

Basically the only option we have is to reduce the spread of the virus without really massively hurting the economy. At same time give scientists and labs everything they need to create a working vaccine verified by FDA rigorous quality process.

A vaccine that kills even more people due to side effects and not vetted thoroughly is even a worse solution.

Biden can’t close businesses and go on full lockdown. Everyone can wear masks in public and still go to work. That is not a huge ask. There are many pragmatic options.

The difference between videos of people celebrating because they thought Trump won and videos of people celebrating because Biden won were stark. I'll say which side had near complete mask compliance for anyone viewing this in the future once context collapses: the Biden crowds.

I wonder if epidemiologists can extract any useful information on mask efficacy from infection rates in these places.

My perception is whoever think that since Trump is gone we can wipe the plate clean and go back to the good old way, is wrong.

Biden will be the First Democrat since Grover Cleveland to take office without a Democratic Senate. The House majority is smaller. So his mandate is effectively toast. Another interesting historical fact. America has never elected 4 consecutive 2 term presidents. If Trump would have been elected it would have been the first time in US history that this has happened. This election wasn't a blue wave by any means, Trump underperformed House Republicans in many swing states implying this was more of a personal decision rather than political.

What do I see changing? Not much:

  - foreign policy: policy changes with Syria and Iran

  - China: An end to tariffs

  - local changes: No more federal opposition to safe injection sites in San Francisco

  - federal taxes could still go up, the Senate has two liberal Republicans who could deliver tax increases to Joe
  
  - expanded federal regulations that do not require changes to the law

What will likely not happen:

  - PR and DC becoming states is no longer plausible

  - packing the Supreme Court is no longer plausible

  - a green new deal or expansions to entitlements are no longer plausible

  - state bailouts are now in question, which could force major structural reforms

You're forgetting by far the most important item: some efforts to combat climate change will happen. This single issue should have been enough to mark Biden as preferable to Trump, even if everything else had been worse.

This is completely true. We will have more regulation. This list is not exhaustive and is my personal opinion on the way I see things changing. I'll attempt to modify

That depends on the Georgia runoffs in January. If the Dems win those two seats, then along with Harris's tie breaking vote they would have a senate majority.

Do you have some information the runoff? I wasn't aware about that.

https://text.npr.org/932068951

interesting. I was not aware of this. Thanks

I wouldn't rule the GA senator red absolutely until the runoff but it does seem the more likely result to guess at the moment (IMO). Remember if the Senate is even the VP acts as tiebreaker.

Here is a useful chart for anyone wanting to look at historical senate share https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/72/Combined...

On the "change" side I'd throw in I'm interested to see how the FCC commissioners change over the next couple of years and what impact that has on things.

On the "not likely to happen" I never understood how packing the supreme court was supposed to be possible in the first place unless members of the court started dropping like flies all of the sudden.

responding to your question on the court, the threat was an expansion of the number of justices on the court.

Ah thanks, makes sense.

"America has never elected 4 consecutive 2 term presidents."

This seems like one of those facts that is so arbitrary as to be basically statistical noise. How many times have we had three consecutive 2 term presidents anyway (i.e. an opportunity for the 4th president to be a consecutive 2 term president)?

I thought it was a cool fact.

In an ideal world, I think we should do either: A) Random selection a la the Venetian Doge (political leader, not meme-canine). The house should definitely be random selection- preferably all citizens over 18 and under say 70 filing a tax return. B) Allow indefinite run-offs with None-of-the-above options. Basically, if None-of-the-above wins, the election is redone but nobody on the ballot is allowed to run for the run-off.

The Doge wasn't selected randomly, but via a series of randomized election rounds in order to ensure that no coordination was possible. Wiki has a fun description:

> Thirty members of the Great Council, chosen by lot, were reduced by lot to nine; the nine chose forty and the forty were reduced by lot to twelve, who chose twenty-five. The twenty-five were reduced by lot to nine, and the nine elected forty-five. These forty-five were once more reduced by lot to eleven, and the eleven finally chose the forty-one who elected the doge.[19] Election required at least twenty-five votes out of forty-one, nine votes out of eleven or twelve, or seven votes out of nine electors.

Ancient Athens appointed most offices by lot, they even had a democracy machine: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kleroterion

Please permit me a ramble, there are too many points to fit in a hn box and I'm typing on a phone.

I'm sure our stateside friends would be happy to acknowledge that US politics has a major effect on the whole world. I have had it pointed out to me before, however, that the USA can vote in whomever they please, and it is none of our business.

But American companies sell us our books and films (understatement), take cuts of our credit card payments, make us coffee, organize our taxis. All of this seems to be with preferential tax treatment. All of these things could be done without the US, but the US is our partner in peace, so it is tolerated.

And here is the rub, this works so long as the USA is a legitimate ally.

And then came Trump, telling us that we don't spend enough on Nato (with US defence companies) and threatening our peace. I believe this has lead to a situation where the US is seen less as a partner and more as a bully, a colonial overlord demanding tribute. I think the next 20 years will see a shift in this kind of trade to the EU and to the East.

The USA can be insular if it wants, but it can't do so and expect everything to be the same as it has been for the last 50 years. An insular US is a declining US. Your new President has a terrific amount of work to do to undo this damage...

> But American companies sell us our books and films (understatement), take cuts of our credit card payments, make us coffee, organize our taxis. All of this seems to be with preferential tax treatment. All of these things could be done without the US, but the US is our partner in peace, so it is tolerated.

Are you implying that America is exporting more than it imports from the EU? The US actually has a trade deficit with Europe.

https://www.census.gov/foreign-trade/balance/c0003.html

Does that include software services?

Edit: Just checked the source. It is goods only. And does not include services, software or not. So, this is sort of a meaningless argument for an economy that is shifting towards services from hard goods.

Thta is not what they were implying. They were refering to power imbalances, not trade by itself.

My feeling is that the bigger issue with things like movies and books is not money (trade) but mind share. The US tends to have more influence elsewhere on how people think than other countries have here.

I'm American and I find it disturbing the degree to which our films, TV shows and other major media are done mostly in California or New York. Those are much more urbanized places than most of the US.

It took me a long time to comprehend why I felt like there was something "wrong" with my life. I consume a lot less popular media (books, magazines, movies, etc) than I used to and my life makes a lot more sense to me than it used to.

I found it personally problematic to be more or less brainwashed with ideas about what life was supposed to be like that in no way matched my actual life. It took me a long time to conclude that this is not some defect in me. This is a situation where our popular imagery doesn't really match reality for the majority of Americans.

That disconnect is bound to be even larger and more problematic for other countries/cultures. I think it is legitimate to be concerned about things like that under the best of circumstances and downright suspicious when the evidence suggests it's not even being done in good faith, so it's not likely some sort of innocent problem. At that point you have to start being genuinely concerned that you are being intentionally manipulated with malice aforethought.

> And then came Trump, telling us that we don't spend enough on Nato

Trump said it loudly and in plain terms, but this is a popular bipartisan view in the US. It is a fact that many wealthy NATO members do not meet the defense spending commitments that membership entails. Obama pressured NATO members to meet their obligations, and Biden will likely do so as well.

https://www.politico.com/story/2016/11/obama-nato-pay-fair-s...

There is a silent understanding (silent, because it isn't raised) that the US takes a larger part of NATO spending because it's politically feasible to do so there, and because protecting Europe is to protect US interests as well.

In some places, spending 2% GDP on defense (meaning cutting back on something else) would be political suicide. So that government is kicked out and it remains 1.2% or something. What happens then? Nato kicks out the member state? That hardly helps any more than a member paying 1.2% and promising to help with Article V!

I think one factor in this election is that the parties splits are misaligned with issues that people actually care about.

So for example: Trump and Sanders (and Tulsi and a number of more fringey candidates) are generally opposed to international intervention.

Immigration considerations are another one (in particular, dem immigration platform is at odds with trade union preferences but aligned with large corporate interests).

There are big, relevant, issues that voters care a lot about that don't conform to the party lines.

While I don‘t disagree about the split between countries being off, I always questioned the notion of other countries needing to spend more. Why shouldn‘t we all spend less instead?

Compared to almost any non-superpower status nation, the US Defense budget is strictly insane.

If they had just shifted a third of that budget towards education under early Obama, I doubt Trump could ever have come this far.

One could view the US defense budget as a sort of subsidy to Europe and Democratic Asia. If the US decreases its defense budget (by a lot), Europe will likely have to increase theirs.

Yes, and in return us Europeans agree to spend the vast majority of that budget on US arms. I'm thinking of multi-billion dollar nuclear subs and $100m aircraft. Then we allow tax free access to our markets and allow the US to skim a charge off all of our payments. To me that is the naivety of the Trumpist policy on Europe, it is only looking at the costs.

Trump still lied about it.

1. The 2% target is a non-binding guideline. 2. Germany has (for some time) a plan in place to increase the defense budget to meet the 2% target. It will increase on a year-by-year basis. 3. Germany spends quite a lot on foreign aid, which 'could' be understood as a risk preventing defense spending.

> 3. Germany spends quite a lot on foreign aid, which 'could' be understood as a risk preventing defense spending.

I was skeptical, so I looked it up. You are correct—Germany does spend a large percentage of its GNI on foreign aid [0]. However, as you put it 'could.' Ultimately you are comparing apples and oranges. Defense spending is different from foreign aid spending, although they may be related. So, this is not a strong argument IMHO.

> 1. The 2% target is a non-binding guideline.

Not fulfilling a non-binding obligation is also not a strong argument. It's a non-binding obligation for me to to wash my hands at home after touching raw chicken. It would still be irresponsible of me not to.

> 2. Germany has (for some time) a plan in place to increase the defense budget to meet the 2% target. It will increase on a year-by-year basis.

IMHO this is your strongest argument, but the fact that the level is not there yet after so many years of NATO, leaves the policy rightly open to criticism.

0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_development_aid_countr...

The UK classifies some of it's foreign aid budget as defence spending to meet it's NATO commitments. It may be a weak arguement to us, but there is a precedent for it.

> Not fulfilling a non-binding obligation is also not a strong argument. It's a non-binding obligation for me to to wash my hands at home after touching raw chicken. It would still be irresponsible of me not to.

Well, if Trump thought it's such a good idea he should have pushed to make it an actual obligation with punishment when its not met.

Instead, he complained with the same misleading statements for 4 years straight.

He also claimed that other countries take advantage of the USA while not understanding that in exchange for not contributing as much, the USA has had (traditionally) more privileges when it comes to setting the direction of foreign policy.

> Well, if Trump thought it's such a good idea he should have pushed to make it an actual obligation with punishment when its not met.

I wasn’t saying anything about Trump. I was just responding to your arguments about Germany’s spending on NATO. Not sure where you read anything about Trump from my comment.

True, but on a deeper level NATO most of all serves US interests, and Joe Biden will grumble but happily continue to subsidize the defense of member nations.

These days NATO is most clearly recognized as a list of countries that the USA as global military hegemon is ready to go to war to defend, and this is hugely beneficial to a country that wants to be a global military hegemon. Wars are expensive and ideally you don’t want to fight any. The existence of an organization like NATO means that (a) none of the member nations are going to fight each other, (b) none of the member nations are going to try to rival the military hegemon, (c) nobody outside of the organization is going to start a war with any of the members. For a military hegemon whose main interest is ensuring global peace so that it can continue to reap the rewards of a global economic system that it is also hegemon over, getting to mark off a large chunk of the developed world as “no wars here” is well worth paying for. In a very, very loose sense it’s sorta like an olden-days imperial power with tributaries, but the “tribute” is realized in the form of the fact that the US government’s position as military and economic hegemon means that it can manufacture dollars for free and other countries will trade goods and services for them.

On top of that, concentrating the defense spending of the alliance within the US is good for the US economy and critically important for maintaining the R&D efforts that the US military relies on to maintain a technological edge over potential rivals outside of the alliance.

>The existence of an organization like NATO means that (a) none of the member nations are going to fight each other

Not necessarily. Greece and Turkey have been an intra-NATO flashpoint for decades, and tensions there have recently flared up again.

https://www.cato.org/blog/old-nato-nightmare-returns-possibl...

Tensions have flared up, but perhaps that is a symptom of a weakening of Nato, and weak foreign policy towards Turkey and their descent.

And when there is a questionable war to be fought they are the first to bang the drums and demand their 'partners' join in a coalition. 'Or else...'.

I'll welcome a divorce from Europe. The EU should flourish into the society it wants to be, and be free to develop its internal market as it sees fit.

An insular US, engaging primarily its geographic neighbours, and countries in the Americas will be better able to focus inward, and work to rectify the internal problems that see it on a path of decline already, while mantaining its sovereignty.

As much of a fantasy as it might be, I do hope Biden will continue the Trajectory of bilateral relations, and minimal alliances that Trump's administration has so clumsily set us on.

That is an incredible view to me. The influence of American culture on Europe is significant. The sales of US services took Europe are colossal. Suggesting that the US give that up to win a pissing contest about who has the most defence expenditure sounds rather ignorant.

I'm honestly not particularly bothered by NATO defense expenditures. NATO member states could spend twice as much per capita, and I'd still be wondering why we insisted on continuing to occupy a major role in European defense.

My disinterest in economic and political entanglements with EU states (and many others) is fairly multivariate, but I'll briefly touch upon the largest reasons.

1st, I believe that the more multinational our companies are, the less financially, economically and culturally interested they become in America's domestic well-being.

Our most economically well-connected and well-to-do see themselves as global citizens who happen to live in the US. They are above petty things such as nationality, happily siphoning US subsidies, and leveraging American tax loopholes with no sense of loyalty or obligation to the country in-which they reside, where their success was made possible, even while their lobbyists do everything possible to keep the interests of American citizens on the backburner.

The few times they indulge in true charity, it's usually as some high-minded investment in the third world.

When they do get involved in domestic politics, it's often only to whine about how distrusting American's have become of the institutions they themselves deliberately compromised, or to push some ill-considered policy that sounds like it would make the country better, but benefits them in some indirect way while ignoring local cultures.

2nd, I think a clean civilizational break would be good for the US and the EU. I'm well aware of Europe's superior standards of living, as are America's liberals. Many people in the US have become disinterested in the national geography (culturally and spatially), and out of an abundance of envy for Europe's achievements and lack understanding for their origins, naively believe we could remap European models of governance, and social services onto the US with few negative consequences. We've become intellectually lazy about our own domestic development, and overly fobd of universalist philosophies towards governance.

We would rather argue over whether to parrot other nations we believe have reached the end of history, or abolish the government altogether (effectively) than we would take the time to consider the US within its own cultural, geographical, and historical context.

We should begin to regard the US as a civilization apart from the European West. Europe has wholesale adopted concepts of positive rights, and benevolent if universal governance, while we have historically been a land of negative rights, and minimal state involvement. The further into history we go, the more bifurcated our civilization's cultural mindsets become, and the earlier we (Amerixans) acknowledge these differences consciously, the sooner we (Americans) can begin to introspect and work around the advantages and limitations that this realizaton entails.

3rd, the longer we operate as a regional security garuntor, the more conflicts we're responsible for keeping frozen, the more interested the world is in our domestic affairs, and the less sovereignty we have in both our domestic and foreign affairs. My shorthand is to refer people to the Saudi, and Israeli lobbies as examples of how our international relations can have outsized effects on our domestic affairs.

When I was complaining to a friend that our media (Australia) spends more time on US politics than our own, they showed me a map of extraterritorial US military bases.

I think the comparison to a colonial overlord is more than apt.

NATO is supposed to be an alliance, not a protection agreement. And what is the point of an alliance if your country doesn't have a worthwhile army? Why can't you be asked to hold up your end? Asking you to hold up your end is not "demanding tribute."

My country does have a worthwhile army and an independent nuclear deterrent. I am dismayed that you can imagine that the European Nato members can't field significant forces, that would be very insular thinking. Sure they don't have stealth bombers and super-carriers...

My country has also supported the United States in many of its foreign campaigns as an ally supplying manpower and materiel to Afghanistan and several gulf wars for instance.

The sub-text is that my country spends a great deal of it's 2% on American weapons, which is not true of some of our Nato neighbour's. When I hear the USA demanding more this is what I hear, 'spend more on US made arms' not 'build a better army'. That is why I call it tribute.

You must be from the UK or France, then. That means your country is very capable of designing and manufacturing world class weapons systems if you don't want to buy from the US.

I am from the UK yes. We have a capable arms industry yet buy Trident, Apache, F35 etc from the US for no reason other than paying tribute.

It's was not a secret that NATO's enormous expansion was dubious for the US or that european countries do not contribute nearly enough. trump 's opinion was just a rude way to say what everyone knew. Even Mitterand wondered what was the reason for NATO after the cold war ended.

> An insular US is a declining US

If EU did that, it would be an empty threat. The US is already realigning towards the ascending markets in Asia rather the aging Europe. There seems also to be very little interest from Europeans to act together as an alliance. Instead they are watching passively as a NATO member (Turkey) is actively threatening allies and other NATO members (cyprus, greece, france)

>It's was not a secret that NATO's enormous expansion was dubious for the US or that european countries do not contribute nearly enough.

I think it would be useful for you to flesh out those two points. 'It's not a secret..' sounds like a Trumpist soundbite, a mechanism to try to pass off a personal opinion as fact or at least as established consensus. There are some much more eloquent people than me in this thread who have argued the exact opposite of what you have stated, that Nato is a net benefit to the US. Would you mind fleshing out your counter-argument further please

Debates about the expansion of NATO are not new and it wasn't ever without criticism (https://fas.org/man/eprint/aurora_29/part05.htm)

and the funding imbalances are long known https://www.defenseone.com/ideas/2013/10/will-us-rebalance-i...

but i think you re more interested in scrutinizing every word so i d rather not continue

As a Turkish person I can say that even if it may look like we've some military power, most of qualified people prisoned after 2016 coup attempt.

It is like a person speaks louder to hide their ignorance. That is what Turkey is doing right now.

Turkey is actively aiding e.g. in NK so those are not just empty threats

My concern is the mass talk of voter fraud shows how distrustful a great deal of Americans are to their own democratic system. I'm ok with placating the fears people have of election fraud and investigating, given the studies done, it's quite certain voter fraud is a prime example of misinformation.

2016-2020 has been a time of seeing just how dangerous misinformation is in the world of mass social media. All it takes is the spreading of false rumors through various means of the internet and social media for people to lose their minds and question their own democracy. I think both social media, advertising agencies, and the modern media is largely responsible for this. Also, us in the tech industry, who have over these last 4 years began to see the truly ugly side of what we're building. In our constant need to hit KPIs, drive up SEO rank, drive virility, we've slowly fed a monster that is now making itself known, and disrupting the very fabric of democracy.

Canadian who has been living in the US for 5 years. Perm resident but not naturalized. Arrived a year and a bit before Trump 2016 win.

This election was so polarizing I am very afraid the country can recover from it.

I am worried enough we have bug out bags packed, with critical documents, as I expect this could easily escalate to a civil war as both sides are convinced they are right; and more worrisome is that the other side is so completely corrupted that they are not Americans or humans and should be taken out like the trash.

We have Trump who will not concede and will fight this to his last moment; and then will continue to fight it from the side lines.

We have AOC on twitter asking people to send names for her registry of Trump supporters for future retribution. You know who else kept such lists? Hitler, Mao, Mussolini.

Really scary times down here. Much worse than when Trump won in 2016.

The US needs all the help, prayers, and luck it can muster right now to find it's way through this.

Guessing you’re referring to:

> Is anyone archiving these Trump sycophants for when they try to downplay or deny their complicity in the future? I foresee decent probability of many deleted Tweets, writings, photos in the future

> Lol at the “party of personal responsibility” being upset at the idea of being responsible for their behavior over last four years

Which I’m sure all will agree is not how you have characterized it.

If I’m incorrect pls provide sources.

She supports this project: https://www.trumpaccountability.net

Keeping such lists is wrong on many levels; and for a member of congress to suggest and support such a thing is beyond comprehension. I suggest going and standing in Dachau or similar places and reflect on what such lists have been used for in the past.

It also seems others feel the same (random selection from many google results): https://nypost.com/2020/11/06/aoc-facing-heat-for-wanting-to...

> She supports this project: https://www.trumpaccountability.net

Can you back this up with a source?

I looked up that tweet from AOC [0] and you’re really exaggerating what she said. Shame one you.

[0]https://mobile.twitter.com/AOC/status/1324807776510595078

Thx - unsuccessfully tried to find it earlier... .

You're right, (directly) not so extreme as mentioned upstream.

At the same time I think that mentioning "archiving" is in my opinion very dangerous especially when stated by a politically exposed person. I don't like that at all.

I don't think that his/her (upstream) fears derived by that tweet are unfounded.

EDIT: btw., I think that in general the "spirit" after these elections should not be to create further divisions (persecution in this case), but to unify and to find a middle ground between parties to make things work.

Smoke less weed and relax. There's not going to be a civil war.

As a Canadian, what stands out for me about the last two elections is that many Americans seem to desperately want a variety of political reforms, but neither party seems interested in providing them. Trump and Sanders both sold themselves as reform candidates in 2016, but only Trump wound up on the ticket.

Sanders might be the real deal, but he's not going to represent a major party until donation and campaign spending limits (like we have in Canada) reduce corporate influence on U.S. politics. Sanders scares away the "big money" that U.S. elections depend so heavily on.

Trump has not proven to be a reform candidate in any sense of the word. As a political outsider with control over both the house and senate for his first two years in office, he had the power to deliver meaningful reforms, but didn't. Americans desiring reform should have felt deeply betrayed by Trump's first term.

The democrats had a smoother primary in 2020, but decided on an utterly bland candidate. Biden is a return to the status-quo. I predicted that, after the last four years, a return to the status quo would appeal to many, but this election proves otherwise. This should have been an easy slam dunk for the Democrats to win, but it's turned out to be a squeaker!

If the democrats ride the status quo for the next four years and both parties were to run the same candidates again, I suspect Biden would lose. The Democrats need to pay attention to what Americans want.

I would suggest that Biden's administration should, despite running on a thoroughly status-quo platform, embrace reform. Too many Americans mistrust their own political system, to the point that they're willing to picket polling stations because they think fraud is being committed. That must be fixed. Finding ways to reduce the influence of money on politics (e.g. campaign spending limits) would be a good start. It will also be an easy sell to devolve and distribute some of the powers that have accumulated in the white house over the last several decades. If you're not comfortable with some of the powers Trump wielded during his time in office, then perhaps those powers shouldn't rest with the POTUS.

Bottom line, if the democrats try to pretend Trump never happened and couldn't happen again, they're in for unpleasant surprises.

I am very curious on what someone voted for Trump.

And what I ask here, is that I expect someone here to be straight forward and eg. Just mention when they just want lower taxes, for example.

( I'm not an American, just curious about other perspectives, since the groups I'm in are more liberal based, from a US perspective)

This election was your regular 4 year reminder that the electoral college is stupid and that the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact needs to be completed.

I agree with that, though I am pretty concerned that the NPVIC would be struck down by the now 6-3 conservative SCOTUS.

I don’t disagree with your goal but I think you ought to elaborate on your arguments.

The electoral college balances geographic diversity against raw popularity. This is just one of many ways the US government gives outsized power to vocal political minorities. Perhaps explain why you don’t like things this way?

If I understand how the election works, the “first past the post” voting system is just as damaging. Correct me if I’m wrong, but they are not related.

Explanation from game theory pov: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yhO6jfHPFQU

I am holding my breath until Jan 6th at least when electoral college votes:

Url: https://crsreports.congress.gov/product/pdf/IF/IF11641

The Electoral College: A 2020 Presidential Election Timeline

Faithless electors will not invalidate the results, especially in this case where Biden has much more than 270 electoral votes.

Still a bit early to say "much more": Arizona can still flip (it's been inching ever closer and is at 0.6% difference at 90% counted) and Georgia has already announced a recount because it's so close.

If those do both actually end up in Trumps favor, that puts him only 11 electoral votes short. If the voting machine errors in Michigan do turn out to be a thing (and the error is large enough), or he wins legal battles there or in Pennsylvania, that's enough to flip the whole election.

It's a very long shot, but this isn't actually over yet until everything is counted and verified.

The legal battles in Pennsylvania aren't even substantial enough to trigger a mandatory recount - the number of ballots the GOP is fighting over is too small.

Also, the Michigan "errors" were errors in publishing the data, not in balloting: https://www.michigan.gov/sos/0,4670,7-127--544676--,00.html

Michigan's results are accurate, and were never in question after one county's glitch.

“Because the clerk did not update software, even though the tabulators counted all the ballots correctly, those accurate results were not combined properly when the clerk reported unofficial results,” the Department of State said.

https://apnews.com/article/joe-biden-donald-trump-technology...

Probably true but faithless elector laws are at the state level. There were 7 validated faithless electors in 2016, the most ever.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faithless_electors_in_the_2016...

https://www.fairvote.org/faithless_elector_state_laws

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faithless_elector#Legal_ruling...

All of them knew their symbolic votes would not change the result, and they didn't all switch in the same direction.

The majority of them were pledged to the loser Democrat, and went faithless so that Republicans could be faithless without risking electing a democrat. Only 2 Republicans took the bait, and that only happened because many Republicans hated Trump, whereas Biden is extremely popular among Democrats.

2016 had a similar electoral vote margin, so a few faithless electors could not and did not affect the outcome.

If today's electoral vote split was 270-268 (as was a possibility if Trump won PA and GA), then things may have been more iffy.

Nitpick: they vote on Dec 14th, but the votes are counted on Jan 6th. Thanks for the link, very educational!

Yeah... there's questions about mail-in/absentee voting that are going to the supreme court.

'Justice Alito temporarily grants Pennsylvania GOP request to enforce segregation of ballots that arrived after Election Day'

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/pennsylvania-ballots...

They’ve been keeping those ballots separate and their are 1k of them. They don’t matter.

I've been told that every vote matters

That was already the policy and was happening before the ruling, the ruling basically just formalized the policy. Doesn’t change anything.

There really aren't; as that article says, the state was already doing what the GOP sued to require, and those ballots are both small enough in number and likely enough to favor Biden that even saying there are "questions" is overblown.

They were already doing that; and even if they weren't, it would not change the outcome.

Remember that when it comes to non-emergency motions, courts are unlikely to grant the form of relief requested when doing so would be moot.

They don't matter. Biden's margin in PA is without those votes.

It’s tantalizing and, in my opinion, overtly political that the Washington Post uses the phrase “enforce segregation” here. This similar story from Reuters says “separate”:

https://mobile.reuters.com/article/BigStory12/idUSKBN27N030

Democrats prayed for such an occurrence in 2016 to no avail. Why do you believe the results will be different this time?

Georgia and Pennsylvania don't have laws preventing faithless electors from voting against their state's winning candidate.

It's looking like the lead will be big enough that even in the (very) small chance things go wrong it won't matter.

>small chance things go wrong

for some definition of wrong

I severely doubt that someone would non-anonymously choose to be the single person that gave away the election to their declared opponent, weeks after being a loyal partisan.

If there's one thing I don't doubt, it's people's dedication to a president they believe is the only person fighting the 'deep state' and other things along those lines. I can easily see it spun (or justified) as "defending democracy" rather than upending it.

Then why didn't it happen with faithless electors in 2016?

There were 10 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faithless_electors_in_the_2016...

Importantly, though:

"... only two... defected from the winner."

Clinton conceded the election to Trump the day after the election.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/nov/09/hillary-clin...

That doesn't mean anything legally either. It's not like you give up your electors when you concede. It's just part of losing gracefully. Technically the only thing that matters is what the electors decide to do.

Well... there is such a thing in law as estoppel. It's primarily used in a civil context; I'm not sure a situation has ever come up for it to be tested in election law.

Dec 14th is a better deadline to watch. That's the date at which a state's "Certificates of Ascertainment" is due. If they miss this deadline, the electorate votes are forfeited.

Keep in mind some of these swing states don't have strong one-party control of the state legislatures, and there could be a strong appetite for a recount or closer scrutiny of the ballots.

https://crsreports.congress.gov/product/pdf/IF/IF11641

The Electoral College votes on the first Monday after the 2nd Wednesday in December; so the 14th. What happens on 6 January is Congress ratifying the electoral votes.

And it's the state legislatures that effectively elect their state's electors, which needs to be done before 14 December.

When I was growing up, Conservatives were the ones much more proud of US institutions, like the courts, universities, and even the free media, while Liberals and Leftists such as Chomsky were always criticizing these institutions, e.g. the media in the book Manufacturing Consent. (They criticized it as being too much a mouthpiece of the government.)

I find it interesting that four years of Trump's usual blame-shifting, together with his fan base, has resulted in Trumpists blowing way past the Leftists in their distrust of all US institutions. This is far beyond the Tea party's displeasure with government spending. Sure, Republicans distrusted scientists before, but now Trump supporters distrust the following for partisan reasons:

Media

Polls

Election

Scientific establishment

Medical establishment [1]

Universities

Courts (so-called judges[2], Mexican heritage[3] etc.)

FBI

CIA

IRS

and much more.

Are the institutions perfect? No. Is there fraud and corruption? Sure, but comparing to other countries relatively little, and probably less than in the past. But destroying Americans' trust in these institutions can be dangerous. I can understand dissidents doing it, but the President?

1. https://ctmirror.org/2020/10/18/inside-the-fall-of-the-cdc/

2. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2017/02/04/tr...

3. https://www.politifact.com/article/2016/jun/08/donald-trumps...

Anyone else want to see more states adopt something other than a winner-take-all allotment of electoral votes? Here in Pennsylvania we’d be about evenly split. I wonder if splitting our electoral votes would moderate our politics.

It would unquestionably help republicans. The problem is that the collective models highly favors small states. So even if large states agree to split their votes, small rural states will still drive the count.

Honestly, the right thing to do is go all the way and just elect the president by popular vote.

I just hope we have a relatively boring 4 years without daily issues that get people on one or both side of the political spectrum upset/angry/hateful/malicious.

Looks like Biden would be able to fulfill his promise of not changing anything: https://www.salon.com/2019/06/19/joe-biden-to-rich-donors-no...

If the same situation persists in 2016 like the deep economical divide, we may even see another Trump like figure rising

I agree with this perspective. We have not seen the end of Donald Trump. We have tough years ahead.

The division will not be fixed until they realize that the division is not ideological.

Most of these comments imply that the division is just ideological. I guess everyone here is so financially well off as to never having been too poor to afford health insurance but just above the cut off to get free health insurance. Families with kids and high living costs, and then being forced to pay over $2000 as penalty for not affording healthcare, it broke many spirits.

It was the ACA "Individual Responsibility Mandate" and it is the reason why all the hispanics in Florida without health insurance that I know, voted for Trump in 2016--because he said he'd get rid of that depressing $2000+ fine. Which he finally did.

Simple as that, and certainly not as idealistic as these comments imply. Those who don't see that did not have to pay that ACA "Individual Responsibility Mandate" while being poor in an expensive city.

A "new direction for divided US" would mean that these politicians stop pretending people vote idealistically versus based on finances. Reading these other comments, one would think all the brown Floridians who voted for Trump are white supremacists. I thought Hacker News was above that simplistic rhetoric.

I guess "the hispanics I know" forgot the proposed revisions to Title X and slashing across the board to any ACA outreach, much to their detriment.

>I thought Hacker News was above that simplistic rhetoric

Nope. Ideas like "hispanics voted for Trump [because of the mandate...], simple as that" are still abundant.

Get ready for 4 years of hard hitting articles like this from the MSM: https://www.npr.org/sections/live-updates-2020-election-resu...

On the topic of combatting disinformation, has any government rolled out a plan to educate the public on critical thinking? Did it work?

I'd love it if the names of common logical fallacies were known by everyone and anyone lying to the media or making unsubstantiated claims would be immediately shut down e.g. "that's just a character attack, you're not answering the question".

The division was created by all the media (social included) manipulation of reality perception. I bet that in 2016 a much higher percentage of votes were against Hillary. In 2020 the "against" was very likely higher. Division will likely keep increasing as everybody's media feeds become more and more tailored to the individual looking at them

Worth also pointing out that 4 years ago that social media was implicated as being manipulated by Russians.

Seems like no foreign state interfered this time around, but the point was that the Democrats blamed division on social media on the Russians and that most of us have amnesia about that.

As a graduate student, Biden's win is personally a huge relief for me and my peers. Most of my fellow grad students are international students, and it was very concerning to have the possibility of another four years of this anti-science, anti-academic, anti-China and generally xenophobic administration.

So, this is received as Very Good News.

December 14th is the deadline to watch. That's the date at which the state must deliver the "Certificates of Ascertainment", signed by the governor. If they don't deliver by this date, the votes are forfeited.

From this point to Dec 14th we're likely to see some interesting legal proceedings before the supreme court, such as whether or not ballots received without a postmark after election day can be legally counted (this might have impact in certain counties in Michigan and Pennsylvania).

https://crsreports.congress.gov/product/pdf/IF/IF11641

In general I think racism and misogyny will need to be disarmed in ways that they haven't been in the past. Nextdoor and Reddit might be best examples which Twitter and Facebook could follow. Increasing friction to post/repost, more fact checks, more labels on misinformation, and better localized moderation in general should be something these companies should have a good handle on already, but it seems like they've barely started grasping the problems.

It almost seems like if this isn't tackled head on instead of being ignored, that there might be scant progress on other issues like climate change.

This title is actually wrong because networks don't decide who wins. If Biden wins, let it be because all due process was followed so that the 71MM who voted for Trump can get behind the new president. There are close and contested elections in various states, with mandatory recounts set, as well as lawsuits underway with affidavits of blocked observers and allegations of fraud. For the sake of not dividing the country, let the Trump half of the nation have their day in court, and then let's unify behind the new president.

> This title is actually wrong because networks don't decide who wins.

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/El74_VZWMAYZtnZ?format=jpg&name=...

Do you really think there's an amount of "due process" that will convince all Trump supporters to get behind Biden? Trump has clearly been planning to call the election illegitimate since long before it happened - casting doubt on mail-in ballots, etc. He hypocritically advocated continuing counts in some states and stopping them in others depending on whether he was ahead. He claimed without evidence that dead people had voted, late cast ballots had been counted, etc. And he falsely claimed that only votes counted by election night were legitimate.

Do you honestly think once his claims relating to poll observers go through due process, everyone will be satisfied?

Pragmatically, there is such a slim chance that any of his challenges change the outcome of the election, that it's reasonable to consider Biden President-elect at this point.

An unforgettable week. An unforgettable year. The most intense and unusual — especially given the circumstances — campaign in my lifetime.

I really do hope we can come together, and put divisions aside. In real life, people have more in common than we might think based on what happens online. There are actual differences, and a lot of anger, and resentment. But what makes America special is our reimagining of democracy, every generation — something we’re all a part of, if we choose to be.

Here’s to science and civility.

As a dad and an United States citizen, I am proud to call Joe Biden , my president.

When he was sworn in as a senator - after his wife and daughter died in a car accident after he won the seat. He said: “If in six months or so there’s a conflict between my being a good father and being a good senator, which I hope will not occur, we can always get another senator but they can’t get another father,”

As a father, I understand the feeling. It also shows me he is a fighter, he has always been. We need someone like him to unite us and move us forward.

Ok legit question, is Biden’s mental health an issue? (i.e. Dementia, Alzheimer’s). Surprised my family brings this up, and I’m not sure how to reply back to them..

My brother met him in an informal setting about two years ago, and expressed concern then over "wow he seemed really old / out of it". But Biden's current speeches and interviews seem lucid and coherent so maybe he was just having a bad day back then.

The presidency, like most other executive jobs, ends up being run by a team of people working together behind the public figurehead. I have faith in Kamala, in the White House advisors, in the picks for cabinet positions, etc. Biden will probably invite back many Obama-era advisors, as opposed to white nationalists like Stephen Miller. Decent people tend to build decent organizations.

As far as I know the votes still need to be counted again. And, you can probably forget about that stimulus package if Biden really wins.

Unless the democrats win the Georgia special elections and do away with the filibuster. The former seems like a coin flip, but if it happens the latter seems like a certainty.

I think we should thank the people who counted the votes, all of them, but especially the ones in those "battle ground" places who had to feel a lot of pressure and had to work in difficult circumstances during a pandemic. Thank you all poll workers, you help make our, sometimes confounding, democracy work.

One of the important things I would be watching out is if Biden lives up to his word of removing the hurdles on family based immigration, as has been outlined in https://joebiden.com/indian-americans/

3551 comments in this discussion as of now. I wonder if this will be the most commented thing in HN ever.

Strange country where the media says who won the election. Elsewhere, there is an official announcement.

what do people think about the voting irregularities in this election

- the delays in Nevada - the early calls in Arizona - the delayed, large swing in pennsylvania - the glitches in Wisconsin and Michigan - the military vote coming in 4:1 Biden in Georgia

Are we allowed to talk about that here or is it verboten?

Create an Ask HN for this. Data analysis is on topic here.

I’m not sure if they were anomalies. Trump advocated not to use mail in ballots, Biden encouraged everyone to stay safe and use ballots. So it’s likely that ballots would overwhelmingly have support for Biden.

At this point, all we can do is speculate. Unless someone produces hard evidence that holds in court, there isn’t much substance to going down the rabbit hole of speculation.

The centrist left and the centrist right need to come together to create a new political party.

Hacking defeat: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/11/09/why-trump-cant...

On a related note, this was interesting to watch about what happens if a candidate refuses to concede: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WZWRhLW7Y8w

I look forward to not being consumed by political news every single second of the day.

For an outsider non US guy looking at the democrat / republican debate seems like a debate between a IntelliJ dark mode and IntelliJ white mode both are a matter of taste but code is the same.

I‘m an „outsider non US“ guy and if you can’t spot the difference b/w Trump and really any normal politician, including Biden, you’re just ignorant.

Wow I just need to comment to be part of this historically large thread!

Did he get the senate?

I had the impression, he can't do much without it, but news from yesterday implied he might get it too, then Biden could even do more than Obama if he has senate backing him.

We’ll know in January after the two Georgia seats are up for another vote. Right now, no.

Approaching peak Fake News. Buckle up.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s29jKFQD6rw

Leaving Trump aside for the moment, the last four years have shown up how fundamentally undemocratic the US is.

No one ever expected Trump to get more votes than Biden. Even the Republicans were well aware of this. In fact, 7 of the last 8 Presidential elections have ended with a Democrat getting more votes than a Republican.

Yet even with a 3.5 million vote lead, the perception was the election was on a knife edge.

This is ridiculous. The EC is an anachronmism and needs to be abolished. It made sense when it was established, but it's clearly not working.

Same for the Senate. 70% of people are represented by 30% of Senators.

You desperately need to fix your broken electoral systems.

Ah. The AP. Ideologically it's NTY's parent org. Called #7 before it came down[2]. Amazing really.

The US is -not- going to be run by the modern uncle police[1]. 2020 is just getting interesting.

I predict Trump legally gets a 3rd term.

[1] http://v6y.net/unclepolice.mp4

[2] https://s3.amazonaws.com/nasathermalimages/public/video/pret...

Here is a simplifying view: In the US there are some people, less than 1% of the voting population, who have a lot of power and control of a lot of money and are looking to the political system to make more money.

This less than 1% do disagree among themselves, and that disagreement is the fundamental source of essentially all the political fighting.

For the other 99+%, there isn't much to fight about.

What the other 99+% want can be summarized in one word -- more. For more detail, they want the two biggies, peace and prosperity. For more, they want "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness", financial and emotional security, love, home and family, good health, happy, successful children. There's not a lot to fight about there.

So, again, the fighting is from the less than 1% who want to use their money and power to get more money.

Of course, way more than 1% of the voting population are highly concerned about politics, are fighting, but, sorry, guys, they are foot soldiers, pawns, for the less than 1%.

As an example, let's take one of the issues, say, health care. Glancing at history, US health care has come a long way since the lone country doctor with a one horse carriage. In terms of current US medicine, he was not very good. Point: Health care has changed a lot and is still changing, rapidly. So, what solution we come up with should accommodate such change.

Health care can be really expensive, and we need a solution for that. We need in some sense to level out the costs, make them predictable. Ways have been private medical insurance, health care membership organizations, and government provided health care.

So, here are the main concerns: Private health insurance is too expensive for a major fraction of the population, so those people look to other options. Then for the other options, concerns are quality of care (it might be too cheap and not very good -- loved ones could die), waiting times, and big tax increases. Point: These are all issues, but some examples can show that we should be able to do quite well on all the issues of quality, waiting times, costs, etc., well enough that we should not have much to fight about.

And there has been the issue of private insurance and "pre-existing" conditions. We can all agree that it would be nice for private insurance companies to ignore such data, conditions. And the richer US states did have laws forcing the insurance companies to so ignore. But maybe now the US is wealthy enough to so ignore for everyone. Hopefully. So, we can all agree or nearly so. Not much to fight about.

So, what is the cause of the the fighting? With some approaches and situations, for less than 1% of the voting population, there is or can be a lot of money involved, or a lot of power and then a lot of money.

My view is that we can go down the list of main political topics and conclude the same -- for 99+% of the voters, there's not much to fight about except some people, less than 1%, want to fight to make money, big money.

But for various policies, operations, programs, etc., it really is possible just to make a mess, to create waste. At least the 99+% can be against the waste!

E.g., for the $trilions W and Obama spent on Gulf War II, was that from (a) people who were in line to make money from the effort or (b) just waste? I'd say, some of (a) but mostly (b). Point: Not all the issues are about the less than 1% seeking money and, instead, there can also be ordinary waste.

Bottom line: The 99% should throttle the less than 1%, settle differences, and get on with life.

Most people (in this election) are more voting against something they hate rather than for something they actually like and want.

Why do people think the president is supposed to be a person to grant your every wish and fix all the problems in America?

It's an imperfect system. But at least we don't have someone in office who is actively trying to break it anymore, at least.

Social media, and media in general, have a lot to do with it. The president won't have much impact on the day-to-day lives of most people. That's how government was setup with checks and balances.

Yet people have been trained and agitated into believing a singular group and person is responsible for everything possible, even though local state and city policies make much more impact.

Agreed, but what other choice was there given the system?

I don't have answer to the current system. I wish there was a way to vote for individual policies instead and the system would find the candidate that most matched.

So, American friends, I can't imagine Trump stopping his hissy fit and conceding... what happens if he doesn't concede?

Nothing. There is no legal requirement to concede, it's just a polite formality. At noon on January 20, Donald Trump will no longer be President of the United States and he will leave the White House. The Marines and Secret Service will politely but firmly escort him and his belongings to the curb if necessary.

It's pretty remarkable though that almost half of the US voted for someone who is clearly unsuitable to be president based on his first term.

It might be time to consider letting go of the democratic ideal that every person's vote has the same weight, and figure out some criteria for either voting eligibity or vote weight that would mostly exclude or give little weight to the votes of people who voted for a clearly unsuitable candidate.

That's the way it was originally, when only people who owned land could vote (not the men-only part). It was a basic test of responsibility, similar to the 501-karma downvote requirement on HN. Holding land wasn't that hard, but it did indicate a baseline.

Unless you're thinking of only allowing certain political or moral viewpoints to vote? That sounds fairly dystopian, no matter what one believes.

Edit: we used to have something else like that - a certain subset of the population only got 3/5 of a whole vote. But I really doubt that's what you want.

The simplest would be to weight one's vote by some non-decreasing function of the number of people who live in the same conurbation.

That would partially achieve the outcome and also makes sense, because if someone wants to live in isolation, then they probably don't care and aren't affected very much by society's policies, and they don't have enough social experience to be correctly informed.

> if someone wants to live in isolation, then they probably don't care and aren't affected very much by society's policies

Or they care too much, or society has driven them away, or they just don't like the population density, or it's cheaper, or they like the countryside better. See: the increasing number of people moving to the country and the popularity of Musk's Starlink project, indicating that remote people are invested in society.

I think that making the assumption that the people who live closer together have a better handle on how to run the country (society != country) needs a lot of justification. The large fraction of the population that lives less densely should not be disregarded as somehow 'less valuable'.

As I referenced above, the last time we tried to weight the value of different people it didn't turn out to be such a great idea. Skin color (the 3/5ths compromise, if you didn't get the reference) or geographic location, the value of a person or their vote shouldn't be tampered with.

They actually weren’t allowed to vote at all.

True. My memory confused population census tallies with voting rights. Still, measured worth of a person is fairly proportional to weight of their vote. Limit either, and you limit both.

Maybe move to a system instead where some people's vote have any weight instead, rather than abolishing democracy.

The EC means people's vote not only get put down the drain, but also they get to vote for candidates nominated with knowledge of this (swing states might not vote for a candidate popular everywhere else)

> letting go of the democratic ideal that every person's vote has the same weight

USA has already let go of it, as convicted felons don't have a right to vote.

> clearly unsuitable candidate.

If people vote for a candidate and the candidate meets the eligibility requirements in the constitution, he/she is suitable. That’s it.

If you want to change the constitution to say that only Democrats can be elected president (this election ended up falling right down party lines again), I think you’re gonna have a hard time getting that through Congress.

What kinds of investments can one make to capitalize on a Biden victory? For example:

* If Biden will be weak on China, do we expect Chinese tech companies to perform well and if so, how can we get exposure to that? Some China tech ETF?

* Biden will likely support a lot of green endeavors, and so Green ETFs could be a good BUY.

* If there is a blue sweep, then there could be a massive stimulus, which would mean lots of money slushing around in the market. Maybe QQQ is a good BUY.

You're too late.

Betting websites use the certification of the Federal Election Commission in order to pay out wagers.

"Democracy - that flash of light between feudalism and automation and then it's gone"

I wonder what stories like this are like for the mods on this site. It must be a waterfall of flags.

Is this good or bad for the stock market? Or does it not matter at all?

It depends on the senate. If republicans hold control of it after GA runoffs in January, then it will be good for the market. The market likes gridlock.

Of course it matters: If there is an income tax increase, if COVID lockdowns are renewed or imposed on a more federal level, if the US ceases to be a net exporter of oil, if the tariffs with China are suspended, they will go down.

If the tariffs with China are suspended the stock market will probably go up. The trade war with China has been a disaster.

Some people criticize Biden's charisma, but it goes to show that Americans have grown beyond the "popularity contest" that elections tend to be. They elected someone for what he stands for. This does not look like much, but it should be inspiring.

The media doesn't have a role in declaring victory in elections.

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

Not an official one, but certainly one of political influence:

“Though it is not formally recognized as a part of a political system, it [News Media] wields significant indirect social influence.”

The media “shifts ground” - in this case making it very hard for President Trump to continue to frame the issue in a way to suit himself.

The media in this case is using approximately grade 6 math skills to tally up electoral college votes and declare that beyond most reasonable doubt Biden won. I think you're overestimating what their role is here. They were also very cautious and could have made a declaration earlier than they did.

Al Gore was projected winner, and didn't concede until mid December.

They can’t declare victory, only project. Personally, I’m suspicious of the results, but if nothing changes, if fraud is not discovered, it’s a fair call.

Favorite fact about the 2020 election:

Biden not only got more Black votes than Obama, he got a higher percentage of the Democratic Black vote (highest in history, in fact).

IOW, Biden is significantly more popular among Blacks than Obama was in 2008 (or 2012). Amazing!

Partly because of the voter turnout. By % wise its not a huge difference.

It's interesting that Trump and Biden both have exceeded the previous record-holder for most votes: Obama in 08.

1. Biden '20 - 74,811,378

2. Trump '20 - 70,554,537

3. Obama '08 - 69,498,516

4. Clinton '16 - 65,853,514

To me, a more plausible explanation is that Trump is uniquely unpopular with black voters.

Trump increased his popularity with both Black men and women.

Biden just got an even bigger increase in metro areas from Blacks, and a higher % of D Black votes than any President ever (including Obama in 2008).

this election was a huge win for republicans, despite trump losing. they (in all likelihood) retain a senate majority, while massively narrowing down the gap in the house.

Great news and I voted for neither! But what a relief!!!

Did you vote? For whom?

Mickey Mouse... republican who could not vote for that maniac, hate monger-er!

This is inaccurate. The media doesn't have any authority to determine election results. We're back in a situation like Bush vs. Gore in 2000 and the election is still up in the air.

Interesting fact: Trump could be elected president in 2024. I don’t think he will be gone for too long.

EDIT: I am no Trump fan. I just think the fact that he could be president in 2024 is interesting.

Trump has a lot of power now. "Republican kingmaker" they say.

But, within the next 4 years, he will continue discrediting himself. I'm quite sure millions of people will still follow his lead, but it'll slowly get smaller and smaller.

I think he will be a Rudy Giuliani type figure. Mostly an angry barking dog that people don't take as seriously anymore, just like before he was president.

It’s hard to fathom that even after all things happened in last 4 years , almost 71 million Americans sided with trump.. a divided country needing a decisive leader to heal..

Tough times ahead!!

> vowing new direction

So... same as every president after election everywhere. Watch as Biden doesn't undo any of the things he promised to undo. Same as Obama.

The media was way too cautious in making the call here, but it's easy to understand why when the Republicans made it so difficult to count absentee ballots before election night, likely to benefit their candidate through the confusion of swinging red and then blue.

If you don't want this to happen again, pressure your red representatives to stop demonizing mail-in/advance voting, and stop destroying the postal system.

There was some interesting game theory stuff going on there, where AP and Fox called Arizona early, but other networks didn't feel it was safe.

And then Nevada has obviously been won for days, but nobody was calling it because that would have put Fox and AP over 270. So all the networks just started waiting for PA rather than calling the obvious for Nevada.

> but other networks didn't feel it was safe.

And might have been right, Biden's lead in AZ keeps shrinking, 3 days ago his lead was 25% of the ballots left to count, now it's 15.

> And then Nevada has obviously been won for days, but nobody was calling it because that would have put Fox and AP over 270.

Although Biden's lead has only grown there saying that it's "obviously won" is a touch optimistic.

> Although Biden's lead has only grown there saying that it's "obviously won" is a touch optimistic.

No, if you follow the election analysts like Nate Cohn, Nate Silver, Dave Wasserman, and especially Jon Ralston (who is "the guy" for Nevada elections), Biden has been the clear winner for nearly two days.

And also AP almost immediately called Nevada after the Pennsylvania drop, so they were definitely waiting on that.

Analysis is more complex than just what percentage of ballots remain. It was widely expected for Pennsylvania to have a decisive swap when Trump had a seemingly huge lead and Georgia a very red state was predicted as being a vastly closer race. North Carolina could have also been called as leaning Trump much sooner, but overall it was a fairly close race.

Voting by people in large groups are predictable and people spend a lot of effort getting this right. Out of 50 states exactly one was significantly different from predictions based on a significant shift in a specific group which is easy to miss in statewide polls.

AP and Fox have access to proprietary survey data for AZ.

Source?

Survey data isn’t votes counted.

At the time, Nevada had a 8000 vote margin with over 100,000 votes outstanding. The real question is why swing states paused counting.

It was not obvious for Nevada, because the outstanding votes were the last 2 days of drop-off, which has skewed red, and there has been uncertainty about how Vegas would react considering Covid's effect on their economy.

Looks like they were waiting for Biden to cross the PA recount threshold. He just did (0.51% > 0.5%).

> when the Republicans made it so difficult to count absentee ballots before election night

That really can't be noted enough. That the count took so long is specifically because several legislatures decided to not allow any preprocessing of mail ballots, and to count mail ballots last.

> That really can't be noted enough. That the count took so long is specifically because several legislatures decided to not allow any preprocessing of mail ballots, and to count mail ballots last.

Indeed this bears repeating.

The whole process mounting to the election day was engineered to sabotage and outright throw out votes from the opposition, even if that comes at the expense of the core principles of the whole political system.

I really wonder how good faith conservatives can view these actions positively. One side tries to make it easier, safer, and quicker to vote. One side is trying the opposite.

The only explanation they can come up with is voter fraud which has not been found to be a widescale problem by nearly every group that has looked into it.

They and their base are not operating in good faith. Trump and other high level GOP very publicly stated that doing these sorts of things to improve voting would only help Democrats and that's why they're opposed. The Us vs Them mentality that increasingly and openly permeates through politics is a cancer to the US' future.

>They and their base are not operating in good faith.

There are certainly some people and perhaps even most people in that group, however there are also still millions of people who do actually believe in small government. Do these people think that winning elections is more important than democracy or is there some reason that they have used to convince themselves that it is okay to make it harder to vote?

I suppose they genuinely believe easier voting brings with it massive fraud. Of course no amount of evidence will convince them otherwise - keep in mind this is the same party that just put a QAnon supporter in congress.

Yes, quite easily: you don’t want election results leaking and being reported early, while the polls are still open. This can spoil the results of the election. If you don’t count the votes until Election Day, that’s a lot easier to guarantee.

Now if only they follow this for primaries. I'm tired of the first few states having 4-8 options and the last states might have 2-3 if they're lucky.

Not to mention the arbitrary power given to stated during primaries merely by when they vote. Why does Iowa, a state that is over 90% white, get to influence the nomination that much?

No one asked for vote counting before Election Day. All that needed to happen was the preprocessing that mail-in ballots require. They need to be verified against voter lists, sorted by voting place etc. None of this even touches the actual ballot, but it requires substantial amounts of time.

That by itself reveals A LOT of meta information that could be used to gauge outcomes and for a campaign to react accordingly. A campaign that knew which voters had returned ballots could look up their party registration and district and then use that for highly targeted voter turnout or suppression on the day of the election. Enough to turn the tide of a close election like this.

Is there any evidence any of this data has been available - let alone been used - for a campaign in any of the states that do preprocess mail-in votes? Because doing so in order to shift a few ten thousand votes would leave quite a bit of a trace.

How would we know? But ultimately it doesn’t matter. This is the first election with near universal mail-in ballots, so no prior election would have had the coverage necessary to make this data useful. Secondly, just because it hasn’t been done yet doesn’t mean it won’t happen in the future. The point is to proactively prevent possible election manipulation, not merely react to demonstrated problems.

The ideas are simply not discussed on corporate media, so most folks don't think about them.

It's really the same on either side. It just changes with the circumstances. Some of the same people claiming the integrity of the vote shouldn't be questioned were the same people claiming the 2016 vote was compromised. And vice versa.

Can you point to any mainstream democrat who made accusations that voters were changed or forged in 2016? Democrats were claiming the process was compromised. I don't remember anyone seriously questioning the integrity of the votes themselves.

The claims weren't just that the system was compromised, but also that votes were manipulated or suppressed. Harry Reid made claims that the vote totals were manipulated.

On a side note... thank you. At least you asked a question about my position rather than simply downvoting without an explanation.

Mea culpa, I was wrong to say "no mainstream democrat", but that was a single retired congressperson. The Republicans now also have two members of Congress who believe that Democrats participate in ritual sacrifice of children to drink their blood so maybe we shouldn't focus on the extreme minority opinions of these parties. Voter fraud is a rallying cry of a large percentage of the Republican party. Votes being changed in 2016 or any other election is not a major rallying cry of a large percentage of the Democratic party.

I believe he was an active US senator at the time (2015-2016). I forget if he was majority leader or minority whip, it if that was during a different part of his tenure.

I do agree that it seemed somewhat isolated in official statements. I did hear quite a few individuals in my personal life believe/state that since the system was compromised that must mean the votes/count must have been changed.

I can see how the fraud claim is popular - if you're losing the popular vote consistently due to (simplistically) higher urban population, you might look for something to use as an excuse. This makes an easy excuse since in your constituent areas (rural) you would have the observation bias that almost everyone you know voted for your candidate and still lost. Sloppy voting system maintenance supplies plenty of anecdotal things to point to, like dead people kn the voting role.

Compromised as a result of aggressive and targeting foreign influence. Social engineering sponsored by state-level actors.

Democrats weren't claiming massive voter fraud was occurring and that it robbed them of the election and refused to concede as as result.

In fact, the one person very loudly crying about voter fraud in 2016 was the same person doing it now. Donald Trump, unhappy at losing the popular vote, claimed and continues to claim that the only reason he failed to secure the popular vote was due to massive voter fraud.

Harry Reid made claims that the sytems were compromised and vote totals were manipulated.

Harry Reid isn't the center point of the Democratic party. Nor is Harry Reid the President, nor is Harry Reid trying to hold the White House hostage.

People say all kinds of crap. There are people who are democrats who are bad people, lie, and say dumb crap. There are people who are republicans who are bad people, lie, and say dumb crap.

There is a profound and marked difference between Harry Reid grumbling about 2016 and what is happening in this election.

Parties play party politics, and you're correct in that there is a lot hypocrisy in that, especially when the balance of power swings. This, however, is not an example of that. This is a refusal to not only accept reality, but also leave lasting damages and deepen the divide in this country. It's shameful and a national tragedy.

I thought Reid was minority whip when he made the 2016 comments.

Yeah, I can see Trump's comments being divisive. There have been Democrats that have made divisive comments too. Which is why I see them as similar. We'll have to see if he steps down when he's supposed to.

It is one of the big mistakes of US politics that the sides are treated as if they are equally compromised. It is really a strawman argument without any merit.

Why do you say that?

From my perspective, they both do questionable, self-serving, and even illegal things. The topics, methods, and frequency do vary. Personally, the last couple presidential elections have felt like a choice between a shit sandwich and a shit sandwich without the bread. (Which is which? Take your pick)

Because the level of mischief between republicans and democrats is just not comparable when objectively assessed (let's say from a historians perspective).

To give you an example from another context which is similar:

In Germany, polticians and some news media have started to use the notion that right-wing terror (e.g. neo-nazi) and left wing terror (e.g. Antifa) are equally evil. If you look objectively though, there is still a disproportionate amount of right-wing terror and many of the crimes attributed to the left-wing are really just part of their fight against the right (they are anti-fascists for a reason). While right-wing terror killed German citizens and immigrants each year, there is no comparable level of crime anymore that could be attributed to the left (need to go back 40 years).

I would like to see the numbers that support this for the Republican/Democrat version of this story. I feel like most people would have strong confirmation bias when assessing this topic.

Also, do you have numbers for looking at this from the perspective of the politicians? My comment was mainly focused on the politicians and party leadership, not really on individuals without an official capacity.

Voter fraud isn't made any harder or easier by checking incoming ballots as they come in against the voter list and sorting them by precinct ahead of time.

To be clear I am talking about their entire approach to voting and not just counting them. Limiting mail in ballots, limiting early voting, limiting polling places, pushing for voter ID, pushing for a more proactive pruning of voter rolls, pushing against same day voter registration, and simply requiring registration at all. One side wants more people to vote and one side wants less people to vote. I can't get over how that latter side isn't considered un-American.

Please don't misinterpret a vocal minority as the will of 50% of the country. We all want every vote to be counted. There's a lot of drama and accusations flying around with emotions running hot.

I am not judging the people of this country. I am judging the actions of one of its political parties. I am asking how the people who support this party can justify the party's policies.

Plenty of people vote for Republicans who blatently don't want every vote to be counted. If you want every vote to be counted, stop voting for those candidates.

The most vocal of those minorities happens to be commander in chief of the world strongest, most heavily armed military. That makes the drama harder to ignore.

Okay this will probably not be popular but I am what I consider a good faith conservative so I'll answer your points in reverse order.

1st: "Every group that has looked into it" and "widespread". First at this point I don't trust many of the groups and institutions, because I have repeatedly over the past 4 years seen various groups act in a concerted manner to try and slander, libel and misrepresent trump while trying to drive people to be angry and irrational about. There have been multiple I've seen things reported that I've said to myself. "Okay if Trump really said that then I am way off of supporting him" but then I go look at the actual remarks and it is radically different from what he said. Any else remember a 2 week news cycle on whether or not cofeve was a racist dog whistle? Ultimately at the end of this my faith in mant previously authoritative institutions has been shaken.

Also I don't know anyone that is claiming "widespread" voter fraud, no one believes there was "widespread" voter fraud in this election it was targeted specific voter fraud at particular places and counties is the contention. Everyone knew going into this what states needed to be won for biden to win. Many of these states were decided by less than 10,000 votes.

In response to your contention about being against making it easier to vote. The fact of the matter is that the more room for error in the voting process the less likely people are to trust the outcome. If we imagine for a second we lived in a non-Covid world right now and there everyone voted like normal do you believe as many people would doubt the veracity of the election? Ultimately I consider integrity of the election to be of higher value than ease of access, because it doesn't matter who gets to vote if no one trusts the process.

Again you asked how could a good faith conservative believe this. This is how, I could be wrong I could be off, but that is how I see things right now. Maybe that'll change but for right now that's how I reconcile being good faith and conservative.

> I am what I consider a good faith conservative

> I don't know anyone that is claiming "widespread" voter fraud

This makes it very hard for me to take your claim of good faith seriously. Yes, perhaps the exact word "widespread" did not come out of Donald Trump's mouth, but there can be no doubt in anyone's mind (if they are indeed dealing in good faith) that Donald Trump has in fact been consistently and emphatically -- and, most important, falsely -- alleging wide spread voter fraud. Try doing a web search for "trump claims wide spread voter fraud" if you don't believe me.

This summer, in PA, a judge of elections pleaded guilty to stuffing ballot boxes for democrats in exchange for cash.[0]

Maybe it’s an isolated incident, really.

The media response that “there is no evidence of fraud” shifted to “no widespread fraud” at some point in last three years. I remember noting the appearance of the new qualifier. That rhetorical shift was their own nuance in the face of recurring anecdote.

But let’s accept that - no widespread fraud. The concern - regardless of Trump or this election - is over a critical mass of fraud in counties that are won by narrow margins.

“Widespread” has never been a requirement of the good faith critique of voter fraud.

So when you hear the catchphrase “no evidence of widespread fraud” realize that it signals buy-in to a straw man argument which talks past the issue at hand.

[0] https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/former-philadelphia-judge-ele...

> This summer, in PA, a judge of elections pleaded guilty to stuffing ballot boxes for democrats in exchange for cash.[0]

A single individual is hardly evidence of "widespread fraud". If you want to play dueling anecdotes, I'll see your PA and raise you Republican vote tampering in North Carolina [1].

None of this is relevant to the substance of my comment, however, which is that I have a hard time seeing how anyone dealing in good faith can honestly say that they "don't know anyone that is claiming widespread voter fraud" [emphasis added].

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/30/us/mccrae-dowless-indictm...

Your anecdote reinforces the critique of fraud and I welcome it.

The argument is to increase the integrity of elections, not offset fraud by one side with fraud by the other and call it even.

There are a lot of anecdotes of fraud, and they keep coming up, enough to undermine the integrity of our elections (as evidenced).

If this was an issue of financial accounting in an organization, I’d wager your behavior pattern would be different - the recurring anecdotes would indicate a substantial risk that needs to be mitigated by putting controls in place to ensure the integrity of the accounts.

Instead, in this instance we are being told not only to look the other way, but are being told recurring anecdotes of abuse don’t warrant substantial procedural changes and improvements in accountability.

As Glenn Greenwald said the other day, this situation is either by choice or ineptitude. But it’s not a non-issue.

> There are a lot of anecdotes of fraud, and they keep coming up, enough to undermine the integrity of our elections (as evidenced).

Two data points is not "a lot" in a country with 150 million registered voters.

If there were actual evidence of enough voter fraud to move the needle, the Trump administration's law suits would gain some traction, particularly after four years of packing the courts with friendly judges. But they aren't [1]. Hell, not even Fox News is taking this seriously any more [1].

[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/trump-vote-lawsuits/...

[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/05/business/media/fox-news-t...

You think the anecdote I listed and the one you listed represent the totality?

This has been a recurring conversation for decades, and the fact that it’s inflamed in the last few cycles points to the fact that it’s getting worse, not better.

Look, the weak controls that were in place on this process are evidently broken in some critical locations - denying poll watchers entry, political material outside polling places, ballot chain of custody issues. So what controls we did have, weak as they were, were clearly not functioning in many critical locations, as evidenced by videos and court testimony over the last week. Without confidence that the controls are working, the results become suspect, especially when the mistakes appear aligned in one direction. This is what the auditing world would call a material deficiency. It’s that simple - how do you restore faith in the process when people won’t just take your word for it? This is a problem set with known solutions.

Forget this election and the outcome you want to see, Biden’s the president barring something crazy - but there’s a systemic problem here that’s getting worse (let’s say relative to the 2000 fiasco).

We still aren’t conversing, as a nation, about how to bring more integrity to the process to allay the very real concerns half this country has. The institutional narrative is that there is no problem. To then willfully deny that this disagreement really matters forestalls the conversation. We’ll see how this ages, but the answer here isn’t for one side to just shut up. The answer is to take meaningful steps to demonstrate that the process has integrity. Videos of poll workers denying poll watchers access don’t create an appearance of integrity. Denying observation of the ballot counting process also doesn’t support the integrity of the results.

> You think the anecdote I listed and the one you listed represent the totality?

Probably not. But I don't see any evidence that the problem extends beyond a few isolated incidents.

> the weak controls that were in place on this process are evidently broken in some critical locations

That is far from evident to me. And your claims are not evidence.

> there’s a systemic problem here that’s getting worse

Claims are not evidence.

> the very real concerns half this country has

The concern may be real, but the problem isn't. It just isn't. (Voter suppression is a real problem. But fraud is not.)

The real concern is (or at least should be) that half the country has lost touch with reality to the extent that a demagogue can make them spend so much mental energy trying to solve a problem that doesn't actually exist.

> The argument is to increase the integrity of elections,

I find it terribly odd that all this concern about the sanctity of the electoral process only dawn upon the Trump administration after a) realizing they were going to lose the election, b) having spent months trying to sabotage the election by mounting a campaign to reject a voting method that was known to be used primarily by the opposition.

And still, in spite of all the explicit accusations of the existence of a massive fraud campaign, they still cannot find any single shred of evidence to support it. Hell, their initial claim about their observers being barred from observing ended up being materialized in simply wanting to have their observers closer to ballot boxes.

> The media response that “there is no evidence of fraud” shifted to “no widespread fraud” at some point in last three years.

What a blatant red herring.

The media did no such thing. What "the media" did was listen to the Trump campaign's empty claims about having lost the election to this magical massive widespread wave of voter fraud, and proceeded to ask the Trump administration for evidence of this massive widespread wave of voter fraud they were complaining about.

Asking a source to substantiate their bold claims, or fact-check them, is now passed off as media manipulation?

And let's be honest here: if Trump is complaining about tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of votes being either fabricated or destroyed, how is a typo in a projection or a postman failing to deliver the mail any substance to that gargantuan claim?

You read the volume of news I do day after day and you’ll find some humor in how the common vocabulary morphs in unison across the channels, and it’s notable when it happens. “Widespread fraud” is right there with “mostly peaceful”.

But again, why spend your time arguing that there’s nothing to see here rather than advocating for improving the transactional integrity of the voting process? And surely you must see those problems even if you trust that politicians don’t leverage them. Which of those pursuits do you think will be more effective in countering the distrust people have in the system? Which one do you think is ultimately healthier for the country? Saying, yes, I see why you would be concerned, let’s work to fix the integrity of the process so those concerns are addressed, or saying the all-to-frequent anecdotes mean nothing and we should have faith that the political machine is inherently trustworthy?

> You read the volume of news I do day after day and you’ll find some humor in how the common vocabulary morphs in unison across the channels, and it’s notable when it happens. “Widespread fraud” is right there with “mostly peaceful”.

I don't know what you were trying to say, but you said nothing if substance. It reads like a red herring that desperately tries to conflate the world begging the Trump campaign to substantiate any of their myriad of claims regarding their so-called massive nation-wide wave of voter fraud, which succeeded their initial absurd and ridiculous announcement of having won the election, with other propaganda tropes.

> But again, why spend your time arguing that there’s nothing to see here rather than advocating for improving the transactional integrity of the voting process?

The only problems that can be fixed are those which exist in the realm of reality.

Where is the massive wave of voter fraud that supposedly robbed Trump of his election? If that problem really exists, shouldn't you be worried about getting to know the evidence of its existence in order to ensure the same thing doesn't happen again?

Because otherwise these wild election fraud claims jus sound like a desperate red herring fabricated by a childish irresponsible man who decided to throw a tantrum instead of admitting defeat.

>First at this point I don't trust many of the groups and institutions

The Trump Administration itself couldn't find evidence of widespread voter fraud.[1]

>Also I don't know anyone that is claiming "widespread" voter fraud, no one believes there was "widespread" voter fraud in this election it was targeted specific voter fraud at particular places and counties is the contention. Everyone knew going into this what states needed to be won for biden to win. Many of these states were decided by less than 10,000 votes.

The 2016 election was one of the closest elections we have ever had and it still would have required roughly 100k votes changed to change the result. This election is even less close. Biden is winning PA by 30k, MI by 150k, and WI by 20k. That alone wins it. You can ignore the close states like GA, NV, or AZ and Biden still wins. This would have needed widespread fraud in order to switch a true Trump win to a Biden win.

>The fact of the matter is that the more room for error in the voting process the less likely people are to trust the outcome.

This flows the other direction too. Voting being suppressed makes people trust the outcome less too. How can an election have integrity if people who want to vote can't? If that is the outcome of strict voting laws, shouldn't we require some higher level of evidence of voter fraud in order to justify this cost of people losing their vote?

[1] - https://apnews.com/article/f5f6a73b2af546ee97816bb35e82c18d

Couple of points.

1. The link you provide is indicating there was no voter fraud in the 2016 election not the, 2020 election.

2. As for "widespread" I think we are disagreeing on what it means, in this case you seem to indicate I am talking just about 1000s of people going out and voting multiple times, there are also concerns around counters through some means, providing a different number for the counted whether by introducing false ballots, lying about the number they counted, etc.

For example there was a machine in Detroit that read in 8,000 votes that were listed for Trump as votes for Biden [0] now that could very well be a simple technical error but it indicates how easy it is cause voting totals to not match the reality of the voting.

As for the final rejoinder, I think maybe we are having different opinions in mind as to what we are discussing. For me I fully support having many polling places that are easy to get to for many people in multiple locations and that on election day we should make it as easy as possible for people to vote; however I also think there should be tighter integrity checks on who is voting and on the counting of votes itself.

[0] https://www.freep.com/story/news/politics/elections/2020/11/...

The point is you need to change hundreds of thousands of votes in order for any voter fraud to impact a presidential race. There is no evidence of anything even close to that happening in this or any recent elections.

>For me I fully support having many polling places that are easy to get to for many people in multiple locations and that on election day we should make it as easy as possible for people to vote; however I also think there should be tighter integrity checks on who is voting and on the counting of votes itself.

The first half of that goes against the policies of the Republican part and Democrats aren't going to disagree with the second half.

“Widespread” and “nearly every” are notable wiggle words. In a tight election in a few states swung by a few counties, “widespread” has never been a requirement.

Anyone can be forgiven for doubting the integrity of our election process in the face of worrying anecdote. The answer isn’t to call for blind faith by ignoring the red flags, but to shore up the process and improve its systemic integrity.

What would your standard be if this concerned the finances of your own company? You wouldn’t be telling the organization to not worry and ignore warning signs.

Some states eliminated witness signature requirements on absentee ballots; some states allowed new votes with no postmark up to a week after the election; videos showing the eviction of poll watchers, political placards posted at the entry of polling places; a “reporting error” with an extra zero corrected only after being called on it, software “glitches” resulting in 3000-vote over-count in one county corrected only after being challenged; a box of ballots produced after Election Day, 100% of whose contents went to one candidate; counting paused in the middle of the night. None of it helped by being refereed by a media plurality that clearly wanted a specific outcome all year.

There’s enough widespread questionable anecdote to warrant a top to bottom audit, which nobody can afford.

Every time the media (trusted by the public less than Catholic priests and politicians, btw) says there’s “no evidence of widespread fraud” in the face of this, it doesn’t help - it only raises another red flag.

And this isn’t just the Presidential election, btw.

That we are incapable of building and executing a process with inherent integrity is getting increasingly risky/dangerous.

Biden is winning PA by 30k, MI by 150k, and WI by 20k. That alone wins it. It seems there would have needed to be 200k fraudulent votes for this election to have been changed. How is that not "widespread"?

Also it isn't just the media that investigates voter fraud. Academics and political institutions have looked into it also and not found a problem. Trump's Administration even looked into it and couldn't find any significant problem. Is there anyone who you would trust that could certify this isn't a problem?

Pennies make dollars, baby. Instead of saying, we see no evidence of widespread fraud - where we have no idea in what context you’re using the word - let’s turn the conversation to making solid attestations about the integrity of the processes, which we certainly don’t hear. Instead we hear “don’t worry about it”.

I think the accounting analogy is the best suited. You won’t say, with whistleblower reports in hand, that there’s no evidence of _widespread_ problems and leave it at that. The presence of recurring whistleblower reports about financial irregularities demands a different conversation: these are the preventative and detective controls we will put in place, and here’s the evidence that they worked, such that we can be assured a high degree of integrity in what we’re reporting.

Right now, the evidence doesn’t even exist to be challenged. Party A puts the onus on Party B to prove that ballots without postmarks weren’t submitted on time and then say there’s no evidence of a problem. No, the problem in that example is the lack of postmarks to even begin to evaluate the suitability of the ballots.

It’s hard to interpret the willful reticence to have this kind of conversation as a nation, especially because the shoe can absolutely be on the other foot some day.

When the integrity of the institution is in question, the right response isn’t to tell people to look the other way. What I’m trying to convey is that nobody believes that a talking head on the news has any authority or personal expertise to tell people “everything’s fine” when the anecdotes just keep coming, particularly in places run by people with a conflict of interest in the outcome.

You ask what authority would have credibility to be taken on their word that everything’s fine. The right question is how do we demonstrate that the processes have integrity. How do we increase the integrity of the processes such that we’re not relying on me accepting integrity on faith.

You used the word “certify”. That’s a good word and we should dig into the strength behind those attestations. Right now they’re based on very weak control structures.

> Instead of saying, we see no evidence of widespread fraud - where we have no idea in what context you’re using the word - let’s turn the conversation to making solid attestations about the integrity of the processes, which we certainly don’t hear.

If that was the case then why has the Trump campaign failed to present any evidence whatsoever to substantiate it's baseless accusations of electoral fraud?

I mean, the Trump campaign complains that the election was stolen from them as a result of this hypothetical electoral fraud campaign that no one sees or has any tangible proof of existing. Heck, the Trump campaign is even accusing elections organized by Republicans of having been compromised. If there is indeed a problem then how come no one is able to see it anywhere, no matter how may times everyone asks?

If no one is able to find any problem anywhere, is there really a problem to begin with?

Well, again - videos of poll watchers being denied access to polling places; videos of political material posted at the entrance to multiple polling places; videos of official party observers being denied access to the ballot counting process; ballots with no postmarks being accepted after Election Day; software glitches in MI that alter the vote count; States abandoning witness requirements for absentee ballots - these are all real events and people don’t know whether or how these samples should be extrapolated.

Further, when the body of material lacks metadata to support chain of custody investigations, or observers can’t witness counting processes, it’s pretty disingenuous to say no evidence can be found. The control failures are the evidence.

There are very real bad examples, and we don’t know how representative they are. There are critical control failures (missing information) that make investigation difficult.

If you want to convince people everything is fine, take away these distractions by shoring up the process - transparency and authentication controls would go a long way towards fending off the accusations of fraud.

> Well, again - videos of poll watchers being denied access to polling places

Are you referring to the cases where the place was packed above capacity (and packed with both dem and good observers) and those wanting to enter had to wait for their turn to enter?

> videos of political material posted at the entrance to multiple polling places;

Are you talking about the Trump supporters getting arrested after picketing a polling place with pro Trump propaganda while brandishing a firearm?

I'm going to make it very simple for you: show any evidence. A primary source describing anything will do. Don't fabricate accounts or go with the "he said she said" approach. Each and every single case you vaguely referred to has been debunked and corrected, but apparently either you prefer to ignore facts or preferred to turn yourself off from the world. Show the evidence. Can you do it?

> The only explanation they can come up with is voter fraud which has not been found to be a widescale problem by nearly every group that has looked into it.

Not "nearly" every group. Every group. Election fraud is effectively nonexistent.

There are plenty of things that were clear sabotage.

Not tallying votes early doesn’t seem so clear cut to me.

The argument is that if early vote counts came out in favor of Biden it could suppress voter turnout on the Republican side.

I don’t know if that’s actually how it would have played out, but it does seem reasonable not to have results start to be reported before everyone has made their choice.

More independence is generally better in voting systems.

There’s a lot of work that needs to be done for mail-in votes. I only have first-hand experience with the German voting system, but from what I read the US system is similar: The actual ballot is in a sealed envelope. This envelope together with a signed paper (“Wahlschein” in Germany) is in a second envelope that goes in the mail. The process of counting that vote starts with opening the outer envelope and verifying that the ballot was issued to the person signing. Then verify that the inner envelope is properly sealed to ensure that the vote is actually secret. Collect the inner envelope with the actual filled-in ballot. No counting has happened yet, but this verification costs considerable time. All of this could be done even before Election Day with no effect on voter suppression - no one at that point can actually know the vote.

In theory, even counting could be done as long as no result is leaked, though there’d be a risk.

Explicitly not allowing the preprocessing - and as far as I followed the news, that’s what happened in PA - seems like a pretty clear cut case of “we want to draw the count out.” to me.

Plenty of states already count ballots early without leaks. If that can’t be trusted, can any aspect of the process?

Even if a minority of the vote was known, how different would that be from public polling that also represent a slice of the electorate (which also is likely not 100% representative of the actual results.)

Well at the point I think everyone knows that polls can be way off.

Of course a small sample of votes is likely to be too, but we aren’t talking about statistical inference here, we talking about political perception.

Let's bee specific: The legislature in PA. If PA were allowed to start counting before election day, this would have been called on Tuesday.

That's a hyper partisan view of a much more complicated situation. In Pennsylvania, for example, the Republican legislature passed laws allowing early counting, which was blocked by the Democratic governor because it limited acceptance of ballots after the election. You can argue the merits of either side, but it isn't sabotage or subterfuge.

https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/pennsylvania-counting-votes-...

> That's a hyper partisan view of a much more complicated situation.

No it’s not.

> it isn't sabotage or subterfuge.

It’s absolutely sabotage. “You can either count all the ballots or count quickly” is dishonest hackery, and defending this behaviour is shameful.

Moreover, some GOP-controlled counties in PA decided to not count mail-in ballots on election day either (they were allowed to start when polls open) and instead saved them all for the following day and beyond.

Waiting to starting the count until the window to vote is over seems like an inherently fair idea - it closes the information gap between absentee and day-of voters. Otherwise it’s like a game of Yankee Swap, where voting (or trading) last is best.

> The media was way too cautious in making the call here,

It's my understanding that it had zero to do with caution and all to do with the fact that the election was not decided.

If there are still votes that were not counted and the slim margin between both candidates is smaller than the number of unaccounted votes then the election results are yet to be determined. Thus it would make zero sense to claim that one candidate was the winner when the votes that are yet to be counted are enough to sway the results.

Not really. Once the models project that it's basically impossible, the DD's call it. They call states like California or Arkansas once they get the exit poll data, before any votes are in.

Fox News called Virginia for Biden when there were like 50% votes in and Trump led with 10%.

They were uber cautious this time and waited for a >0.5% lead.

> Not really. Once the models project that it's basically impossible (...)

It's only "basically impossible" if the amount of votes to be counted are still enough to sway an election.

You should think things through and pay attention to the unwanted consequences of these sort of claims. We're living a development where half the US population is complaining about voter fraud and conspiracies to withheld their candidate from their rightful place in the US's regime. It makes no sense to argue in favor of taking shortcuts in the election process citing arcane arguments and models, each of which unverifiable and impenetrable to the common man, and expect it to simply accept an outcome that is dictated by you and not verifiable by them.

If you want a country to accept election results, the results need to be obvious and above any scrutiny. In the case of elections, you only get there if all votes are counted and any shred of doubt is rendered an impossibility. Otherwise all you get is conspiracy theories, dissent and erosion of any faith on the democratic nature of a system.

> You should think things through and pay attention to the unwanted consequences of these sort of claims.

Who is "you" here? The media organizations are the one making the calls and defining the processes for doing so, not some random on HN.

> It makes no sense to argue in favor of taking shortcuts in the election process citing arcane arguments and models,

The media calling the election is not part of the formal election process. If the media calls the election wrongly they just get humiliated when the final results come in and they are proven wrong. The media doesn't decide the election result.

"Dewey Defeats Truman"

I mean they will count all the ballots, this is just the DDs of the major news groups seeing that its statistically improbable (like, less than 3 std devs) and projecting the winner.

> I mean they will count all the ballots, this is just the DDs of the major news groups seeing that its statistically improbable (like, less than 3 std devs) and projecting the winner.

We're talking about people who spread conspiracy theories on how the big media companies are manipulating the public into stealing an election.

Seeing media companies announce that the opposing candidate has won even though the race is exceptionally close, votes are still being counted, and it's still theoretically possible to see their own candidate win.... That just contributes to fuel the conspiracy theories that are being fabricated to delegitimize the election results.

Clearly you disagree with the methodology used by decision desks, however, what /u/stu2b50 said is absolutely the way they have worked in real life for many years.

The purpose of a decision desk is to project who will win each election as soon as possible using all available data. They don't need all the votes to be in if they believe the remaining votes skew towards a particular candidate based on polling.

Of course, in the end it is the votes that decide who wins not the decision desks, but most often there is no difference between the two outcomes.

Their cautiousness made sense. Projections just before the election showed a lot steeper win for Biden. It didn't play out that way so it makes sense to be cautious.

Trump had a lot more support among some demographics than people expected. as the race got tighter it made sense to doubt what might play out.

> Their cautiousness made sense. Projections just before the election showed a lot steeper win for Biden.

You need to distinguish between the national vote, which met projections with a significant dem majority, and state races, some of which were close, which is also what was predicted.

State level projections in swing states were off by 7 points.

Why were the polls so wrong again?

Which projection was off by 7 points?

Let's take: Pennsylvania

These polls are from November 1.

Targoz Market Research was really off. 56 to 42

https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5e28be4ccb16eb0aa6496...

New York Times 42-49

https://int.nyt.com/data/documenttools/az-fl-pa-wi/bc6b622f3...

I am distinguishing between the popular vote...

I honestly don't recall much in the way of news about the popular vote projections. Probably because folks were more concerned with other things.

Once it became clear that the election wouldn't be called on election night, was there really any benefit to making an early call? Whether it was called on Thursday or Saturday seems kind of irrelevant when inauguration isn't until January.

It's much better to be certain that wrong.

There's an argument to be made that not making the call when the result was already certain, even if the margin of 0.5% hadn't been reached yet, was irresponsible in the sense that it allowed Trump more time to promote this idea that he has won, everything's fraudulent etc. (Just look at his last tweet: https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/13250998450450718...)

I disagree with that argument FWIW, but I can certainly understand it. Though I think people were just impatient to hear "Biden has won" be made official, even if they already knew. I certainly was.

the result was definitely not certain. there was more outstanding votes than the leader's margin, and it wasn't clear what the composition of those votes was. it was definitely very likely that they would follow the trend of the rest of the state, but it could have come to pass that the late-arriving absentee ballots or provisionals in PA broke very differently to the early-arriving absentee ballots. They called it when the first sample of outstanding allegheny county ballots were counted and made it clear that the rest of those votes were going to trend as expected.

the networks have to balance a late call giving fodder to conspiracy theorists with an early or uncertain call also giving fodder to conspiracy theorists. they don't want to be doing anything that could promote a narrative claiming the networks are trying to influence the election for biden.

It is. The longer it drags the longer you can feed fodder to conspiracies. Calling it too quickly would have been bad as well but not as bad as not calling when the end is clear. I think calling it now seems appropriate even though I don’t think Arizona should have beeen called.

but it's easy to understand why when the Republicans made it so difficult to count absentee ballots before election night,

In Pennsylvania, the Republican House passed a bill to start counting three days early but it died in the Senate under threat of veto from the Democrat governor -- https://apnews.com/article/2396bbdd1617a82c4919127726778711 The Democrats had a separate bill that would have started counting much earlier, but the Republicans opposed that for fear there would not be proper oversight over the counting process.

That bill also bans dropboxes and makes it harder to get a mail-in ballot. It's just a normal voter suppression bill.

The bill would have still given PA voters multiple months to get their ballot and mail it in. Hardly voter suppression. As for dropboxes, I really wish we could have some survey of opinion about them before it became a partisan issue. If it wasn't a partisan thing, I think the problem of dropboxes making ballots less traceable and enabling fraud would be pretty well acknowledged by all.

>The media was way too cautious in making the call here, but it's easy to understand why when the Republicans made it so difficult to count absentee ballots before election night, likely to benefit their candidate through the confusion of swinging red and then blue.

I'm curious about the efficiency of this strategy. I'd figure they'd gain more by allowing early counting, leaking the pro-democrat results and thus lowering democrat turnout on election day. After all, why bother voting when it's already in the bag and so on.

The opposite effect occurred in 2016. With Trump leading in east coast states, west coast states saw reduced Democrat turnout (relative to norm)

Well, the Republican legislature apparently discussed with the whitehouse about ignoring the popular vote and appointing electors for Trump (and was willing to talk about this on record)

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2020/11/what-if...

So apparently the strategy was to make the vote counting look suspicious enough that it would give cover for essentially a coup.

> when the Republicans made it so difficult to count absentee ballots before election night

Haven't been watching this closely. Care to share some refs? Thanks

https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/pennsylvania-counting-votes-...

Republicans in Pennsylvania, a swing state, created a law that didn't allow for absentee ballots to begin to be counted until 8pm on election day.

> pressure your red representatives to stop demonizing mail-in/advance voting, and stop destroying the postal system

You can pressure them all you want on that. It won't change a thing because making it easier to vote via mail will possibly result in them being voted out by making it easier for minorities to vote.

Because minorities are unable to find polling locations? I don’t understand your claim.

Because the economically disadvantaged part of the US population (which disproportionately affects minorities) can't afford to take a day off from work to vote, so voting by mail is a good way for them to vote without a personal downside.

Alternatively this could be fixed by making Election Day a national holiday and/or setting up more polling locations.

It took me less than 15m to vote on Tuesday, no lines or anything (deep red county). I've heard of people waiting for hours but that's because their local govt failed them (not enough locations, under-staffed, etc).

IMO seems more accurate to say in-person voting disproportionately affects incompetent municipalities.

I mean a deep red county that will stay red whether they correctly reflect their populations leanings or not, so there is little incentive to suppress any voting efforts, right? That's in contrast to a currently-elected-light-red county where the population is slightly leaning blue, but can't express that due to hindrances in the voting process (you can flip the colors if you want).

Or just not having ridiculously long queues.

Much of the rest of the democratic world looked upon those reports of people waiting all day, sometimes 10+ hours in a queue and thought "it took me 5 minutes where I live".

In countries without long queues to vote, you don't need to take a day off work.

Oh, I agree. That's what I wanted to suggest with more polling places.

Another way would be to hold elections on a Sunday instead of the middle of the week. There seem to be a number of fairly simple ways to improve on the way US voting works, and it's baffling that none of them are implemented.

It's coming either way. Once a country with a similar representitive system hits 80% urbanization, it's government tends to be more progressive, especially on certain hot topic policies like gun control.

You can already see how the popular vote for president is consistently Democrat. There is also a pact of states that promise to vote for the popular vote winner once their ranks have 270 electoral votes. A good visual way to view this divide is the map showing the county-by-county vote allocation.

And stop closing polling places in urban (Black) neighborhoods, etc, etc

> pressure your red representatives to stop demonizing mail-in/advance voting, and stop destroying the postal system

I don't see why expressing concerns about postal voting would necessarily be a partisan thing. Don't the TWO major political blocks want a fair process? Perhaps everyone?

...especially in light of evidence of documented cases. Here is a sample query for: "Fraudulent Use of Absentee Ballots which resulted in a criminal conviction" (with results ruled as recently as 2020):

https://www.heritage.org/voterfraud/search?combine=&state=Al...

The result set doesn't include "Duplicate voting", "Impersonation", "Altering the vote count", which are separate criteria (relevant to mention because they are part of the ongoing allegations).

Whatever happens, don't let the country both start and end in Philadelphia.

CNN projects Biden has won PA, and thus the presidency. It has also been called by AP, NBC, and ABC.

No: he hasn't, and that's confusing to both "the world" as well as waaay too many Americans: the election isn't until mid December, when the electoral college casts its votes. You didn't vote for the president, you voted for what your state will try to vote for in December. Unfortunately, state representatives in the presidential election are not universally required to vote along the state election result, and while rare in the past, the current administration is clearly not above bribery and criminal endeavours to get what they want, when they need it.

(Of course, if that's news to you, then you're probably not in the US right now)

Biden is PROJECTED to win the White House, because that's how US elections work. It looks for all the world that he'll win, but he might not depending on the electoral college: you don't win because the most people voted for you. That's not how elections work in the US.

And before someone goes "what are the odds": this isn't 2016 when people still pretended to honour the system. We have 4 years of established corruption, exploits, and literal criminal behaviour to draw on. Until elected by the electoral college, Biden has not won. And remember that many states merely put a monetary fine on being a faithless electors: it's not even illegal. $1000 to pick the guy who'll pay you back bigger, instead of who the state voted for? Scandalous! But also: entirely legal.

While what you describe is possible, I really don't think anyone thinks it's at all likely? For example, I would happily give you 10:1 odds against (a) the decision of the electoral college is not what we expected because of faithless electors and then (b) that decision stands.

I'll up that to 50:1.

Obviously I don't think it's likely, but that's not really the point. I literally laughed out loud when I read in the local news earlier today that the president of my country "congratulated Biden with his victory". (AFAIK, he is not some outlier, many of them did, but unfortunately I couldn't find a full list). I mean, we all know that's not how it's formally done, and we all know how important formality always used to be to these folks. With such vigor they should've just appointed Biden the new PotUSA months ago based on some CNN polls and be done with it. Trump would obviously protest, but he is protesting now, so what's the difference?

> we all know that's not how it's formally done, and we all know how important formality always used to be to these folks

But it is how it's been done, for decades. Winning a majority of the electors has been considered winning the presidency for a really long time. For example, from November 9th 1988: https://www.margaretthatcher.org/document/107377

The electoral college is vestigial, and if it voted in a way different from how its electors had been chosen that would widely be considered stealing the election.

That's because until now, there hasn't been someone who's going to exploit every rule they can, and bribe where it's legal, to stay in power. Stealing the election is perfectly acceptable to the incumbent.

The best way to keep that from happening, though, is emphasis on how the real election is the election for the electors.

Recounts and court challenges are fine, as long as they keep the discussion about making sure that the chosen electors actually represent how people voted. If we start seeing any push to appoint different electors or claims that it would be legitimate for electors to vote a different way, however, we need to pay attention and push back hard.

> it's not even illegal.

SCOTUS from 2020:

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/unanimous-supreme-co...

See comments below. This decision only means states have the right to penalize, but WI, PA and GA have no such laws.

https://www.fairvote.org/faithless_elector_state_laws

That decision didn’t make being a faithless elector illegal; it just confirmed that it’s legal for states to do so.

Which means a state that is loyal to one party could still screw the popular winner. Yikes.

Also: WI, PA, GA have no such laws:

https://www.fairvote.org/faithless_elector_state_laws

Hoo boy.

The math is in incredibly against this fever dream. Biden will wind up with 306 electoral votes to Trump's 232. You think he can steal over 30 elector votes against the will of their people?

Sorry, have you been paying attention the last 4 years? If you discount things because "the maths is against it" you maybe underestimate exactly how much of a criminal sociopath the incumbent is. Yes, the maths is against it. Of course it is. Can we therefore assume it won't happen? Not if you care about your democracy surviving.

What is more likely is that some vote recount changes things. It is highly unlikely that an ejector will change their mind.

And up to and including the 2016 election I would have agreed with you, but perhaps you haven't noticed the last four years, which changed this to "no, that's really not as unlikely right now. If they can get away with it, they're almost certainly going to at least try".

I predict a spike in Covid cases due to mass celebrations.

Ah the forefathers. Thanks for the good system.

The division and basically legal corruption are my concerns.

On a basic level, we are all people and all run the same basic way, and have the same basic needs.

One layer up, we are Americans. Those of us who travel, or who communicate outside the domestic US, see many other nations and often a higher degree of solidarity as citizens.

Looks like a priority problem to me.

We all need to earn enough to make it, or we all end up paying the costs associated with chronic homelessness, for example.

We all need to see the doctor too.

Eating good food, and the other human basics are not hard to understand.

Often, I see "those other people" type arguments of various kinds too.

Lazy people. Different colored people. Weird people. Other people; namely, not people like us, or not in our tribe, group, and...

Ordinary people do not have very effective representation. Money talks. And it should, but that brings me back to priorities again.

No judgement, no blame here. Just observations.

I submit resolving these things to a more harmonious body politic is on us people. I am not convinced anyone, or entity can just swoop in and improve things.

That is just where we are today.

One other observation:

Nations older than us have been where we are. Their peoples have had to do the work to get past it, and have had to do that multiple times.

This tells me we aren't experiencing anything fundementally new, in human terms.

But it is new to America. New in the sense of the USA being young enough, and the pace of change in the world being rapid enough for the state of things to feel new, or like doom, or, or...

Given the burden of improving on our current state lies with us as people, citizens, I submit the following:

We all need to understand one another better. That starts by talking. Really talking and listening. This is best done sans judgement, and with deliberate intent to understand better.

We all are where we are in life, and we all have made choices, and relitigating the past does not appear to hold answers for our future.

This is about what we do now. It is about our priorities as humans and Americans too.

Take voting, for example.

People had the following options:

Vote Major Party

Vote other

No vote.

Everyone made their choice and had reasons, right?

If we apply the intent to seek understanding of one another and avoid judgement, that means having a talk about why people voted or no voted the way they did.

People no voting, often did so because they did not want to consent to, or endorse, approve of what they see as ineffective, corrupt governance. Or they did not connect a vote to a positive future for themselves and theirs.

Why is that? I think many, and include myself until recently, would rush to judge and blame.

A vote for non major party X really is a vote for major party Y. Same for staying home.

After talking some, the idea of candidates interviewing for a job comes up and poor or toxic representation means not approving them for the job, and with that we see lazy, or stupid aren't really valid as reasons why.

I will stop there, and urge you to think about how all of that is framed up as a duty, or burden and how people may reject all of that in light of what they may see as an irrational election.

Same goes for how people have voted or not before too. Those decisions are made, cannot be unmade and people had their reasons for making them.

Notably, after some real discussion, the reality hits: we can't tell people to approve of potential leaders, and we can't dictate what is best, nor their point of view.

We can talk to them and understand what they need to cast a vote. We can attract them to join a cause and all that too.

So why doesn't that happen more?

I submit this is a big part of the priority and mutual understanding and consideration discussion we all need to have.

Without that talk being a fundamental part of our body politic, we appear to be divided into factions, blocs who understand others, "those other people" increasingly poorly as pressure to avoid the worst continues to rise.

With that discussion, it becomes much easier to see what we may consider an obvious, rational choice, say lesser evil as an example, really is not so obvious, or may even be harmful, not a lesser evil, but perhaps just a different kind.

No matter how this all goes, at any given time our future is about the decisions we make together, the actions we take together, and the outcome we live with together.

The election is past us now, but please do consider it was about the votes people were about to cast, not the ones they may have cast in the past.

Talking about all that is much easier and can be far more effective when people are not also fending off negative, and frankly until we understand one another better, uninformed personal judgements too.

We are divided to a harmful degree despite all of us having the same basic humanity.

I urge you to talk, and I mean really talk with others very indifferent from you, who live differently than you do and understand one another better.

I do not know how we get our priorities in order as people otherwise. And without that, we rub the risk of our future continuing to be an increasingly mixed bag for increasing numbers of us.

Finally, consider this idea:

When we make the discussion about what we oppose, it is not going to be about what we need, or want that is good.

Think about trying to lead a team by only telling them what not to do. They will get somewhere, and it won't be anything anyone opposed either.

We all benefit from an explicit, public good. That means the basics are in order leaving people with free agency to get after better, or what they want.

Understanding one another better will make that explicit, public good more clear.

It will improve our basic solidarity as people, reduce division.

I submit one final idea:

There will not be a net public good we all benefit from and depend on, unless we make the discussion, body politic, about it.

And that is how I am playing it now, and have been for a while now.

I want and need to be voting FOR good, not AGAINST bad, or evil.

You probably do too, and I encourage you to make more of the discussion about that explicit, public good and demand our leaders do the same things; namely, understand the people they need votes from better, and to apply that understanding to propose policy people can vote FOR, not just default to people voting AGAINST the very worst.

Nothing is officially certified.

nice

> It's still on our todo list to have some form of karma sharing for situations like this, to make it be less of a race and/or lottery.

Just disable karma on topics like these. They are going to be submitted multiple times and very quickly anyway, nobody "needs" the karma and it doesn't matter if nobody gets it.

Agreed. One of the factors that makes HN superior to the likes of reddit is the lack of overt karma farming which reduces the quality of discourse.

(We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25017129)

While it’s true that the US government needs structural reform, the issue wasn’t anything the Constitution can fix by nibbling around the edges. The issue is that the unified Republican elite, along with > 35% of the electorate, is fundamentally lawless and anti-democratic, and will do anything it can to cheat its way into power. All three branches are implicated and have been for a while: Bush v Gore in 2000, the US Attorney firings, Shelby County in 2013, the refusal of the Senate to convict Trump in 2020, the disgusting anti-science politicization of coronavirus, and so on. The scale of Trump’s personal corruption is unique among Republican national figures, particularly in foreign policy. But the racist authoritarianism and fundamental disrespect for elections is a defining creed of the party.

One of the more unpleasant truth about democracy is that it’s quite fragile. In any real sense, the US has only been a democracy since 1965. When large segments of the population are ideologically opposed to democratic governance - universal human rights, respecting fair elections, following the plain text of the law, and so on - mechanisms by which democracy sustains itself begins to fail.

One possibility is to amend the constitution to change first-past-the-post voting in all local-to-federal elections, to let never-Trump types speak out without facing electoral suicide, and to divert right-conservative attention away from a single “leader” figure. And obviously the electoral college needs to go.

But the fact that more than 65 million people voted for Trump at all speaks to a great sickness and nihilism in American culture. Trump himself might be put out to pasture. But Trumpism existed before he got here, and it isn’t going anywhere.

Nihilism is the truth of the world. Everyone is deluding themselves otherwise. Nearly everyone with significant power is nihilistic. Without god (and even if there was a god) there are no morals. All we have is genetics. Morals are just bias.

Using nihilism as a negative descriptor is funny when nihilism as a philosophy isn't against or for anything.

Reality is of course uncomfortable for most people which is why I'm getting downvoted :)

> "Nihilists! Fuck me. I mean, say what you like about the tenets of National Socialism, Dude, at least it's an ethos."

Without the electoral college we become a nation ruled by the cities. I prefer to maintain the republic so all states have a voice and not go full democracy.

That’s a very strange misreading of how elections work (and misstates US demographics, most of us live in suburbs).

But even taken on its own terms, isn’t that better than “a nation ruled by a rotating handful of states with nothing in common other than a somewhat steady 50-50 split in the electorate”? The current system is indefensible madness.

The duopoly has more to do with the bias of first past the post voting than the population demographics. The electoral college exists for the express purpose of preventing population centers from running the country with no regard to the rural population.

Better to let land vote than the actual people right?

Interesting that in your “nation ruled by cities” ranchers in Wyoming would still have about 50x influence in determining the make up of the US Senate when compared to folks in NYC, SF or LA.

The electoral college winner-take-all system has nothing to do with our "republic" or with "rural voters vs city voters".

From: https://www.npr.org/2020/11/06/931891674/as-presidency-hinge...

"States like New York and North Dakota are valued the exact same way under the current system. They're valued not at all, because they're reliably either Republican or Democrat [...] The only way I know how to put urban voters at parity with rural voters and rural voters at parity with urban voters is to make every voter in this country politically relevant in presidential elections."

The way to do that? A national popular vote that would require candidates to campaign in all 50 states. The effect would be that every voter would know their vote matters.

"I don't care if you're in the heart of Manhattan or in the outskirts of Helena. When you go vote for the American president, you know what's going to count toward the final result in a national popular vote election. And you're not going to be treated like a second-class citizen."

> unified Republican elite, along with > 35% of the electorate, is fundamentally lawless and anti-democratic, and will do anything it can to cheat its way into power.

This is unnecessary. I am of course relieved that Biden won. I am also appalled by Trump and his enablers in the Republican party. I'm also extremely disappointed that more people did not clearly repudiate Trumpism.

But that 35% of the electorate, which is closer to 48% per Trump vote share, are people and neighbors. This kind of rhetoric only serves to continue the bitter fighting. There may very well be a core of unredeemable, white supremacists behind Trump. But I'd like to believe that most are misled, misinformed, yet good people. I know my neighbor is one in fact.

> But I'd like to believe that most are misled, misinformed, yet good people. I know my neighbor is one in fact.

Something I have found increasingly frustrating is this childish attitude that saying “so-and-so is a bad person” means “so-and-so will always be a bad person and can do nothing to change for the better.” Simplistically separating people by “inherent nature” leads to us not calling a spade a spade when someone is being a bad person, and means bad people can’t ever actually appreciate the scope and impact of their misdeeds.

People who voted for Trump did so for reasons that were, by and large, morally outrageous. We don’t need to treat them like lost sheep who were incapable of understanding what Trump represents. There were a shocking number of horrendously terrible people in Germany and Rwanda, and most didn’t go to jail when the genocide ended. After WW2 it was really hard to find a German who would say they voted for the Nazis, and I am sure many or those millions of people led upstanding lives. That doesn’t make their decision to vote for the racist strongman retrospectively defensible.

(There’s also the related problem of “he can’t be a bad person, he’s nice to me!”)

The sentiment underlying your comment is an important one. While it's essential to see the goodness in people, it's also essential that we are honest about bad behavior. Regardless of their goodness, or them being misled or misinformed, > 35% of the electorate has been unwavering in supporting/advocating/justifying behaviors that are

> fundamentally lawless and anti-democratic

If my neighbor, who I believe is a good person, is abusing their spouse, it is absolutely necessary to call the abuse for what it is.

We need a better word than "Trumpism". It will be too easy to disregard all the other very good examples you gave by dismissing it as Trumpism and now that he's gone, so is the problem.

(We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25017663.)

There are still a significant minority of single issue anti-abortion voters who will support any candidate on that basis regardless of what else he does. I don't agree with them, but they exist and they are sincere in their beliefs. It's a mistake to confuse that with nihilism.

There are facts here. Things like Covid 19 and climate change are both real and current or impending disasters. The "left" has solutions and the "right" pretends they don't exist. The US right has slipped further and further from understanding of what is actually happening around them and under trump specifically fell into a disinformation black hole. I hope that future repoublican leaders are more based in reality.

>the "right" pretends they don't exist.

Most people in the right don't disbelieve the coronavirus exists, they just think it's not dangerous enough to warrant massive government impingement on people's rights to free movement, association and commerce.

Most people in the right don't disbelieve the coronavirus exists, they just think it's not going to kill them, its going to kill someone else.

FTFY

Just like regular flu. It kills lots of people every year. So do car accidents - lets just ban driving?

> So do car accidents - lets just ban driving?

Yes.

Or, to be less hyperbolic about it: do a lot more things that change us towards being a society where travel via single-occupant vehicle is not the default, or the highest-prioritized use of a space when many other options are cleaner, safer, more efficient space uses, encourage better health, and are not as environmentally and socially damaging.

So, to link it back to coronavirus: taking steps to mitigate a harm that we know exists, that we can predict coming, and that absolutely involves making changes to how we conduct our daily lives but if a lot of us make a little change, we make a dramatic effect.

Ok, looking at first reply to my post, they reference "commercial freedoms", which I support. Look at COVID 19, commerce (measured in restaurant reservations and retail purchases) dropped like 90% before the government lockdowns. The way to improve the economy and provide "commercial freedom" is to defeat the virus. The way to defeat the virus is though, amongst other tools like masks and vaccines, lockdowns. You could remove all the restrictions you want and things won't go back to normal for business or their patrons until the risk serious illness from a disease is small enough that you don't need to think about it when making evening plans. Additionally, when you reference "banning cars", cars used to be extremely dangerous. We have cumulatively spent millions of hours and hundreds of thousands of human lives developing engineering solutions to make cars safer. Things like masks are like seatbelts, and "suspending indoor dining" is like adding a crumple zone to the front of the car and we do ban cars that aren't sufficiently safe.

Since this pandemic began, I’ve never understood this line of reasoning. I invite you to enlighten me.

Let’s say we use the governments force to close business down, in order to hinder the virus from spreading there.

When the government later stops applying this force and business can reopen with persecution, will the virus not just continue from where it left off?

In March they said “flatten the curve to not temporarily overload hospitals”, which I get, but the reasoning for keeping the forced lockdown only seems logical if you never reopen.

For this reason I’m glad my country is one of very few that never locked down. More have died here than in the neighbour countries, but I fail to see why they won’t catch up when they reopen.

The virus can't "continue from where it left off" if there's nobody left in the country infected by it.

If it turns out there were a few infections left, or one slipped through quarantine for arriving travellers, the health system has enough capacity to perform testing for anyone with even mild symptoms, and comprehensively contact trace.

This has worked for several countries.

> The virus can't "continue from where it left off" if there's nobody left in the country infected by it.

If every member of our species is convinced to quarantine for a month, the disease could maybe be eradicated, but this is clearly not realistic. Herding cats is easier.

Even quarantining everyone for a whole month probably wouldn't do it. Did you see that article about the immunosupressed woman who was spraying out viable Covid-19 virus for like 70 days without any visible symptoms of Covid?

Two reasons:

Treatments get better. As we learn how the disease works, we know how to treat it better. This means that if you get sick now rather than at the beginning, you are much less likely to die.

Secondly: people are working on vaccines. If you can hold it until one is available, you might not have to get sick at all.

In my neighbour countries no one is asking them to “please hold” - the government is using its (violent) force to make them stop living and doing business. In my home Sweden we are spared. I say there is an important moral difference between enforcing such a thing and not.

The vaccine is also still vapourware

>Secondly: people are working on vaccines. If you can hold it until one is available, you might not have to get sick at all.

I work in vaccines and I don't believe any vaccine is even close to coming out. The products our company is working take about 10 years from start to final sale.

Its quite likely that the FDA will have to lower their standards to fast-track coronavirus vaccines. I am going to be very skeptical of their safety given that we don't have long-term data, especially with the newer unproven vaccine tech.

> When the government later stops applying this force and business can reopen with persecution, will the virus not just continue from where it left off?

This is the strategy New Zealand followed, and now their lives are back to normal. Here's a pic of one of their sports stadiums[1]. Notice how nobody needs to distance or wear masks because they got control over COVID spread.

[1] https://images.indianexpress.com/2020/06/New-Zealand-rugby-1...

Would it be possible to totally close the border to for example Germany, France, or Czechia, like NZ can do? I highly doubt it but am open to ideas. It would certainly be immoral to use force to hinder native citizens from travelling out of the country.

>lets just ban driving?

Or maybe let's infringe on your freedoms by: requiring a license to drive, requiring use of a seatbelt, setting safety standards for car manufacturers...

> Just like regular flu. It kills lots of people every year

The worst flu killed 80k people in a year, and normally kills about 20k a year. It hasn't even been a year and three times as many people have died compared to the worst flu season, and 1,600+ Americans die every day from COVID. This epidemic so far has been more than twelve times worse than the average flu season.

> So do car accidents - lets just ban driving

About 38k people die in car accidents in the US, and the average person drives 1 million miles before getting in an accident. And that's with practically every person in the country driving that can. In contrast, only 3% of Americans have had COVID, yet 237k of them have died in less than a year. If the majority of Americans get COVID, millions of people will die.

> The worst flu killed 80k people in a year

I think you're about 3 orders of magnitude off. COVID is pretty bad, but the 1918 flu was horrifyingly awful. Flus can get pretty bad.

I was thinking of the 2017/2018 flu season which killed 80k in the US. H1N1 tends to get singled out as itself, Spanish Flu or swine flu.

9/11 killed a minuscule amount of deaths in comparison and warranted huge cut of freedoms, multiple massive military interventions, the US starting to normalise torture and black prisons, but somehow requiring people to distance and wearing masks is a step too far?

Let's not forget it Trump suggested to slaughter Muslims using bullets dipped in pigs blood, so he is definetly not a antiwar as some here suggest.

It would be a spectacular failure of logic to evaluate someones record on war based on a flippant comment (which you misrepresented) as opposed to, oh I don’t know, maybe if they started any wars. Considering that he is the first president in at least a century to not engage in any new wars, I think that might be a better signal.

At least we learned for the last 4 years that certain values are no longer uphold.

It shouldn't be hard for a sharp upstanding human being not to throw out 'flippant' comment.

That actually surprised me the most. That exactly what you said, stopped to matter.

It shouldn't and we shouldn't allow it.

The comment was made in response to the Barcelona terrorist attacks and was very specifically joking about what we should do to domestic terrorist groups that mass murder. It was also not his original thought. He cited a myth regarding what he thought someone else famously did to terrorists and said maybe we should do that.

Getting upset about what he actually said and in what context seems like faux-outrage or someone with motivated reasoning to try and find something to get upset about.

I would be more curious on why this is not bothering you at all.

You do like it doesn't matter.

Does it?

It would be more realistic to consider whether or not Trump dropped more bombs on poor people in Yemen than Bush and Obama combined[1], which he did.

[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/trump-have-bombed-yemen-more...

If you drive drunk and make an accident with me and i get hurt, holy shit you might go to prison.

Knowing that there is a virus, not doing anything about it and then spreading it onto me, should also have consequences.

As it is not possible to do so, might be a good idea to mandate mask wearing and cautions someone might think.

It's been well-known for MONTHS that COVID is significantly more deadly than the regular flu.

To still try to downplay COVID and act like it's no worse than a regular flu is, quite frankly, willful ignorance.

> To still try to downplay COVID and act like it's no worse than a regular flu is, quite frankly, willful ignorance.

I've found that it isn't ignorance, it's that they just don't care.

I know highly educated people who are more than capable of understanding the statistics underlying COVID infections, and they still say "it's just the flu".

These were people who knew about COVID in January, and were talking about what a threat it could be. Yet months later they're repeating the President's talking points.

They simply don't care.

> It kills lots of people every year. So do car accidents

COVID-19 has killed more Americans this year than all accidents. It's the third leading cause of death. That's much more significant than influenza.

Actually the coronavirus does not exist at all.

They are correct in thinking that. For most people it's unlikely that a COVID-19 infection would kill them. The CDC's estimates for infection fatality rate by age are:

0-19 years: 0.003%

20-49 years: 0.02%

50-69 years: 0.5%

70+ years: 5.4%

Source: https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/hcp/planning-scena...

For younger ages, that's comparable to influenza: https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/burden/2017-2018.htm#table1

Are you sure?

https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/burden/2019-2020.html

38 Million infected, 18 Million visits and 22k death due to influence.

Corona now has 10 Million cases 240k death.

I mean, don't get me wrong, even if its 0.02% for 20-49 year old in USA: 1. Thats still a lot of people if we hit Millions of infections 2. you can also see that the death rate was much higher at the beginning: https://ourworldindata.org/mortality-risk-covid 3. we are still not trying to get everyone from the street so they are not dying, we are getting them from the street that if they are dying, they are not dying because of full hospitals.

And of course doctors are getting better every day fighting it and learning more about it.

I personally absolutly don't mind sitting around for a year to wait this out. I only have one live and i don't want to have covid right now nor any long term issues from it.

Covid showed something quite interesting to me: You are better of in dooms day scenarios if you can sit it out a little bit.

> Covid showed something quite interesting to me: You are better of in dooms day scenarios if you can sit it out a little bit.

Yeah this is actually really interesting because in a non-pandemic world taking the more conservative (lowercase c) approach to safety is less useful, but in our current world with a lot of genuine uncertainty and numerous catastrophes it actually nets better.

> I personally absolutly don't mind sitting around for a year to wait this out. I only have one live and i don't want to have covid right now nor any long term issues from it.

Yes, Please continue to have discipline and hold out against peer pressure to lower your guard. As someone who got covid, early 20s, exercise daily, low-processed food diet, no history of health issues, I got a mild case of Covid and the post-covid stage for me is much worse than the actual illness period and this phenomenon is very underrated in people’s discourse about risk assessment. Most people on this forum feel great arguing the pandemic on paper but have no lived experience of what this does to your body. 70, 80 days out where you feel super fucked up, new symptoms arise, random shit like pressure in your heart and chest, body aches day after day, extreme sensitivity to the cold.[0]

Imagine if covid were named HIV instead and people said, “look! After 10 months all these young people haven’t died. It must not be a big deal. Probably the flu”. Which is to say we still don’t know much about the virus. Most people in this forum are used to a world where every major disease of humanity has been studied for 20+ years,[1] so it’s sort of a confusion they have that they think the science is figured out. If you aren’t a biologist or studied biology heavily, science all seems like magic to you so it must be hard to tell the difference between something that is understood and not understood yet

[0] PS and still recovering

[1] source: my ass

> Are you sure?

Are you disagreeing with the CDC's numbers? I gave sources for a reason.

It's obvious why COVID-19 would have killed more people this year than a typical flu season: more people can get infected, because it's a novel disease which we have no prior immunity for. Additionally, infections are likely to be more serious, as immunity isn't a binary. Meanwhile the various viruses and virus strains that we call "the flu" has been around our whole lives.

But the fact is, if you do get infected with the flu, and you're young (particularly children), you're roughly as likely to die as if you get infected by COVID-19.

> I personally absolutly don't mind sitting around for a year to wait this out. I only have one live and i don't want to have covid right now nor any long term issues from it.

You are welcome to make that decision for yourself. But remember, others' will have different priorities. My job is mostly unaffected, so far. Other people I know have lost their businesses and careers. I personally know some people involved in food aid in poorer countries: people are literally starving to death due to lockdown.

The COVID-19 infection fatality rate by age is approximately the same as overall mortality by age. It shouldn't surprise people that many people would decide that they're willing to take that risk, especially when we have examples like Sweden, New York City, large parts of India, etc. to show that even uncontrolled spread is not an existential threat to society, and herd immunity kicks in and things go back to normal. (antibody testing has found about 20-30% of Stockholm, 30-50% of NYC, etc. has been infected, most without realizing it)

> Covid showed something quite interesting to me: You are better of in dooms day scenarios if you can sit it out a little bit.

You are lucky to be in a position where you can do that. A significant chunk of society can not. And the fact is, very few places in the world have been able to control COVID-19 without indefinite lockdown. It's just too contagious in most societies.

I have short term heart damage from covid. Wanting herd immunity is ignoring the suffering a good subset of the infected will experience. I guess your next line will involve something about suffering being better than dying. And I guess its okay that I can’t play with my toddler because of secondary effects because they were highly unlikely to die.

Most people don't disbelieve the coronavirus exists, they just think it's not going to kill them, its going to kill someone else.

FTFY

And they are wrong. It's most likely not going to kill them or anyone they know.

Keep coping. Next year is going to suck. I hope I’m still alive next year and covid complications don’t kill me :/

This. Closing all playgrounds in my state for many months was just pushing it a little too far, for example.

> people ... don't disbelieve the coronavirus exists, they just think it's not dangerous enough to warrant [quarantine]

That's operationally the same thing.

In other words, if that belief is wrong they're still killing people.

Let's be cautious. Once we have good testing we can know where the virus is and contain it without such a drastic quarantine. That's the rational, non-partisan thing to do.

We know where it is. It's everywhere, because huge parts of the country have given up on even trying to keep it contained.

As of today we're at about 10 million cumulative cases (a full 3% of the country's entire population), 132,000 cases per day, and the cases-per-day count doubling every 20-30 days. That's a progression that gives you millions of new cases a day just by May.

> 10 million cumulative cases

Known cases. True numbers are likely to be much higher than that. For starters, the estimated percentage of entirely asymptomatic infections is around 18% to 80%(1), with many more getting only mild symptoms. Many if not most people with mild symptoms will never bother to get tested.

It would not be surprising if 100 million Americans have in fact been infected already. That's the kind of ratio of known to actual cases that antibody testing has repeatedly found. And even that may be an underestimate, as antibody testing doesn't measure T-cell response.

1) https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7470698/

Your order of magnitude is off (log2 = n + * 3)

132000 cases per day, doubling every 30 days, would be about 328 million additional verified infections by the beginning of May. You may note that exceeds the total number of Americans who have not already tested positive, which gives a pretty good hint that model can't actually reflect reality for that long.

Additionally, the 10M number is the number of people who have tested positive, not the number who have been infected, which is probably several times higher than that even.

So yeah. I doubt we have even two more doublings ahead of us, at least as measured by hospitalizations (positive tests are a bad measure because early testing was very lacking). Less than one wouldn't surprise me.

I don't subscribe to any side, but on this topic I much prefer the freedom of movement that I get to enjoy in the U.S., especially in some states. I'd hate to be locked up like they were in Australia and now Europe. Even the bay area was getting a bit much for me with their random restrictions on outdoor spaces.

There is no doubt that the virus is deadly, and more deadly for certain age groups, but let's not treat it like the great plague. On top of that, with mask use and distancing the spread is negligible, especially outside.

When did we get so risk-averse where every death should be prevented no matter the cost? Many people die for various reasons. You can maximize your age by sitting inside a cushioned room all your life to limit injuries, but I prefer to not live that way.

120,000+ infections and 1000+ deaths per day are negligible?

This is not what I said.

I mean, I read your post, but it basically sounded like you wanted a full reopening like Texas but allowing the people who want to wear masks to wear masks. Is that not what you're advocating for?

Maybe part of your problem is this

>basically sounded

You whittled down this persons post to a basically sounded. When you discard information you create your own vacuum. The person said nothing about a full reopening and instead was pointing out how travel should not be limited like other countries who have and are still in worse situations.

>is that not

And talking in weird negatives doesn’t help your case either.

It is indeed not a 1 on 1 copy of words but it was the contents, and trying to shy away with 'that's not what he said' is just dishonest and wilful dissonance.

You should get your numbers straight before you write things like this "like the great plague.".

Do you really think there is any politiction out there who likes to shut their country down because of anything? Tanking the economy just because of some flue?

No.

Pandemic Experts (our experts, your experts) estimated that if we wouldn't do this, we would see a very bad outcome and Politictions decided that its more important to not hit this scenario and tank the economy instead.

Now your expert expertise on this is something like 'but let's not treat it like the great plague.'?

Funny enough, i'm in Europe and i do feel fine sitting at home. I'm quite happy that we don't have that high numbers as USA has.

The problem in the USA is not 'wearing masks outside and having no other restrictions' but 'coronavirus is a hoax' 'i can't breath with a mask' 'a mask is against the amendment' 'my freedom'.

And yes we have this stuff here as well. 20k people demonstrated because of masks. Like since when did our society became so antisocial or dumb, that people think wearing a facemask mandation made their lives so much worse that they want to demonstrate it?

Do you realise how combatitive your tone is? What benefits do you think it brings to the discussion?

Text does not convey tone. You are ascribing tone in your mind. Text is language and does not bring along gestures, facial expressions, or eye contact.. things your brain uses to detect tone and subtleties in the words

For instance based on this text your “tone” is combative, but I bet you are reading it in your mind with eye brows raised and hearing a different accent on syllables. Maybe you would say that first sentence a little bit quieter to show compassion, but I’m reading it as if you had an attitude on the words “your tone is”

Can you please answer instead of trying to manoeuver away from it with a lame distraction?

The primary risk of covid is getting to the point of the exponential curve where hospitals are completely overwhelmed. People with unrelated problems and injuries struggle to get treatment, accident and emergency wards become full past capacity.

That is what the lockdowns are to prevent, and as a European I much prefer taking a month at home to prevent such a catastrophe.

> I don't subscribe to any side,

OK...

> but on this topic I much prefer the freedom of movement that I get to enjoy in the U.S.

Well, that didn't take long. Or are you assuming that's not a side?

In my social circles, it very much is. My understanding of facts leads me to believe COVID-19 is a great enough "plague" to warrant lockdown measures.

People who share your opinion often write these responses out as "extremely risk-averse", but many disease experts vehemently disagree.

To put that in context, let's consider your next statement:

> Many people die for various reasons.

In the United States, we keep track generally of how people die. The top three causes of death[1] in 2018 were heart disease at 655,381, cancer at 599,274, and accidents at 167,127.

So far, COVID-19 has surpassed accidents at 229,238 deaths[2].

This isn't about preventing death no matter the cost. It's about taking reasonable measures to slow what has become the third leading cause of death for Americans.

[1] https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/leading-causes-of-death.htm [2] https://covidtracking.com/data/national

How many deaths were caused by the lockdown? I know we cant easily measure this but the number is surely substantial and by not keeping this in mind we are implicitly saying the number is zero, which leads us to make bad decisions.

My mom is at risk. My mom.

She's going to die. Hopefully, peacefully in her sleep. If she gets the covid she'll die in horrible agony, drowning in her own dissolving lungs.

I'm "averse" to that form of death, for my mom, for anyone.

I never got tested, but I had covid in a really horrible way. How does good testing help quarantine when there are people who are gettin the virus and not getting tested (some of which still heading out into the public creating more asymptomatic patients)

Further the virus can remain viable on surfaces for days, weeks if frozen. How does testing (combined with the above, ppl not getting tested) help in any way to know where the virus is. I think it will identify hotspots but then what. Texas was a hit spot and still had 4000 cases/day. Testing didn’t help reduce case count, but it did indirectly limit the effectiveness of the emergency room...

How do you know you had Corona if you did not get tested and how does it relate to the rest of your argument?

Oh well I don’t normally have shortness of breath or chest pains in the middle of the summer. Also had extreme brain fog and couldn’t remember howto code (true story). Also was coughing for the entire month of may. Oh cardiologist said I had a heart attack and partly failed a stress test, but couldn’t find any reasons for a healthy man in his mid30s to have had a heart attack.

Pulmonologist told me I had lung scarring and I had to do breathing exercises. Hmm what else happened. There was also stabbing back pain. My feet and hands were tingly and numb for two weeks, I lost all feeling below my knees....

But the pcr and igG tests all came back negative. Doc thinks pcr test was too late and serology test was false negative. At this point I don’t care about the tests I know what I experienced and it matches up to other bad covid experiences

Forgot to add, I have pericarditis now and have been told to rest and go easy for the remainder of the year

While anti-science exists at both ends of the political spectrum, only one of the major us political parties seems to embrace conspiracy theories with gusto. And that party has a not insignificant number of adherents that accept the belief that covid is a hoax.

But notice that you've shied away from the climate change claim; the scientific consensus has not gotten softer in the last 20 years, but as recently as a few years ago one party denied the existence of climate change. Even recently a considerable majority of the strong adherents of one particular political party disbelieve that climate change is happening.

One more data point in terms of political parties' views on science: there are two people in the White House now who believe that evolution is a hoax, Mike Pence and Mark Meadows, both of whom derive that belief from their religious practices.

Does a leader need to believe that evolution is a process that happens to be an effective leader? Not necessarily, though it may hinder their ability to make informed choices when, e.g. dealing with a pandemic whose causal agent is evolving.

(Does a leader need to accept a heliocentric model? Again, probably not, very little in the way of political life depends on the leader's cosmology at that scale, but for some reason it would make me deeply uncomfortable if we ended up with a president some day who insisted the sun revolved around the earth.)

There's also a large percentage of the population whose religious beliefs preclude a belief in evolution, especially in certain regions of the country. In a democracy, you don't get to suppress certain viewpoints or beliefs because science disagrees with them. You get a representative of the people.

You mean like the silly Russia conspiracy theory we wasted so many years on?

Like the current "massive voter fraud" conspiracy we're currently wasting time on

Read the Republican-led Senate Intelligence Committee report.

https://www.intelligence.senate.gov/sites/default/files/docu...

yea, the silly thing is that we all really underestimated or at least accurately estimated the involvement of Russian actors in the rise of trump in 2016. This is cannon, and the report was written by republicans.

I’ve read it. Like I said, total conspiracy theory. Nothing in there to suggest Trump was involved in anything, and we know now that the infamous Steele dossier was bogus.

> Nothing in there to suggest Trump was involved in anything

No. But so many members of his immediate circle are named as being involved.

> we know now that the infamous Steele dossier was bogus

This is a weird thing to say. The Steele dossier was presented as a set of unsubstantiated claims which required further investigation.

Disproving a limited number of them (eg, Michael Cohen doesn't seem to have been in Prague when one of the claims said he was) doesn't show much except that specific claim is unproven.

Additionally, many of the allegations have been proven!

Notably - and amusingly - the "pee tape" part of the dossier hasn't been disproved at all. Given the huge amount of attention that has gained one would think holes would have been found by now. The Mueller report actually adds some weight to this story, noting how a Russian associate of Cohen had claimed to have "stopped the flow of tapes" from the owners of the hotel Trump stayed in.

Read for yourself! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steele_dossier#Veracity_and_co...

That’s not how evidence works. The onus is not on Trump to prove a negative. And crucially:

”Rtskhiladze later admitted he had been told the tapes were fake, but he did not communicate that to Cohen, the report says.”

Literally a hoax.

> That’s not how evidence works. The onus is not on Trump to prove a negative

Of course. As I said - it was a set of unsubstantiated claims. Some turned out to be false, but some didn't. It wasn't a bogus dossier.

> Literally a hoax.

So you pull the one footnote from that which supports your viewpoint and ignore all the rest that doesn't?

The point wasn't if the tapes were fake: the point was if Trump believed they might exist.

It's very much "dangerous enough" if it completely overwhelms hospitals, which we've seen it do before harsh measures were taken. The people's rights to free movement, association and commerce should not infringe upon the right of others to safely breathable air and to medical care if needed.

Except there is no right to medical care. However, there are actual rights to the other things.

As someone who experienced covid in a bad way, I’m just going to say a lot of Americans on both sides of the political aisle don’t believe the virus is dangerous. They are just worried about their parents or grandparents. Oxymoron, I know, but the inconsistent message and conflicting cross talk from multiple parties has created this situation.

> Most people in the right don't disbelieve the coronavirus exists, they just think it's not dangerous enough to warrant massive government impingement on people's rights to free movement

A little bit like how one could feel about the 3,000 casualties of 9/11 versus one’s rights to free movement over the past 20 years.

Examples such as this suggest we’re not arguing from probabilities but from partisanship.

I believe in climate change. But were also seeing major changes on the rest of the planets in the solar system as well and last time I checked, we weren't burning fossil fuels on Mars the past century.

The sun is the shared interface we have with the other planets, and I think its the main driver of climate change we are seeing. And above that the galactic magnetic sheet is likely driving the sun and driving the magnetic fields changes were seeing.

Pollution isnt cool, but co2 is the least of our concerns right now. The 12000 year cycle here and it's going to be a rough ride.

[citation needed]

This 12k year cycle you are mentioning, is part of climate change calculations.

You are not a minority genius who did a few calculations on back of a notepad, is reading the internet and now is smarter than real experts.

Real experts spend there daily life with it and actually know what to calculate.

And yes it is co2.

No, the "left" doesn't have solutions as can be seen by the current course of the pandemic in Europe.

We could probably learn from countries that have successfully handled the situation though, regardless of whether we consider ourselves “left” or “right”.

I doesn't seem that we can. Most of Europe has failed to do that and now needs to lock down to different degrees.

And of course this isn't related to left vs. right, but rather being competent, geography, having a disciplined population and political will. I was merely replying to someone who said that the left has solutions and offered the counter-evidence.

Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan have had very successful strategies and outcomes.

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25023021.

not arguing, just curious why? Did I violate something? Something I can do better next time?

I'm highly supportive of the content moderation procedures here.

Partly because we try to prune the heaviest subthreads by detaching their heaviest sub-subthreads, and partly because it was a step into partisan argument, which is a step away from curiosity. That doesn't make your comment wrong—I hope that's clear. It's just that curiosity is what we're trying to optimize for.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

awesome thanks! Always interesting to see content moderation strategies in action IMO.

Nov 3 - Election Day

Nov 7 - News media called a winner (this is not an official act)

Dec 8 - Deadline for resolving election disputes

Dec 14 - Electoral college casts votes

Dec 23 - Deadline for receipt of electoral college votes

Jan 6 - Congress counts the electoral college votes

Jan 20 - Inauguration Day

Judges have thrown out nearly every lawsuit the Trump campaign has filed.

If Republicans keep the Senate Biden won't accomplish much of his agenda. Especially with Mitch Mcconnell's uncompromising approach expect gridlock, government shutdowns, probably a constitutional crisis or two, and a complete inability to respond to any further crises.

Nah, he and Harris are senate insiders who will work relationships across the aisle and get things done.

not really

- Why would Mitch let them do anything? It worked to hobble Obama. If the axe a fair and powerful stimulus post-pandemic couldn't they pull off another mid-term comeback better?

- Biden has little agenda, which make make comprimise appear easier, but one must not forget the pre-compromise that happened before negotiating began.

We're in for at least 2 years of no meaningful policy, people.

Biden has little agenda? Trump had none. He could not articulate a single policy that he'd pursue in his 2nd term.

Yes, and? I wasn't trying to argue that Trump is better! I'm trying to argue that Biden is woefully insufficient.

I highly doubt they can outmaneuver Mitch. Especially in this current environment where the two parties are unwilling to work together and have a divisive relationship. Things might have been better a couple of decades ago where working across the aisle was more common I think.

The fact they are insiders assures me nothing will get done while fingers are pointed every which way.

Nah, Biden said it himself in the last presidential debate:

> [1:1:08] Trump: I just ask-- I just ask one question: why didn't you do it in the eight years, a short time ago? Why didn't you do it? You just said, ‘I'm going to do that. I'm going to do this.’ You put tens of thousands of mostly Black young men in prison. Now you're saying you're going to get-- you're going to undo that. Why didn't you get it done? You had eight years with Obama? You know why, Joe, because you're all talk and no action.

> [1:17:29] Welker: All right, Vice President Biden and then we're gonna move on to the next section.

> [1:17:34] Biden: We had a Republican Congress. That’s the answer.

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/elections/2020/...

And in 2020 we currently have a Democratic-controlled house, and a narrowly Republican-controlled Senate. If either party knows what's good for them, they'll work together.

Finally, Biden was not president from 2008-2016. A much less experienced insider was (as great and popular as Obama was).

Mitch McConnell said that his goal was to make sure that Obama is a one-time President. When you come in with an attitude like that, it's difficult to get anything done. If your peer at work came in and said, my goal is to make sure you don't last more than 3 months here, do you think you can be successful?

Yeah Mitch McConnel is my biggest worry. He can keep on blocking until Biden loses support. Our government is hell bent on preserving their egos that they often don’t do what’s best for their citizens.

I don’t expect much to change this time unless there are drastic changes on how decisions get made. Or if Biden can appeal to the few republicans that actually do care about their constituents over being Mitch McConnel’s sheep.

In 2001 a Republican Senator flipped to become a Democrat and give them the majority.

I'm not ruling out that possibility now. Especially when the stakes are even higher.

And in 2010, Joe Lieberman (D) blocked Obamacare from getting a public option.

It’s not that a party has a 51-man majority, although that helps for simple legislation. It’s that a party has a majority that can withstand defectors. And one further, defectors aren’t always defecting out of malice. Susan Collins (R) resides in a remarkably purple region such that she needed to oppose Trump on some of his policies to ensure she could get re-elected this year (and she did).

On the other hand, Obamacare passed.

I don't think we can say in advance what will and won't be blocked. But on the news today they pointed out that Biden has literally spent decades working in the Senate. So if anyone has across-the-aisle relationships, it would be him.

Anyways, again: we cannot say in advance what's going to happen next.

It passed in a totally gutted manner because it makes far less sense without a public option to balance the mandate.

My point isn’t oBAmaCaRE bAd. It’s that every single senatorial race counts, even after 51/60.

That is legal? Wow, very sleazy. In Brazil you lose your office if you switch after elected. You can still go against your party when voting, but changing parties after election has got to burn you forever...

It's legal in many places where you explicitly vote for individual candidates, not parties (and even in some where party lists are voted)

This is a major problem the US is going to have to figure out. How do you get anything done in the legislature when one party has the incentive and ability to stop everything?

To me what this election (as well as the 2016 election) illustrates, is what a poor set of choices we have had.

In no sane world should it have been difficult for the Democrats to defeat Donald Trump in 2016. He had no history in political office, and he lost the popular vote to just about the worst candidate the Democrats could have put up. Had the Democrats put up anyone who was less divisive than Hillary Clinton then we are not where we are today.

Likewise this time around, nobody I have talked to seriously voted for Joe Biden on his own merits. They voted for him because he's not Donald Trump. I have had people tell me they don't care if there is fraud and cheating, it's worth it if Trump is defeated. Put up someone with more genuine appeal and you not only get the "anyone but Trump" vote but you get enough undecided votes that there isn't any room for questioning the result.

We need better candidates who generate real support and appeal other than just not being their opponent. Not sure how to get there.

> I have had people tell me they don't care if there is fraud and cheating

This sounds like you suggest there is/was fraud or cheating, which you shouldn't be doing. Not sure if that was what you intended.

I agree with the rest of your post though. Joe here won because of the division in the democratic party. He would have lost to most Republicans. He gathered the most votes ever for obvious reasons. People didn't exactly stay home this year. There has never been more enthusiasm for voting, whether it was for or against something.

There is fraud every election. It doesn't typically change any of the results, though, and can (and should) be ignored.

If Trump voters are really upset about it, states can audit the vote and show that fraud was a very small percentage, and didn't change any outcomes. (Both sides commit fraud, so they tend to cancel each other out.)

That‘s not the point (that fraud may happen in any election). Trump asserts that there was systematic fraud in large numbers, in a way that the outcome of the election was changed. And many of his 70mm voters may subscribe to his point of view. This will increase the hostility between the two parties in the US.

When I see Trump talk, I wonder if he really believes what he says or if he knowingly and willfully lies.

What this man has done in four years has put a great damage to the democratic culture in the US, and he badly harmed the reputation of the US around the world, especially when it comes to old allies in Europe.

Edit: If Trump was not a narcisstic egomanianc („I WON THIS ELECTION BY A LOT“?!? Wtf?!), he would have stepped up in dignity, conceded his loss, congratulated Biden and wished him well. The US is confronted with many challenges in the midst of a huge pandemic, the nation is divided, and all he has to say is he won by a lot (in big letters)?!? This is it?

> I wonder if he really believes what he says or if he knowingly and willfully lies.

He will literally say anything it takes, truthful or not, to win the current argument.

Anybody familiar with the church has encountered this sort of "playing both sides of the fence" before.

In both cases, the Holy Man has all the answers, and it sounds like they know what they are talking about-- even if their answers are contradictory.

Questioning that leads to circular logic you can't unravel, and in the end you give up and accept that they know better than you. Institutionalized gaslighting, in both cases.

> There is fraud every election

Of course. Which is why it's really only worth mentioning in the context of fraud actually changing anything significant.

Not sure why either side has anything to do with fraud in this election (I got that undertone from the post).

As always extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.

Maybe they should. Something needs to restore faith in the process. If we lose that, we lose everything. And a not-small minority believe that the election was fradulent. There's always a fringe that feels that way, but it seems to be growing.

> Something needs to restore faith in the process. If we lose that, we lose everything.

If the process results in electing white supremacist like Trump, shouldn't that cause people to "lose faith in the process?"

Biden's historic turnout and election is proof the US doesn't want fascism. If that doesn't restore faith in the process, I don't know what would...

This election is about as far from a clear mandate as you can get, with Democrats (barely) winning a presidency but not the senate and losing ground in the house.

They're just believing what their information-circle is saying. They're not looking at things themselves. For instance, in the discussions I've seen of the Right talking about fraud, they've not mentioned the shenanigans of the USPS not delivering mail that arrived on time (WaPo yesterday had a story IIRC).

They need to believe. So they follow those that help them do so.

The reverse of that is likely just as true; people that are happy Biden won, have no concern if there was fraud, just like those that wanted Trump to win would not question him winning.

This is probably the new normal. Republicans have learned a thing or two of after four years of claims about Russia stealing the election. Both sides will work overtime now to delegitimize winners whenever possible.

You're probably right. I'm not a fan of Trump, and I'm not sure how I'd feel if I found out that there was truly fraud and the election belonged to Trump.

But I am in favor of investigating all (legitimate) allegations of fraud, not just the ones that DJT wants to investigate. And counting all ballots.

They're complaining about votes being counted in states run by Republicans when both Republicans and Democrats are watching the count.

Trump formed a committee to find voter fraud and for years it failed. It silently disbanded. The heritage foundation has researched voter fraud too, and it has found little to no evidence.

If that doesn't satisfy them, what will? You're basically saying we have to convince a group of people that fucking unicorns and dragons don't exist.

Faith is eroding in the American electoral process because the Republican party has been working very hard both to undermine the process and to spread propaganda to the effect that the process is untrustworthy.

People could have more faith in the process without more legal cases like Florida 2000 (which kept Gore out of the White House despite him winning the vote in Florida), the Brooks Brothers Riot[0] and its 2020 replicas, the 2019 Georgia governors race (where the Republican candidate was also the secretary of state responsible for counting the votes; needless to say, there were 'irregularities.'), pervasive efforts to prevent demographics that historically do not vote Republican from voting[1], manipulation of the postal service to disenfranchise likely Biden voters[2], the continuing myth of 'voter fraud' that the GOP spreads[3] to justify disenfranchisement, and the constant drumbeat of 'it's rigged if I don't win' emerging from Trump's Twitter account and replicated by Facebook and other right-wing media outlets.

There's no clear way to restore faith in the electoral process without removing disdain for democracy from the Republican Party's DNA.

[0] https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/what-is-the-brooks-b...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voter_suppression_in_the_Unite...

[2] https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2020/11/05/usps-late...

[3] https://www.cnbc.com/2020/09/24/fbi-has-not-seen-evidence-of...

Is there a way for the Supreme Court to censure the Republican Party for the damage they've caused? Serious question…

No, this is not in the constitution. But regardless, two-thirds of the supreme court are Republican appointees.

The Republican party was under a consent decree to prohibit it from attempting to prevent minorities from voting, but once enough Republican justices were installed on the supreme court the consent decree was terminated. The court also voided the most effective parts of the voting rights act, which further allowed the GOP to suppress voter turnout among demographics likely to vote Democratic.

The preponderance of partisan, Republican, judges on the supreme court is very much part of the problem.

Faith is eroding in the American electoral process because the Democratic party has been working very hard both to undermine the process and to spread propaganda to the effect that the process is untrustworthy. [See the Russia hoax that was propagated and still believed to this day].

Take a step back, take a deep breath, and remember that issues are more complicated than "my team good, your team bad."

Co-ordinated Russian election interference was investigated by Trump's own Justice Department. They didn't find any. That sounds like democracy working to me.

Or perhaps we shouldn't investigate foreign election interference?

> Russian election interference was investigated by Trump's own Justice Department. They didn't find any.

The DoJ very much found signs of Russian election interference. They just couldn't prove that the Trump campaign actively conspired with Russia.

Wrong.

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

At least read the Wikpiedia summary of the Mueller Report[0] if you don't have the time to read the whole document.

The 'Russia hoax' produced multiple criminal charges, both of Russians for interfering in the 2016 election, and of several Americans for obstructing the DoJ's attempts to investigate the possibility of people in the Trump orbit conspiring with the Russian government.

It has been factually established that Russia interfered with the 2016 election. The only question -- which cannot be answered because people in the Trump orbit lied to investigators and concealed evidence -- is whether the Trump campaign actively conspired with Russian entities beyond Trump openly asking for their help to access H. Clinton's 'emails.'

Take a step back, take a deep breath, and remember that some issues are a lot clearer than intentionally obfuscatory Republican narratives make them out to be.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mueller_report

It shouldn't be ignored, it should be prosecuted when found. We just shouldn't waste tens of thousands of dollars searching for the handful of people in the country who are going to bother doing it. But if we find it, they should go to prison.

Contrarian take: Republicans should be allowed to waste as much of their own money as possible searching for irrelevant "fraud." Might be a useful lesson.

How is "people can spend money on whatever they want" a contrarian take?

I didn't even know there were claims of fraud or cheating but as I was watching this video of Biden talk of how the president gets elected and smirk about the counting taking place[1], I immediately felt something offputting.

Now as someone who makes judgement not completely off facts but from what I see and feel, my eyes squint and my mouth pouts discerningly because I feel we are not much better off.

[1] https://youtu.be/XUnuLFIXWv4?t=267

> Had the Democrats put up anyone who was less divisive than Hillary Clinton then we are not where we are today.

You say this like Clinton did badly: she got 2.9M more votes than Trump!

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_United_States_presidentia...

Most of the voting public rejected Trump in 2016. It's just that 77K of those votes were in the "wrong" places (MI 10K; PA 44K; WI 23K).

> You say this like Clinton did badly: he got 2.9M more votes than Trump!

That's because a few blue states have huge population such as California.

Are you implying that each Californian should count for less than one vote?

No one is implying that, that's how it works and is intended to work.

It's a historical quirk rather than intention. No sane democracy would have the electoral college system today.

I agree with your last sentence, but this is very clearly the intention. Small states threw a fit when they were writing the constitution so now we're stuck with this bullshit.

That’s not strictly true; the original intention was for slaveholding states to have a roughly equal voice in presidential elections without letting slaves vote. Smaller states threw a fit about counting slaves as full citizens for the purposes of representation, which is how we arrived at the Three-Fifths Compromise.

I'm talking about Connecticut compromise, which created the electoral college, not the 3/5 compromise.

The Connecticut Compromise created the Senate, not the electoral college. The explicit purpose of the electoral college was to give more power to slaveholding states without enfranchising slaves.

The Three-Fifths Compromise is intrinsically related to the electoral college, because it instructed how to count slaves when determining how many House seats a state would get.

I'm not sure if you're aware, but the senate is the reason the electoral college isn't democratic. Every state gets two senators and because of that 2 bonus electoral college votes. That's why Wyoming gets 3 times as many electoral college votes per person as California. Without the senate the electoral college is just a popular vote. The 3/5 compromise doesn't even exist anymore because slavery is now illegal.

> I'm not sure if you're aware, but the senate is the reason the electoral college isn't democratic.

That’s one of the reasons, but not the only one. Another problem is that electors are allocated to the winner of the state popular vote no matter how close it is.

> Without the senate the electoral college is just a popular vote.

Even if you didn’t count Senators for the purposes of electoral votes, you could still end up with one candidate winning the popular vote and another winning the electoral vote.

You're not wrong, it's a horrible system

It's intention was to give slave owners more voting power without actually letting slaves vote. It was wrong then and still is now.

https://time.com/4558510/electoral-college-history-slavery/

Your (implied) counterproposal is not neutral either: you are suggesting that rurals and suburbans should be ruled by young type-As who are willing to pack themselves into tiny, overpriced apartments and make their careers a top priority well into their middle age. Why should that culture dominate?

> Are you implying that each Californian should count for less than one vote?

In a federalist republic, yes that's exactly what that means. The country was deliberately designed as a collection of independent states, and not a single population whose diversity is merely geographic.

> The country was deliberately designed as a collection of independent states,

Hmm... Couldn't it be argued that this haven't really been the case since the civil war?

When I lived in SF, most Americans I met weren't originally from California (not had they lived there long).

You're making the implicit assumption that more of those people exist than the rural and suburban types, in which case... Yes? Your comment cuts both ways - one of those groups is going to be the dominant culture and if your argument is that the smaller one should win, I don't see the reasoning to back it up.

The coastal city culture is already dominant in all types of media and academia and large corporations.

The electoral college moderates the effect. The big states still dominate. Just not as completely. The small states have their voice instead of being completely irrelevant. It's not that they "win" or even have an equal say.

It's not about winning. The original motivation for the US's structure is to impede lawmaking at the highest levels unless absolutely necessary. Making laws is not making progress.

You've assumed that everyone agreed at some point on majoritarianism, which never happened.

Open minded question: Maybe yes?

If states don't have an ability to have a voice for themselves as states, what's the point of them at all? They gain this small but important nudge towards autonomy from the electoral college.

I think states already get that enough through the senate.

I really think the president should be by popular vote, but don't see any way this would ever get changed.

The senate is one mechanism, but its mere existence is not reason enough to consider it sufficient.

The NPVIC[0] is actually inching closer and closer to being in force. It will still take a long time, but I see it actually possibly working eventually.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Popular_Vote_Intersta...

IMO, states choosing to enter an agreement like this of their own free will, is the appropriate way to get a popular vote, if that's what the people want, while still retaining the right of the electoral college.

I personally disagree with a state choosing to sacrifice its voice in such a way, but it's its right to do so, to award its votes how it sees fit.

I think this agreement won't work. When it matters, it would be ignored by some state and any enforcement can be challenged as circumventing the constitution

Yeah, I can see there being difficulty. It's the type of thing that sounds good to a lot of people before they find themselves in a situation where it actually makes a difference. When it suddenly kicks in and people say, "wait, what?", I can see there being legal action or something. But I think it would also be too late, if it's already been accepted as law. It might prompt people to want to start undoing it, but there may be an instance of it applying first.

In case you're not aware of the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Popular_Vote_Intersta...), take a look. It's doable.

You can still have states and also have a national popular vote.

The remaining point of having states would be that local state law can still vary.

This is true even if we got rid of the senate, the EC, and every federal body had purely population-proportional representation (which I am in favor of).

Federal law overrules local law, so they are intertwined. A vote at the federal level is in many ways a vote on local laws, too.

While technically true, this isn't always the case in practice. After all, marijuana is still illegal in the eyes of the Federal Government but this has done very little to deter state-sanctioned dispensaries in more than a handful of states.

That means it sometimes is the case in practice.

I wasn't disputing that. I was pointing out that there are notable exceptions.

Okay. I guess I'm saying that's irrelevant. For local & federal law to be intertwined doesn't require there to be a lack of exceptions.

Not fully. It's already pointed out that federal law overrules state law, but it's important to remember that congress is only supposed to be able to make federal law on a small set of enumerated issues. IMO the issue is when you have an expansion of what congress is able to make laws on which limits what states can do.

States are not people, why should states have a voice? What voice would that be, if not the one of the people who live there?

States having a voice is the whole point of a state. If states shouldn't have a voice, they should be phased out.

But they do have a voice, they are an entire level of gov't. They shouldn't necessarily have any particular say in the election of the president.

States "have a voice" in the local justice system and laws, as well as senators.

Making the president of the whole country be elected directly by the whole country would not make states redundant, far from it.

Because the constitution says the states elect the president. That's how it works. In modern times this means the people of each state decide, by popular vote, how their state votes.

You're saying it should be like this because it is like this. That doesn't take us very far.

In most countries states (or provinces or departments or whatever they like to call their subdivisions) exist in order to have some degree of internal autonomy. They can have their own laws and institutions based on their historical culture. That's enough. They don't have to have any special treatment at the Federal level.

How do you feel about the fact that this kind of thinking basically rules out the possibility of Puerto Rico from ever becoming a state? Or California splitting into two states?

And? There are/were plenty of GOPers even in "blue" states, and they counted in the PV as well. Further, it is generally not states that "are blue", but rather more urban areas:

* https://www.city-journal.org/html/real-engine-blue-america-1...

> There's a decisive break between Democratic and Republican support at a population density of 800 persons/per square mile.

* https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2013-04-01/how-the-d...

Yes, this is often ignored.

In 2016, California had the 3rd most votes for Trump, with 4.5M.

Similarly, despite losing the state 52/43, Texas contributed the 4th highest count for Hillary.

I said that he lost the popular vote.

My point is that many of his 2016 votes were "anyone but Clinton." If he had a more appealing opponent, it wouldn't have been close.

Isn't your claim falsified by this election? This opponent was someone else. Trump didn't lose many votes.

The reality that's hit me this year is that most Americans will vote for anyone who wins "their" party's primary. Everything else is rationalization.

I'm saying that both elections were decided based on hate of the opponent, not support for the winner. That's backwards from what it should be.

That's how it's been for at least decades. Democrats voted for Gore from hate of Bush. So this is a structural problem you're stuck with. Unless you come up with a stronger force than a pandemic with 100,000 fatalities.

Ranked choice elections, or something that gives seemingly fringe candidates a chance. Skip primaries for party candidate and use the extra time for more debates.

I don't think so. They wanted Trump. And people wanted Clinton, I have seen them. And people wanted Biden.

It is denial to say they don't want Trump. They truly do want him.

I assumed the same, but I've seen in CNN's live coverage on election day (unfortunately I can't find it now) that in an exit poll (I don't remember where) only 2 of 5 Trump voters said they voted against Biden (and not for Trump), but 3 of 5 Biden voters said they voted against Trump (and not for Biden).

Have not people checked and realized that trump got more votes this time ?

I think he did 62.9 million last time and is at 70.5 now.

More people got out and voted, and more people voted for trump than before.

Yeah. It's all about getting us off our asses and into the voting booth.

I think this also explains why more partisan rhetoric wins. It gets more people mobilized, while not really hurting you with moderates. It only hurts you with people who think. Who're a tiny minority. (I'm not convinced I'm one of them.)

> most Americans will vote for anyone who wins "their" party's primary

I agree in principle, the majority of people will just vote party line. But there is no doubt that Trump supporters came out in force in 2020 far greater than 2016. I cannot for the life of me understand why so many people think Trump is an ideal choice for President, but I do continue to try and listen, maybe I will finally get hit with the clue bat. I've got Trump fans as friends, but they can never really articulate why I should agree with them other than 'democrats bad'. And that doesn't resonate with me, because I need something more than simple tribalism to guide my choice.

Tom Nichols, Never Trumper and former GOPer:

> A Large Portion of the Electorate Chose the Sociopath

* https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/11/large-port...

Trump got more votes this election. The "anyone but clinton" line is a falsehood. The real reason Trump won is because huge swaths of Americans feel disenfranchised because we no longer control the entire worlds economy like we did for the 30 years after ww2. They're entitled brats who feel they deserve more even thought they're already the wealthiest group of unskilled workers in the world. And the republicans realize that and are willing to lie and say they can bring that America back.

"Entitled brats" is a little harsh. What salary should an unskilled American be entitled to? (An Indian with the same skills might get a few dollars a day.) Do you live on that amount? Would you be happy about it to, if you had been born with worse genetics or a worse home environment?

You're right, it is too harsh. I'd feel the same way if I were them. It's very difficult to come to the realization that your life will be worse than that of your parents and grandparents(at least economically). It's unfortunate that they've fallen for republican bullshit because I think it's pretty clear that democrat policy is better for them in the long run, but democrats aren't willing to lie and they're very bad politicians compared to republicans.

This post is a great example of the attitude that led to exact to the Trump win.

The middle class in America paid for globalization in a way that the lower and upper classes have not. I spent enough time in other countries to truly appreciate that there are 1 billion less people in poverty because of globalization. But they are also very many angry people who will point out that globalization has not been great for them. The only politician who They felt they could turn to was Trump.

Globalization isn't a choice. It's a fact. I understand being angry that your job is gone, but no one can bring it back. All of the factories in the world being destroyed was extremely lucky for America, and it probably won't ever happen again. America will never manufacture the vast majority of goods for the whole world again because now other countries can manufacture much of their own stuff, let alone stuff for us. Democrats and republicans both know that, but only democrats admit it. Trump won by pretending he can change it. I do blame the democrats for their horrible messaging. It doesn't matter if your platform is better if you can't convince people.

Globalization was a choice. It was a choice forced on part of the world as part of Pax Americana. If the USA had not done so, the world would be badly vastly different.

I agree. But it is also a political choice. Lets not forget, you may have the opportunity and move where the money is, but, if its in china, it will be a different world. So it is not really a fair game, where there is a world to conquer and everyone can start something.

And also not to forget, that the social systems, that we have built to make up/downs in the cruel nature more bearable, they have not been globalized. It is, when one looks at each country, still very local. If everything is more distributed and in different political zones, i think, they will fall apart, as the money went somewhere else, where production happens.

We will see.

> But it is also a political choice.

It's also an economic choice: the suits could have shared the economic benefits more (or politicians redistributed more), but in Capitalism excess 'created value' tends to go to the owners (Capital), and so we got a rise in the concentration of wealth over the last forty years.

You're describing the Democrats platform. Clearly this is not why Donald won.

And in a globalized world, if someone has built something, that is of use for many, a few will be even more richer than in today's term, by the nature of it. It is simply not comparable to some local baker, where only a few citizen will go to on a day.

The divide between the have and have not could be stronger, though, when you dont have, maybe that is still a lot more to what you have today (e.g. medical progress), it is just not as much as the ones at the top.

And then the cycle continuous, the divide will be used to form agendas, and so on.

I think what hinders us the most in installing a proper system for globalization, that all these areas have grown for centuries and it is definitly not easy to unify and agree on something. I hope, people have answers for that. I definitly do not want a system like communist china for that, i just "escaped" one myself, even though it probably has many advantages too. :-)

The US did not have to allow China into the WTO, that was a choice. The US did not have to turn a blind eye to the fact its product get way less market access in China than Chinese products get in the US, that was a choice.

I can go on and on and on. While America could never return to the post WW2 position, there were ways to make the current position bearable which were not taken due to ideological and political reasons.

Starting trade wars would not be good for the us. It would just lead to more international dominance from China. At least we can be competitive in the services sector with current policy. Trade wars would just make us even less competitive. Moving away from a replaceable manufacturing economy to a high skill services economy is a good thing, and cutting off other countries would make the us worse off.

Trade wars are sometimes justified. Your suggested strategy does not only have bad political and human consequences - it's not stable strategically.

Eventually, China will use its huge manufacturing edge to create a military advantage - this is already starting to happen - and then it could bully all of East Asia to give its trade massive advantages, while absorbing Taiwan.

The US must rebalance before it is too late. Hopefully latest technological development might make this rebalance easier.

It has more to do with the fact that every first world economy is visibly broken and very unequal. It's not unique to the US.

I don't think so. It's not like Trump or the republicans are even pretending to be focused on reducing income inequality. Remaining better than other groups is a priority for Trump voters. If they just wanted everyone to be better off they'd vote Democrat.

In reality, in 2016, abstention won the election and it wasn't even close.

Yo, it's not just one thing. Clinton, party, absent, jerks, EC are all factors.

> You say this like Clinton did badly: she got 2.9M more votes than Trump!

You say this like Clinton did well. This is a sub 5% advantage over a racist game show host.

And yet it doesn’t matter to the above posters point. You can blame the electoral college if you want, but it just means the type of demagoguery to get elected is different.

Hillary Clinton had a very long history of antagonizing anytime she could people on the right. For example remember her slut-shaming of bull Clinton’s accusers, or her attack in the “vast right wing consipriacy” trying to defend her husband from the totally untrue charges from Monica lewinsky. The reality of it is that the Democrats have to appeal to more than just their base to be elected. They seem to of learned that lesson this time.

Score Voting is the solution -- give candidates a score from 0-99 and take the highest average score. Works great to decide Olympian Gold/Silver/Bronze medalists. Plus, no vote is wasted, and bicameralism is transcended.

Is the ballot for olympian medalists public ?

What are the incentives for someone not to vote 99 for the candidate he wants to win, and 0 for all others ?

There's nothing wrong with that. You can also decide to vote against one candidate by giving everyone else 99, and that's okay too.

Yeah, that (or approval voting, or STAR) would be a good system in a primary.

In the general election, using plain score voting is a bit dangerous; if you consider a Trump vs Clinton race where all the Trump voters give him a ten out of ten, and most of the Clinton voters give her a six or seven, then Trump wins by a bigger margin than he did in 2016. (STAR fixes this with an immediate runoff of the top two after maximalizing everyone's vote.) But in a primary election, it might be good to get the candidate with the most enthusiasm behind them.

One difficulty in implementing something like this for the Democratic primary is that it isn't very compatible with the delegate system. Maybe that's not entirely a bad thing and delegates should be done away with, but sometimes it's good to have a group of people at the convention who can make decisions if something unexpected happens to one of the candidates.

You could have individual states adopt different voting systems for their primaries and just use them to allocate delegates. For instance, instead of allocating delegates proportionally to anyone with more than 15% of the vote using first-past-the-post ballots like we do now, allocate delegates proportional to their candidate's total score, perhaps with some cut-off (like, no delegates awarded if your score average is less than 4 out of 10) or a rule that only the top N candidates are awarded delegates.

So the system would be bad because people voted for the wrong guy?

A system where a minority of voters with strongly-held opinions overrules a majority of voters with weakly-held opinions is a bit counter to the principles of democracy, I think. Or another way of looking at it is that most voting systems grant more influence to strategic voters than honest voters, but score voting (also called range voting) does that to a greater degree than some other systems we could use instead.

(One of the reasons I prefer approval voting over score voting is that there's less of a gap between strategic voting and honest voting. Everyone is forced to give a maximalized yes/no vote for each candidate rather than casting a lukewarm vote.)

Unfortunately, Approval Voting cannot deliver the best candidate for the job when analyzing the Bayesian Regret. Only minimized best via Score Voting.

I assume you're referring to the graph that appears (among other places) on this page[1] about 3/5ths of the way down?

You're right that score voting does better in that simulation when everyone votes honestly. But if everyone votes strategically, then score voting and approval voting are the same. (This makes sense because tactical score voting is mostly just score voting with maximalized votes, which is basically the same as approval voting.)

Using approval voting basically forces everyone to use tactical voting. Which might be less good in some metrics but it ensures that all voters have basically the same amount of influence, as opposed to tactical voters having more influence than honest voters. I think having equal influence is pretty important.

I'm not sure if this simulation that everyone likes to cite has been run more recently with STAR voting. That would be interesting.

[1] https://ncase.me/ballot/

I'd say metagame would come down fast and everyone that voted would be voting with 'strongly-held opinions', so the real issue is probably just how strongly can you be for one candidate and limit that.

Score voting results in tactical voting where only the most extreme scores are given, instead of revealing their "true preferences" on a grayscale. In fact, those who provide honest scores are disadvantaged, because the deciding-power of their vote would be lower than those who purposely exaggerate their scores to the extremes!

It works in situations where there are few voters and their votes are all publicly visible.

Score Voting is the superset of all voting methods. It is quite alright that some people would vote that way, an equivalent style to an Approval ballot. It is difficult to argue that more resolution is worse -- we desire more resolution in our phone screens and monitors, because we get a clearer picture.

HN is populated by many software engineers, we understand the principle of GIGO - garbage in, garbage out. Voters can be asked for an ordinal preference order or for approval. 99% of voters have these and can explain their choices (which isn't to say their choices are necessarily logical/rational).

Voters do not as a rule have a mathematical score for a candidate, excluding the case where they score equivalently to Approval.

Take a candidate which you did not vote for but do not hate, is your score for the candidate 1, 2 or 3.141529? Can you give an explanation for your score and why it is that exact value and not a bit higher or lower?

Asking people for information they do not have (a mathematical score for each candidate) leads to GIGO - unless just about everyone does Approval, in which case Score's just a more complicated, worse version of Approval.

While it's not my first choice, we could offer multiple versions of ballots that were translated to Score Voting canonical ballots. If you want the deeper resolution, you can have it. If you want to do FPTP you can have a ballot that masks a Score Voting ballot and simply votes just one person a 99. If you want an approval voting ballot, it masks a Score Voting ballot giving all your choices a 99. Score Voting is still the superset, the appearance would be cosmetic -- however, I am willing to concede that confusing ballot appearances do affect outcomes.

Score voting will increase polarization to levels unseen even in 2020 America, for no practical benefit over approval voting.

Score's tactical logic leads to most voters giving the extreme scores to every candidate, and psychology means all these voters will end up justifying it to themselves - leading to extreme polarization when the losing side is convinced the winner has no redeeming qualities whatsoever. The last presidential term showed what happens than, now repeat that for all levels of government all the time.

Worst of all, some very few people will actually give partial scores. Why is that bad? Well, what's the most common way to calculate scores today? There are various single-issue and ideological organizations which put out scores measuring representatives. Just about all these organizations represent absolutist POVs regarding their single issue or ideology (e.g. the NRA has a score for every representative). So to get a high score, representatives are pushed to extremes.

I'd score Trump a zero.

Single transferable vote is significantly better, 0-99 and everyone would just give the “least worst option” 99

Arrow got a Nobel prize for showing that ranked ballots are bad, mainly for the reason that when a candidate is dropped the results can change. The absolute best winner is not chosen consistently. Score Voting is the superset of all voting methods. Our Union deserves the best.

Arrow said “Most systems are not going to work badly all of the time. All I proved is that all can work badly at times.”

I think we’ve proved that FPTP works badly a lot of the time, time to try something else

> Likewise this time around, nobody I have talked to seriously voted for Joe Biden on his own merits. They voted for him because he's not Donald Trump.

Yeah, same here, but that's because we live in progressive bubbles. Dem voters chose Biden over many other candidates that progressives preferred.

> We need better candidates who generate real support and appeal other than just not being their opponent. Not sure how to get there.

You cannot imagine someone actually liking Biden without being soft in the head. And other people cannot imagine someone liking Trump without being racist. But these assumptions prove nothing except lack of imagination.

People need to understand how heterogenous the US is...in every way. We have to regain the ability to see the world from other people's perspectives and extract the grain of truth from those perspectives.

I disagree, Democratic voters again did not get to choose their candidate. A candidate was selected for them. Even better one of the worst candidates during the primary was penciled in as Vice President; she is a good little party follower having the approved opinion and not one of her own.

If anything it shows that the party rules above all.

The lesson of Trump is that we have two political parties so immune to outside challenge it took someone of his level of money, fame, and more, to beat both parties and make no mistake, be beat both.

Hence going forward, when Congress tells you they want to pass laws preventing certain monies from entering politics always understand it is to prevent anyone challenging their two party rule

>>I disagree, Democratic voters again did not get to choose their candidate. A candidate was selected for them.

This is quite wrong. Biden crushed Bernie in the primaries.

No, Biden had never won a single primary (while Bernie had multiple during this campaign alone) until SC, when most every other candidate dropped out while endorsing Biden in a span of a week or so in a (successful) attempt to deny Bernie the nomination.

And then there are things like the Iowa caucus where Mayor Pete decided to crown himself winner before one was officially declared (gee, sound familiar?) because the Iowa Dem party crapped the bed.

Bernie only won a single primary, Nevada, prior to South Carolina. He lost in Iowa and tied in New Hampshire. Just prior to Super Tuesday several candidates who were polling in single digits dropped out and endorsed Joe Biden. Maybe it was because they agreed with Joe's policies, maybe the party put a gun to their head, and maybe they just didn't like Bernie.

I would have thought that's clear when Hillary used campaign funds while running against Bernie https://www.politico.com/story/2016/07/dnc-leak-clinton-team...

Democratic voters again did not get to choose their candidate

Didn't Joe Biden get most of the votes in the primaries? After Super Tuesday he was leading in delegates, and once the race came down to 1-on-1 with Bernie he did even better. This tells me there is significant support for very liberal policies like those from Bernie, but the party as a whole is still much closer to the center.

Bernie was the front-runner until the week where every single candidate simultaneously dropped out to endorse Biden. I think this is what people mean when they say the establishment rose to fuck Bernie when it became clear that he could actually realistically win the nomination.

Biden wasn't my first choice the primaries, but if Bernie had more support he could have beaten Biden in a head-to-head race. Though I think part of the cause for this accusation is that Bernie does well among non-voters. Thinking back to 2016 Clinton clearly had more support in the primaries than Bernie, but Bernie had a lot of support from people who didn't normally vote. So it does make sense that when Bernie lost, that group didn't feel represented by the democratic party.

This isn't a hypothetical problem. Trump is dead politically, but the dissatisfaction that made his brand of populism electable is still there.

And if Biden - or Harris - don't take steps to address it by 2024, someone much worse than Trump will appear.

And they may well win.

The reality is voters on both sides vote how the various media outlets tell them to vote. There's plenty of media noise, but the available narratives are carefully curated, and voters don't get to generate their own from the grassroots upwards.

This has become far more dangerous as Facebook and the various other online platforms have moved towards microprofiling and microtargetting.

This was a huge issue during the Brexit campaign, when disingenuous single-issue ads aimed at very narrow demographics with specific vulnerabilities put the result over the top.

Trump spent more on social in this election than Biden did, and the result was a good collection of surprise wins in states like Florida, and the second biggest voter turnout in US history.

If Trump had been even slightly more competent and focused and if Covid hadn't been happening this would have been a bloodbath for progressives.

The reality is voters on both sides vote how the various media outlets tell them to vote

I think it's a viscous feedback loop. Media outlets construct & present narratives based on what they believe will get people to tune-in/click etc., mostly a financial consideration. That content guides the audience's beliefs in the direction of the narrative. Media outlets are then locked in to that narrative, and must present content that coincides with or pushed it even further, and the cycle continues.

I agree with you on social media. I think Facebook targeting engagement has led to an extremely damaging level of polarization.

America has a ton of issues, but I think some democratic reforms are critically important. Voting rights are being attacked, and I don't think most people are represented well by the two party system.

That perspective seems like it is just trivializing the reality that most Democrats do not like Bernie’s policies. It’s not some phantom scary “establishment” cabal rising up, which makes it sound like something unethical happened. Rather, it’s just sensible consolidation that is part of the process.

The Democratic Party apparatus, particularly the DNC, logically lends its support to Democratic candidates, individuals who over time have demonstrated their loyalty to the Party. Like it or not, that's how political parties work. Sanders is not a Democrat. By all rights, he should've run as an Independent. If he had been able to successfully execute control over the party by appealing to the rank and file, good for him. But it is unreasonable to have expected the DNC lifers to have actively lent support to what was effectively a hostile takeover attempt. I don't see that as fuck Bernie, just as self-preservation.

But it is unreasonable to have expected the DNC lifers to have actively lent support to what was effectively a hostile takeover attempt.

I viewed it much the same. I also saw it as very similar to what President Trump did with the Republican party in 2016: Tracking his registered political affiliations and statements of political belief over the years put him all over the map. And he also faced similar pushback, probably more forceful, from the Republican establishment as Bernie did from the Democrats. I think that reveals a deep division between traditional the conservative platform and everyday Republicans, or at least that everyday Republicans were deeply cynical about the desire & ability of the Republican establishment to deliver.

Again, probably a similar mechanic was underlying support for Bernie. Which means (no surprise) that a very large group of Americans are completely disillusioned with the political establishment.

> Bernie was the front-runner until the week where every single candidate simultaneously dropped out to endorse Biden

That's not true.

https://i.imgur.com/EnsuC7N.jpeg

https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2020-presidential-delegat...

The field narrowed after the results of the contests on 3/3. Biden had the lead at the end of that day and it only grew after that.

It's more likely they endorsed him out of self interest because it was clear he would win and they wanted to be considered for the VP pick or other posts. Conspiracy is much less likely and viewing it through that lens (without evidence) is more a reflection or one's beliefs than the actual events.

Bernie was still behind in delegates at that point, though he might have been picking up steam. He wasn't really ever a majority choice though: With the exception of Vermont and North Dakota, when he placed first in a primary it was with a plurality but not a majority of the vote. Collectively a majority seemed to be voting for a moderates, but the moderate vote was split among multiple people. When those other moderates dropped, that entire moderate majority coalesced around a single person. At least that's my interpretation when adding up % of voted by candidate.

However, I think a majority might not have wanted a moderate. They might have wanted a progressive, but voted moderate because their priority was to get Trump out, and they believed (maybe falsely, we'll probably never know for sure) that a more progressive candidate could beat Trump. The party establishment was certainly pushing that narrative.

I think Americans will super liberal or progressive policies, but not the labels that come with them. Socialist, atheist and defund the police is still not how you get elected in the USA.

I think this is spot on.

The way people in the US behave resembles atheists more than they resemble any religion. Generally people don't want to defund the police, including African Americans (people want police to be more accountable and empathetic), and really no mainstream politician is very close to socialism in this country. But its just the labels that stick.

The term "socialism" is thrown around a lot but I think it is most often used as a shorthand way to describe the desire to use the power of the federal government to address issues as contrasted with the desire to avoid using the power of the federal government. Broadly speaking "big government" approaches vs "limited government/free market" approaches, specifically with respect to the federal government.

In generally I think state government solutions don't receive enough attention in policy discussions.

This is so important. Symbols matter and these words carry too much symbolic baggage.

A rose by any other name would smell as sweet, so let us just rename the rose and get on with it.

Biden absolutely dominated the primaries once the voting began.

The staggered nature of the primaries combined with the inanity that is FPTP makes for poor fairness. ~No one will vote for their preferred candidate if they find out he/she is doing poorly - they’ll vote for the most electable candidate that they can stomach.

I think that's the point of the comment you replied to. Biden did quite badly early on in the primaries, and only after a large chunk of other candidates dropped out and threw their weight behind him with endorsements that he did significantly better. In a sense, the party has made up its mind on the candidate it wants.

By 'quite badly early on in the primaries' you mean the first two where Pete won one and then tied Bernie in the state next to Bernie's home state, and then one that Bernie won, right? After that was South Carolina where Joe won handily, then Super Tuesday where Joe basically ran the table and never looked back.

The party did not decide, the people clearly indicated who they wanted. They wanted the person who could win the general election. Turns out they were a lot smarter than you give them credit.

> Yeah, same here, but that's because we live in progressive bubbles.

Biden is a stopgap, he was what was required to get rid of Trump, which was job #1, a P1 if you will. A "progressive bubble" or other media-created marketing phrase is not a factor, it's a pure transaction: Trump has to go. People rose to the occasion this time.

> You cannot imagine someone actually liking Biden without being soft in the head

This isn't a fair interpretation of what they were saying, nor realistic. People are going to lament that a big part of Biden's support was functional, in order to get Trump out, but people complain about unchangeable things all the time. It's not significant.

I think the point is, if everyone agrees Biden is just a stopgap, why didn't they just pick someone better?

For him to be a "stopgap" at all must imply that some Democrats today see him as the best end-game option, and we just need to "convince" them to be even more progressive

If the risk is that someone like Romney, or McCain get in, I think progressives would feel more free to take risks and pick a more progressive candidate. To most progressives, while they're not fans of Romney and revisionism aside weren't fans of McCain, having one of them in power feels less dangerous than having Trump in power.

If next election they're up against an attempt for Trump to get back in, then yes, you could expect a large progressive turnout for a Biden re-election. But if he's against a more moderate republican, I don't think you'll see the turnout that happened this year repeat, which may turn out to be a problem for his supporters.

Note that Biden has already indicated that he would prefer to serve only a single term. Of course that doesn't mean he definitely won't be running in 2024, but if true then the race will be more wide open than a typical incumbent candidacy.

He's nearly 78 now. He'd be 81 next time around, and his campaign this election cycle could hardly be called vigorous. The electorate will be younger also. I don't think there will be much appeal even as an incumbent unless his accomplishments in office are remarkable.

Assuming republicans control the senate, it would be practically impossible for Biden to accomplish anything remarkable.

It seems the best we can hope for is a president who doesn't try to fire CDC experts and who doesn't appoint far right judges.

His campaign was 'not vigorous' as you called it because of the pandemic

Do you have a source for him saying that? I can only find that he says he intends to be a “transitional candidate” to the next generation.

A search for "biden single term" brings up the first result as this: https://www.politico.com/news/2019/12/11/biden-single-term-0...

"Former Vice President Joe Biden’s top advisers and prominent Democrats outside the Biden campaign have recently revived a long-running debate whether Biden should publicly pledge to serve only one term, with Biden himself signaling to aides that he would serve only a single term. While the option of making a public pledge remains available, Biden has for now settled on an alternative strategy: quietly indicating that he will almost certainly not run for a second term while declining to make a promise that he and his advisers fear could turn him into a lame duck and sap him of his political capital. According to four people who regularly talk to Biden, all of whom asked for anonymity to discuss internal campaign matters, it is virtually inconceivable that he will run for reelection in 2024, when he would be the first octogenarian president. “If Biden is elected,” a prominent adviser to the campaign said, “he’s going to be 82 years old in four years and he won’t be running for reelection.” The adviser argued that public acknowledgment of that reality could help Biden mollify younger voters, especially on the left, who are unexcited by his candidacy and fear that his nomination would serve as an eight-year roadblock to the next generation of Democrats."

If Biden is alive in 2024, I could absolutely see the Democratic party running him as a candidate and losing.

Thank you, I needed a laugh.

> if everyone agrees Biden is just a stopgap, why didn't they just pick someone better?

Because the electoral college distorts what "someone better" means. Democrats picked someone more popular than Trump in 2016 and lost. Biden's home state is the swing state of Pennsylvania. Home state advantage is generally fairly minor, but in this case the margins are so close that it might have actually made the difference (obviously we'll have to wait for the final count, which we won't have for days).

Exactly right about the electoral college distortion. If we went by popular vote we could probably have had someone much more progressive. But we have to thread the needle of the electoral college.

The electoral college advantage doesn’t systematically advantage republicans: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-cage/wp/2014/04/2.... Don’t forget that Obama’s “blue wall” states are smaller than average and benefit from the EC. And they’re historically quite progressive economically. Obama in fact had a structural EC advantage in 2012: https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/did-democrats-get-lucky...

> In fact, Mr. Obama would probably have won the Electoral College even if the popular vote had slightly favored Mitt Romney.

> If all states had shifted toward Mr. Romney by 5.3 percentage points, Mr. Obama would still have won Colorado and therefore the Electoral College — despite losing the national popular vote by 1.5 points.

Losing the upper Midwest produces an EC disadvantage for Democrats, but that’s not an impediment to a traditional progressive candidate in the Sanders mold.

Moreover, the EC gives an average of a few point advantage one way or the other. It’s not enough for a “much more progressive” candidate. You can see this by looking at the House popular vote, which is proportional (and not affected by gerrymandering). Republicans regularly win the House popular vote: https://fivethirtyeight.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/chat-...

> The electoral college advantage doesn’t systematically advantage republicans

Indeed, which is why one would hope that solutions for moving beyond this creaky, janky system would be embraced in a bipartisan fashion. Sadly, the approach that is furthest along in that regard, the NPVIC (which I have issues with, but is still better than the current system) has so far only been enacted exclusively by states that Biden carried this year. Regardless of the fact that the electoral college does not inherently benefit the Republican party in the long term, the events of the past 20 years have sufficed to make them adamantly against any reform here.

The problem was that more progressive policies were divisive even within the party, and out of the more moderate candidates running Biden has the most name recognition and probably the most "we know we're going to get".

If by "someone better" you mean more progressive, then you're exactly right: you need to convince a portion of the moderate majority to be more progressive. That is a difficult & long term process.

> more progressive policies were divisive even within the party

divisive within the Party, but not among the constituency.

"more progressive policies" is a broad term, could mean anything from "Medicare for All" to "Abolish the Police", and some of these are much more divisive than others.

"abolish the police" isn't a policy

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

"Yes, We Mean Literally Abolish the Police"

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/12/opinion/sunday/floyd-abol...

if you read past the headline, the actual policy it proposes is to reduce the number of police and cut the budget.

If you read further the author says

"I’ve been advocating the abolition of the police for years"

"We don’t want to just close police departments"

"People like me who want to abolish prisons and police"

i mean again, advocating for abolition isn't a policy proposal.

take for example angela davis, the most prominent prison abolitionist today. she says in this interview (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x3q_qV5mHg0) that there currently isn't a model of a prison-free society, only hints here and there.

Okay, call "abolish the police" a long-term goal instead of an immediate policy. It (and its shorter term policies like "abolish half the police by defunding them") are still very divisive among the electorate.

you can't abolish half of a thing. abolishing half of slavery still leaves you with slavery. you're confused about some basic terms here.

and if you're using a broad enough notion of divisiveness, then anything is divisive, including tan suits and dijon mustard. so divisiveness as you're using the term is not a property of the relation between the constituency and the political object (policy/slogan/etc.), but it's instead a tool that social engineers can use to create antagonism between populations.

for example, abortion appears to be an extremely divisive issue because of the way the issue has been socially engineered, but if you look at the data, a large majority of americans agree on the vast majority of abortion cases. it's the edge cases and disagreements on the rationale for/against abortion that are used to create the appareance of divisiveness.

> you can't abolish half of a thing. abolishing half of slavery still leaves you with slavery

Then I guess the abolitionists failed because slavery still exists.

You're right, abolition of slavery won't be achieved until settler colonial slave states like the united states are dismantled and replaced with a fair society. However, the abolitionists did accomplished many great notable things, such as killing a bunch of racist southerners.

I'm not sure who you are referring to when you say constituency. What is your definition of that term? Mine is that all people are part of the constituency: A person elected president is responsible for leading everyone; A person elected to the House or Senate is responsible for representing everyone in their district/state, not just their party. My definition of "party" are all of the people registered as Democrats.

I think you're right that some aspects of more progressive policies are not divisive for the country: I think most people would agree that everyone should have healthcare. I think most people would agree that everyone should have access to education. I'm not sure I even look at those sorts of things as "progressive". The progressive part is how those things are structured and how they are paid for.

As I think about it further, I think there's also a possibility that a majority of Democrats do believe in progressive policies on things like this, but when selecting a candidate they opted for one someone not as progressive because they didn't think the progressive one had as much chance of getting elected. Their calculation, perhaps a bit cynical, was that the less progressive person that gets elected can do more than the very progressive candidate that loses.

democratic voters tragically did respond to the fearmongering of establishment propagandists, but the problem for them isn't in the electoral sphere. it's on the ground where people are facing mass evictions, a mental health and suicide epidemic, poor communities facing a "dark winter", and so on. the moderate wing of the democratic party choosing not to protect vulnerable communities won't make these problems go away.

Weren't the Democrats trying to craft a new aid package for the "dark winter"? I thought they were simply blocked by the Whitehouse/Senate who probably didn't see cooperation on this as beneficial to their election prospects... and a Whitehouse that couldn't seem to make up its mind on the issue.

I agree establishment leadership is skeptical of more progressive policies, probably not for philosophical reasons but for a more cynical calculations that support isn't good for their political prospects.

you're talking about the covid relief package that pelosi refused to pass because it would've helped trump's chances at reelection.

I'm not sure that package would have done very much. I suppose it would have been better than nothing though, and another one could have been passed after the election. You're probably right that Pelosi calculated that a compromise wasn't in her interest, but I'm also not sure if it was in the Republican's interest: I think both sides would claim victory and it would have come down to whoever was able to spin it the most to their benefit.

Unfortunately, now that the election is over I also don't think it will be easy to get anything done. The GOP is not going to want to give Democrats an early "win", and will likely pivot to their "but the deficit!" talking points now that they're out of office. I think things will need to get much much worse before a compromise is possible.

I honestly don't think any of the Dems in the primary except him would've beat Trump given how important WI, MI, and PA were.

Na, those votes were coming regardless of the loon running

Beto, hands down. But he never stood a snowball’s chance because of how stupid the FPTP-imposed primaries are. You need to out-left or out-right all other candidates your party puts forward to get their backing for the real elections. It’s a recipe for disaster.

>You need to out-left or out-right all other candidates your party puts forward to get their backing for the real election.

How can you claim that when Biden was one of the least left leaning democratic candidates?

Well, in practical terms, you have to be able to win the Democratic primary to be the Democratic candidate. There’s no “they” that could have picked someone better, and the people that you or others may have thought were better did far worse than Biden in the primaries.

Sure, but it's pretty clear that certain candidates get more backing from the DNC mothership and the media than others. In turn, this affects voter perception.

As un-democratic the electoral college is, the US parties do a much better job in picking candidates in a democratic manor. Especially when compared to Germany, our parties run their party leaders as top candidates for chancellor. Party heads are elected by party members, but in practical terms any results under 85% plus percent is already seen as a lack in confidence.

So yeah, who ever wins party primaries is the candidate the parties base wants. Obviously, distorted by money, but still.

They did pick someone - him. Let's not forget he was the nominee because he won the primaries meaning he was considered the best of the contestants. Not everybody is as progressive as Sanders and not everybody liked Sanders tone

I have a feeling that if you somehow ran a ranked-choice vote-transfer algorithm, you'd still end up with Biden as the candidate fewest people take issue with. The eternal problem of the left is getting people to agree on the specifics of how things should be improved.

People only rose to the occasion by chance. Had there not been corona and had the economy still been booming, Trump would probably have won. Surely it is possible to find someone out of 300 million people with the same qualities as Biden -- not a big ask, since his #1 quality is that he's not divisive -- but 30 years younger?

His #2 quality is probably having been Obama's Vice President. The majority liked Obama though to vote him in twice, and Biden represents more of that.

That's a good point.

I would chime in with that's the entire point, another 8 years of Obama-esque policy.

Biden will be 86 in 8 years...

oh god no, not more of that

For democrats who chose him during his primaries, his #1 quality was that he was a moderate/centrist. The democrat party isn't only made up of leftists/progressives. There were a considerable number of democrats who were scared of Bernie and turned off by his supporters.

For GOP/Independents who voted Biden, his #1 quality was also that he was moderate and a close second was that he was not divisive.

> People rose to the occasion this time.

A bit nitpicky, but I think it's important: "people" cannot be really considered responsible for the win. If just 1.5 voters every hundred had flipped side, Trump would have won. At this point, with the results so close, who wins the elections is basically a coin toss- which arguably isn't a terrible thing in democracy, as it means that the parties compete fiercely and almost optimally for votes. But still in the end the outcome of these elections seems due mostly to chance.

Note that due to the electoral college, it's not as close as you make it seem. On the national level the current votes is 51% for Biden vs 43% for Trump, that's quite a large difference.

On the NYT website it says 74.5 million votes for Biden vs 70.3 million for Trump. It makes about 51% vs 48% (without counting the other candidates).

I think Biden was well selected to be a candidate that everyone could tolerate.

But especially given his age and how much focus there has been on suggesting (perhaps falsely) that his health isn't good, a lot more weight has been given to Harris.

Harris did poorly in the primaries and I think even her supporters should be able to see why many people find her to be an extremely undesirable pick (it's not exactly the right political climate to nominate a self-described "Top Cop", and even Biden has a fairly "law and order" voting history, compared to typical for democrats).

I know people who hate trump who claimed to have voted for him or just not voted, because they believe that electing Biden/Harris would create a substantial risk of either Harris becoming president or forcing the dems to nominate Harris in the next election (and thus excluding viable candidates that actually reflect their views)... and that for all the find wrong about Trump, he's at least substantially ineffectual.

> Biden has a fairly "law and order" voting history, compared to typical for democrats

Keeping in mind that Biden hasn't been a senator since 2009, during his time in the senate he was dead center among senate Democrats in terms of liberal/conservative votes cast (i.e. both more liberal and more conservative than 50% of his fellow Democratic senators): https://voteview.com/person/14101/joseph-robinette-biden-jr . Of course as noted this was over a decade ago, and what passed for centrist back then might not today.

In case you're wondering how this metric pans out for the most recent Senate: https://voteview.com/congress/senate/115/text , which (according to this metric) lists the four most liberal senators (as shown by their senate votes) as, in order, Warren, Harris, Booker, and Sanders.

I agree, but I don’t think one needs to be particularly overall right-leaning to be right-leaning in a specific facet, and GP was specifically speaking about (and only about) the law and order aspect.

I had that view of Trump for the first 3 years or so - hey, he’s not just divisive but also incompetent so he’s not going to get anything substantial done! So nothing to worry about right?

But then COVID hit, and I’m fairly certain that having coordinated, science-based leadership in the highest levels of government would have spared us from quite a lot of suffering. So much for rooting for ineffectual.

> But then COVID hit, and I’m fairly certain that having coordinated, science-based leadership in the highest levels of government would have spared us from quite a lot of suffering. So much for rooting for ineffectual.

Yeah, COVID has really emphasized for me (a recovering libertarian) how important it is to have functioning and competent government institutions (along with other social institutions).

So you rejected libertarianism because of ineffective government response? Seems an odd position.

The COVID response by the government further illiterates why libertarianism is correct.

Having an authoritarian government is not a solution to a pandemic, and it is sad that once again people are willing to sacrifice essential liberty for promised safety

Ofourse as the truism goes, you will lose both in that deal...

The cult of personality that has wrapped itself around the office of President of the United States is down right terrifying.

> The COVID response by the government further illiterates why libertarianism is correct.

The US COVID response doesn't illustrate that any more than Soviet elections [1] illustrated that voting is a sham, which is to say it doesn't illustrate it at all. A particular bad implementation, especially one that was arguably sabotaged, doesn't disprove a concept. A laissez faire response to an epidemic is a bad one, and the US response has been pretty close to that in many areas.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vFjh8lBB6T4

I would love to know what what you think a proper governmental COVID Response would be? What state do you think the national model should have been like.

Also Do you believe COVID concerns should out weigh all other things including Economics, and even other health conditions (for example people stopped getting screenings for almost all other health conditions during this time. Cardiologists have come out extremely worried about the drop off in their health segments)

Finally Do you believe all rights can be suspended provided the executive of the government declares a state of emergency? What if any limits on this declaration should there be or this the declaration the sole purview of the executive

> Also Do you believe COVID concerns should out weigh all other things including Economics, and even other health conditions (for example people stopped getting screenings for almost all other health conditions during this time. Cardiologists have come out extremely worried about the drop off in their health segments)

> Finally Do you believe all rights can be suspended provided the executive of the government declares a state of emergency? What if any limits on this declaration should there be or this the declaration the sole purview of the executive

Of course not, but you're engaging in over-the-top all-or-nothing hyperbole, even if you don't realize it, so your question isn't reasonable.

Libertarianism seems far more reasonable than it actually is when you mainly compare it to straw men.

Imagine a worse scenario where he needs to address some escalated global incident that could lead to world War. People only see that he didn't quite f it up like they thought he would up until covid. That's not ineffectual. It was damn luck.

I don't disagree, but I also see how its easy to see how other voters don't agree: E.g. look at the performance of other nations. You can make comparisons where the US doesn't look bad (or even looks good) depending on what comparisons you make and what time windows you choose.

Similarly, if you emphasize the importance of the errors of science-driven bodies, the amount of flip-flopping in expert advice (e.g. over masks), or the specific state responses in states that have local administrations more like what we would have hoped for, you could make an argument that it would not have made that much difference. Maybe not a correct argument, but at least one where reasonable and informed people could have a debate over it.

There is a lot of noise in pandemic impact, a lot of noise in how people perceive pandemic impact, and there hasn't been much time to reach robust scientific conclusions on the impact of different policies. I wouldn't argue that differences between policies aren't real, but just that they're (currently) easily spun or discounted.

There is, also, I think a good argument to be made to cautious about science based leadership in general. The tremendous power of science is that it gives you the power to defy tradition, popular will, and even common sense and make the world dramatically better, because its predictions were right. But when science is wrong, it can also be used to defy reason and common sense and bring tremendously bad results. E.g. there has been more than one genocide carried out in the name of "science". Rejecting science is not the answer, but nor is blindly following whatever is passing for science in your civilization at any moment. :)

It’s a great environment to be a self-described “top cop.” This summer, more than half of Latinos polled said they were more worried about the “breakdown of law and order” than “systemic racism.” Nobody except the progressive wing of the Democratic Party sees being a prosecutor as a liability.

I think it's a liability in that the democrats best shot at the presidency are candidates that have progressive credentials without being too progressive themselves.

Kamala is very progressive in a way that's a huge liability in the general, but because she's a prosecutor she doesn't get as much credit as she should in the primary. And I think in that sense it can be a liability.

I think ineffectual is wrong here, re: Trump. By State Department metrics alone, we pay more now for less people and less passports processed than before Trump took office. Anecdotally, we tend to have less State department representation at trade and industry conferences around the world. It's not very clear to my why we're spending more on the State department under Trump than any year under Obama if we're doing less with it...

You can compare the financial reports on their website: https://www.state.gov/plans-performance-budget/agency-financ... and https://2009-2017.state.gov/s/d/rm/rls/perfrpt/index.htm

I legitimately like Biden. I think he was the best candidate for the current moment.

People have a tendency towards "visionary" politicians, who arrive with agendas and strive to make them reality. Politicians who "flip flop" are derided, because changing your position is a sign that you never had real ideals.

But I think we have this backwards—in a representative democracy, the job of a politician is to represent the electorate! The ideal politician, then, would be an empty vessel, who was willing to move to wherever the people are.

And that's exactly who Biden is. He's always been a centrist democrat, but his "center" moves alongside his party. Biden also believes that governing is fundamentally about building coalitions, not smothering the other side.

I am worried that Republicans may simply be unwilling to make any deals, no matter how hard Biden tries or what compromises he's willing to make. But, if anyone can do it—and that's a very, very big "if"—then Biden probably can.

Exactly. Would I have loved to see Bernie/Warren as a president? Yes.

Do I think a boring centrist president is for the best right now to deal with this pandemic and the upcoming recession? Also yes.

It’s likely that Biden’s centrism is going to result in him cowing to Republican pushes for austerity or limited, corporate bailouts that further exacerbate inequality and stoke populist discontent. I’m not sure that these impulses will work well in the context of the pandemic or it’s economic effects.

I agree with the second sentence, I'm hopeful the first isn't true (although I see the worry). The stories I've been reading about who he's using as economic advisors give me hope.

But it all has to get through Congress too.

It’s been reported in multiple outlets that his top pick for the Commerce department is Meg Whitman, a Republican who has also drove several companies into the ground. Trump also demonstrated that nothing has to get through Congress with his appointment of no-vote-required acting heads, for which he suffered zero consequences.

Oh boy, then what's the point of having representatives at all? Just put every line in the budget to a vote. Personally, I want someone smart and rational who can put in the work to understand what's going on, listen to subject matter experts, and make tough calls based on what's right for the country. I don't want an "empty vessel", but I'm also not super concerned with someone's political website perfectly matching up with everything I happen to believe at the moment.

> Personally, I want someone smart and rational who can put in the work to understand what's going on, listen to subject matter experts, and make tough calls based on what's right for the country.

Oh, I didn't mean to imply that we should have a robot! Yes, leaders need to listen to experts and advisors and make thoughtful decisions. But they should also stay in tune with the electorate.

Perhaps a politician is naturally inclined towards removing regulations so that it's easier to grow a business. That's a reasonable baseline position—but if there's suddenly an up-swell of support for strong environmental regulations to combat global warming, it's completely reasonable to change your position in response to the will of the country.

Ah, gotcha. Agreed!

>>I am worried that Republicans may simply be unwilling to make any deals

Recent history has shown the democrats are also unwilling to make any deals... See the last Stimlus where Republicans wanted to deal for doubling what was already the Largest government expenditure in US history, and the democrats would accept nothing less than 4x that plus several poison pills that had nothing at all do with the economic stimulus that was inside the so called "hero's act"

The problem with the division we have now, is Republicans / Libertarians and to some extend even Union/Blue Dog Democrats have a VERY VERY VERY different view of what the proper role of the federal government to the new "democratic socialist" democrats that have seeming taken over the democrat party (the Bernie, Warren, AOC democrats)

When one side wants 0 new spending but will "compromise" and agree to 1.5 Trillion, and the other side will accept nothing less than 4 Trillion in new spending but a fundamental shift in all aspect of American governance, I am not sure what kind of deal can be had there

Well said. Let startups be visionary, the government should be boring and centrist most of the time.

If everything is going well and on track in the government, there shouldn't be any news.The president of the united states shouldn't be the center of attention.

The way the house and senate looks, this is going to be one long 4 years of gridlock. That's the only meaningful thing republicans can do now. Block everything. Make Democrats look as bad as humanly possible, then campaign for a second Trump term (or whoever is not imprisoned at that time, maybe he can tweet-lead the country from prison as well).

I agree, and I am very concerned and scared about that possibility. I hope to god Democrats do everything in their power to win the runoffs in Georgia, but it may simply not be achievable.

America's political system—as it exists right now—is fundamentally broken. Politicians have discovered that it is not in the minority party's interest to compromise, and so they don't, and nothing whatsoever gets done.

I don't blame Biden for any of this, however. But I'm extremely concerned.

> "flip flopping"

A small observation: you know when we had more political compromise? When we had less (de facto) transparency.

Agreements bargained out in a dark room, with everyone announcing the compromise and expressing support for what's agreed, are how American politics worked best.

Radical transparency poisons compromise. By which I mean, non-comprehensive but absolute transparency: everyone knows details, but no one understands the greater picture.

In a largely uneducated democratic electorate (relative to our elected officials, their staffs, and professionals, and leveled as a non-partisan charge against all parties and independents), why do we try to completely usurp our elected representatives' ability to bargain on our behalf?

We, as voters, should judge our politicians on what they do, not what they reject.

The former results in functional compromises we're not thrilled with. The latter results in ideologically pure paralysis.

More depth: https://president.upenn.edu/meet-president/Mindsets-Politica...

Biden is great... maybe not as progressive as other Dem's would like but I am moderate (D) -- and here is the thing, most voters want to pay their bills and not think about politics.

I got really turned off by some of the things Bernie was going for (like voting from prison) which are pointless if you have someone like Trump in office shredding the whole country. I like Bernie as a person but we would have lost Florida by a landslide with him on the ticket.

For this moment, Biden is great, I couldn't be happier.

So, expanding suffrage is just so terrible that it disqualifies Sanders? Unbelievable.

Correct.

It's amazing that in a world where we can all be connected that actual result was we all chose to connect with people who think just like us.

There was only one candidate progressives preferred. Before Super Tuesday, all other candidates dropped out and endorsed Biden. THAT's how it happened.

Bernie maintained a slight chance up until the outbreak of covid where he suspended his campaign specifically out of concern for spreading the disease.

I've had people literally tell me they didn't care if it was Hitler, they would vote for him over Trump.

And they're weren't making a joke, they were dead serious.

You'll find people to say stupid stuff in support of nearly any position. Try not to let it affect your views too much.

They are the equivalent of mindless downvoters on hn, lol.

> Likewise this time around, nobody I have talked to seriously voted for Joe Biden on his own merits.

I voted for Biden because although I didn't always agree with Team Obama/Biden, they weren't 10% as divisive as Donald Trump.

Anecdotes aside, I'd love to see any real data you have on this topic.

I for one love both Joe and HRC as inspiring figures and would have voted for them even if the other candidate was not a bigoted wannabe authoritarian.

I'm curious, what do you find inspiring about Joe Biden?

Life in public service, continuing to keep his family together after the death of his wife, daughter, and more recently, adult son.

Also, my dad was able to get healthcare under the ACA, at a time we really needed it. I don't know how much credit for that belongs to Biden alone, but he was a part of it. He's passed away now, but I'm thankful my mom didn't have to mortgage their home at the time.

Lifelong politicians with a less-than-stellar background as attorneys are inspiring figures to you? Seriously?

I don't think lifelong politician is bad in itself. We did try out someone without a political background, but all he managed to do was normalize racism.

My family lived about 15 minutes outside of Stillwater, OK. Thanks to DJT's rhetoric, my black in-laws only saw open racism and derogatory comments, because of both their race and religion.

I'll pick lifelong politicians over any candidate that wants to make me a third-class citizen.

> less-than-stellar background as attorneys

Yeah, he stands and works for people that have been underestimated, as you've just done.

The final popular vote is going to match Bidens favorables at around 52%. This was not a "poor set of choices", this is a pretty decisive victory.

> We need better candidates who generate real support and appeal other than just not being their opponent. Not sure how to get there.

Stop giving a single person that much power. The US is huge, it made sense back when news took a month to make it across the country, but now it doesn't.

Many of the best-run democracies in the world have a history of unappealing presidents, prime ministers, and so on. You don't need better candidates, you need the President to matter less. You want the seats in the houses to dominate the media, not the figurehead.

(free bonus: it'll also help you get rid of that ridiculous two-party system)

We're supposed to have checks and balances. It seems a few key individuals were terrified of DJT and wouldn't stand up to him. Someday maybe we'll know why.

If checks and balances don't work when you need them most they might as well not exist.

Yes; there's a framework in place but it's not as robust as we would like it to be.

It's not just about Trump, though. The U.S. Congress has been consistently ceding power to the executive for decades. It would be nice to see a shift in the other direction, but I'm not optimistic.

I'd say judges. Now they have them, and with the exception of some die hard Trump converts and supporters I would be surprised if the Republican establishment abandons Trump rather quickly.

As much as I wish that were true, the 70+ million votes mean he’s still powerful within the GOP, reflected by the fact that most Republicans are still being fairly quiet about the need to accept defeat and move on.

Yeah, I might very well be wrong. I did put some thought into it, and came to the conclusion that Trumpism is no ideaology or even a movement. Especially when compared to historical political movements like the national socialists in Germany, fascists in Italy or Russian communism. It looks more like a combination of white supremacists, conservatives, conspiracy theorists, religious hardliners and macho culture. All held together by Trump's reality TV style bling and the GOP establishment.

Trump never was the leader of the GOP, was he? He turned people like Cruz and Graham into devote followers. Mostly, I think, out of fear of Trumps base. People like McConnell were never swayed, these people pushed their policies through. Yes, Trump has his stable 40%. But with him gone, that number will decrease. The GOP will make sure of that, because continuously embrassing Trump after he lost will only hurt them.

Maybe that's wishful thinking, but for now I, as a European, am grateful that the US internal problems are again internal ones and don't affect every country on Earth anymore. I am also glad that the incoming admin already now seems a lot better prepared and organized to fight COVID-19 and its effects. Because that alone will safe lives. And maybe a couple of years of America's absence from Western leadership was a necessary wake up call for the world in general.

Personally, so I hope Biden finds a way to sort stuff like healthcare, police violence, voter suppression, gerrymandering out. Because that can only be good.

Ah, and before I forget, I hope Harris as VP is a sign that they intend to legally clean up Trump's legacy. Letting him get away scott free because he was president once would do as much harm to Democracy than 4 more years of Trump.

> Someday maybe we'll know why.

I really want to know the truth. There were some really vocal never-Trumpers like Graham who flipped to become extremely loyal supporters. Why? What makes someone become that fiercely loyal to a man they absolutely know will not show any loyalty to them? It has to be power, he knows something, I guess. In the case of Graham, it can't be proof that he's gay, that wouldn't surprise anybody, even his own constituents. So it's got to be something far more devastating.

I'm with you. It's almost like a plan is coming together before our eyes. Put people in "power" that can be controlled.

I had no idea that there were rumors about Graham being gay. That may very well upset his constituents. They may be fine as long as they can pretend it's not real, but with overwhelming proof or even a confession that could spell disaster.

I dunno. I am intrigued, though.

> You want the seats in the houses to dominate the media, not the figurehead.

Yea, so if you could let the media know, that would be great.

No, it's the other way around. The president has to matter less means that the politicians in the houses should have more power and the president less.

The media will report on who has the power, simple as that.

> The media will report on who has the power, simple as that.

Sounds like they are the problem then to me. They could just be giving airtime to local representatives instead. Even your local mayor. Fortunately local news isn’t god awful about this, but the media decides what it wants to report on. If they want to report every Tweet that comes out of Trump’s account that is a decision they are making. They could just as easily report on numerous other topics.

The Presidency in the US is a weak position compared to the Prime Minister in the UK. Outside of fighting wars, the President has to convince Congress to give them the authority and money to do anything. Even their Ambassadors have to approved by the Senate.

The prime minister of the UK isn't directly elected.

Neither is the President who is actually elected by the Electoral College and not by a popular majority. States matter A LOT.

Regardless, does this even matter in terms of how politically powerful that single person is?

> Neither is the President who is actually elected by the Electoral College and not by a popular majority.

In this context, the electoral college is an implementation detail. American voters put a checkmark next to their personal preference for president, UK voters do no such thing.

> Regardless, does this even matter in terms of how politically powerful that single person is?

Yes, it makes a huge difference! The PM of the UK stays prime minister as long as they have the confidence of a majority of the House of Commons. The president of the US can only be prematurely removed if they are convicted of serious crime.

Voting is by name and election is by the Electoral College. The indirection remains.

No, House impeachment and Senate trial do not require a serious or indeed any crime. Impeachment is entirely a political matter akin to losing a confidence vote. It carries no penalty besides removal from office. Serious crimes and misdemeanors is not specified and drunkenness has been used (although it was around 1800 or so).

The US president has far more power than the UK Prime Minister, who only leads their party and requires MPs to vote for anything they want to do, as Boris Johnson discovered last year when he failed to get his plans through parliament multiple times.

Far less. Yes, the PM can fail to get a bill passed by his own majority and can even lose a confidence vote. But the President can’t even submit a bill to Congress, and then either or both houses of that Congress can be of the opposite party. Even the Senate can kill legislation or appoints by failing to reach a supermajority over a filibuster.

Perhaps less (or similar) lawmaking power, but the President of the US leads an entire branch of government which comes with a significant amount of power in its own right.

The President leads the Executive Office of the President. The Federal agencies (the Treasury Department, Department of Defense, ...) are themselves led by Cabinet Secretaries nominated by the President and confirmed by the Senate. The Prime Minister appoints Ministers not subject to confirmation by anyone else.

You are about to see how important this confirmation veto is.

I’d go further and say we need the federal government to matter less. I think everyone would be happier if we gave more power to local governments. Power should flow up from the people to the federal government but today it flows downwards. This is why both sides think the other is intolerable.

Because the federal government collects so much of the tax revenue they have so much of the power. Politics is mainly deciding who gets the money. I’d prefer if my state and my town had more to do with it than pols from places I have nothing in common with.

I really wish that the US voting system did not rely on strategic voting, in which voters are basically forced to choose the lesser of two evils.

I am a huge proponent of ranked choice voting, and I donate to https://www.fairvote.org/. Politics have a wide spectrum of opinions and choices, and our government should represent that.

Ranked choice voting (instant runoff) is flawed and confusing to explain to people.

Score voting or approval voting is simpler and has none of the non-monoticity of instant runoff.

Unfortunately every voting system is flawed in some way and strategic voting is still rewarded. Not trying to sound like the current one is an intelligent option though, there are plenty of schemes that are strictly better, like the one you linked.

To me, this is one of the biggest problems with politics these days. Everyone wants a candidate that they like more than they want a candidate who can ably run the country. The fact is that this country is full of people with different ideas, desires and needs. Donald Trump had real support, but only from a single faction. He was president of his base only. Joe Biden on the other hand, is no one's favorite but it should be pretty obvious to anyone that he's qualified and that he can be a president for all of the United States.

The journalists Matt Taibbi and Glenn Greenwald talk about this a lot: the question of what happened with Clinton's loss, why Trump, why these shocks and why the persistent support.

The argument would be that there's a strong elitism that manifested in the Democratic Party, which abandoned some of its core Progressive principles with things like NAFTA (and the never-ending wars). H. Clinton echoed this, with a haughty campaign that called people she should be wooing 'deplorables,' skipping campaigning in key battleground states, and blaming sexism for some of her campaign failures ("it's about me") instead of self-reflection ("How could I have had broader appeal.") Even today you'll often find people reminding you that Trump appeals to people without college degrees. Outside of a pure data context, saying that over and over again suggests that somehow people with degrees are better capable of selecting the leaders of everyone, which is an extremely elitist perspective. So Trump comes along, attacks NAFTA and free trade, speaks plainly and so forth.

Was he making false promises about returning jobs overseas, helping workers and other Sanders talking points? Absolutely. But the self-reflection that needs to happen here (given the loss of two dozen House seats and numerous local upsets) is, what are we doing wrong, here.

To wit:

Exit polls, which can be unreliable, pegged his national support at 32%-35% of the Latino vote. More tellingly were results in certain counties. Starr County, Texas, the county with the highest percentage of Hispanic or Latino voters — above 95% — voted for Hillary Clinton by a 60-point margin in 2016, but gave Biden just a five point win in 2020.

Even more amazing was Trump’s performance among Black voters. The man whose 2016 message to “the blacks” was very nearly a parody of long-ago New York mayoral candidate Mario Procaccino’s pledge that “My heart is as black as yours” must have found a new way to connect. Trump doubled his support with Black women, moving from 4% in 2016 to 8%, while upping his support among Black men from 13% to 18%. Remember, this was after four years of near-constant denunciations of Trump as not just a racist, but the leader of a literal white supremacist movement:

[...]

Trump’s numbers with the LGBTQ community were a stunner also, jumping from 14% to 28%. In September, a dating app for queer men called Hornet ran a survey that showed 45% support for Trump among gay men. Ever since Trump jumped into politics, media observers have rushed to denounce any Trump-related data that conflicts with conventional wisdom, and the Hornet survey was no different. Out magazine quoted a communications professor from Cal Poly Pomona as saying, “To tout a Hornet poll as evidence of LGBTQ support for Trump is clickbaity, sloppy journalism.” Even the Hornet editor scoffed at his own poll, before it all turned out to be true in the election.

Trump even improved his standing among white women, 53% of whom were already pilloried in 2016 for voting for a man who bragged about how you “grab ‘em by the pussy, you can do anything.”

(Matt Taibbi, Which is the Real "Working Class Party" Now?, Nov 2020)

> Outside of a pure data context, saying that over and over again suggests that somehow people with degrees are better capable of selecting the leaders of everyone, which is an extremely elitist perspective.

If you're educated, if you're middle class, like most people here, you want a president - any politician really - to be better than you. You want people smarter than you running the country, because you understand that governing is a boring job that requires skill.

But the second job of the president is to be a role model, to be a good example. And if the president is too good, too perfect, too clean, there's a bunch of people who are going to feel alienated or inferior. And that turns into resentment and hate.

So then Trump comes along. A sexist, racist, buffoon who ignores political correctness. And for a lot of people, having him as a role model makes it easier to keep up, to compare yourself. "He says it like it is", they say. His terribleness gives them permission to be equally terrible. If the president can grab women by the pussy, they can grab women by the pussy.

I don't know if splitting the Head of State from Chief Executive would help solve it, a lot of other countries have split the role, it's not like they have to go together. But it's clear that the governing job has to be moved away from the idiotic popularity contest that is the presidential election so that we can ensure we get people capable of governing in the role.

I think your message missed the point that you're replying to. Or, maybe you've accidentally added a datapoint in the direction of the argument I'm making, which is that it is elitist to believe or desire or suggest or push the notion that people with college or higher degrees are better able to determine leaders than the non-educated. I can expound on this - fundamentally ethical, not rational - argument if desired. I'd argue even that it is an anti-democratic attitude. My argument begins like this. College degrees correlate with wealth, and people without degrees are, on average, lower in the income scale than those with college degrees. 70% of American adults don't have American degrees. Therefore, if you continue down the path of associating college degrees with correct voting, not only are you classist, you're an elitist.

And you've also threw in "not politically-correct" into sexist and racist. As if, political correctness the correct approach, and it's on par with sexism and racism. That actually bothers me a lot, because sexism and racism are often actions, political correctness is speech, and speech is considered on par with action. But it bolsters the arguments that elites don't understand what the polling is saying, many Americans don't like political correctness. It skews right-wing, but there are a large number of economically left-wing people who, also, don't like political-correctness. The polls show it. And the two journalists I quoted above also reference this, and I can send some data if desired.

No, I'm saying that the two camps use radically different criteria for selecting a president, and this is why they don't understand each others argument or motivations.

The educated "elites" use competency as a criteria, and the last four years clear show of incompetency and inability to govern seals the deal for them, and they don't understand how anyone could come to any other conclusion.

Meanwhile, the other camp is using relatability. They see all his flaws, and think that it makes Trump more human, and therefore a better president. They think Biden lacks "energy", and don't understand how anyone could want to vote for him.

Both sides are voting "correctly" according to their own criteria, which is why they're both so incredibly bewildered by how the other side votes. The disconnect isn't because one side is "better" at picking than the other using shared criteria, it's because both sides are using different criteria completely.

OK. I see your point, stated like that.

I think that there's a different argument, though, to explain the two-camp phenomenon. One clue is the locations of the red v. blue voters, and another is in the shifting of certain demographics I highlighted in the comment you replied to above. To recap, we noted that Trump's support among EVERY group that are not white males has gone up, not down. Among white males, Trump's support dropped by 4 points, but among blacks and especially hispanics, it went up.

I think there's a Left and a Right stance on cultural issues, and there's a Left and a Right stance on economic issues. Did you know that if you ask the question: Do you think racism is the most important issue facing America today? .. that the answer Yes is more likely to be seen the higher the degree of the person? So that's a good example of a Cultural Left issue of the present.

Let's take an Economic Left issue, minimum wage. I'm going to cherry pick one from a right-wing state, Florida. They voted to increase the minimum wage this week, which should come as a surprise.

Then you have the polling showing that Americans in large majority support a government healthcare option.

So clearly there is a shift going on here where Democrats are representing Cultural Left issue but, aside from a few Progressives within them, are still Economic Right. Trump had Economic Left talking points, even if he wasn't honest about them. That's why he won those people over. Much of the DNC are Cultural Left but Economic Center or Right, as evidence by Jeff Bezos happily putting BLM slogans on AWS console pages and dedicating much of the Washington Post to race and gender issues.

In summary: upper class liberals favor the establishment DNC because of their focus on the Cultural Left issues, like gender and race, and less educated / poorer and for sure rural cultural groups often favor a Trumpian set of politics. Should we even talk about the right-wing attitudes about hands-off Silicon Valley and Wall St. among mainstream Democrats? And how else would you explain the Republicans suddenly talking anti-Wall St. rhetoric (Tucker Carlson), opposing NAFTA (Trump [ stealing Bernie's talking points ], and taking an economic Populist approach to tariffs and trade?

A prominent propaganda outlet had been slandering Clinton for decades, including 20+ politically guided hearings over an issue caused by the opposition party and an outrageous politically motivated investigation by a supposedly impartial law enforcement agency.

To compare Clinton, who had been a senator and Secretary of State, and cast her as a bad choice compared to a billionaire heir and reality tv star who had no experience is sort of absurd. Politics is a popularity contest and heavily influenced by media and irrational thoughts and behavior.

Biden wasn’t just selected. People voted for him from a pool of 20-ish candidates in the democratic race. Yes, Biden is soft. He is not an entertainer. He probably has many missing qualities that Trump had. However he has almost half a century of experience in Congress driving bills and fighting for his constituents. He was the safe bet.

Out of the 20 candidates, Biden was the most likely to defeat Trump. He is a realist compared to the other candidates. People realized that and voted for him. If Bernie was chosen as the candidate, Trump would have won a second term. The bet panned out.

I feel it’s so easy to live in a Democratic bubble in Washington state. I guess same goes to California. Middle America thinks in a very very different way than we do.

Saying that Bernie was cheated isn’t exactly right but also not exactly wrong. The entire news media apparatus beat him down with a lot of extremely bad faith questions. “Do you support confiscating everyone’s guns?” “Ok so do you think guns are great and everyone should have them?” kinda thing.

That may be half of the problem, but the other half is that I think most people think Bernie was just over promising and that they could never have socialized health care, even though most everyone else has it. Much in the same way that the UK couldn’t imagine a country without socialized healthcare, thus voting in Boris Johnson, the US can’t imagine a country with it. We’re just completely stuck. It’s a shame.

> However he has almost half a century of experience in Congress driving bills and fighting for his constituents. He was the safe bet.

It is extremely notable that Biden is the first candidate in ~30 years to win the presidency and have what I'd call a "serious" career in US Federal politics.

There is circumstantial but somewhat compelling evidence that American's don't like Congressional experience. Congress is despised, their wins are thin, their lies are large and their missteps catastrophic.

Where does 12 years come from? Obama served more years in federal government as a senator than did Bush or Clinton (former state governors).

My mistake, thanks, upped the number of years from 12 to 30.

>If Bernie was chosen as the candidate, Trump would have won a second term. The bet panned out.

Big citation needed. I live in Ohio which went red, you do live in a Democratic bubble but it is different than what you imagine it is.

I guess it really depends on people's preferences on issues. It turned out more people hated Trump as a president than liking his presidency, and Trump supporters should accept such choice.

I weigh more on the culture side, and I'm abhorred that institutions can blatantly teach racism like critical race theory, which discriminates an entire race. I don't believe ACAB. I'm disgusted that Pelosi thinks that people can topple statues if they want, and AOC says "Is anyone archiving these Trump sycophants for when they try to downplay or deny their complicity in the future? ", and the media kept spreading hoaxes like "fine people on both sides". I certainly don't agree that different political views should be moralized. Well, none that that matters now, I guess. American people have decided that left view is what they want, and we should respect and accept the decision.

Meh, we've had lots of unexciting presidents in the past. In my own lifetime the only president I was ever actually excited about was Obama. I think the only thing that does eclipse that excitement IS not having Trump anymore. I disagree with the notion that we need to be excited about a president in general because that's what GOT us Trump. The president should be boring, and move the country forward like a normal, boring job. I yearn for a president that might pop up every 45 days (oh yeah he's the president and he's doing something). Instead of what we just had.

With Trump I feel like we dangerously moved towards having super celebrity presidents that are more interested in being King. I don't think the US should have a King. It should have someone that "PRESIDES" over governments boring ass functions.

Emanuel Macron, président of France since 2017 famously decided that France needed just that, after 10 years of hypermediatisation of his predecessors.

I tend to think he was right.

Needs what? Macron is always in the spotlight.

I'd argue differently. Yes, his name is dropped often in the press.

However, if you compare the number of interviews, speeches, or other public interventions, they have been greatly reduced since the hyperprésidences of Sarkozy and Hollande.

As Dominique de Villepin predicted at the time (2010): a president that is omnipresent, managing everything directly, ends up being isolated, and paradoxically powerless since he is overloaded.

Francois Hollande is the one who campaigned on the fact that he wanted to be a "normal" president, as opposed to Sarkozy's taste for the spotlight.

You are completely right. But that was not what were talking about. When Hollande said he wanted to be "normal" he meant "less snobbish", or more precisely "not like Sarkozy". However, both Hollande and Sarkozy were "reactive", in the media making statements non-stop. Hollande organised a panicky press statement on a Sunday evening, during the apex of the "affaire Leonarda" (explanation for non-French : 'should this 16-year old get to stay in France').

The point that GP was making, was that perhaps a president should not be the only one in the spotlight, and that his interventions should be more "rare". And I simply pointed out that a similar discussion had taken place in France.

Trump is certainly not presidential, but if you look at his policy, he's not less autocratic and has done more to give power to the states than other presidents.

This has been a long-standing trend. Since Jimmy Carter each president has been less qualified than the previous, and more of a celebrity. Barack Obama hadn’t even held a state wide office for a term when he started to run for president. Bush and Reagan had at least been governors. Trump, well we’ll seen how that turned out.

The best thing I can say about biden at the moment is that he’s phenomenally unlikely to continue this cult of personality presidencies that we’ve had.

You know the US has a presidential and not a parliamentary republic right?

Yep. It's just a job. You're supposed to go in there, do the work, and if you didn't do any scandals you get reelected. You're not supposed to be in the spotlight every day. You're not supposed to juice the economy or any of that. Nobody in a democratic government should have any power over a free-market system. If anyone in the government including president is messing around picking winners and losers, that's not free-market or capitalism. That's cronyism. We should be picking the president based on his qualifications, not on his false promises to juice this or that economic sector.

When the framers were originally drafting the Constitution, they were originally planning on calling the President by "His Majesty", but the framers decided not to in order to specifically discourage any association with a King, who rules by fiat, and a President who rules through the consent of the governed.

Democrats can only win at the margin of the electoral college. That margin is not progressive. The coastal Democratic strongholds are always going to vote blue. It makes absolutely no sense to adopt their platform.

Political game theory favors appealing to the margin and the margin is moderate. The margin doesn’t take an extreme stance on social issues a la San Francisco. Quite the opposite: they hear things like “defund the police” and liberals shouting down “all lives matter” and they feel rightfully as if Democrats are threatening their place in society. The progressive politics of exclusion and contempt are totally unfit to the task of winning the electorate just as much as the equivalent conservative extreme.

Why rightfully?

The Democratic Party supports policies that privilege minorities over White people or are even outright racially discriminatory, such as affirmative action.

Affirmative action strives to achieve top down equal results at the expense of privileging certain people on the basis of their biological character. The right solution is bottom up economic stimulus to create equal opportunity, and it should support poor Black/Hispanic Americans as well as poor White Americans (of which there are a sizable and growing number).

You need look no further than the failure of Prop 16 - which sought to remove language from the California Constitution that provides equal protections and consideration to all Californians irrespective of race, gender, etc - to understand how deeply unpopular these sorts of strategies to rectify societal imbalance really are.

While I am personally largely socially liberal, I’ve never understood how Democrats unironically adopted a policy agenda that explicitly preferences certain people on the basis of race, which is quite possibly the worst way to address racial injustice.

Another take is the "moderate" will always vote for their party regardless. By nominating an extremist you get out the vote of those who normally stay at home. Trump was an extreme candidate but the "moderate" Republicans stuck with him. I feel the same thing would have happened with Bernie. The "moderate" Democrat might have shaken their head a bit, but they it wasn't like they would vote for a Republican.

This is the sort of flawed analysis that has likely plagued Democratic strategists and resulted in the party being so needlessly impotent over the past few decades. It doesn’t account for the (problematic) winner-take-all mechanics of the electoral college. Furthermore, according to Gallup in its most recent poll on the issue, 36% of the electorate is independent.

> nobody I have talked to seriously voted for Joe Biden on his own merits.

Okay, I did, so you can't say that anymore. I didn't vote for him in the primary, but I voted for him in the general. There's good stuff here:

https://joebiden.com/joes-vision/

He's a centrist. I expect him to be right in the middle of the Democratic party. It's not as bold as I would like in some places and has things I don't like in others, but it's progress. It's substantive policy proposals to try to make headway on climate change, healthcare, covid19, jobs, and on and on.

Agree with you, but completely understand the original comment. Its true that, similar to previous elections, people aren't voting For. They're voting against.

That said, the reason Biden, despite his substantive proposals, isn't well-liked by Dems is because there seems to be broad disappointment with the Democratic party's failure to nominate and elect someone who is representative of the future we all want. There's a comment in this thread to the tune of "why are only 70 year old men running and winning the presidency in the USA" today. Indeed -- there's so much political failure in our government across the board that it's hard to believe in Biden and the party.

I volunteered as a Democratic poll greeter on Election Day with two women, a woman from Cincinnati who works for the NC government as an economist and an African American woman from New Jersey retired from Johnson and Johnson so she could raise her son who had a hearing disability and “blacks kids with disabilities don’t get the help they need in public schools.”

They both voted for Biden in the primary. I asked them why. Both said “because I thought he had the best chance to win the general.”

The Democrats keep picking centrists because we’re a centrist country, I guess.

I was going to vote for Buttigieg in the primary and voted Warren after he dropped out, but that was a symbolic vote since Biden had already locked it up.

I’ve recently shared my thoughts on how I think we got here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25004795

I was hoping for the Dem ticket that had a more anti-establishment leaning. Biden isn't a nemesis to big-tech like Trump is. He's an established politician who served while the Patriot act was in place. Seems scarier to me for increased surveillance and censorship.

Probably why every tech company told me every day for the last 6 months to vote. I think the thing I’m most excited about with this election is to stop being bombarded by every site to vote!

I think this is down to your bubble. I know quite a few people who want Biden, and said they would have voted for Trump again over Sanders (who was the most notably discussed other person). I know a bunch more people who are as you describe of course.

The DNC had at least _half a dozen_ better candidates this time. They had better candidates last time, too. It's just that the establishment wants to be in control, so they put Biden in (and Clinton last time). If that's not obvious, I don't know what to tell you. The GOP establishment tried that too, with Trump, but they're less organized, so Trump tore them up pretty easily due to his unorthodox campaigning.

I think it's a mistake to dismiss Trump in this way. I see Biden as a very safe and strong choice. Trump was extremely well-liked by his base. I think he is the most magnetic candidate that Republicans have fielded since Regan.

It took a huge effort, a strong and widely palatable candidate, a safe platform, a great campaign, a pandemic, mail-in voting, all the pooled power of the tech companies, and a lot of luck to take him down. Seeing how difficult it was just cements it for me that I am in a bubble and that tens of millions of people have very different worldviews and values than I do. It is very hard to admit to myself that my core values might not be widely shared by others.

I agree. I also have a hunch that you are in a very different bubble than I am, and the worldview that I convey from your bubble does not make sense to me at all. I think I used to be in ”your” bubble when I was a lot younger.

> all the pooled power of the tech companies

Here's a start. It's not an advantage to have these criminals try to tell everyone what to think.

Anybody with half a brain wants to see them in jail, rather than in a position to curate our realities.

She still got quite a lot of votes.

I think that what people don't want to admit is that Trump is what half of America wants. He is the right kind of masculine man and has all the right approaches.

I'm not from the US, and I'm happy with how the election has turned out, but I agree for similar reasons.

I was telling my friend the other day, why is it that the presidency is a competition between retiree geriatrics of the same generation? Biden and Trump have 4 years difference in age. Where's the representation for people significantly younger than post-retirement age? Even Bernie Sanders, a favourite, is hitting his latter years, and it seems the Democrat candidate is just chosen by the DNC rather than what their voter base would like.

So, it's great news that Trump avoids a second term, but I don't see a progression in the political system yet.

> I was telling my friend the other day, why is it that the presidency is a competition between retiree geriatrics of the same generation?

I mean, I'm not thrilled it turned out that way this election, but that's not really the rule for Presidential elections; Carter, Clinton, Bush II, and Obama were 52, 46, 54 and 47 when elected.

You missing a big point from 2016. Hillary lost due to social engineering hack behind that election. Social media cos were better prepared this time

Downvoted because in 2016 there was a "social engineering hack" and Trump received 63 million votes. In 2020 I haven't seen much evidence of that and Donald Trump received at least 70 million votes. He's a popular guy among a very significant percentage of the population... like it or not.

Hillary lost due to being an extremely unlikable candidate. In addition, she faced a charismatic and controversial wildcard candidate who promised to shake up the system in a time where people were sick of career politicians.

And a portion of dem voters were pissed off about how Sanders was treated by the DNC, though I have no idea if that caused any meaningful portion to abstain or vote for Trump.

I don't trust Biden any further than I can throw him, but he is a known devil who is under scrutiny for his neoliberal legislative history. It was a smart move to veep Harris.

In a way his tough on drugs/crime history was necessary to pull in the hand-wringing boomers and fingers crossed he's flip flopped there and wants to be the cool grandpa who gets to legalize it before he croaks as his legacy or whatever.

I'm paraphrasing and streamlining several people's opinions on the matter here.

Biden has already said the crime bill was a mistake. In his final town hall (that was a debate substitute) iirc

What I disliked so much about this election was that I believed based purely on policies drafted by both parties, that the democrats did not bring anything better to the table than what republicans did, and this is against a party that spent billions and counting building a wall that will basically not work as advertised.

What Trump got right and why he won against Hillary back in 2016 is that US is on the brink of losing its hegemony. Nationalistic Americans flocked to his appeals to close off borders, to renegotiate trade deals, back out of agreements that hurt the US, and promise bringing manufacturing back into our borders.

Biden is a career politician so he knows how to say all the right words to appeal to as many people as possible, but where those words fail is in their over-promise in that the sum of policies put forth simply don't add up. Not that trump hasn't made promises he couldn't keep, but he has taken and put into motion a lot of things that represent a very nationalistic ideology.

Personally I think that even with the dysfunctional pathologically lying brain that Trump had, he was on the side with the better economic playbook. Regardless of what one may think about him, Trump is the one with business experience, and Biden is the one with political experience. And as much as I would love to believe that we live in a world where we can make allies, and negotiate, and hand out financial aid, and work together to green the earth, the reality is we live in a Corporatocracy, and that even Biden came to power by its merits.

I was very much on the fence. Lets just say I wasn't feeling very positive about the next four years even before the election was called.

I can be argued that Trump inherited the good economy from Obama. But there is so much more to life than just economy.

Trump did in fact inherit a good economy from Obama, but that's not really what I was talking about. I was talking about actions, not so much where the economy was.

Trump's only business experience is in running them into the ground. He is horrible at business and even worse at understanding the sort of macro-economics you would hope that a president might know a little something about. His pathetically short attention span is probably the only thing that kept him from doing more long-term damage.

> ... Trump had, he was on the side with the better economic playbook.

Ah, yes, the "fiscally conservative" move to give permanent tax cuts to billionaires, while giving small, temporary tax cuts to everyone else. And without a plan to cut spending.

> Trump is the one with business experience, ...

45 has experience... losing money. A lot. And having his businesses going bankrupt, several times. The next bankruptcy will be interesting, as he is personally on the hook for $400M USD.

I voted for Kamala

We need to reform the system so that people feel like they can afford not to be tribal. Key to this is the unbalanced wildcard that is the United States Supreme Court. While the Supreme Court has the ability to basically make any law or any decision no matter how flimsy the textual language support, the United States is not a democracy, it’s a dictatorship. without that fear of what a court could and would do, Trump would have never won his first campaign.

I always hope that some moderate politician will come along in deemphasize the power of the bases. A strongly pro environment Republican, or a true honest pro life Democrat. Unfortunately what we’ve seen, and continue to see in this election is at the wings in each party are all powerful.

We need to rebuild institutions that have been shaped by decades of imperial President rule. I agree with the chaos engineering example that was given earlier. We now know what part of the system don’t scale. Something that we cannot permit if we want to continue having a democracy is presidents acting like they can ignore law, make appointments were not in recess, pass executive orders with the force of law. We also need to stop excusing his behavior because of parties and links. Obama gave trump the weapons that he used in office with a national Labour relations Board debacle and his immigration orders. Trump orders were simply the flipside of that coin.

It’s time to re-factor America. we may want to consider going as far as making the presidency more of a Prime Minister role, as opposed to an independent position. The country and the stakes are now so high that we cannot afford to have another Donald Trump.

> I always hope that some moderate politician will come along in deemphasize the power of the bases. A strongly pro environment Republican, or a true honest pro life Democrat. Unfortunately what we’ve seen, and continue to see in this election is at the wings in each party are all powerful.

Me too. When I was a kid, I lived in a conservative farm state whose federal representation was 100% Democratic (just like most of its neighbors). Things just seem a lot more dysfunctional now, because the polarized conformity doesn't allow for enough heterodox party members who can help forge compromise on issues that actually have broad support.

IMHO, what the country really needs is a truce in the culture wars, and forget this winner-take-all battle for countrywide conformity.

> Had the Democrats put up anyone who was less divisive than Hillary Clinton then we are not where we are today.

> Likewise this time around, nobody I have talked to seriously voted for Joe Biden on his own merits. They voted for him because he's not Donald Trump.

That might just be a function of your bubble. Biden was probably the Democratic candidate with the broadest appeal, which is in fact his own merit. Biden wasn't running for President of California. He might not have deeply appealed to this or that demographic or ideological slice of the electorate, but if you go too far in that direction with a diverse electorate you risk getting either electable failures that bully the rest of the country (like Trump) or unelectable failures (like some of the other candidates in the primaries).

> They voted for him because he's not Donald Trump.

That’s very interesting (but not surprising) to hear. I’m in a conservative bubble, and many people I know voted for Trump because he’s not a Democrat and opposes policies of the modern Democratic Party.

There were many discussions among conservatives on how to set up criteria for what feels to many like a choice between good policy and good character — though others argue that’s a false dichotomy to begin with when most of the job in question is policy (i.e. policy is character in this case).

The thing that those of us outside the US find interesting is that you don’t have a left and a right party. You have a just right of center party and a far right party. Pick any Democrat (with a few exceptions) and pop them in another countries left party (Uk labour for instance) and they would be sent over the aisle with jeers.

My assumption is that the Cold War and fear of anything vaguely “commie” pushed the US that way as the gov in the 50s and 60s seems (from anecdotes) to have been very progressive.

I would love to see what would happen if you had single transferable vote (or similar) that picked the single issue voters away from the GOP. You might find a situation where the dems become everyone’s second choice because they are firmly in the Center and it would show just how unprogressive they really are (or at least how they appear to be to an international audience)

It still blows my brain that there isn’t wide spread single payer/NHS style health care in the richest country in the world.

And don’t get us started on gun control, I’ve travelled to dozens of countries around the world and nowhere have I felt less safe than SF/Buffalo/NY/Miami/Jackson.

> It still blows my brain that there isn’t wide spread single payer/NHS style health care in the richest country in the world.

And the odds are good it won't ever happen. It is deeply ingrained in the culture of this country that the gov't is bad, and private corporations are good. So we willingly accept death panels as long as it's some faceless insurance company, because hey, it's not the gov't.

Nevermind that we arguably have more control over the gov't than we do a faceless corporation. Short of changing jobs, I don't really have any leverage over my insurance provider.

I think Trump repulsed so many people - regardless of policy it was an epoch for the voting population where either you say that behaviour is acceptable or not. Thankfully it was rejected but it’s concerning so many people seem to accept such repugnant behaviour if the general policies align with their own politics.

I mistakenly thought the line was way further back than it actually is and I just wonder where the line actually is. Trump wasn’t the line, the population could stomach worse.

Either way, I think voting for Biden on the “not Trump” basis is fine, and ultimately the blame for the what some voters see as an empty dichotomy lies flat at the feet of the short sightedness of the Republican Party.

The frustration I have is that some conservatives won't even agree to that framing. It wasn't they were choosing policy over character, it's that they see nothing wrong with his character. I've had many arguments w/ conservative friends because they think he's just been treated unfairly or "everyone has faults", then point to character flaws of other candidates. I mean, I understand it, but just a gross false equivalency. In the end it's their opinion and mine.

> Likewise this time around, nobody I have talked to seriously voted for Joe Biden on his own merits

Did you talk to the black voters in Clayton county, Atlanta or Philadelphia? Because it was them who put Biden over the line and put the election results beyond doubt.

What? Every vote put biden over the line, those just happened to be the last counted (to declare a victor) -- and has nothing to do with how strongly they felt about Biden

Biden would never win PA and GA without 80%+ margin in those counties. No other dem candidate would come even close.

One of the biggest problems we have today is lack of good leaders. Not just in politics but in business and other fields.

Among those holding highest office across the planet - how many can you name that you genuinely love and respect? Maybe a handful? In a sane world, how can people like Trump, Bolsanaro, Duterte etc hold the highest office in their countries?

Business world isn’t that great either.

Somehow we have reached a situation where it is getting harder to find good leaders

Simple fact is one person is incapable of directing millions. Forget about hundreds of millions.

Materialism. The culture gets what it values.

Not US citizen but currently resides here.

I think Biden prevails on one thing: the public don't believe Trump will contain COVID.

>>>nobody I have talked to seriously voted for Joe Biden on his own merits.<<<

On the other hand, I know lots of people who voted him on his own merits which and they listed them as - he is centrist, he was a senator/VP which means he has the experience and knowledge to navigate congress, he has good ethics/morals (which means they could tell their kids to look up to him), he is a Christian, he believes in climate change.

I know lots of Democrats who are moderates/centrists and preferred Biden over Bernie and Warren.

Personally, I also found him to be a good candidate and not a 'he is not trump so automatically he is better'

The problem is that even if you had “better”, the majority of voters wouldn’t vote for “better candidates.”

Voters like users of a software application are hostile, irrational and often unqualified to use the system.

The question is what will we do and how will we improve our form of government now that the stress test of Trump’s presidency is over?

How do we make a more perfect union in the face of often uninformed, unqualified voters?

How do we really ensure that our officials are ethical and responsible individuals seeking to serve?

I have no clue.

We have fallen out of touch with working class voters. We need to reconnect with them and their needs.

We also need to undo the damage conspiracy theories have done in the red parts of this country -- many extremely blue collar meat and potatoes should-be-core-of-the-democratic-party people wince when they hear that you are a democrat because they have been taught by fox news and facebook that democrats are evil coastal elites who don't care about the working class and are part of the deep state.

Right now everything we say to them tends to push them further away (e.g. the voter fraud court cases getting immediately thrown out in court because they were without merit will be seen by these voters as PROOF of the deep state). To win over voters like this, we have to actually _watch_ the media they consume to figure out how to inoculate them from the cult-like conspiracy theories they have become vulnerable to.

> We need better candidates who generate real support and appeal other than just not being their opponent. Not sure how to get there.

IMO the democrats did themselves a big disservice by having such popular alternatives to both trump _and_ biden.

eg: yang was popular, sanders was popular, harris was popular. People wanted their candidate to be running for president, and were left with re-evaluating who they'd vote for (trump or biden) when their favorite was cut.

I really think the presidential election needs the following reforms:

Electoral votes map to popular vote in each state.

Runoff voting allowing parties to run multiple candidates without fearing the dilution of a "leader" (eg One could have voted "Yang, Sanders, Harris, Biden" and still be generally assured their vote benefitted their party.

Minor parties such as green + libertarian need to be invited to debates.

You’re reading this wrong. Biden won because he was someone voters in suburban Atlanta could stomach. Any of the further left candidates would’ve seen Trump win. (The idea of a more left candidate juicing the base further is bananas. Democratic turnout in this election was pretty much maxed out.)

If you don’t know anyone who likes Biden you live in a bubble. My parents like Biden and they dislike the Squad. The riots scared them. They’re older, and immigrants, and they think Carter was really swell. Biden is exactly who they wanted. And there are a lot of people like them. They’re the kind of people that turned northern VA blue.

I have a theory that non-progressive Democratic voters are so concerned with candidates' perceived "electability" that they're repeatedly picking unexciting candidates who end up being less electable. The Democratic party needs to focus on increasing turnout (a potentially huge pool of new voters) rather than swaying an extra 2-4% of consistent moderate voters over, IMO.

Republican voters don't seem to have the same problem. I mean, Trump was probably the least "electable" candidate of all time. But he got a lot of people excited about voting.

> illustrates, is what a poor set of choices we have had.

> We need better candidates who generate real support and appeal other than just not being their opponent. Not sure how to get there.

This is in great part due to First Past The Post voting method[1] employed. The US isn't interested in democracy if they can't at least move from FPTP to something at least as good as Approval Voting. (Which is one of the simplest alternatives)

Some criterions FPTP does no meet from Wikipedia[1][2]:

1. Mutual Majority Criterion: if a majority (more than 50%) of voters top-rank some k candidates, then one of those k candidates must win.

2. Condorcet Winner Criterion: if a candidate would win a head-to-head competition against every other candidate, then that candidate must win the overall election.

3. Condorcet Loser Criterion: if a candidate would lose a head-to-head competition against every other candidate, then that candidate must not win the overall election.

4. Independence of Irrelevant Alternatives Criterion: the election outcome remains the same even if a candidate who cannot win decides to run.

5. Independence of Clones Alternatives Criterion: the election outcome remains the same even if an identical candidate who is equally-preferred decides to run.

6. No favorite betrayal: Can voters be sure that they do not need to rank any other candidate above their favorite in order to obtain a result they prefer?

At least consider how 2, 4, and 6 affect alternatives like Howie Hawkins, Bernie Sanders, or Gloria la Riva to name some examples. I find it hypocritical when US government officials criticize 1-party states when the US is a 2-party state and as if that was a big qualitative difference.

[1]: https://www.wikiwand.com/en/First-past-the-post_voting#/Effe...

[2]: https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Comparison_of_electoral_systems#...

>Had the Democrats put up anyone who was less divisive than Hillary Clinton then we are not where we are today.

Sanders would have lost too, once Trump begun to paint him as a socialist commie. Oddly, O'Malley would have won easily.

> Had the Democrats put up anyone who was less divisive than Hillary Clinton then we are not where we are today.

Fun fact I recently learned, but a 2013 Quinnipiac University poll found Hillary Clinton to be the most popular US politician with 61% approval.

I was shocked when I learned this, but it makes me wonder if the idea that Clinton is broadly unpopular is mostly just a meme?

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-politics-clinton-idUS...

Demographics show that whites really really really like Trump, and everyone else doesn't. Which mirrors the rhetoric of Trump I (hope) any rational person can agree.

In the case of such polarized racial politics, the Democrats needed a white male to try to not further inflame the white base and pick off as many white voters as possible. That left a nonrepresentative candidate for the almost-majority minority "everyone else".

Racial politics have underpinned presidential elections since... well, slavery. This one was no different, it just had the sad spectacle of overt racism rather than at least SOME window dressing overlaid on the "Southern Strategy" since the civil rights era.

Agreed. This is why we need to push voting in the primaries

I don't care if you're liberal or conservative. The problem with Trump is that all of his success has come from lying, cheating, and manipulation. That's all he knows. This was never a simple matter of political differences. This was not normal.

What if everyone does it but he's just bad at it and that's why we notice.

48 laws of power opening certainly suggests so.

"48 laws of power" was a book for fools though. "Leadership Secrets of Attila the Hun" was better. (And "The Prince" more principled!)

> What if everyone does it but he's just bad at it and that's why we notice.

Seriously though, do you really believe that or are you just trolling?

I would definitely err on the side of believing it and you are yet to provide any concrete arguments to why I shouldn't. Which makes me think you simply don't have them.

> I would definitely err on the side of believing it

You've never met one person with integrity?

I mean, I admit, in my experience they're rare. Oh sure, everyone thinks that they have integrity, or at least, gets offended if you suggest they don't.

But I've met a few. I even once met a politician who seemed to me to have integrity.

FWIW, I can't tell if we're ruled by well-meaning incompetents, or competent evil people.

I've met people who don't realize how to exploit everyone around them, sure. Don't know how to distinguish them from those who can but don't.

Fools and wise men look alike, eh?

And Trump is the first politician that has lied cheated or manipulated situations to their advantage?

The only thing this time was the politician was incompetently bad at hiding it. And I say that as someone who would have been delighted with Sanders.

Do you really believe that all politicians are like Donald Trump just better at hiding it?

Please point out the place I used the word "all" or anything resembling it.

> The only thing this time was the politician was incompetently bad at hiding it.

The word "only" implies that all other times all other politicians were competently good at hiding it.

Are you gonna answer my question or do you just want to play logical footsie?

you're the one playing logical foootsie. nothing op said implied that all other politicians are as crooked as trump, only that all the other crooked politicians that do exist are smarter than trump. stop being so disingenuous and actually read that which you react to.

That's not a very helpful response.

garbage in, garbage out

No it implies all other times when other politicians were better at it. Plenty have been caught (I could name dozens a-la Nixon, Clinton, Boris Johnson, the Mahon Tribunal) but there are plenty of others that get away with what they do too (eg. Albert Reynolds).

Too put an exact percentage on who falls where on a scale of greyness is basically unknowable as a lot shall die with their secrets. But I would sooner claim it was 100% (I don't, not even close) than it is 0% minus Trump which is simply laughably naive.

> Plenty have been caught (I could name dozens a-la Nixon, Clinton, Boris Johnson, the Mahon Tribunal) but there are plenty of others that get away with what they do too (eg. Albert Reynolds).

I'm going to assume you're Irish (because of the context) - can you explain to me how Albert Reynolds was a liar? Maybe he just looks honest, sandwiched between Haughey and Ahern.

Sorry, you're right, had Haughey mixed up with Reynolds in my head somehow. My bad.

Cheers!

Sorry for the noise.

Someone once asked me, when Barack Obama was first elected, if I trusted him. I was mildly astonished. I said, "That's not what politicians are for!" To me it seems clear that the primary purpose of politicians is to get out in front of the crowd and justify to ourselves and to the world our crimes, cruelties, and vices.

I mean, if people weren't wicked would there be any politicians or lawyers?

I actually dropped out of high school and was homeless for a few years, in part because of disaffection with society and politics. I got over it. Nowadays I tend to believe that most people are doing their best, we just suck. I think it's the aftermath of the Younger Dryas and the invention of agriculture, but that's a whole 'nother story.

Anyhow, I'm curious about how other people view the world and (at this point in history) the political class, so thank you.

They're worse then Trump, by far the most exciting thing about him is that he isnt part of that political class that has lied and cheated America for decades.

I'm not sure how you can come away from any observation of politics and not conclude that lying is absolutely rampant. Are there politicians who are relatively honest? Sure, but while they may have loyal grass-roots support, they tend not to be the most successful and they are most definitely in the minority.

Most any person with a sense of political history could provide a litany of examples just for recent politicians, not to mention past eras.

I don't think the main difference here is Trump's ability to lie, though he does have an impetuous manner of speaking that makes it hard to sustain elaborate lies. I think the main difference is the willingness (or lack thereof) of people in respectable positions to cover for his lying, because he is not considered respectable.

> but while they may have loyal grass-roots support, they tend not to be the most successful and they are most definitely in the minority

Because the electorate want that. If they rewarded honest people we'd have more successful honest politicians. In the end too many people want easy solutions, which often don't exist.

Whataboutism isn't going to win any arguments when comparing trump's lies to other politicians. The difference in scale is many orders of magnitude different.

> lying is absolutely rampant. Are there politicians who are relatively honest? Sure, but while they may have loyal grass-roots support, they tend not to be the most successful and they are most definitely in the minority.

That actually matches my default belief pretty well, FWIW, but I don't have a lot of evidence for it. Yes, there are lots of news stories about lying/corrupt politicians, but without the greater context how can you tell the prevalence? It's like a negative survivorship bias, we only hear about the scandals.

> I think the main difference is the willingness (or lack thereof) of people in respectable positions to cover for his lying, because he is not considered respectable.

Yeah, I found that sad and disgusting.

My personal problem is, is this just what humans are? Can we do better? Should we "Take off and nuke the site from orbit. It's the only way to be sure."?

I try to remind myself that we are in fact getting better, we have the tools to fix our problems, and there's reason to hope. Yay us!

No politician is as outwardly vulgar or crude as Trump, but... for e.g. Bill Clinton is now seemingly allowed, nay, welcomed in polite company after sexually assaulting multiple women. How come the media or our esteemed blue checkmarks never ask dems about that? Trump and his flaws are well represented in US politics.

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

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

I really do think the amount of lying and cheating was significantly higher.

Plus, he was not bad at hiding it. He had seen lying as being smart, something to be proud of. Significant part of those who like him to - for them the lies were clever way to own the libtards.

> The only thing this time was the politician was incompetently bad at hiding it.

Whilst all politicians bend the truth and perhaps most do tell a small number of outright lies, that does not make them comparable to Trump.

Trump repeatedly lies, contradicting himself - even within minutes of saying one thing, he'll say the opposite. He doesn't even acknowledge the idea that being truthful is important. This has had deadly consequences, for example in his inability to acknowledge the reality of the pandemic.

It's not just the lying. The narcism and clownish behaviour has made it impossible to take him seriously, and that has damaged America's reputation - this does matter, your reputation matters when negotiating and trying to get things done internationally.

He's also been hateful and offensive towards many individuals and groups. This is bad for social cohesion, but moreover our leaders should try to set an example for us to follow, not debase our society.

Note that I'm not arguing for or against his policies here, and I can understand why some people voted for him.

My point is that it's really important not to normalise his behaviour. That way lies tyranny.

Weapons of mass destruction capable of reaching the capitals of Europe.

If Trump had governed like say Gov Chris Christie he'd likely have won this election.

That's not true. He restored stock market levels which is a success, and he didn't lie or cheat to do that.

Presidents seem to get a lot of, sometimes undeserved, credit for the economy when they were President. Besides inherit a strong and growing economy, what specifically did Trump do to deserve credit for the stock market growth under him? And conversely, does he deserve partial or full credit for the impact of covid-19 (and his slow response to it) on the economy at the end of his term?

He did have tax cuts to the rich, which probably helped the stock market.

At best, we're assigning a ton of credit to him based on a vague "probably." Lots of non-Trump factors influenced the stock market over the last four years.

I really hope these past eight months cement the idea in more peoples head that the stock market has little correlation to reality.

It fluctuates based on personal sentiment from institutions and money managers. Political policies may drive the market to react in a certain way from time to time but the only real 'direct' effects come from whichever Fed Chair is appointed at the time.

A stock is a voting right in a company, which among other things can be used to vote for distributing dividends to stock owners.

That is what gives it value to the purchases of the stock.

It is purchased because the buyer expects to earn more from it than they paid, and that they likely can pass it on later.

The value of stocks is certainly connected to real value, and it is one of humanity’s greatest inventions.

Of course stocks have real tangible value or else we wouldn’t be able to buy and sell them. They’re not something that you barter with.

However, the majority of Americans do not associate stocks with voting rights. Only a slim minority of Americans own stocks to begin with!

Most laymen investors or readers believe that the stock market is an indication of how well our economy is doing — which it’s not.

The value of the stock market, like you said, is based on the buyers expectations. Which is what I said: the market is controlled by institutions and money managers. Those are the majority of your buyers.

I agree it’s sad how far this world is from perfection, and that so many don’t know about the benefits of owning capital.

I wish I could convince people to spend only half of what they spend on weed and alcohol on buying stocks - it would be of great benefit to the masses. How can we show them the benefits?

You're talking past the point under discussion, to wit:

>the stock market has little correlation to reality... It fluctuates based on personal sentiment from institutions and money managers

>a slim minority of Americans own stocks to begin with...

>most laymen investors or readers believe that the stock market is an indication of how well our economy is doing — which it’s not.

And therefore an improved stock market does not equate to an improved 'economy', and therefore it is incorrect to credit Donald Trump with an improved economy purely because tax cuts to the rich may have bumped the stock market. What on Earth does your comment have to do with that?

A slim minority of Americans have a 401k?

Barely half have some sort of 401k program and the average holding amount is only $40,000. Nothing to really gloat about.

Earners of $100,000/year or more have 5x the amount in holdings as compared to those earning $99,000 or below.

Only 14% of Americans are invested in individual stocks outside of a 401k program.

401k assets only amount to 17% of the total US retirement.

None of these numbers tell a great story because Americans are not saving for retirement. If they are, they’re barely saving a years worth of their salary.

I'm nowhere close to rich or a Trump voter, but I'm glad my 401k) went up when the stocks went up. The Dem's economic policies in recent years are stinkers. I don't like the idea of raising taxes and creating new money-pit departments and thinking the government can fix stuff like education at the federal level. The idea of mandating people to purchase a healthcare product was also abhorrent. I'd much sooner get behind something like a single payer/universal coverage and kill off the useless insurance industry.

> I'd much sooner get behind something like a single payer/universal coverage and kill off the useless insurance industry.

At least in Germany most people still have a private care insurance option because the free stuff doesn’t cover everything and it’s just as expensive as the USAs insurance so I don’t think the insurance industry will go away just because their is a single payer system.

Killing off industries is not what free societies do.

Nobody is asking the government to make sneakers.

Universal access to healthcare is a human right, and insurance as a product by its very nature - is non-universal - as it relies on denying access to make profit.

The pre-existing conditions loophole in the current system means that you can purchase insurance one day before you get sick or need a major medical procedure and a private company is mandated by the government to pay up. The whole Obamacare plan is a clusterF*.

>> Universal access to healthcare is a human right.

Healthcare comes from a provider. Would you say a provider has an unequivocal obligation to provide its service to the people?

Well, they can't deny emergency care to a human being who is about to die/in critical condition, can they? So lets start on that common ground - They do already have unequivocal obligations in the current system. Now from that end of the spectrum to the other end, say perhaps an elective purely cosmetic surgery that is non-essential (agreed, this is subjective) we can find some middle ground, can we not?

As a practical matter of policy, the government can incrementally build the path towards universal coverage. By identifying problems in the outcomes of the existing system, and using various common-sense priorities to draft legislation, this can be done in a slow and sustainable manner. There are various proposals out there drafted by people far smarter than I. Its not that I think any particular one is a silver-bullet, but the current system where people go bankrupt due to medical costs is very alarming. We need to start somewhere if we are to tackle this problem.

I totally get the fear of creating yet another entitlement program, and how hospitals will possibly milk the government, but the current system isn't working, people are quite literally dying and/or having their lives be destroyed due to medical costs, so it about time we did something. I've seen some of this damage first hand and its terrifying to think it could happen to people I care about or even myself.

>> Well, they can't deny emergency care to a human being who is about to die/in critical condition, can they? So lets start on that common ground

Let’s first find our common ground. If you are a doctor and a patient comes to you, and the doctor refuses on the grounds he will not be paid enough, you think you have the right to compel this doctor to perform the service anyway?

The emergency care example you give is an extreme and shouldnt be used as the basis for all other policy. I would say a doctor who chose the job as an emergency care provider acknowledges your stance when he took the job, to provide service to matter what, not because it is a right but a contractual obligation.

I think the "what right do you have" or "can you force someone" phrasing is adversarial and can't drive a conversation.

Lets instead look at distilling the universal access idea to its essence, we need

  1) A capital pool to fund the program
  2) A legislative framework that
    2.1) Lays out the products and services and the pricing of those
    2.2) Allows for price negotiation based on geography and other market driven criteria
    2.3) Drafts fines for inappropriate behavior - excessive billing, using unapproved medication, etc
    2.4) Defines licensing terms for a provider to bill the government

Now #1 is no different from any other regular insurance, you collect individual payments at the federal level. #2 would also be federal legislation. #2.4 would be similar to how medicare-certified hospitals operate.

Now the question really becomes - why would any provider not take this deal? Certainly, there could be several reasons, and those can be addressed on a case by case basis. But the point I want to make is, we can start small, maybe we only tackle preventative care at first.

It takes a certain level of complete ignorance to not know that for the past 30+ years the economy and stock market has grown more under Democratic presidents than Republican ones.

For the past several decades, presidents who presided over booming economies have shared credit. You must have missed that.

> Besides inherit a strong and growing economy

The bottomless debt and asset inflation Trump inherited was not a sign of a strong and growing economy.

How can you call a countries economy Strong when its lending its money for near zero interest? It’s a deeply flawed idea that’s not sustainable in the long run. Obama’s fed tried to placate this worry that the QE and low rates were temporary.

Well here we are. 12 years after 2008 and we are back to zero % rates and more QE that doubles the national debt every Presidents term limit.

The Truth is the economy began to show signs of cracking in dec 2018 with the yield curve reversal when Trumps fed tried to raise rates above a measly 2%. A healthy economy would not do this. The economy hasn’t been healthy since early 2000s

His tax cut only made the bottomless debt situation you mentioned even worse. Every Republican administration wants to cut taxes. I don’t know how they can look at themselves in the mirror and still call themselves conservatives.

I agree with your statement. But the OP was a response to someone saying Trump inherited a good economy which isn’t true.

FWIW while the Fed tried to raise rates during Trump's term, this was very much against the wishes of the Trump administration and Donald Trump.

They didn’t try. They did. And they found out that they couldn’t because as soon as they did the economy started to crumble. So was Trump justified in not wanting to

What? He asked Federal Reserve to keep buying everything ob lnstock market with newly printed money. Thats how it went up, by also weakening dollar all around the world. Its another scam.

To be fair, the Fed has managed to maintain its independence. So while the money printing has buoyed the markets, Trump had little to do with it.

The fed is independent, but how about black rock?

I'd have to at least partially disagree with both parts of that statement. The president can only do so much to influence the stock market. A lot of how it goes is due to the state of the economy that is inherited when they gain office. That said, the Trump tax cuts and dismantling of environmental and fiscal regulation probably did help the stock market (not to say I necessarily agree with those moves). However, I would definitely argue that much of his lying was in service of propping up the stock market, some of it likely successful. Downplaying the severity of the pandemic would be the latest and most obvious example, but there are many others.

You can make an argument that he decreased taxes for the richest of the rich to do that. I don't think that is a cause worth celebrating. Not to mention that stock market levels don't translate to a good economy or good paying jobs for people. We can see that in the past months, where the stock market was doing well but economy not so much.

Stocks hit all-time highs in 2013 and every year since.

Maybe you should look at the data.

Do you have a source for that?

Regardless of the merits of ascribing market action to the president...

To claim that Trump "restored" stock market levels when in reality the S&P 500 had gained 183% in the previous 8 years (the second highest returns of any presidency after Clinton), is an admission of blatant bias and sheer ignorance.

This is wrong on so many levels. Obama continued the war and killed thousands of innocent people, did nothing for blacks in his 8 years term but he is the baton of morality

So you would have preferred if Obama left bin Laden alone, and if he let ISIS expand all over the middle East.

No you would have just complained about that. Let's face it, you voted to make your country a global laughing stock in order 5o get a $5 tax cut every year.

Please don't assume how other people have voted, you have no idea who GC voted for.

And yes, I for one would've preferred a faster withdrawal from the Middle East. Decades of conflict in the Middle East should make it clear to any mildly competent student of history that intervention of the sort the US has been trying (and Obama ramped up) is the opposite of effective in the long term. The only winning party is the Military Industrial Complex.

It looks to me like so many are bothered by Trump because he didn't wrap all the lying and cheating and manipulation in a likeable, family-friendly public persona, like the presidents of the past did. He certainly said a lot of outrageous or false things, but policy-wise he didn't really make any horrible decisions.

So many of you want to desperately believe that the abnormal situation in the US can be pinned on one man and that once he's gone everything will go back to normal, or if not the situation will normalize to a certain extent. That just doesn't seem possible.

Trump is just the convenient scapegoat for the disastrous globalisation which hollowed out American industry, for the race but especially class conflicts which were never really settled and for the ultra-aggressive capitalism which creates many more losers than winners and for the two party system which is fundamentally vulnerable to corruption.

>but policy-wise he didn't really make any horrible decisions.

This is where the problem lies within our current political discourse: both parties have fundamental differences within themselves on what they view as being morally on the up-and-up.

Both parties view certain demographics in their own way and this allows them to engage in policies that allow them to accomplish their end goal while never causing harm -- because they genuinely believe they are not causing harm to anyone. They're only following through on policies that match their moral compass.

Until this country has a reckoning on what its fundamental values should be, there will always be a sense of distrust and skepticism between each other.

> Until this country has a reckoning on what its fundamental values should be, there will always be a sense of distrust and skepticism between each other.

Do we need to agree on fundamental values? How might it be possible to avoid reaching a (likely impossible) agreement?

Perhaps we may not need to agree on every topic but there must be a discourse happening between each other in good faith. This rarely happens in our current political climate as most people (using Twitter as a sample group) is hyperreactive to any sort of criticism from their opponent.

If we, or all nations, want to come together, our first step is to recognize the importance of the United Nations. If we are able to understand that the United Nations can be an apolitical checks and balance to all countries, it may be a major step forward.

An ideal theory is that all countries begin living by the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights[1]. Incorporate this into the foundation of your countries government and it sets a tone and example for which type of moral values you prioritize within your borders.

[1]: https://www.un.org/en/universal-declaration-human-rights/ind...

> If we, or all nations, want to come together, our first step is to recognize the importance of the United Nations.

Interesting that the other response to my post (thus far) essentially argues for the opposite. That a re-emphasis on local politics would be preferable.

Personally, I think letting people go there own way as much as possible is the best course, and empowering the United Nations is pretty much the opposite of that. I'm not saying there isn't a lot of good stuff in the Declaration of Human Rights, but to have a super-ordinate body that is in no way directly accountable to the people over whom it rules, and which attempts to reconcile increasingly disparate cultures, will result in authoritarianism and war.

> Personally, I think letting people go there own way as much as possible is the best course, and empowering the United Nations is pretty much the opposite of that.

As in a Native American reservation type of self localized governing? That’s the only way I could see any good coming from separating each individual locality apart and attaching their own executive branch to it. We currently have 50 seperate states which almost govern in that way but they still must answer to an executive branch and that can be confusing.

Should one branch have a say in all local decisions? Who gets to decide on which person makes those decisions for all? My fear would be that governing completely independent of any other branch could also lead to authoritarianism: if one person persuades the locals they have the best mind to guide them through troubles, they’d ultimately have the final say in decision making once they gain their trust and the ability to govern.

(Apologies if formatting makes it sound confusing, I jumped off my laptop and am instead currently using mobile. Will edit to clarify any discrepancies.)

I posted my reply to the parent comment before seeing yours, and I have to say that the second paragraph you write articulates many of my objections to the UN in a succinct way that I've long struggled to achieve.

The parent comment is concerning American domestic cohesion. A tricky problem in and of itself.

To your point, I'm not sold that all nations ought to come together into a unified state. Least of all beneath the banner of the UN, which has hardly shown itself to be apolitical (its very mission presumes a specific cultural and political end).

Articles 7, 13, 26(2), 29(3) are non-starters for much of the country (myself included). As I read them, they have significant implications for national sovereignty.

There needs to be some unified national bent, but I think consensus is an entirely unrealistic expectation for the union.

Ultimately, I think the most viable path forward is a cultural reprivileving of state and local politics over national-level politics, and to rehabilitate our national mythology (half the country thinks we're a divine gift, and the other thinks we're a physical manifestation of every sin in Western history).

Unfortunately, I'm not sure if that's a more realistic path than any other at this point. The development and expansion of our bureaucracies under executive control makes the federal government too easy and tempting a tool for the imposition of any one faction's agenda upon all other states.

Policy wise he probably didn't make any bad decisions. But his words have made it okay to be racist. As a minority, I experienced more minor forms of racism in last 4 years than in last 20 years before. He made it cool to be racist. He made my life slightly more inconvenient. And I am sure if I didn't had high paying job I would have suffered more balant racism. Trump is evil human and I am glad he will gone soon enough.

> But his words have made it okay to be racist. As a minority, I experienced more minor forms of racism in last 4 years than in last 20 years before. He made it cool to be racist.

No, he didn’t. He denounced white supremacy more than any politician ever has, but folks were obsessed with these “Trump is a Nazi” lies. There’s a reason that more minorities voted for him than any GOP candidate ever. In fact, the only demographic that he lost ground on was white men.

What minor forms of racism are you saying he caused in your life?

> He denounced white supremacy more than any politician ever has,

Source? I’m very curious to learn more about this

Here’s a video compilation of Trump denouncing racism and white supremacy on 38 different occasions (https://youtube.com/watch?v=Bd0cMmBvqWc).

Do you have a source for that source? What about his emails in his laptop?

But Trump [1] also says the non-white congresswomen known as "the squad" should go back to where they came from. Even riled up his supporters [2] to chant "send her back".

You know "go back to where you came from" is a common racial insult hurled at non-white immigrants decades or generations after they naturalize in the USA?

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bMZnemqsCdI [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CqLxxbjVG_k

Is Biden any better? Quoting 'adventured' from elsewhere in this thread:

> As opposed to Biden's belligerent life-long racism, which the left universally goes a great distance out of its way to ignore?

> Even Kamala Harris called him a racist. She did her best to run away from that after it was no longer convenient of course.

> See: Biden's statements on "a racial jungle," segregation, busing, and how he didn't want his children going to desegregated schools.

> See: Biden's support of the crime bill that specifically targeted and locked up a million black people.

> See: Biden's past friendships and associations with 'former' KKK memembers like Robert Byrd (someone he considered a good friend and mentor). Byrd was one of the most vile pieces of scum elected to the US Government in the past century. How's that for associating with white supremacists?

> See: Biden's racist statements about Obama prior to the 2008 election.

"what about Biden?" in no way excuses Trump's statements.

It is in the context of Trump supposedly “making it cool to be a racist”. You’re not replacing Trump with a pure and just candidate like Sanders, but rather with another racist (if you believe Trump deserve to be labeled a racist) who’s been on the wrong side of history for the majority of his political career. The only difference is that the mainstream media has abandoned all journalistic integrity in order to protect Biden and attack Trump at all costs. They’re really no better than FoxNews at this point.

I find this incredibly disturbing. I don’t mean that negatively or personally in any way. But I routinely meet people who are completely unaware of this and who actually think he called Nazis very fine people. Because the media and the campaign ads and people on social media keep repeating this lie and never show the dozens of times that he has already addressed this, including in the second half of the sentence that quote comes from, but was edited out. The fact that such a significant hoax that is trivially debunked continues to live on for years is a bad sign. Obviously, this is why he attacks the media so much. And who can blame him?

Sibling comment has a compilation of him doing it 38 times. I recommend this video as well:

https://youtu.be/6R6hxPYWD50

Tell me this: When Trump riled up his supporters to chant "send them back" when referring to the American congresswomen known as "the squad", was it racist or not?

"Go back to where you came from" is a common racial insult non-white immigrants endure even decades or generations after they naturalize.

> I experienced more minor forms of racism in last 4 years than in last 20 years before

That's awful. What kind of things happened (if you don't mind) and do you think it was an attitudinal change or were there policy decisions that were the cause?

> He made it cool to be racist.

I infer from this it was young people that you think (or know) have been affected.

Edit: typo

Mostly attitude changes. Like if our group of mostly brown people with kids is at a festival, security gaurds or cops would all of sudden hangout next to us. We would just laugh it off and cops are not rude or anything. But I rarely noticed cops hanging out near us when we are in mostly white group.

Another thing, a little worse service especially at upscale suburban resturants. Now brown/desi people are known to be cheap when it comes to tips, so that does have some effect on the service. However, before 2016, we rarely got bad/slow service. But it seems we had more issues at resturants in last 4 years than before. (Btw I always tip decent 20% standard and more depending on the service)

From cool I meant people now openly sterotype minorities especially on Facebook. Both young and old. Like friends complaining that they didn't get a job because company was trying to hire a black woman. And, in fact, I have heard from multiple of my Republican friends that a Black Woman is the most powerful person in the US. (Ofc, I don't believe that)

Here is a more balant racism experience I had. On a date night, we sat next to another couple. The guy was really not happy, he started talking just loud enough for us to hear that Trump will round up all Muslims and immigrants and ship them out. Then he started singing that his cousin is Navy Seal and he likes to kill Iraqis, Afghanis, and all the dities. His date kept telling him to shut up. He asked waitress to change tables, I think.

We tried our best to ignore and have a good evening. This is the only incident in last 4 years but never experienced anything like this before especially in upscale restaurants.

That must leave a nasty taste in the mouth. I know from my own experience that it's harder to laugh off these kind of things if you feel they're more pervasive in society than just one idiot. Of course, it's hard to draw good conclusions from anecdotes but they're still evidence of prejudice that too many are too quick to dismiss.

> I rarely noticed cops hanging out near us when we are in mostly white group.

I heard something similar from a mixed race footballer in the UK (where I'm from). Again, it's difficult to draw conclusions but these things add up. Part of the problem is how to measure or validate things like this in such a way that they become persuasive to change.

For what it's worth I hope it doesn't happen again, or the good far outweighs the bad (which may be all we can hope for in life!)

> but policy-wise he didn't really make any horrible decisions.

I'm not sure if this is permitted by the guidelines. I can prefix perhaps with: I get why a lot of people voted for Trump, and I have sympathy with some of his policies, but I think there _were_ some policy decisions that were judged to be horrible, including by NGOs and internationally. Some examples listed below.

I'm not saying other presidents don't made horrible decisions, but I am saying that there seems to be a tendency to excuse his behaviour by a whataboutism argument, and it's really important to get down in the detail, into the facts, and not let Trump's style of politics trickle down to us all.

Separating children from their parents to deter immigration: https://www.nbcnews.com/news/latino/trump-administration-s-c...

The Travel Ban: https://www.amnesty.org.uk/licence-discriminate-trumps-musli...

Science and medicine cuts: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5468112/

Abandoning the kurds: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/10/28/turkey-syria-t...

While I agree with you on most of those points, abandoning allies of convenience when they are no-longer useful has a long history in US foreign policy, and the Kurds should really have known this might happen given that they were abandoned by Bush 1 in 1991: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1991_uprisings_in_Iraq

I don't know enough about the other three, but there are many people who disagree with you on the child separation.

We have 10 million illegal immigrants in the US. Previous administrations have been soft on border enforcement, which led to that number constantly increasing, putting regional pressure on wages, lower class jobs, and regional cultural identity.

Trump increased enforcement of existing immigration laws. He wasn't going to put the kids in detainment centers with their parents. Children don't belong in prisons with adults, there would be incredible abuses that occur. Hence separation pending litigation and/or deportation.

It sounds like the cure was worse than the disease. Solve the immigration problem by taking it out on the children. When this was suggested did anybody step up and say this seemed like a bad idea?

"We have 10 million illegal immigrants in the US. Previous administrations have been soft on border enforcement, which led to that number constantly increasing, putting regional pressure on wages, lower class jobs, and regional cultural identity."

There are lots of ways to solve these problems which don't rely on separating children from families. Interesting you feel the government should act in order to ensure stability of regional cultural identity, and that damaging families of these migrants seem to be a reasonable answer to do so.

Also, no law forced this policy of child separation. They could have created family focused detention facilities. They could have done a lot of things. They did child separation to convince people to not come to this country.

His track record on the environment is terrible. So is separating families from their children and putting them in cages.

CO2 Emissions are the lowest they have been in 30 years. Lower than under Obama. And that includes pre-pandemic. Is that terrible?

https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2018/jun/18/environmen...

Thanks, this confirms what I said. Also, it was written in 2018, and it has continued to decline as of the most recent data, which further undermines the latency hypothesis.

Maybe you have another metric that you think is important, but this data says that his record is on this one is objectively not terrible.

You mean the cages that protesters staged during a demonstration? Or did I miss the actual child abuse that did not receive any sort of congressional oversight?

> but policy-wise he didn't really make any horrible decisions

You don't feel how he handled the Covid pandemic was a bad policy? The guy's vanity wouldn't allow him to wear a mask to act as a good example to his base. He blatantly ignored most of what his advisors told him and proceeded to advocate quack remedies and dubious advice.

I really dislike the trope of "all politicians lie" when discussing Trump. It's the worst kind of "what about-ism". I do value a president talking to the American people like we are adults and tell us uncomfortable truths. I think Obama tried that on occasion ands it backfired on him in a major way (comment about those that cling to guns and religion comes to mind).

I do agree with you that it's not solely Trump's fault. The republican party quickly fell into step behind him to get their way above any sort of moral high ground they could have hoped to claim in the past.

I think that the OP's major point is that Trump was a symptom of the problems in US society, not a cause.

He did say a lot of the quiet parts loud, which makes some oppponents regard him as uniquely bad.

Has everyone forgotten that the Bush administration used similar magical thinking and logic:

> The aide said that guys like me were 'in what we call the reality-based community,' which he defined as people who 'believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.' [...] 'That's not the way the world really works anymore,' he continued. 'We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors...and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do'.[2]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reality-based_community

I think the real problem here is that the extremes of US politics (mostly the right) have been spreading lies and garbage to their base for years, and eventually, they got a President who believed the nonsense.

As the saying goes, a democracy gets the leader it deserves. Dictators sometimes get democratically chosen. The dictator chosen in Germany between WWI and WWII was also a symptom of a problem. You cannot simply deduce everything towards such one person; however you also cannot simply say he is executing the "Will of the People". We're not in direct democracies; we pick our leader for 4 years, and that leader (plus some others) have a lot of power during those. I used to say we rotate dictators we pick every 4 years, but back then I had a rather dystopian world-view.

As for G.W. "you are either for us, or against us" [1] Bush, people forgive and forget quickly. Though I'd argue he was just a vassal for Rummy, Cheney, et al. For an insight into Bush, watch the movie Vice from 2018. It centers around Dick Cheney, how he became Vice President. Bush successfully managed to get the hardcore Christians behind him, which I suppose was a natural path given the Lewinsky-Clinton scandal. Another good documentary of around that time is Adam Curtis' The Power Of Nightmares which you can find freely and legally on Archive.org.

[1] Bifurcation 101, very polarizing statement.

> As for G.W. "you are either for us, or against us" [1] Bush, people forgive and forget quickly.

> [1] Bifurcation 101, very polarizing statement.

Which eventually (and seemingly irresistibly, though not inevitably) led to "You are either for me, or against me" Trumpism.

> Has everyone forgotten that the Bush administration used similar magical thinking and logic:

> > The aide said that guys like me were 'in what we call the reality-based community,' which he defined as people who 'believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.' [...] 'That's not the way the world really works anymore,' he continued. 'We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. [...]'

That's not really magical thinking per-se, it's more akin to "might makes right" or "he who has the gold makes the rules". The most charitable interpretation I can think of is that it's stating a form of realpolitik first-mover advantage (which in a very narrow sense, isn't wrong).

Denial of COVID-19 and eventual spats with an educated expert (Fauci), denial of climate change (which we need to act on as a world population), separation of children and parent (which, as a parent, makes me extremely sad). Trump's M.O. was one of denial, ignorance, and stupidity.

Now, one might say these don't affect me. For example, the separation of children and parents of immigrants does not affect you if you are an American citizen who is allowed to vote, has a job, etc. Neither might climate change affect you as it is, or perhaps not enough yet. What did affect us all, in the world, was COVID-19, and the first wave was especially deathly. The nonchalant response of Trump to that issue was what I expected to be an eye opener to the American voter. And honestly, you don't want a president who behaves in such a way to a crisis (also look at how it backfired in Brazil). You want one who addresses the issue, is honest to you, like a gentleman or gentlewoman would.

Every Republican who stood up to Trump, I am proud of you. It takes courage to go against the flow of a powerful lunatic, when everyone follows him. The emperor wears no clothes.

> You don't feel how he handled the Covid pandemic was a bad policy?

It wasn't good, but it wasn't an outlier compared to the west.

In the last week there have been 16 deaths per million from covid in the USA, down below places like the Netherlands, Portugal, UK, Italy, France, Spain, Poland, Argentina, Belgium etc.

Overall the US has performed as well as the UK, slightly better than Italy Sweden and France, not as bad as Spain and Belgium.

> > You don't feel how he handled the Covid pandemic was a bad policy?

> It wasn't good, but it wasn't an outlier compared to the west.

Only if you don't adjust for density. The US in general (and even most large US cities) are very low density in comparison to Europe, which could/would/should have helped a lot (turns out, poor public transportation infrastructure + suburban tracts of McMansions + high dependency on cars is good for something after all). Instead, that was all negated by idiotic super spreader events and the like.

I think a lot of the deaths can be traced to structural issues in the US, but his failures of leadership during the pandemic made things worse. It's not clear to me by how much and I'm guessing that a lot of people might be in the same situation, which would partly explain why he wasn't punished even more at the booth.

A few months ago it looked like Europe's doing great, but now we're getting hammered in spite of all the measures. The countries that were successful at controlling the pandemic have enacted a series of measures that work very well together, but if one or more are missing, the infections spiral out of control, no matter if e.g. masks are mandatory or certain venues are closed.

According to Politifact, 72% of Trump's statements they fact checked were at least mostly false. Thats a hell of a lot worse than your average politician.

I think the style of lying is definitely part of it, but I do think the details matter. I was talking with a Trump supporter (I held my nose and voted for Biden, as I did for Clinton in 2016). He was pretty heated, because a lady he flirts with at work let him know that she was a hardcore Democrat and that she didn't think anyone should vote for Trump. It was toward the end of a long day, so I wasn't sure if I was up for the conversation, but he's a pretty decent guy, so I engaged, and we had a solid chat.

I made a point that seemed to resonate with him - Biden represents high-level corruption, the kind of slick corruption that maintains stability and is relatively predictable. Trump, though, represents a mob style of corruption - or the kind of corruption you see from dictators in developing nations. If it benefits him in the short-term, and he can do it, he will. Chess vs Checkers. Some people prefer the latter, and it seems some view it as a more honest type of corruption, but for most people, stability is important.

I've noticed a lot of Right-leaning people would also like to see some form of ranked voting, so I think it's the political parties (both of them) rather than the people holding things back.

I think you bring up key issues in your closing paragraph, but the implementation of Globalization is what really hurt the middle class in the US. Whenever people lose a proper balance, they will suffer, and I think most everyone can agree that the US did a particularly poor job of ensuring balance - probably not by accident.

Anyway, I feel for people who are troubled by the result of the election. I was in their shoes in 2016, and I can relate to some of their concerns. If we start from a place of understanding/trying to understand, we can build systems that work for everyone. If we allow the two-party system to perpetuate artificial divides, progress will be much slower, and we'll take more false steps. The loudest are typically the worst of us. We can't fall into the trap of using them as stand-ins for the other side. This was much more ranty than I intended, but I hope it makes sense.

How do you deal with any of those issues without being demonized as a socialist? My memory is that capitalism and globalization were such a winning platform for the republicans that even the democrats jumped on the bandwagon in the 90s. How do we get out of this mess?

I don't understand why this is flagged. It's highly relevant to tech (particularly given trump's moves on Chinese tech firms and his treatment of social media) and from a legitimate source.

Yeah, I'm not sure, the one from 2016 where Donald Trump won had a very nice discussion on it.

It wasn't flagged.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12909752

Technically it’s false because one doesn’t become President-Elect until vote counts are officially certified.

Yea, but we've always referred to them as president elect once it's obvious they will win.

No, one becomes the president elect after the electoral college votes, which is still a month away.

Biden will now begin to receive intelligence briefings. He is the President-Elect (which is not a legal term - it is a media one - so it is silly to insist your definition is correct)

Headline is inaccurate. He's not president elect until a joint session of congress counts the certificates of votes from the electoral college and declares him as such.

Yeah, Biden likely will be president elect. But the news media's call of what they think is likely is in no way official.

Edit: When I wrote this, the headline was along the lines of "Joe Biden is President-Elect."

Direct link: https://edition.cnn.com/politics/live-news/trump-biden-elect...

Also called by ABC, NBC and the AP (https://twitter.com/AP/status/1325112826072084480). Congratulations, America.

The thing that will sit deep within me for at least the next few years is that, no matter how you slice it, a vote for Trump is complicit acceptance of his divisive and harmful behavior. Of course you don't need to be a racist to vote for Trump, but you do need to fear the other options so much that you agree that his behavior and the way that he represents our country to the rest of the world is tolerable compared to what might come after him.

I was on the phone with my mom earlier and one of her friends called her up. She's a republican, but they avoid politics. She asked her, genuinely afraid, if she thought that Harris would steal the presidency and convert the country to socialism. She's not an idiot. She's a physician, but was still so caught up in fear mongering that she genuinely believed that the government would steal her income and that there would be riots in the streets as we turn into a third world nation. I'm going to think about her differently after hearing that.

This is probably the first time in my life where I am going to look at people differently based on who they voted for and I hate that. However, I can't get it out of my head that they voted for a president that has so disgraced the highest office in our country and that they did it because of a fear of the future burning so far inside them that they felt another four years of Trump was preferable to even as bland of a change as a Biden presidency will be.

Wow. I'm used to the idea of republican physicians, but one who'd genuinely believe in a VP plot to steal the presidency to establish socialism is... surprising and scary.

Where do you think she got the ideas? Fox? Other media outlets? Or does the sewer link into social media have an unknown source?

Physicians are just people like everyone else. In fact, many of them are far more concentrated in terms of education, social circle, and free time. Smart people are very good at coming up with rationalizations and justifications for the things they believe or fear. We think we're better than generations past, but human nature is human nature.

If you feel that way it may be a sign that you are too far into your own "filter bubble". I'm not saying those views are reasonable, but they are easier to contemplate if you swim in a sea of right-wing viewpoints, some of which actually make some sense. Read Fox News, The Federalist, etc., hangout on r/Conservative, follow the YouTube right-wing rabbit-hole a ways, and you will be really pissed off but probably have a better sense for how people can get sucked into that kind of worldview. My experience is that it takes constant effort to avoid capture by the "default" left-leaning viewpoint that comes through most mainstream news sources. I live in a place where I am exposed to the Trump viewpoint only rarely, and I found myself aghast at some friends who said they were thinking about voting for Trump. But when they explained their reasons for it, it was clear we weighed the importance of things differently, but their reasoning made a lot of sense. But my initial reaction had been outright rejection, like an immune system fighting an invader.

So, your answer to someone feeling distaste for fascists and racists is they just aren't immersed enough in the fascist worldview to feel sympathy for it?

Try to be charitable. I read it as you don't have to change your taste, but you can develop some empathy.

If you don't try to understand someone you won't change their mind.

You're playing by rules which fascists don't respect.

> So, your answer to someone feeling distaste for fascists and racists

There is a lot to unpack there. You already have a prejudiced and a bias going into your thought of them based on their choice of only two real options. Think about that.

You are looking at the world through a straw, almost with an ideological lens of religion. Politics are the new religion in ways, and yours is terrifying.

Anti-fascism is terrifying?

I don't think this about republicans or any other political group, but if you're a Trump supporter after all that has happened (birtherism, 'grab her by the pussy', banning an entire religion from US entry, separating children at the border, 'Jews will not replace us', refusing to denounce and hiring white supremacists, 'fine people on both sides', 'when someday I leave [office], whether it's in 4 years, 8 years, 12 years, 16 years', praising Putin, Duterte, Kim Jong Un), you are beyond the pale of civilisation. You have supported racism, fascism and a naked grab for power and the destruction of democracy in the US and around the world.

If you break the rules of civilised society and violate the right of others to exist or vote, you can expect to be shunned.

Anti-fascism are literally committing acts of fascism.

Denouncing white suprmacy:

  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bd0cMmBvqWc

  https://twitter.com/RubinReport/status/1311469297613504512

  https://twitter.com/authorMCWebb/status/1311499351043313665

The "Fine people" myth (when you view the entire thing in context):

  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6R6hxPYWD50

The entry ban:

   Did you see what happened to that French school teacher? Have you read The Strange Death of Europe?

It doesn't matter though. In that fine people video, even when people were presenting with the reality from the carefully selected video clips they had heard about, they still wouldn't accept it.

The media has damaged our psyche. There are not peaceful protests in Portland right now. There have been riots for months! I use to live in Seattle, and the media did a very poor job of covering CHAZ. I made this:

https://battlepenguin.video/videos/watch/9f81cd38-3ee9-4f26-...

Antifa is not an idea, it is real. There are cell groups who have done terrible things and the media paints them as peaceful protestors. They're not. They're straight up descendants of The Students for Democratic Society and The Weather Underground ideologically. The protestors in Portland are Domestic Terrorist. The National Guard was finally called in this week to stop them from burning things down.

Suppressing speech: that's fascistic

Getting people fired because they support a politician you don't like: that's fascistic

Calling everyone you don't like a racist or white supremacists: that's fascistic

The hard left, big tech and big media are the fascists.

Thank you for showing us who you are.

It's crazy, I feel like I'm just constantly being gas-lit whenever it comes to talking about Trump. "Don't believe the media, it's all rigged against him" "<x bad thing> is all just a myth, you've been duped" "Don't believe your eyes".

It's like, come one, I live in Portland. There's no media conspiracy and the city isn't burning down from "antifa terrorists" or whatever. Take a step out of your filter bubble.

Isn't Fox literally the largest cable provider of news in the usa and has been for decades? What is more main stream?

Nothing, but the US media is deeply divided and partisan like everything else - while it’s the biggest it’s watched almost exclusively by right wing republicans, democrats mostly see it as propaganda and lies and don’t watch it at all; and Republicans regard MSNBC in the same light.

From what I read Trump’s has many character flaws. That’s an understatement.

He is, however, one of the few presidents in the past century, to have avoided starting a new war.

Biden has a record of participating in a government that supported intervention in Syria and Ukraine, and his family benefiting from it, (whether legitimately or not is not my concern).

For this reason I have reluctantly preferred Trump to Biden.

What do I do now, how would I continue to participate in a society full of people who think and feel like you?

Remember the little game of chicken and insults over Twitter with Kim Jong Un, that ended up with Donald Trump giving everything Kim Jong Un wanted, because he's an artist of "the deal"? (Trump did get a lovely letter in a giant envelope and swooned about it, remember?)

How do you only worry about what you read about Biden and his record on wars, where you even bloody admit that you're not really concerned about "his family benefiting from it", and IGNORE everything else that should worry you? Like a denial of the reality of the actual virus killing Americans (1 website says at the moment more than 243000 dead, that's like having a 9/11 number of deaths, followed by a 9/12, a 9/13, with two towers and 4 planes crashing every day all the way past Thanksgiving, with the latest being 2 more planes smashing into 2 more WTC-sized towers on a 12/1/2001...).

Let me try to answer why I think that is: you like Trump, for whatever reason (maybe you're racist, maybe you're brainwashed by Fox to think Biden is the devil), and you looked for a justification for liking him, and you found one when you read about him "profiteering from war". Good enough for you, everything else is irrelevant.

I care less about someones family benefitting from it if they have the decency to be ashamed of it and keep it hidden. Trump is explicitly the opposite, he flaunts it everywhere.

A few quick thoughts...

Can you provide an instance where Trump's individual action prevented a military engagement or war that was actively lobbied for by leading Republican figures?

It seems unlikely for a President to start a military engagement without the support of their closest political allies and constituents. So it would seem that blame for previous wars should fall across both Congress and the President, and you can no doubt agree that many of the same Republicans (and Democrats) are in the same seats that they were then.

> The thing that will sit deep within me for at least the next few years is that, no matter how you slice it, a vote for Trump is complicit acceptance of his divisive and harmful behavior. ...

How many Biden voters would approve of his full-throated support for the Iran and Iraq wars? How many support his current stance against Medicare for All? How many would defend the Obama administration's escalation of the Drone Wars (assuming they're even aware it's going on)?

The bigger question here is how many Americans were voting for the the least terrible option?

The general antipathy toward Trump though is not based on policy grounds, but rather his whole way of being. His casual disregard for truth and flagrant mendacity, his blinding narcissism, his disdain for international cooperation, etc.

Even if, as a progressive, you find Biden milquetoast and uninspiring, he at least isn’t an embarrassment to the office and to the country.

I expect my leader to do what he thinks is best for the country. I don't expect them to be perfect. Obama wasn't. George wasn't. Clinton wasn't. McCain and Romney wouldn't have been.

But I never doubted for a second that they weren't trying to do their best. Trump, I did, and that's why I voted against him.

I was. I knew none of the other issues mattered. The only thing I cared about was war, and Trump was the first anti-war president. Even then, he didn't reduce drone strikes, but he greatly lowered America's war footprint. I wrote about it here:

https://battlepenguin.com/politics/who-will-lead-us-from-war...

In fact he did not. This is yet another lie told to his supporters.

Trump expanded the global War on Terror and drone strikes in particular which are the biggest component of it. It doesn't make sense to exclude drone strikes, they are the largest part of the war.

https://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/trump-escal...

That's mentioned in the article I wrote/posted. There are two big issues with the drone strikes: it looks like they went down because he classified drone strike information .. and all the information (which I source) give different numbers and different time periods. They is no background to these sources? Are reporters watching drones take off and land? I have a hard time thinking reporters are doing any actual reporting right now.

But yes, it's likely drone strikes have gone up. They went up under Obama. They will go up under Biden. It matters not who is president, we will drone more each year than before. There is no doubt.

He has avoided actual on the ground wars, carpet bombing (Libya) and created historic peace treaties with three nations who now recognize Israel. Obama got a peace prize while he was in active conflicts for his entire presidency and actively bombed 7 nations.

US foreign policy did not meaningfully change under Clinton, Bush, Obama or Trump and I agree will not under Biden. It's probably very hard to change given entrenched interests, and nobody has even tried.

Trump has done nothing to change policy - he kept occupying troops abroad, expanded strikes globally, undertook strikes on Iran and assassinated a top member of that regime illegally in Iraq - we haven't seen the fallout yet.

Also if you're willing to overlook Trump's racism and fascism in favour of a slight change in foreign policy (even if it was real), I'd suggest some introspection at this point.

You’re going to think less of people because of the extremely uncharitable rationale you imagine they must have. Great.

Your own mother notwithstanding,it’s almost certainly the case that not everybody who voted for Trump did it because of “a fear of the future” at least not anymore than anybody else who votes against any other candidate.

Thank god.

Now I want the last 4 years of my life back.

Or 6 years, if you also count the 2016 primaries.

You still have to deal with a 6/3 hard-right supreme court, courts packed to the gill with FedSoc pasties, and most likely (though depending on a GA runoff) the same senate which basically gridlocked Obama's second term and prepared the grounds for Trump's term.

Getting Trump out of office was the number one priority. We can doom about the other stuff later.

Disagree. I think getting McConnell out of office would’ve been a much bigger win.

There are enough other Republicans in the Senate from safe states that I'm sure one of them would be happy to play obstructist on any Democrat policy. Eliminating any one senator without gaining majority is just a morale victory.

I would easily have rather have Trump and Democrat super-majorities in both houses.

(Not even counting one can just impeach Trump successfully.)

My prediction is that McConnell retires. Without a willing patsy to play against, there is not much to be gained by staying in office. He rammed a court nomination through, mission accomplished.

I am sad to say that it is likely not over; the people who voted for Trump didn't wink out of existence. The Democrats barely won the presidency and lost ground in Congress. It's really a tremendous slap in the face for them by the public, given how unfit his opponent and those who aligned with him were.

Things could easily flip the other way in 2024, particularly if the economy goes south as it's been projected to do in 2021.

> particularly if the economy goes south as it's been projected to do in 2021.

"As you know, we've inherited quite a budget crunch from President Trump." -- Lisa Simpson

I know you said it in jest, but I am continually impressed how relevant Simpsons were/are in the areas of politics. I don't know whether it is the question of the human condition ( robot radio host saying "can you believe these clowns in Washington?" ) or just some careful time travel, but it is fascinating.

You're overlooking the most chilling explanation of all: The Simpsons are bending reality to make their predictions come true.

Seriously though, "The best way to predict the future is to create it" as Alan Kay once said, and there are cases of science fiction inspiring technologists to create actual products and inventions.

I doubt the next 4 years will be better.

I have little doubt they will be worse.

The process isn't over yet (AP News opinion withstanding) but this wasn't really a victory for Democrats at all in my opinion assuming the probable happens.

The polls at minimum were very wrong which means either fixed or stupid take your pick.

We are going to see a lot of incidents of shady doings around the election (how could we not?) brought up over the next couple of months.

Biden and team won't really be able to deliver rainbows and ponies and may have to get quite authoritarian to quell dissent.

Trump leaves on a high note with a large amount of support and Republicans made big gains and greatly expanded the party.

A whole lot will have to go right for this to be anything like a victory for the Democrats. It almost would have been better for them if they let the chips fall and Trump take the rap for what's going down next.

These 10's of millions of people aren't going anywhere, they'll be even madder next time around and in the polls watching like hawks with court sanction. And Trump will be talking the whole time about the injustice and how he was railroaded. Rightly or wrongly people will listen.

You will not get them back, because that is how democracy works. Lots of people will want their last 4 years back in 2024.

No, I won't get them back because that's how time works.

If you thought the Trump presidency was bad, wait till you see Trump News or Trump TV.

Now we can get back to destabilizing the Mideast, offshoring our manufacturing jobs, starting more endless wars and transferring the rest of our technology to China. The Trump years were just a speed bump on the way to complete globalization.

What is your preferred solution to those problems?

dang's comment from 4 years ago on this subject (Trump's election win): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12910929

Anyone else get weird vibes reading that? If feels like that comment was written yesterday and an eternity ago. It's feels like 4 years just passed by in a jiffy but at the same time, it felt like it was the longest 4 years of my life.

Yeah, reading dang's wording again brought back memories of that thread and all the events back then - and my general disbelief at the result.

This year in particular has been weird for me for passage-of-time; it feels simultaneously like the pandemic has been a constant forever - but also, spring and summer have gone so fast and now it's almost 2021.

(We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25017129)

Democrats = welfare capitalism

Republicans = neo-feudalism

So since that's the only choice you get you might as well vote for dems and at least get some food stamps.

Fact check: False.

The election process is still ongoing, the media is simply saying Biden is their guess.

Allegations of cheating will be investigated before we get the final result.

The media are saying "It is mathematically impossible for Trump to win without recounts" and in fact we can make a stronger statement - it is highly unlikely that Trump will win even with recounts given the margins. So far there is not one story of substantial fraud that looks plausible (let alone probable) and the two closest that I have found are a data entry error by a polling company (leading to "they suddenly found 100k Biden votes" posts all over the alt-right-o-sphere) and a postal worker in Michigan caught on the Canadian boarder with 1k postal items in his truck including three ballots.

Here you go https://twitter.com/tedcruz/status/1325495515748950018

Interesting people claimed fraud for the last 4 years now claim it's impossible

We'll find out the truth once every LEGAL vote gets counted in the coming weeks/months.

p.s. The voting Software company (yes, the one with the "glitches" changing Trump votes to be for Biden), has been linked to Nancy Pelosi.

Not an American citizen, but I’m really glad that Biden won. USA sets an example for other Western countries, and Trump wasn’t a good example. I hope you’re able to recover from Trumpism and that the Republican Party rejects such violent and authoritarian points of view.

Edit: I’m not saying US citizens should think of other nations when casting their vote. Just glad — as non-US citizen - that Biden won and that our national far-right politicians can finally shut up about Trump

I agree.

When I vote I make sure I pick the candidate that other countries would be happy with.

Touché

Very wise, it sucks to end up trapped on an island first politically, then economically and finally socially.

The US understands that stick very well when the topic is its opponents.

> When I vote I make sure I pick the candidate that other countries would be happy with.

Is not something that the common voter could control. You will do in the 50% of the cases in fact, just by chance.

And is great, because deliberately burning all bridges with all your allies and to pee in the curtains just to make a vanity statement, is not a productive way to work in a multinational team to obtain your goals.

Why is this getting downvoted?

https://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/the-u-s-electio...

Care to tell us what you're linking? It's behind some wall (and breaks the back button as well).

Unfortunately, Trump's brand of conspiracy theory populism resonates with a significant number of American voters more so than any other political ideology. Trump was so popular that his base increased over the last four years. So popular with that base that an actual messianic cult formed around him. Trump himself just wasn't charismatic, competent or forward thinking enough to capitalize on it at scale the way populist dictators in other countries have. But that still leaves the danger of a competent successor to Trump in the future.

What we need to watch for is whether or not the Republican Party interprets this as a repudiation of Trumpism, or merely of Trump himself.

> Unfortunately, Trump's brand of conspiracy theory populism resonates with a significant number of American voters more so than any other political ideology.

The problem runs deeper than that. Unfortunately Trump's blend of populist rhetoric fueled by conspiracy theories, divisiveness, and victimization coupled with a vindictive/authoritarian agenda has seeped out of the US borders and reverberated in european countries that are now struggling (again) with he rise of fascist parties.

Take for example Spain's Vox party, which is quite literally a fascist apologist which copies Trump and recently even went as far as claiming that Spain's current government is the worst in 80 years, subtly bundling Franco's fascist regime in comparison and thus stating that it was a better alternative than the current democratic regime.

The free world has a problem with fascism in specific and authoritarian regimes in general, and Trump contributed to whitewash these political movements to the point that they might regain mainstream status throughout the world.

Exactly. USA may not get it because they never really had fascism, but some of us in Europe do. It’s not pretty. It’s not good for our national far-right parties to look at one of the most powerful nation in the world and think: “they did it, we can too”. Like I said in another comment, it’s not about US citizens thinking about other countries before casting a vote.

But it’s understandable that some of us non-US citizens are glad to see Trump go.

> Exactly. USA may not get it because they never really had fascism, but some of us in Europe do. It’s not pretty.

The scariest part, to me, regarding the way the Trump administration whitewashed fascism is that those of us who live in countries who experienced it are fully aware that fascism doesn't dawn upon us with a bang, and more often than not it just seeps in.

Therefore, people are desensitized towards fascism because they expect it to come as a bogeyman that strong-arms his way into power in an obvious way and against everyone's wishes. It does not. It sneaks in with overwhelming popular support, based on a rhetoric that there's an inhuman enemy threatening the little people and that the fascist hero is here to save everyone from evil by doing whatever it takes. That's precisely what we are seeing with Trump, with their supporters demanding beheadings and bullets to the head of reactionaries, while their supporters praise Trump for being a bully that's on their corner protecting them.

> those of us who live in countries who experienced it are fully aware that fascism doesn't dawn upon us with a bang, and more often than not it just seeps in.

I feel the same way about socialism and communism.

You may want to review the history of how the major communist states became communist states.

> violent and authoritarian points of view

I don't follow politics too closely, but I keep hearing Trump is the first president who started no new wars. He also supposedly brokered numerous peace deals and had 4 Nobel Peace Prize nominations.

Is there a lot of violence I'm missing that warrants calling him "violent and authoritarian"?

Hey, I would encourage you to follow politics more closely! If you want a broad overview, I would start with the wikipedia page for Donald Trump. I'd also spend some time reading about media literacy and bias - your comment about Nobel Peace Prize nominations stands out as a bit of red flag that you may be uncritically repeating something you heard from a far-right editorial source. Good luck, there's a lot of information to synthesize, but this stuff is really important!

Why not answer the parent's specific points instead of just lecturing them to read more?

Give a man a fish versus teach a man to fish.

What a nasty and patronizing comment.

But also one that contains an important message that parent should read.

> and had 4 Nobel Peace Prize nominations.

FWIW, Nobel Peace Prize nominations are worthless. National level politicians, professors can nominate anyone.[1] You could find someone (or three people) to nominate you.

[1] https://www.nobelprize.org/nomination/peace/

https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/facts/facts-on-the-nobel-p...

> Nominated but not awarded

> Joseph Stalin, the Secretary General of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (1922-1953), was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize in 1945 and 1948 for his efforts to end World War II.

> Adolf Hitler was nominated once in 1939. As unlikely as it may seem today, Adolf Hitler was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize in 1939 by a member of the Swedish parliament, E.G.C. Brandt. Apparently, Brandt never intended the nomination to be taken seriously. [...]

> Other statesmen and national leaders who were nominated but not awarded the Nobel Peace Prize:

> Italy: Benito Mussolini

Does teargassing protestors for a photo op count as "violent and authoritarian"?

Peace Prize nominations are worthless. Literally, worthless. Anyone can be nominated by anyone.

Yes, the fact that we didn't get into any hot war is pretty much the only thing that Trump has going for him, though it was partially due to others backing him off bad ideas.

He wanted to remove us from a South Korean defense agreement, which would have been huge for each country's economy and defenses.

He bombed an Iranian general in Iraq - it was a huge gambit of arguable utility, and the only reason the Iranians didn't get more international support for retaliation was because they shot down a civilian airliner on accident.

He talked so much crap to NK that there was serious concern of an escalation in fighting.

But, yes. We didn't have any major foreign-based terror attacks, and we didn't get entangled in fighting a new conflict.

As far as the peace deals, I think they could be good, but they haven't "fixed" anything yet. The Palestinians still have no sovereignty, the Israelis still deny Arabs rights of citizenship, Iran and SA still are at each other's throats while Yemen, AFAIK, is still a humanitarian crisis.

China is perpetrating a holocaust on ethnic minorities, and Trump congratulated Xi on his success there.

The man is no human rights hero.

---

edit: Not to mention his domestic policy failings, his characterizations as sitting president of all who disagree with him as "enemies", his rhetoric around protesting, his encouragement toward violent right-wing actors, and his use of the National Guard to clear out a public square to get a picture taken with a holy book he has never read.

"He bombed an Iranian general in Iraq - it was a huge gambit of arguable utility, and the only reason the Iranians didn't get more international support for retaliation was because they shot down a civilian airliner on accident."

The utility of his action against Qassem Suleimani is not in question. It was clearly a very effective move. Whether this was justified depends on your viewpoint of Iranian actions in the Middle East.

> the Israelis still deny Arabs rights of citizenship

This is an outright lie. About 20% of Israel's citizens are Arabs, and there are Arabs in the Knesset, the Courts, etc.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arab_citizens_of_Israel#:~:tex....

@dang please don't allow HN to become a platform for spreading absolute lies.

I've always thought that most of the rage came from a dying traditional media quickly realizing they could capitalize on Trump's bombastic style for a critically important advertisement cash injection. Look at viewership of major media properties declining until around 2016. Opinion pieces, designed to induce rage-clicks, are vastly more cost effective than actual journalism or just reporting the facts. Plus, for the average viewer, it's just plain fun to read your "team's" spin on the facts. I'm sure the typical response to this is that "the media has always been like this", but I certainly haven't seen a situation quite this extreme in a while.

If you spent all of your time in a bubble reading these opinion pieces from a select group of sources and news aggregators that presumably aggregate the news that is most likely to generate ad impressions/clicks (Reddit, Google News seems to push highly inflammatory opinion pieces), sure, I can see how you'd think Trump is some sort of fascist dictator hellbent on destroying the world. The average political junky isn't going to spend brainpower trying to understand the diametrically opposed.

To be clear though, most level headed individuals don't actually believe Trump is a fascist. That's an extremist view (and obviously insulting to anyone who has lived under fascism) that's just used to sow discord and get a reaction.

Trump is inarguably fascist, just incompetently so. Nobody really disputes this.

I mean, sure, I imagine no one disputes that in whatever self-selected bubble you get your news from, but that isn't the debate here. Yes, as stated above, I totally agree that if you filter down your news into whatever makes you feel safe, comfortable, and doesn't challenge any of your beliefs, it is easy to come to the conclusion that "Trump is a fascist". That isn't useful for anyone trying to become an informed voter though.

> Trump is inarguably fascist, just incompetently so. Nobody really disputes this.

I'd argue against Trump being an incompetent fascist. That's still giving him too much credit.

He's authoritarian, a narcissist, views the world through a zero-sum transactional lens, doesn't see anything wrong with cronyism or nepotism, and as far as he's concerned you're either with him or against him.

Some of that has certainly allowed fascistic people to accrete around him, and enact policies that are fascistic, but as far as I can tell, that's only because the lowest hanging fruit and the clearest path to avoiding blame was in removing restraints and checks and balances. IOW writing (and reading) and passing regulations is hard, removing or ignoring them is comparatively easy.

If it were easier to avoid blame, punish enemies, line his pockets, and put his stamp on things by nationalizing industries, he'd have been doing that instead.

And I wouldn't quite rule anything out as an attempt at some kind of "grand bargain" before he leaves office if he decides he wants to punish the GOP.

It's a fact that Trump sympathizes a lot with dictators and got along with Xi Jinping, Kim Jong-Un, Putin and others much better than e.g. European leaders.

He always avoided distancing himself from fascist and racist movements and their actions in the US. He teargassed people just so he could get a couple pictures taken in the middle of a protest. He tried to cast a democratic election into doubt and talked for months about his intention of not conceding the oval office in the case of a loss in the election.

I don't think Trump could ever be a dictator, but he clearly does not oppose the idea and undoubtedly contributed to the political divide in the US.

What war did Jimmy Carter start?

Regardless of whether or not he accomplished those things, his outspoken goading of his base and complimenting other authoritarian or authoritarian adjacent rulers on Twitter and other media outlets is a clear source on violent and authoritarian points of view.

> I keep hearing Trump is the first president who started no new wars.

Don't believe everything you hear. This is false.

> He also supposedly brokered numerous peace deals

Like what?

> and had 4 Nobel Peace Prize nominations.

As others have noted, this means nothing.

> Is there a lot of violence I'm missing that warrants calling him "violent and authoritarian"?

The violence is largely hypothetical, and would, if it materialized, probably be perpetrated by white-supremacist militias rather than the U.S. military. But that Trump is authoritarian there can be no reasonable doubt. He has a long record of using his power to fire anyone who speaks against him, to harass anyone who speaks against him who he does not have the power to fire, and to protect and grant favors to anyone who supports him politically, even if they have been convicted of crimes. That kind of behavior is the textbook definition of authoritarian.

> He also supposedly brokered numerous peace deals

No need for "supposedly": https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefings-statements/president-do...

He was busy inciting riots in his own country and calling soldiers suckers and losers. He almost triggered a 3rd world war by killing Suleimani.

> USA sets an example for other Western countries

This is what we really need to fix.

Many on here are dominated by the establishment, FAANG and mega banks, all of who back Joe Biden.

One candidate supports separating children from their families for certain groups of illegal immigrants, kept those children in cages for some time, and has since lost track of around 500 of them; not reuiniting them with their families. This has all been extensively documented.

And approximately seventy million people have voted for that candidate.

Okay, so with all of that in mind, please provide the nuance you want to talk about. I’m very interested in this nuance that you claim will move us away from “crazy extremist”.

The last thing I want to do is come across as defending Trump, because I didn't vote for him either time and am happy to see him go. But your reply is a perfect example of the problem I'm talking about, and it is present on both sides of the equation (i.e. I'm going to point some things out, but please don't read that as meaning that I think this is a problem that only some people on one side participate in - both are incredibly guilt of it, generally speaking).

So here goes:

> One candidate supports separating children from their families

This is objectively false. Nobody "supports" that position at all as a matter of policy - rather you have oversimplified a complex problem to the point of absurdity. A police officer pulls over a drunk driver and finds kids in the car. The driver is arrested. Do the kids go too? No, of course not. Is it correct to say that "the police support separating children from their families"? Only in the most technical and intentionally misleading sense. Is it their policy to find ways to separate kids from parents? Of course not. Are there sometimes situations in which the only practical solution is to separate some kids from their parents? Yep!

> keeping them in cages

Again, nobody "supports" keeping children in cages. (and do keep in mind that these so-called "cages" were used by earlier administrations too) But consider this situation: your country has a standing policy that when a refugee comes to your border, instead of turning them away, you let them in, you keep them in a temporary facility while you try to go through the legal process of evaluating their asylum claims or whatever because your country also has a standing policy that people just can't wander into the country unaccounted for. Most of the time, these two policies can be in harmony, but one day 20k people show up on your doorstep. Policy A says you don't turn them away, policy B says you don't let them loose into the country. What do you do? And I'm not talking about what would be the long term ideal, if we have unlimited time and money. I mean what do you do about this problem /today/? You're probably going to scramble and set up some temporary shelter while you get the policymakers to start figuring out a real solution, but you can't just call into existence beds, food, and furnishings.

> and has lost track of 500 of them.

The president obviously doesn't track them to begin with, so Trump obviously didn't lose track of them (any more than the 800,000 who are reported missing each year were personally lost by Trump - see https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-missing-children/miss...).

I'm not really interested in debating these specific policies, because the larger issue is that you can look at things one of two ways: 1) There are 70 million people who voted for an idiot. By extension, they must be terrible to some degree or another too. 2) The solution to any "interesting" problem - especially social problems - involves tradeoffs, conflicting objectives, pros and cons. If the solution really were trivial and simple, we wouldn't argue about it. The debate is because it's so complex, and with any really complex problem, you can have very reasonable and intelligent people draw different conclusions on how best to proceed.

If you choose to see the U.S through the lens of #1, you may as well give up now, because it's hopeless - those people are barely people and are separated from you by an insurmountable gulf. OTOH lens #2 is hopeful - you see that ultimately everyone wants pretty much the same high level objectives, the debate is the path to get there and how to spend limited resources. With #1, nothing will get done. With #2, potentially everything is possible.

> Nobody "supports" that position at all as a matter of policy

Well except that the Trump admin explicitly changed from a policy of not separating families.

> I mean what do you do about this problem /today/?

Stop policy B. The executive has the power to do so. There is no law requiring that asylum seekers be kept in detention centers. Trump directly ended catch-and-release policies by executive order in 2017.

These two things are things that Donald Trump explicitly and personally changed. The orders quite literally have his signature on them.

> Stop policy B. The executive has the power to do so. There is no law requiring that asylum seekers be kept in detention centers

Right, except that there are good reasons against just letting in whoever claims asylum without properly vetting them; there are some very large downsides to what you're suggesting. Your position is that the risks are worth it, and that's fine, but others will argue that different approaches can solve the problem with less risk and less total harm. No single position is without tradeoffs, hence the debate.

But again, the larger point here is that the oversimplification of a complex issue is nothing more than a way to take cheap shots by making opposing views into something sinister. It's a borderline ad hominem attack - my opponent is evil, therefore I can dismiss his concerns without ever really addressing them.

> there are some very large downsides to what you're suggesting

Do you have any data to back this up? I don't remember the issue under the Obama admin.

> No single position is without tradeoffs, hence the debate.

There's a difference between a debate and an Executive Order. Donald Trump isn't "debating" putting people in cages. He is putting people in cages. He, personally, changed policy to put people who otherwise would not have been in cages.

In fact, this policy was both so unpopular and legally tenuous that Trump was forced to roll much of it back due to intense pressure from, well, pretty much everyone else. Even the CBP said that the zero tolerance policy trump adopted was bad.

> It's a borderline ad hominem attack - my opponent is evil, therefore I can dismiss his concerns without ever really addressing them.

Yes well, if you don't want that, you shouldn't have Stephen Miller write your border policy.

> This is objectively false. Nobody "supports" that position at all as a matter of policy

As a matter of policy the Trump administration's position was that making getting caught trying to enter the United States illegally as painful as possible, including family separations and the risk of losing your children.

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/immigration/trump-admin-dis...

It was a literal policy. It is Trump policy. Try again.

ETA: And just to be clear, even the administration admitted it was their policy, because they later reversed it!

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/20/us/politics/trump-immigra...

> nobody "supports" keeping children in cages.

So it happened by accident?

Is that not worse?

That is almost always how these things happen. There is a policy. It collides with the real world. Someone "solves" it. People find out and there is outrage.

Usually that means it changes through political decision. I don't know what happened in this particular case since I don't keep enough track of US politics.

I think you're right.

FWIW, somehow I find that sort of accidental evil even worse than a mustache-twirling villain, you know?

Like, somebody had to put that first kid in a cage and lock it. That can't have felt good. What was it that prevented that person from saying on that day, "You know what, fuck this, we're not doing this."?

Your post implies that everyone who supports Trump supports that policy. That’s exactly the lack of nuance that’s the topic of discussion. People who voted for Trump had two options: Trump and that policy or Biden who they found even more unpalatable. The nuance is there: Why do they find Biden more unpalatable than that policy?

You tell me. If there’s nuance there, then I’m super interested to hear about it. What’s so bad that it outweighs breaking up families, or any of the other things Trump and his government have done over the past four years?

Why don't you find someone who voted for Trump, ask, and listen with an open mind?

There are pro-lifers who think that basically nothing outweighs the 'murder of unborn children' and can't fathom voting for a Democrat. You might have more in common with them than you think.

Was about to write this very thing. Also many people frightened that a defunded police will not be able to protect them.

As a registered Democrat, I would happily support a variety of measures factually proven to reduce (legal or illegal) abortion rates in general, such as easier access to birth control and better sex ed for teenagers, as well as programs that would reduce the appeal of abortion, such as high-quality government-funded adoption programs for newborns.

Strangely enough, pro-lifers generally oppose those kinds of things.

Outside the issue of immigration, it's pretty well accepted that separating children from their parents is to be avoided, but sometimes the alternative is worse so the state steps in and does it anyway. The state steps in when there is abuse or neglect - do you oppose "breaking up families" even then, or do you concede that sometimes it's the right call?

Is it not possible that in the context of immigration there can also be situations where it needs to happen? (e.g. communal housing could put children in the vicinity of harmful people, or fake families with human traffickers posing as parents)

Trump's separation policies were put into place to punish and hurt immigrants, not protect children. Hypotheticals are not reality.

If you’re interested in the real reason, this is not quite true, although I would not disagree that he thought the extra deterrent would be a bonus.

This was not actually a policy. This was a side effect of a different policy. The policy was zero tolerance on criminal immigration law. That means, if an adult crosses the border illegally, they committed a crime and must be arrested for said crime. That part isn’t actually new, Trump just directed them to enforce the law. That’s where the issue comes in. When an adult male goes to jail, such as if I were to get a DUI with my kid in the car, I’m not allowed to take a kid in with me to jail. It doesn’t matter if they’ll be left alone with no one to care for them. No matter what, arrestees can not bring their kids to jail, ever.

So in this situation, the parent is arrested and charged with a crime, and the kids are held until a guardian can be located. And guess what? Many from Mexico or El Salvador actually don’t want to come up to the US and get their kids, if such a person even exists. The Obama admin built these “cages” for that reason. But, they didn’t enforce the law as much, so they were not used so often. They did build them and they did put kids in them though.

The policy absolutely was intended as a deterrence:

the heads of the three major immigration agencies wrote to their boss, Secretary of Homeland Security Kirstjen Nielsen, to present her with three options for how to step up immigration enforcement at the border. They recommended “Option 3” — prosecuting every adult who crossed the border illegally, including those who came with their children — because it would “have the greatest impact on current flows.”[2]

> No matter what, arrestees can not bring their kids to jail, ever.

And yet through some miracle they reversed this policy and issued a new executive order reversing the "zero-tolerance policy" that says:

"The President’s executive order issued on June 20, 2018, directed, among other things, that the Secretary of Homeland Security maintain custody of alien families during any criminal improper entry or immigration proceedings involving their family members, to the extent possible. This order stated that the policy of the administration is to maintain family unity, including by detaining alien families together where appropriate."[1]

This is a return to how it used to be run - families were detained together.

[1] https://www.gao.gov/assets/700/696788.pdf

[2] https://theintercept.com/2018/09/25/family-separation-border...

> Your post implies that everyone who supports Trump supports that policy ...

Well, everyone who supports Trump decided that those policies are better than the alternative.

What could be worse than children in camps is beyond me though ...

Those people probably didn't see that coverage that so upset you (and me, to be honest) because they live in a completely different media environment.

Lots of them care more about abortion and religion that you presumably do, and that's what makes Biden worse for them - the fear that they'll lose their ability to practice their faith and have it be part of their lives.

I don't get it either, but you're essentially doing the same thing to them that they do when they claim that Biden will introduce a Green New Deal, or make abortions mandatory or something (I should watch more Fox, clearly, so I'd have better examples here).

Sadly you are probably right about the different media environments.

At the same time, no, I'm not essentially doing the same thing. Let's face the facts - the current conservative media environment (Fox, etc) is deeply distorted.

I'm not making claims based on bad information, or making untrue claims.

Let's also bear in mind that, as much as networks like Fox distort and manipulate the truth, I'd bet plenty of people in these distorted media environments have a degree of understanding that what the Trump administration has done is wrong.

But people (all people) hate the discomfort of cognitive dissonance and look for any reason to avoid it.

To circle back to the main point, people making false claims (even if they are unaware of the falsehoods their claims are based on) is not the same thing as someone else pointing out the falsehood itself.

What makes you think those 500 kids came with their parents?

The entire child crusade was caused by the Obama administration unilaterally changing asylum law to allow claims that are unrelated to a claimant's home nation state actions. Until then, being from a poor crime ridden country was not a valid ground for an asylum claim in any country. During the Obama administration, an immigration judge ruled that such a claim was valid, the Obama DOJ let the ruling stand (the DOJ can overrule immigration judges).

As soon as this policy was recognized and promoted by NGOs, the flood gates opened, women and children first instead of working adults first.

Also, until then absent congress made law for special cases, one could not travel through n-number of countries until eventually reaching the one you want to claim asylum in.

Asylum is a remedy for people in danger because of state actions or state actors -- it must be made in the first reached neutral country, not four countries over because that country has better benefits.

Trump's DOJ put things back to normal.

> What makes you think those 500 kids came with their parents?

That’s what the family separation controversy is about - minors who arrived along with their parents but were then separated from them. Unaccompanied minors are a separate issue.

May I ask how you know that the children came in with their parents in every single case? After all, if we knew that they came with their parents, it would imply we have some documentation that points to who their parents are, and could potentially contact them.

I admit, I haven't extensively researched this, but would like to collect more info and keep an open mind.

The problem is entirely that sufficient documentation was not kept.

Agreed, documentation was in some cases improperly maintained and/or became stale once they started contacting the people. As a parent, I can empathize and it is truly heartbreaking. I hope Biden can do something positive here.

But at the same time, I think the larger issue is a bit more nuanced, than simply assuming people are all monsters.

for e.g. After some initial research :- https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/21/us/migrant-children-separ...

>Some of the families who have been identified have decided their children would be safer in the United States than in their home countries, and elected for the children to stay with friends or family members who agreed to sponsor them.

>And because the computer system used by border authorities for processing incoming migrants had not been updated to accommodate family separations, the agents often inadvertently deleted identification numbers that could have been used to keep track when parents and children were sent to different places.

>In some cases, members of the steering committee have had access to only names and countries of origin while trying to locate separated parents. Even after conducting public record searches to identify the cities where the families were from, they faced additional hurdles. Many of the families had fled their homes to escape violence or extortion, intentionally withholding information from friends and neighbors about where they were going.

etc..

If you truly want learn something, first try learning why something that looks so obviously bad might be nuanced. Search for yourself to find out why the Obama-era policy of separating the children was put into place.

Please return those goal lists to where they were. This NEEDS to stop. If you don't have an answer to why Trump et al thought it okay to permanently separate immigrant children from their parents and your stead yell "BUT OBAMA!", that's cheating.

So do you actually have an answer or not?

You're turning on the TV and after missing out on half the game, and asking why a team is losing. You gotta watch the full match, my friend.

> permanently separate immigrant children from their parents

"Permanently" is a new one on me, even Trump-haters don't go that far. This whole thing is about a temporary measure while confirming that the adults with the children really are their parents, and not some random person smuggling children across the border.

The system is backlogged so it's definitely taking much longer than it should, but not permanently unless it's found the adult and child aren't related.

The family separations policy was applied to asylum seekers. Seeking asylum is an established legal process, so 'illegal immigrant' doesn't apply.

That's worse, right? You get how that's worse.

Yes, that was my point.

One candidate supported bombings in the middle east that resulted in deaths of hundreds, thousands of civilians including children. I'm pretty sure killing children is worse than keeping them alive. Why would you support that candidate?

You're playing a rhetorical game, rather than having an honest discussion.

Trump has committed more drone strikes than Obama. The only reason most people don't know this is because the Trump admin did away with all transparency requirements.

https://chicago.suntimes.com/news/2019/5/8/18619206/under-do...

We're slipping into a whose worse argument. OK, Obama/Biden admin was largely style over substance, and I can't think of anything major they got accomplished. His whole "I'm going to change the way the game is played" was just bluster. Nothing came of it for eight years. He got incremental stuff done like any other president. Obamacare was a giant gift to the insurance industry. And he got a peace prize on top of that? Are you kidding me?

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25021317.

The fat lady isn’t singing yet

Not legally confirmed yet.

Usually posts with many comments get demoted fast... Not this one I guess

If I was Trump, I would ask for a mental and physical evaluation of Biden since he is senile.

STOP TEH COUNTS

Doesn't the actual election happen later? If I recall in 2000, they had some trouble until December with Al Gore.

Because vote counts in Florida 2000 were a) absurdly close and b) alone would have determined the winner of the election.

Neither is the case here.

it's a projection, tens of thousands of provisioned and military ballots are still not counted. Recounts are still to happen in most swing states. Lawsuits are pending.

It’s unlikely a recount will happen in Pennsylvania, as Biden’s margin of victory now exceeds the recount threshold of 0.5%.

there is legal battle ongoing in PA

Anyone else not getting Trump's real Twitter account on search anymore for the past few days?

"Trump Twitter"

Obviously @realdonaldtrump is normally top, with preview.

Its far from over. Has anyone compared the people on the legal team that Bush used to beat Gore with the current Supreme Court justices?

4D chess. Thats how he plays.

"Throwing every legal challenge at the wall to see what sticks" isn't exactly 4D chess. He's batting a little over 50% right now on even having cases heard, much less victories; a little under half of what's been filed, the courts have either already found against his campaign or summarily dismissed for being too half-baked to waste court time on.

https://www.politico.com/news/2020/11/04/supreme-court-trump...

Its going to go to the House of Representatives, and they will elect him.

4D, I'm telling you.

How?

He's referring to the new information that two of the young lawyers that were involved in the Bush v Gore case, are now supreme court justices installed by Trump

I don't follow. A 269-269 split, given how the states have broken, is staggeringly unlikely. Multiple states would have to be flipped, and since US elections are so distributed, it's unlikely for SCOTUS to find in such a way as to change the results of more than one of these states, if any.

And even if the election somehow ended up in the 12th Amendment case of the House deciding: the House is trending Democrat control.

Additionally, Justice Thomas was grilled by Senator Biden over Anita Hill's allegations.

"Grilled" is a strange way to describe "Reached a compromise in his position as Chair of the Judiciary Committee to suppress the testimony of four women whose stories supported Anita Hill's." Biden's soft-handling of the question of Thomas's conduct has been raised as a concern during this Presidential campaign.

Circling back on this, there is one aspect in which I'd agree it's 4D chess: 60% of the money Trump is raising right now for these lawsuits is going to pay off campaign debts from the election. It doesn't matter how frivolous the lawsuits turn out to be if it keeps Trump from having to dig into his own pocket to pay for his campaign.

But that's only "4D chess" in the sense that it's a con, run by a conman. A classic con, in the sense that people believe the money donated is for one purpose and it's used for another.

If the deep state and central banking system is crushed in the end it won't matter who spent what, it will be a good investment.

Yeah, none of the money Trump is spending is for that. The only thing he cares about is staying President so that he has the authority to pardon himself. He's a man riding a tiger; people look at him and go "how brave and strong he must be to master that beast," but the wise know he can't stop, because the moment he does the tiger eats him. Citizen Trump is on the hook for breaking the laws of the state of New York.

There's no reason to believe he'd even want to "crush" the "central banking system." His value is delineated in dollars. If the dollar collapses because central banking has collapsed, he's out most of his fortune.

I don't think I'll ever understand why people think this guy isn't a rich man on the side of the wealthy.

> The only thing he cares about is staying President so that he has the authority to pardon himself.

Projection. Everyone in DC is gonna kill themselves if Biden doesn't make it because they know they're gonna either face a firing squad or do life in prison.

> There's no reason to believe he'd even want to "crush" the "central banking system."

Portrait of Andrew Jackson hanging in the Oval Office.

> I don't think I'll ever understand why people think this guy isn't a rich man on the side of the wealthy.

TDS.

You'll have to be clearer in your meaning. Yes, there is a portrait of one of America's worst Presidents hanging in the Oval Office. That President served during a time predating the International Monetary Fund, the United Nations, and World War II. Whatever he thought about central banking doesn't apply to the economic realities of the early 21st century. Is your argument that Trump would tear down central banking because Jackson is his hero and wanted to tear down central banking during his administration? Because I don't think you're arguing that Trump is profoundly stupid, but a hero-worship-based attack on a cornerstone of the global economy would be profoundly stupid.

The rest of your statement is Q conspiracy nonsense that I will discount out of hand, because I don't debate the unreasonable.

Just enjoy the show. Can't stop what's coming.

Heh, indeed.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/new-york-ag-trump-or...

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-trump-new-york-lawsui...

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2020/11/07/trum...

https://dcdirtylaundry.com/bombshell-the-2020-election-took-...

Heh.

You're right, that is hilarious. That media source grossly misunderstands martial law, states of emergency, and presidential authority. If Trump tries to declare the election null and void, that's simply a coup attempt on his part, nothing more. He's welcome to try it, and I look forward to the US Marshals responding accordingly.

If that's indicative of where you're getting your information, I understand why this is the information you keep presenting.

Actually, with the data from the servers, they will be able to show when the software was ordered to start switching votes. They will be able to petition SCOTUS to nullify the election because of such broad foreign election interference and send it to the House.

And as far as a coup attempt, there hasn't been any certification of the election results yet. How could there be a coup when the results aren't yet known?

What did you think about the CIA not being invited to the overseas raid? Methinks the Fed Govt. is learning how to do without them, almost as if the CIA's days are numbered.

https://www.bitchute.com/video/K8aPVcG2rvI0/

You can get people to believe anything you want when you make stuff up.

https://apnews.com/article/fact-checking-9754011363

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/pennsylvania-election-2020-pat-...

At this point, the best reason I can propose that the CIA wasn't invited to the overseas raid is there wasn't an overseas raid.

This is Comet Ping Pong all over again and I'm watching you fall for it in realtime. It's sad. :(

https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2020/11/huge-attorney-sidne...

The lawyer of the man suing to have the American election overturned is not a reliable source of factual information. That's like believing Charles Manson's lawyer when he says his client is innocent.

Get a third-party confirmation on anything Sidney Powell does not say under oath. Even in the quote from her, we can see she is not the primary source on this information. "But I do not know if good guys got it or bad guys got it." She's relaying information she's received second-hand, and since her client is known to believe unsubstantiated conspiracy theory, it's safe to assume a modest probability that the second-hand source is unsubstantiated conspiracy theory.

(Also, as a useful first-pass filter on baloney, any news story that starts with a blast-word like "HUGE!" is probably not going to pass the sniff test for veracity. Rags use blast-words because they have to make up for their lack of integrity with spectacle. News organizations with a reputation to lose just use short-sentence headlines).

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2020/11/19/heres-how...

... hell, she's not even his lawyer anymore.

https://www.bbc.com/news/election-us-2020-55040756

Never was. Here is Trump's path to power, described by Tim Pool:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dhLYeXG1hgg

4D chess, I'm telling you.

Pool does fine reporting, but I'm going to defer to lawyers on this topic.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I6sVow9l8H4

And I don't know where you get the idea that Powell wasn't part of the President's legal team. Are you calling the President a liar?

https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/13278115271231037...

Whoah. A tweet that wasn't disputed by @Jack's organization, that bastion of fact checking.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/giuliani-says-sidney-powell-not...

Powell wasn't representing Trump. However, she is definitely on "Team Patriot".

a) Trump is a primary source of what Trump said; there's no fact checking involved. You either take Trump as a reliable source of info about himself, or you don't. If you don't, this entire conversation is moot because you're claiming a guy who can't even tell who his legal team is is playing 4D chess. If you're trusting some "my mother's cousin's sister works at the Pentagon and she heard what's really going on is" source over the words of the plaintiff in these cases, that's your problem.

b) Check the dates of the tweet vs. the headline. She was on his legal team; now she's not. Kicked off. Incompetent hiring isn't 4D chess.

Honestly, this is the problem with QAnon. If the only way to conclude the dumbest guy in the room is actually the smartest guy in the room is to assume he's the smartest guy in the room and to work backwards to figure out how that might possibly be true, Occam's Razor suggests we already have our answer.

> Portrait of Andrew Jackson hanging in the Oval Office.

That's about approach to political patronage, not opposition to central banking.

Not the US House of representatives, the state houses. The Republicans have 31, the Dems 19.

States can't change their rules for certification of electors without a governor's signature. If a state tried to pull some nonsense like changing the selection of electors away from the process as encoded in law before Nov. 3, that'd be new law and (a) would require a governor's signature or a veto-proof majority and (b) may actually be ex-post-facto if the current law is structured such that it declares how electors related to the votes cast on Nov. 3, so could be stopped by state courts.

The fantasy that Republican state legislatures could steal the ability of the people of their state to choose the President is just that: fantasy.

https://dcdirtylaundry.com/bombshell-the-2020-election-took-...

My condolences to all the Americans for voting Biden into the president's office. Please enjoy the remains your economic prosperity and peace while they last.

Also: sign up your children for Chinese lessons, they'll need it.

"Racist" mentioned in this thread dozens of times along with fascists all the usual derogatory buzzwords. Communist and woke both worryingly have less mentions considering the context. Bolshevism suprisingly has got no mentions considering what the YCombinator Alumni Michael Simon tweeted and the platform he set up.

Anywho, I digress. I believe those in here to be intelligent and educated so I would ask you to take your partisan hats off for a minute if you're honest and consider when AZ goes Trump this is the time for you to start freaking out.

The mainstream media has been extremely irresponsible and the forthcoming riots when this is overturned are going to lay squarely on their feet. I would also ask those of you who have a conscience to be less irresponsible than journalists over these coming weeks until December in an attempt to reduce said damage.

I say this because if you think Biden is going to be your president you haven't been watching carefully enough.

Also dang if you will please change the title. Biden hasn't won anything yet - as you know the media doesn't declare winners esp not given their woeful conduct and bogus calls (AZ), states have to certify before a winner is declared. Also please ask PG to be more responsible with his tweets if he will listen. This will reflect badly on all involved.

Thankyou.

Edited to add: I don't see Next Page at the bottom of the pages in this story, I'm not sure if it's bugged...

The downvotes were expected in this place.

I just want whoever is reading to know everything you're seeing tonight is an illusion. There is no president elect until the officials appoint it according to Americas constitution. The concession that has not been received means a great deal.

This is the third coup attempt after Russia and impeachment and a lot of the people on this board are going to be savagely disappointed.

In addition I still can't believe this title stands. Interesting you would risk such bad press by perpetuating an actual lie on this delicate subject.

How does HN feel about the call from AOC to compile lists of those who supported or worked for or aligned with the Trump administration (https://nypost.com/2020/11/06/aoc-facing-heat-for-wanting-to...). Former Obama administration staffer Michael Simon said that he is gathering the names of anyone who supported Trump in the 2016 and 2020 election, and has created a project for this (https://mobile.twitter.com/trumpaccproject).

This seems like the logical end of cancel culture and deplatforming, which is to assemble a list of people and organizations to target or shame or blacklist. I find this to be a very disagreeable suggestion given that people simply are exercising their constitutional and political rights and this furthers division, encourages extremism, and has a chilling silencing effect on civil discourse.

To me this reeks of authoritarian Leftism, like the violence seen in past revolutions in China or Russia. There is also a great deal of irony as well, since AOC and her supporters are certainly not calling for a blacklist of Marxists, despite Marxism being the cause of over 100M deaths in the 20th century.

2016 HN had a big, busy thread for Trump's election and didn't wait for the Electoral College to vote in December.

It stayed up. Please show the same consideration.

Everybody does realize that this has no legal significance, right?

It's predictive of a forthcoming legally-significant event.

Surely somewhere in the emanations and penumbras of the constitution we can find that the AP’s decision is binding.

As Hamilton famously wrote in Federalist Paper #85:

"It's not official until it's Facebook Official."

Yes, I'm pretty sure everybody here understands that AP doesn't officially decide who wins the election.

It still has significance.

Joe Biden has added "president elect" to his bio. When Trump tweets that he won, Twitter flags it.

The difference being Joe did not call himself that. He waited for AP to call it.

That's my point. AP doesn't decide who won the election.

what an obnoxious way to rain on a parade. everyone is more than aware of how the electoral system works.

Looking around the thread you'll see that might not be the case. I think the comment meant to correct a (hopefully uncommon) misconception that the election is now final before all the votes have been counted, which of course isn't true.

Yes, but note how quickly it was picked up by general populace as fait accompli.

Do you realize no one thinks it has legal significance?

But it is a marker that people use as shorthand. There is no getting around the fact that Biden will have 270 electoral votes.

> Do you realize no one thinks it has legal significance?

Almost everyone does.

There absolutely is room for Biden not to have 270 electoral votes, if investigations reveal (... correctly or incorrectly) big enough issues that some states don't send electors.

I don't think there's a realistic way for Trump to have 270 electoral votes, but he could still possibly be awarded the Presidency by a weird-ass one-vote-per-state vote in the House.

Not saying Biden didn’t win, but is it really the media that makes the call?

No, the real call isn't until the electoral college votes on December 14th. The media is calling states when their projections are confident enough (and possibly when the difference is above the automatic recount threshold).

> No, the real call isn't until the electoral college votes on December 14th.

Doubtful. Doesn't look like Trump is going to concede. Likely litigation and supreme court in the coming weeks.

> The media is calling states when their projections are confident enough (and possibly when the difference is above the automatic recount threshold).

The media has been projecting trump to lose since 2016. Well since 2014 really.

Either way, it's history in the making. Comfy chair. Popcorn. All set.

IIUC, litigation cannot (Constitutionally) change when the electoral college votes, when those votes are counted, or when the Presidency transfers. Assuming all states appoint electors in accordance with the safe harbor provisions of the Electoral Count Act, the "real call" is December 14th. If that doesn't happen, then it's possible neither candidate will have 270+ votes and in that case the "real call" is an unusually counted vote in the house.

With the current projections, it would likely have to be three states that fail to send electors properly for Biden to have a chance of losing.

Him conceding or not doesn't change anything. At worst the secret service will drag him out of the residence at 12PM 1/20

Donald Trump was called the Republican nominee for months before the convention even though you could say that was the "media" making the call. In fact, he didn't become the nominee until the vote at the convention was certified.

But it is completely irrelevant. Biden will be the next president.

The typical term is "presumptive". Trump was the presumptive nominee until the RNC met. Biden is the presumptive victor, pending completion of vote counts and EC vote. But people just shorten it to the (foregone conclusion of) victor.

As someone who is not that much into politics but receives salary in US dollar - what does Biden win mean for the US economy and the dollar?

Not much if they don’t win the senate.

Historically, when the President and at least one house of Congress are opposing parties, the federal government tends to be gridlocked except in time of national emergency (e.g., 9/11).

This, I believe, is why the markets are reacting rather optimistically to the election results. Market makers clearly believe that a Biden presidency and a Republican Senate will get very little done, pass very few new laws, and spend a lot of time quarreling. This allows the economy to essentially run on auto-pilot, which in a free market system is rather conducive to growth.

If however the Senate swings to the Democrats after all the votes are counted, it may be a different story.

> Historically, when the President and at least one house of Congress are opposing parties, the federal government tends to be gridlocked except in time of national emergency (e.g., 9/11).

Unless you mean in the strict technical sense of national emergency, where the US has spent exactly 14 months not in one since March 9, 1933 (so the rule is moot because it basically never applies), historically that's mostly not true; it wasn't that true in the 1980s through 1992s with Democrats controlling one and sometimes two houses of Congress and Reagan-Bush presidencies. It wasn't very true in the mid-late 1990s with Clinton vs. Gingrich (there were shutdowns, but also major bipartisan initiatives like welfare reform).

Still, it's pretty true if you narrow it to a Democratic President and Mitch McConnell as Senate Majority leader, rather than trying to make it some nonpartisan broad historical phenomenon.

Clinton was a pragmatist; he shifted to a more moderate position after 1994 and the huge GOP sweep of the House. Thus he and Gingrich were able to work together and get some great work done.

> Clinton was a pragmatist;

Maybe, more significant was that he was ideologically a center-right neoliberal, the same as the dominant faction of the Republican Party at the time he was elected.(but not the same as the right turn the Republican Party took in response.)

> he shifted to a more moderate position after 1994

Not really. Overall policy outcome shifted from what a center-right neoliberal with weakly progressive stands on social issues could agree with a Democratic Congress that was to his left on both economic and social issues on to what athe same President could agree with with a Congress that was slightly to his right on economic issues and far to his right on social issues.

Welfare reform, for instance, may have passed after Republicans took office, but it wasn't Clinton “shifting to a more moderate position”, as it was a major part (though not as significant as health care, on which he was defeated by Democratic defections before Republicans took control) of his 1992 platform.

But the point is, in either case, while you can find excuses for each of the exceptions to the supposed “divided government is normally total gridlock outside of unusual emergencies” idea, the history of divided government has far more exceptions than cases which support the rule.

Return of a coordinated US foreign policy, which includes supporting allies and not kowtowing to dictators, will bring stability to global financial markets. With the US once again making decisions based on facts and science and sound economic policy, I fully expect the US economy to get back into stable, modest growth (vs. the last 4 years of chaotic instability. If the government is unstable, the economy reacts pessimisticly).

The guy elected promoted and voted for the Iraq war. Let's ease up on saying the foreign policy is going to be good.

Where did Trump kowtow to dictators?

Here's Moody's pre-election analysis (PDF)[0]. Overall they viewed a Democratic win as more economically productive than a Republican one.

[0] https://www.moodysanalytics.com/-/media/article/2020/the-mac...

More predictability in the market, even more so if the Senate remains in Republican hands (since the ensuing political deadlock would make it unlikely that we'll see major legislation pass over the next two years).

Probably not a lot for quite a while to be honest. The virus is still here, the deficit is still ballooning and Biden won't even be in office for another few months. Even when he is, it will take time for policies to be formulated, enacted and eventually have any effect.

Closer relations with China. Reverse on immigration. US attracts/accepts more foreign workers. Probably a raising dollar and lower stockmarket. The high taxes might see some flee high tax states/regions (living in New York city making 400k will cost you 60%+ of income tax) to lower cost states or out of country or remote.

Overall remote work should increase with a different lockdown tone at the federal level creating uncertainy in commercial real estate.

You won’t see 60% income tax on 400k. That would require an additional 10%+ new income tax (which no one is asking on a 400k income). Even then, you’d not lose 60% of your income. You’d lose around 35%-40% to taxes still because of how tax brackets work.

Anything after 400k would be taxed at that rate, 62%.

"In California, New Jersey and New York City, taxpayers earning more than $400,000 a year could face combined state and local statutory income tax rates of more than 60%"

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.cnbc.com/amp/2020/10/19/tax...

The question is how does this affect many FAANG employees? Is a move out of state an option?

It is an option, but remember something that the Democrat party was talking about in 2016... a global tax. Prediction, that will make a big comeback under Biden

No one really knows.

A big factor will be who wins the Senate, and that won’t be decided until January due to two run off elections in Georgia.

The two possible outcomes in the Senate will still leave questions about what, if any, additional stimulus legislation will be passed, and my guess is that this has the potential to impact the markets and exchange rates significantly.

There is no easy answer to your question, so I would start reading up on the potential outcomes and relevant legislation if it might have a material impact on you.

Likely the biggest change for the next year will be strategy for fighting Covid. Expect vast expansion of test and trace, bigger push for mask mandates, but also earlier reopening of public spaces and a sharper recovery in second half of 2021. Impact on the dollar is a crap shoot due to huge Fed intervention that never wound down from the last recession.

Probably not as much as this:

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/M1REAL

It's flagged why? There's an identically titled one for Trump from 2016.

Politics is usually against the HN guidelines.

Also there's a new thread from the NY Times that has more votes and isn't flagged https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25016070

Absurd. There is an identically titled article from election night 2016, for Trump. HN has consistently carried water for Trump by allowing a small number of HNers to flag Trump critical articles, for four years.

Donald Trump is the president-elect of the U.S. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12907201

I won't deny that HN as a whole has a conservative tilt (edit: at least in who's willing to flag and downvote), but I've always found dang's rulings on stuff fair and reasonable. We'll probably get a thread at some point with a stickied reminder to chill out.

edit: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25015967

You're on the right one!

Flag abuse and the lack of transparency about it by moderators is one of the worst features of HN.

I seriously doubt HN has a "conservative tilt". People on this site generally try to call the good for the good and the bad for the bad, regardless of party.

Well, that was after Hillary had conceded.

The NYTimes one has also been flagged now, and just about every comment in that thread has been downvoted heavily. My guess is it's a small group of users flagging everything about the election results.

> There's an identically titled one for Trump from 2016.

It would probably be flagged today, too; the tolerance for mainstream political content has dropped since 2016.

Since the oil embargo of 73-74[0], which was caused by the 'Arab-Israeli War', securing the oil supply from the Middle East has been a top priority of the US government. The embargo highlighted how vulnerable the US was to the Middle East. Since then, 'Peace in the Middle East' has been a plum goal of successive US administrations. President Carter was able to get a peace agreement between Israel and Egypt[1] which contributed to his ultimately winning a Nobel prize[2].

Succeeding administrations failed to gain additional peace and instead leaned on regime change in an attempt to oust unstable governments and seat US-friendly, stable regimes. This approach failed in principle: Regime change itself did not lead to stability. But instead, led to wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and ultimately, it was the protracted presence of US troops in those nations that provided stability. That stability was paid for with the lives of US soldiers put in harms way of militants from both within those nations and from outside of them.

Under Obama, two threats emerged: ISIS and an emboldened Iran. ISIS went from a 'JV Team', to controlling an area the size of Pennsylvania, spanning Iraq and Syria[3]. Iran was granted an agreement to suspend weapons-grade nuclear research until 2031 [4]. Iran may or may not be complying with the agreement, but it was known that they were causing instability throughout the Middle East, funding ISIS, Hezbolah, and planning and funding ambush attacks on US troops throughout the region[5].

This was the situation in January 2017.

Reviewing what the current administration has done since taking office, the coordinated and deliberate steps, and the results, have been astonishing, given the intractable and largely unsuccessful efforts to stabilize the region over the last 50 years:

a. Established 'energy independence' by modifying US regulations on production of oil, natural gas and coal. The US became a net exporter of energy, reducing the leverage that the Middle East states have over the US[6].

b. Moved the US Embassy in Israel to Jerusalem and recognize the Golan Heights as Sovereign Israel territory. This worked to gain trust from Israel, improving their willingness to participate in peace agreements. [8]

c. Coordinated with Russia to eliminate ISIS. It was completely eradicated, including US Special Forces killing the leader and founder, Al-Baghdadi[10].

d. Withdrew from the Iran Nuclear accord, and renewed sanctions against Iran. The funds provided by the accord likely were used in part to fund their terror activities.

e. Killed General Soleimani, who was know to be the mastermind and source of funding for terrorism throughout the Middle East, directed not just at US, but other Arab States as well. [7] d. and e. illustrated to the Arab States that the US was willing to take decisive action to quell the regional threat that Iran posed.

f. Withdrew troops from Syria, extricating the US from that war zone, after ISIS was defeated.

g. Begin withdrawing troops from Iraq and Afghanistan. Most Arab countries want the US out so they can self-govern again.

h. With the above puzzle pieces in place, the administration rapidly concluded peace agreements between Israel and three Arab states: United Arab Emirates, Bahrain [9] and later, Sudan. Other countries are said to be joining soon.

i. Earned 2 Nobel peace prize nominations for the peace agreements (for 2021, winners will be announced next September).

Reviewing this timeline, and the magnitude of this achievement, it's hard to square the approach and its success against the claims of ineptitude leveled.

[0] https://history.state.gov/milestones/1969-1976/oil-embargo

[1] https://www.history.com/news/jimmy-carter-camp-david-accords...

[2] https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/peace/2002/carter/facts/

[3] https://abcnews.go.com/International/isis-years-jv-team-inte...

[4] https://www.europarl.europa.eu/cmsdata/122460/full-text-of-t...

[5] https://www.state.gov/reports/country-reports-on-terrorism-2...

[6] http://tiny.cc/oilexport

[7] http://tiny.cc/defang

[8] http://tiny.cc/Embassy

[9] http://tiny.cc/mideastpeace

[10] https://www.njhomelandsecurity.gov/analysis/tag/Abu+Bakr+al-...

he didn't win anything

"wins"

And this is relevant here how?

This thread is the worst. September looms.

“ If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.”

Flagged

Nobody won the white house yet.

The media doesn’t decide who wins elections, voters do.

Fraud

I'm glad for those Americans who suffered the nightmarish past 4 years. Finally, you're about to catch a break.

Anyone who’s just been living life and not obsessively reading CNN will tell you that the last 4 years have been pretty ordinary and fine.

The coronavirus pandemic and how the Trump administration handled it was likely the proximate cause for Trump losing the election.

If things were indeed normal or he acted like a leader to minimize deaths, he likely would have won reelection.

the downvotes in this thread are gross

I still don’t see what was so bad about Trump. Can someone explain?

Biden has not "won the whitehouse". There is a process which includes court challenges, recounts, & the Electoral College. This headline is premature at best & if Trump wins court challenges, could be misleading...

I don't envy Joe's position. The vaccine is a question mark and COVID probably has a lot to do with his victory. I think I speak for all Americans when I say we all want to be free from this disease and doing better 4 years from now.

What would ya'll do if the courts rule in Trump's favor re: ballots arriving after Nov 3? I'm just saying, wait for the decisive victory, and be careful of the possibility of civil war.

Media and political institutions have been attempting to bury the current president with the tired Russia narrative and other gambits since he walked down the escalator.

Joe's appeal today to "let this grim era of demonization in America begin to end here and now!" seems disingenous given the past 4 years, but I do hope that our public discourse improves, for everyone's sake.

It is Important to note that this is not the official result.

It is 99.99% correct call but it is not the official result.

Unless DJT does the sportsmen like thing and concedes.

Given Hillary had told not to call concede under any circumstances DJT will probably not either.

It will be a totally unnecessary mess.

High odds he will be the first holographic president ever. He's a uniter and not a divider. One day he will resurect from the crypt to whisper sweet affirmations on live TV about unity, sugar and spice and everything nice, and get claps from a parking lot of empty cars.

He hasn’t been certified as the winner of even a single state yet. Trump called the bluff, soon the only vote that matters will be ACB’s.

News organizations have always made the call before the vote was certified (hence the famous "Dewey Defeats Truman").

FTX [0] has President Trump's chances at remaining President in February 2021 at a little over 10%. Numerous legal pathways remain for President Trump to win.

https://ftx.com/trade/TRUMPFEB

That is patently false. There are no allegations at any level that would legally alter the election results.

I'm not sure where you get your confidence from. Just yesterday the Supreme Courter ordered ballots received after election day to be counted separately in Pennsylvania. This will at least give us an idea if the legal proceedings can "legally alter the election results", because if that number is high enough to swing the state there's going to be a lot of litigation.

There's a long way to go until Jan 20th folks. Buckle up.

https://thehill.com/regulation/court-battles/524900-supreme-...

Pennsylvania was already segregating the ballots, the order just ensures it. They were NOT a part of the count yet.

Source?

Those votes were segregated and Trump lost soundly without them. I’m not even sure they’ve been counted yet in PA but reports were that there were only about 500 late ballots.

Although there are possible scenarios where enough ballots would be disqualified, there are scenarios beyond that. Legislatures don't necessarily have to certify the result. Electoral Count Act and Bush v. Gore seem to suggest that state legislatures can in fact do as they please despite state law suggesting otherwise. And all of the heavily disputed states have Republican legislatures.

Given an electoral dispute it could be decided by house delegations which gives Republicans an edge.

What happens if Biden dies before the electoral vote? Do the electors vote for the vice president candidate? Does she assume office as president if Biden dies after the electoral vote?

Interesting question, this seems to cover both parts https://qz.com/1929017/what-happens-if-biden-dies-before-ina...

Posting this, not to be confrontational but to share info.

https://twitter.com/FareedZakaria/status/1326255584069513220

This is a piece on GPS ( a CNN show ) where Fareed Zakaria lays out a potential election endgame, predicated on legal strategy with "allegations" as a key component, that seems to line up with exactly what is happening now. that could be very effective at altering election results.

Note that the video was recorded before the election and shows a potential strategy that uses legal challenges to voting results at various levels as a navigation tool aimed at ending with a situation where congress/states elect the president on a one-vote per state basis.

These are 11c contracts that pay $1 in Feb if he's president and $0 otherwise. It's basically people betting on what is a very unlikely scenario now.

Calling this a 10% chance he continues to be president in Feb21 is disingenuous at best.

A lot of people here are talking about the "healing the division" but what if the path forward is to figure out how to exist with the division? We need to start getting more creative than just wishfully thinking this polarization is going away anytime soon because news flash, it's not. So what is the step forward?

A national divorce needs to start being talked about more seriously. It's at least peaceful and amicable, and better than the other alternatives (civil war, foreign conquerors, authoritarianism, etc).

This isn't "giving up" on the problems per say, but instead, accepting reality and thinking of solutions going forward. Thinking the left and right can be unified again is as wishful as thinking Artificial intelligence won't displace anymore workers.

Does anyone feel strange about a 77 year old man being put under this much stress?

Politics aside, I would not wish a stressful job on any 77 year old regardless of their health and well being - there are biological realities to being a human.

I don't know what motivates these decisions but it seems to me the people of his own party either don't care that there is a non-trivial chance he will die, or they think the glory of being president, even if compromised is worth dying for, or something else.

All of the reasons I can come up with strike me as misguided - 'president' is not a mountain peak you reach with your dying breath, it is supposed to be a difficult job of serving others.

If someone has a take on what his party/he is thinking that's other than 'winning is all that matters', I'd really like to know.

I don’t get the age concerns. He’s only 3 years older than Trump.

He's in vastly better physical condition than Trump, too.

What's Trump got to do with it?

The question is whether or not you'd wish your 77 year old parent/grandparent to undertake 4 years of immense stress.

If your answer is yes I would, I'd like to know why and what factors you consider worth the risk of dying of stress related illness.

To be clear, this is not a job only select 70-year olds can do, this is a job many others want to do and I think if you ask any rational human being, a younger person would be better suited for.

What’s your point exactly? Yes, somebody younger can do the job but Biden chose to run and the people voted for him.

He knows what to do, and delegation is a thing as well.

I will be very surprised if he runs for another term however.

The same can be said of Trump--he's 74 and obese, which I would say puts him and Biden at least around the same level of health. It would be re-assuring to have younger candidates, but you can't claim this is an issue for one candidate but not his heavy, three-years-junior opponent.

At the end of the day as long as the president has the ability to choose competent advisors / cabinet member I think they'll be successful, and I definitely have more confidence in Biden's ability to do this.

Biden has vowed to a group of his donor that, if he is elected, "Nothing would fundamentally change":

https://www.salon.com/2019/06/19/joe-biden-to-rich-donors-no...

so the title should be amended to: "Biden wins White House, effectively vowing no new direction for US".

So tired of calls to action from everyone related to pulling sentence fragments out of speeches from group figureheads and building a whole narrative around what it could have meant since what was said isn't "shocking" enough in context. Always 3rd (or worse) level references because the source material wasn't clickbaity enough. Often shared with comments like "not sure if this is true but it really makes you think" or other ways of feigning ignorance about what was just said while still saying it.

Isn't there anything good being done by any leaders worth sharing instead of how one found a year old article or tweet that they managed to turn into a "hot take" comment? Or progress on actual efforts instead? Is this thought the real silent majority or is all anyone's ever interesting in shitting on whatever <other guy> says?

After the l4ptop from hell was exposed, we can see he does not care for much other than continuing to enrich his family. There certainly will be new directions towards China, Middle east

Actually, in Biden's defense - while those emails do provide further evidence of corruption, they don't show he doesn't care for anything other than family enrichment. They perhaps show that he care to unduly benefit his son, which is bad, but not the same thing.

As a non-US citizen watching this from the outside, I'm divided between my relief at American's not having to endure Trump's stupidity for another 4 years, and some trepidation for world citizens on what a competent/active US president will do w.r.t. foreign policy & proxy wars.

The perception is that Trump was too dump to start new wars and wasn't subtle - so you could at least know what he's thinking w.r.t. your (non-American) interests. On the other hand, most American presidents are nice & courteous at face value while raining drone bombs on unsuspecting non-Americans, spreading Freedom (with a capital F).

As a non-American, I would rather Americans endure a bit longer and the remaining (7B-0.3B) world citizens have 4 more years of (relative) US non-involvement. Selfish, I know, but the world needs a breather.

Let see how taxing wealthy out of existence to pave the road to prosperity will work out for Bi... I mean Harris.

Completely independently of who won/will win this election, I find it massively irresponsible that media outlets are calling it before actual states are. The media should report the news, not make it.

This happens every election. States always take days or weeks to certify their results.

The fact that it always happens doesn’t make it any better. Media announcements have real effects. We already saw this happen in 2000.

This is why they now wait until polls are closed.

The media was not the reason why 2000 was controversial..

In 2000 it was bad because the call was done for something too close (hundreds of votes) that hadn't finalized and the controversy that followed was around how close that state was not that states had been called.

The differences in the "close" states needed to push past 270 are nearly 100x that and multiple would need to flip to matter. The only remaining thing that's actually close to watch is how much over 270 Biden ends up with at this point.

That is an old tradition. Why should the states call a national election?

Because the government is made up of laws, not media corporations.

I mean we called Trump the President-elect before the states certified results. A lot of senators and congresspeople are now marked as "Senator-elect" or "Future Governor" or whatever.

I'm sorry - but it is silly to be pedantic on this.

Were you saying it was bad to call Donald Trump the Republican Nominee before his convention speech? Even though it was mathematically and legally certain?

In life, only death and taxes are mathematically and legally certain

That’s not really a comparable situation. Right now, we are waiting on a recount in Georgia and the final results in North Carolina and Arizona, not to mention any court cases or recounts that inevitably arise. The media mostly called this because people got tired of waiting, IMO.

At this point, it is practically impossible at a statistical level that the outcome would change even if every legal avenue on Trump's wish list were granted. There is such a thing as a reasonable degree of statistical certainty, and the media have been extremely conservative this time around (compared to, say, 2000) to ensure they don't get egg on their face and retract calls.

Also, there's this whole thing about "freedom of speech" that conservatives like to crow about, too.

It is not practically impossible. Highly unlikely, absolutely, but so is pretty much everything these days.

The quip about freedom of speech is really unnecessary. One can criticize the media while recognizing the importance of individual free speech. I don’t see this as the same issue, even if they are legally.

Can you describe a set of facts that are within the realm of reasonable possibility under the current set of circumstances that would substantially change the outcome?

> The quip about freedom of speech is really unnecessary. One can criticize the media while recognizing the importance of individual free speech

Live by the sword, die by the sword. How about Citizen's United, instead?

A plausible, but again, highly unlikely scenario:

- Supreme Court gets involved with PA and some votes are thrown out, or a recount is done.

- Recount in Georgia gives it to Trump.

- Arizona is still not declared and could go to Trump.

- North Carolina seems to be going to Trump.

I don't know what the word "plausible" means to you, but to most (and in the dictionary), plausible means "reasonable or probable." If something is unlikely, it is also implausible. It is imaginable, of course, but anything is imaginable.

Do you have anything to contribute to this conversation other than quibbling with definitions?

As an attorney and technologist, words and code are my stock in trade. So, accuracy in vocabulary and expression is important. If you are here, presumably you are a technologist, and so correctness should be important to you, too.

If we find that the scenario you have described has come to pass, you are more than welcome to come back and hit me over the head with it. However, you should also be able to stand by your own claims, especially when there are mathematical probabilities attached to them.

I said it was a plausible scenario, not a likely one. Rather than address the scenario, you’d rather argue about the meanings of words.

I’m sorry, but I have better things to do.

They don't officially become "the next president" until the Electoral College's votes are counted in January. Are we supposed to not try to figure out who won or ignore what the likely future is for two more months?

I found the AP's article (who [edit: many, not nearly everyone] goes off of for race calls) to be interesting: https://www.ap.org/en-us/topics/politics/elections/how-we-ca...

How could this possibly work? Do you want to legally bar speech with the content "We have a 99.9% confidence that X will win"?

The media calling the election has no legal force. In principle, they look at the results and call the election once they think it's highly unlikely that a particular candidate can lose. Sometimes that call is badly made, like Florida 2000 or, IMO, Fox calling Arizona prematurely. But it's misinforming viewers to claim that all candidates still have a chance after some point in time.

That's how it's done in most countries in Europe as well in my experience. To be clear in the end it's not what the media say that matters, it's the certified vote counts but those come in often much later. In this case I believe that some states like Alaska will be counting ballots well into next week.

It makes sense to call the race once the lead is considered significant enough that the remaining ballots can't statistically change the outcome.

A good counterexample in this election is Arizona, that's been called early for Biden by some outlets (AP and Fox News IIRC) but is still considered to be potentially winnable by Trump by the others. In this case it is possible that AP and Fox were a bit too trigger happy.

What if you look at "calling a race" as "reporting on the underlying mathematical trajectories based off of empirical vote evidence"?

Given I believe that's an accurate description of what's involved in a news organization calling a race, they're not making the news, but reporting it, albeit in a form that makes it more palatable to the average reader.

Yes but that isn’t the messaging here. “Biden won the election” is.

If there is some kind of court challenge or recount that changes the outcome, it’s really bad for trust in the democratic system. Better to just be patient and wait - but patience is something lacking these days.

This is not at all a new phenomenon. News organizations have always predicted elections before they are certified.

As I said in another comment, it wasn’t okay then, it’s not okay now.

But your premise that this has something to do with peoples patience “these days” is incorrect. The AP has been calling presidential races since 1848.

So perhaps you are right that this is problematic but it is neither new nor related to anything thats happened in recent history. Its hard to see why the rest of your premise is true when the rest of your assumptions are so faulty.

You must also find it massively irresponsible for Trump to state he won the election as early as Wednesday morning.

Fortunately, his statements, like those of the media, aren’t how the winner is determined. Rather, all the votes are counted and then certified. The media waits until the unofficial counts are outside of the reach of recounts. Trump’s legal challenges are contradictory: he’s arguing to continue counting in states where he is behind and stop counting in states where he is ahead. It doesn’t work that way.

After 2000, the media has been very conservative in waiting to call elections. In any case, they’ve twice miscalled a presidential election but it didn’t impact the ultimate winner, because at the end of the day, we follow the rule of law.

Yes, of course it was irresponsible for Trump to do so. That has nothing to do with my comment, which is about the news media.

Fair enough, I addressed that part of your comment too.

The republican party has no counterpart anywhere in the world. They are led by evangelical bigots and some of them even believe in QAnon conspiracy theories. It is the hideous face of inbred de-evolution of philosophical and political ideas into fanatisms and childish naratives. They are not going away. Educate you population, separate church and state now, and maybe future trumps wont be able to do so much damage.

I am convinced that the main problem in the US is the structure of the Senate. It is preposterous to assert that the state of Rhode Island or the welfare state of Kentucky is as important to the security or economic health of the nation as California or Texas.

We are a divided nation: people trying to make the best of their situation, and the Senate, a fantasyland where we pretend that every state is equally relevant.

The "2 per state" rule worked back in 1776 because the states were roughly the same size, everyone was a farmer, and fertilizer had not yet been invented.

Today, senators should be allocated based on the GDP of each state.

Meh, trump's gonna whine democrats stole the election, media is constantly talk about him for next 4 years, he will win again in 2024 and nothing is going to change. Meanwhile climate change, economy and social media nonsensence will keep getting worse, why ? because nobody wants to really fight for the little guy.

Regardless of media projections (and we know how accurate projections have been the last few years), it's simply not true that Biden has won.

No one has yet won. No one will have won the election until states certify their counts. It'd be nice if the counts, and recounts, were already completed. (Florida, of the "hanging chad" debacle, actually finished its count within hours in this election. Why did these less populous states move so quickly, and then slow down so much, once it became apparent who was winning? Scroll down on this page: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/11/03/us/elections/... to see the timeline in the battleground states)

No state (out of all 50) has yet certified their count, and certainly no battleground states have certified their counts. In fact, many of them have still not even finished counting the votes.

To assert otherwise, over a weekend when none of the recounts or court cases are resolved, is literally spreading misinformation that many of the same media outlets are claiming to be stopping. Instead, they're shaping the narrative and rushing to crown a victor so that it becomes a fait accompli.

That has also been true of every election in the past that has been called by the media before the election has been formally certified. In a typical election, the media would call it, the loser would offer up a concession speech, and only then the winner would declare victory. Even Hillary did that back in 2016, it probably won’t happen like that in 2020 for the first time in recent history for reasons.

Ballots take weeks and in some cases months to count. We’re all familiar with projecting/crowning a winner with the understanding that it could change. But the way we use won in almost all competitive contexts involve a high likelihood estimation. Including ‘winning’ a contract/deal, winning a race, etc. New information can affect outcomes.

> We’re all familiar with projecting/crowning a winner with the understanding that it could change.

But the title is "Biden wins", not "Biden is projected to win".

It's obviously an incredibly close race, so there is a both a moral and legal onus for an even closer examination of the results. That has not happened.

For example, per the NYT, Arizona has 3% votes outstanding (estimated), but the margin of victory that has been called for Biden is less than half that.

The polls have just not been accurate at all this cycle (or the last), so using them to project victory is fraught with peril.

> New information can affect outcomes.

Indeed. ;)

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