@Salty Herbert -- Given your propensity to accuse people who disagree with your politics of drug use, I don't want to hear a SINGLE complaint from you ever again about my caricaturing your political stances as "TEH STOOPID EBIL LIBRUHLZ IS STOOPID...AND EBIL!"
If you're willing to dish it out, you DAMN WELL better be willing to take it, F***ING HYPOCRITE!
Ah, the typical lib preemptive strike. Accusing someone else of the very thing that you're doing.
So it seems that YOU'RE the one that can't take it when you're all too willing to "dish it out". That make you the "F***ING HYPOCRITE!") ;>
This post was edited by Salt and Red Pepper at November 10, 2016 10:46 AM MST
@Salty Herbert -- I DEFY you to find a single instance of me engaging in the kind of personalized attacks you ROUTINELY engage in on this forum. You'll search long and hard with no success. So your claim that I'm engaging in some sort of "preemptive strike' is simply a lie.
I cannot help that your political rants tend to devolve into personal anecdote ("Someone I know was harmed by Obamacare...therefore Obamacare sucks") or fact-free ranting (such as your speculation that Trump voters voted for Trump because they were tired of "lawlessness"...when actual crime rates are at historical lows), suggesting that your main political motivation is "TEH STOOPID EBIL LIBRUHLZ MUST NOT WIN!"
If you don't want your simplistic emotional rants caricatured, come up with better reality-based arguments. I ALWAYS start by giving people the chance to make reasoned arguments. Sometimes I even make them for other people ("What I hear you saying is X, but have you considered...?"). It's only when the fact-free demonization starts that I start making fun of it.
Since the overwhelming majority of what you post IS fact-free demonization (I cite the aforementioned rant about "lawlessness" as a paradigm example), it is YOU who are initiating the ad hominem attacks, and I have no qualms about poking fun at it.
Meanwhile, as a member of the Reality-based Community, I can take whatever fact-free personal attacks you care to dish out. Since they are invariablly incorrect and simply reveal what an angry prejudiced intellectually-lacking person you are, they say much more about you than they do about me...;-D..
Yeah, I'm baked.. Nonetheless, with ONE hand tied behind my back, I kick your ass regularly... Can you imagine how bad it would be for you if I was operating at full strength??
Are you drunk?? You sound drunk.. You're not making any sense.. Why would I understand some slur you found on a left wing web site?? Don't you understand how slurs work??
Sure. When you mix it into your replies. You're just as guilty as me and excon and every other human being. My point being is what's good for the goose is good for the gander. excon doesn't seem to ever see it that way with anyone.
To be honest I don't see much we really disagree on in the big picture between you and me. That's why I don't get why you feel a need to use the tired "stoopid liberalz" horsechit for any sign of minos disagreement. There is too much isolating our collective selves in one camp and anyone with anything else to say in another. It's that kind of division that brought this political pimple to a head. This kind of "team" nonsense that gave us Trump and a competing candidate that couldn't beat him. The reason the nomination was stolen from Sanders.
It's freaking sad what transpired, but the anarchist in me is experiencing a level of schadenfreude over the absurdity of a messed up political system cannibalizing itself. Watching the nation drink from the very well it poisoned.
I really hope the wake up call is heard and the nation rises up to make sure this doesn't happen again. Sometimes things have to get worse before people decide to fix the problem.
I don't know what to think yet, as I don't know how The Donald will react to The Conversation.
The Conversation = a (probably imaginary) meeting, where representatives of the Real Power Structure in the United States/World indicate to our nominal democratically-elected leaders what the limits of their actual power are.
It's unclear whether any actual Conversation happens, although it took President Obama about 1 month from inauguration (and despite having control of the House and almost philibuster-proof control of the Senate) to pull back dramatically on a lot of the "Hope and Change" he promised in his campaign.
What SHOULD have been a $2 trillion stimulus with lots of high-leverage demand creation instead ended up being $800 billion, about half of which was decidedly non-stimulative tax cuts.
What SHOULD have been a radical rethinking of how we pay for health care in the United States instead ended up being mostly a clone-copy of Massachussetts' Romneycare (a plan originally written by the Heritage Foundation to preserve for-profit health care provision). Unfortunately, unlike Romneycare, Obamacare doesn't have a larger government entitity it can extract massive subsidies from in order to make it work.
What SHOULD have been a dramatic rollback of the Bush-era abuses of our civil rights and expansion of the National Security State was instead a nearly full-on embracing of Bush/Darth Cheney doctrines on unchecked executive power (but with more sophisticated legal justifications for it), the continued use of legally dubious "black" prisons like Gitmo, and wholesale expansion of assassination/terrorism via drone.
While The Donald is unlikely to attempt any changes to the aforementioned Obama policies, he may run into his own set of Conversations where he is informed of the naivete of many of his proposals.
It will be interesting to see what happens if/when The Donald tries to use trade policy to "bring American jobs back"...and he finds almost NO support for such policies in Congress or among the people (i.e. the Rich and Powerful) who actually matter in the American political system.
I think that Americans, by and large, wanted to take the reins back from the corporate establishment this election. They managed an upset in the Republican party, and damn near did so with the Democrats as well. That the Ds did not listen hurt them.
The Rs swept the nation last night. They took the Senate, the House and the WH. But it wasn't the Rs that did so, not really...it was the POed American citizens. Republicans now have the opportunity to actually do the bidding of the people that elected them. If they fail to do so, Congress will sweep blue in the midterms.
I have had a long-standing argument with a friend over voting "the lesser of two evils". She brought that up this morning regarding the results of this election. This wasn't a 'lesser of two evils' election. This was an "I want my F'ing country back!" proclamation of those who will no longer accept the Bushes, Romneys, McCains and Rubios or the Clintons, Gores, Kerrys that the establishment offers us as an either/or choice.
I think Trump's election was largely based on a segment of the American populace (mostly white, mostly with less-than-college education) wanting "their country back." Unfortunately, it isn't "theirs" anymore, and the evolution of the world suggests it will never be "theirs" again.
Also, while Trump's election is arguably an unprecedented event, the composition of Congress is nowhere near as radical an event. Incumbents mostly won, and they mostly won because (thanks to gerrymandering and de facto political segregation) incumbents mostly win in Congress. This suggests Trump's victory was largely a "cult of personality" effect and not some broader-based dramatic shift in our political system.
This election, while unprecendented in many ways, does not hold a candle to the 1980 election of Ronald Reagan (who won the popular vote by 10% and the Electoral College 489-49) with its parallel GOP pickup of TWELVE Senate seats and 34 House seats. THAT was a truly groundbeaking change in American politics.
It remains to be seen if Trump's election will produce anything remotely similar.
Unfortunately, it isn't "theirs" anymore Got any statistics to back that claim? Because I'm thinking that the USA is STILL predominately white and that the number of college "indoctrinated" people is somewhere around 30%. The outcome of the election would seem to endorse those "facts".
But maybe, just maybe, it's not about white vs. other skin colors. Maybe people are sick and tired of the constant justification of lawlessness because someone's ancestors may have been oppressed. Maybe people are just tired of all the Demoncrat hate-mongering for fun and profit. And maybe, just maybe, some of those college types are looking at the debt now hanging over their heads and the fact that they're still living in their parents' basements with no hope of a decent job, let alone starting a life of their own.
This post was edited by Just Asking at November 9, 2016 10:57 AM MST
@S and RP Re: Unfortunately, it isn't "theirs" anymore
That was a rhetorical/metaphorical claim, not a statistical one, so perhaps I should have been more explicit in what I meant.
It is my impression that many of the "want my country back" crowd long for a time when they were the dominant demographic group (both in political and economic power) and believe the government has somehow been complicit in removing that power from them. To an extent, they are correct. When the government starts requiring that employers hire employess without discriminating on the basis of ethnicity, gender, arrest record, etc., by definition the competition for prized jobs goes up, and people who previously benefitted from discrimination lose out.
But they are also incorrect insofar as much of what ails the moderate-educated "Real American" is a mixture of technology changes, demographic changes, and the integration of the global economy, NONE of which is practically reversible.
For example, Trump won Michigan by about 12,000 votes (<0.27%). Some pundits attributed his victory to how globalization has impacted the automobile industry, long a source of high-paying jobs for moderately-educated workers.
However, a far more dramatic change over the past several decades has been improvements in production efficiency. It used to take the Big 3 about 60 man-hours of labor to produce a car. Now that figure is more like 10 to 15 man-hours. Most of the jobs in the industry haven't gone to Mexico or China, they've gone to robots.
As for your claims about "constant justification of lawlessness", given that US crime rates are at or near 50-year lows, the statistics don't bear out your claim. As noted by Newt Gingrich, Americans don't "feel" safer, but that's because they allow demagogues to manipulate them, not because they are actually less safe than in past years.
Your claim about the woes of college types (whom statistics indicate mostly didn't vote for Trump) is well-founded. However, I note that a year of tuition at UCLA when I went there (during the first Reagan administration) was about $1,000. Corrected for inflation, that figure should be about $2,500 today. Instead, a year's tuition at UCLA is currently $12,000. Why are college students in such huge debt? Because of deliberate CONSERVATIVE political policies to quit generously funding colleges with tax money and substituting student loans instead.
Do you REALLY think a Trump presidency will reverse that trend? Based upon what? The stunning success of Trump University?
Anyway, in short, the glory days of when a high-school-educated "Real American" could get a good-paying job down at the GM plant, get married, buy a house, buy a boat, and send his 2.3 kids to college are gone, and they are not coming back regardless of who was elected President this election cycle. Those who voted for Trump on his vague promise to "make America great again" were simply deluded.
This post was edited by OldSchoolTheSKOSlives at November 9, 2016 11:31 AM MST
@S and RP -- I note that your reply above consists of two ad hominem attacks and ZERO content addressing (let alone debunking) the claims I make.
I know the I've Got Nuggets counterargument is popular among RAWFs, but you are usually less transparent in your admission you've got nothing but name-calling in your arsenal...;-D...
Regan did not change the system of politics as usual in this country, it was after his presidency much as it had been before. So that really has no bearing on anything I said.
Neither does your assumption that I was speaking primarily of a segment of Americans consisting whites with no college education. The Americans that I spoke of wanting their country back include everyone that stood against the usual party BS this election from both parties, as well as the growing number of Americans that belong to neither party. This was a huge "F*** You!" to both the Democrats and the Republicans.
I never claimed any reasoning for why Rs now hold majorities in both the House and the Senate. I simply stated that if they fail to represent the people, they will lose those majorities.
What Trump's election represents is a thoroughly PO population.
As I said before, I partially agree with you. There was an interesting segment on CNN where Democratic political consultant David Axelrod noted that a large majority of Americans polled (across all parties) believed Trump lacked the temperament/experience to be a good president...yet the voting shows many voted for Trump anyway.
That would tend to confirm your "pissed off voters" hypothesis.
What I think many Americans ***fail*** to realize is that the source of their frustration does NOT lie with the President. It lies in much deeper social/political structures which President Trump lacks the power, intellect, and/or inclination to address.
Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe President Trump's first day in office will be a constitutional amendment to explicitly overturn Buckley v. Valeo (the SCOTUS money=speech decision at the root of our oligarchy of the Rich). If so, I'll support him wholeheartedly. But I doubt it.
The source of voter frustration does indeed lie with the president...and with Congress, and with the SCOTUS, and with governors and state legislatures, and with local politicians, and with the apparatus of both parties. The source of voter frustration and anger lies with the whole damn system.
You may think Hillary's temperament better than Trump's, I do not. Her experience is another strike against her, in my book. As for her intellect, she is one who thinks so highly of herself that combined with her hawkishness, I truly feared her being elected. I have repeatedly heard and seen comments from those worried about Trump having the nuclear codes, but she is the one that worried me regarding foreign relations. Those are my opinions, you are free to disagree, but you will not change them. Have a good evening, SKOS.
@Bozette -- I readily concede HRC was a flawed candidate and I wasn't going to vote for her myself.
However, I think your claim that people are fed up with "the whole damn system" are not supported by the evidence of the election. There was no great anti-incumbent sweep. Heck, it was smaller than 2010 or 2012 in that respect. Hence, you are projecting YOUR OWN FEELINGS on to the American electorate.
It could happen that your feeling are reflected by the American people in general, but there is little to no evidence this is so. Yes, Trump won, but there was no great down-ticket anti-Establishment tidal wave. This suggests the Presidential election was decided on the comparative merits of HRC and Trump, while the rest of the election followed more conventional factors.
excon 