Can't do much worse than Hillary as Secretary of State.
Giuliani has lost it lately and think he would be terrible for any position that requires rational thought, but his experience is somewhat comparable (or better) to Hillary's going in. The Associate Attorney General for USA, US Attorney for NY (Top federal Attorney in NY), oh and being the Mayor of NYC for 8 years is a pretty huge role, more important than most politicians, save for a select federal politicians, and certainly more prestigious/important of a role than a Senator.
edit: The guy has all the credentials for AG, so not sure why he wouldn't be favored for that role.
Can't do much worse than Hillary as Secretary of State.
Giuliani has lost it lately and think he would be terrible for any position that requires rational thought, but his experience is somewhat comparable (or better) to Hillary's going in. The Associate Attorney General for USA, US Attorney for NY (Top federal Attorney in NY), oh and being the Mayor of NYC for 8 years is a pretty huge role, more important than most politicians, save for a select federal politicians, and certainly more prestigious/important of a role than a Senator.
edit: The guy has all the credentials for AG, so not sure why he wouldn't be favored for that role.
It's less his resume than his current disposition and temperament which seem to indicate he's gone whacko. He seemed quite sane way back when he was Mayor, that was a long time ago. Need I post the video evidence from the campaign?
__________________
Trust the snake.
Last edited by Bunk; 11-14-2016 at 07:45 PM.
The Following User Says Thank You to Bunk For This Useful Post:
I'm not insulting anyone for having a different perspective. Some people are willing to have an earnest conversation and work through difficult topics and ideas. Other just want to post snarky trolling crap. If someone wants to engage and talk about ideas, that's fine, but just posting smarmy sarcastic BS when people are trying to have a conversation is annoying.
EDIT: Or, what Enoch Root said.
You are, however, responding in kind. The exact thing you just said to avoid in order to "win the war" or whatever you were talking about.
Regardless, I think we've squeezed everything out of this conversation. Thanks for indulging.
It's less his resume than his current disposition and temperament which seem to indicate he's gone whacko. He seemed quite sane way back when he was Mayor, that was a long time ago.
I won't argue that. But I think a lot of it is a schtick - I saw one interview on election day he was quite honest and rational about the prospects heading into the election, almost as if he was hedging his bets should Trump have lost.
The far right cannot 'win'... they are what they are, and they are out there every time. Their votes don't change, and never change an election.
Just as the far left won't/can't win on its own. It (like the far right) is what it is.
Elections are won in the middle. What the left is missing here is that many people in the middle voted Trump because the elitist, bigoted (yes, leftist liberals like PsYcNeT, are just as bigoted, hateful and exclusionary as the people they are trying to condemn), have insulted non-cardholders for so long that those people have finally said #### you, I am sick of you putting me down just because I am not a PC, SJW, white-hating, elitist.
Until rational people realize that many of these people aren't KKK racists, simply people who are tired of not having a voice, nothing will be learned from this election.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Enoch Root
I really like you as a poster, so it disappoints me to see you so blatantly hypocritical and oblivious to the issue that you think you're addressing.
No one is asking to be coddled. People like PsYcNeT constantly insult anyone that isn't as militantly left as him/her, and those people are fed up. They aren't racist, they aren't misogynistic, they are simply tired of being lectured about white privilege.
The militant left can be just as prejudist as the people they are trying to attack. And their victims are sick of it. That doesn't make them racist, it just makes them tired and frustrated.
I believe this election will, in the long run, be a major positive because it is bringing a lot of things to the surface that need to be brought to the surface (on all sides). It is only then that they can be dealt with.
Best 2 posts in the last few pages.
The Following 4 Users Say Thank You to Weitz For This Useful Post:
You are, however, responding in kind. The exact thing you just said to avoid in order to "win the war" or whatever you were talking about.
Right - I just didn't think Resalien was trying to take part in a discussion. He certainly wasn't making any attempt to engage the points I was making, just trying to caricature them for a cheap drive-by joke. That's annoying.
Quote:
Regardless, I think we've squeezed everything out of this conversation. Thanks for indulging.
Likewise. I would be interested in picking the last part of this back up, if you're ever interested in doing so. I don't know that I've ever heard that line of argument about tribalism and tribes before and I'm still not sure I understand what you're getting at, but I'm curious. As I said, I think tribalism is on the whole a negative force, but I do recognize that it has some positive aspects as well (a sense of community and belonging being one of the obvious ones).
__________________ "The great promise of the Internet was that more information would automatically yield better decisions. The great disappointment is that more information actually yields more possibilities to confirm what you already believed anyway." - Brian Eno
I tend to agree. People (some here, the MSM, facebook, protesters, etc) are acting as if the KKK makes up all 60 million of Trump voters. Millions were women, black, latino. More importantly, hardly any voters are indeed the "deplorables" that keep being pushed as the stereotypical Trump supporter.
People can be fed up with corruption, the Washington machine, democratic policies, and a whole host of other things without being white supremacists.
I would like to thank both of you for your continued inputs into what has been a rational, intelligent, useful, and interesting-to-follow conversation for the past few pages.
More discussion like this and less hate please.
The Following 3 Users Say Thank You to Enoch Root For This Useful Post:
I was really clear about this. It's frustrating to have to just keep repeating it. I think we live in a constant state of choice between conversation with people we disagree with, and violence. So, to answer your question, we respond to these people with facts, reason, evidence, and we don't respond in kind. Win the war of ideas.
Have you ever tried using facts and reason with an American conservative Fox News viewer?
They could not possibly care less about facts and logic. Their "feelings" about what's really happening in America are what they look at, no matter how much data, how many statistics you show them.
Ideally that's a wonderful option, but I just had this exact discussion with a Trump voter last week. Despite every single thing I mentioned about the flaws in his campaign her response was "well I just feel like he's right about..." "well I just feel like that's not true..."
Fox News has made "feelings" fact and facts irrelevant. So if we can't have a reasoned discussion, if these people won't listen to fact and reality and actual science, what's the answer?
Quote:
This is a fantasy caricature of the Trump voter that doesn't really reflect reality, I don't think. Which I recognize is a bit of an irony since I just a page ago created a caricature of the well-meaning blue collar family man, but I think this is a pretty superficial analysis of the motivations of "rural America", whatever that means.
Really now?
How many American Trump supporters from the heartland have you interacted with lately?
I deal with these people every single day. Just Friday I had a woman in our salon raving about how Trump was going to bring back coal, and how we had to go back to manufacturing and Trump was going to fix it, because those damn elites have totally forgotten about those small towns.
This isn't a caricature, these are actual people that I interact with on a daily basis. I think that's where this goes sideways, I actually deal with these small town, coal miners' daughters and sons on a daily basis. My mother's family is from Appalachia, they all worked on the railroad. My mom's family literally came from those small town, coal mining communities. I'm not looking at these people in the abstract, I actually know these people.
Quote:
Again, a caricature. They're not telling conservatives that they need to broaden their world view and be more accepting. They're telling conservatives that their world view is, in its entirety, evil, and that they're terrible, immoral people for subscribing to it. Full stop.
If you're going to accuse me of using caricatures, I'm going to need you to stop doing the same. By and large the left is not saying "you're evil awful people and everything you do is wrong." The left is saying that gay people are also people and deserve equal rights, that blacks are still being discriminated against, that Muslims are not inherently bad, that women are still treated as secondary to men, and that perhaps conservatives need to look at themselves and their worldview and see if they're exacerbating the problem.
Quote:
Just reflect on this statement. You really think that tens of millions of Americans went into the voting booth and thought this to themselves? You really think these people are, at their core, bad people?
This is why I'm cynical. That sort of cultural fracturing can't be repaired.
I think that tens of millions of Americans cannot possibly grasp what a gay latino male immigrant is feeling. I think that tens of millions of Americans have no idea what it's like to be a black woman with sons whose lives she's worried about on a daily basis. I think that tens of millions of Americans can't possibly imagine themselves being denied a job or an apartment or a damn wedding cake because of discrimination.
It's not that they're bad people, it's that they just don't care enough to worry about others. Inherent selfishness, inherent victim complex. Basic human reactions, we all care about ourselves first, we all feel like we're the good guy in our own story. Life is hard for them, and that's all they can see, regardless of who else might have it worse. I never said it made them bad, but it does make them careless, and it shows a lack of empathy.
The Following 10 Users Say Thank You to wittynickname For This Useful Post:
That attitude will ensure that liberals will keep losing.
Keep losing? The Democrats lost one election, after being in power for eight years.
This whole theory of "this attitude will ensure __________" has been around for about three days, but apparently it's now the gospel.
We all pretty much know that Trump is going to be an incompetent President. How incompetent we don't know, but incompetent he will be. The media and social media won't be able to change that.
When his empty promises to Make America Great Again, resurrect extinct industries, and convince industrialists to bring home production facilities simply don't materialize, he'll be out on his ass too.
This whole "unless you liberals change, it will be hard-right conservatives forever" is nonsense. Hell, 10 days ago the story was "unless the conservatives change, they'll never win again".
__________________
The Following 4 Users Say Thank You to RougeUnderoos For This Useful Post:
I think that tens of millions of Americans cannot possibly grasp what a gay latino male immigrant is feeling. I think that tens of millions of Americans have no idea what it's like to be a black woman with sons whose lives she's worried about on a daily basis. I think that tens of millions of Americans can't possibly imagine themselves being denied a job or an apartment or a damn wedding cake because of discrimination.
Tens of millions of American's don't give a #### because they have their own problems trying to survive and make it out of poverty. They don't count though because they aren't a minority or part of a LGBTQ community.
AltaGuy has a magnetic personality and exudes positive energy, which is infectious to those around him. He has an unparalleled ability to communicate with people, whether he is speaking to a room of three or an arena of 30,000.
Join Date: Jun 2007
Location: At le pub...
Exp:
I don't think racists or bigots voted in Trump, and I'm a left-side-of-center guy. I do think a bunch of rural and poorish Americans voted against their best interests, which unfortunately aligned with that large segment of Americans who are in that fact-less Fox news land and are Republicans forever based on guns and abortions.
In my opinion, the view espoused in this thread that the far left (Black Lives Matter, LGBQT, whomever we want to use as an example of "regressive" leftism) is to blame for swing voters voting Trump is laughable.
The candidate was Hillary Clinton, not Bernie Sanders. Hillary Clinton is an elitist snob without any real cause aside from power and opportunity. The far left was screwed by the DNC and HRC faction. But we have a discussion going on here about how identity politics and tribalism and the far left is the issue? HRC is none of those things. She isn't an activist or a SJW or a regressive leftist.
Frankly, it just seems like the usual posters are beating the usual drums. But it has very little to do with what actually transpired imo.
The Following 5 Users Say Thank You to AltaGuy For This Useful Post:
I really like you as a poster, so it disappoints me to see you so blatantly hypocritical and oblivious to the issue that you think you're addressing.
No one is asking to be coddled. People like PsYcNeT constantly insult anyone that isn't as militantly left as him/her, and those people are fed up. They aren't racist, they aren't misogynistic, they are simply tired of being lectured about white privilege.
The militant left can be just as prejudist as the people they are trying to attack. And their victims are sick of it. That doesn't make them racist, it just makes them tired and frustrated.
I believe this election will, in the long run, be a major positive because it is bringing a lot of things to the surface that need to be brought to the surface (on all sides). It is only then that they can be dealt with.
Not sure how I'm hypocritical but I'll roll with it. I also learned I have a sense of self important elitism today and that's pretty cool.
I think we are having a failure to communicate regarding semantics. I won't go so far as to call it hypocritical but I think we can both agree that a large portion of the right has mocked "triggering" for quite some time don't you think? I find it side splittingly hilarious that these same people are now chastising the left for being too blunt about how they approach those who believe awful things. The "non PC" party gets upset when you point out awful crap they believe. You don't want to hear about white privilege? Well that kind of sucks because it's a thing and ignoring it isn't going to fix anything. That's why uncomfortable truths have the word uncomfortable in front of them.
The television mogul and real estate man who has been elected was objectively hateful on both the campaign trail and in his public history. Many would like to argue he's not racist so fine, we'll tone it down to bigoted or prejudiced. He is clearly, to me at least, misogynistic and there is now a VP in place who is so unapologetically homophobic that I'm surprised there's any debate. Conversion therapy? C'mon son.
These are not acceptable views. Sorry let me clarify that. I don't want to believe I live in a place where these are the kinds of views that should be considered acceptable for political policy. In a civilised society they have no place in government and by normalizing them and saying "let's discuss this reasonably" they're being given a level of respectability they don't deserve. You want to believe terrible things at home? Go ahead I can't stop you but for a country and for the commander in Chief it's an embarrassment.
Now not everyone who voted Trump is an out and out Muslim hating, sexual assault advocating, race baiting hate monger. Thinking that would be silly. But it stands to reason that a large section of those who did vote Trump didn't find any of those things to be a big enough problem to guide their conscience somewhere else. There are other options of course. Perhaps they don't consider social issues to be important in the least in a vote for president, maybe they don't possess the capacity to understand the repurcussions of these ideas, or maybe they are kind of awful people. These are all options I'd think but that's part of my liberal elitism showing through and I'm ok with that.
What my rambling is saying is that tired and frustrated doesn't get to be the cop out argument for why you don't want to address it. That it makes you uncomfortable is a good thing, because that means you know it's crappy. Sure they have their own problems with poverty or loss of jobs and that sucks but it doesn't absolve them from the consequences of their vote.
Apologies if this is all over the place, I was just trying to capture the spirit of the thing you know?
Last edited by ResAlien; 11-14-2016 at 08:21 PM.
The Following 7 Users Say Thank You to ResAlien For This Useful Post:
Tens of millions of American's don't give a #### because they have their own problems trying to survive and make it out of poverty. They don't count though because they aren't a minority or part of a LGBTQ community.
But the issues they're dealing with are often the same issues that those minorities are dealing with. We're all trying to survive, afford healthcare, get our kids a good education, etc. These are not problems that only those people face.
Their answer is to elect a guy who knows literally nothing about politics, a man who was born into millions of dollars, a man who declared bankruptcy repeatedly, and in his wake left hundreds of small business owners (contractors, painters, those blue collar workers who are just like these people) unpaid, who is currently being investigated for a fraudulent "university" that stole tens of thousands of dollars from people just like them for his own gain. A man who has never in his life looked out for anyone but himself, and these people vote for him because they think he'll magically change after 70 years on this planet?
These are people who continually vote against their own interests because the GOP dangles coal and anti-abortion policies and gun rights in front of them, while their unions are dismantled and their schools go unfunded and they can't even get decent internet access in their towns.
The Following 3 Users Say Thank You to wittynickname For This Useful Post:
Tens of millions of American's don't give a #### because they have their own problems trying to survive and make it out of poverty. They don't count though because they aren't a minority or part of a LGBTQ community.
About 6% of the country is made up of white people living in poverty. I doubt they made a large impact on the election one way or the other. There is nothing anywhere in anything Trump promised that would in anyway make their lives better if they did vote for him.
About 6% of the country is made up of white people living in poverty. I doubt they made a large impact on the election one way or the other. There is nothing anywhere in anything Trump promised that would in anyway make their lives better if they did vote for him.
And if poverty is the issue, Trump failed, based on NYT exit polls, Clinton won among people whose income was less than $50k.
Fox News has made "feelings" fact and facts irrelevant. So if we can't have a reasoned discussion, if these people won't listen to fact and reality and actual science, what's the answer?
Difficult question. I'm not sure I'm with you on the premise here, first of all... most people at least care about having the right information. They're just willing to be wilfully blind. That can be overcome to some degree, if you're willing to talk to them long enough. That being said, yeah, there are some people who are just not going to come around, and will assume whatever you tell them is an attempt to mislead them. But those people aren't enough to win an election by themselves. If you have these conversations, publicly, and make the more cogent arguments, the broader public will come along. You can't convince everyone, but if you put the best ideas out there, they'll win the day on the larger scale.
At least, that's how its been in the past. I'm getting a bit discouraged about this given how information is shared nowadays and the bubbles people live in. The problem is that if this doesn't work, I think the alternative is blood in the streets. We already see that, to some extent; people being beaten up for voting Trump; people being intimidated or assaulted for being pro-Clinton. It's group polarization at work. The antidote is talking to, and building relationships with, people who you fundamentally disagree with on important issues. That's hard to convince people to do.
Quote:
I deal with these people every single day. Just Friday I had a woman in our salon raving about how Trump was going to bring back coal, and how we had to go back to manufacturing and Trump was going to fix it, because those damn elites have totally forgotten about those small towns.
Sure, I bet. I'm saying that their motivations are more complicated than what you were suggesting, which was that they wanted to go back to some golden age that never happened. I think that for a lot of these people, their concerns aren't some sepia toned nostalgic yearning, they want to be able to live their ordinary lives in relative peace and not have the concerns of others thrust on them. Whether their view of the world, or the economy, or the coal industry is right or wrong, that "just leave me alone" motivation is pretty understandable, or should be.
Quote:
If you're going to accuse me of using caricatures, I'm going to need you to stop doing the same. By and large the left is not saying "you're evil awful people and everything you do is wrong."
I heard an awful lot of, "if you're voting Trump, you're a bad person". Deplorable, whatever. You and I had a back and forth where you took a pretty absolutist moral position on abortion, and it seemed to me that there was simply nowhere to stand on the pro-life side. No one could be pro-life and have good motivations for it. That was my impression of your position, anyway.
Quote:
The left is saying that gay people are also people and deserve equal rights, that blacks are still being discriminated against, that Muslims are not inherently bad, that women are still treated as secondary to men, and that perhaps conservatives need to look at themselves and their worldview and see if they're exacerbating the problem.
This is quite clearly a motte and bailey. This isn't all the left is saying, by a longshot.
Quote:
It's not that they're bad people, it's that they just don't care enough to worry about others. Inherent selfishness, inherent victim complex. Basic human reactions, we all care about ourselves first, we all feel like we're the good guy in our own story. Life is hard for them, and that's all they can see, regardless of who else might have it worse. I never said it made them bad, but it does make them careless, and it shows a lack of empathy.
I mean, that all sounds pretty damning, to be honest. They don't care about others, they're inherently selfish? I really think you're wrong. I think people are better than you give them credit for. Everyone's the hero of their own story, and just about everyone likes to consider themselves compassionate. Like I say, you seem to have caricatured these people as villains, that you can look down on as being inherently morally inferior to you. Maybe some of them are, but it's more than likely that you just have your moral "dials" tuned differently - you care about things they don't, and vice versa. It's pretty hard to defend the position that your particular calibration is inherently better. By what standard?
__________________ "The great promise of the Internet was that more information would automatically yield better decisions. The great disappointment is that more information actually yields more possibilities to confirm what you already believed anyway." - Brian Eno
Anybody reading/read Hillbilly Elegy? It provides some pretty interesting insight into poor white middle America and its motivations.
In a weird way, just as much of the left could be viewed as being a collection of minority groups who "want in" on what has traditionally been regarded as white privileges, poor or nearing poor white folks now seem to be their own minority group chasing the same thing.
And I can see how the positions taken by many leftist groups offend them. It would suck to be accused of having white privilege when - while being white - you certainly don't seem to be enjoying many privileges. That could get tiring.
