Donald Trump for President Thread

[neil999]

Watching TYT fumefest

Interesting to see that they also blamed democrats who actually ditched Hillary and maistream media too.

pretty clear trump won cos certain dems didnt want to/couldnt be bothered to vote for hillary

which they obviously entitled to do

 

[TheFinnFan]

pretty clear trump won cos certain dems didnt want to/couldnt be bothered to vote for hillary

which they obviously entitled to do

True. Maybe the fact that they saw how Crooked she really is put them off.

 

[Ashtonian]

Well thats impossible to answer isn't it , given the quotes and open support of the militia's for Trump is was a genuine concern given the pre-election rhetoric.

As regards protest I think it's perfectly reasonable , people have an absolute right to oppose political parties or decisions . From thatcher and the poll tax to the war in Iraq it's a right to protest and in the US it's even legislated for . The difference comes when violence enters the protest .

From my perspective, it seems petty. Complain when you don't get your own way sort of thing. If it continues then it would just generate such a whining culture in the west that just weakens us on the whole.

I am all for protesting in numbers. I believe in the right issues it can be effective, so don't get me wrong i don't believe against protesting. I just think there is a whining culture creeping into western society where protesting when you just don't get the result you want is a little weak culture in general.

 

[Whistlin' Dixie]

True. Maybe the fact that they saw how Crooked she really is put them off.

I doubt there's a 'maybe' about it, meself. Plenty already said so before the election.

 

[Harryflashman]

From my perspective, it seems petty. Complain when you don't get your own way sort of thing. If it continues then it would just generate such a whining culture in the west that just weakens us on the whole.

I am all for protesting in numbers. I believe in the right issues it can be effective, so don't get me wrong i don't believe against protesting. I just think there is a whining culture creeping into western society where protesting when you just don't get the result you want is a little weak culture in general.

Given we are talking about brexit , the biggest post war decision in the U.K. , and this election which has certainly been the most divisive and downright dirty it doesn't seem unreasonable that those who voted the other way would react .

 

[1966efc]

A few people on here will remember that the election of D J is hardly the worst thing that's ever happened in political America.

In one year ('68)

Luther King killed
Bobby Kennedy Killed
George Wallace wins 5 states on a segregationist platform
Nixon elected
Tet Offensive in Vietnam
Race riots
& etc.

Perspective!

 

[KaiserEFC]

Fair play to Hitler too. He was also unstoppable

I think it's pretty unfair to compare Trump to Hitler

Hitler didn't have to wear a wig.

 

[neil999]

I doubt there's a 'maybe' about it, meself. Plenty already said so before the election.

it might work out well, trump might not do to much damage in 4 years and dems might get a radical candidate for 2020...who that'll be i have no idea...

 

[Ashtonian]

Given we are talking about brexit , the biggest post war decision in the U.K. , and this election which has certainly been the most divisive and downright dirty it doesn't seem unreasonable that those who voted the other way would react .

But my point is the whining culture is stemming from things not going your way.

It isn't decisions made at the top which are being protested, it is votes. So either way the protesting of the vote is being done by the minority and the majority won. So it is complaining and tantruming when you don't get your own way so to speak rather than have a genuine reason to protest. Don't like trump? Well it is tough that there was another candidate that more people liked over your one.

As i say i just see that less as a power of the people and more of a weakening of western society.

 

[kithnou]

So somehow this guy is a frontrunner...

His speeches are so bad its hilarious, they are just all over the place and a complete train wreck and yet middle america seems to think he's awesome.

Imagine foreign relations with him in charge, frightening.

May I request mate, if you able to seeing as you are the original poster, to change the thread title to "DONALD TRUMP POTUS ELECT"?
If you can't maybe a moderator can help out?
I think it is only fitting.

 

[dholliday]

aye well said. identity politics is nothing but a voter factory.

add all those articles encouraging white males to get the snip because oh woes the environment can't take any more people, and also encouraging white females to focus on their careers and you're left with even smaller white demographics, currently the average is barely over 1 kid per household. In Spain for example the average age for a woman to have her first child is 33.

Add encouraging of mass migration into the mix from cultures who average 3-4 kids per household and you can see the idea.

I visited the S****front forums once a few years ago (as a trolling liberal, of course). It was the most inhumane hateful horrible online community i've ever witnessed. It was also hugely active and the posts, while abhorrently racist and utterly disagreable, were well written, revealing most members to be probably educated middle-class. Probably all Trump voters.

One common theme that stayed with me was that they all believed the government's migration policies were encouraging white genocide. I always thought how stupidly wrong and entitled that sounded.

Yet...I feel awful to admit they may have a point. Not necessarily that it's true, but that from a neutral perspective you can see where they're coming from.


I think the most valuable lesson we all can learn from this is the need to debate openly with the other side of the fence, not just our own echo chambers. We need to understand where other people's views (however awful) are coming from. With this knowledge we can better prepare and hopefully offer better options than things like Brexit or Trump, things that the sizeable amount of Trump/Brexit-voting folk would feel moved to vote for.

Things that do away with identity politics while still protecting all people from hate & discrimination. The latter is clearly non-negotiable.

This is the big challenge for the online commentariat. Anything else will be just the same polarising head-in-the-sand rubbish which clearly isn't helping.

I can see many folks with the best of intentions attempting to sort something that is still inconceivable within the framework of the intellectual map you have on board to measure the events of the last 48 hours. There are a couple of us who do not sing out of the same hymnal that love the people here and want to share viewpoints that help make things make more sense. This is posted in that effort. We could drill down and battle over various points of the below, but frankly, some of us are tired of getting beat up over it. When we walk away is when you should prepare for what's coming next, as it won't be from us.

With that said, I recommend you read the following. With respect, from my sensei:

It's important to see the failed 2016 Clinton presidential campaign in terms of intelligence failure because the same could happen to anyone. It could for example happen to the US armed forces when least expected. Therefore it's important to examine how such failures occur in order to avoid finishing up like Hillary in the recently concluded election: the sure winner one day who 12 hours later was the abject loser.

The question of how such an overwhelming political force could lose so badly when every one of its indicators predicted success was raised by Jim Newell of Slate. "I think of the lawmakers, the consultants, the operatives, and—yes—the center-left media, and how everything said over the past few years leading up to this night was bulls**t." The BS assured them they were on the verge of annihilating the Deplorables. A few dizzying hours later the predicted disaster had happened -- but to them.

The Democrats will now control next to nothing above the municipal level. Donald Trump will be president. We are going to be unpacking this night for the rest of our lives, and lives beyond that. We can’t comprehend even 1 percent of what’s just happened. But one aspect of it, minor in the overall sweep, that I’m pretty sure we can comprehend well enough right now: The Democratic Party establishment has beclowned itself and is finished.

One reason for the failure identified by Newell was that Hillary's analysts became invested in their own predictions. "Theoretically smart people in the Democratic Party ... worked giddily to clear the field for her. Every power-hungry young Democrat fresh out of law school, every rising lawmaker, every old friend of the Clintons wanted a piece of the action. This was their ride up the power chain." They predicted they would do well. Of course they would predict that.

Other "gains" ultimately proved poisoned pawns. The corruption of the mainstream media did nothing more than open the doors to disaster. By turning the MSM into an adjunct of the progressive cause they stilled the last voices that would tell them the truth. By election day there was no one left to warn them and bam! they walked right into it.

There is one other factor implied in the Newell piece which he neglects to develop. The campaign models became the data themselves. The indicators became the inputs and whole apparatus self-referentially detached itself from reality. The progressive "demographic model" (which models identity politics) constrained what the Hillary campaign could conceive. The reason progressive politics is about race is their models are about race. With only such a limited vocabulary there were some ideas the model could simply not express. They were unsayable. Newell doesn't even know how to begin to formulate the problem in this limited language.

It may still be true that in the long term, Republicans can’t win with their demographics, but we found out Tuesday that the long term is still pretty far away. Democrats have to win more white voters. They have to do so in a way that doesn’t erode the anti-racist or anti-sexist planks of the modern party, which are non-negotiable. If only there were a model for this. There was no model for prosperous non-hyphenated America because their model prepended everything with the hyphen that was assigned.

The identity politics model was essentially a promise machine which calculated how many votes could be obtained by appealing to a given population segment. Plug in the variables: cisgendered, black, college educated etc and out comes a "message" with its estimated yield in votes. Hillary was the end point of this political sausage making machine. According to their demographic model Hillary had enough messages to conquer the world.

Unfortunately messages were not reality. "Between the idea and the reality, between the motion and the act falls the Shadow," as TS Eliot once put it. There were plenty of shadows. Whatever its utility the Promise Machine might have been for campaigning it did nothing to deliver. People who did not think of themselves in racial terms 24x7 started noticing things going downhill. These parts of them lived outside the model.

They lived in an America -- the everyday America -- that the model had written off. But the progressive machine could not notice. All it did was constrain common sense policy to the point where governance became impossible, foreign policy itself became untenable without running afoul of some promise created by the model.

The more the Promise Machine cranked out the worse governance became. It was as if the Hillary campaign were gaming their moves against themselves rather than contra the actual foe, which is Reality. As such they were ace in their synthetic world but s**t outside of it. They were 'historic' in their own universe but losers outside of it.

The seeds for an intelligence failure of monumental proportions were sown. Right on schedule they gulled themselves over a cliff.

The the way to avoid such failures is simple -- but hard. The lesson is this. Don't try to take over the intellectual world. Don't try to create an echo chamber or Promise Machine. Don't try to homogenize the Narrative. These lessons are important to grasp if America is not to lose to some apparently weak foe. Romans knew how powerful a toxin self-deception could be, as did some Hollywood screenwriters; at least the ones who scripted the 1970 movie Patton, which ends with the title character thinking these thoughts:

“For over a thousand years Roman conquerors returning from the wars enjoyed the honor of triumph, a tumultuous parade. In the procession came trumpeters, musicians and strange animals from conquered territories, together with carts laden with treasure and captured armaments. The conquerors rode in a triumphal chariot, the dazed prisoners walking in chains before him. Sometimes his children robed in white stood with him in the chariot or rode the trace horses. A slave stood behind the conqueror holding a golden crown and whispering in his ear a warning: that all glory is fleeting.”

Don't listen just to the musicians. Heed also the slave. Do not silence the critics. All glory is fleeting.

 

[abelard]

interesting how prescient the Bernie Bros™ (white guys mad about Hillary Clinton getting her due, even if they’re people of color and/or women/queer) turned out to be:
https://www.jacobinmag.com/2016/10/trump-voters-white-working-class-vox-racism/

"Let me be clear. All of the following are true: From the start, Trump has put naked appeals to racism at the center of his campaign. In the process, he has magnetized a congeries of alt-right eugenicists, Confederate flag-wavers, and paranoid Mexican-haters to his cause. And then he went on to win 52 percent of the Republican vote in the primaries; he’ll probably win at least 40 percent of the popular vote in November.

Those facts aren’t in dispute. The question is what to make of them. There’s no doubt that the nation’s “white nationalists” provide disproportionate support to Trump’s racist campaign – and given the campaign’s tone, it would be very strange if they didn’t. Presumably, the nation’s socialists also provided “disproportionate” support to the Bernie Sanders campaign. And that sort of effect seems to account for how all the studies Matthews cites arrived at their findings, mathematically speaking.

For example, Matthews points to a study by UCLA’s Michael Tesler who found that “support for Trump in the primaries strongly correlated with respondents’ racial resentment,” and did so more strongly than McCain’s support in 2008 or Romney’s in 2012.

What that means concretely, if you look at Tesler’s charts, is that on the one hand Trump did a lot better than Romney and McCain among the more racially resentful half of Republicans; but on the other hand, he did equally well as them among the less racially resentful half. From eyeballing Tesler’s charts, it appears that the more racially resentful half of Republicans contributed a bit under 50 percent of Romney and McCain’s primary support. For Trump, the number was about 60 percent.

If that difference doesn’t seem all that big, it’s because while Trump has been very effective at mobilizing the most obsessively racist fraction of Americans to his cause — and great at winning Republican votes overall — he hasn’t been manufacturing more racists.

Indeed, amid the flood of “explainer” articles reporting the findings of complicated regression studies on racist attitudes, it’s striking how rarely you see simple aggregate numbers. The heated polarization of the Obama and Tea Party era in particular gave rise to an outpouring of intricate studies on the political correlates of “racial resentment” – dozens of which have been reported in Vox.

Meanwhile, in a co-authored academic article published this year, Donald Kinder, the University of Michigan social scientist who first developed the concept of racial resentment, reported: “Racial resentment is essentially stationary over the last quarter century, as measured by the ANES or by the GSS. We detect no sign here that White Americans’ racial resentments hardened during the Obama Presidency.”

Likewise, Gallup regularly asks the question, “Should immigration be kept at its present level, increased, or decreased?” Anti-immigration sentiment has been in long-term decline among non-Hispanic whites. In 2002, those wanting less immigration exceeded those wanting more by 43 percentage points. This year that number was 22 percentage points.

And that seems to be the case all around the world. Take the example of France, where the level of racism in political discourse seems to reach new heights every week and the far-right has been on the ascendant for decades. Yet the percentage of the French who say there are “too many immigrants in France” fell from 75 percent in 1988 to 50 percent in 2012. The percentage who think immigration is a “source of cultural enrichment” rose from 44 percent in 1992 to 75 percent in 2009. The percentage who agree that immigrant workers “should be seen as being at home here, since they contribute to the French economy” rose from 66 percent in 1992 to 84.5 percent in 2009."

 

[Little Ralphy]

But my point is the whining culture is stemming from things not going your way.

It isn't decisions made at the top which are being protested, it is votes. So either way the protesting of the vote is being done by the minority and the majority won. So it is complaining and tantruming when you don't get your own way so to speak rather than have a genuine reason to protest. Don't like trump? Well it is tough that there was another candidate that more people liked over your one.

As i say i just see that less as a power of the people and more of a weakening of western society.

I thought Hilary was the popular vote, meaning she got more actual votes but the way the seats are done Trump still won?

There was a large number of older people voting for Trump, so it's also understandable that the younger generations would protest, as much like Brexit here they feel it's going to affect them more.

I find it amazing a state like Florida where the ethnic community is so large could vote for Trump given what he's been saying, but then I guess there is a great deal of retired white folk living there.

Listening to people talk about their reasons for voting for Trump, it's almost like a throwback to the 60's way of life, and they're blaming immigrants for lack of jobs etc. A few people were even praising him as a businessman saying that's what they need to negotiate trade deals etc. Given most of his portfolio was filled with mis-truths etc. it is very similar to Brexit with the way the voting has gone.

 

[abelard]

To emphasise my point, the UK Chief Scientific Advisor released a paper yesterday on AI.

"More widely, it is likely that technological change could mean that job-specific skills may perish more quickly and people may change jobs more frequently. This emphasises the need for re-skilling over the course of a career"

Which is pretty much identical to a similar paper from the Science & Technology Select Committee last month. The notion that rustbelt jobs are going to return by building a wall or controlling immigration is dishonest in the extreme.

The Right might provide more satisfying scapegoats, but what is the actual Conservative solution to this? ^

Lost your job as a trucker to self-driving cars? We'll take away your healthcare and drive up the cost of education further still, in order to fund still more tax breaks for the one guy who owns the machines that replaced you. Unemployed, Homeless, debt-ridden, and stripped of access to social or financial capital, we're confident you and your lot will finally stop being so lazy and just pull yourselves up by your bootstraps already.

 

[abelard]

I thought Hilary was the popular vote, meaning she got more actual votes but the way the seats are done Trump still won?

ironic that the Electoral College was originally conceived to prevent demagogues from seizing power...