Current Affairs The 2020 United States Presidential Election
- Thread starter riddick
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You give people too much credit.
Agree to disagree. In my opinion, the rise of Donald Trump has to do with many other things. First and foremost having a black man who's name sounds Muslim as the President immediately prior.
Having any female (or anyone not a white Christian male really) run after Obama was never going to go well.
Way too much change for a sadly large part of the country.
Someone in the party should have thought about the long game and chosen a competent seemingly virtuous white man and then try to gain control of the Senate so stuff could get done rather than constantly blocked.
Biden was the obvious (safe) choice and likely would have gotten the party backing if he hadn't opted out.
BirkenheadBlue
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lol
abelard
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I haven't said that the Iraq War is entirely responsible for Donald Trump; I disagree though with your claim yesterday that it has nothing to do with his election, or with the breakdown of trust in corporate media.
The idea that Trump won primarily as a result of racist backlash is also incoherent - undoubtedly there are many voters for whom Obama's race was an issue, but they did not in any way swing the election. The same electorate that gave Obama two terms and one of the most sweeping victories in modern political history by definition did not then vote for Donald Trump because an African-American President was unacceptable.
abelard
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It doesn't take much effort to press a button on the remote control though? Television is far more passive than social media - you can have it on in the background while you cook, or eat. The bar to access couldn't be lower. And anyhow, in the rare instances when corporate television news has anything interesting to say, it is all over social media within an instant, anyways. Say what you will about Q-Anon, but it is certainly not lazy, or passive.
First off, I'm not advocating for watching CNN or Fox or whatever
But I do think there's a new media that bypasses the conscious decision to 'turn the news on'.
It's on peoples phones. They sit there scrolling, 'oh look, Marys young lad is in 2nd grade now, Tom Davies could be going to Southampton, hillary Clinton runs a child trafficking organization, Jim took a cool picture of a sunset'.
More and more, I see reasonable people on line telling me that wearing a mask is pointless and a form of government control. These people are not extreme politically and are certainly not getting this message from MSM.
My point being, you (or Death in this case) can rant about CNN till the cows come home but it's misplaced anger.
If you understand that corporate interests control the platforms and the content that goes on there, if you educate yourself about the source of the content and it's intent, you might have some chance of getting the bigger picture.
But most people today are lazy about news and are quick to outrage, it's a dangerous combination especially when it's hidden between 'Beckys first holy communion' and 'here's a fox in my back yard'.
Clearly there are degrees of everything, you can pick apart semantic but I'd say Pittsburgh would probably admit that Iraq was partially responsible for the lack of trust in the media. But his greater point, that the damage was mostly done by then, stands, and you know it does.
Instead you're arguing about the degree of the importance of an incident that led to Trump.
On your other point about the election, sure some counties in swing states went for trump after going for Obama but you're ignoring the huge amount of support that got Trump to the point where he needed those counties. There most definitely was a huge perceived threat to white culture that gave trump a foothold in the primaries, that's why he whipped up racist and xenophobic hate, christ, it's why he started birthersism 10 years ago or something.
When presidential elections are decided by only a handful of states because of the electoral college, these voters most definitely can swing an election. Motivating a handful of people that don't otherwise vote can swing elections. Trump lost the popular vote by 3 million, and if any of a handful of states changed by 50K votes the election would have been different
I think we've beaten this to the ground, so perhaps we need a thread entitled "News agencies are in the business of making money in a capitalist society, so real journalism is dead: A Discussion of the Fall of Western Civilization in the Age of Social Media and Fake News" where we can wax philosophical on how to fix this
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