US Elections 2016 Part II: The Debates & General Election

[Reckoner]

Trump is a con artist.

http://mobile.nytimes.com/2016/10/02...ump-taxes.html

Curious what he cared about hiding more: the fact that he didn't pay taxes or that his business failings were that bad.

[MCAL]

Can't wait to see how Trump's supporters defend this. Should provide quality entertainment I imagine.

[Xellos-_^]

Originally Posted by Harbinger

You know, there's something that would be really useful, especially for this election. Give people the following choice:

()Clinton
()Trump
()Stein
()Johnson
()Other Third Party thingy
()NON-CONFIDENCE with the current choices (or just NONE OF THE ABOVE)

If the last option has more votes, then ALL major parties have to present new candidate.

People who think hate Clinton and Trump will have a legitimate choice. Instead of voting for the lesser of 2 evils, they simply PURGE both evils. Bye bye Trump. Go to Hell Clinton.

Yeah... it's not going to happen though... but it would be nice to have.

Under the consitution, if no candidate receive majority of electoral votes. The House elects the new president. You stupid protest vote would be worse then meanless. It would reward the House republican with their obstructionism.

If you really want change go run for office and convince people your idea are worth supporting. If you are n9t willing shed your sweat and blood, shut the hell up about your change.

[Reckoner]

Another interesting article about what's going on with a lot of Trump voters.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/...P=share_btn_tw

It's true that this is a sect of America that is largely being ignored and forgotten about. How they responded is indeed very ugly at times, but the old American lifestyle is dead. Hillary already went to places like coal country and told them that those jobs are not coming back. That could be taken the wrong way, but the solution is to innovate and train for the future and not walk backwards. We aren't going to bring back manufacturing jobs because even if manufacturing is brought back technology has already replaced the labor.

[Brother Coa]

Originally Posted by Reckoner

We aren't going to bring back manufacturing jobs because even if manufacturing is brought back technology has already replaced the labor.

And this is the biggest problem in modern age and why technological advancement is slow - by creating new things you replace old ones and that means millions of workers losing their jobs.

Ideal solution would be for a state to pay re-education of all those workers from work they are being fired into new line of work brought by modern science. Technology has replaced labor but you still need labor in certain area, and that technology needs to be maintained.

But the problem is that most of the time the state does not care, and capitalist directors care even less. To them profit is the most important and investing into re-education is not profitable enough for them. Shame really....

[frivolity]

That was a very good article, and it strongly highlights the problem with the current US election:

Both the black and white working class are stagnating, falling further behind – almost anyone except the very wealthy are, regardless of race. It is humiliating, and many have responded with a want for respect. That they are both doing it along racial lines, rather than working together, isn’t fully surprising: we are largely a segregated country.

Every demographic in the US is going through hard times, regardless of race, language, or religion, and both candidates are using identity politics to prey on the hopelessness that everyone feels - Hillary to women and minority races, Trump to men and whites.

The rise of Trump is making so much news simply because many men and whites are voting along those lines, when in the past it was primarily women and minority races who did so:

Yet only African Americans have a long history of racial oppression. Consequently, how they respond is filled with difference. In Central they can tell me without pause that they voted for Obama because he was black, and they won’t vote for Trump because he doesn’t like African Americans.

For the working class whites, given our country’s history of racism, of segregation, of slavery, finding respect through race is dangerous territory. Yet, with the unions mostly gone, with so many other outlets for respect eroded, it has left many with few easy options other than surging ahead, led by Trump, into the ugly, unacceptable territory of outright racism.

[Note: In my view, both sides are showing racism here by voting along racial lines, not just the white folks]

What the US needs is a president that can look past racial lines and work for the benefit of everyone, while truly believing that, "All lives matter". Unfortunately, that won't occur in this election.

[frivolity]

Originally Posted by Brother Coa

And this is the biggest problem in modern age and why technological advancement is slow - by creating new things you replace old ones and that means millions of workers losing their jobs.

Ideal solution would be for a state to pay re-education of all those workers from work they are being fired into new line of work brought by modern science. Technology has replaced labor but you still need labor in certain area, and that technology needs to be maintained.

But the problem is that most of the time the state does not care, and capitalist directors care even less. To them profit is the most important and investing into re-education is not profitable enough for them. Shame really....

I agree with your diagnosis, but not the treatment.

Imo, the biggest problem is that the cost of re-education in the US is simply too expensive, so most workers won't have the finances to retrain. In turn, this problem is exacerbated because students are being given large government loans that many have no hope of ever repaying. This influx of public funds going into student loans has greatly driven up the cost of education, and is creating a gigantic bubble that will eventually burst when a large number of students default on their loans.

The first step to solving the problem would be for government to stop providing widescale subsidies (some directed scholarships for disadvantaged students are fine, instead of subsidies for everyone). The second step would be education reform in order to better prepare students for the changing economic and technological environment.

[Brother Coa]

I agree, that may very well go for students.

But what I am refereeing to here is high-school educated factory workers and miners. What are you going to do with them after technological advancements make their jobs obsolete?

[Jaden]

Originally Posted by Reckoner

Trump is a con artist.

http://mobile.nytimes.com/2016/10/02...ump-taxes.html

Curious what he cared about hiding more: the fact that he didn't pay taxes or that his business failings were that bad.

Probably the failings, he prides himself as a winner, but losing almost a billion dollars on a venture would have put just about anyone out of business forever. He already defended himself on not paying income tax in the debate, saying that's the smart thing to do and whatever tax money he pays "would be squandered".

[shadow1296]

he is technically not wrong on the squandered part
http://www.cnsnews.com/mrctv-blog/cu...ur-tax-dollars
i wish this was fake, but it isn't and there used to be a report released yearly (stopped in 2011 i think) about even more of things like this happening yearly

[Reckoner]

Originally Posted by frivolity

That was a very good article, and it strongly highlights the problem with the current US election:



Every demographic in the US is going through hard times, regardless of race, language, or religion, and both candidates are using identity politics to prey on the hopelessness that everyone feels - Hillary to women and minority races, Trump to men and whites.

The rise of Trump is making so much news simply because many men and whites are voting along those lines, when in the past it was primarily women and minority races who did so:


What the US needs is a president that can look past racial lines and work for the benefit of everyone, while truly believing that, "All lives matter". Unfortunately, that won't occur in this election.

Except that Romney already won similar numbers with white male voters. That's nothing new. The reason it makes news like this is because Trump channels their anger in the worst manner imaginable, inviting racism to be legitimized in the public eye (Regardless of whether or not he himself is racist, though I do think he's done some pretty racist things with housing in the past as an example).

Trump is also not being honest with these voters (Well dude is crazy and isn't honest about much to be fair). He says he's going to bring back manufacturing jobs and pretty much the only idea he's provided is again a big tax for the ultra wealthy. Typical Republican trickle-down nonsense that does not work. Hillary by far is the person trying to work for the benefit of everyone. She went to coal country and told them honestly that those jobs are not coming back and she came up with a plan to get them employed with energy technologies of the future. Sure, you might debate whether that is the best solution and if that helps the environment, but it is something far more concrete than anything Trump has done. Trump has only made this country more racially charged than it was before, distracting his voters with petty things like illegal immigration (Net zero at the moment) and his Muslim ban (Uh... Yeah guys not blatant bigotry at all).

I would love to have a discussion about the effect of identity politics on the more crazy side of the left, but that's neither here nor there in an election like this. If this were Hillary vs Rubio or something, then we could have a more legitimate conversation about that. Right now these voters are very right to be worried about Trump's racial divisiveness.

[Ithekro]

Originally Posted by Harbinger

You know, there's something that would be really useful, especially for this election. Give people the following choice:

()Clinton
()Trump
()Stein
()Johnson
()Other Third Party thingy
()NON-CONFIDENCE with the current choices (or just NONE OF THE ABOVE)

If the last option has more votes, then ALL major parties have to present new candidate.

People who think hate Clinton and Trump will have a legitimate choice. Instead of voting for the lesser of 2 evils, they simply PURGE both evils. Bye bye Trump. Go to Hell Clinton.

Yeah... it's not going to happen though... but it would be nice to have.

I'd like that. I'm tired of voting for a lesser evil or a greater evil. I don't want either evil in power.


The Senate is the body that picks the next president from the top three national choices should none have the majority needed via the Electoral College. One vote per Senator (100 total). Ties are broken by the Vice President, but if there is none, since it is the next Congress, not the present one, a tie is a tie.

The Vice President is selected by the House of Representatives. One vote per state (50 total - not sure if DC gets a say in this one). They have only the two top nationally voted candidates to choose from. Their is no tie breaking mechanism in place.

If the Senate can't pick, the next in line is the selected new Vice President until such time as a new President is selected. If the House doesn't select a Vice President, it falls to the new Speaker of the House until such time as a new President is selected.

This would be an Acting President, until an actual one is selected or elected.

[frivolity]

Originally Posted by Reckoner

Except that Romney already won similar numbers with white male voters. That's nothing new. The reason it makes news like this is because Trump channels their anger in the worst manner imaginable, inviting racism to be legitimized in the public eye (Regardless of whether or not he himself is racist, though I do think he's done some pretty racist things with housing in the past as an example).

Trump is also not being honest with these voters (Well dude is crazy and isn't honest about much to be fair). He says he's going to bring back manufacturing jobs and pretty much the only idea he's provided is again a big tax for the ultra wealthy. Typical Republican trickle-down nonsense that does not work. Hillary by far is the person trying to work for the benefit of everyone. She went to coal country and told them honestly that those jobs are not coming back and she came up with a plan to get them employed with energy technologies of the future. Sure, you might debate whether that is the best solution and if that helps the environment, but it is something far more concrete than anything Trump has done. Trump has only made this country more racially charged than it was before, distracting his voters with petty things like illegal immigration (Net zero at the moment) and his Muslim ban (Uh... Yeah guys not blatant bigotry at all).

I would love to have a discussion about the effect of identity politics on the more crazy side of the left, but that's neither here nor there in an election like this. If this were Hillary vs Rubio or something, then we could have a more legitimate conversation about that. Right now these voters are very right to be worried about Trump's racial divisiveness.

Not exactly.

Romney's vote percentages cannot be explained by race and gender lines since they're broadly in line with the previous numbers seen when the election was white male vs white male. If we look at historical vote percentages:

Men | Whites
DNC | GOP DNC | GOP
2000: 43 54 42 55
2004: 44 55 41 58
2008: 49 48 43 55
2012: 45 52 39 59
2016: 35 54 37 53 (abc poll, 25/9/16, likely inaccurate by now)

The GOP has always done better among whites and men, except in 2008 when Obama pulled in better numbers with men. Even Romney's performance among whites was only 1% better than Bush against Kerry - when the election was white male vs white male.

The clear outlier here is Hillary's male vote, which is far lower than the rest. We also see that the male vote that left Hillary has shifted to third parties instead of to Trump, which supports my earlier point that men are starting to vote along these lines (I thought that there was a shift for whites too, but it doesn't seem to be reflected in abc's numbers, keeping in mind that polls aren't always accurate).

Hillary is the last person who should ever be talking about honesty. On that note, there is no running away from an evaluation about the merits of candidates' policies when talking about whether or not they're misleading their voters by suggesting policies that will not have their stated effects. My position is that they're both con artists.

[Dauerlutscher]

https://www.washingtonpost.com/natio...0dc_story.html

...“It never crossed my mind that I’m losing it,” she said several months after her release, and a big reason for this conviction was the rise of Donald Trump, who had talked about so many of the things she had come to believe — from Obama being a founder of the terrorist group ISIS, to Hillary Clinton being a co-founder, to the idea that U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia may have been murdered in a White House plot involving a prostitute and a pillow.

“They say they found a pillow on his face, which is a pretty unusual place to find a pillow,” Trump had told the talk-radio host Michael Savage, who was using his show to explain the scenario to his 5 million weekly listeners, who then spread it on Facebook, where it wound up in Melanie’s feed...

It's unbelievable how stupid and braindead some people can be.

[MCAL]

I was just reading this too. The minds of Trump's base is a terrifying thing to behold.

[Dauerlutscher]

I just don't see any logical reason to vote for that guy. I mean, from my point of view, even the dumbest idiot can't be so blind and not see that Trump is a big hypocrit, a liar, a racisst, sexist who has absolutely no clue about anything related to politics.

The articel Reckoner postet is also very interesting.
Many Trump voters want respect? And they seriously believe that this idiot will make it happen? They seriously believe or just want to believe that he can give them jobs and that he will "make america great again"?
I admit it. A part of me would like to see Trump win this election just so that those idiots will see how incredible dumb their choice was.

[Harbinger]

Yeah, you can find a lot of reasons to hate Trump (there is a lot... there's no shortage of it). However, you can find equality as many reason to hate Hillary...

From my point of view, Clinton are some of the most corrupt and despicable human beings running for office.

[frivolity]

Originally Posted by Dauerlutscher

I just don't see any logical reason to vote for that guy. I mean, from my point of view, even the dumbest idiot can't be so blind and not see that Trump is a big hypocrit, a liar, a racisst, sexist who has absolutely no clue about anything related to politics.

The articel Reckoner postet is also very interesting.
Many Trump voters want respect? And they seriously believe that this idiot will make it happen? They seriously believe or just want to believe that he can give them jobs and that he will "make america great again"?
I admit it. A part of me would like to see Trump win this election just so that those idiots will see how incredible dumb their choice was.

I'm the opposite. A part of me wants Hillary to win so that her legacy will leave such a dark mark on liberalism that the moderates will embrace conservatism for years to come.

There would be no FDR without Herbert Hoover being so bad, and there would be no Ronald Reagan without Jimmy Carter. Sometimes, when both candidates are terrible, it is better to lose the battle in order to win the war.

There are some things money can't buy, like manners, morals, and integrity. For everything else, there's MasterCard Hillary and Donald.

[Irenicus]

As we debate whether race is a scientific concept (hint: we have a word for that kind of thinking, very convenient really: scientific racism), Mr. Trump's -not racism- has very much stirred a new conflict in the American Jewish community.

The author, a Millenial Jewish magazine intern at Politico, wrote this article from an insider's perspective. These young men and women, the author included, grew up in a world where they were nearly indistinguishable from the "white" mainstream. They grew up with AIPAC, et al, fighting to paint the Left as the anti-Semitic side, as they held strong ties to the interests of the Israeli state and aggressively opposed leftist sympathies for the Palestinian cause (even now an increasing political threat with the growing momentum of the BDS movement and Israeli diplomatic isolation). Often caught in-between, they tend to have to deftly navigate identities and cultural concerns, though largely from a position of safety and, more or less, confidence.

Yet when the real Nazis woke up and long-silenced rhetoric of hate spewed out across America -- making real for the first time an experience their grandparents used to tell in old family lore -- the silence of AIPAC and the Jewish Right is creating a new anger: betrayal.

Unless the leaders of the older Jewish Right speak up, and speak up soon, this divide may leave a permanent scar. It will reveal them as nothing more than what the Evangelicals are (excepting those who have made a stand -- with applause to Mr. Romney and the Mormon community) -- without integrity. Politics first.

Originally Posted by Harbinger

Yeah, you can find a lot of reasons to hate Trump (there is a lot... there's no shortage of it). However, you can find equality as many reason to hate Hillary...

From my point of view, Clinton are some of the most corrupt and despicable human beings running for office.

Just because you repeat it with such conviction doesn't mean it's true. Just because you act the disappointed neutral does not mean you stand on morally superior ground. Such false equivalency is moral cowardice, avoiding responsibility in a tantrum of self-absorbed pretensions.

You are deluded if you think Clinton is anywhere close to being among the most corrupt and despicable to ever run for office in the long history of the United States. You are without ground to stand on if you think her character is somehow equivalent to Trump, of whom all civilized and ethical people should (and often do) recoil from in abject opposition.

I tolerated this sort of self-absorbed attitude for long enough, thinking it was mere indulgence, a normative cliché as old as politics. No more. No, they are not equally as bad. No, they are not the "lesser of two evils." No, I will not let that accusation stand. This insidious lie has done enough damage to the moral fabric and sanity of my country.

[Sheba]

@ Irenicus

I fucking blame that on post-modernism and relativism. Where we forget what is morally right and wrong. Usually, if we go morally wrong, our mothers or fathers will fucking bitchslap us to get us back on the right path. Something father and mother did to me when I was rooting for communism. Because THEY survived a communist dictatorship while half their family tree disappeared in the name of the glorious revolution.