DOOM, or The Official 2016 US Election Thread

Leo

Leo

Well-known member
Pro tip: "Neo-Nazi" is shorter than "Alt-right" by an entire character space! Save space in your tweets! AND be less euphemistic!
 
Mr. Tea

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
sadmanbarty said:
The Right Way to Resist Trump

http://mobile.nytimes.com/2016/11/1...st-trump.html?referer=https://t.co/uTs023F4pm
Click to expand...

Shortly after Mr. Trump gave his acceptance speech, protests sprang up all over America. What are these people protesting against? Whether we like it or not, Mr. Trump won legitimately. Denying that only feeds the perception that there are “legitimate” candidates and “illegitimate” ones, and a small elite decides which is which. If that’s true, elections are just a beauty contest among candidates blessed by the Guardian Council of clerics, just like in Iran.

These protests are also counterproductive. There will be plenty of reasons to complain during the Trump presidency, when really awful decisions are made. Why complain now, when no decision has been made? It delegitimizes the future protests and exposes the bias of the opposition.
Click to expand...

Exactly. Furious screeds titled "Fuck The White Working Class" probably don't help much, either (although that's surely a textbook case of the sort of thing that's only ever going to be read by people who agree with it before they've even read it).
 
firefinga

firefinga

Well-known member
Mr. Tea said:
Exactly. Furious screeds titled "Fuck The White Working Class" probably don't help much, either (although that's surely a textbook case of the sort of thing that's only ever going to be read by people who agree with it before they've even read it).
Click to expand...

But it's people's right to protest, especially in this case. Saying the protesters "deligitimize" democratic elections is actually deligitimizing (peaceful) protest, which is a basic democratic right.
 
vimothy

vimothy

yurp
firefinga said:
But it's people's right to protest, especially in this case. Saying the protesters "deligitimize" democratic elections is actually deligitimizing (peaceful) protest, which is a basic democratic right.
Click to expand...

Zingales doesn't say that protests delegitimize democratic elections, but that they "delegitimize future protests and [expose] the bias of the opposition".
 
Mr. Tea

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
firefinga said:
But it's people's right to protest, especially in this case. Saying the protesters "deligitimize" democratic elections is actually deligitimizing (peaceful) protest, which is a basic democratic right.
Click to expand...

Yes, of course. If I lived in the USA I would very likely be taking part in protests myself. He's not contesting whether people have the right to protest, he's talking about how this could play into Trump's hands and the effects it could potentially have on the many millions of non-voters and the no doubt also large number of people who voted for HRC with no great enthusiasm.

I dunno, maybe it's just not wise for outsiders to say what Americans 'should' be doing right now, given the extremes of emotion that people are charged with. But on a rational level, what he's saying makes sense.
 
vimothy

vimothy

yurp
Speaking of globalisation, and doom (of course), ominous noises can be heard in the distance:

[W]hat happens to international global supply chains if and when beneficiary countries decide the capital locked up in maintaining global trade can be put to better use domestically or that outsourcing production half way across the world doesn’t make sense when there’s untapped spare capacity at home, which is now much more cost effective?

The answer is that supply chains shrink, but the underlying credit arrangements live on. As the manufacturing hubs face up to the respective shortage of hard-currency repayment flows this brings — and potentially default — their hard-currency credit deteriorates. This compromises access to resources and hard-currency resources in general, especially if those countries which would like to keep producing for their own consumer benefit almost entirely.

At that point the global hard currency shortage — which let’s face it amounts to a global dollar shortage — stands to become the the most significant destabilising force in recent times and the most unanticipated global tail-risk.
Click to expand...
 
Mr. Tea

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
Corpsey said:
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news...-recount-fund-michigan-wisconsin-pennsylvania

Wouldn't it be amazing and/or terrifying if they discovered evidence of Russian hackers tampering with votes?
Click to expand...

Has anyone else heard about this, and had more or less the following reaction to the concept of a "hacked voting machine":

voting_machines.png


?
 
vimothy

vimothy

yurp
I've been trying for some time now to understand the reaction of Hillary Clinton’s supporters to her defeat in last week’s election. At first, I simply dismissed it as another round of the amateur theatrics both parties indulge in whenever they lose the White House. Back in 2008, as most of my readers will doubtless recall, Barack Obama’s victory was followed by months of shrieking from Republicans, who insisted—just as a good many Democrats are insisting today—that the election of the other guy meant that democracy had failed, the United States and the world were doomed, and the supporters of the losing party would be rounded up and sent to concentration camps any day now.

That sort of histrionic nonsense has been going on for decades. In 2000, Democrats chewed the scenery in the grand style when George W. Bush was elected president. In 1992, it was the GOP’s turn... American politics and popular culture being what it is, this kind of collective hissy fit is probably unavoidable.

Fans of irony have much to savor. You’ve got people who were talking eagerly about how to game the electoral college two weeks ago, who now are denouncing the electoral college root and branch; you’ve got people who insisted that Trump, once he lost, should concede and shut up, who are demonstrating a distinct unwillingness to follow their own advice. You’ve got people in the bluest of blue left coast cities marching in protest as though that’s going to change a single blessed thing...

Still, there’s more going on here than that. I know some fairly thoughtful people whose reaction to the election’s outcome wasn’t histrionic at all—it consisted of various degrees of shock, disorientation, and fear. They felt, if the ones I read are typical, that the people who voted for Trump were deliberately rejecting and threatening them personally...

To some extent... this was a reflection of the political culture of personal demonization I discussed in last week’s post. Many of Clinton’s supporters convinced themselves, with the help of a great deal of propaganda from the Democratic Party and its bedfellows in the mainstream media, that Donald Trump is a monster of depravity thirsting for their destruction, and anyone who supports him must hate everything good. Now they’re cringing before the bogeyman they imagined, certain that it’s going to act out the role they assigned it and gobble them up.

Another factor at work here is the very strong tendency of people on the leftward end of American politics to believe in what I’ve elsewhere called the religion of progress—the faith that history has an inherent tilt toward improvement, and more to the point, toward the particular kinds of improvement they prefer. Hillary Clinton, in an impromptu response to a heckler at one of her campaign appearances, phrased the central tenet of that religion concisely: “We’re not going to go back. We’re going to go forward.” Like Clinton herself, a great many of her followers saw their cause as another step forward in the direction of progress, and to find themselves “going back” is profoundly disorienting—even though those labels “forward” and “back” are entirely arbitrary when they aren’t the most crassly manipulative sort of propaganda.
Click to expand...

http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.co.uk/2016/11/when-shouting-stops.html

Not sure what it means when a man styling himself as the head of the "Druidical Order of the Golden Dawn" is more rational and lucid than the majority of media pundits, but there you go.
 
D

droid

Well-known member
lol. And back in the real world.

Arctic ice melt could trigger uncontrollable climate change at global level

Aides to the US president-elect, Donald Trump, this week unveiled plans to remove the budget for climate change science currently used by Nasa and other US federal agencies for projects such as examining Arctic changes, and to spend it instead on space exploration.

“That would be a huge mistake,” said Carson, noting that much more research needs to be done on polar tipping points before we can understand the true dangers, let alone hope to tackle them. “It would be like ripping out the aeroplane’s cockpit instruments while you are in mid-flight.”

He added: “These are very serious problems, very serious changes are happening, but they are still poorly understood. We need more research to understand them. A lot of the major science is done by the US.”
Click to expand...

https://www.theguardian.com/environ...-climate-change-global-level?CMP=share_btn_fb
 
Leo

Leo

Well-known member
gallows humor from a friend on Facebook: "I can't believe I'm going to have to live my final years under Fascism because a website created to share cat photos wiped out the critical thinking skills of two generations."
 
S

sadmanbarty

Well-known member
Pre-election from NYT, WaPo & Politico: Clinton email server (first) outnumbered Trump conflict-of-interest stories five to one

 
S

sadmanbarty

Well-known member
vimothy said:
Response to Krugman from Jim Naureckas at FAIR: http://fair.org/home/appeal-to-the-working-class-dont-bother-says-krugman/
Click to expand...

From that piece:

"Clinton, as it happens, mostly chose not to deliver messages about issues. UCLA political scientist Lynn Vavreck did an analysis of 2016 presidential campaign advertising that she wrote up in the New York Times (11/23/16), and the results were striking:

Both candidates spent most of their television advertising time attacking the other person’s character. In fact, the losing candidate’s ads did little else. More than three-quarters of the appeals in Mrs. Clinton’s advertisements (and nearly half of Mr. Trump’s) were about traits, characteristics or dispositions. Only 9 percent of Mrs. Clinton’s appeals in her ads were about jobs or the economy. By contrast, 34 percent of Mr. Trump’s appeals focused on the economy, jobs, taxes and trade."
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Top