I'd love to see something that works to reverse this trend. Maybe some kind of option on facebook that allows you to modify the feed a bit, or some kind of demographic-based version of Omegle. Maybe a browser plugin that can learn about you (and the echo chamber you are in) and start suggesting things that are challenging to your world view.
The worst offenders in social media disinformation deliberately use social media to get in touch with others like them because of social's "clustering" tendencies so no, it wouldn't get much adoption.
Internet is full of opposing opinions. It's not like people don't see them, they don't click them.
The people that would most benefit from that plugin wouldn't be the ones to use it. If you are aware of your media bubble, you probably have the cognitive tools to do something about it.
If it isn't solved at the root, i.e. at the Facebook level, it won't be solved. However, since Facebook's commercial interests are aligned against it, I am pessimistic it will be solved. Maybe Facebook's successor can solve it.
Made a pro Trump post here once. It got down voted into oblivion. Not on Facebook anymore, but when I was my aunt defriended me over politics. What this author doesn't understand is that the right isn't in an echo chamber. We're very much aware of left wing media and are exposed to it all the time. It's just lost all its persuasive power over us because it's founded on straw men. Now the answer presented is basically to justify political censorship under the guise of fact checking? Good to know that the left has learned nothing. Get ready to keep on losing.
Maybe you aren't in an echo chamber. What about The people liking stories about Obama being born in Kenya? Or trump being endorsed by the pope? Removing blatantly false lies isn't censorship, it's literally the bare minimum they should do.
GP edited their post since I replied to make it less arrogant. Maybe you should edit yours too.
Edit: Oh and I'm sick of being denounced as a moderate. Seriously, the highlight of the entire election has been attacks and demonization on the other side. Fuck me for trying to point out shitty behaviour, right?
My original comment is appropriate. The fact you feel it's appropriate to comment on his relationship with a family member and say you're sorry for his Aunt and then pass judgement about the general public's behaviour during an election is quite arrogant.
I don't think there's anything I regret more the past month than engaging with you. Here I am complaining about demonization, and here you are focusing so hard on attacking me.
Since you're such a fan, there's an email on my profile; feel free to send all your personality feedback and concerns there.
Bit dramatic, im sure there are plenty more things you regret doing this month. I enjoyed our conversation and Im glad you learned a thing or 2 about being humble.
>> Huffington Post told its readers Clinton had a 98 percent chance of being elected;
>> build a better environment for news
I agree. They can start by not telling me what to think. Focus on reporting. I got so sick of the media putting spin on what Hillary thinks (they know what she thinks?) or what someone else was saying about Donald trump (without vetting) from 30 years ago and on and on.
I have stopped believing them. The news agencies are opinion shows as far as I'm concerned. They are propaganda, bought and paid for by interests that are not American.
Just thought I'd share a tidbit that I haven't been able to elsewhere. I work for a large market research firm that does polls for a large news network. On Sunday, we ran a poll for them that put Trump at 8 points ahead. They decided against publishing it.
Thank you for sharing. From my two months of non-professional research, it looked like Trump was going to win by a big margin. The major media outlets were looking outright deceptive from my perspective.
Interesting, isn't it? Filtering out facts that they didn't believe, not because they were trying to lie, but because those who demand that we "celebrate diversity" have so little actual diversity themselves that they all truly believed the same, standard narratives they consistently tell each other, resulted in a situation where one of their beliefs could be objectively tested, and they were all wildly wrong in exactly the same way.
What does this suggest about all the other stories the mainstream media (CBS exec: "How could Nixon have won? I don't know a single person who voted for him!") tells every day, in exactly the same way, about all sorts of issues that can't be so easily measured?
And what does it suggest about the academic institutions that enforce conformity to exactly the same set of opinions and narratives and not only filters information but fires and otherwise silences dissenters? And anyone who suggests that a system so utterly lacking in diversity of thought that there is no one left on campus who will tell them if they're wrong can't be trusted is called "anti-intellectual" and "anti-science".
It doesn't tell me that they are wrong about everything, just that they are likely to be just as wrong about some other issues they are adamant about as they were about this one, but that promoting their dogma, not working to find the truth, is what they really care about, which doesn't make them wrong about any particular thing, just not reliable.
pcunite - we've discussed in another thread, but the election was actually quite close. HRC had more of the popular vote, and a 1% shift from Trump to Clinton would have resulted in her victory.
Sure, but the polls being published and "marketed" had her with an insurmountable lead. Silver had her at 70% and that was generous to Trump compared to many. This isn't about the polls being wrong because the race was tight. Many misrepresented likely turnout (because many are incompetent and thought the 2016 electorate was going to be the 2012 electorate) and the media pumped up those same HRC favorable polls while the pundits attacked the validity of what turned out to be better polls (LA Times). It sure looked like a propaganda machine to me, but I'm just one of those deplorables.
Some honest questions: Do you think it's worth polling at all? Do you think it's possible they made honest mistakes in their models? If you're voting in the election, you're going to have an opinion. Is it possible to work on polling honestly while being an eligible voter?
Personally, I think polling is worthwhile. I think it's possible they made honest (and sometimes incompetent, but not malicious) mistakes, and acknowledge that attempting to predict the outcome of a future event is inherently difficult. I think it is possible to do honest work while still voting.
Polls are useful for the campaign as part of media optimization and field strategy. In terms of value to the electorate, I think polls are anti-value: they are presented to generate response, be it entertainment or motivation. The electorate needs to held accountable for turnout, not tricked into it. I don't believe in requiring voting, but I despise the methods used to GOTV. Either you possess civic engagement or you don't
The connection you make between polls and GOTV is interesting. I hadn't thought of it that way. So, as I understand it, the campaign is the candidate and the people working to get the candidate elected. The campaign can legitimately use polls to decide where to allocate resources (e.g., money for ad buys, themes for ads, on-the-ground person-to-person outreach). However, it's not legitimate for a campaign to publicize the poll numbers, as voters should be motivated by the campaign's message rather than by fear of being behind in the polls.
Is this a fair representation of what you're saying? I don't feel I've captured it quite right, as I can't figure out how to tie in the entertainment aspect of polls. Also, I'm not happy with my choice of the word "fear" as the driving aspect of motivation.
Acknowledging that I may not have captured your argument correctly, I'm going to move forward, fully willing to abandon it if it ends up relying on parts that I've misunderstood.
For one, I'm not sure where to draw the line of who is involved in a campaign, and therefore who should know about poll results. There are people who are paid to work on the campaign, so it seems clear they are part of the campaign. And there are people who spend a lot of time volunteering, so I think it's fair to consider them as part of the campaign. There are people who volunteer less, for example donating a few evenings working for phone banks, or perhaps working in IT or data management, or working on the polls themselves. Then there are people who aren't directly working for the campaign, but are passionate about their candidate (or perhaps passionately opposed to another), and either work on their own or self-organize. Maybe the line is that only people who are involved in decisions that require polling data should know the results? What justifies "needs to know"?
Another question I have is about GOTV in general. The numbers I've seen show that over 40% of eligible voters didn't vote in the 2016 election. I think we agree that more people should vote. Some GOTV methods I've seen are general, non-partisan "Please vote" campaigns. Partisan ads often include admonishments to vote. There are also programs to help people get to the polls (for example, rides). Some of these are non-partisan, some partisan. Are these legitimate GOTV efforts? If the electorate is to be accountable for turnout, what other methods can they use? Should partisan ride-providing efforts have access to poll data to best allocate their resources? How about non-partisan groups, as polls may show which areas are expected to have lower turnout?
As I said, I've responded to what I interpreted as your position before confirming that my interpretation is correct. I've done this in the interest of expediency, not to build a straw man. So please let me know how my interpretation can be improved if it's not correct.
Thoughtful and great questions. I think you probably have a bias (I do too), but I appreciate your framing of the problem and I want to give you a reply that does your questions justice.
So...
Internal polls are not generally released. Nor are they shared to PACs. This is one benefit of public polling. It helps coordinate between the campaign and the PAC side.
Re entertainment, I think watching polls is as entertaining as watching any sport for a lot of people. (I think that is pretty obvious actually - just my observation, though I worked with people in the political consulting industry, so perhaps my circle is wonkier than most).
Now, the big crux and where we will disagree... People should vote because they are civicly minded and want to participate in the process. That requires education and sophistication, which is something both side lack en masse. The only thing worse than people not voting, IMO, are dumb people voting for the wrong reasons. The latter is mob rule and is why we're where we're at. Stupid is a bipartisan quality.
As for access to voting, I think we could benefit from electronic or more mail-in. I don't want to suppress the right to vote; I just don't want to see sides manipulate the idiots of the electorate into voting. If you ever see how a GOTV strategy is put together, they look for people who are "persuadable", which is just another way of saying dumb. (Those analysts will admit it too if you put enough drink in their belly)
Ah. For some reason I had it in my mind that you thought that there shouldn't be public polling. That was incorrect. That's not the case, is it?
I completely agree that people should vote because they're civically minded and want to participate, and ideally make their decisions based on a well-educated understanding of the issues (and all they entail). What does this mean practically? What level of education is adequate? What are the wrong reasons? Single-issue voting? Being inspired by a leader? We're human, not perfectly (nearly?) rational, imperfect in general. What level of sophistication is necessary? I'm asking these questions of myself as much as of you.
I have similar questions when it comes to persuasion. One person's education is another's persuasion is yet another's malicious manipulation. How do we convince people to be civically minded without persuading them that it's the right thing to do? What's the distinction between appealing to people who are likely to be amenable to your position and looking for those that are persuadable? How do you educate people who are, as you put it, "dumb"?
Like I said earlier, these are questions I pose to myself as well. I'm asking here because I want to get other's opinions. Thanks again for taking the time to consider them. Discourse can be an important part of reaching understanding.
One other thing to factor in: the GOPe brazenly sabotaged the GOTV effort for Trump. I doubt we would be discussing the "he lost the popular vote" trope if they'd just run their normal one, even a post 2010 normal one (Micheal Steele's RNC had better things to do in 2010 than run the party's normal GOTV effort, it fell to the Republican Governors Association, which e.g. results in unnecessary losses in Colorado and Washington State, which they decided not to put their much more limited resources into).
Get out the vote efforts are, at least in my case, anti-productive. If I wasn't going to vote anyway, whichever side bangs on my door, litters my yard with their pamphlets, overstuffs my mailbox, and harasses me with phone calls is the side that I am going to vote against, just because they've irritated me.
Did they have her with an insurmountable lead, or did they have her with a decent lead still within the margin of error which got misinterpreted?
I'm starting to wonder if the overconfidence in a Clinton victory boils down to assuming that errors are independent when they really aren't. Specifically, did they assume swing states might go one way or the other individually, rather than that they might move as a block? There was a lot of talk about how there were a bunch of states that favored Clinton and she only needed to win one of them. Pulling numbers out of my rear end, if she had a 50% chance of winning each of 8 states, and she only needed one, you might assume her odds of winning the election are 99.6% (255 out of 256). But if they all swing together, then her odds of winning would only be 50%.
Quibble: since this is done by Electoral College adjusted voting, it wasn't "almost dead even" by that accounting, as of right now the AP called Arizona for Trump, making it 290-228. Michigan leans him, New Hampshire leans Hillary, if those two break in those ways, it'll be 316-232, which is fairly big as these things go, close to Obama's 2012 win.
About as big as I expected, although not quite as big as I hoped, then again, there are always surprises in Presidential elections. I didn't expect Trump to get Pennsylvania (or Toomey to win), I expected Russ Feingold to win (yesterday saw a report on the general issue of Team Hillary ignoring/taking for granted the Rust Belt, including ignoring a plea for help from Feingold), and one of the biggest surprises is that Minnesota truly was in play (margin looks to have gone from ~200K in 2012 to ~40K).
The electoral college margin doesn't mean a whole lot. Tiny swings in the vote can result in huge swings in the electoral college. If you lose your balance on top of a mountain, teeter both ways, then fall to the right, the fact that you might come to rest miles from the peak doesn't mean it wasn't a near thing.
If Clinton has lost only one of her firewall states, your comment would have applied. The fact that Trump flipped quite a few of them makes it no longer a close one.
If two countries play a best-of-5 soccer games, and one beat the other 3-0 with three consecutive 1-0 games in the last minute. It would have been hard to claim that one team isn't obviously better and the margin of winning is small.
Those firewall states mostly went by 1-2% margins.
Your analogy is flawed. The individual "games" weren't that skewed. Instead, imagine two basketball teams play best-of-5. The scores are 100-98, 101-99, 100-101, 99-100, and 98-100. It would be bizarre to say that one team was greatly superior based on that, even though they did have a big margin in percentage of games won.
I don't necessary agree with your argument of extending the analogy to include more states (I would have agreed with that had Clinton actually flipped states that was leaning red, she didn't). The most logical analogy if we are to extends the game would be saying that they were playing a best-of-50, and Trump wins with a score of 306 to 232, which is a huge difference in score. Yes, that would be a pretty bad/ awkward analogy and is pretty irrelevant to your point - I could make the argument that the games were scored differently, and the team that knows to win the necessary one would be the superior team. That would be too rationalizing, however.
On further reflection, I do agree that the election was close. I'm guessing my previous response was conditioned on Trump being the underdog, arguing on a different point you were making.
I'm not extending the analogy to include more states (games are equivalent to states here), but rather changing the scores to reflect how close many of the states/games were.
Your "most logical analogy" still isn't quite right. The individual scores for each game were very close, and the total scores actually slightly favor Clinton. But Trump won more games, after weighting the games in a certain way. But I don't know how to do it better, I don't think there's any sport that's really played anything like this!
I'd say the best measure for closeness would be either how much of a shift in the overall vote was needed to flip the result, or how much of a targeted shift could generate a change in the result. In this case, an overall shift of 1-2% would have changed the result, and a targeted shift of some tens of thousands of votes could have. It's not the closest election ever (2000 probably takes that prize by these criteria) but it's fairly close compared to, say, 2012 and 2008.
The electoral college margin doesn't mean a whole lot.
Except, for, you know, who administratively runs the country for the next 4 years, has the bully pulpit and therefore potentially great influence over the Congress, etc. etc. etc.?
It sure seems to mean a whole lot based on all the sad faces and rioting in the streets I've seen over the last few days.
And, circling back to the real point, it's the rules of the game, claiming some sort of greater meaning only when your side loses the popular vote is beyond pointless.
You seem to have missed the presence of the word "margin" in the quoted words, as well as my entire point.
To remind you, my point is that the election was very close. It is not that the result is bogus or nobody cares or it's meaningless.
A tiny shift in sentiment would have changed the outcome of the election. The fact that the margin of electors is about 14% doesn't change that fact. The electors are not a meaningful measure of how close the race was.
How have they not finished counting and called those remaining states yet? Do they just give up once somebody gets over 270? Ah, fuggit, nobody cares anymore...?
Many states have automatic recount policies or laws if an election is too close, and that can kick in for positions other than president, and obviously every Federal House seat was up for election. That might cover Michigan, but it would not seem New Hampshire, e.g. Senator i.e. statewide race Kelly Ayotte lost by 743 votes and has conceded.
Or maybe AP calls it if a candidate concedes? Guess we'll just have to wait, and for California, they've got over 4 million absentee ballots to count....
The only example I've heard of where "Ah, fuggit" kicks in is when enough ballots have been counted that the absentee ones can't change any race, and the extra labor is not considered to be worth it.
In a sense, he did win big. He cleaned up on winnable states.
It would take an exceptional, once-in-a-generation, beloved Republican to win states like California, New York or Massachusetts, and I don't think Trump even tried there. Just the margins of victory in those three states are around 1/12th of Clinton's entire vote total.
The major media outlets were looking outright deceptive from my perspective.
I had some CNBC shows saved on my Tivo and I recently went back to look at what they were saying. Here's an extreme example of the deception. Just the day before the election CNBC was showing states such as Montana, North Dakota and South Dakota as "leaning" GOP, not "likely" GOP. But here are the results for those states:
Montana Trump 57% Clinton 36%
North Dakota Trump 64% Clinton 28%
South Dakota Trump 61% Clinton 32%
From this one could easily conclude that the mainstream media deliberately chose to deceive about the expected outcome in those states. Why? Perhaps to not show as much dark red on the national map?
Yes there were true battlegrounds or toss-ups. E.g. Florida only went for Trump by about 1.3%. But there were more than 2x as many Trump voters than Clinton voters in North Dakota. It was a bald-faced brazen lie to call that "leaning".
However, unless you are already very knowledgeable in these subjects, it will take longer than 10 hours to understand them. Very much worth the read though.
Thanks, but that is a somewhat crazy answer. I have a BA in mat with a few upper division stat and prob classes, but desire to do a grad degree in stats (yuck). I just want to read a book about how pollsters practically execute their job.
And with good reason: polls measure popular vote, not electoral vote, and Trump most certainly did not win the popular vote by 8 points. He didn't even come close to that margin.
So if this poll said Trump was "8 points ahead", where did it say he was "8 points ahead"? A generic statement of "8 points ahead" is, when hearing about a poll with zero other context read to mean "8 points ahead in a national poll of likely voters with a representative sample", which is a national popular vote measure of limited utility in predicting electoral outcome.
He was 8 points ahead in a national poll of likely voters with a representative sample when asked who they would be more likely to vote for. I don't have specifics besides the 8 pt. lead because I'm not on the analysis side of things and the results weren't published. And I agree, phone polling is fairly limited as far as outcome prediction goes. Part of the reason they didn't publish is because they thought it was a fluke.
My original comment wasn't to prove the accuracy of the polling, rather, to show the bias of the media when reporting poll results. While the poll may have been innacurate,so were many of the polls that put Clinton ahead that they decided to publish.
I have a poll that shows Clinton led by 500,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 percentage points and actually received more electoral votes than there are electrons in the universe. Will you publish it? If not, will you allow me to call you biased?
Keep in mind that there is a difference between a poll and a model. Models aggregate many polls in ways which attempt to predict the Electoral College tally. This includes polls specific to individual states. In this election even state level polls were inaccurate which lead to model predictions being off.
That interesting. I run a silly little website website that invited people to vote against one of the two candidates [1]. I watched our analytics like a hawk during the couple of weeks before the elections in order to adjust messaging, content and ads.
This, of course, wasn't scientific at all except for the fact that we were running ads to attract both sides of the discussion equally. They were geographically limited to the US. About a week before the elections the trend was unmistakable. The support for Trump in the form of CTR, engagement and votes to the hundreds of different ads out there told a story.
We actually tried to get this story out and attempted to publish a press release. It was rejected by all of the top press release agencies we used for other business. Not one of them wanted to publish that things were not looking good from Clinton, even from a silly little entertainment site.
To confirm the bias a few days later we issued a press release indicating that Clinton was catching-up and Trump was predicted to lose. Everyone published the release.
We can't have the media operate with such bias in this country. Freedom of the press is important, but when the press become political activists we should all yell foul and reign them in. The first thing totalitarian regimes do is take control of the press. We can't have a press that is so far to the left that they won't report the truth, or worst, distort it.
I know this is just one data point. There are plenty more from other sources. The bias and manipulation are very real.
We can't have the media operate with such bias in this country. Freedom of the press is important, but when the press become political activists we should all yell foul and reign them in. The first thing totalitarian regimes do is take control of the press. We can't have a press that is so far to the left that they won't report the truth, or worst, distort it.
You say we "can't", but we demonstrably do have such a press. And you're 100% correct to discern the totalitarian nature of it.
Which is why alternative sources have become so important, and as more people's "Pravda breakers" trip (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12921328) the less important this old press becomes. Look no further than the former "Newspaper of Record", it's post-election front page, it's crashing revenue, and why I call it "Carlos Slim's personal blog".
Historically it started with Reagan's zapping of the "'Fairness' Doctrine", which allowed right of center talk radio to become a thing, which I'm sure helped prime things for rise of the Internet. Drudge's 1998 reporting of a story spiked by Newsweek (sold in 2010 for a dollar and assumption of its liabilities) clearly marked this was a decisive change ... and yet our "press", MSM, this whole old establishment, seems determined to stay the course.
Which, just citing the two financial bits above, looks like a path to oblivion (although many of us are predicting they'll get direct government support soon enough, but that won't get them readers), and therefore self-correcting in, say, the medium term. So I'm not quite so alarmed, as long as the Internet stays free of censorship at the IP and maybe DNS levels.
Errr, I'm referring to this FCC policy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fairness_Doctrine a rather brutal tactic by Truman that I've read Eisenhower used as well. Zapping it allowed for frankly "unbalanced", dishonest if you prefer, and inequitable radio shows like the icontic The Rush Limbaugh Show.
You're right that I had been conflating "equal time" with "fairness".
But it still seems that "fairness" is BS. First, I'm quite sure it can't pass Constitutional muster on the web. It was permitted back in the 60s predicated on the FCC managing a scarce resource (broadcast frequency spectrum). But for practical purposes, Internet bandwidth is unlimited, and it couldn't get away with this. Also, this seems little more than a nod. For any given issue, there's a kaleidoscope of differing ideas. It seems it shouldn't be too difficult to engineer a compliant broadcast that still manages to completely exclude specific undesired ideas, by including other views as compensating balance.
Rush Limbaugh is crap, and I won't watch him. But do you really want to live in a country where that's actually forbidden? I don't.
> when the press become political activists we should all yell foul and reign them in. The first thing totalitarian regimes do is take control of the press.
We should take control of the press, like totalitarian regimes!
(Sorry for the snark, but there really is a big contradiction here which both sides are struggling with. The American press aren't especially left-wing, they're just tremendously unreliable - story template first, facts second.)
The correct way to present polls is with a sampling of many different polls, like Real Clear Politics or 538. Yes, all the polls were off across the board, but individual polls have a higher likelihood of being wrong than a bunch of polls combined.
Most of our other polls were off as well, but in Clinton's favor, so do we not publish those either? At the time, there was no way to know what was correct, so shouldn't sharing the information be more important than anything else?
I can't really see Facebook censoring, fact-checking, or otherwise adjusting their algorithms to expose people to opposing views in any significant way. They're the McDonalds of the internet. Their entire business model depends on satisfying the addictive cravings of their users. It would be like McDonalds discontinuing fries and replacing them with kale and tofu bites.
I began believing trump had a legitimate shot to win the election over a year ago, when his candidacy was mainly taken as a joke. I noted to people who didn't believe me that the essential dishonesty of the media was a key element in what they assured me could not happen. Most assurances were driven by media-fed opinions I tried to warn them not to trust.
I also learned pretty early on that saying I believed he had a shot would anger people, and often lead to accusations of many, many PC sins such as racism on my part. This did not convince me I was wrong.
I have some measure of hope that people are going to learn the right lessons this time. People are still too deep in the grief process for me to judge it clearly, but hope is enough for now.
I look forward to moving past the shock, but never the outrage. I am pleased to think that the outrage is just getting started. What I mean by that is something like the feeling expressed by Jean Paul Sartre, in his novel Troubled Sleep, about World War II.
In the novel, Germany invades France, but the French soldiers don't truly understand that they are at war.
The Germans destroy village after village, but the French soldiers don't truly understand that they are at war.
With superior tanks and airplanes, the Germans quickly defeat the French, but the French soldiers don't truly understand that they are at war.
The French are forced to surrender, but the French soldiers don't truly understand that they are at war.
The French soldiers are taken to a temporary prison camp, but they don't truly understand they are at war.
A rumor spreads among them that Hitler has decided to send them home to their families. The soldiers are cheered. Some even praise Hitler for his graciousness in victory. They don't realize they are actually at war.
At the end of the novel, the Germans order the French soldiers onto trains. The trains start moving. It is understood by the soldiers that if the trains go north, to Germany, then they are being sent to slave labor camps, but if the train turns south, then they are being sent home to their families.
In the final scene, the train comes to a fork, where it must go north or south. The soldiers watch anxiously. And then train turns north, toward Germany. And then, finally, the French soldiers realize they are at war.
I feel like this election was a bit like that, for many weak liberals who thought that it was okay to be "centrist." I feel like they are finally waking up to the fact that this is a war.
This is the only upside that I find in this election.
Republicans were trained over the years to pick someone "electable". They figured it would go better with the population, electoral votes.
So in 2008, they went with McCain, a Republican who supported campaign finance reform.
In 2012, they went with Romney, a Republican who was governor of Massachusetts, a traditionally moderate/liberal state, who implemented Romneycare.
Both of them were normal, Romney made a faux-pas regarding the %47 line, but all in all he would have been an OK president, and kept the Republicans moderate.
The media slaughtered him in the general election. Called Republicans racists (which I didn't notice him being), classists (umm, do you think Clinton would live in a project?), and he couldn't answer back.
That's why in 2016, the base got fed up with having to hold their nose and vote a moderate, they decided that if they're losing anyways, they might as well pick someone "who says it the way it is". Now when the media says that he's a racit, they say "Oh, like they called Bush (who had an African American Secretary of State) racist? They just hate Republicans".
Liberals cried wolf. They refused to have a conversation, and we ended up with Trump.
The evolutionary process in the republican party has been going on since Ross Perot ran as an Independent candidate in 92 and split the republican vote and gave the election to Clinton.
There has been a slowly growing populist faction on right that reject the Neo-con aggressive military policy. And has an America first trade policy that rejects NAFTA style free trade.
That movement had been building and finally broke through with Ron Paul in 2008. The populist movement and Liberty movement after Ron Paul has grown exponentially. It was only a matter of time before the Washington wing was challenged by the populists for control of the party.
That is what has allowed Trump to win the nomination. The populists in the party establishment supported Trump and the Washington wing was out numbered and had to concede and surrender. This is a process that has been in motion for over 20 years to bring the Republican party to the quite amazing transformation.
That's one way to look at it. Another way (and I'm trying hard not to endorse one viewpoint or the other, I've heard both) is:
Liberals are tired of the Clintons. They're tired of nominating people just left of center who fail to inspire them, while candidates who speak their mind and call for change (Bernie) are ignored by both the DNC and the mass media. They perceive, rightly or wrongly, that Republicans have been fighting a battle while Democrats make concessions to people who are unwilling to compromise. And now that the most outspoken, uncompromising candidate has won the election, they're being told to compromise again, to swallow their emotions and have a conversation with people who aren't interested in talking with them.
The media told them this was Hillary's turn. They were told to vote against Trump, but nothing about what they were voting for. They were told that feelings don't matter and to vote for the greater good, even while candidates within the party and without inspired based on emotion. Is it any wonder that turnout was down?
I don't think Trump was the only one running such a campaign. How else would you describe the resounding message from the Clinton campaign that a vote for Trump is a vote for "racism, sexism, homophobia", etc..?
Both Trump and Clinton's campaigns seem successful - there was less voter turnout than in 2012. However, the angles they took seem to have reshuffled support in a way that ended up with Trump winning.
> Both Trump and Clinton's campaigns seem successful - there was less voter turnout than in 2012.
Turnout this election was 2% higher than 2012. It just doesn't look that way because everyone is focused on Clinton's and Trump's totals. This election saw the most votes cast for alternate candidates (a hair over 5% according to Wikipedia) since Ross Perot's run in 1996.
Haven't read in detail your citation, although I'll note claiming a Republican operative said "We have three major voter suppression operations underway" is ludicrous on its face, "suppression" is not a word you're going to use when talking to hostile MSM reporters, but lower turnout was baked into the cake if for no other reason than Obama was not on the ticket.
For that matter, compare Democratic votes in all three elections, looks to me like you can draw a fairly straight line 2008 to 2016.
But if you drop the loaded word suppression, yes, of course part of the game is to discourage the people who might vote for your opponent, the biggest change is that the language used today is by comparison quite tame.
It's so embedded in our Constitutional order, the great compromise that made it possible in the first place, the 2 Senators per state, and the 2 extra Electoral College votes each state gets, that it's not really "a huge complaint for ages", unless, of course, it's your side that lost. It's happened, what, 4 times now?
Note also that at least in this election the unofficial margin (at least per the AP, which hasn't called Michigan and New Hampshire yet) is rather small, and one also has to count 3rd parties.
Putting the shoe on the other foot, what do you have to say about both of Bill Clinton's elections, where Perot resulted in more people voting against than for him. For that matter, just checking now (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_presidential_ele...), every third party candidate but the Constitutional party's, and independent Evan McMullin, earned more votes than the margin between Hillary and Trump. So it's really hard when you look at those non-major party vote total to say that in any way she won the popular vote, especially if you claim this didn't matter for her husband in the '90s.
"A huge complaint for ages" was a reference to what I saw people talking about after the 2000 election. If you say that it's wrong based on how the Constitution came about in the 18th century, then you've completely misunderstood what I was saying there. I'm not saying that people have been complaining about it for hundreds of years, I'm saying that people were complaining about it for months (or years?) following the 2000 election.
2000 was the first presidential election I was old enough to vote in. I have voted in every presidential election (and every midterm and local one except when I was living overseas) since. Of the presidential elections I've voted in, the electoral college has flipped 40% of them. So don't try to dismiss my complaint on the basis that it's rare. Maybe it is throughout history, but it has become distressingly common lately.
And don't assume I'm complaining just because "my side" lost. I didn't vote for Gore in 2000. I did vote for Clinton in 2016, but I do not identify as a Democrat, and only voted for her because I believe Trump is a terrifying and dangerous choice. I was too young to vote for Bill Clinton in the 90s, and while I think he did a decent job, I think HW Bush and Dole would have too.
I don't really see how Bill Clinton is "putting the shoe on the other foot." My ideal system wouldn't be a simple first-past-the-post arrangement. I would like to have runoff elections or ranked-choice voting or something like that.
You seem to be imagining a whole slew of arguments on my behalf that I didn't make and don't believe. If you want to reply to me, please reply to what I'm saying, not whatever you imagine I must think.
OK, I suppose if I'm dismissing it because it's rare, it's due to our disparate histories, I'm much older, the first election I watched closely having come of political age intellectually was Nixon v. McGovern in 1972, and first voted in 1980 (Reagan v. Carter). So I personally have experienced it as much rarer an issue, and of course one in my favor (maybe, was W in office in 2001-4 a good thing? If the numbers hold true, will Trump be? ^_^).
But my bigger point are things that I think you must address, if you're to address my concerns, like how it will make half of the the Great Compromise non-operative, and change the election to a focus on 8-10 metro areas, none of which I or my family live in, even those in the Kansas City metro area (30th).
You feel disenfranchised in 2 out of your 5 presidential elections; do you think I want my family and myself to be disenfranchised in them forever?
I don't care about the Great Compromise. I understand why it was necessary. The United States in the 18th century was a loose collection of mostly sovereign colonies, and there was the real possibility that the smaller ones would decide not to join up if they didn't get disproportionate power in the new nation.
It's a different country now. We have many more states, and the role of states has greatly diminished. Most Americans think of themselves as Americans first, and citizens of their state a distant second. Many aspects of our electoral system have changed. The idea of allowing an 18-year-old black woman who owns no property to vote would be as bizarre to the founders as the idea of directly electing the president.
I don't actually feel disenfranchised. I've always lived in swing states, so my vote counts for far more than most. My dislike of the electoral college is not rooted in the fact that I feel like I don't have a voice.
I don't understand this notion that you and your family would be disenfranchised in a system where the president is chosen directly. Your vote would count exactly as much as the vote of someone living in New York City. Sure, there are more people living in NYC than there are where you are, but there are far more Americans not living in NYC than living in NYC. A quick look at the popular vote totals will show you that the 10 biggest metro areas don't overwhelm everyone else.
Sure, a lot of attention would be given to big cities. I don't see what's wrong with that. A lot of people live there! But other places wouldn't be ignored, since every vote in every location would be just as important. Wyoming probably wouldn't get many visits from candidates, but how many do they get now?
As it stands, the swing states get all of the attention. Neither candidate cares much about what voters in California or Texas think, because their attention won't change anything. Democrats just need to not totally piss off California, and Republicans just need to not totally piss off Texas. If Californians have some important issue they'd like to see action on, nobody is going to care about it. That's 65 million people disenfranchised right there, just in those two states.
Why is it better to have the candidates care almost exclusively about the needs and desires of ~60 million Americans living in swing states, and completely ignore the other 260 million of us? You say that people in Kansas City would be disenfranchised with a direct vote. I say that they're disenfranchised now, because neither Kansas nor Missouri have the slightest chance of choosing Democratic electors. In a popular vote system, the candidates might care more about New Yorkers than Kansans, but at least they'd care some.
And one response I have to that, developed from this conversation, is that this election is a turnout anomaly because the GOPe sabotaged the GOTV effort for Trump (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12932865 for a bit more on that).
And are you really sure about that? The AP, the "definitive" source I've been following through Google (https://www.google.com/search?q=election+results+2016+usa#eo...), says California reporting is 100%, and the nationwide margin is still about the same as it's been for some time, medium 6 figures.
Maybe that's a high estimate, I don't know. We'll know in a few weeks in any case.
Am I sure the demographic trend towards cities will continue? Yeah, I'm pretty sure. They may not continue to vote the way they do now, but they are going to decide presidential elections.
It's a huge complaint when it confronts people who didn't learn how the system works in civics class, I guess, but it's been the way that presidential voting has worked since before we were all born, so the outcry is sort of annoying at best.
Also, as the only groups legally able to propose a change to this system are right now benefiting from it, I wouldn't hold my breath.
Embrace the power of "and", both can be true, except I'd quibble with disposable099 and say many of us, I would not be surprised if most, believed Trump could win.
For me, that was through a combination of his refusing to play the game by the other side's rules (a restatement of disposable099's point) and how terribly awful a politician Hillary is. In fact, I go so far as to say she's an almost total failure in life, aside from graduating from the good schools she went to, the one good decision she made in life was to accept Bill's outstanding offer of marriage, everything successful in her life after law school flows from that.
To give you a hint of that, it's pretty obvious the reason she accepted and self-exiled to Arkansas in the 1970s was that between failing the D.C. Bar Exam and being terminated with extreme prejudice from the Watergate Investigating Committee, she had completely burned her potential future career in D.C./East Coast politics. There's lots more if you want more details, but, I can close with the obvious facts that she twice reached for the highest brass ring in US politics with serious campaigns and failed both times, to rather different sorts of people (weasel words since, for example, both Obama and Trump are master level trolls).
Echoing my point at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12930056 when you cite a totally biased when it comes to politics site like Snopes, our response is a simple "We Don't Care."
But, tell me, why did she exile herself to 1970s Arkansas? As someone who grew up 3 counties north of the state, I can assure you back then it was considered to be a massively worse place than my native Missouri, and the very close states of Kansas and Oklahoma. There was something qualitatively different about it, in a bad way.
Note that she went from working on the Watergate Committee, which was the highest pinnacle of the Left in the '70s aside from perhaps the Carter Administration years later, to being a partner at a politically well connected law firm in Arkansas, one no one ever heard of outside the state before the '90s.
What's your explanation for her move? Surely she could have tried again to pass the D.C. bar exam.
I'm confused - what about the Snopes article is "nothing of the sort"? They cite sources, quote those sources, and provide good evidence that she wasn't fired. Do you have evidence to the contrary other than Zeifman's (self-contradictory) claims?
I'm confused... isn't saying "Hillary was fired with extreme prejudice from the WIC" a political issue? You're trying to make a political point by using a mistruth as evidence of the fact?
The claim that Hillary was fired with extreme prejudice from the WIC is political.
My claim that citing Snopes claim to the contrary---it being a political issue---does not make it a mistruth to me, rather, you might say it's an example of the maxim that "nothing is confirmed until officially denied".
That, in fact, is pretty much how we on the Alt Right† nowadays treat anything political on Snopes.
†For the purposes of this discussion, the Alt Right are those on the right who's response to being called racist is "We Don't Care".
Again, apologies for not grasping your point directly, but I'm not quite following you.
Are you saying you dismiss Snopes as being left-biased, therefore the matter over whether "Hillary Clinton was fired with prejudice" is still not resolved?
And until Hillary Clinton (or presumably the WIC) come out and directly either confirm or deny that statement, then repeating the statement is "fair game"?
But doesn't that put the onus on the subject to confirm or deny every single tinpot, falsehood statement out there, otherwise its safe to consider it the truth?
Is it similar to the example you gave of being called a racist and responding with "We don't care"? Should Hillary Clinton respond to the statement with "I don't care if you think I was fired with prejudice from the WIC"? Is that what you are saying? How would that stop the "mistruth" from being repeated?
(apologies, I'm from the UK so this isn't a line of thought I've come across)
Are you saying you dismiss Snopes as being left-biased, therefore the matter over whether "Hillary Clinton was fired with prejudice" is still not resolved?
Yes.
As for the rest, I believe the evidence I've seen that this was true is sufficient to support my opinion, especially when combined with my own analysis of "Why the hell did she self-exile to Arkansas?!?!??!!!", the latter admittedly using data most Americans, let alone people in the world don't and can't have, and therefore we don't need to get into epistemological weeds.
> I believe the evidence I've seen that this was true is sufficient to support my opinion
I assume you're not talking about the "fired with prejudice" claim here because you'd be directly contradicting Zeifman's own words. But if you are, can you show us this evidence?
So you think Hillary was fired with prejudice from the WIC, even though there is no evidence that this statement is true, you are willing to accept it as gospel and further, bind that into strengthen your opinion of her?
Is that not the textbook definition of bias?
And as I further gather, your response to this is "I don't care", as in "I don't care that I am biased"; not that "I acknowledge my biases as a weakness in my rational thought processes".
Do you see bias as a strength? Do you believe that adjusting your mental model of the world to adapt to new information as a hindrance? Have I mistaken your point?
(Please please please do not mistake my questions as judgements; I genuinely am interested in your opinion and argument!)
This answers zimpenfish below as well: whatever you believe, to the Alt Right, Snopes is dead to us for all things political.
And what isn't political nowadays? Although the demarcation is pretty clear, falls along the line of a particular person who does their explicitly political stuff. But who trusts the rot to stay there?
And it sounds like you don't believe in, or have never heard of Robert Conquest's Second Law of Politics: "Any organization not explicitly right-wing sooner or later becomes left-wing." See Fox over the last few years, first the top dog explicitly said they were moving to the left, now he's been ousted in a coup and the writing is on the wall for the remaining figures on the right who are still under contract.
> "Any organization not explicitly right-wing sooner or later becomes left-wing."
So you're defining centrism as impossible? No wonder everyone ends up in bubbles.
And you're calling Fox News, the prototypical right-wing TV news station, left-wing? What? Why? How? I just did a quick scan of foxnews.com and had a hard time finding a single story that wasn't obviously pro-Trump. The best I could do was http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2016/11/11/obamacare-enrollm...
Hired an explicitly politically biased person to do their political "debunking", see the item mdpopescu linked to: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12930881 With of course the predicable results.
So you're defining centrism as impossible?
Post-French Revolution, yes, by and large. Something we on the Right in the US have been saying prior to, say, this election, is that we think the Left is wrong, they think we're evil. Well, it's now polarizing as we decide they're not just wrong, but definitely evil.
And you're calling Fox News, the prototypical right-wing TV news station, left-wing? What? Why? How?
Maybe from your end of the pond they're "prototypically right-wing", and you might just be right about "prototypical", but they've always carried themselves as being "Fair and Balanced", i.e. allowing both sides a fair hearing. You can certainly look at their lineup of Leftists prior to the explicit shift to the Left that started a couple or so years ago as confirmation of this. Would a true "right-wing" (as defined in the US!) station give e.g. Juan Williams an honored seat at the table?
And I guess you missed Megyn Kelly's feud with Trump, and her leading role in the coup that ousted the founder and head of the channel?
I'm not telling you as someone across the pond that it's worth investigating, just like I haven't put any effort to speak of in discovering the causes of the Decline and Fall of the Torygraph, which I avidly read as a right of center 5 hours early for me news source back in the '90s, but, seriously, Fox has changed, and it's still a work in progress as two of Murdoch's more liberal sons run the place.
If someone isn't going to accept a source, responding only that they should accept your the source because it's trustworthy isn't likely to convince them. Unfortunately I don't have a better suggestion for supporting the reliability of a source.
I think this issue of mutually acceptable information sources is really problematic. How do we rebuild this? How do we get people to start trusting each other again?
How do we get people to start trusting each other again?
When I get approvingly labeled "irredeemable", the answer is, that will never happen.
The best outcome is that we'll live and let live, although Ian Fleming's famous "Live and Let Die" formulation is of course much more accurate.
Going back to your starting point, this is indeed a total rhetorical fail, which I thank you for pointing out. I'm going to assume that pjc50, who as I recall has a good head on his shoulders, hasn't noticed how institutions can change.
To give an example on my side with about as much amazement as he's expressing about Snopes, I no longer dismiss out of hand everything Alex Jones and Infowars have to say (!!!).
> pjc50, who as I recall has a good head on his shoulders, hasn't noticed how institutions can change
Thanks for the compliment! A little civility can go a long way in these things.
Institutions and people certainly can change. I've lost a lot of respect for various media institutions over the years. e.g. the Telegraph, not just for having a climate change denial column but for the reasons Peter Oborne resigned (influence by advertiser HSBC to prevent adverse coverage). The BBC's political coverage is increasingly just bad, apart from Paxman - Question Time is the two sides shouting across each other, not an informative or useful programme. Their Scottish coverage in English is poor (weirdly, their Gaelic news programme is excellent despite, or possibly because of, its tiny budget).
I do wonder how much of this is just popularity effects. Do people actually want slower, more careful, less angry partisan news? Or do they want a team they can cheer for? The BBC hide all their insightful, analytical programming on BBC4.
Edit: you may be surprised to know that I used to read ZeroHedge, although not seriously. For sane capitalism-skeptic news coverage I'm fond of FT Alphaville.
Anger has been shown to drive engagement stronger than reasoned opinion, or even good news. (I recall seeing research on this, but don't have it at hand.) So getting people riled up can unfortunately be profitable. This is similar to clickbait, sensationalist journalism when you have ad-supported news in comparison to subscription-supported. Ryan Holiday's Trust Me I'm Lying includes a very insightful section on this topic. I think it's less what people want than what they react to. O fabled homo economicus.
Again, I cite Hillary labeling me and mine as "irredeemable"; absolutely nothing has made me more "angry"† than that in all the Presidential elections since I came of political age in time for the 1972 Nixon vs. McGovern one.
†"angry" is an entirely insufficient word for this.
I can completely understand that. While we're having a useful discussion on how to rebuild trust, is it useful to bring up an emotional and tangential (albeit related) topic like this? I'm afraid it can potentially derail the conversation. (I hesitate to even bring this up for the same reason). That's not to say that this shouldn't be discussed. A lot of the language used during the campaign was particularly vicious and should be addressed. I just don't know if this particular micro-discussion is the place for it. Figuring out solutions to the things we agree on is particularly important given the highly polarized environment we find ourselves in. And with that, I'll take my answer off the air :)
The problem is, it's anything but tangential. It flows directly from the French Revolution, and became a big thing in the US in the cultural '60s, which extended into the calendar '70s, the idea that the menu of solutions for your political problems includes outright liquidation of a subset of your opponents.
How can I consider this to be tangential when our current President started his political career in the home of two of the most notorious '70s figures advocating this, who made a wild guess that 10% of the population could not be reeducated and would have to be liquidated? You might say, people they thought to be "irredeemable". And these are people of Hillary's generation.
I bring this up not to attack Obama, but to show how well received such eliminationism is on the US Left (heck, in one of those things that makes you wonder if there's a God, the man had a feature article in The New York Times on 9/11 (written and printed before the attack, of course), with him standing on an American flag).
That this sort of thing, including Hillary's speech, is not completely out of bounds means I cannot for a second assume the political struggle in the US is not existential for me and my family.
And given that, I can't in the least see how trust can be rebuilt, at least prior to driving out of polite society all of these figures, instead of feating them.
So, yes, it is, and unfortunately has to be a complete derail of the conversation, given that to the best I can discern you're not taking this issue seriously.
Can I ask roughly how old are you? Did you grow up horrified at the mass murders by the tens of millions by the Left in the 20th Century, including by the Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei AKA National Socialist German Workers' Party? How the Soviets were poised to kill > 100 million Americans in 30 minutes if they launched their misses and bombers? How Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge (Red Khmers, formally the Communist Party of Kampuchea per Wikipedia) killed off perhaps half their nation's people. How just having glasses was a death sentence, because it suggested to them that you might have a formal education?
What's your opinion on the US crusade for gun control? Is it really about "gun safety"? Has it become something more sinister than the explicit through the 1970s "Keep guns out of the hands of blacks" (and other minorities starting around the turn of the century, but blacks were the foremost target)?
> in the cultural '60s, which extended into the calendar '70s, the idea that the menu of solutions for your political problems includes outright liquidation of a subset of your opponents.
> I cannot for a second assume the political struggle in the US is not existential for me and my family.
So, I once asked my Romanian colleague what it was like in the revolution at the death of Ceaucescu. It was, obviously, horrifying and chaotic, with all sorts of self-appointed street violence squads. Since then I've generally cut him a bit more slack when he rants about leftists. That kind of thing sticks with a man. And so I also have some sympathy with the Cubans who've maintained that Cuba is some great commie threat to the US, etc. etc.
What I cannot understand is the belief that there is going to be some kind of purge of white right-wing Americans. To me, the idea that "eliminationism" has any kind of base in the "left" (or at least the part that has the Democratic party in it) is just unrecognisable. To me, it is completely out of bounds already.
(Edit: I suppose the US does maintain an internment camp for political opponents, beyond the rule of law, and Obama has failed to close it. But Bush opened Guantanamo and put its inmates there. This is also why we campaign against the unaccountable drone murder programme)
I'm sorry I appear not to be taking it seriously, but I find it about as plausible as an alien invasion. Now, if you asked me who in the US was genuinely and plausibly afraid of eliminationism, I would have said the usual: ethnic minorities (not just black people and Native Americans, but bearing in mind the internment of Japanese people during the war), and non-straight people. And Jews.
I'm middle-aged enough to remember the Cold War. I also remember walking past a TV showing footage which I assumed was Beirut and turned out to be the LA Rodney King riots. And I know enough history to know that massacres extend a long way back before the French Revolution.
I'm baffled at the ascribing of the Nazis to the "left", given their explicitly murderous anti-Bolshevism and war with the USSR. The thing is, there are a lot of people on the left who believe that Trump is going to start exactly the same kind of eliminationist event. Aren't both sides afraid of the same thing? Has someone left their tu quoque mirror on upside down?
Obviously I disagree with the "out of bounds" analysis, and something has prompted Americans to buy arms at unprecedented rates, and for years with few breaks, more each month than the same month in the previous year. During a grinding recession.... And there's been no changes in concealed carry law for a full 5 years and 10 days; that's a factor, but it doesn't explain how the entire supply of rifles of military utility dried up....
Perhaps, with my being here, and you obviously not, we should agree to disagree on it?
As for the Nazis, you're confusing national with international socialists, and if we just view that as an internecine fight, we all know how nasty those can get. Plus Hitler hated the Weimar socialists with a burning passion, I'm told by one source more than the Jews, and come to think of it from my recent readings on the development of the atomic bomb (Rhodes especially), they were a higher priority target in the civil service, see e.g. Richard Courant.
As for your armed insurgency, from everything I'eve heard the AR-18 "Widowmakers" were more infamous (certianly a better rifle, Eugene Stoner atoning for the AR-10/15), and on that note, maybe the difference between subject and citizen also can't be bridged.
Heh, you're very welcome, and note that with an anodyne user ID like yours it took more for me to notice you, and, yeah, civility helps, and the lack of it is a key to understanding the changes in the US, which go back ... 100 years, maybe, the original Progressives?
I'm sure that just like the US examples just listed in my "loss of respect" list, I don't really follow at all the ones you list, except for adding the Torygraph to my list and no longer reading them.
"absurdly localist" ... well, that's like Obama referring to Sarah Palin, sitting Governor of a US state, as a mayor of a small town in that state. Except, of course, he was a Presidential candidate and that was more than a little disrespectful and polarizing. In fact, we could label pretty much 99% of the Establishment Feminists as "Feminist Deniers" based on their treatment of her, simply because she wasn't on their political team.
I have no idea about "popularity effects", and I don't follow any of the MSM over here besides my local paper, but I don't think that's it, I think the start of a better explanation over here, from Glenn "Instapundit" Reynolds is:
Just think of the media as Democrat operatives with bylines, and it all makes sense.
Except it's wider than that, as we saw when almost all of the GOPe, as well as much if not most if not almost all of the Right's Establishment Authorities (press), went all in against Trump. Who, if nothing else, we can thank for putting two particular political dynasties into the ash heap of history this year.
Good item, including most especially citing the single person who turned this part of Snopes into a sad joke, and linked it to her clear expressions of Left/Democratic political biases.
This really hasn't been a good year for Establishment Authorities, has it?
What does "Establishment" really mean here, other than "left wing"? I mean, a lot of people would say that a billionaire property developer was pretty "establishment".
What do you make of the rumour (I think it's still a rumour rather than confirmed?) that Steven Mnuchin will be Treasury secretary? Would you call him "establishment"?
"Establishment Authorities", and I should emphasize I'm talking about "Authorities", not, for example, the ever more loathed GOPe(stablishment), on the Right who haven't exactly covered themselves in glory this year include:
National Review (NR/NRO)
Erik Erickson and his Redstate website (a leading article the day after the election was "Is Trump [an] Antichrist?")
Hugh Hewitt
Pajamas Media but only in general, dissent was allowed, then again, if they'd purged co-founder Glenn "Instapundit" Reynolds...
The Weekly Standard and very notably its founder William Kristol, who has the true neo-con pedigree as the son of Irving Kristol
I think the latter's Commentary, except they pay-walled themselves out of relevance....
Oh, what about NRO's Kevin Williamson telling the Rust Belt people who provided the margin that elected Trump that:
The truth about these dysfunctional, downscale communities is that they deserve to die. Economically, they are negative assets. Morally, they are indefensible.
That's from http://www.nationalreview.com/article/432876/donald-trump-wh... and deserves a particularly special place in the Decline and Fall of most of the US Right's "Establishment Authorities" in 2016, especially when he and his organization doubled down on it.
Possible exception, who's part of NRO, Pajamas Media, and the Hoover Institution (which means it's much harder to purge him), Victor Davis Hansen, but he's an odd duck in so many ways.
> But, tell me, why did she exile herself to 1970s Arkansas? As someone who grew up 3 counties north of the state, I can assure you back then it was considered to be a massively worse place than my native Missouri, and the very close states of Kansas and Oklahoma. There was something qualitatively different about it, in a bad way.
Fayetteville, AR was a cute, hippie college town in the mountains. Going to high school there in the early 90s, we thought Missouri and Oklahoma were holes, and the only place we related to in Kansas was Lawrence.
Yeah, but Fayetteville, which I have the most familiarity with (my father did his first year or two of college there, and it's close to Joplin) is not Little Rock, and we're also talking about the early-mid '70s, not the early '90s, which I can't speak to as to what Arkansas was like, since I'd moved to the Boston area for college in 1979.
And neither are D.C., a center of international power. Hillary was nothing if not ambitious.
Not quite true. She was an outstanding commodities futures trader. She deposited $1,000 in cash into a trading account, and in ten months worked the account up to near $100,000.
So at least she has that skill to fall back on.
Or, maybe, just maybe, it was simply a bribe paid to the wife of the Governor of Arkansas.
As explained in a letter to the editor in The Wall Street Journal, a tax deductible bribe, the way the scam works is that someone at the trading firm violates the wall between the front and back offices. They place equal and opposite trades, and then prior to settlement, they assign their bribee the winning trade, and themselves the losing one, and the latter can be deducted against gains for the next few years.
And of course, if she wasn't the Governor's wife, but you of course implicitly acknowledge that. For that matter, it was also said that that sort of trading back then was dangerously leveraged for thinly capitalized neophytes, you could lose a lot more money than what you put into your trade. I seem to remember independently of this, that at worst case you could end up taking delivery of what you wagered on. Now, my family with 3 boys bought a half-side of beef at a time right at that time, but....
It was a DNC plan to give the Republicans a more extreme "Pied Piper" candidate like Trump. That's why the media helped boost his campaign early on. You can read more from the PDF link on this email:
> for many weak liberals who thought that it was okay to be "centrist." I feel like they are finally waking up to the fact that this is a war.
This kind of divisive and baseless finger-pointing at moderates is what is wrong with US politics. To see it on the liberal side is both ironic and painful. For years the gop ousted moderates in its ranks as RINO's (Republican In Name Only). This approach badly damaged the party: it left them with no standing among young voters, formerly moderate McCain went hard to the right for a presidential primary and never came back to center. Senator Olympia Snowe resigned and penned a famous open letter denouncing this very ostracizing of moderate republicans. It has taken nearly a decade for the republicans to present a candidate with social policies that are not entirely at odds with the under 30 demographic. Trump may be socially distasteful, but he is is not looking to repeal gay marriage and plans to keep pot a "states issue". Imagine hearing that from a GOP candidate 4 years ago.
Now that the GOP has a winning candidate, your answer is to double-down, and call the moderates in your party "weak"? Listen, political stances are neither weak nor strong. They are opinions based in personal experience, individual ethics, and our respective priorities. There is no "right" answer here. There is no "war" being fought. This is how democracy works. The pendulum swings one way and then the other.
Comparing the result of this election to french soldiers being sent to nazi camps is perhaps the single most absurd analogy i have seen since the primaries kicked off. And that is saying a great deal given the ridiculousness we have all suffered the past 18 months. Shameful.
But it is happening. That is a fact. I see it in my own social circle. Friends who have spent many years defending "centrist" Democrats, and now they finally see that "centrists" are the problem. They are waking up. They are seeing the need for something more radical. I've had some variation of that conversation a dozen times in the last 48 hours. And of course, it isn't just my friends. It is happening all over the country. This election will mark the end of the "centrist" Democrat. That really is the only benefit that this election brings.
Be careful not to learn the wrong lessons from Bernie Sanders. I supported Bernie because he was old school hard left and largely avoided identity politics and scandal. I'm not frustrated with 'centrist' Democrats as much as I'm frustrated with all the people who pooh-poohed me when I said that Hillary Clinton seemed like a sleazy person who had a deep closet full of skeletons. I was told that these were personality flaws I was supposed to overlook in favor of 'electability' even though I knew full well they were why she's not electable. I'm frustrated with the people who told me I'm a 'Bernie Bro' for having standards, and that my fundamental objection to Hillary is that she's a woman.[0]
Hillary didn't lose because she's a woman, she lost because she's a condescending crook.
- A Washington State alternate for Sanders who voted for Clinton in the general
[0]: In fact I found this latter accusation so offensive that I considered going full rogue and voting Trump.
And those people are exactly the problem. They are willing to throw away the Supreme Court, climate change, and fair immigration all over a perceived personal slight.
? OP calls out a specific motivation. The motivation of the subgroup references is very clear. It's you who is trying to expand that to a generalization.
Your social circle may be made up of extremists who won't tolerate diversity of opinion, but there are many, many centrists in this country and if this election does mark the end of the "centrist" Democrat, it may mark the beginning of Republican rule.
It's the same thing that has been happening in Britain, where the Labour party as lead by Corbyn is miles behind the Conservatives (who in turn have made blunder after blunder).
In my circle of friends I've seen that the spectre of Nu-Labour, the very centrist version of Labour (often referred to as Diet-Tory) was responsible for the Iraq war. I know people that would rather back a Corbyn and his Old-School Labour, even if that means that Labour is less electable, as long as it means that their principles are intact.
Not saying I agree with that at all but thats what I see in a large circle of leftist, northern middle-age/class people.
Indeed. It's complicated; people are finally, after Chilcot, willing to cut off everyone who supported the Iraq war. It's a symbol of a particular kind of bad moral compromise. Unfortunately, it's compromise that won Blair his elections; he offered a middle-class, British-nationalist (remember Cool Brittania?) business-friendly Labour party. Which worked brilliantly until Iraq.
Corbyn is a disaster and has no new ideas - he's not even a reliable Brexitsceptic. His only advantage is being free of the taint of Blairite compromise. But who else is there? Possibly Tom Watson. Someone really needs to come up with a good answer to the question "what is the point of the Labour party?" other than "not being the Tory party".
(Don't blame me, I'm voting SNP, who give exactly the kind of reliable centrist technocracy that's extremely popular with actual voters.)
> It's complicated; people are finally, after Chilcot, willing to cut off everyone who supported the Iraq war.
This is not true at all, at least for anyone who counts when there isn't going to be a vote. The media and the entire consultocracy have rallied around the Blair generation even harder, and still have the bizarre fantasy that a David Miliband could ride in and save Labour. It's the same fantasist thinking that thought Clinton was a shoo-in and Brexit could never happen. Labour has no future as a moderate Tory party because the Tory party is currently a moderate Tory party. Labour already has no future in Scotland, and should ally with the SNP; that the Blairites can't see that Labour's last election in Scotland was lost because Dugdale was outperformed on every level by both Sturgeon and Davidson shows that they're living in a fantasy world.
Centrist Labour have openly declared scorched-earth war on the left of the party, and out of some misplaced sense of civility or ideal of compromise in governance, Corbyn won't do the same. He needs to use the power while he has it, and if the attempt is a failure, clear out and allow the centrists to do their unstained-Tory-governement-in-waiting thing until the next financial crash.
Corbyn's ideas are fine; from my (absurdly distant) perspective, what the Labour party needs are old ideas, not new ones. The bulk of the PLP seem to think that their only job is to listen to Tory proposals for cuts, counter-propose the same cuts, but only 2/3rds of them, scream that the Tories are heartless over and over again, and then abstain on the final vote. Corbyn is the only one offering any proposals that aren't slightly modified Tory ones. The problem is that Britain has one of the worst media environments in the Anglosphere outside of Australia, precisely zero mainstream outlets can manage to quote an entire sentence from him verbatim, and think that Bill Clinton telling lobbyists that he's a shabby "maddest person in the room" is an important news story. There shouldn't be secret PLP enemies lists to be "discovered." He should have proxies that are reading these lists to every outlet that will listen, every day.
No voters are looking for centrist technocrats other than the highly-paid professional service workers who the centrist technocrats are drawn from. Voters are looking for change from the neoliberal consensus. Labour and The Conservatives are completely weak, and in total disarray. Wait until your own racist reality tv-show host shows up, with a fistful of protectionism and an explicit platform to completely reverse austerity, steeped in racism and a hint of social conservatism. Britain is gagging for it - Nigel Farage, Boris Johnson - is Lord Sugar available?
Sorry about the babbling, but it just annoys me that people don't see that it's the left being marginalized by the media, not Corbyn in particular. Anyone who came from the left would have their mannerisms ruthlessly battered by the British press, and content-free constant accusations of "unelectability" and "uselessness." Eventually, a demagogue will come who will completely dominate the press through naked aggression, evocations of a better, purer time in the past, and, likely enough, an large ownership stake in the media itself. Then, we'll learn the lesson yet again that we should have learned from Western dabbling in the Middle East: once you've helped an oligarchy to eliminate all of the tolerant, secular opposition in a country, all you have left are the maniacs.
Again, sorry. The idea of ranting like this to a SNP voter is silly:) Just needed to get it out.
edit: There was 50x the coverage of a later retracted non-story about whether Corbyn could get a seat on a train than Chilcot, which had come and gone in maybe two weeks (after all of the wait.) Colin Powell was pretty happy about the priorities of the British media. Why would you relitigate some old pointle...
Trump didn't win because he was on the right. He beat the entire Republican establishment and the tea party rabble before he beat Clinton, and on most subjects he ran to the left of every single one of them. The shit everybody is fucking tired of is the Clintons, and their friends.
McCain: 60 million votes; Romney: 60 million votes; Trump: 60 million votes.
Obama: 72 million votes; Obama 2: 66 million votes; Clinton: 60 million votes.
Related, respect for the Mainstream Media (we'll know he's really serious if he takes the advice to abolish the White House Press Corps).
Need more? I'm sure I can come up with more. But you're 100% right that "everybody is fucking tired of ... the Clintons", and after having them "live rent free in my brain" for 24 years (!!!) I'm profoundly glad Trump put them in the ash heap of history. Except I have expect Master Level Troll Obama (something he has in common with Trump) to not pardon them, to not "end our long national nightmare" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inauguration_of_Gerald_Ford)WR... to them.
What those numbers show, at first glance, is the characterization of Bush 2 as an idiotic war-mongering chimpanzee has finally worn off in the forefront of the national consciousness.
So the approach is: When running straight into the wall doesn't work (i.e. ignoring the issues and simply calling everyone "stupid", "racist", etc.), we must try harder (we must fight them)! Okaaaayyyy...
"Never interfere with your enemy when he is making a mistake", a maxim attributed to Napoleon, works well for what I'll label as the Alt-Right here, defining us as those who's response to being called racist is "We Don't Care" instead of automatic surrender.
I lean left, but I'm highly disgusted by extremist leftist tacticts, exemplified by the fact that the media feminists can't even take a fucking joke (e.g. Justine Sacco and Tim Hunt). When you're so far left that you see everyone as the enemy, you're no longer progressive, but regressive, oppressive.
And when people revolt, you double down. As if you wanted Trump to get his second term.
That's a recipe for further division. We're going to end up with two populations with completely disjoint Overton Windows, and even worse, they won't be geographically disjoint. We'll have two choices; try to bring things back together somewhere in the middle, or bloody and violent civil war.
You sure continuing our mostly cold civil war isn't an option in the middle? What would spark the bloody and violent civil war?
Seriously, me and mine are prepared for one and continuously upping our preparations (note, those hold as well for many/most disasters), but we don't see specifics on the horizon, didn't even WRT to Hillary labeling us as irredeemable. What would be the Fort Sumter? Which, I'll note, happened over 3 months after the state succeeded.
Since I don't see any prospects for "try[ing] to bring things back together somewhere in the middle" after what my side perceives as an unrelenting and pretty much ever increasing assault from the Left for over a century (the Progressives, not to mention our latest reaction of God-Emperor Ascendant, excuse me, President Elect Trump (!!)), I'm really hoping for some sort of middle option.
I agree that the Democratic party in the hands of the 'new' identity politics Left with Bernie Sanders style leaders is going to crash and burn much harder then the Republican Neo-cons were able to destroyed the Republicans.
But really, what choice do the Democrats have but to go as far into the kaleidescope of identity as then can go? The DNC has been totally disgraced as a sham. Its a puppet establishment in the pocket of Wall street and the Corporate Globalists just as much as the Bush Neo-cons were.
There is nothing left of the Democratic party for the working class. They threw the European Americas overboard as 'irredeemable deplorable'. And they think the melting pot and Integration are Racist oppressive ideas of the Patriarchy. The idea that America should have one national language is Racist. The idea that people need legal citizenship in order to vote and collect services is literally Hitler level oppression.
How are you going to bring that back to a 'Center'? Is there even a center for the Democrats anymore that includes The Constitution and the Declaration of Independence that was written by White Men who owned Slaves?
As bad as the problems are for the Republicans there nothing compared with what is happening to the Democrats.
They threw the European Americas overboard as 'irredeemable deplorable'.
Eh, no, half weren't irredeemable fit only for liquidation, half were judged capable of being reeducated.
That's important to the extend fewer people believed they belonged in the irredeemable camp, those of us who did got "crawl over broken glass" motivated to vote against Hillary.
How are you going to bring that back to a 'Center'? Is there even a center for the Democrats anymore that includes The Constitution and the Declaration of Independence that was written by White Men who owned Slaves?
Disrespect for both documents long precedes the identity politics that now condemn them, so I'm not sure it's a new thing so much as a new excuse.
I don't think there's any bringing back that center, at least for the foreseeable future. It takes only one side polarizing things enough (for the purposes of my point, it doesn't matter which side you think did it), to where both sides view those in the middle who claim to belong to their side as traitors.
Sanders was representing actual issues (economic einequality), not mostly imaginary issues (identity politics) that the elites use to divide and conquer the populace. That was Hillary.
You are doing exactly what the article and the comments above are slating the left for doing: turning the issues that actually affect the other side every day, or which they want treated as important, into "imaginary issues".
You think identity politics are imaginary to the various minorities (of all descriptions) who just want equal footing and the ability to not deal with race and gender every day of their lives?
If that was their real concern, they wouldn't subscribe to feminism and/or social justice. E.g. even the idea of women being a minority is bullshit (they're actually a majority). Feminism focuses on solving problems for a specific group of people. That's bigotry, pure and simple. Let's rather focus on solving problems for everyone who's affected. And that was exactly what Sanders was doing - economic inequality is largely at the source of all the issues described (e.g. the fact that blacks commit more crime - which in turn pins "whites" (i.e. the majority) against them - could largely be solved by removing them from poverty). Identity politics is largely just an elite "divide and conquer" tactics that's making the lower/middle class groups hate each other.
As I minority, I will tell you that I trust Sanders far more with social justice than HRC.
Also there's nothing bigoted about folks working to make sure women get the same wages as men, or to break the cycle of poverty black folks in Chicago's south side are stuck in. Those are problems plain and simple, and they need to be solved.
I don't think wage gap is a problem. Most statistical analyses explain the gap (via different education and occupation choices, work experience and hours, and negotiaiton skills). Sure, women could increase their wages by negotiating better and getting education that pays better (e.g. STEM). Just as some (many?) men. It's important that we tell them that, but there's no point targeting a specific group with this message.
Yes, there could be other discrimination (e.g. there probably is some discrimination against women achieving high management positions) (although it's really hard to measure) - I agree that's a problem and needs to be solved, but it doesn't appear to me that the public discourse revolves around it (it usually ends at the "70 cents to the dollar" myth), and I think the current tactics are actually counter-productive (e.g. they're making men afraid of working with women, lest they say something inappropriate or wear the wrong t-shirt).
I'll agree with you that the feminist movement adopts tactics that are counterproductive sometimes (not everyone does everything correctly) but I disagree with you in that there is a point helping out a certain group.
Consider a resource A. All humans should have equal access to this resource, but because of various social, cultural, economic and historical factors, minority groups B and C have less access to A than the rest of humankind. I don't think there is anything wrong with targeting those specific groups to help them engineer better access to resource A.
But woman don't have less access to resource A. They only have less access in average! So if you target women, inevitably you'll help some women (Hillary Clinton comes to mind) that are (individually) much more privileged than some (individual) men. I don't think that's fair.
Very true, that does happen, and it is unfair, but it's a cost of helping the oppressed. Welfare is a great example of this: let's say for a population of 12 that gets welfare, 4 recipients become welfare queens (able to work but choosing not to so they can live off the dole) and the remaining 8 are helped enough so that on top of all the hard work that they do (think of single mothers working multiple jobs who are still below the poverty line), they are able to live and raise their kids with dignity.
Yes those it's unfair those 4 people take advantage of welfare, but for me, that's an acceptable cost for helping the other 8 who need it. I'm happy my tax dollars go to that.
Of course you can argue forever about whether the cost is worth the benefit, and whether basic income is better than welfare in this form and yadda yadda, but I'm trying to illustrate to you that in a system designed to help a population (I don't agree with you that women are not disadvantaged, but substitute them with any other minority group like black people), some people will inevitably abuse the system, but that's okay as long as there are enough people who benefit to justify the cost of the small number of abuses. In sum: helping a population with less access to resource A is not bigoted and, if implemented right, is a very reasonable approach.
You're ignoring the case where resource A is finite, or relatively so, health care, especially in the US where the Federal government controls the number of new doctors and hospital beds and requires emergency room care for all is a great example of that. As soon as the Federal government can no longer can borrow money a essentially zero percent real interest rates, you'll find that's even true for things like "welfare queens".
I don't understand how you're addressing my argument, but I'm arguing in favour of the concept of targeting a specific population to help them and saying that this approach is not bigoted. I'm not talking about the how, but about the why, and that there are lots of cases where this is justified. I agree that this approach can be badly implemented (maybe healthcare as in your example is one), but it is a useful tool in the right context. Examples: targeting immigrants to help them assimilate, or targeting kids in inner-city schools who don't have the resources of rich suburban school to help them get into college.
In other words, you see the resources being used in "targeting a specific population" as essentially infinite, not to mention that the extraction of them is without serious problems.
That's simply not the world I see myself living in; to quote Margret Thatcher, "The trouble with socialism is that eventually you run out of other people's money".
And for today's object lesson on that, see Venezuela, where those that are not pure money problems are inherent and unavoidable in the political process you're endorsing to "target a specific population". As shown by the very word target; in the case of Venezuela, replacing competent STEM types with politically reliable ones, 18,000 in the first wack, and then favoring current production over longer term investment necessary to maintain production levels.
I think you're confusing my suggestion (it being okay to help black kids escape the cycle of poverty using tax dollars) with blanket socialism? I didn't say anything about socialism.
How would you differentiate between your definition of identity politics, and recognizing the very real, factual discrepancy between how society treats white males and most of the rest of the population. Do you believe in white privilege, or do you consider it just another example of identity politics?
In other words, if I say 'The law enforcement and legal systems of the United States treat African Americans very differently than white Americans, and this needs to be changed.' - is that recognizing a problem that needs attention, or am I engaging in irrelevant, invalid 'identity politics'?
As I said, I think if you ensure economic equality for everyone, the problem will solve itself soon enough.
Having said that, if you want to tackle the problem of discrimination separately (e.g. because you believe you can solve more quickly and easily than the economic inequality problem), then the tactics currently used (i.e. feminism - complaining, protesting, self-victimisation, and shaming reasonable conter-arguments) are the wrong way to go about it.
Lets for a moment consider a similar, yet different problem. Rape. Men are statistically more likely to rape women than women are (feminists are happy to point that out). I don't think it's correct to villify men as a group for that, but I do think it's reasonable for women to be extra cautious when interacting with men (e.g. it may be a better idea if a drunk woman asks a female friend to take her home, than a male friend, or to cross the street to avoid strange men at night). Nothing personal, just statistics - and oponents can scream "sexism" as loud as they want, but you can't put a price on personal safety (of course, feminists won't scream "sexism" in this istance, because it's fashionable to shame men).
Same with blacks and crime. Blacks statistically commit more crime, so it's not unreasonable to be more afraid of or cautious with blacks than with whites (or asians). Sure, it could be plain racism (pre-judice), but it could also simply be pattern-matching based on statistics (post-judice). And even if you consider those instincts to be wrong, it's hard to fight against them, after all they've been keeping us alive for thousands of years!
If you nevertheless want to fight those instincts, I guess the best way is more information, and emphasizing that people should be treated as individuals, not as a group. Unfortunately, feminism/social justice/identity politics isn't very good at either. In particular, if you attack (verbally or physically), shame, fire, riot against those whose opinion you want to change, I can't imagine you'll achieve much.
Anyhow, that's my thinking, although I fully accept it's wrong/there's more to it - here in the EU, I'm quite a bit removed from racial issues...
In particular, if you attack (verbally or physically), shame, fire, riot against those whose opinion you want to change, I can't imagine you'll achieve much.
When it comes to the disemploying and physical violence, I assure you that you'll indeed accomplish a lot, just not anything you want. The verbal abuse of course doesn't help, either, and has helped to harden attitudes prior to this period where disemployment and physical violence are rising to the fore.
Okay, let's stipulate that the notion of "white privilege" is real. The shattered people who voted for Trump, who spend their lives being called "white trash" by "coastal elites," are clamoring for a share of that privilege. How do you address them?
They already possess white privilege. No matter how bad their situation, all other things being equal, if the color of their skin were black instead of white, they would be treated worse by the society around them and our social institutions. They would have found it more difficult to get a good education, more difficult to get a job, more likely to be harassed by the police, more likely to be thrown into jail for offenses that would merit a slap on the wrist for a white person.
I do not know the best way to convey this to poor whites. It certainly presents a difficult task to tell someone who has struggles with life, or has overcome almost unsurmountable obstacles, that they have it easier than others. But some have given it a try:
Huh? Im a Democrat and I always believed the Dems should focus on economic and social equality.
The GOP plays with identity issues (God, Guns, Flag, etc).
The Dems need to stay away from that and get back to the populist roots and focus on the working folk. That is what made the Dems a successful party in the past.
Most of the very wealthy people I've met work very hard indeed, yet they are not considered to be "working folk". Why be antagonistic toward powerful people in the core jargon of the party plank? Would honesty of language, or perhaps even inclusiveness, work better than emotional resonance and tribalism?
> the ability to not deal with race and gender every day of their lives?
Sometimes, a thought percolates up from my poor rural white-boy hind-brain, that maybe instead of absorbing themselves in thinking and protesting and teeth-gnashing about these issues, they might be happier if they focused on themselves and things they can do to improve their own lot in life. If you constantly pick at a scab, it takes forever to heal.
I have to remember to not let these forbidden thoughts dribble out. Damn...
The Dems CRASHED already. We lost everything. We barely have any states. We do not even make a sizable minority party in the House. We don't have the Senate.
This is the result of years of trying to meddle in with "identity" politics that the GOP are good at. But that's not what the Dems should be doing.
Get back to the populist roots that defined the Party for many years. Get back into that and get back the rural and urban and young voters and we can finally move forward.
This is the result of years of trying to meddle in with "identity" politics that the GOP are good at.
Maybe they were once good at it, but I just don't see that as of, say, 2008 and on. See, for example, my one line description of the Alt Right as "People on the right who respond to being called racist with 'We Don't Care'". At least at the national level, the GOPe(stablishment) is either not playing that game, or playing it well. Which is one reason Trump won, and the down ticket races resulted in your cited crashing.
Me, I'm surprised how the Republicans ran the tables statewide in Missouri, defeating a Carnahan and installing a weasel with no moral courage as Governor. And this is a catastrophic change from 2012, when they won Governor, the Senate race, AG, Secretary of State, and Treasurer, that is, every state-wide race but President and Lieutenant Governor. Although we also elected supermajorities to the statehouse, with the governor ending up having the most veto overrides in state history (then again, he didn't play well with the legislature).
We're also not betting that Claire McCaskill will be able to pick her opponent in 2018. I'm not yet willing to say we've turned Red from Purple, but it doesn't look at all good this year.
It was noted by ... University of Tennessee Law School professor Glenn "Instapundit" Reynolds or one of his co-bloggers that with this election, the last remaining Democratic state house in the South fell to the Republicans.
I note that, somewhat to my surprise, in what's considered to be the Purple state of my home Missouri, the Republicans ran the tables this year at the state level, and we had some very good reasons to vote for the Democratic gubernatorial candidate this year (as I did), but he lost by twice the margin of our Senate race, where as I saw it the differences were more clear. The Carnahan dynasty also lost a statewide race.
Only thing off hand I can think that makes sense of those two results is that there was a strong anti-establishment vote, which made the Senate race that much closer. And I guess no one, or no one credible enough, see all our discussion of the decline and fall of our Lügenpresse in this topic, was able to sufficiently point out that the non-establishment Republican gubernatorial candidate was a weasel with no moral courage.
Heck, I stopped reading that part of my local paper when rather early on they endorsed Hillary for her foreign policy experience. Call it disastrously neocon, call it as I do setting a large part of the world on fire and palpably wanting to start a shooting war with Russia, the only county which can end the US in 30 minutes ... well, I'll also note the paper turned off comments for that article. It certainly didn't make any difference in my county's voting numbers.
I agree. There's a narrative at the moment that the left should have listened to the right more. That's the wrong lesson.
The US GDP in real dollars is 2.3 times larger than it was in the mid-70s. In the same time period the median household income went up 1.12 times.
Considering the size of the US GDP, that's a staggering amount of money that's just disappeared into the 1%'s bank accounts. It's a multi-trillion dollar heist. People are so loss-adverse that they've been fine with not getting paid literally twice as much, so long as someone told them they'd have less chance of losing their job if they went along with it.
Regular Americans did their part - the economy grew, but they didn't benefit from it. The left should be making that crystal clear, that clarity should make people furious, and the left should ride a tide of justified anger to power.
What the they shouldn't to is ponder whether the right is on to something and it really is the Mexicans that are to blame for their job insecurity, or that taxes and regulations maybe actually are the reason that the median American household doesn't have the 6-figure income that they would have had, had their wages been commiserate with America's success over the last 40 years.
The left should act like the left, and address the economic problems of the poor and middle class people of America directly -attacking the deliberate fiscal and taxation policies that caused them. And if that doesn't focus group well, they should have some actual principles and do it anyway.
> that the left should have listened to the right more. That's the wrong lesson.
Reminds me of the following: "listen to your users, but ignore what they say". Which is actually an entire chapter of Programming as if People Mattered, a great book.[1]
So I don't think the left should have done what the right says, but it definitely should have listened more. Sort of like the whole seriously vs. literally thing with Trump.[2][3]
That's exactly what the left needs to do, but I don't see it happening when a large portion of the typical politician's work schedule is calling the people responsible for that heist and asking for money. That conflict of interest is fundamental problem[1].
People want a platform that actually is liberal, but liberal politicians moved further to the right in an attempt to work with people that were never going to compromise. Instead of seeing even an acknowledgement of the real economic problems that many people struggle to deal with, the left instead showed the were more interested in taking corporate money.
> attacking the deliberate fiscal and taxation policies that caused them
That's hard to do in an environment of regulatory capture and large donations from the people that would be regulated.
Bernie Sanders sent this message clearly, and he had enough financial support from the middle and working class to outspend Clinton in the primary. So it's possible.
> ... taxes and regulations maybe actually are the reason that the median American household doesn't have the 6-figure income that they would have had, had their wages been commiserate with America's success over the last 40 years.
How can this not be true? The 1% just knew how to play the game, where the game = finding all the loopholes in the mountain of shitty taxes and regulations you talk about.
Adding more taxes, more regulations, and more social programs isn't the answer. Adding the _right_ taxes, regulations, and social programs may actually do something.
1. Trump says something really bad
2. Check a poll aggregator (538)
3. Breath sigh of relief
For a good chunk of the election, Hillary had a really big lead in the polls. But after the Comey incident, things got tighter[1]. Nate Silver had some really good analysis on how tight the race was (a Trump win was within the polling error, and when state level polls are off, a lot of times they are all off in the same direction). But he was getting shouted down by the other aggregators. I was pretty on edge for this part of the race, but at the end, it looked like Hillary was picking up some momentum.
I think part of it was the bubble effect, but I also think Democrats put too much faith in these forecasts.
[1] At least on 538, a bunch of the other forecasters didn't budge. HuffingtonPost had a 98% chance of Hillary winning at the end. I really hope someone holds them accountable for that, as I wouldn't be surprised if such confident forecasts contributed to voter apathy.
> HuffingtonPost had a 98% chance of Hillary winning at the end. I really hope someone holds them accountable for that
What's the evidence for them being wrong?
To be clear, I'm not arguing that they were correct. But I see a trend of attacking any prediction (including those of 538) that rated a Trump victory at less than 50% likelihood as wrong, based on the evidence that he won.
If I predict there's a less than 1% chance of you winning the lottery, you winning the lottery doesn't prove that I was wrong.
I have no idea what the likelihood of a Trump victory was before the election. Maybe it was 1%, maybe it was 99%. But I think discussion of predictions shouldn't be results-orientated for single results.
Personally I think 538's prediction was fine. In fact they explicitly called the situation where Trump would win despite the popular vote deficit.
As for the rest of the forecaster that gave Clinton 99% to win, given a US presidential election, the priori of a candidate winning is 50% (historical data, roughly speaking). So you would need some quite extraordinary evidences to get the posterior to 90+% for a candidate.
In this case, the evidences were mostly the polls. To have 99% prediction for a candidate based on a poll, the poll would need have at least 98% accuracy (assuming that when they're wrong, the probability of they being wrong in either directions is the same). Personally, I don't think the polls to be anywhere near that level of accuracy in general. Unfortunately I don't got any number of poll accuracy on hand - I'd love to see it if anyone have a citation.
There are more factors that will affect an election, but with similar reasoning to above, to get a 98-99% prediction, those factors will have to be 90%+ reliable as well. That is some quite tall order.
This is a case where the onus is on the forecaster to show that their number (98% for example) is sound, since they're the one making the extraordinary claim.
Lotteries are picked randomly. Elections are chosen deliberately. It was not a toss of the dice that gave the win to trump, so any poll that did not predict him as the winner is by definition wrong.
Or to question your logic another way, what would a poll mean in the context of a lottery?
They did a post-mortem and pretty much just blamed the polls[1], but didn't really go into detail about why their model spit out that number. But for what it's worth, I have a background in data analytics, and I would never create a model that returns a number in the 90's unless the forecasted results were well outside the estimated range of error. And according to 538, based on what they were seeing, a Trump victory was well within the polling errors, and the polls were off by a similar amount in the 2012 election (but in Obama's direction). They had their forecast in the 70's (and mid 60's just a few days before). Another modeling parameter that may have been a factor in the two models was the number of undecideds. Silver was also very open about how high those were, and how it was pushing up the uncertainty of the model. So it might be possible that HuffPo was ignoring those
Regardless, for something like an election where so many factors can influence an outcome (turnout, late breaking news, biased polls) and with so few previous events to base your model on (~12 elections worth of data), you should heavily discourage your model from outputting such a high number. It is irresponsible considering what kind of an impact those types of forecasts can have on voter apathy and decision making, and the only reason I can think they did it was so that they could award themselves the 'most accurate forecaster' title after the election. But instead, they now get to award themselves the 'worst forecaster award', and the rest of us are stuck with Trump for 4 years.
The Economist had a very compelling graphic for how the polling went wrong [0]. Essentially, results were within the margin of error, but the errors (positive and negative) in a given state were strongly correlated with the percent of the white electorate with no college education.
538 made the compelling (and in the end, sadly accurate) statistical point that modeling errors in polls are very likely to be correlated across states, not independent like a lottery.
Nate Silver's reputation went up again for me in this election.
The man who completely called it wrong WRT to Trump in the primaries, and I seem to remember seeing a Tweet where he called both the final election and the World Series wrong (and the latter domain is where he first made his bones)?
I've gotten the general impression that while he might have done not as badly as others in this last minute polling, in general he did not cover himself in glory in 2016, and here I rate it by an org's confidence in their numbers.
But I didn't follow this at all closely, for it was obvious to me all or almost all the public polls were getting it seriously wrong, see e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12930950
Likewise. Not a trump or a brexit fan, but I've been called an idiot who knows nothing about the world, as nobody but an idiot would believe either of those possible. After the event, same people tell me that I didn't actually see it coming, you just always assume the worst. No. I read history. It seemed obvious that trump would win from when he announced his candidacy - because he was dismissed out of hand. Same with brexit. It all boils down to people believing perfectly possible things to be impossible. Challenging that challenges their sense of self.
After seeing this video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FHkPadFK34o (posted on reddit), I really believe no one took Trump Presidency possibility seriously. Everyone believed their bubble. Now when their bubble burst, they are just blaming everyone else.
Dem Rep Keith Ellison : Any body on the democratic side who is scared of idea of President Trump, better vote, get active. Because this man has got serious momentum and we should be ready that he will be leading the republican ticket.
A lot of people are now trying to get Keith Ellison as new head of the DNC. There are arguments for and against, but this video is the single best argument for.
That video is what most of us were thinking, yes, but I now see that there were people who called it, they just couldn't say it loudly or repeatedly enough to be taken seriously because they would be shouted down and ostracized, exactly as happened in the video. The parent just said it. Scott Adams was working his persuasion theory (ok, he is one who wasn't afraid to say it loudly or repeatedly). There were others in quiet little corners of the internet who believed that Trump supporters existed en masse but had retreated into the woodwork and would come out to prove the polls wrong.
That's pretty much how I've lived the past year. Even close friends would descend into personal attacks they knew were completely incorrect in their zeal to deny that trump was a force they didn't understand.
And Adams has taken a hit in the pocketbook for what he's pointed out, besides being branded as an out-to-lunch loon. Good for notoriety, I supposed, but not so much for the feel-good motivational speaking gigs that he used to rake in.
This isn't a personal attack, but I think your choice of language shows just how pervasive that thinking was.
Very nearly half of the electorate believed in a Trump presidency enough to mark him down at the ballot box. Those people aren't "no one". Simply looking at the Trump presidency as a lack of voter turnout because people were in their own personal bubble fails to give those people and their ideas any credence.
If we are going to have a real conversation about diverse ideas in this country, it needs to include all of them, not just whatever happens to be popular at the moment. Maybe some ideas turn out to be irreconcilable, but we should at least try to understand them and recognize that they exist.
May be I was not clear in my language. I was talking mainly about main stream media not believing and laughing at people who even suggested that. And now the media wants to blame various reasons/people for Hillary's loss.
I too believe that people need to understand the diverse ideas leading to voters voting for their candidates. And I also hate the present media trying to shame 60 million people as racist and sexist etc for voting for Trump and not even trying to understand that people can have different priorities and reasons.
The ultimate delicious irony is that the DNC and Hillary campaign colluded to elevate Trump as the GOP's candidate because they thought he'd be easier to beat.
I keep seeing this claims about DNC / Hillary and Bernie, but its always seeped in so much anger, I've been avoiding the posts. Is there any chance you could link me somewhere where I could read up on it impartially?
This is actually tough to do, I'll see if I can find a comprehensive list of the emails. I was following the leaks as they came out and so many of them referenced Bernie that the narrative in the Clinton campaign became clear. I'll reply with what I find for you.
I take this post as an example of the media looking for anyone to blame, except themselves. The closest that the post comes to a mea culpa is this:
> And of those who [sought information in journalism], not enough of them trusted it to inform their political decisions.
Of course they didn't. We know, for instance, that media after the Gulf War will not allow pictures that show war as anything but spotless. We know that, for every single topic, they'll present a stupid counterpoint and claim that a 50/50 balance is needed, even if the counterbalance is nonsense. They barely call people out on their (obvious, documented) lies. And don't get me started on sponsored content.
I think people turned to Facebook news because, ultimately, they trust their friends and relatives more than the media. And why shouldn't they? The media has done everything in their power to shape public discourse as they see fit, and now they are surprised that people don't trust them anymore.
I know that getting Mark Zuckerberg to care about the problem is absolutely key to the health of our information ecosystem.
Zuckerberg has been quoted as saying it's "crazy" to think that fake news on FB could have influenced the election. OP says that a fake news story about the Pope endorsing Trump got 868,000 shares on FB. Something doesn't add up here.
Zuckerburg is a lying sack of shit. Or (here's the part were I hedge so dang doesn't scold me for not giving infinite second chances) Zuckerberg is a boob that forgot his own company published an scholarly study about their ability to manipulate people through small chances in what they're shown.
People like to think they can ignore the influence of things like advertising, propaganda and promotional freebies. But time and time again the data shows it works, just more subtly that dropping everything and running to the store for a Pepsi. Social influence of political opinion isn't hugely different.
Perhaps Zuckerburg means it's crazy that anyone let anything posted on facebook influence them. But that idea is interchangeable with the idea it's crazy people use facebook at all. Everyone at facebook is working to make a product that influences people, whether they're immediately cognizant of it or not.
I expect fake and misleading anti-Trump stories saw similar numbers; I've certainly been seeing quite a lot them shared widely on Twitter. (The photoshopped fake of Trump's parents in KKK uniforms got a cool quarter of a million retweets, for example, which is astounding for Twitter.) So it probably contributed to the polarized and hostile nature of the election, but there's no particular reason to assume it swung the results one way or the other.
Heh, you've got a point, but simple brand recognition, or even making me aware of a product could be sufficient (I don't exactly buy into The Hidden Persuaders thesis, read about half of it back in the '70s and ... wasn't persuaded ^_^).
How many "X company is shutting down" HN items have you seen where you've never heard of the company in the first place?
868,000 is less than 1/60, and this assumes everyone who shared it believed it. Some may have realized it was false, and shared for the lulz. Also, it assumes that all of those people actually voted.
In the old days our echo chambers were defined by geographical constraints, and by the society we kept. Our misinformation came from one or a handful of media sources.
Now we have thousands of sources of misinformation to choose from, and our echo chambers have taken on new life online.
But then, as now, the truth is like poetry. And people fucking hate poetry.
It can seem like we're living in an idiocracy, but the average person hasn't gotten any stupider. The world has become too complex for anyone to understand.
"The world has become too complex for anyone to understand"
This is why I am excited to see free college tuition enter the debate. What I would love though is two extra mandatory years of high school. Teach government(so people dont think the president is a dictator), law(so people dont get taken advantage of), teach more about other cultures(so people can find out what they have in common, hopefully breaking the echo chamber), teach logic and rhetoric, and some more computer skills, maybe a basic programming class.
While I agree the world is too complex for any one person to understand everything(hence the specialization of labor). I do believe we can do better though, all is not lost :)
I'd prefer that more efficient use was made of the four years of high school they've already got people locked in for. Everything listed could be done, in addition to what (little) is already learned in those four years. It might be necessary to reform teachers unions to shake out the deadwood and find budget to double salaries, to raise the average level in the talent pool though.
As much as I find his persona to be ridiculously self aggrandizing and smug, Scott Adams made some pretty on point calls on this election, predicting Trump would win over a year ago. He's got some metaphorical construct he calls the "persuasion filter", with various notions about its components.
http://blog.dilbert.com
He claims he recognized Trump as a "master persuader", which once he started running. I confess I didn't take it too seriously, but in his view "master persuaders" take advantage of various cognitive and emotional bias we have, often appealing to emotion.
In his view, when it comes to something like pursuading voters, appeals based on facts fail. Appeals based on tapping into the right emotions succeed.
Non of this theory is particularly novel, propaganda has been a major component of governing since time immemorial.
But he did hone in on Trumps ability to tap into these emotional motivational centers in a striking way.
I've been rather depressed about the election, with some passing moments of "maybe it won't be to bad."
Two days after, some of the shock has worn off. But I've never been quite so distressed by the outcome of an election. Which has prompted some self reflection: how much of my distress is based on the fact that my team lost, that Trump was successfully painted as a thug by Clinton campaign, who manipulated me similar to how Trump did his supporters?
I'm not sure how I'll see things tomorrow, next week, next year. But as of tonight, I think the root of my distress is that Trump abandoned all pretense of a fact base campaign. His lies were total, said with impunity, no sense of shame whatsoever.
He comes closest to a sort of "impressionistic truth" in his ability to intuit people's weak spots, their fear, their hypocrisy, their aspirations. Hence, he is a masterful bully, because his insults hone in on an emotional truth.
The downside to this ability, aside from the fact that he uses it to hurt others, is that he has no sense of irony, no insight to his own projection, no humility, and is easily baited. Small slights seem to rattle him almost more than big ones.
IMO, Hillary retains a strong comittment to living in a fact based reality. That's one reason she lacks political charisma. Her attempts to elide a challenging issue, to convince an unsympathetic audience, her pre-planned "zingers", her lies, are all so transparent, and she comes off as a phony, practicing on off putting brand of persuasion based around pandering, instead of convincing.
I think this is at least part of my alarm with what Trump has done, because there is simply no way to refute anything he says. He simply doesn't care. His, statements are often vague, lacking specifics, nouns, big on pronouns, verbs, and meaningless superlatives.
When I hear this kind of rhetoric, I tend to get an uneasy feeling. I'm very sensitive to arguments that don't make sense. I can feel it, and sometimes if I want to figure out what is wrong with the argument, I have to actively work through it.
I wasn't immune to the entertainment value of watching this master bomb thrower destroy his bewildered primary opponents . Especially because his technique undermines the skills of a professional politician. Once Trump pulled back the curtain on his opponents clunky rhetorical machinery, they were powerless to get it back.
So I liked it, because watching professional politicians do their professional politician speaking is freaking annoying. The art of political language is to not provide any "attack surface" to your opponents. Trump just bypassed all that, because he is hyper agressive, and cares about winning far more than about how he "looks."
Once that phase of the election was through, I found no appeal in Trumps meandering, stream of conscious boasting and hucksterism.
Any discussion of why Trump won and why Hillary lost has to acknowledge the fact that Hillary is genuinely corrupt and well known for taking large sacks of cash from Goldman Sachs, and a large segment of the voting population finds the idea of rewarding that kind of behavior with the presidency infuriating beyond all belief.
Is electing Trump instead stupid and spiteful? Yes, but it's completely understandable.
I'm not sure if you'll get this, but I did want to respond.
I agree there are valid criticisms to make of Hillary. My main concern is that she is so entrenched within the elite power structure, so captured, that her ability to steer US policy in better direction would be limited. If she could even perceive what that might be.
The bottom line is that money talks in the US. She needs money to run a campaign, and she wants to make money for herself, like most people.
She's friends with the elite, the Wall St. elite. Well, that's because she lives in the "real world", and the elite in US, both in position and income, hold disproportionate power.
These people are not all bad. They are citizens too. We all rely upon the complex, and fragile, economic system we live in. I don't have an issue with Hillary taking big bucks for speeches.
I listen to what she says, and what she has done. Some of it I agreed with, some of it I don't. That's life.
Hillary is not any more corrupt than her peers. Probably less, as I think she still has some integrity.
Obviously a large portion of the population hate her, so she lost. That doesn't mean she's corrupt. The right wing propaganda machine attacked her constantly. Considering how much she has been investigated, she's absurdly clean.
This is exactly how I have been feeling for the past few days, but I've been struggling to put it all into words, so thank you for sharing this.
The way that Trump is able to treat basic facts with such contempt and yet still get millions of people to trust him such an important office is deeply disturbing to me. I can't shake the feeling that at some point over the next four years, there is going to be a moment where reality (as it always does) finally catches up, and we're all going to be in a world of hurt. Democrat, Republican, and probably a good chunk of the rest of the world as well.
I find it appalling that suddenly Hilary was portrayed as some kind of saviour by the media just because she is not as bad as Trump.
Well, sorry for believing that elections are about choosing the good candidate, not voting against the bad candidate.
If there is one single person to blame for these elections outcome, that person is Hilary Clinton, she put America and the World in danger when she used her grip on the DNC to push Bernie Sanders aside during the primaries, although it was clear that the people desperately wanted change. That was the key moment in these elections that got Donald Trump elected.
Many always love to poo poo the idea that there is strong media bias to one side yet each election simply demonstrates it. Where is the correction? Where are those press people from the sixties and seventies that dogged all politicians regardless of party.
the problem is they operate in an echo chamber. they truly do think they are better than those they present the news too and therefor beyond criticism. this alone keeps them from acknowledging any criticism, whether deserved or not.
the press needs to keep the bias to the editorial pages. newspapers should not be endorsing candidates, instead they need to list the claimed views of candidates with their current and past actions. report, not distort
I the forces that drove this election's media failure centre almost entirely around the problems with polling data, not a inherent problem with journalism.
The journalists were working with the best data that they had available. If a journalist is told that there is only a small chance of a candidate being elected, it is not surprising that they don't necessarily take his chances seriously.
Credit to 538 though, for putting Clinton's chances sub-70% in the final week (returning to to 70% on the final day) and for repeatedly warning of the lack of certainty given the lack of good quality polls.
I disagree. The problem was that all journalists (Fox News included) used the polling as an excuse to not actually get out and do journalism. Polls should have been but one input. Instead, because most polls said what all of them wanted to believe, the effects of anchoring and confirmation biases were amplified. Anything to the contrary was dismissed as nonsense.
I don't understand how thick headed the mainstream media (MSM) seems to be in not getting it. This "upset" win of Trump (upset in the sense that it didn't play by the MSM's wishes) was not an isolated incident - it's happened in India (2014), it happened in UK (Brexit), and it has been repeated in the US.
The fundamental driver for all three instances has been the removal of all filters on social media. The problem was that for too long the MSM used their power to filter content to its readers/viewers, and the filter was tuned by a group that wanted to script reality in a form that they wished to see come to fruition, even if their stand was hypocritical.
So for example, you'd see a huge hue and cry in the MSM about how freedom of expression was being harmed because a right wing outfit threatened someone for speaking out against a majority religion, and yet, when someone spoke out against Islam, and Islamic groups placed a bounty on his head, the same MSM would just go silent. It is this blatant hypocrisy that finally got them.
And now, with social media, for the first time people have access to unfiltered news and can form their own opinions. And for better or worse, the hypocrisy of the MSM is glaringly obvious for people who have access to multiple viewpoints on an incident - not just a filtered viewpoint. With the hypocrisy bare, it's basically been a revolt against the established media.
And unless the established media takes it upon themselves to be more honest in whatever stand they take, this is going to repeat, because, people aren't fools you know.
Old media model: a couple thousand Harvard graduates produce and filter the content for billions of people (English speaking world) by monopoly control on the 2-3 television channels, 4-5 major newspapers/zines.
New media model: a media consumer can read the opinions and thoughts of 1000s of other people across the globe, and participate in the formulation of their own opinions, and receive feedback from others.
The one-to-many top-down elitist control of opinion formation and transfer is dead. For better or for worse. Probably better. Especially when it appears to be the case that the main opinion media elitists care about is that people acknowledge them as elite..
The only criticism of the new media model I've seen is the filter bubble, but I feel that is overblown.
The firehose of social media gives us so many data points for the perceptions of others. In daily life, having a more accurate perception-ometer is a powerful thing.
At my age of near 56, I have found pretty much nothing in my mental toolbox to be more useful than a well honed BS meter, be it ordering things on Amazon or wading through our political swamps.
As long as one keeps in mind that the perceptions flowing through that fire hose are skewed in a way simply by virtue of flowing through that particular fire hose.
With the "old model" (leaving aside op-eds), I at least have some assurance that due-diligence is being done in terms of research, fact checking and verification of sources. The "old model" has journalists in the field, on the front lines reporting the facts.
With the "new model", I have zero assurance that due-diligence has been done. The burden of analysis and research is squarely on my shoulders. A fact is no longer a fact in that I can find any blog to support whatever position I wish to take. The blurring of opinion with news is "infotainment". The filter bubble reinforces itself.
>due-diligence is being done in terms of research, fact checking and verification of sources
I think part of the problem is that this is a fallacy. They give the impression that fact-checking and due diligence has been done when it actually hasn't. It's an appeal to authority, with CNN telling you they're the most trusted news source and showing you reporters on the ground and breaking news stories.
Sure' indépendant news sources are unreliable, but so are mainstream news sources. The burden of research has always been on your shoulders, you just didn't realize it until now. Fox News, MSNBC, the NYT are relying on the fact that you don't fact-check them, that you don't do independent research. They're banking on you believing that they're trustworthy news sources in and of themselves.
And it's just not true. It may never have been true.
"The burden of research has always been on your shoulders, you just didn't realize it until now"
Bravo. I just wanted to add, critical thinking is also required(and always has been) I see articles that present a bunch of research, and then make claims that the research doesnt support. Ive even seen articles summarizing one paper, where the article completely gets it wrong. Recognizing the narrative/bias is important.
Unfortunately, this is hard. Even more so with the variety of sources. Lately I have been trying to follow individual publications and authors to better recognize their bias/narrative. Of course now I am missing out on other viewpoints :(
"And it's just not true. It may never have been true"
Hence the corrections section I remember in newspapers. What if they didnt want to print a certain correction???
Maybe follow other's links to it, maybe check it out for Their slant on things. But never, ever, trust it again, even to the limited degree of trust we're talking about.
Search for those you can trust, those who don't cut corners or lie, and treasure them.
That's pretty much the whole point, or at least that you have to assume that any other report from the organization could be equally inaccurate. Or worse. Or better; what it says is that their editorial process is fatally flawed.
The real filter bubble is not one that's imposed by Facebook, but one that's imposed by an individual.
That is, people join subreddits or Tumblr groups and they filter out opposing views. Then they approach the "center" of that group, which itself is way outside mainstream.
Eventually, they self-impose a sort of filter that limits the access to moderating opinions.
Unfortunately, unfiltered also means more "undistilled".
The flipside of removal of filters of news on social media, is that we get a lot more low quality news based on unchecked facts. It is bad enough that the established media posts "breaking news" as fast as possible without taking the time to thoroughly consider the facts or give us a complete and rounded story.
Everything is becoming "headline news". We get more and more during the day, and we don't have the same time to digest what we get, so we just look at the headlines, skip the reports we don't like, and skim the few that look interesting -- The echo chamber.
We still need high quality sources that are trustworthy and able to filter out some of the "noise", simplify the stories to something we can digest without loosing details, and we also need to be exposed to news we don't like.
News on social media is sensationlist and usually none of those things.
In a world of more noise, more echo, fewer facts, and less details, we decide more based on gut feelings.
I think some of Trump's result could be attributed to the fact that, he spoke more to the heart of people than Hillary did.
E.g. the coal miners who voted for Trump because he promised them their jobs back. At least I think, it will difficult to return coal to its former "glory" with the current energy landscape (e.g. cheap and plenty oil as well as cheaper alternatives), so I am doubtful that will happen.
The whole idea of making America great again, returning jobs, and repealing trade agreements and Obama Care, speaks primarily to the heart of the people. We all love the good old times -- Especially, when we feel down and out of luck and life is difficult.
I think you're underestimating the intelligence of people. We like to think that we're much better than the average Joe at separating the wheat from the chaff, but the truth is that the average Joe just isn't so bad at it either - or at least, isn't much worse than an editor sitting in his echo chamber.
If I look at my twitter feed now, for example, I have a bunch of tweets criticizing a new decision of the government to withdraw high-denomination currencies (I'm from India), and for every such tweet there are others that are calling out the fallacies of the argument put forth. And vice versa.
Gives me all the viewpoints I need to form an opinion.
I don't underestimate our intelligence, but I think most of us have too little time to do the due diligence ourselves. I am not saying you should trust one traditional media source, but I hope that unfiltered social media never fully replace traditional media.
For me Twitter is just hopelessly noisy compared to a well written and nuanced newspaper article that presents me with most of the facts, opinions, potential consequences, graphs, etc. involved with a topic.
The sad thing is that most news in traditional media is not well-written, well-researched, or nuanced.
E.g. the coal miners who voted for Trump because he promised them their jobs back. At least I think, it will difficult to return coal to its former "glory" with the current energy landscape (e.g. cheap and plenty oil as well as cheaper alternatives), so I am doubtful that will happen.
It can at least partially happen. The Democrats have waged absolute total war on the coal industry, something Hillary explicitly confirmed during the campaign, and you don't have to dial that back much to have some good effects, the biggest issue will be the power plants that have converted to natural gas and can't easily go back (and, boy, was that a bad national decision, making us much more fragile, even if coal is truly nasty stuff).
The main bubble that burst was that of the people who thought trump was a joke, no?
Are fed up people really the medias failure? Bernie Sanders also had surprising support for similar reasons to Trump: they both where going against the system.
Just for some discussion: maybe the classic media finally lost control and people regained some freedom of choice? Every big media house was against trump and he still won.
And let's not forget that a lot of people really had to jump their shadow to vote for Hillary as the lesser evil.
The last 30 years have seen a distinct change in economic policies that rewards the privileged and leave others struggling in the name of efficiency and capitalism.
Yet when things go southward and things like the banking crisis happens these principles are swiftly jettisoned and privileged interests indiscriminately bailed out with the media and 'experts' stepping in to gloss over the rank hypocrisy.
The poor are harassed and incarcerated for every small trangression while the rich and connected like the bankers, Shrekeli, Holmes routinely get way with fraud and worse.
These inconsistences are not forgotten. All that economic power is then inevitably used in a self serving way to further increase their own share of rewards like quasi feudalism.
Wars are being fought to benefit financial interests that leave millions in other countries in disarray, billion dollar surveillance industries are built that fundamentally shift the balance of power from the people to the state.
HN itself is guilty of celebrating wealth and gloating over the irrelevance of people with automation and AI. Why the gloating? Where is the sensitivity to the impact of these technologies on society and the unprivileged. There is so much disrespect and general nastiness to people here who are not perceived to be successful with no notion of adversity or privilege. This kind of disrespect and dehumanization is bound to rankle. Cmon these are your own people. What do you think these people are going to do? They will listen and vote in demagogues.
Quibble to your posting which I otherwise largely agree with, Shrekeli is under Federal indictment, and every one is cheering that, and it's too early for Holmes to receive the same treatment, although the fraud she was running should have been brought to heel much earlier, we're talking life and death here, as with Shrekeli.
A better example would be Jon Corzine, and how it looked for quite some time that the people he defrauded would not be made whole, despite the white line law on this. Or to bring it back to this election, "The S in SCIF Does Not Stand for Servant".
I think people are fed up of the establishment and their apologists. People are fed up of this flawed narrative that apparently can't be controlled and only delivers more disparity and suffering to the unprivileged and more riches to the privileged. And this is some auto pilot that is beyond control?
People feeling powerless and craving control makes them susceptible to any demogogue. Anyone who can exploit this disenchantment will win, like Trump did. But Trump is establishment, his team reaching out to Dimon on day one makes a complete mockery of 'anti-establishment expectations from his supporters'.
and his team reaching out to Dimon on day one makes a complete mockery of 'anti-establishment expectations from his supporters
You don't suppose that might be a lie designed to sabotage him starting out the gates, or that Dimon's name somehow got on a list but is going to be removed in the normal process?
You don't suppose there are factions fighting, through leaks in this case, was is often the single most important battle in a US presidential election, for "people are policy"? Much of the awfulness of George W Bush's administration is from the people chosen for these positions, and that can be in part traced back to his lack of courage when Team Gore stopped/truncated his transition process by yelling about the election not being decided yet. (More is from Bush's weird loyalty patterns, e.g. he should have told Norman Mineta, "I'm sorry, but I need a war time Secretary of Transportation, and you were not selected with that criteria in mind" and replaced him immediately after 9/11.)
We will, of course see in due course, but it's a little early to be so dispositive. Perhaps we can wait until we hear his nominations officially??
The problem with facebook is the SHARE button. If I want to read Fox news or Huggington Post, I'll go to those sites and read. If I want to watch Cat videos I'll go to YouTube myself. The problem is that it's way too easy for my "friends" on facebook to click to promote whatever stirs their interest. One would hope most of the content shared on facebook is user-generated, not user shared. But there is no money in that so they have simplified the process of sharing monetized crap to a single click.
There is some irony in condemning this use-case of Facebook on HackerNews, where user-shared content and comments about it are pretty much the entire raison d'etre
The media normalized mainstream expressions of hate, giving them hourly implicit approval and mainstream normalcy, because it was giving them ratings and ads.
Every historian I know sees frightening parallels between Trump and various fascist regime rises. Virtually no coverage of this.
If news is unable to provide historical context, apply moral judgement, or do any investigative journalism of the ample skeletons in Trump's closet, then they are truly a shell.
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[ 4.5 ms ] story [ 267 ms ] threadInternet is full of opposing opinions. It's not like people don't see them, they don't click them.
If it isn't solved at the root, i.e. at the Facebook level, it won't be solved. However, since Facebook's commercial interests are aligned against it, I am pessimistic it will be solved. Maybe Facebook's successor can solve it.
I need to update it a bit with a few of the newer subreddits that have sprung up for alt-right types, but it's still there.
God, this election really has brought out the worst in people. I'm sorry for your Aunt.
Edit: Oh and I'm sick of being denounced as a moderate. Seriously, the highlight of the entire election has been attacks and demonization on the other side. Fuck me for trying to point out shitty behaviour, right?
Since you're such a fan, there's an email on my profile; feel free to send all your personality feedback and concerns there.
>> build a better environment for news
I agree. They can start by not telling me what to think. Focus on reporting. I got so sick of the media putting spin on what Hillary thinks (they know what she thinks?) or what someone else was saying about Donald trump (without vetting) from 30 years ago and on and on.
I have stopped believing them. The news agencies are opinion shows as far as I'm concerned. They are propaganda, bought and paid for by interests that are not American.
What does this suggest about all the other stories the mainstream media (CBS exec: "How could Nixon have won? I don't know a single person who voted for him!") tells every day, in exactly the same way, about all sorts of issues that can't be so easily measured?
And what does it suggest about the academic institutions that enforce conformity to exactly the same set of opinions and narratives and not only filters information but fires and otherwise silences dissenters? And anyone who suggests that a system so utterly lacking in diversity of thought that there is no one left on campus who will tell them if they're wrong can't be trusted is called "anti-intellectual" and "anti-science".
It doesn't tell me that they are wrong about everything, just that they are likely to be just as wrong about some other issues they are adamant about as they were about this one, but that promoting their dogma, not working to find the truth, is what they really care about, which doesn't make them wrong about any particular thing, just not reliable.
Here's an excellent analysis from five-thirty-eight: http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/what-a-difference-2-perc...
Personally, I think polling is worthwhile. I think it's possible they made honest (and sometimes incompetent, but not malicious) mistakes, and acknowledge that attempting to predict the outcome of a future event is inherently difficult. I think it is possible to do honest work while still voting.
Is this a fair representation of what you're saying? I don't feel I've captured it quite right, as I can't figure out how to tie in the entertainment aspect of polls. Also, I'm not happy with my choice of the word "fear" as the driving aspect of motivation.
Acknowledging that I may not have captured your argument correctly, I'm going to move forward, fully willing to abandon it if it ends up relying on parts that I've misunderstood.
For one, I'm not sure where to draw the line of who is involved in a campaign, and therefore who should know about poll results. There are people who are paid to work on the campaign, so it seems clear they are part of the campaign. And there are people who spend a lot of time volunteering, so I think it's fair to consider them as part of the campaign. There are people who volunteer less, for example donating a few evenings working for phone banks, or perhaps working in IT or data management, or working on the polls themselves. Then there are people who aren't directly working for the campaign, but are passionate about their candidate (or perhaps passionately opposed to another), and either work on their own or self-organize. Maybe the line is that only people who are involved in decisions that require polling data should know the results? What justifies "needs to know"?
Another question I have is about GOTV in general. The numbers I've seen show that over 40% of eligible voters didn't vote in the 2016 election. I think we agree that more people should vote. Some GOTV methods I've seen are general, non-partisan "Please vote" campaigns. Partisan ads often include admonishments to vote. There are also programs to help people get to the polls (for example, rides). Some of these are non-partisan, some partisan. Are these legitimate GOTV efforts? If the electorate is to be accountable for turnout, what other methods can they use? Should partisan ride-providing efforts have access to poll data to best allocate their resources? How about non-partisan groups, as polls may show which areas are expected to have lower turnout?
As I said, I've responded to what I interpreted as your position before confirming that my interpretation is correct. I've done this in the interest of expediency, not to build a straw man. So please let me know how my interpretation can be improved if it's not correct.
Thanks!
So...
Internal polls are not generally released. Nor are they shared to PACs. This is one benefit of public polling. It helps coordinate between the campaign and the PAC side.
Re entertainment, I think watching polls is as entertaining as watching any sport for a lot of people. (I think that is pretty obvious actually - just my observation, though I worked with people in the political consulting industry, so perhaps my circle is wonkier than most).
Now, the big crux and where we will disagree... People should vote because they are civicly minded and want to participate in the process. That requires education and sophistication, which is something both side lack en masse. The only thing worse than people not voting, IMO, are dumb people voting for the wrong reasons. The latter is mob rule and is why we're where we're at. Stupid is a bipartisan quality.
As for access to voting, I think we could benefit from electronic or more mail-in. I don't want to suppress the right to vote; I just don't want to see sides manipulate the idiots of the electorate into voting. If you ever see how a GOTV strategy is put together, they look for people who are "persuadable", which is just another way of saying dumb. (Those analysts will admit it too if you put enough drink in their belly)
I completely agree that people should vote because they're civically minded and want to participate, and ideally make their decisions based on a well-educated understanding of the issues (and all they entail). What does this mean practically? What level of education is adequate? What are the wrong reasons? Single-issue voting? Being inspired by a leader? We're human, not perfectly (nearly?) rational, imperfect in general. What level of sophistication is necessary? I'm asking these questions of myself as much as of you.
I have similar questions when it comes to persuasion. One person's education is another's persuasion is yet another's malicious manipulation. How do we convince people to be civically minded without persuading them that it's the right thing to do? What's the distinction between appealing to people who are likely to be amenable to your position and looking for those that are persuadable? How do you educate people who are, as you put it, "dumb"?
Like I said earlier, these are questions I pose to myself as well. I'm asking here because I want to get other's opinions. Thanks again for taking the time to consider them. Discourse can be an important part of reaching understanding.
Those, however, allow for vote buying and coercion, so I utterly oppose them.
I'm starting to wonder if the overconfidence in a Clinton victory boils down to assuming that errors are independent when they really aren't. Specifically, did they assume swing states might go one way or the other individually, rather than that they might move as a block? There was a lot of talk about how there were a bunch of states that favored Clinton and she only needed to win one of them. Pulling numbers out of my rear end, if she had a 50% chance of winning each of 8 states, and she only needed one, you might assume her odds of winning the election are 99.6% (255 out of 256). But if they all swing together, then her odds of winning would only be 50%.
The vote was almost dead even. If you though Trump was going to win big then you were just as wrong as the places that predicted a big Clinton win.
About as big as I expected, although not quite as big as I hoped, then again, there are always surprises in Presidential elections. I didn't expect Trump to get Pennsylvania (or Toomey to win), I expected Russ Feingold to win (yesterday saw a report on the general issue of Team Hillary ignoring/taking for granted the Rust Belt, including ignoring a plea for help from Feingold), and one of the biggest surprises is that Minnesota truly was in play (margin looks to have gone from ~200K in 2012 to ~40K).
If two countries play a best-of-5 soccer games, and one beat the other 3-0 with three consecutive 1-0 games in the last minute. It would have been hard to claim that one team isn't obviously better and the margin of winning is small.
Your analogy is flawed. The individual "games" weren't that skewed. Instead, imagine two basketball teams play best-of-5. The scores are 100-98, 101-99, 100-101, 99-100, and 98-100. It would be bizarre to say that one team was greatly superior based on that, even though they did have a big margin in percentage of games won.
On further reflection, I do agree that the election was close. I'm guessing my previous response was conditioned on Trump being the underdog, arguing on a different point you were making.
Your "most logical analogy" still isn't quite right. The individual scores for each game were very close, and the total scores actually slightly favor Clinton. But Trump won more games, after weighting the games in a certain way. But I don't know how to do it better, I don't think there's any sport that's really played anything like this!
I'd say the best measure for closeness would be either how much of a shift in the overall vote was needed to flip the result, or how much of a targeted shift could generate a change in the result. In this case, an overall shift of 1-2% would have changed the result, and a targeted shift of some tens of thousands of votes could have. It's not the closest election ever (2000 probably takes that prize by these criteria) but it's fairly close compared to, say, 2012 and 2008.
Except, for, you know, who administratively runs the country for the next 4 years, has the bully pulpit and therefore potentially great influence over the Congress, etc. etc. etc.?
It sure seems to mean a whole lot based on all the sad faces and rioting in the streets I've seen over the last few days.
And, circling back to the real point, it's the rules of the game, claiming some sort of greater meaning only when your side loses the popular vote is beyond pointless.
To remind you, my point is that the election was very close. It is not that the result is bogus or nobody cares or it's meaningless.
A tiny shift in sentiment would have changed the outcome of the election. The fact that the margin of electors is about 14% doesn't change that fact. The electors are not a meaningful measure of how close the race was.
>..a 1% shift from Trump to Clinton would have resulted in her victory.
Here's an excellent analysis from five-thirty-eight: http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/what-a-difference-2-perc...
Or maybe AP calls it if a candidate concedes? Guess we'll just have to wait, and for California, they've got over 4 million absentee ballots to count....
The only example I've heard of where "Ah, fuggit" kicks in is when enough ballots have been counted that the absentee ones can't change any race, and the extra labor is not considered to be worth it.
It would take an exceptional, once-in-a-generation, beloved Republican to win states like California, New York or Massachusetts, and I don't think Trump even tried there. Just the margins of victory in those three states are around 1/12th of Clinton's entire vote total.
I had some CNBC shows saved on my Tivo and I recently went back to look at what they were saying. Here's an extreme example of the deception. Just the day before the election CNBC was showing states such as Montana, North Dakota and South Dakota as "leaning" GOP, not "likely" GOP. But here are the results for those states:
From this one could easily conclude that the mainstream media deliberately chose to deceive about the expected outcome in those states. Why? Perhaps to not show as much dark red on the national map?Yes there were true battlegrounds or toss-ups. E.g. Florida only went for Trump by about 1.3%. But there were more than 2x as many Trump voters than Clinton voters in North Dakota. It was a bald-faced brazen lie to call that "leaning".
* For designing psychology experiments: https://smile.amazon.com/Conducting-Research-Psychology-Meas...
* For Bayesian modeling and inference: https://smile.amazon.com/Bayesian-Analysis-Chapman-Statistic...
However, unless you are already very knowledgeable in these subjects, it will take longer than 10 hours to understand them. Very much worth the read though.
The better ones are usually pretty transparent about them.
The point of polls is to predict who's going to win.
It's not that hard to take into account Electoral College anyways.
I have a poll that shows Clinton led by 500,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 percentage points and actually received more electoral votes than there are electrons in the universe. Will you publish it? If not, will you allow me to call you biased?
This, of course, wasn't scientific at all except for the fact that we were running ads to attract both sides of the discussion equally. They were geographically limited to the US. About a week before the elections the trend was unmistakable. The support for Trump in the form of CTR, engagement and votes to the hundreds of different ads out there told a story.
We actually tried to get this story out and attempted to publish a press release. It was rejected by all of the top press release agencies we used for other business. Not one of them wanted to publish that things were not looking good from Clinton, even from a silly little entertainment site.
To confirm the bias a few days later we issued a press release indicating that Clinton was catching-up and Trump was predicted to lose. Everyone published the release.
We can't have the media operate with such bias in this country. Freedom of the press is important, but when the press become political activists we should all yell foul and reign them in. The first thing totalitarian regimes do is take control of the press. We can't have a press that is so far to the left that they won't report the truth, or worst, distort it.
I know this is just one data point. There are plenty more from other sources. The bias and manipulation are very real.
[1] http://youarefired.com/
You say we "can't", but we demonstrably do have such a press. And you're 100% correct to discern the totalitarian nature of it.
Which is why alternative sources have become so important, and as more people's "Pravda breakers" trip (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12921328) the less important this old press becomes. Look no further than the former "Newspaper of Record", it's post-election front page, it's crashing revenue, and why I call it "Carlos Slim's personal blog".
Historically it started with Reagan's zapping of the "'Fairness' Doctrine", which allowed right of center talk radio to become a thing, which I'm sure helped prime things for rise of the Internet. Drudge's 1998 reporting of a story spiked by Newsweek (sold in 2010 for a dollar and assumption of its liabilities) clearly marked this was a decisive change ... and yet our "press", MSM, this whole old establishment, seems determined to stay the course.
Which, just citing the two financial bits above, looks like a path to oblivion (although many of us are predicting they'll get direct government support soon enough, but that won't get them readers), and therefore self-correcting in, say, the medium term. So I'm not quite so alarmed, as long as the Internet stays free of censorship at the IP and maybe DNS levels.
I've seen this claim before, but I'm unconvinced. Do you think that under the "Fairness" regime, things really were fair?
I'm thinking of the way that Gary Johnson and Jill Stein were treated by the debate commission, where fairness is claimed to be in effect.
And thanks no doubt to a bit of Google AI, here he is on the topic, discussing how it was back in 1980 as well as more generally: http://www.rushlimbaugh.com/daily/2014/02/20/anyone_remember...
As the Wikipedia article notes, this has nothing to do with the equal-time rule: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equal-time_rule about which I'm expressing no opinion.
But it still seems that "fairness" is BS. First, I'm quite sure it can't pass Constitutional muster on the web. It was permitted back in the 60s predicated on the FCC managing a scarce resource (broadcast frequency spectrum). But for practical purposes, Internet bandwidth is unlimited, and it couldn't get away with this. Also, this seems little more than a nod. For any given issue, there's a kaleidoscope of differing ideas. It seems it shouldn't be too difficult to engineer a compliant broadcast that still manages to completely exclude specific undesired ideas, by including other views as compensating balance.
Rush Limbaugh is crap, and I won't watch him. But do you really want to live in a country where that's actually forbidden? I don't.
We should take control of the press, like totalitarian regimes!
(Sorry for the snark, but there really is a big contradiction here which both sides are struggling with. The American press aren't especially left-wing, they're just tremendously unreliable - story template first, facts second.)
Spend some of that money to support a newsroom.
I also learned pretty early on that saying I believed he had a shot would anger people, and often lead to accusations of many, many PC sins such as racism on my part. This did not convince me I was wrong.
I have some measure of hope that people are going to learn the right lessons this time. People are still too deep in the grief process for me to judge it clearly, but hope is enough for now.
It's going to take the left a long time to grapple with this. I look forward to moving past the shock and outrage.
In the novel, Germany invades France, but the French soldiers don't truly understand that they are at war.
The Germans destroy village after village, but the French soldiers don't truly understand that they are at war.
With superior tanks and airplanes, the Germans quickly defeat the French, but the French soldiers don't truly understand that they are at war.
The French are forced to surrender, but the French soldiers don't truly understand that they are at war.
The French soldiers are taken to a temporary prison camp, but they don't truly understand they are at war.
A rumor spreads among them that Hitler has decided to send them home to their families. The soldiers are cheered. Some even praise Hitler for his graciousness in victory. They don't realize they are actually at war.
At the end of the novel, the Germans order the French soldiers onto trains. The trains start moving. It is understood by the soldiers that if the trains go north, to Germany, then they are being sent to slave labor camps, but if the train turns south, then they are being sent home to their families.
In the final scene, the train comes to a fork, where it must go north or south. The soldiers watch anxiously. And then train turns north, toward Germany. And then, finally, the French soldiers realize they are at war.
I feel like this election was a bit like that, for many weak liberals who thought that it was okay to be "centrist." I feel like they are finally waking up to the fact that this is a war.
This is the only upside that I find in this election.
Republicans were trained over the years to pick someone "electable". They figured it would go better with the population, electoral votes.
So in 2008, they went with McCain, a Republican who supported campaign finance reform.
In 2012, they went with Romney, a Republican who was governor of Massachusetts, a traditionally moderate/liberal state, who implemented Romneycare.
Both of them were normal, Romney made a faux-pas regarding the %47 line, but all in all he would have been an OK president, and kept the Republicans moderate.
The media slaughtered him in the general election. Called Republicans racists (which I didn't notice him being), classists (umm, do you think Clinton would live in a project?), and he couldn't answer back.
That's why in 2016, the base got fed up with having to hold their nose and vote a moderate, they decided that if they're losing anyways, they might as well pick someone "who says it the way it is". Now when the media says that he's a racit, they say "Oh, like they called Bush (who had an African American Secretary of State) racist? They just hate Republicans".
Liberals cried wolf. They refused to have a conversation, and we ended up with Trump.
There has been a slowly growing populist faction on right that reject the Neo-con aggressive military policy. And has an America first trade policy that rejects NAFTA style free trade.
That movement had been building and finally broke through with Ron Paul in 2008. The populist movement and Liberty movement after Ron Paul has grown exponentially. It was only a matter of time before the Washington wing was challenged by the populists for control of the party.
That is what has allowed Trump to win the nomination. The populists in the party establishment supported Trump and the Washington wing was out numbered and had to concede and surrender. This is a process that has been in motion for over 20 years to bring the Republican party to the quite amazing transformation.
Liberals are tired of the Clintons. They're tired of nominating people just left of center who fail to inspire them, while candidates who speak their mind and call for change (Bernie) are ignored by both the DNC and the mass media. They perceive, rightly or wrongly, that Republicans have been fighting a battle while Democrats make concessions to people who are unwilling to compromise. And now that the most outspoken, uncompromising candidate has won the election, they're being told to compromise again, to swallow their emotions and have a conversation with people who aren't interested in talking with them.
The media told them this was Hillary's turn. They were told to vote against Trump, but nothing about what they were voting for. They were told that feelings don't matter and to vote for the greater good, even while candidates within the party and without inspired based on emotion. Is it any wonder that turnout was down?
A chart that sums up the election for me:
http://imgur.com/TOGIbcP
Trump didn't win the election, dropping Democrat turnout lost it.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/10/27/do...
Both Trump and Clinton's campaigns seem successful - there was less voter turnout than in 2012. However, the angles they took seem to have reshuffled support in a way that ended up with Trump winning.
Turnout this election was 2% higher than 2012. It just doesn't look that way because everyone is focused on Clinton's and Trump's totals. This election saw the most votes cast for alternate candidates (a hair over 5% according to Wikipedia) since Ross Perot's run in 1996.
For that matter, compare Democratic votes in all three elections, looks to me like you can draw a fairly straight line 2008 to 2016.
But if you drop the loaded word suppression, yes, of course part of the game is to discourage the people who might vote for your opponent, the biggest change is that the language used today is by comparison quite tame.
I'm shocked that's not getting more discussion this time around. I seem to recall that it was a huge complaint for ages after it happened in 2000.
Note also that at least in this election the unofficial margin (at least per the AP, which hasn't called Michigan and New Hampshire yet) is rather small, and one also has to count 3rd parties.
Putting the shoe on the other foot, what do you have to say about both of Bill Clinton's elections, where Perot resulted in more people voting against than for him. For that matter, just checking now (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_presidential_ele...), every third party candidate but the Constitutional party's, and independent Evan McMullin, earned more votes than the margin between Hillary and Trump. So it's really hard when you look at those non-major party vote total to say that in any way she won the popular vote, especially if you claim this didn't matter for her husband in the '90s.
2000 was the first presidential election I was old enough to vote in. I have voted in every presidential election (and every midterm and local one except when I was living overseas) since. Of the presidential elections I've voted in, the electoral college has flipped 40% of them. So don't try to dismiss my complaint on the basis that it's rare. Maybe it is throughout history, but it has become distressingly common lately.
And don't assume I'm complaining just because "my side" lost. I didn't vote for Gore in 2000. I did vote for Clinton in 2016, but I do not identify as a Democrat, and only voted for her because I believe Trump is a terrifying and dangerous choice. I was too young to vote for Bill Clinton in the 90s, and while I think he did a decent job, I think HW Bush and Dole would have too.
I don't really see how Bill Clinton is "putting the shoe on the other foot." My ideal system wouldn't be a simple first-past-the-post arrangement. I would like to have runoff elections or ranked-choice voting or something like that.
You seem to be imagining a whole slew of arguments on my behalf that I didn't make and don't believe. If you want to reply to me, please reply to what I'm saying, not whatever you imagine I must think.
But my bigger point are things that I think you must address, if you're to address my concerns, like how it will make half of the the Great Compromise non-operative, and change the election to a focus on 8-10 metro areas, none of which I or my family live in, even those in the Kansas City metro area (30th).
You feel disenfranchised in 2 out of your 5 presidential elections; do you think I want my family and myself to be disenfranchised in them forever?
See also how if the GOPe hadn't sabotaged the GOTV effort for Trump, we probably wouldn't even be having this discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12932865
It's a different country now. We have many more states, and the role of states has greatly diminished. Most Americans think of themselves as Americans first, and citizens of their state a distant second. Many aspects of our electoral system have changed. The idea of allowing an 18-year-old black woman who owns no property to vote would be as bizarre to the founders as the idea of directly electing the president.
I don't actually feel disenfranchised. I've always lived in swing states, so my vote counts for far more than most. My dislike of the electoral college is not rooted in the fact that I feel like I don't have a voice.
I don't understand this notion that you and your family would be disenfranchised in a system where the president is chosen directly. Your vote would count exactly as much as the vote of someone living in New York City. Sure, there are more people living in NYC than there are where you are, but there are far more Americans not living in NYC than living in NYC. A quick look at the popular vote totals will show you that the 10 biggest metro areas don't overwhelm everyone else.
Sure, a lot of attention would be given to big cities. I don't see what's wrong with that. A lot of people live there! But other places wouldn't be ignored, since every vote in every location would be just as important. Wyoming probably wouldn't get many visits from candidates, but how many do they get now?
As it stands, the swing states get all of the attention. Neither candidate cares much about what voters in California or Texas think, because their attention won't change anything. Democrats just need to not totally piss off California, and Republicans just need to not totally piss off Texas. If Californians have some important issue they'd like to see action on, nobody is going to care about it. That's 65 million people disenfranchised right there, just in those two states.
Why is it better to have the candidates care almost exclusively about the needs and desires of ~60 million Americans living in swing states, and completely ignore the other 260 million of us? You say that people in Kansas City would be disenfranchised with a direct vote. I say that they're disenfranchised now, because neither Kansas nor Missouri have the slightest chance of choosing Democratic electors. In a popular vote system, the candidates might care more about New Yorkers than Kansans, but at least they'd care some.
The power is anyway going to shift to cities. If it doesn't happen in the 2020 census, it will in the 2030 census.
And are you really sure about that? The AP, the "definitive" source I've been following through Google (https://www.google.com/search?q=election+results+2016+usa#eo...), says California reporting is 100%, and the nationwide margin is still about the same as it's been for some time, medium 6 figures.
http://www.scpr.org/news/2016/11/09/66046/california-la-coun...
Maybe that's a high estimate, I don't know. We'll know in a few weeks in any case.
Am I sure the demographic trend towards cities will continue? Yeah, I'm pretty sure. They may not continue to vote the way they do now, but they are going to decide presidential elections.
Also, as the only groups legally able to propose a change to this system are right now benefiting from it, I wouldn't hold my breath.
Sure, I don't think that it'll ever change. But that doesn't mean people can't complain.
For me, that was through a combination of his refusing to play the game by the other side's rules (a restatement of disposable099's point) and how terribly awful a politician Hillary is. In fact, I go so far as to say she's an almost total failure in life, aside from graduating from the good schools she went to, the one good decision she made in life was to accept Bill's outstanding offer of marriage, everything successful in her life after law school flows from that.
To give you a hint of that, it's pretty obvious the reason she accepted and self-exiled to Arkansas in the 1970s was that between failing the D.C. Bar Exam and being terminated with extreme prejudice from the Watergate Investigating Committee, she had completely burned her potential future career in D.C./East Coast politics. There's lots more if you want more details, but, I can close with the obvious facts that she twice reached for the highest brass ring in US politics with serious campaigns and failed both times, to rather different sorts of people (weasel words since, for example, both Obama and Trump are master level trolls).
She wasn't fired from the WIC.
http://www.snopes.com/politics/clintons/zeifman.asp
But, tell me, why did she exile herself to 1970s Arkansas? As someone who grew up 3 counties north of the state, I can assure you back then it was considered to be a massively worse place than my native Missouri, and the very close states of Kansas and Oklahoma. There was something qualitatively different about it, in a bad way.
Note that she went from working on the Watergate Committee, which was the highest pinnacle of the Left in the '70s aside from perhaps the Carter Administration years later, to being a partner at a politically well connected law firm in Arkansas, one no one ever heard of outside the state before the '90s.
What's your explanation for her move? Surely she could have tried again to pass the D.C. bar exam.
I have no comment on her reasons for leaving Arkansas or anything else.
That sort of trick just doesn't work any more, which is, of course, the whole reason we're having this general discussion in the first place.
Could you explain a bit clearer?
The claim that Hillary was fired with extreme prejudice from the WIC is political.
My claim that citing Snopes claim to the contrary---it being a political issue---does not make it a mistruth to me, rather, you might say it's an example of the maxim that "nothing is confirmed until officially denied".
That, in fact, is pretty much how we on the Alt Right† nowadays treat anything political on Snopes.
†For the purposes of this discussion, the Alt Right are those on the right who's response to being called racist is "We Don't Care".
Are you saying you dismiss Snopes as being left-biased, therefore the matter over whether "Hillary Clinton was fired with prejudice" is still not resolved?
And until Hillary Clinton (or presumably the WIC) come out and directly either confirm or deny that statement, then repeating the statement is "fair game"?
But doesn't that put the onus on the subject to confirm or deny every single tinpot, falsehood statement out there, otherwise its safe to consider it the truth?
Is it similar to the example you gave of being called a racist and responding with "We don't care"? Should Hillary Clinton respond to the statement with "I don't care if you think I was fired with prejudice from the WIC"? Is that what you are saying? How would that stop the "mistruth" from being repeated?
(apologies, I'm from the UK so this isn't a line of thought I've come across)
Edit: Bit of rewording for clarity
Yes.
As for the rest, I believe the evidence I've seen that this was true is sufficient to support my opinion, especially when combined with my own analysis of "Why the hell did she self-exile to Arkansas?!?!??!!!", the latter admittedly using data most Americans, let alone people in the world don't and can't have, and therefore we don't need to get into epistemological weeds.
I assume you're not talking about the "fired with prejudice" claim here because you'd be directly contradicting Zeifman's own words. But if you are, can you show us this evidence?
Is that not the textbook definition of bias?
And as I further gather, your response to this is "I don't care", as in "I don't care that I am biased"; not that "I acknowledge my biases as a weakness in my rational thought processes".
Do you see bias as a strength? Do you believe that adjusting your mental model of the world to adapt to new information as a hindrance? Have I mistaken your point?
(Please please please do not mistake my questions as judgements; I genuinely am interested in your opinion and argument!)
And what isn't political nowadays? Although the demarcation is pretty clear, falls along the line of a particular person who does their explicitly political stuff. But who trusts the rot to stay there?
And it sounds like you don't believe in, or have never heard of Robert Conquest's Second Law of Politics: "Any organization not explicitly right-wing sooner or later becomes left-wing." See Fox over the last few years, first the top dog explicitly said they were moving to the left, now he's been ousted in a coup and the writing is on the wall for the remaining figures on the right who are still under contract.
So you're defining centrism as impossible? No wonder everyone ends up in bubbles.
And you're calling Fox News, the prototypical right-wing TV news station, left-wing? What? Why? How? I just did a quick scan of foxnews.com and had a hard time finding a single story that wasn't obviously pro-Trump. The best I could do was http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2016/11/11/obamacare-enrollm...
Hired an explicitly politically biased person to do their political "debunking", see the item mdpopescu linked to: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12930881 With of course the predicable results.
So you're defining centrism as impossible?
Post-French Revolution, yes, by and large. Something we on the Right in the US have been saying prior to, say, this election, is that we think the Left is wrong, they think we're evil. Well, it's now polarizing as we decide they're not just wrong, but definitely evil.
And you're calling Fox News, the prototypical right-wing TV news station, left-wing? What? Why? How?
Maybe from your end of the pond they're "prototypically right-wing", and you might just be right about "prototypical", but they've always carried themselves as being "Fair and Balanced", i.e. allowing both sides a fair hearing. You can certainly look at their lineup of Leftists prior to the explicit shift to the Left that started a couple or so years ago as confirmation of this. Would a true "right-wing" (as defined in the US!) station give e.g. Juan Williams an honored seat at the table?
And I guess you missed Megyn Kelly's feud with Trump, and her leading role in the coup that ousted the founder and head of the channel?
I'm not telling you as someone across the pond that it's worth investigating, just like I haven't put any effort to speak of in discovering the causes of the Decline and Fall of the Torygraph, which I avidly read as a right of center 5 hours early for me news source back in the '90s, but, seriously, Fox has changed, and it's still a work in progress as two of Murdoch's more liberal sons run the place.
I think this issue of mutually acceptable information sources is really problematic. How do we rebuild this? How do we get people to start trusting each other again?
When I get approvingly labeled "irredeemable", the answer is, that will never happen.
The best outcome is that we'll live and let live, although Ian Fleming's famous "Live and Let Die" formulation is of course much more accurate.
Going back to your starting point, this is indeed a total rhetorical fail, which I thank you for pointing out. I'm going to assume that pjc50, who as I recall has a good head on his shoulders, hasn't noticed how institutions can change.
To give an example on my side with about as much amazement as he's expressing about Snopes, I no longer dismiss out of hand everything Alex Jones and Infowars have to say (!!!).
Thanks for the compliment! A little civility can go a long way in these things.
Institutions and people certainly can change. I've lost a lot of respect for various media institutions over the years. e.g. the Telegraph, not just for having a climate change denial column but for the reasons Peter Oborne resigned (influence by advertiser HSBC to prevent adverse coverage). The BBC's political coverage is increasingly just bad, apart from Paxman - Question Time is the two sides shouting across each other, not an informative or useful programme. Their Scottish coverage in English is poor (weirdly, their Gaelic news programme is excellent despite, or possibly because of, its tiny budget).
Sometimes news is absurdly localist, in the style parodied by the Onion's "Area Man": http://www.ellontimes.co.uk/news/aberdeenshire-business-owne...
I do wonder how much of this is just popularity effects. Do people actually want slower, more careful, less angry partisan news? Or do they want a team they can cheer for? The BBC hide all their insightful, analytical programming on BBC4.
https://www.opendemocracy.net/ourkingdom/peter-oborne/why-i-...
Edit: you may be surprised to know that I used to read ZeroHedge, although not seriously. For sane capitalism-skeptic news coverage I'm fond of FT Alphaville.
†"angry" is an entirely insufficient word for this.
How can I consider this to be tangential when our current President started his political career in the home of two of the most notorious '70s figures advocating this, who made a wild guess that 10% of the population could not be reeducated and would have to be liquidated? You might say, people they thought to be "irredeemable". And these are people of Hillary's generation.
I bring this up not to attack Obama, but to show how well received such eliminationism is on the US Left (heck, in one of those things that makes you wonder if there's a God, the man had a feature article in The New York Times on 9/11 (written and printed before the attack, of course), with him standing on an American flag).
That this sort of thing, including Hillary's speech, is not completely out of bounds means I cannot for a second assume the political struggle in the US is not existential for me and my family.
And given that, I can't in the least see how trust can be rebuilt, at least prior to driving out of polite society all of these figures, instead of feating them.
So, yes, it is, and unfortunately has to be a complete derail of the conversation, given that to the best I can discern you're not taking this issue seriously.
Can I ask roughly how old are you? Did you grow up horrified at the mass murders by the tens of millions by the Left in the 20th Century, including by the Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei AKA National Socialist German Workers' Party? How the Soviets were poised to kill > 100 million Americans in 30 minutes if they launched their misses and bombers? How Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge (Red Khmers, formally the Communist Party of Kampuchea per Wikipedia) killed off perhaps half their nation's people. How just having glasses was a death sentence, because it suggested to them that you might have a formal education?
What's your opinion on the US crusade for gun control? Is it really about "gun safety"? Has it become something more sinister than the explicit through the 1970s "Keep guns out of the hands of blacks" (and other minorities starting around the turn of the century, but blacks were the foremost target)?
> I cannot for a second assume the political struggle in the US is not existential for me and my family.
So, I once asked my Romanian colleague what it was like in the revolution at the death of Ceaucescu. It was, obviously, horrifying and chaotic, with all sorts of self-appointed street violence squads. Since then I've generally cut him a bit more slack when he rants about leftists. That kind of thing sticks with a man. And so I also have some sympathy with the Cubans who've maintained that Cuba is some great commie threat to the US, etc. etc.
What I cannot understand is the belief that there is going to be some kind of purge of white right-wing Americans. To me, the idea that "eliminationism" has any kind of base in the "left" (or at least the part that has the Democratic party in it) is just unrecognisable. To me, it is completely out of bounds already.
(Edit: I suppose the US does maintain an internment camp for political opponents, beyond the rule of law, and Obama has failed to close it. But Bush opened Guantanamo and put its inmates there. This is also why we campaign against the unaccountable drone murder programme)
I'm sorry I appear not to be taking it seriously, but I find it about as plausible as an alien invasion. Now, if you asked me who in the US was genuinely and plausibly afraid of eliminationism, I would have said the usual: ethnic minorities (not just black people and Native Americans, but bearing in mind the internment of Japanese people during the war), and non-straight people. And Jews.
I'm middle-aged enough to remember the Cold War. I also remember walking past a TV showing footage which I assumed was Beirut and turned out to be the LA Rodney King riots. And I know enough history to know that massacres extend a long way back before the French Revolution.
I'm baffled at the ascribing of the Nazis to the "left", given their explicitly murderous anti-Bolshevism and war with the USSR. The thing is, there are a lot of people on the left who believe that Trump is going to start exactly the same kind of eliminationist event. Aren't both sides afraid of the same thing? Has someone left their tu quoque mirror on upside down?
Gun control is probably going to take another post tomorrow; but you can probably guess if I tell you I'm a Brit. In the meantime, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12054306 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11288841 (summary: the UK had an armed insurgency with AR-15s and it kind of sucked for everyone)
Obviously I disagree with the "out of bounds" analysis, and something has prompted Americans to buy arms at unprecedented rates, and for years with few breaks, more each month than the same month in the previous year. During a grinding recession.... And there's been no changes in concealed carry law for a full 5 years and 10 days; that's a factor, but it doesn't explain how the entire supply of rifles of military utility dried up....
Perhaps, with my being here, and you obviously not, we should agree to disagree on it?
As for the Nazis, you're confusing national with international socialists, and if we just view that as an internecine fight, we all know how nasty those can get. Plus Hitler hated the Weimar socialists with a burning passion, I'm told by one source more than the Jews, and come to think of it from my recent readings on the development of the atomic bomb (Rhodes especially), they were a higher priority target in the civil service, see e.g. Richard Courant.
As for your armed insurgency, from everything I'eve heard the AR-18 "Widowmakers" were more infamous (certianly a better rifle, Eugene Stoner atoning for the AR-10/15), and on that note, maybe the difference between subject and citizen also can't be bridged.
I'm sure that just like the US examples just listed in my "loss of respect" list, I don't really follow at all the ones you list, except for adding the Torygraph to my list and no longer reading them.
"absurdly localist" ... well, that's like Obama referring to Sarah Palin, sitting Governor of a US state, as a mayor of a small town in that state. Except, of course, he was a Presidential candidate and that was more than a little disrespectful and polarizing. In fact, we could label pretty much 99% of the Establishment Feminists as "Feminist Deniers" based on their treatment of her, simply because she wasn't on their political team.
I have no idea about "popularity effects", and I don't follow any of the MSM over here besides my local paper, but I don't think that's it, I think the start of a better explanation over here, from Glenn "Instapundit" Reynolds is:
Just think of the media as Democrat operatives with bylines, and it all makes sense.
Except it's wider than that, as we saw when almost all of the GOPe, as well as much if not most if not almost all of the Right's Establishment Authorities (press), went all in against Trump. Who, if nothing else, we can thank for putting two particular political dynasties into the ash heap of history this year.
This really hasn't been a good year for Establishment Authorities, has it?
What do you make of the rumour (I think it's still a rumour rather than confirmed?) that Steven Mnuchin will be Treasury secretary? Would you call him "establishment"?
"Establishment Authorities", and I should emphasize I'm talking about "Authorities", not, for example, the ever more loathed GOPe(stablishment), on the Right who haven't exactly covered themselves in glory this year include:
National Review (NR/NRO)
Erik Erickson and his Redstate website (a leading article the day after the election was "Is Trump [an] Antichrist?")
Hugh Hewitt
Pajamas Media but only in general, dissent was allowed, then again, if they'd purged co-founder Glenn "Instapundit" Reynolds...
The Weekly Standard and very notably its founder William Kristol, who has the true neo-con pedigree as the son of Irving Kristol
I think the latter's Commentary, except they pay-walled themselves out of relevance....
Oh, what about NRO's Kevin Williamson telling the Rust Belt people who provided the margin that elected Trump that:
The truth about these dysfunctional, downscale communities is that they deserve to die. Economically, they are negative assets. Morally, they are indefensible.
That's from http://www.nationalreview.com/article/432876/donald-trump-wh... and deserves a particularly special place in the Decline and Fall of most of the US Right's "Establishment Authorities" in 2016, especially when he and his organization doubled down on it.
Possible exception, who's part of NRO, Pajamas Media, and the Hoover Institution (which means it's much harder to purge him), Victor Davis Hansen, but he's an odd duck in so many ways.
Ask and I can come up with more ^_^.
Fayetteville, AR was a cute, hippie college town in the mountains. Going to high school there in the early 90s, we thought Missouri and Oklahoma were holes, and the only place we related to in Kansas was Lawrence.
And neither are D.C., a center of international power. Hillary was nothing if not ambitious.
Not quite true. She was an outstanding commodities futures trader. She deposited $1,000 in cash into a trading account, and in ten months worked the account up to near $100,000.
So at least she has that skill to fall back on.
Or, maybe, just maybe, it was simply a bribe paid to the wife of the Governor of Arkansas.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hillary_Rodham_cattle_futures_...
And of course, if she wasn't the Governor's wife, but you of course implicitly acknowledge that. For that matter, it was also said that that sort of trading back then was dangerously leveraged for thinly capitalized neophytes, you could lose a lot more money than what you put into your trade. I seem to remember independently of this, that at worst case you could end up taking delivery of what you wagered on. Now, my family with 3 boys bought a half-side of beef at a time right at that time, but....
https://wikileaks.org/podesta-emails/emailid/1120
This kind of divisive and baseless finger-pointing at moderates is what is wrong with US politics. To see it on the liberal side is both ironic and painful. For years the gop ousted moderates in its ranks as RINO's (Republican In Name Only). This approach badly damaged the party: it left them with no standing among young voters, formerly moderate McCain went hard to the right for a presidential primary and never came back to center. Senator Olympia Snowe resigned and penned a famous open letter denouncing this very ostracizing of moderate republicans. It has taken nearly a decade for the republicans to present a candidate with social policies that are not entirely at odds with the under 30 demographic. Trump may be socially distasteful, but he is is not looking to repeal gay marriage and plans to keep pot a "states issue". Imagine hearing that from a GOP candidate 4 years ago.
Now that the GOP has a winning candidate, your answer is to double-down, and call the moderates in your party "weak"? Listen, political stances are neither weak nor strong. They are opinions based in personal experience, individual ethics, and our respective priorities. There is no "right" answer here. There is no "war" being fought. This is how democracy works. The pendulum swings one way and then the other.
Comparing the result of this election to french soldiers being sent to nazi camps is perhaps the single most absurd analogy i have seen since the primaries kicked off. And that is saying a great deal given the ridiculousness we have all suffered the past 18 months. Shameful.
Hillary didn't lose because she's a woman, she lost because she's a condescending crook.
- A Washington State alternate for Sanders who voted for Clinton in the general
[0]: In fact I found this latter accusation so offensive that I considered going full rogue and voting Trump.
Your social circle may be made up of extremists who won't tolerate diversity of opinion, but there are many, many centrists in this country and if this election does mark the end of the "centrist" Democrat, it may mark the beginning of Republican rule.
It's the same thing that has been happening in Britain, where the Labour party as lead by Corbyn is miles behind the Conservatives (who in turn have made blunder after blunder).
Not saying I agree with that at all but thats what I see in a large circle of leftist, northern middle-age/class people.
Corbyn is a disaster and has no new ideas - he's not even a reliable Brexitsceptic. His only advantage is being free of the taint of Blairite compromise. But who else is there? Possibly Tom Watson. Someone really needs to come up with a good answer to the question "what is the point of the Labour party?" other than "not being the Tory party".
(Don't blame me, I'm voting SNP, who give exactly the kind of reliable centrist technocracy that's extremely popular with actual voters.)
This is not true at all, at least for anyone who counts when there isn't going to be a vote. The media and the entire consultocracy have rallied around the Blair generation even harder, and still have the bizarre fantasy that a David Miliband could ride in and save Labour. It's the same fantasist thinking that thought Clinton was a shoo-in and Brexit could never happen. Labour has no future as a moderate Tory party because the Tory party is currently a moderate Tory party. Labour already has no future in Scotland, and should ally with the SNP; that the Blairites can't see that Labour's last election in Scotland was lost because Dugdale was outperformed on every level by both Sturgeon and Davidson shows that they're living in a fantasy world.
Centrist Labour have openly declared scorched-earth war on the left of the party, and out of some misplaced sense of civility or ideal of compromise in governance, Corbyn won't do the same. He needs to use the power while he has it, and if the attempt is a failure, clear out and allow the centrists to do their unstained-Tory-governement-in-waiting thing until the next financial crash.
Corbyn's ideas are fine; from my (absurdly distant) perspective, what the Labour party needs are old ideas, not new ones. The bulk of the PLP seem to think that their only job is to listen to Tory proposals for cuts, counter-propose the same cuts, but only 2/3rds of them, scream that the Tories are heartless over and over again, and then abstain on the final vote. Corbyn is the only one offering any proposals that aren't slightly modified Tory ones. The problem is that Britain has one of the worst media environments in the Anglosphere outside of Australia, precisely zero mainstream outlets can manage to quote an entire sentence from him verbatim, and think that Bill Clinton telling lobbyists that he's a shabby "maddest person in the room" is an important news story. There shouldn't be secret PLP enemies lists to be "discovered." He should have proxies that are reading these lists to every outlet that will listen, every day.
No voters are looking for centrist technocrats other than the highly-paid professional service workers who the centrist technocrats are drawn from. Voters are looking for change from the neoliberal consensus. Labour and The Conservatives are completely weak, and in total disarray. Wait until your own racist reality tv-show host shows up, with a fistful of protectionism and an explicit platform to completely reverse austerity, steeped in racism and a hint of social conservatism. Britain is gagging for it - Nigel Farage, Boris Johnson - is Lord Sugar available?
Sorry about the babbling, but it just annoys me that people don't see that it's the left being marginalized by the media, not Corbyn in particular. Anyone who came from the left would have their mannerisms ruthlessly battered by the British press, and content-free constant accusations of "unelectability" and "uselessness." Eventually, a demagogue will come who will completely dominate the press through naked aggression, evocations of a better, purer time in the past, and, likely enough, an large ownership stake in the media itself. Then, we'll learn the lesson yet again that we should have learned from Western dabbling in the Middle East: once you've helped an oligarchy to eliminate all of the tolerant, secular opposition in a country, all you have left are the maniacs.
Again, sorry. The idea of ranting like this to a SNP voter is silly:) Just needed to get it out.
edit: There was 50x the coverage of a later retracted non-story about whether Corbyn could get a seat on a train than Chilcot, which had come and gone in maybe two weeks (after all of the wait.) Colin Powell was pretty happy about the priorities of the British media. Why would you relitigate some old pointle...
McCain: 60 million votes; Romney: 60 million votes; Trump: 60 million votes.
Obama: 72 million votes; Obama 2: 66 million votes; Clinton: 60 million votes.
Thanks for sharing that with us.
But he ran strongly to the right of the GOPe on:
Immigration
The Muslim subset of that
Globalism
The Right to Keep and Bear Arms (RKBA)
Political Correctness
Related, respect for the Mainstream Media (we'll know he's really serious if he takes the advice to abolish the White House Press Corps).
Need more? I'm sure I can come up with more. But you're 100% right that "everybody is fucking tired of ... the Clintons", and after having them "live rent free in my brain" for 24 years (!!!) I'm profoundly glad Trump put them in the ash heap of history. Except I have expect Master Level Troll Obama (something he has in common with Trump) to not pardon them, to not "end our long national nightmare" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inauguration_of_Gerald_Ford)WR... to them.
John Stewart even made fun of this particular attack 6 years ago (http://www.cc.com/video-clips/m0pvy5/the-daily-show-with-jon...), and our principle easily extends to all the other accusations the Left thinks are still effective in their "fight".
And when people revolt, you double down. As if you wanted Trump to get his second term.
Seriously, me and mine are prepared for one and continuously upping our preparations (note, those hold as well for many/most disasters), but we don't see specifics on the horizon, didn't even WRT to Hillary labeling us as irredeemable. What would be the Fort Sumter? Which, I'll note, happened over 3 months after the state succeeded.
Since I don't see any prospects for "try[ing] to bring things back together somewhere in the middle" after what my side perceives as an unrelenting and pretty much ever increasing assault from the Left for over a century (the Progressives, not to mention our latest reaction of God-Emperor Ascendant, excuse me, President Elect Trump (!!)), I'm really hoping for some sort of middle option.
But really, what choice do the Democrats have but to go as far into the kaleidescope of identity as then can go? The DNC has been totally disgraced as a sham. Its a puppet establishment in the pocket of Wall street and the Corporate Globalists just as much as the Bush Neo-cons were.
There is nothing left of the Democratic party for the working class. They threw the European Americas overboard as 'irredeemable deplorable'. And they think the melting pot and Integration are Racist oppressive ideas of the Patriarchy. The idea that America should have one national language is Racist. The idea that people need legal citizenship in order to vote and collect services is literally Hitler level oppression.
How are you going to bring that back to a 'Center'? Is there even a center for the Democrats anymore that includes The Constitution and the Declaration of Independence that was written by White Men who owned Slaves?
As bad as the problems are for the Republicans there nothing compared with what is happening to the Democrats.
Eh, no, half weren't irredeemable fit only for liquidation, half were judged capable of being reeducated.
That's important to the extend fewer people believed they belonged in the irredeemable camp, those of us who did got "crawl over broken glass" motivated to vote against Hillary.
How are you going to bring that back to a 'Center'? Is there even a center for the Democrats anymore that includes The Constitution and the Declaration of Independence that was written by White Men who owned Slaves?
Disrespect for both documents long precedes the identity politics that now condemn them, so I'm not sure it's a new thing so much as a new excuse.
I don't think there's any bringing back that center, at least for the foreseeable future. It takes only one side polarizing things enough (for the purposes of my point, it doesn't matter which side you think did it), to where both sides view those in the middle who claim to belong to their side as traitors.
You think identity politics are imaginary to the various minorities (of all descriptions) who just want equal footing and the ability to not deal with race and gender every day of their lives?
Also there's nothing bigoted about folks working to make sure women get the same wages as men, or to break the cycle of poverty black folks in Chicago's south side are stuck in. Those are problems plain and simple, and they need to be solved.
Yes, there could be other discrimination (e.g. there probably is some discrimination against women achieving high management positions) (although it's really hard to measure) - I agree that's a problem and needs to be solved, but it doesn't appear to me that the public discourse revolves around it (it usually ends at the "70 cents to the dollar" myth), and I think the current tactics are actually counter-productive (e.g. they're making men afraid of working with women, lest they say something inappropriate or wear the wrong t-shirt).
Consider a resource A. All humans should have equal access to this resource, but because of various social, cultural, economic and historical factors, minority groups B and C have less access to A than the rest of humankind. I don't think there is anything wrong with targeting those specific groups to help them engineer better access to resource A.
Yes those it's unfair those 4 people take advantage of welfare, but for me, that's an acceptable cost for helping the other 8 who need it. I'm happy my tax dollars go to that.
Of course you can argue forever about whether the cost is worth the benefit, and whether basic income is better than welfare in this form and yadda yadda, but I'm trying to illustrate to you that in a system designed to help a population (I don't agree with you that women are not disadvantaged, but substitute them with any other minority group like black people), some people will inevitably abuse the system, but that's okay as long as there are enough people who benefit to justify the cost of the small number of abuses. In sum: helping a population with less access to resource A is not bigoted and, if implemented right, is a very reasonable approach.
That's simply not the world I see myself living in; to quote Margret Thatcher, "The trouble with socialism is that eventually you run out of other people's money".
And for today's object lesson on that, see Venezuela, where those that are not pure money problems are inherent and unavoidable in the political process you're endorsing to "target a specific population". As shown by the very word target; in the case of Venezuela, replacing competent STEM types with politically reliable ones, 18,000 in the first wack, and then favoring current production over longer term investment necessary to maintain production levels.
In other words, if I say 'The law enforcement and legal systems of the United States treat African Americans very differently than white Americans, and this needs to be changed.' - is that recognizing a problem that needs attention, or am I engaging in irrelevant, invalid 'identity politics'?
Having said that, if you want to tackle the problem of discrimination separately (e.g. because you believe you can solve more quickly and easily than the economic inequality problem), then the tactics currently used (i.e. feminism - complaining, protesting, self-victimisation, and shaming reasonable conter-arguments) are the wrong way to go about it.
Lets for a moment consider a similar, yet different problem. Rape. Men are statistically more likely to rape women than women are (feminists are happy to point that out). I don't think it's correct to villify men as a group for that, but I do think it's reasonable for women to be extra cautious when interacting with men (e.g. it may be a better idea if a drunk woman asks a female friend to take her home, than a male friend, or to cross the street to avoid strange men at night). Nothing personal, just statistics - and oponents can scream "sexism" as loud as they want, but you can't put a price on personal safety (of course, feminists won't scream "sexism" in this istance, because it's fashionable to shame men).
Same with blacks and crime. Blacks statistically commit more crime, so it's not unreasonable to be more afraid of or cautious with blacks than with whites (or asians). Sure, it could be plain racism (pre-judice), but it could also simply be pattern-matching based on statistics (post-judice). And even if you consider those instincts to be wrong, it's hard to fight against them, after all they've been keeping us alive for thousands of years!
If you nevertheless want to fight those instincts, I guess the best way is more information, and emphasizing that people should be treated as individuals, not as a group. Unfortunately, feminism/social justice/identity politics isn't very good at either. In particular, if you attack (verbally or physically), shame, fire, riot against those whose opinion you want to change, I can't imagine you'll achieve much.
Anyhow, that's my thinking, although I fully accept it's wrong/there's more to it - here in the EU, I'm quite a bit removed from racial issues...
When it comes to the disemploying and physical violence, I assure you that you'll indeed accomplish a lot, just not anything you want. The verbal abuse of course doesn't help, either, and has helped to harden attitudes prior to this period where disemployment and physical violence are rising to the fore.
I do not know the best way to convey this to poor whites. It certainly presents a difficult task to tell someone who has struggles with life, or has overcome almost unsurmountable obstacles, that they have it easier than others. But some have given it a try:
http://thoughtcatalog.com/gina-crosley-corcoran/2014/01/expl...
The GOP plays with identity issues (God, Guns, Flag, etc).
The Dems need to stay away from that and get back to the populist roots and focus on the working folk. That is what made the Dems a successful party in the past.
That's all.
Sometimes, a thought percolates up from my poor rural white-boy hind-brain, that maybe instead of absorbing themselves in thinking and protesting and teeth-gnashing about these issues, they might be happier if they focused on themselves and things they can do to improve their own lot in life. If you constantly pick at a scab, it takes forever to heal.
I have to remember to not let these forbidden thoughts dribble out. Damn...
The Dems CRASHED already. We lost everything. We barely have any states. We do not even make a sizable minority party in the House. We don't have the Senate.
This is the result of years of trying to meddle in with "identity" politics that the GOP are good at. But that's not what the Dems should be doing.
Get back to the populist roots that defined the Party for many years. Get back into that and get back the rural and urban and young voters and we can finally move forward.
Maybe they were once good at it, but I just don't see that as of, say, 2008 and on. See, for example, my one line description of the Alt Right as "People on the right who respond to being called racist with 'We Don't Care'". At least at the national level, the GOPe(stablishment) is either not playing that game, or playing it well. Which is one reason Trump won, and the down ticket races resulted in your cited crashing.
Me, I'm surprised how the Republicans ran the tables statewide in Missouri, defeating a Carnahan and installing a weasel with no moral courage as Governor. And this is a catastrophic change from 2012, when they won Governor, the Senate race, AG, Secretary of State, and Treasurer, that is, every state-wide race but President and Lieutenant Governor. Although we also elected supermajorities to the statehouse, with the governor ending up having the most veto overrides in state history (then again, he didn't play well with the legislature).
We're also not betting that Claire McCaskill will be able to pick her opponent in 2018. I'm not yet willing to say we've turned Red from Purple, but it doesn't look at all good this year.
I note that, somewhat to my surprise, in what's considered to be the Purple state of my home Missouri, the Republicans ran the tables this year at the state level, and we had some very good reasons to vote for the Democratic gubernatorial candidate this year (as I did), but he lost by twice the margin of our Senate race, where as I saw it the differences were more clear. The Carnahan dynasty also lost a statewide race.
Only thing off hand I can think that makes sense of those two results is that there was a strong anti-establishment vote, which made the Senate race that much closer. And I guess no one, or no one credible enough, see all our discussion of the decline and fall of our Lügenpresse in this topic, was able to sufficiently point out that the non-establishment Republican gubernatorial candidate was a weasel with no moral courage.
Heck, I stopped reading that part of my local paper when rather early on they endorsed Hillary for her foreign policy experience. Call it disastrously neocon, call it as I do setting a large part of the world on fire and palpably wanting to start a shooting war with Russia, the only county which can end the US in 30 minutes ... well, I'll also note the paper turned off comments for that article. It certainly didn't make any difference in my county's voting numbers.
The US GDP in real dollars is 2.3 times larger than it was in the mid-70s. In the same time period the median household income went up 1.12 times.
Considering the size of the US GDP, that's a staggering amount of money that's just disappeared into the 1%'s bank accounts. It's a multi-trillion dollar heist. People are so loss-adverse that they've been fine with not getting paid literally twice as much, so long as someone told them they'd have less chance of losing their job if they went along with it.
Regular Americans did their part - the economy grew, but they didn't benefit from it. The left should be making that crystal clear, that clarity should make people furious, and the left should ride a tide of justified anger to power.
What the they shouldn't to is ponder whether the right is on to something and it really is the Mexicans that are to blame for their job insecurity, or that taxes and regulations maybe actually are the reason that the median American household doesn't have the 6-figure income that they would have had, had their wages been commiserate with America's success over the last 40 years.
The left should act like the left, and address the economic problems of the poor and middle class people of America directly -attacking the deliberate fiscal and taxation policies that caused them. And if that doesn't focus group well, they should have some actual principles and do it anyway.
Reminds me of the following: "listen to your users, but ignore what they say". Which is actually an entire chapter of Programming as if People Mattered, a great book.[1]
So I don't think the left should have done what the right says, but it definitely should have listened more. Sort of like the whole seriously vs. literally thing with Trump.[2][3]
[1] https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=tzEABAAAQBAJ&pg=PA107&lp...
[2] http://www.cnbc.com/2016/11/09/peter-thiel-perfectly-summed-...
[3] http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/09/trump-ma...
That's exactly what the left needs to do, but I don't see it happening when a large portion of the typical politician's work schedule is calling the people responsible for that heist and asking for money. That conflict of interest is fundamental problem[1].
People want a platform that actually is liberal, but liberal politicians moved further to the right in an attempt to work with people that were never going to compromise. Instead of seeing even an acknowledgement of the real economic problems that many people struggle to deal with, the left instead showed the were more interested in taking corporate money.
> attacking the deliberate fiscal and taxation policies that caused them
That's hard to do in an environment of regulatory capture and large donations from the people that would be regulated.
[1] yes, I wanted to vote for Lessig
How can this not be true? The 1% just knew how to play the game, where the game = finding all the loopholes in the mountain of shitty taxes and regulations you talk about.
Adding more taxes, more regulations, and more social programs isn't the answer. Adding the _right_ taxes, regulations, and social programs may actually do something.
Please don't add to the former. This is not a war. It is a fundemental disagreement, but we are hopefully a long long way away from it being a war.
1. Trump says something really bad 2. Check a poll aggregator (538) 3. Breath sigh of relief
For a good chunk of the election, Hillary had a really big lead in the polls. But after the Comey incident, things got tighter[1]. Nate Silver had some really good analysis on how tight the race was (a Trump win was within the polling error, and when state level polls are off, a lot of times they are all off in the same direction). But he was getting shouted down by the other aggregators. I was pretty on edge for this part of the race, but at the end, it looked like Hillary was picking up some momentum.
I think part of it was the bubble effect, but I also think Democrats put too much faith in these forecasts.
[1] At least on 538, a bunch of the other forecasters didn't budge. HuffingtonPost had a 98% chance of Hillary winning at the end. I really hope someone holds them accountable for that, as I wouldn't be surprised if such confident forecasts contributed to voter apathy.
What's the evidence for them being wrong?
To be clear, I'm not arguing that they were correct. But I see a trend of attacking any prediction (including those of 538) that rated a Trump victory at less than 50% likelihood as wrong, based on the evidence that he won.
If I predict there's a less than 1% chance of you winning the lottery, you winning the lottery doesn't prove that I was wrong.
I have no idea what the likelihood of a Trump victory was before the election. Maybe it was 1%, maybe it was 99%. But I think discussion of predictions shouldn't be results-orientated for single results.
As for the rest of the forecaster that gave Clinton 99% to win, given a US presidential election, the priori of a candidate winning is 50% (historical data, roughly speaking). So you would need some quite extraordinary evidences to get the posterior to 90+% for a candidate.
In this case, the evidences were mostly the polls. To have 99% prediction for a candidate based on a poll, the poll would need have at least 98% accuracy (assuming that when they're wrong, the probability of they being wrong in either directions is the same). Personally, I don't think the polls to be anywhere near that level of accuracy in general. Unfortunately I don't got any number of poll accuracy on hand - I'd love to see it if anyone have a citation.
There are more factors that will affect an election, but with similar reasoning to above, to get a 98-99% prediction, those factors will have to be 90%+ reliable as well. That is some quite tall order.
This is a case where the onus is on the forecaster to show that their number (98% for example) is sound, since they're the one making the extraordinary claim.
Or to question your logic another way, what would a poll mean in the context of a lottery?
Regardless, for something like an election where so many factors can influence an outcome (turnout, late breaking news, biased polls) and with so few previous events to base your model on (~12 elections worth of data), you should heavily discourage your model from outputting such a high number. It is irresponsible considering what kind of an impact those types of forecasts can have on voter apathy and decision making, and the only reason I can think they did it was so that they could award themselves the 'most accurate forecaster' title after the election. But instead, they now get to award themselves the 'worst forecaster award', and the rest of us are stuck with Trump for 4 years.
[1] http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/pollster-forecast-donald...
538 made the compelling (and in the end, sadly accurate) statistical point that modeling errors in polls are very likely to be correlated across states, not independent like a lottery.
Nate Silver's reputation went up again for me in this election.
[0] - http://www.economist.com/news/united-states/21710024-how-mid...
I've gotten the general impression that while he might have done not as badly as others in this last minute polling, in general he did not cover himself in glory in 2016, and here I rate it by an org's confidence in their numbers.
But I didn't follow this at all closely, for it was obvious to me all or almost all the public polls were getting it seriously wrong, see e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12930950
Nobody likes Cassandra.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VfqVih7IFlI
Dem Rep Keith Ellison : Any body on the democratic side who is scared of idea of President Trump, better vote, get active. Because this man has got serious momentum and we should be ready that he will be leading the republican ticket.
Everyone else in the panel laughs at him.
Very nearly half of the electorate believed in a Trump presidency enough to mark him down at the ballot box. Those people aren't "no one". Simply looking at the Trump presidency as a lack of voter turnout because people were in their own personal bubble fails to give those people and their ideas any credence.
If we are going to have a real conversation about diverse ideas in this country, it needs to include all of them, not just whatever happens to be popular at the moment. Maybe some ideas turn out to be irreconcilable, but we should at least try to understand them and recognize that they exist.
I too believe that people need to understand the diverse ideas leading to voters voting for their candidates. And I also hate the present media trying to shame 60 million people as racist and sexist etc for voting for Trump and not even trying to understand that people can have different priorities and reasons.
http://www.inquisitr.com/3696795/you-all-know-that-the-clint...
And we also learned from the Podesta leaks that the DNC and Hillary campaign colluded to sabotage Bernie's campaign.
All the while the Correct The Record Super PAC created a media and information bubble across social media.
So now we are left with people having the biggest case of cognitive dissonance of their lives.
https://angrypoliticsshade.wordpress.com/2016/11/06/podesta-...
Scroll down to the Bernie Sanders section for examples.
> And of those who [sought information in journalism], not enough of them trusted it to inform their political decisions.
Of course they didn't. We know, for instance, that media after the Gulf War will not allow pictures that show war as anything but spotless. We know that, for every single topic, they'll present a stupid counterpoint and claim that a 50/50 balance is needed, even if the counterbalance is nonsense. They barely call people out on their (obvious, documented) lies. And don't get me started on sponsored content.
I think people turned to Facebook news because, ultimately, they trust their friends and relatives more than the media. And why shouldn't they? The media has done everything in their power to shape public discourse as they see fit, and now they are surprised that people don't trust them anymore.
Zuckerberg has been quoted as saying it's "crazy" to think that fake news on FB could have influenced the election. OP says that a fake news story about the Pope endorsing Trump got 868,000 shares on FB. Something doesn't add up here.
http://money.cnn.com/2016/11/10/technology/facebook-mark-zuc...
Zuckerburg is a lying sack of shit. Or (here's the part were I hedge so dang doesn't scold me for not giving infinite second chances) Zuckerberg is a boob that forgot his own company published an scholarly study about their ability to manipulate people through small chances in what they're shown.
People like to think they can ignore the influence of things like advertising, propaganda and promotional freebies. But time and time again the data shows it works, just more subtly that dropping everything and running to the store for a Pepsi. Social influence of political opinion isn't hugely different.
Perhaps Zuckerburg means it's crazy that anyone let anything posted on facebook influence them. But that idea is interchangeable with the idea it's crazy people use facebook at all. Everyone at facebook is working to make a product that influences people, whether they're immediately cognizant of it or not.
How many "X company is shutting down" HN items have you seen where you've never heard of the company in the first place?
~60,000,000 people voted for each side.
868,000 is less than 1/60, and this assumes everyone who shared it believed it. Some may have realized it was false, and shared for the lulz. Also, it assumes that all of those people actually voted.
Now we have thousands of sources of misinformation to choose from, and our echo chambers have taken on new life online.
But then, as now, the truth is like poetry. And people fucking hate poetry.
It can seem like we're living in an idiocracy, but the average person hasn't gotten any stupider. The world has become too complex for anyone to understand.
This is why I am excited to see free college tuition enter the debate. What I would love though is two extra mandatory years of high school. Teach government(so people dont think the president is a dictator), law(so people dont get taken advantage of), teach more about other cultures(so people can find out what they have in common, hopefully breaking the echo chamber), teach logic and rhetoric, and some more computer skills, maybe a basic programming class.
While I agree the world is too complex for any one person to understand everything(hence the specialization of labor). I do believe we can do better though, all is not lost :)
He claims he recognized Trump as a "master persuader", which once he started running. I confess I didn't take it too seriously, but in his view "master persuaders" take advantage of various cognitive and emotional bias we have, often appealing to emotion.
In his view, when it comes to something like pursuading voters, appeals based on facts fail. Appeals based on tapping into the right emotions succeed.
Non of this theory is particularly novel, propaganda has been a major component of governing since time immemorial.
But he did hone in on Trumps ability to tap into these emotional motivational centers in a striking way.
I've been rather depressed about the election, with some passing moments of "maybe it won't be to bad."
Two days after, some of the shock has worn off. But I've never been quite so distressed by the outcome of an election. Which has prompted some self reflection: how much of my distress is based on the fact that my team lost, that Trump was successfully painted as a thug by Clinton campaign, who manipulated me similar to how Trump did his supporters?
I'm not sure how I'll see things tomorrow, next week, next year. But as of tonight, I think the root of my distress is that Trump abandoned all pretense of a fact base campaign. His lies were total, said with impunity, no sense of shame whatsoever.
He comes closest to a sort of "impressionistic truth" in his ability to intuit people's weak spots, their fear, their hypocrisy, their aspirations. Hence, he is a masterful bully, because his insults hone in on an emotional truth.
The downside to this ability, aside from the fact that he uses it to hurt others, is that he has no sense of irony, no insight to his own projection, no humility, and is easily baited. Small slights seem to rattle him almost more than big ones.
IMO, Hillary retains a strong comittment to living in a fact based reality. That's one reason she lacks political charisma. Her attempts to elide a challenging issue, to convince an unsympathetic audience, her pre-planned "zingers", her lies, are all so transparent, and she comes off as a phony, practicing on off putting brand of persuasion based around pandering, instead of convincing.
I think this is at least part of my alarm with what Trump has done, because there is simply no way to refute anything he says. He simply doesn't care. His, statements are often vague, lacking specifics, nouns, big on pronouns, verbs, and meaningless superlatives.
When I hear this kind of rhetoric, I tend to get an uneasy feeling. I'm very sensitive to arguments that don't make sense. I can feel it, and sometimes if I want to figure out what is wrong with the argument, I have to actively work through it.
I wasn't immune to the entertainment value of watching this master bomb thrower destroy his bewildered primary opponents . Especially because his technique undermines the skills of a professional politician. Once Trump pulled back the curtain on his opponents clunky rhetorical machinery, they were powerless to get it back.
So I liked it, because watching professional politicians do their professional politician speaking is freaking annoying. The art of political language is to not provide any "attack surface" to your opponents. Trump just bypassed all that, because he is hyper agressive, and cares about winning far more than about how he "looks."
Once that phase of the election was through, I found no appeal in Trumps meandering, stream of conscious boasting and hucksterism.
I guess I'm not the tar...
Is electing Trump instead stupid and spiteful? Yes, but it's completely understandable.
I agree there are valid criticisms to make of Hillary. My main concern is that she is so entrenched within the elite power structure, so captured, that her ability to steer US policy in better direction would be limited. If she could even perceive what that might be.
The bottom line is that money talks in the US. She needs money to run a campaign, and she wants to make money for herself, like most people.
She's friends with the elite, the Wall St. elite. Well, that's because she lives in the "real world", and the elite in US, both in position and income, hold disproportionate power.
These people are not all bad. They are citizens too. We all rely upon the complex, and fragile, economic system we live in. I don't have an issue with Hillary taking big bucks for speeches.
I listen to what she says, and what she has done. Some of it I agreed with, some of it I don't. That's life.
Hillary is not any more corrupt than her peers. Probably less, as I think she still has some integrity.
Obviously a large portion of the population hate her, so she lost. That doesn't mean she's corrupt. The right wing propaganda machine attacked her constantly. Considering how much she has been investigated, she's absurdly clean.
The way that Trump is able to treat basic facts with such contempt and yet still get millions of people to trust him such an important office is deeply disturbing to me. I can't shake the feeling that at some point over the next four years, there is going to be a moment where reality (as it always does) finally catches up, and we're all going to be in a world of hurt. Democrat, Republican, and probably a good chunk of the rest of the world as well.
Well, sorry for believing that elections are about choosing the good candidate, not voting against the bad candidate.
If there is one single person to blame for these elections outcome, that person is Hilary Clinton, she put America and the World in danger when she used her grip on the DNC to push Bernie Sanders aside during the primaries, although it was clear that the people desperately wanted change. That was the key moment in these elections that got Donald Trump elected.
the problem is they operate in an echo chamber. they truly do think they are better than those they present the news too and therefor beyond criticism. this alone keeps them from acknowledging any criticism, whether deserved or not.
the press needs to keep the bias to the editorial pages. newspapers should not be endorsing candidates, instead they need to list the claimed views of candidates with their current and past actions. report, not distort
The journalists were working with the best data that they had available. If a journalist is told that there is only a small chance of a candidate being elected, it is not surprising that they don't necessarily take his chances seriously.
Credit to 538 though, for putting Clinton's chances sub-70% in the final week (returning to to 70% on the final day) and for repeatedly warning of the lack of certainty given the lack of good quality polls.
The fundamental driver for all three instances has been the removal of all filters on social media. The problem was that for too long the MSM used their power to filter content to its readers/viewers, and the filter was tuned by a group that wanted to script reality in a form that they wished to see come to fruition, even if their stand was hypocritical.
So for example, you'd see a huge hue and cry in the MSM about how freedom of expression was being harmed because a right wing outfit threatened someone for speaking out against a majority religion, and yet, when someone spoke out against Islam, and Islamic groups placed a bounty on his head, the same MSM would just go silent. It is this blatant hypocrisy that finally got them.
And now, with social media, for the first time people have access to unfiltered news and can form their own opinions. And for better or worse, the hypocrisy of the MSM is glaringly obvious for people who have access to multiple viewpoints on an incident - not just a filtered viewpoint. With the hypocrisy bare, it's basically been a revolt against the established media.
And unless the established media takes it upon themselves to be more honest in whatever stand they take, this is going to repeat, because, people aren't fools you know.
Old media model: a couple thousand Harvard graduates produce and filter the content for billions of people (English speaking world) by monopoly control on the 2-3 television channels, 4-5 major newspapers/zines.
New media model: a media consumer can read the opinions and thoughts of 1000s of other people across the globe, and participate in the formulation of their own opinions, and receive feedback from others.
The one-to-many top-down elitist control of opinion formation and transfer is dead. For better or for worse. Probably better. Especially when it appears to be the case that the main opinion media elitists care about is that people acknowledge them as elite..
The only criticism of the new media model I've seen is the filter bubble, but I feel that is overblown.
Each viewpoint is "correct" from the authors viewpoint, knowledge, and information. Doesn't mean that it's closer to the truth in the wider world.
The firehose of social media gives us so many data points for the perceptions of others. In daily life, having a more accurate perception-ometer is a powerful thing.
With the "new model", I have zero assurance that due-diligence has been done. The burden of analysis and research is squarely on my shoulders. A fact is no longer a fact in that I can find any blog to support whatever position I wish to take. The blurring of opinion with news is "infotainment". The filter bubble reinforces itself.
I think part of the problem is that this is a fallacy. They give the impression that fact-checking and due diligence has been done when it actually hasn't. It's an appeal to authority, with CNN telling you they're the most trusted news source and showing you reporters on the ground and breaking news stories.
Sure' indépendant news sources are unreliable, but so are mainstream news sources. The burden of research has always been on your shoulders, you just didn't realize it until now. Fox News, MSNBC, the NYT are relying on the fact that you don't fact-check them, that you don't do independent research. They're banking on you believing that they're trustworthy news sources in and of themselves.
And it's just not true. It may never have been true.
Bravo. I just wanted to add, critical thinking is also required(and always has been) I see articles that present a bunch of research, and then make claims that the research doesnt support. Ive even seen articles summarizing one paper, where the article completely gets it wrong. Recognizing the narrative/bias is important.
Unfortunately, this is hard. Even more so with the variety of sources. Lately I have been trying to follow individual publications and authors to better recognize their bias/narrative. Of course now I am missing out on other viewpoints :(
"And it's just not true. It may never have been true"
Hence the corrections section I remember in newspapers. What if they didnt want to print a certain correction???
Maybe follow other's links to it, maybe check it out for Their slant on things. But never, ever, trust it again, even to the limited degree of trust we're talking about.
Search for those you can trust, those who don't cut corners or lie, and treasure them.
That is, people join subreddits or Tumblr groups and they filter out opposing views. Then they approach the "center" of that group, which itself is way outside mainstream.
Eventually, they self-impose a sort of filter that limits the access to moderating opinions.
"War is wrong"
And we would go around the circle: "yup", "absolutely", etc
"Some other liberal talking point"
yup, of course, so true....
The flipside of removal of filters of news on social media, is that we get a lot more low quality news based on unchecked facts. It is bad enough that the established media posts "breaking news" as fast as possible without taking the time to thoroughly consider the facts or give us a complete and rounded story.
Everything is becoming "headline news". We get more and more during the day, and we don't have the same time to digest what we get, so we just look at the headlines, skip the reports we don't like, and skim the few that look interesting -- The echo chamber.
We still need high quality sources that are trustworthy and able to filter out some of the "noise", simplify the stories to something we can digest without loosing details, and we also need to be exposed to news we don't like.
News on social media is sensationlist and usually none of those things.
In a world of more noise, more echo, fewer facts, and less details, we decide more based on gut feelings.
I think some of Trump's result could be attributed to the fact that, he spoke more to the heart of people than Hillary did.
E.g. the coal miners who voted for Trump because he promised them their jobs back. At least I think, it will difficult to return coal to its former "glory" with the current energy landscape (e.g. cheap and plenty oil as well as cheaper alternatives), so I am doubtful that will happen.
The whole idea of making America great again, returning jobs, and repealing trade agreements and Obama Care, speaks primarily to the heart of the people. We all love the good old times -- Especially, when we feel down and out of luck and life is difficult.
If I look at my twitter feed now, for example, I have a bunch of tweets criticizing a new decision of the government to withdraw high-denomination currencies (I'm from India), and for every such tweet there are others that are calling out the fallacies of the argument put forth. And vice versa.
Gives me all the viewpoints I need to form an opinion.
For me Twitter is just hopelessly noisy compared to a well written and nuanced newspaper article that presents me with most of the facts, opinions, potential consequences, graphs, etc. involved with a topic.
The sad thing is that most news in traditional media is not well-written, well-researched, or nuanced.
It can at least partially happen. The Democrats have waged absolute total war on the coal industry, something Hillary explicitly confirmed during the campaign, and you don't have to dial that back much to have some good effects, the biggest issue will be the power plants that have converted to natural gas and can't easily go back (and, boy, was that a bad national decision, making us much more fragile, even if coal is truly nasty stuff).
Are fed up people really the medias failure? Bernie Sanders also had surprising support for similar reasons to Trump: they both where going against the system.
Just for some discussion: maybe the classic media finally lost control and people regained some freedom of choice? Every big media house was against trump and he still won.
And let's not forget that a lot of people really had to jump their shadow to vote for Hillary as the lesser evil.
Yet when things go southward and things like the banking crisis happens these principles are swiftly jettisoned and privileged interests indiscriminately bailed out with the media and 'experts' stepping in to gloss over the rank hypocrisy.
The poor are harassed and incarcerated for every small trangression while the rich and connected like the bankers, Shrekeli, Holmes routinely get way with fraud and worse.
These inconsistences are not forgotten. All that economic power is then inevitably used in a self serving way to further increase their own share of rewards like quasi feudalism.
Wars are being fought to benefit financial interests that leave millions in other countries in disarray, billion dollar surveillance industries are built that fundamentally shift the balance of power from the people to the state.
HN itself is guilty of celebrating wealth and gloating over the irrelevance of people with automation and AI. Why the gloating? Where is the sensitivity to the impact of these technologies on society and the unprivileged. There is so much disrespect and general nastiness to people here who are not perceived to be successful with no notion of adversity or privilege. This kind of disrespect and dehumanization is bound to rankle. Cmon these are your own people. What do you think these people are going to do? They will listen and vote in demagogues.
A better example would be Jon Corzine, and how it looked for quite some time that the people he defrauded would not be made whole, despite the white line law on this. Or to bring it back to this election, "The S in SCIF Does Not Stand for Servant".
As shown as the cabinet is "old guard" republican ideology.
Regulations! Bad! ... etc.
People feeling powerless and craving control makes them susceptible to any demogogue. Anyone who can exploit this disenchantment will win, like Trump did. But Trump is establishment, his team reaching out to Dimon on day one makes a complete mockery of 'anti-establishment expectations from his supporters'.
You don't suppose that might be a lie designed to sabotage him starting out the gates, or that Dimon's name somehow got on a list but is going to be removed in the normal process?
You don't suppose there are factions fighting, through leaks in this case, was is often the single most important battle in a US presidential election, for "people are policy"? Much of the awfulness of George W Bush's administration is from the people chosen for these positions, and that can be in part traced back to his lack of courage when Team Gore stopped/truncated his transition process by yelling about the election not being decided yet. (More is from Bush's weird loyalty patterns, e.g. he should have told Norman Mineta, "I'm sorry, but I need a war time Secretary of Transportation, and you were not selected with that criteria in mind" and replaced him immediately after 9/11.)
We will, of course see in due course, but it's a little early to be so dispositive. Perhaps we can wait until we hear his nominations officially??
Every historian I know sees frightening parallels between Trump and various fascist regime rises. Virtually no coverage of this.
If news is unable to provide historical context, apply moral judgement, or do any investigative journalism of the ample skeletons in Trump's closet, then they are truly a shell.