US Presidential Debate: Page 48 - The Arsenal discussion forum and community: One More in the Tolly

US Presidential Debate

mags

Quincy Abeyie wrote:
But whoever said she wasn't statesmanslike wasn't talking specifically about during the debates.

Don't mean to make a federal case out of it.

I'll leave that for the new president when his Trump U massive fraud case goes to trial. Well, I think it will, but then again it's Trump, so anything goes.

y va marquer

Only a matter of time before we're going to see posts on here inching forward the view that Trump isn't all that bad, really

Says a lot that his blatant and fierce misogyny isn't seen as dangerous.

flobaba

Yeah, it's all going to be normalized with time.

Human beings are strange creatures.

flobaba

America/Americans have fucked up big time. Big time. This reflects terribly on the soul of country.

A lot of people will not say this, but I for one am ashamed of this country today. I truly believed it's people were/are better than this. I was wrong.

Bold Tone

mags wrote:
Qwiss! wrote:
If you think everyone who voted for trump is lacking in basic intelligence you are part of the problem. People vote for a variety of reasons. I was talking to a guy I play an online game with who voted for Trump and his main reason was because Obamacare had pushed his premiums through the roof, a pretty common issue these days. He's not an idiot, he's not a terrible person, he just has priorities I disagree with.

I was responding to someone else's use of the "intelligent" phrase contextually.

Read my lips.
I have said this before.
Words matter.
My words: "To me many of them reflect Trump. Shallow, thin skinned, racist, misogynous, fear lovers."
What part didn't you get?
No words about idiots, terrible, deplorable persons, no words about basic intelligence.

Pick, pick, pick.

Before you use my "intelligent" comment to defend yourself, at the very least quote the sentence rather than the word on it's own.
[font=Source Sans Pro]''...[/font]
[font=Source Sans Pro]I know i can't speak for the 100,000,000 plus voters but i doubt the Comey letter made 56% of white women choose him over clinton in the swing states.[/font]

[font=Source Sans Pro]These are intelligent adults who made their decisions based on a whole host of opinions and they are the reason trump is your president-elect.[/font]
[font=Source Sans Pro]..."[/font]

Klaus

y va marquer wrote:
You think that the angry and the disenfranchised who pin their hopes on a man who despises and targets vulnerable people, who abuses his status to insult and molest women, are not part of the problem?

That the mentality that constantly looks to externalise blame, demonise minorities and create scapegoats is not dangerous?

I work for an American corporation where our sister sites in the US are crammed with white college educated Trump supporters, where those who visit from our site do not discuss politics.

All they want is to hold on to their wealth, privilege and guns.

Pretty much. White privilege has always been racist, homophobic and misogynist in itself, but this election result along with a few others preceding it tells you that it doesn't matter a jot whether people are conscious of it or not. It takes a long time to cultivate this behaviour in people. It's not economic downturn, it's not globalisation. It's the opposite: it's people being entitled and privileged. The picture of (what we were told were) white college kids with their marching suits and red hats looking absolutely delighted at the Trump rally while women, muslims and LGBT people were crying in despair over at Hillary's might have been oversimplified, but it was telling.

A couple of weeks before the election a video broke where Trump not only admits to sexual assault but revels in it. A dozen or so women stepped forward and supported what he said in the clip. And the result is not only that he won — he cleaned out the house and the senate too. And people talk about not making this about 'identity politics'. 😆 It's exactly what it's about. It's why a fascist like Trump can say the most extraordinarily homophobic and racist things in public and gain popularity. It's why a steady stream of men are trying to splain it away right now, and I notice they are doing it here too by dismissing the grave concerns about Trump's personality that the two female posters in the thread have raised as irrelevant or misguided.

Transgender suicide hotlines spiked during the North Carolina bathroom bill earlier this year. They received three times as many calls as they usually do. The 'it's just a joke' approach that straight white people adopted was literally killing them. How does anyone imagine they and other LGBT people feel in the wake of their country having elected a guy who promised that he'd take away their rights in front of Christian fundamentalists, a vice president who wants to take money away from HIV treatment and put it into conversion therapy, and given the republican party—made up of the most vehemently homophobic bunch of privileged white people in the entire western world—unrestricted power to enforce their agenda against bisexuals, homosexuals and transsexuals? It's not just marriage equality that they've lost. People have already started killing themselves (which I'm sure someone's going to sneer at soon and write off as 'premature') :

Clrnc

Burnwinter wrote:
@lorddulaarsenal wrote:
Trump is a brilliant communicator

Disturbing thing is the revelations about Trump's private misogyny, and his overt racism as a campaigner seem to have been his campaign strategy in and of themselves—ie that's what many of the people voting for him wanted.

Mirth wrote:
52% of voters earning less than $50K went for Hillary Clinton. Trump won (by a small margin) in the brackets above. So much for blaming the poor and unemployed for this.

I think this swing chart from 2012 is a pretty interesting tool for understanding where the electoral movements were situated demographically.

What the chart doesn't do is convert the categories of identity measured by censuses and surveys into a historical and political theory of why these things are happening—in which regard neither "whites are all racists" or "economic precarity" is entirely compelling.

That's really interesting, but other than the fact that the poorer and uneducated people mostly jumped to the Republican, it's pretty much inconclusive for any other reasons. And that also proved that Trump increased his votes in most segments, including those he took an issue with.

mags

Bold Tone wrote:
mags wrote:
I was responding to someone else's use of the "intelligent" phrase contextually.

Read my lips.
I have said this before.
Words matter.
My words: "To me many of them reflect Trump. Shallow, thin skinned, racist, misogynous, fear lovers."
What part didn't you get?
No words about idiots, terrible, deplorable persons, no words about basic intelligence.

Pick, pick, pick.

Before you use my "intelligent" comment to defend yourself, at the very least quote the sentence rather than the word on it's own.
[font=Source Sans Pro]''...[/font]
[font=Source Sans Pro]I know i can't speak for the 100,000,000 plus voters but i doubt the Comey letter made 56% of white women choose him over clinton in the swing states.[/font]

[font=Source Sans Pro]These are intelligent adults who made their decisions based on a whole host of opinions and they are the reason trump is your president-elect.[/font]
[font=Source Sans Pro]..."[/font]

Fair enough, Bold Tone. My bad.

Really it's about the use of language or the lack of language that gets to me.
And the ease with which spinning words and sentences has become so commonplace.
Some people don't even realize they are doing it.
Word meanings change so easily when in a spin mode. Gads, I sound like someone teaching English!

Good you included your entire sentence.
I probably should have pointed out that the host of opinions include racism, chauvinism, elitism, materialism, fear, hatred of Hillary, no policies of substance like affordable health care, etc. Am I making any sense? Or maybe it makes me part of the problem? :saint:

Bold Tone

🙂

arsedocmd

anybody remember when dubya won and everyone everywhere was like what? how? wtf america? i don't get it, this doesn't make sense.. and now this.

ElGeniodeOviedo

Is America full of homophobes, racists and bigots of varying stripes? To a certain extent, sure. Like many other places in the world.

Politics, however, is about winning hearts, minds and votes. It's not about moral superiority. Trump didn't get more votes overall than Mitt Romney; he just got them in the right places. A better candidate from the Democrats wins this election, which is shown very clearly from even a cursory glance at the results tabulation.

Given the existence of the Electoral College and how political representation works geographically in the States, a political rhetoric of shaming without offering significant, substantive change only works to depress turnout, not win elections. Which is exactly what happened.

The results of this election will be stark and severe in certain policy and political areas, there is to be no doubt of that. That's why its important to assess what sort of political imagination wins in the current landscape, and what approach has been losing.

Freddie deBoer, Michael Moore, and Glenn Greenwald have done an outstanding job articulating this over the last day or so on Twitter for those interested

Burnwinter

Klaus wrote:
And people talk about not making this about 'identity politics'. 😆 It's exactly what it's about. It's why a fascist like Trump can say the most extraordinarily homophobic and racist things in public and gain popularity. It's why a steady stream of men are trying to splain it away right now, and I notice they are doing it here too by dismissing the grave concerns about Trump's personality that the two female posters in the thread have raised as irrelevant or misguided.

This'll do for my next post too, as it's spot on.

Daz

Sure that's a massive part of the problem but I don't see how accepting this (white, male hetero privilege) means that the effects of globalisation and economic downturn need to be erased from the conversation. For me it's the interactions between these forces that should be the focus of critical analysis if the modern progressive left is serious about providing a genuine alternative.

Burnwinter

I harp on those factors constantly, although for me it's the structure (which cannot be regulated by national democracies) of the global economy rather than its effects in developed countries (as opposed to the global south) which is most deeply problematic.

As for the "serious alternative" which the left must provide, it cannot be yet another nationally focused party of the left, or a messianic candidate, if it hopes to overturn the logic of the hollow, post-neoliberal authoritarian era into which we're blundering.

The store set by the left in figures working within existing parliamentary parties, like Corbyn or Sanders, is as ill-advised as Manchester United fans thinking Jose Mourinho would simply wave a wand and close up the deep cracks in their club over a summer.

y va marquer

Klaus

They don't need to be erased, Daz. There's a magnitude of reasons and influences. My point is simply that the bulk of the racist, misogynist, homophobic voters existed for a long, long time before Trump came along, and they aren't products of failed economic policies. He didn't dupe them; he reinvigorated them by speaking directly to their bigotry. That's exactly how this kind of demagogery works; in Europe, in the US, in Australia. Wealth and power doesn't breed idealism. This is a key thing to understand when talking about poor people and rural areas.

I like Glenn Greenwald deeply, but he, more than perhaps any other journalist writing about the election, fails to see the other side of this because he's busy reiterating the deep dislike he harbours for Clinton and her spineless centrist, pro-Wall Street, pro-establishment and anti-leftist agenda. I think he was dead right in his analysis back in 2015 of why she wasn't a good candidate, but he's been stuck on that point for a year and now he's looking for vindication; no matter what people point out about Assange and Wikileaks and the real powers at be that fuelled the kind of election reporting The Intercept have done in 2016.

In reality, whether Hillary is a good candidate or not stopped being the question for a lot of people the second the alternative became Trump, because his version of America is that dangerous to their own lives and well-being, and the longterm effects are that disastrous for their futures. The republicans have been building towards this for some time; they just hadn't found anyone who speaks bigotry the way Trump does.

jones

mags wrote:
jones wrote:
Specifically during debates? So everything else is fair game, even when she's giving an interview? 😆

Trump is vile, nobody here has ever argued otherwise. Your focusing on him when people are trying to point out Hillary's gigantic flaws however is questionable. Not the first time though that you refuse to that argument so I'll leave it here

Don't change the game, jones.
And speak for yourself. Not this nobody here business.
I specifically said during the debates. Did you get that?
And if you have read my posts, I have never stepped away from stating she has major flaws.
In fact , I have brought it up. And I voted for Bernie. Did you get that post?
Her flaws I can live with, his are appalling.

I don't bother watching debates of somebody who publicly revels in the lynching of another person, a lynching that she paved the way for and that was the immediate cause for Africa's richest country turning into Daesh's biggest stronghold within a couple years.

That might be a flaw that you can live with but I (and others if I'm allowed to speak for them too) cannot. Criticising her does not constitute an endorsement of him so I'm not sure why you've repeatedly reacted this sensitively to people calling her fake, an agent of big business, a massive bellicist etc

jones

El Genio de Oviedo wrote:
Given the existence of the Electoral College and how political representation works geographically in the States, a political rhetoric of shaming without offering significant, substantive change only works to depress turnout, not win elections. Which is exactly what happened.

I don't think you can say political representation "works" geographically.

No rigging here to see though, move on

lorddulaarsenal

Trump's preference for protectionism and lack of genuine will for free trade will damage the US in the near term.

Good for Blighty though! 😃

Mirth

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/trump-picks-top-climate-skeptic-to-lead-epa-transition/

Ffs

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