General politics thread (was: General U.S. politics thread)

glennmagusharvey

Normally, when I see a headline like "TRUMP: OBAMA, CLINTON 'FOUNDED ISIS'", I would chalk it up to being some sort of exaggeration.

But when it claims that Donald Trump said something outrageous...well, it actually turns out to be entirely true.  And repeated several times, just to whip up the crowd.

Bee

I mean if he was going for "extreme mishandling of Middle Eastern politics and unnecessary wars that we leave without cleaning up afterward led to increasingly extreme terrorist groups until they eventually became ISIS", then yes, pretty much every president for at least the last few decades is to blame.

But given that it's Trump, he undoubtedly meant that Obama and Clinton literally founded ISIS.

glennmagusharvey

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/08/12/a-massive-new-study-debunks-a-widespread-theory-for-donald-trumps-success/
The usual profile of Trump supporters being from economically-stressed areas may be more complex than you think.

http://www.politico.com/story/2016/08/hillary-clinton-climate-team-226930
Clinton prepares to advocate strongly for action on climate change in both campaign rhetoric and assembling a policy advising team.

glennmagusharvey

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2016/8/15/1560134/-How-the-GOP-s-Double-Life-Blew-Up-in-Its-Face

A nicely detailed rundown of how the Republican Party has been courting hatred and bigotry for political gain, since the 1950s.

fourteenwings

Interesting article, sad it didn't get to the late 90/00s though.

glennmagusharvey

"Cats can sense evil."

http://imgur.com/7gQJGPe

lrdgck

http://www.breitbart.com/tech/2016/03/29/an-establishment-conservatives-guide-to-the-alt-right/

So I've got this one article that seems interesting, so I wanted to share. It's applicable on a greater scale than US alone and it could certainly serve as a basis for discussion for more philosophically inclined amongst us, but it mostly reflects on the state of US presidential race, so I'm posting it in this thread.

glennmagusharvey

Oh hey it's Breitbart.com, which is home to the worst of the fire-breathers.  And it's an article co-authored by Milo Yiannopoulos, famed #gamergater.

Oh hey it's a Super-Rare Arch-Conservative Ghost Pepe as well.

Having once defended gamers,
another group accused of harbouring the worst dregs of human society,
we feel compelled to take a closer look at the force that’s alarming so
many. Are they really just the second coming of 1980s skinheads, or
something more subtle?

You're not my shield, Milo.

The alternative right are a much smarter group of people — which
perhaps suggests why the Left hates them so much. They’re dangerously
bright.

No, actually, there's just a bunch of philosophical wankery going on, and people attempting to find meaning in their lives by chaining themselves to philosophical and political ideology.

Now, they have a point to say that there's something missing from this "everyone is a statistic" type of thinking that the modern culture-independent economics/business mindset has.

But what's missing is respect for cultures, not culture war.

But natural conservatives have other concerns: chiefly, the preservation of their own tribe and its culture.
...
... the regressive left, which is currently intent on tearing down statues
of Cecil Rhodes and Queen Victoria in the UK, and erasing the name of
Woodrow Wilson from Princeton in the U.S. These attempts to scrub
western history of its great figures are particularly galling to the
alt-right, who in addition to the preservation of western culture, care
deeply about heroes and heroic virtues.
...
This follows decades in which left-wingers on campus sought to remove
the study of “dead white males” from the focus of western history and
literature curricula.

No one wants to erase the study of "dead white males" -- and do of course note that the study of "dead white males" is widely and overwhelming practiced today.  History from this perspective is a part of history, but there are other parts of history that are less often told.  People want to tell more of other parts, because, y'know, there are other dead people than dead white males, as there are dead white females, as well as dead non-white females and dead non-white males.

Now, I guess these so-called "natural conservatives" (going by the name the article gives them) have a bit more of a point if they're talking about a zero-sum situation such as a gen-ed world history class.  But do consider that right now, world history classes basically focus on western civilization, while the other parts of the world are big question marks that no one fills in until westerners come in contact with them.  But there are clearly people there.  And the subject is "world history", not "western European and recent North American history".

Just because we didn't used to know as much about ancient Africa or ancient South America doesn't mean that they don't count.  In fact, learning about them can tell us more about understanding how the world is today.

As for hero worship, it would be nice to note that people aren't perfect.  Now the only reason that people talking about worshipping famous figures less seem to be always talking about dead white people is because these famous figures just happen to frequently be dead white people, and mainly dead white men.  If you got more statues and more worshipping of dead other kinds of people, there'd be people discussing how they did "unheroic" things in their lifetimes.

Besides, hero-worship is a little silly when what you're actually admiring is values like bravery, which only happened to be exhibited by certain actions of famous people (whose lives were always far more complex than you can summarize in a quote at the base of any statue).

You’ll often encounter doomsday rhetoric in alt-right online
communities: that’s because many of them instinctively feel that once
large enough and ethnically distinct enough groups are brought together,
they will inevitably come to blows. In short, they doubt that full
“integration” is ever possible. If it is, it won’t be successful in the
“kumbaya” sense. Border walls are a much safer option.

The mistake here is thinking that it's race and culture that makes people sort themselves into groups that come into conflict.  Race and culture are just two convenient excuses for this.  Give a large and dense enough group of people -- say, basically anything bigger than a small town, or even a small town itself -- you can find long-running feuds with strongly-partisan opponents lining both sides.  This even happens within a family.

If there is something that can be fought over, humans will fight over it.  Differences in race and culture are mere excuses.

concerns from white voters that they’re going to go extinct

There's nothing wrong with pondering the eventual fate of anything.

The problem comes with using that pondering to fuck over someone else.

Of course, just as was the case in history, the parents and grandparents just won’t understand, man. That’s
down to the age difference. Millennials aren’t old enough to remember
the Second World War or the horrors of the Holocaust. They are barely
old enough to remember Rwanda or 9/11. Racism, for them, is a monster
under the bed, a story told by their parents to frighten them into being
good little children.

As with Father Christmas, Millennials have trouble believing it’s
actually real. They’ve never actually seen it for themselves — and they
don’t believe that the memes they post on /pol/ are actually racist. In
fact, they know they’re not — they do it because it gets a reaction.
Barely a month passes without a long feature in a new media outlet about
the rampant sexism, racism or homophobia of online image boards. For
regular posters at these boards, that’s mission accomplished.

This is very true.

The regressive Left loudly insists that it stands for equality and
racial justice while praising acts of racial violence and forcing white
people to sit at the back of the bus (or, more accurately, the back of
the campus — or in another campus altogether). It defends absurd
feminist positions with no basis in fact and ridicules and demeans
people on the basis of their skin colour, sexual orientation and gender.

I want to know what the "back of the campus -- or in another campus" thing is.  They might be talking about affirmative action.

As for what "absurd feminist positions with no basis in fact" are being referred to, I don't have a guess.  And what the last bit refers to, I don't know either.

They want to build their homogeneous communities, sure — but they don’t
want to commit any pogroms along the way. Indeed, they would prefer
non-violent solutions.

The problem with this is that sometimes, intentionally or unintentionally, the idea of "build[ing] homogeneous communities" is used in order to exclude others and generate resentment -- especially resentment born from inequality of economic resources, and thus economic opportunities.

BassFishing

On their own terms, the biggest problem the altright has is that the NEETsocs don't have the EQ and the DailyStormer types don't have the IQ to do anything to guard against getting constantly swindled by hustlers. Year Zero after RaHoWa/the splitting of America into ethno-states/whatever their proposed solution to the status quo is will never be Man In The High Castle, it will be a graveyard ruled by the cast of Big Brother. 

lrdgck

Oh, and by the way: here's the link to Youtube clip of the incident.

vandro

That article provided the conservative media with something to oppose, even Cathy Young, another gamergater, renounced them as racists. 

glennmagusharvey

Trump is certainly good at generating memes

glennmagusharvey

A "delicious but bleak" vision for America: "taco trucks on every corner"

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/09/02/the-national-economic-implications-of-a-taco-truck-on-every-corner/

Yes someone actually said this.

fourteenwings

The people at the Post must be very bored.

Then again Donald Trump is actually running for president so whatever that is can be journalism too I guess.

Bee

If we could have mariachi bands all over the place I'd call that a selling point.

Stormtroper

Taco trucks on every corner.

He says that as if it's a bad thing.

Earthlight_Ray

Jill Stein.

glennmagusharvey

Earthlight_Ray wrote: »

Jill Stein.

I don't like her fearmongering on vaccines and anti-science positions like that.  I thought the Greens respected science, but I guess it's selective.

Earthlight_Ray

Alas. The great evils of corporatism, fascism, and... skepticism regarding vaccines? :V

fourteenwings

Jill Stein doesn't seem to want to be elected to anything aside from a light prison sentence.

...at least she probably knows that Aleppo is?

Naas_Human

Earthlight_Ray wrote: »

Alas. The great evils of corporatism, fascism, and... skepticism regarding vaccines? :V

Preventable diseases experiencing resurgence, and dressing up the kind of stupidity that leads to things like that as "skepticism" are hardly good.

glennmagusharvey

Hasn't it already been studied and found that vaccines cause no increase in the rate of autism or other disorders?

Also stuff with GMOs and general "chemophobia" or "artificial-phobia".  Also sorta nutty positions to take.

I care a ton about climate change, to the point where I study climate change policy, so don't say that I'm anti-environmentalist or someshit.  I just actually care about good scientific reasoning to back things up.

Similarly, I don't unconditionally love nuclear power, nor do I unconditionally hate it.  Incidentally, I hear that they're developing a molten salt reactor that is a safer procedure and can even use what is currently considered spent fuel to generate power.  That seems promising.

Serocco

Anyone else worried the moderators will pull a Lauer and not challenge Trump?

glennmagusharvey

Serocco wrote: »

Anyone else worried the moderators will pull a Lauer and not challenge Trump?

Certainly a possibility but I think Lauer got enough flak even from his own industry colleagues that people learned a lesson from him.

Regardless, I'm not exactly "worried" on a personal level.  If it's gonna happen, it's gonna happen, and this in particular is a piece of the puzzle that I have no control over so it's kinda pointless to fret over it.

I haven't joined the chorus of people lambasting Matt Lauer, but I could certainly join a chorus of people lambasting the debate moderators if they did that.

Serocco

Romney did win the first debate, and that didn't matter, so maybe this first debate won't matter either.

If Hillary Clinton is not sufficiently progressive (even though everyone
has a different standard for that), like backing off on debt relief for
college, voting rights restorations, minimum wage, and such, then go
primary her in 2020.

If she at least tries, and fails, it's basically what would've happened with Bernie anyway, so there you go.

glennmagusharvey

What does it even mean to "win" a debate?  To outperform one's expectations?  If so Trump is clearly going to "win" the debate with basically any semi-competent level of preparation, because expectations on him are like lower than piss-low.

Serocco

Well, Romney was clear and precise while Obama was nervous, tired and flustered in the first debate.

Presentation is huge in these debates. Cause, you know, on policy, it's not even a contest here, and by default, Hillary wins by a landslide on that.

Earthlight_Ray

Stein's position on vaccines is *nuanced* because she depends on the support of hippies like me, many of whom distrust big business on principle. But she's not anti-vax by any stretch.

Serocco

Vaccines are needed. Quit being anti-vax.

Earthlight_Ray

Vaccines gave me autism! ;P