Yes, if Clinton had been more convincing to voters she would have won the election.
And if I stand under the shower and turn the knob I get wet.
Note who you give agency to there.
Clinton is the subject, the actor. The voters become the object, that which is acted upon.
The reality is the voters are the ones with the power and the candidates are the supplicants. Its illusion of control self-comforting crap.
There isn't a world in which Trump could have convinced you to vote for him. Most of the people in this thread feel that way. But we're the special ones with agency, and beliefs. The non-college educated whites, they just had to be persuaded better. They don't really believe in what Trump espouses, it was just Clinton needed to convince them better.
The voters made their decision in those states. They weren't tricked. There wasn't insufficient information. Some chose sanity and rationality. Some chose to not participate in society. Some chose to throw their vote away. And a plurality of those who showed up in enough states willfully chose a hatemonger to be President.
Everything else is smoke
Cool I guess we are just going to keep losing then. Because we did everything perfectly.
It's hard to read but I think it makes some good points. The left has been using the "[Republican candidate] is racist, fascist, and hates women" lines for so long that they've become extremely ineffective. I heard a lot of this during 2000 and 2004. IDK if McCain really ever had this argument used against him, but Sarah Palin and Romney definitely did. Now in this election it was the main argument against Trump, but the knife isn't sharp enough anymore.
I also think this logic applies to the "White billionaire doesn't care about you / didn't pay his fair share!" argument that was used heavily against both Romney and Trump. The left needs to rely less on these personal attacks.
I don't know, the point of the boy crying wolf story was that there was no wolf, not that the wolf turned out to be a Husky who just had a wolf as his cheif strategist and whose son was half coyote.
No I think it is totally fair to say that we, in the name of messaging, made McCain and R-money out to be much more monstrous than they really were, and as a result we could not actually call someone a monster who actually WAS one without people recalling our words from campaigns past.
It's hard to read but I think it makes some good points. The left has been using the "[Republican candidate] is racist, fascist, and hates women" lines for so long that they've become extremely ineffective. I heard a lot of this during 2000 and 2004. IDK if McCain really ever had this argument used against him, but Sarah Palin and Romney definitely did. Now in this election it was the main argument against Trump, but the knife isn't sharp enough anymore.
I also think this logic applies to the "White billionaire doesn't care about you / didn't pay his fair share!" argument that was used heavily against both Romney and Trump. The left needs to rely less on these personal attacks.
I don't know, the point of the boy crying wolf story was that there was no wolf, not that the wolf turned out to be a Husky who just had a wolf as his cheif strategist and whose son was half coyote.
No I think it is totally fair to say that we, in the name of messaging, made McCain and R-money out to be much more monstrous than they really were, and as a result we could not actually call someone a monster who actually WAS one without people recalling our words from campaigns past.
That wasn't the point of the article, though, the point was that trump isn't so bad because some black people like him and he is no more racist than the average 70 year old white guy.
Which, ok, great. A lot of Iranians and Indians really liked Hitler because he wasn't against them personally. So what?
Unfortunately there is only one Obama, and he's leaving the presidency. What he did was going to be difficult to replicate under the best of circumstances. Not to mention the circumstances are different when it's tried by a white woman like Hillary Clinton, who has to be less subtle with messaging for minority voting blocs.
Great but it has nothing to do with the post to which you responded
It did in that what Obama did was not something your average politician would do, otherwise he wouldn't be an exception. Politicians of Obama's pedigree are rare. Without someone liked that trying that approach the chances of that succeeding lower considerably.
I feel like this entire angle is subtly constructed to allow an argument that voting for Obama doesn't prove anything about the racism of a group of people, while simultaneously saying that voting for Trump is sufficient to accuse people of racism regardless of evidence to the contrary including that they also voted for Obama.
That doesn't seem like a legitimate set of positions to hold.
You keep using racism as outright conscious hatred when no one else is. Voting for Obama does not mean you aren't racist. I am racist despite having voted for Obama and Clinton.
The white Obama voters who voted for Trump use it that way. scheck's defs #2 and 3 are each more rarified and academic, and therefore more divorced from the common parlance.
I'm (I thought obviously) talking about people on this forum, with which we are having a conversation.
I reject the academic labels as useful, as do others both within the academy and within the thread and forums.
I am also deeply sceptical of the rigor with which people diagnose these things.
OK, so what term would you use to describe people who are willing to stop-and-frisk all POC and register all Muslims if it means they can get four years of job security? I'm willing to change my terminology but I don't think the connotation of racist is inappropriate in the context of a forum where we gripe about how shitty humanity is.
Humans.
I think a major issue is that the language we use on forums like these leaks out into greater public discourse. Or do you think that Trump voters haven't heard that liberals think they're "racist" just for voting for Trump?
Also, I'm guessing no small number of Trump voters figured his chances of positively influencing their economic outcomes were better than his chances of, say, actually making a Muslim registry happen. Or building a wall, for that matter.
I reject that all of humanity would subscribe to that, even under the probability game. I wouldn't. Am I not human?
I am willing to give a lot of slack to people that truly are desperate, but that is not what's happening.
I have no doubt that Trump voters have heard us call them racists. That's on us for not being appropriate to the forum in which we are engaging. I don't think its use here is inappropriate or widely misconstrued, but as I've said I'm willing to change terminology since some people disagree, but then the onus is on those who need that clarification to define terms.
Yes, if Clinton had been more convincing to voters she would have won the election.
And if I stand under the shower and turn the knob I get wet.
Note who you give agency to there.
Clinton is the subject, the actor. The voters become the object, that which is acted upon.
The reality is the voters are the ones with the power and the candidates are the supplicants. Its illusion of control self-comforting crap.
There isn't a world in which Trump could have convinced you to vote for him. Most of the people in this thread feel that way. But we're the special ones with agency, and beliefs. The non-college educated whites, they just had to be persuaded better. They don't really believe in what Trump espouses, it was just Clinton needed to convince them better.
The voters made their decision in those states. They weren't tricked. There wasn't insufficient information. Some chose sanity and rationality. Some chose to not participate in society. Some chose to throw their vote away. And a plurality of those who showed up in enough states willfully chose a hatemonger to be President.
Everything else is smoke
Cool I guess we are just going to keep losing then. Because we did everything perfectly.
We nominated a candidate that half of the country (rightly or wrongly) actively hated and you consider that to be perfect?
There will always be third party voters; looking at the outcome and going "it's stein's fault" is dumb because 1) there are many complimentary causes and 2) stein voters were likely not voting for a democrat anyway.
I mean they're voting for Jill "quantitative easing for student loans" Stein; nobody needs to pretend that an appeal based on rational voter theory would persuade them.
I really don't think you can just declare 2 to be true. If you compare Green party votes from 2012 to 2016, there are some shockingly large rises in the number of votes that frankly cannot be explained as natural growth. The easiest explanation is that there were voters who were unwilling to vote for either Trump or Clinton, but believe the environment is an important issue so went ahead and voted Green this time. A huge chunk of them probably have no idea what the Green party platform consists of other than being good for the environment.
The idea that voting Green is about environmentalism does not hold up in my experience. As I said earlier, Green party voters are generally essentially protest voters. They vote 3rd party because fuck the system, because fuck the 2 parties, because I won't vote for warmongers like those democrats or republicans, etc, etc, etc.
The Green Party vote is basically the fuck everything vote for people on the left and tends to rise when people don't like either candidate.
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Apothe0sisHave you ever questioned the nature of your reality?Registered Userregular
Think of it like rape culture. Rape culture doesn't mean everybody rapes; it means a few people rape, and many others make excuses for them, or downplay its importance, or simply don't care.
Voting for Trump doesn't make you a rapist, but it does make you an active participant in rape culture, because it means you made excuses for or didn't care about his history of sexual assault.
Likewise, voting for Trump doesn't automatically make you a racist. But it does mean you participated in "race culture," because you made excuses or didn't care about his racist views.
Have you ever considered throwing oil on a fire? I'm positive it will be an effective method of fightin fires.
I feel like you skipped a step there because I'm not sure how your metaphor relates to my post. Could you explain?
You've invoked another just as if not more contentious concept in order to attempt to garner support for implicit racial bias on steroids.
You couldn't be playing to the choir any harder right now :biggrin:
Are we:
-Talking about what we think is the case about the way the world works
-Talking about how we would deploy rhetoric to convince other people to do things we would like them to do
If the response to
"Man, [x] sucks."
is just
"And that's why no one who likes [x] will ever support you! Only people who agree that [x] is bad will like you if you say [x] is bad!"
There's not much conversation happening.
If you care to look back a bit, the parallel to rape culture was chosen as part of an attempt to convince for what I will, for want of a better term, call "my side" that everyone is (at least a little bit) racist and that it's a perfectly valid inference to declare Trump voters as complicit in racism.
I am willing to bet dollars to donuts that few of those for whom this was intended to convince find rape culture to be particularly intellectually compelling as a concept and I will state I do not think it is valid, holds any great explanatory power or is backed by any particular authority. But, I stress, I do not seek to speak for others in this regard. It's not exactly a secret that it isn't well accepted by a non-trivial contingent of the forums and has lead to some of most viscous knock down drag out arguments the forums have seen when it has been deployed.
This isn't the thread for prosecuting the sceptical case but it think it should be clear that such a comparison couldn't be more disasterous if it were an attempt to convince me and likely the others for whom it was ostensibly to convince.
Which all comes back to my central thesis - it was really good as an example to create stark tribal lines and would be very satisfying as an expression of identity to those so aligned.
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IlpalaJust this guy, y'knowTexasRegistered Userregular
No we're just dancing between the two things that can be, and are, true: A.) There are things Clinton/Democrats could've done better, and areas to improve for 2020. B.) That does not absolve anyone of the responsibility of their vote.
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Switch - SW-7373-3669-3011
Fuck Joe Manchin
Yes, if Clinton had been more convincing to voters she would have won the election.
And if I stand under the shower and turn the knob I get wet.
Note who you give agency to there.
Clinton is the subject, the actor. The voters become the object, that which is acted upon.
The reality is the voters are the ones with the power and the candidates are the supplicants. Its illusion of control self-comforting crap.
There isn't a world in which Trump could have convinced you to vote for him. Most of the people in this thread feel that way. But we're the special ones with agency, and beliefs. The non-college educated whites, they just had to be persuaded better. They don't really believe in what Trump espouses, it was just Clinton needed to convince them better.
The voters made their decision in those states. They weren't tricked. There wasn't insufficient information. Some chose sanity and rationality. Some chose to not participate in society. Some chose to throw their vote away. And a plurality of those who showed up in enough states willfully chose a hatemonger to be President.
Everything else is smoke
This is exactly the kind of rhetoric that isn't going to help you with the next election.
Yes, if Clinton had been more convincing to voters she would have won the election.
And if I stand under the shower and turn the knob I get wet.
Note who you give agency to there.
Clinton is the subject, the actor. The voters become the object, that which is acted upon.
The reality is the voters are the ones with the power and the candidates are the supplicants. Its illusion of control self-comforting crap.
There isn't a world in which Trump could have convinced you to vote for him. Most of the people in this thread feel that way. But we're the special ones with agency, and beliefs. The non-college educated whites, they just had to be persuaded better. They don't really believe in what Trump espouses, it was just Clinton needed to convince them better.
The voters made their decision in those states. They weren't tricked. There wasn't insufficient information. Some chose sanity and rationality. Some chose to not participate in society. Some chose to throw their vote away. And a plurality of those who showed up in enough states willfully chose a hatemonger to be President.
Everything else is smoke
Cool I guess we are just going to keep losing then. Because we did everything perfectly.
Except no one said that. That's your words that you are shoving in others mouth.
The whole point, rather, is that attempting to deprive voters of agency is ridiculous. Voters chose. You can totally blame them for how they chose. Not if you are a politician though, that generally doesn't work.
Yes, if Clinton had been more convincing to voters she would have won the election.
And if I stand under the shower and turn the knob I get wet.
Note who you give agency to there.
Clinton is the subject, the actor. The voters become the object, that which is acted upon.
The reality is the voters are the ones with the power and the candidates are the supplicants. Its illusion of control self-comforting crap.
There isn't a world in which Trump could have convinced you to vote for him. Most of the people in this thread feel that way. But we're the special ones with agency, and beliefs. The non-college educated whites, they just had to be persuaded better. They don't really believe in what Trump espouses, it was just Clinton needed to convince them better.
The voters made their decision in those states. They weren't tricked. There wasn't insufficient information. Some chose sanity and rationality. Some chose to not participate in society. Some chose to throw their vote away. And a plurality of those who showed up in enough states willfully chose a hatemonger to be President.
Everything else is smoke
Cool I guess we are just going to keep losing then. Because we did everything perfectly.
We nominated a candidate that half of the country (rightly or wrongly) actively hated and you consider that to be perfect?
Yes, if Clinton had been more convincing to voters she would have won the election.
And if I stand under the shower and turn the knob I get wet.
Note who you give agency to there.
Clinton is the subject, the actor. The voters become the object, that which is acted upon.
The reality is the voters are the ones with the power and the candidates are the supplicants. Its illusion of control self-comforting crap.
There isn't a world in which Trump could have convinced you to vote for him. Most of the people in this thread feel that way. But we're the special ones with agency, and beliefs. The non-college educated whites, they just had to be persuaded better. They don't really believe in what Trump espouses, it was just Clinton needed to convince them better.
The voters made their decision in those states. They weren't tricked. There wasn't insufficient information. Some chose sanity and rationality. Some chose to not participate in society. Some chose to throw their vote away. And a plurality of those who showed up in enough states willfully chose a hatemonger to be President.
Everything else is smoke
This is exactly the kind of rhetoric that isn't going to help you with the next election.
And when PantsB is the Democratic Candidate in 2020, that will be relevant.
Till then it's just alot of people trying to shut down discussion for some reason. As if saying "Trump voters voted for a bigoted monster" is some sort of goddamn magic spell that must not be uttered, even alone in front of the bathroom mirror with the lights on.
Yes, if Clinton had been more convincing to voters she would have won the election.
And if I stand under the shower and turn the knob I get wet.
Note who you give agency to there.
Clinton is the subject, the actor. The voters become the object, that which is acted upon.
The reality is the voters are the ones with the power and the candidates are the supplicants. Its illusion of control self-comforting crap.
There isn't a world in which Trump could have convinced you to vote for him. Most of the people in this thread feel that way. But we're the special ones with agency, and beliefs. The non-college educated whites, they just had to be persuaded better. They don't really believe in what Trump espouses, it was just Clinton needed to convince them better.
The voters made their decision in those states. They weren't tricked. There wasn't insufficient information. Some chose sanity and rationality. Some chose to not participate in society. Some chose to throw their vote away. And a plurality of those who showed up in enough states willfully chose a hatemonger to be President.
Everything else is smoke
Cool I guess we are just going to keep losing then. Because we did everything perfectly.
Except no one said that. That's your words that you are shoving in others mouth.
The whole point, rather, is that attempting to deprive voters of agency is ridiculous. Voters chose. You can totally blame them for how they chose. Not if you are a politician though, that generally doesn't work.
What we think about the voters who didn't vote for Hillary is beside the point. It is far easier to change our approach in reaching those voters than it is to change the voters themselves -- and changing our approach is quite difficult enough.
We can wax philosophical all day about who bears the blame for President-Elect Trump. At the end of the day, though, we can really only decide one thing: are we going to keep doing what we've been doing, or try something else? Because we don't get to decide what white voters in the Rust Belt are going to do next time around. We get to choose how we convince them to do something else, and that's it.
Point is, if you keep assuming you are the superior racereligiongender political party, and refuse to try to acknowledge or understand the other side, you aren't going to be able to pull them into the fold. And starting a conversation by calling them names and telling them how morally superior you are isn't going to start a meaningful discussion with them.
Yes, if Clinton had been more convincing to voters she would have won the election.
And if I stand under the shower and turn the knob I get wet.
Note who you give agency to there.
Clinton is the subject, the actor. The voters become the object, that which is acted upon.
The reality is the voters are the ones with the power and the candidates are the supplicants. Its illusion of control self-comforting crap.
There isn't a world in which Trump could have convinced you to vote for him. Most of the people in this thread feel that way. But we're the special ones with agency, and beliefs. The non-college educated whites, they just had to be persuaded better. They don't really believe in what Trump espouses, it was just Clinton needed to convince them better.
The voters made their decision in those states. They weren't tricked. There wasn't insufficient information. Some chose sanity and rationality. Some chose to not participate in society. Some chose to throw their vote away. And a plurality of those who showed up in enough states willfully chose a hatemonger to be President.
Everything else is smoke
This is exactly the kind of rhetoric that isn't going to help you with the next election.
And when PantsB is the Democratic Candidate in 2020, that will be relevant.
Till then it's just alot of people trying to shut down discussion for some reason. As if saying "Trump voters voted for a bigoted monster" is some sort of goddamn magic spell that must not be uttered, even alone in front of the bathroom mirror with the lights on.
No, it's just that "Trump voters voted for a bigoted monster" isn't some deep insight that will help us win in the future. It is surface-level, knee-jerk reflex thought.
"Why did they vote for Trump?" is better, but still not good enough.
"Why didn't they vote for Hillary?" is getting closer to where we need to be.
Unfortunately there is only one Obama, and he's leaving the presidency. What he did was going to be difficult to replicate under the best of circumstances. Not to mention the circumstances are different when it's tried by a white woman like Hillary Clinton, who has to be less subtle with messaging for minority voting blocs.
Great but it has nothing to do with the post to which you responded
It did in that what Obama did was not something your average politician would do, otherwise he wouldn't be an exception. Politicians of Obama's pedigree are rare. Without someone liked that trying that approach the chances of that succeeding lower considerably.
I feel like this entire angle is subtly constructed to allow an argument that voting for Obama doesn't prove anything about the racism of a group of people, while simultaneously saying that voting for Trump is sufficient to accuse people of racism regardless of evidence to the contrary including that they also voted for Obama.
That doesn't seem like a legitimate set of positions to hold.
You keep using racism as outright conscious hatred when no one else is. Voting for Obama does not mean you aren't racist. I am racist despite having voted for Obama and Clinton.
The white Obama voters who voted for Trump use it that way. scheck's defs #2 and 3 are each more rarified and academic, and therefore more divorced from the common parlance.
I'm (I thought obviously) talking about people on this forum, with which we are having a conversation.
I reject the academic labels as useful, as do others both within the academy and within the thread and forums.
I am also deeply sceptical of the rigor with which people diagnose these things.
OK, so what term would you use to describe people who are willing to stop-and-frisk all POC and register all Muslims if it means they can get four years of job security? I'm willing to change my terminology but I don't think the connotation of racist is inappropriate in the context of a forum where we gripe about how shitty humanity is.
Humans.
I think a major issue is that the language we use on forums like these leaks out into greater public discourse. Or do you think that Trump voters haven't heard that liberals think they're "racist" just for voting for Trump?
Also, I'm guessing no small number of Trump voters figured his chances of positively influencing their economic outcomes were better than his chances of, say, actually making a Muslim registry happen. Or building a wall, for that matter.
I reject that all of humanity would subscribe to that, even under the probability game. I wouldn't. Am I not human?
One need not accept that all of humanity would subscribe to anything to accept Trump voters as human beings, rather than try to define them as some monolithic Other.
You missed my point entirely.
They're human beings with worries and priorities, just like us. Maybe they don't think Trumps awful policies will happen. Maybe they don't care. Maybe they figure that's somebody else's problem (like hey, maybe NYC voters can worry about stop-and-frisk in NYC, which is a local policy).
Do I need to requote Jon Stewart? Oh, I forgot, we don't like him anymore now that he's not telling us what we want to hear nightly.
Point is, if you keep assuming you are the superior racereligiongender political party, and refuse to try to acknowledge or understand the other side, you aren't going to be able to pull them into the fold. And starting a conversation by calling them names and telling them how morally superior you are isn't going to start a meaningful discussion with them.
Actually the point is that we aren't having that discussion with them right now. This is not the thread for talking directly to rust belt white voters or Stein voters. So why do y'all keep bringing this up? All it does is try to shut down other people talking about the results of the election clearly and accurately.
And I kinda do assume that the Democrats are the superior political party to the Republicans or the Greens. Why shouldn't I? Why else would you support the party?
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CambiataCommander ShepardThe likes of which even GAWD has never seenRegistered Userregular
Whether you call it white fragility or something else, there does not appear to be a good way to discuss the concept of racism or unconscious bias with a white person. I had the only serious fight I've ever had with my dearest sister when I was trying to describe unconscious bias, and I went into that conversation with the complete belief that the racist sentiments she's expressed to me were not as a result of hatred in her heart or any sort of intent and with a strong belief in her natural goodness. It still ended with her in tears. Granted I did gain some ground with her, and I might gain more, but we're two people who love each other and have a good solid relationship. I have no idea how I would do this with anyone I was less close to.
Camb I know this is an emotional topic for you but listen to what you're saying.
There's no good way to talk about racism with a white person? I don't think that, when statements like this are OK for you, that you're going to make a lot of headway with people.
I'm sorry, you're going to have to be more explicit about what's wrong with my wording.
Maybe if I put it this way you'll find it less objectionable: people who are not negatively affected by a phenomenon have a hard time believing it exists. If they also benefit in some way from the phenomenon, they will become defensive and angry when you try to explain it.
This is true of racism, misogyny, rape culture, homophobia, xenophobia, and any other such topics. I gather in your world, spool, it's impossible to surmise which groups benefit from those circumstances, so every conversation where you try to discuss them it's a complete mystery how the person you're speaking to will react if you bring them up.
The bolded is an unnecessary qualifier that is only going to add to the defensiveness and anger, and does your argument a disservice. People who aren't negatively affected by a phenomenon and have a hard time believing it exists are going to have an even harder time swallowing the notion that they benefit from the phenomenon.
But I don't necessarily bring that portion of it in when discussing it with a person who doesn't believe racism exists. My description was for Spool, telling him what groups might have the most difficulty believing in racism and having racism explained to them. It has nothing to do with how I explain the phenomenon to my sister, for example. Unless you're trying to tell me Spool doesn't believe that there are any groups that benefit from unconscious racism, which I'd have to hear from Spool himself before I'll believe it.
"If you divide the whole world into just enemies and friends, you'll end up destroying everything" --Nausicaa of the Valley of Wind
Specifically with regards to Stop-And-Frisk: NYC voters did worry about it, managed to work it through the court system to get it declared unconstitutional. The President-elect has said he plans to make sure to implement it where he thinks it's necessary, like Chicago, despite the fact that it is unconstitutional.
Point is, if you keep assuming you are the superior racereligiongender political party, and refuse to try to acknowledge or understand the other side, you aren't going to be able to pull them into the fold. And starting a conversation by calling them names and telling them how morally superior you are isn't going to start a meaningful discussion with them.
Seems to have worked well enough for one side. Which is where this frustration comes from. There's no conversation on the other side about "How do we get those liberals to see us as people, understand us?" There's no outreach. There's no unifying, win or lose. It's always on us. Why is that?
FF XIV - Qih'to Furishu (on Siren), Battle.Net - Ilpala#1975
Switch - SW-7373-3669-3011
Fuck Joe Manchin
Yes, if Clinton had been more convincing to voters she would have won the election.
And if I stand under the shower and turn the knob I get wet.
Note who you give agency to there.
Clinton is the subject, the actor. The voters become the object, that which is acted upon.
The reality is the voters are the ones with the power and the candidates are the supplicants. Its illusion of control self-comforting crap.
There isn't a world in which Trump could have convinced you to vote for him. Most of the people in this thread feel that way. But we're the special ones with agency, and beliefs. The non-college educated whites, they just had to be persuaded better. They don't really believe in what Trump espouses, it was just Clinton needed to convince them better.
The voters made their decision in those states. They weren't tricked. There wasn't insufficient information. Some chose sanity and rationality. Some chose to not participate in society. Some chose to throw their vote away. And a plurality of those who showed up in enough states willfully chose a hatemonger to be President.
Everything else is smoke
Cool I guess we are just going to keep losing then. Because we did everything perfectly.
We nominated a candidate that half of the country (rightly or wrongly) actively hated and you consider that to be perfect?
Point is, if you keep assuming you are the superior racereligiongender political party, and refuse to try to acknowledge or understand the other side, you aren't going to be able to pull them into the fold. And starting a conversation by calling them names and telling them how morally superior you are isn't going to start a meaningful discussion with them.
Actually the point is that we aren't having that discussion with them right now. This is not the thread for talking directly to rust belt white voters or Stein voters. So why do y'all keep bringing this up? All it does is try to shut down other people talking about the results of the election clearly and accurately.
And I kinda do assume that the Democrats are the superior political party to the Republicans or the Greens. Why shouldn't I? Why else would you support the party?
We know Trump is an awful ______. We know that most of us here consider the Democrats superior.
None of that is particularly compelling discourse. There is another thread for lamenting the state of the Union and the American electorate. I'm not trying to shut it down, I'm trying to steer us to a conversation that results in some reflection on what we have the ability to change -- namely, ourselves.
Yes, if Clinton had been more convincing to voters she would have won the election.
And if I stand under the shower and turn the knob I get wet.
Note who you give agency to there.
Clinton is the subject, the actor. The voters become the object, that which is acted upon.
The reality is the voters are the ones with the power and the candidates are the supplicants. Its illusion of control self-comforting crap.
There isn't a world in which Trump could have convinced you to vote for him. Most of the people in this thread feel that way. But we're the special ones with agency, and beliefs. The non-college educated whites, they just had to be persuaded better. They don't really believe in what Trump espouses, it was just Clinton needed to convince them better.
The voters made their decision in those states. They weren't tricked. There wasn't insufficient information. Some chose sanity and rationality. Some chose to not participate in society. Some chose to throw their vote away. And a plurality of those who showed up in enough states willfully chose a hatemonger to be President.
Everything else is smoke
This is exactly the kind of rhetoric that isn't going to help you with the next election.
And when PantsB is the Democratic Candidate in 2020, that will be relevant.
Till then it's just alot of people trying to shut down discussion for some reason. As if saying "Trump voters voted for a bigoted monster" is some sort of goddamn magic spell that must not be uttered, even alone in front of the bathroom mirror with the lights on.
No, it's just that "Trump voters voted for a bigoted monster" isn't some deep insight that will help us win in the future. It is surface-level, knee-jerk reflex thought.
"Why did they vote for Trump?" is better, but still not good enough.
"Why didn't they vote for Hillary?" is getting closer to where we need to be.
It is an important insight actually and you should stop dismissing it.
It tells us, for one, that a ridiculously huge number of voters will vote Republican no matter what. Nothing is disqualifying. It tells you that a big mistake of Clinton's electoral strategy was focusing on showing voters how horrible a monster Trump was. Pussygate, the wall, Mexicans=rapists, these things were all like super well-known. It's just nobody cares. Nobody minds electing a rapist. So don't run on that next time.
These are where we need to be too and continuing to try and dismiss them is silly on your part.
shryke on
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Apothe0sisHave you ever questioned the nature of your reality?Registered Userregular
Point is, if you keep assuming you are the superior racereligiongender political party, and refuse to try to acknowledge or understand the other side, you aren't going to be able to pull them into the fold. And starting a conversation by calling them names and telling them how morally superior you are isn't going to start a meaningful discussion with them.
Seems to have worked well enough for one side. Which is where this frustration comes from. There's no conversation on the other side about "How do we get those liberals to see us as people, understand us?" There's no outreach. There's no unifying, win or lose. It's always on us. Why is that?
Because a) we just got trounced b) we haven't discovered an effective tactic that worked for us without repercussion (ala the republican obstruct everything and blame Obama) and c) collectivist solutions are a big part of left/liberal/progressive platforms
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SummaryJudgmentGrab the hottest iron you can find, stride in the Tower’s front doorRegistered Userregular
Blaming the voters is exactly the kind of shit Trump would have done.
Its always the voters. For one, anything else makes democracy meaningless. If an election isn't the expressed will of the voters, its a meaningless circle jerk. The voters are what is morally relevant and who actually decide. That's where the credit and blame belongs. This is impolitic for an actual politician to say, but the reason Trump is going to be President is not Clinton, its not Podesta, its not even Trump, Stein or Putin. Its the voters who chose him in sufficient numbers in sufficient states. And that sufficient number was determined by who didn't show up and who didn't vote for a viable candidate as much as who voted for Trump or Clinton. Everything else is obfuscation.
Wow, that's super convenient.
You take all the agency away from Clinton, and this way we don't have to lay any blame at her feet, or at the DNC. We can just not learn anything and get ready to Make America Even Greater in 2020, and the important thing is that you come out of this convinced you weren't wrong about anything.
Woooh, that was a close call.
SummaryJudgment on
Some days Blue wonders why anyone ever bothered making numbers so small; other days she supposes even infinity needs to start somewhere.
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Apothe0sisHave you ever questioned the nature of your reality?Registered Userregular
Yes, if Clinton had been more convincing to voters she would have won the election.
And if I stand under the shower and turn the knob I get wet.
Note who you give agency to there.
Clinton is the subject, the actor. The voters become the object, that which is acted upon.
The reality is the voters are the ones with the power and the candidates are the supplicants. Its illusion of control self-comforting crap.
There isn't a world in which Trump could have convinced you to vote for him. Most of the people in this thread feel that way. But we're the special ones with agency, and beliefs. The non-college educated whites, they just had to be persuaded better. They don't really believe in what Trump espouses, it was just Clinton needed to convince them better.
The voters made their decision in those states. They weren't tricked. There wasn't insufficient information. Some chose sanity and rationality. Some chose to not participate in society. Some chose to throw their vote away. And a plurality of those who showed up in enough states willfully chose a hatemonger to be President.
Everything else is smoke
This is exactly the kind of rhetoric that isn't going to help you with the next election.
And when PantsB is the Democratic Candidate in 2020, that will be relevant.
Till then it's just alot of people trying to shut down discussion for some reason. As if saying "Trump voters voted for a bigoted monster" is some sort of goddamn magic spell that must not be uttered, even alone in front of the bathroom mirror with the lights on.
No, it's just that "Trump voters voted for a bigoted monster" isn't some deep insight that will help us win in the future. It is surface-level, knee-jerk reflex thought.
"Why did they vote for Trump?" is better, but still not good enough.
"Why didn't they vote for Hillary?" is getting closer to where we need to be.
It is an important insight actually and you should stop dismissing it.
It tells us, for one, that a ridiculously huge number of voters will vote Republican no matter what. Nothing is disqualifying. It tells you that a big mistake of Clinton's electoral strategy was focusing on showing voters how horrible a monster Trump was. Pussygate, the wall, Mexicans=rapists, these things were all like super well-known. It's just nobody cares. Nobody minds electing a rapist. So don't run on that next time.
These are where we need to be too and continuing to try and dismiss them is silly on your part.
Trump voters voted for someone we (for a given value of 'we', i.e. not me) think is a bigoted monster is a better and more accurate insight.
And Trump didn't say Mexicans were rapists, he said illegal immigrants were rapists and drug dealers.
Apothe0sis on
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KetarCome on upstairswe're having a partyRegistered Userregular
Whether you call it white fragility or something else, there does not appear to be a good way to discuss the concept of racism or unconscious bias with a white person. I had the only serious fight I've ever had with my dearest sister when I was trying to describe unconscious bias, and I went into that conversation with the complete belief that the racist sentiments she's expressed to me were not as a result of hatred in her heart or any sort of intent and with a strong belief in her natural goodness. It still ended with her in tears. Granted I did gain some ground with her, and I might gain more, but we're two people who love each other and have a good solid relationship. I have no idea how I would do this with anyone I was less close to.
Camb I know this is an emotional topic for you but listen to what you're saying.
There's no good way to talk about racism with a white person? I don't think that, when statements like this are OK for you, that you're going to make a lot of headway with people.
I'm sorry, you're going to have to be more explicit about what's wrong with my wording.
Maybe if I put it this way you'll find it less objectionable: people who are not negatively affected by a phenomenon have a hard time believing it exists. If they also benefit in some way from the phenomenon, they will become defensive and angry when you try to explain it.
This is true of racism, misogyny, rape culture, homophobia, xenophobia, and any other such topics. I gather in your world, spool, it's impossible to surmise which groups benefit from those circumstances, so every conversation where you try to discuss them it's a complete mystery how the person you're speaking to will react if you bring them up.
The bolded is an unnecessary qualifier that is only going to add to the defensiveness and anger, and does your argument a disservice. People who aren't negatively affected by a phenomenon and have a hard time believing it exists are going to have an even harder time swallowing the notion that they benefit from the phenomenon.
But I don't necessarily bring that portion of it in when discussing it with a person who doesn't believe racism exists. My description was for Spool, telling him what groups might have the most difficulty believing in racism and having racism explained to them. It has nothing to do with how I explain the phenomenon to my sister, for example. Unless you're trying to tell me Spool doesn't believe that there are any groups that benefit from unconscious racism, which I'd have to hear from Spool himself before I'll believe it.
Spool is basically a textbook example of white fragility in this thread, ever since the concept came up.
Beyond that though, it truly isn't necessary for the concept of white fragility itself. People who are not knowingly affected by a negative phenomenon, and have a blindness to its very existence, are going to get angry and defensive when you tell them they are a part of the system that perpetuates that phenomenon whether they actually benefit from it or not.
Unfortunately there is only one Obama, and he's leaving the presidency. What he did was going to be difficult to replicate under the best of circumstances. Not to mention the circumstances are different when it's tried by a white woman like Hillary Clinton, who has to be less subtle with messaging for minority voting blocs.
Great but it has nothing to do with the post to which you responded
It did in that what Obama did was not something your average politician would do, otherwise he wouldn't be an exception. Politicians of Obama's pedigree are rare. Without someone liked that trying that approach the chances of that succeeding lower considerably.
I feel like this entire angle is subtly constructed to allow an argument that voting for Obama doesn't prove anything about the racism of a group of people, while simultaneously saying that voting for Trump is sufficient to accuse people of racism regardless of evidence to the contrary including that they also voted for Obama.
That doesn't seem like a legitimate set of positions to hold.
You keep using racism as outright conscious hatred when no one else is. Voting for Obama does not mean you aren't racist. I am racist despite having voted for Obama and Clinton.
The white Obama voters who voted for Trump use it that way. scheck's defs #2 and 3 are each more rarified and academic, and therefore more divorced from the common parlance.
I'm (I thought obviously) talking about people on this forum, with which we are having a conversation.
I reject the academic labels as useful, as do others both within the academy and within the thread and forums.
I am also deeply sceptical of the rigor with which people diagnose these things.
OK, so what term would you use to describe people who are willing to stop-and-frisk all POC and register all Muslims if it means they can get four years of job security? I'm willing to change my terminology but I don't think the connotation of racist is inappropriate in the context of a forum where we gripe about how shitty humanity is.
Humans.
I think a major issue is that the language we use on forums like these leaks out into greater public discourse. Or do you think that Trump voters haven't heard that liberals think they're "racist" just for voting for Trump?
Also, I'm guessing no small number of Trump voters figured his chances of positively influencing their economic outcomes were better than his chances of, say, actually making a Muslim registry happen. Or building a wall, for that matter.
I reject that all of humanity would subscribe to that, even under the probability game. I wouldn't. Am I not human?
One need not accept that all of humanity would subscribe to anything to accept Trump voters as human beings, rather than try to define them as some monolithic Other.
You missed my point entirely.
They're human beings with worries and priorities, just like us. Maybe they don't think Trumps awful policies will happen. Maybe they don't care. Maybe they figure that's somebody else's problem (like hey, maybe NYC voters can worry about stop-and-frisk in NYC, which is a local policy).
Do I need to requote Jon Stewart? Oh, I forgot, we don't like him anymore now that he's not telling us what we want to hear nightly.
lolwhat?
Man, people been crapping on many of the things Jon Stewart says for AGES now. Go back through the old Daily Show threads and you'll find tons of complaints continually about stuff he gets wrong. About how he perpetuates terrible ideas about economics and about how he normalizes Republican politicians and doesn't challenge them on his show all the time for instance. Those two complaints were fairly frequent.
This idea that people only decided Stewart was an idiot sometimes after the election is a ridiculous rewriting of history.
Blaming the voters is exactly the kind of shit Trump would have done.
Its always the voters. For one, anything else makes democracy meaningless. If an election isn't the expressed will of the voters, its a meaningless circle jerk. The voters are what is morally relevant and who actually decide. That's where the credit and blame belongs. This is impolitic for an actual politician to say, but the reason Trump is going to be President is not Clinton, its not Podesta, its not even Trump, Stein or Putin. Its the voters who chose him in sufficient numbers in sufficient states. And that sufficient number was determined by who didn't show up and who didn't vote for a viable candidate as much as who voted for Trump or Clinton. Everything else is obfuscation.
Yep. Democracy sucks when you lose.
So either posse up and get it right next time or get out of the game.
You can't move on rationally until you understand what happened. Its very much the bargaining phase still here. "Candidate X needed to persuade better" says X's positions were the correct ones, the voters were aligned with X but that the least ethically important aspect - the campaign apparatus, staff, or techniques - was the failure point.
There are tons of people to point the finger at. The media played up Clinton's negatives and Sanders attacked them. Clinton's favorable number dropped from 0 to -25 during the democratic primaries and most of that came from the left dropping support. Maybe Clinton would have won if Bernie blah blah blah blah. Maybe if Comey blah blah blah. Its irrelevant (well Comey should still be held accountable for grossly unethical behavior and political use of his law enforcement position but that's a different thing).
The voters decided. That's democracy. And I'm not afraid to say they chose badly. They chose unethically. They chose stupidly. And yes they were a minority and Clinton had an actual plurality. But the citizenry - voters and non-voters alike - chose. And it sucks. But pretending they didn't chose, that the decision wasn't made with eyes wide open by those who chose Trump and yes those who chose their own self-importance or ideological purity over actually making a difference, is just whistling past the graveyard.
The Democratic party has lost nearly every state government. It has lost Congress and the Senate and the White House. That is due to the voters. They have chosen. Blaming it on Clinton ignores that she outperformed the generic Congressional Democrat by a wide margin, wider than Obama ever did, and that in swing states she outperformed essentially every Democratic Senate candidate despite Johnson and Stein voters. Those GOP Senators who opposed Trump were the ones who did the most poorly and those who kowtowed generally were reelected. Clinton wasn't rejected, Trump and Trumpism was embraced.
Specifically with regards to Stop-And-Frisk: NYC voters did worry about it, managed to work it through the court system to get it declared unconstitutional. The President-elect has said he plans to make sure to implement it where he thinks it's necessary, like Chicago, despite the fact that it is unconstitutional.
Which is interesting, because last I checked the President doesn't actually determine CPD policy.
Just sayin'.
Even appointing multiple SCOTUS justices and getting it declared explicitly constitutional doesn't mean Chicago has to, ya know, do it. It's not a mandate. The elected officials of Chicago and Illinois presumably have some say in this policy.
Yes, if Clinton had been more convincing to voters she would have won the election.
And if I stand under the shower and turn the knob I get wet.
Note who you give agency to there.
Clinton is the subject, the actor. The voters become the object, that which is acted upon.
The reality is the voters are the ones with the power and the candidates are the supplicants. Its illusion of control self-comforting crap.
There isn't a world in which Trump could have convinced you to vote for him. Most of the people in this thread feel that way. But we're the special ones with agency, and beliefs. The non-college educated whites, they just had to be persuaded better. They don't really believe in what Trump espouses, it was just Clinton needed to convince them better.
The voters made their decision in those states. They weren't tricked. There wasn't insufficient information. Some chose sanity and rationality. Some chose to not participate in society. Some chose to throw their vote away. And a plurality of those who showed up in enough states willfully chose a hatemonger to be President.
Everything else is smoke
This is exactly the kind of rhetoric that isn't going to help you with the next election.
And when PantsB is the Democratic Candidate in 2020, that will be relevant.
Till then it's just alot of people trying to shut down discussion for some reason. As if saying "Trump voters voted for a bigoted monster" is some sort of goddamn magic spell that must not be uttered, even alone in front of the bathroom mirror with the lights on.
No, it's just that "Trump voters voted for a bigoted monster" isn't some deep insight that will help us win in the future. It is surface-level, knee-jerk reflex thought.
"Why did they vote for Trump?" is better, but still not good enough.
"Why didn't they vote for Hillary?" is getting closer to where we need to be.
It is an important insight actually and you should stop dismissing it.
It tells us, for one, that a ridiculously huge number of voters will vote Republican no matter what. Nothing is disqualifying. It tells you that a big mistake of Clinton's electoral strategy was focusing on showing voters how horrible a monster Trump was. Pussygate, the wall, Mexicans=rapists, these things were all like super well-known. It's just nobody cares. Nobody minds electing a rapist. So don't run on that next time.
These are where we need to be too and continuing to try and dismiss them is silly on your part.
Except I'm not? You'll note that earlier in the thread I specifically noted that we need to reevaluate what constitutes a disqualifying scandal.
Maybe we are talking past each other a bit here. My point isn't that racism/sexism/etc. can't be part of the conversation. But it needs to be part of the conversation in a way that is productive, rather than a way to excuse our loss. And it needs to tie into the fact that until we can get those people back on board because we are doing things that directly address their needs -- even if it's rural white folk -- fighting the -isms is going to be a losing proposition because nobody listens to the guy who is obstinately refusing to put any of the focus on you with your very real problems.
Yes, if Clinton had been more convincing to voters she would have won the election.
And if I stand under the shower and turn the knob I get wet.
Note who you give agency to there.
Clinton is the subject, the actor. The voters become the object, that which is acted upon.
The reality is the voters are the ones with the power and the candidates are the supplicants. Its illusion of control self-comforting crap.
There isn't a world in which Trump could have convinced you to vote for him. Most of the people in this thread feel that way. But we're the special ones with agency, and beliefs. The non-college educated whites, they just had to be persuaded better. They don't really believe in what Trump espouses, it was just Clinton needed to convince them better.
The voters made their decision in those states. They weren't tricked. There wasn't insufficient information. Some chose sanity and rationality. Some chose to not participate in society. Some chose to throw their vote away. And a plurality of those who showed up in enough states willfully chose a hatemonger to be President.
Everything else is smoke
This is exactly the kind of rhetoric that isn't going to help you with the next election.
And when PantsB is the Democratic Candidate in 2020, that will be relevant.
Till then it's just alot of people trying to shut down discussion for some reason. As if saying "Trump voters voted for a bigoted monster" is some sort of goddamn magic spell that must not be uttered, even alone in front of the bathroom mirror with the lights on.
No, it's just that "Trump voters voted for a bigoted monster" isn't some deep insight that will help us win in the future. It is surface-level, knee-jerk reflex thought.
"Why did they vote for Trump?" is better, but still not good enough.
"Why didn't they vote for Hillary?" is getting closer to where we need to be.
It is an important insight actually and you should stop dismissing it.
It tells us, for one, that a ridiculously huge number of voters will vote Republican no matter what. Nothing is disqualifying. It tells you that a big mistake of Clinton's electoral strategy was focusing on showing voters how horrible a monster Trump was. Pussygate, the wall, Mexicans=rapists, these things were all like super well-known. It's just nobody cares. Nobody minds electing a rapist. So don't run on that next time.
These are where we need to be too and continuing to try and dismiss them is silly on your part.
Trump voters voted for someone we (for a given value of 'we', i.e. not me) think is a bigoted monster is a better and more accurate insight.
Actually the accurate insight would be that he is a bigoted monster (easily provable) and they just either don't care or actually agree with him.
Yes, if Clinton had been more convincing to voters she would have won the election.
And if I stand under the shower and turn the knob I get wet.
Note who you give agency to there.
Clinton is the subject, the actor. The voters become the object, that which is acted upon.
The reality is the voters are the ones with the power and the candidates are the supplicants. Its illusion of control self-comforting crap.
There isn't a world in which Trump could have convinced you to vote for him. Most of the people in this thread feel that way. But we're the special ones with agency, and beliefs. The non-college educated whites, they just had to be persuaded better. They don't really believe in what Trump espouses, it was just Clinton needed to convince them better.
The voters made their decision in those states. They weren't tricked. There wasn't insufficient information. Some chose sanity and rationality. Some chose to not participate in society. Some chose to throw their vote away. And a plurality of those who showed up in enough states willfully chose a hatemonger to be President.
Everything else is smoke
This is exactly the kind of rhetoric that isn't going to help you with the next election.
And when PantsB is the Democratic Candidate in 2020, that will be relevant.
Till then it's just alot of people trying to shut down discussion for some reason. As if saying "Trump voters voted for a bigoted monster" is some sort of goddamn magic spell that must not be uttered, even alone in front of the bathroom mirror with the lights on.
No, it's just that "Trump voters voted for a bigoted monster" isn't some deep insight that will help us win in the future. It is surface-level, knee-jerk reflex thought.
"Why did they vote for Trump?" is better, but still not good enough.
"Why didn't they vote for Hillary?" is getting closer to where we need to be.
It is an important insight actually and you should stop dismissing it.
It tells us, for one, that a ridiculously huge number of voters will vote Republican no matter what. Nothing is disqualifying. It tells you that a big mistake of Clinton's electoral strategy was focusing on showing voters how horrible a monster Trump was. Pussygate, the wall, Mexicans=rapists, these things were all like super well-known. It's just nobody cares. Nobody minds electing a rapist. So don't run on that next time.
These are where we need to be too and continuing to try and dismiss them is silly on your part.
Trump voters voted for someone we (for a given value of 'we', i.e. not me) think is a bigoted monster is a better and more accurate insight.
And Trump didn't say Mexicans were rapists, he said illegal immigrants were rapists and drug dealers.
One might even suggest that lumping all Mexicans in with illegal immigrants is just a bit racist....
Yes, if Clinton had been more convincing to voters she would have won the election.
And if I stand under the shower and turn the knob I get wet.
Note who you give agency to there.
Clinton is the subject, the actor. The voters become the object, that which is acted upon.
The reality is the voters are the ones with the power and the candidates are the supplicants. Its illusion of control self-comforting crap.
There isn't a world in which Trump could have convinced you to vote for him. Most of the people in this thread feel that way. But we're the special ones with agency, and beliefs. The non-college educated whites, they just had to be persuaded better. They don't really believe in what Trump espouses, it was just Clinton needed to convince them better.
The voters made their decision in those states. They weren't tricked. There wasn't insufficient information. Some chose sanity and rationality. Some chose to not participate in society. Some chose to throw their vote away. And a plurality of those who showed up in enough states willfully chose a hatemonger to be President.
Everything else is smoke
Cool I guess we are just going to keep losing then. Because we did everything perfectly.
Except no one said that. That's your words that you are shoving in others mouth.
The whole point, rather, is that attempting to deprive voters of agency is ridiculous. Voters chose. You can totally blame them for how they chose. Not if you are a politician though, that generally doesn't work.
What we think about the voters who didn't vote for Hillary is beside the point. It is far easier to change our approach in reaching those voters than it is to change the voters themselves -- and changing our approach is quite difficult enough.
We can wax philosophical all day about who bears the blame for President-Elect Trump. At the end of the day, though, we can really only decide one thing: are we going to keep doing what we've been doing, or try something else? Because we don't get to decide what white voters in the Rust Belt are going to do next time around. We get to choose how we convince them to do something else, and that's it.
We can "change our approach" sure.
I'm not willing to support a party that isn't willing to fight against racial discrimination. I'm not willing to support one that wants to actively discriminate against Muslims or is fine with torture or is willing to suppress science or fail to fight global warming. I'm not willing to support one that goes backwards on LGBTQ rights or takes away a woman's right to choose.
The thing that is going to change in the next four years is people will remember or first experience what its like to be under unified Republican control of government. That's what happened in 2006 and 2008. And in 2012, those D advantages were halved and now they're gone
Point is, if you keep assuming you are the superior racereligiongender political party, and refuse to try to acknowledge or understand the other side, you aren't going to be able to pull them into the fold. And starting a conversation by calling them names and telling them how morally superior you are isn't going to start a meaningful discussion with them.
Seems to have worked well enough for one side. Which is where this frustration comes from. There's no conversation on the other side about "How do we get those liberals to see us as people, understand us?" There's no outreach. There's no unifying, win or lose. It's always on us. Why is that?
I imagine there is more than you expect, but that Clinton was your candidate. Others pointed out the same thing. You literally picked the only candidate that could have lost to Trump. And while I am sure you think her superior in every way and that everything she did was just chaff, it apparently mattered enough to a number of Independents and Republicans that were turned off by Trump, but still chose him over Clinton.
Also, I suggested you to try and understand the other side, and you retorted with, "well, it's up to them to convince us to understand them." The comparable would have been to ask whether or not there are people on the other side that have tried to understand you. And I do believe there are more of them than you expect (and I'm not just referring to Republicans... that also includes Independents). It is up to both sides, and neither side is ever going to convince everyone, but you need to convince a majority. Digging in your heels and continuing to slander anyone who disagrees with you is unlikely to be very convincing.
Yes, if Clinton had been more convincing to voters she would have won the election.
And if I stand under the shower and turn the knob I get wet.
Note who you give agency to there.
Clinton is the subject, the actor. The voters become the object, that which is acted upon.
The reality is the voters are the ones with the power and the candidates are the supplicants. Its illusion of control self-comforting crap.
There isn't a world in which Trump could have convinced you to vote for him. Most of the people in this thread feel that way. But we're the special ones with agency, and beliefs. The non-college educated whites, they just had to be persuaded better. They don't really believe in what Trump espouses, it was just Clinton needed to convince them better.
The voters made their decision in those states. They weren't tricked. There wasn't insufficient information. Some chose sanity and rationality. Some chose to not participate in society. Some chose to throw their vote away. And a plurality of those who showed up in enough states willfully chose a hatemonger to be President.
Everything else is smoke
Cool I guess we are just going to keep losing then. Because we did everything perfectly.
Except no one said that. That's your words that you are shoving in others mouth.
The whole point, rather, is that attempting to deprive voters of agency is ridiculous. Voters chose. You can totally blame them for how they chose. Not if you are a politician though, that generally doesn't work.
What we think about the voters who didn't vote for Hillary is beside the point. It is far easier to change our approach in reaching those voters than it is to change the voters themselves -- and changing our approach is quite difficult enough.
We can wax philosophical all day about who bears the blame for President-Elect Trump. At the end of the day, though, we can really only decide one thing: are we going to keep doing what we've been doing, or try something else? Because we don't get to decide what white voters in the Rust Belt are going to do next time around. We get to choose how we convince them to do something else, and that's it.
We can "change our approach" sure.
I'm not willing to support a party that isn't willing to fight against racial discrimination. I'm not willing to support one that wants to actively discriminate against Muslims or is fine with torture or is willing to suppress science or fail to fight global warming. I'm not willing to support one that goes backwards on LGBTQ rights or takes away a woman's right to choose.
The thing that is going to change in the next four years is people will remember or first experience what its like to be under unified Republican control of government. That's what happened in 2006 and 2008. And in 2012, those D advantages were halved and now they're gone
I never once said that we need to stop fighting against racial discrimination, and neither did anybody else.
Yes, if Clinton had been more convincing to voters she would have won the election.
And if I stand under the shower and turn the knob I get wet.
Note who you give agency to there.
Clinton is the subject, the actor. The voters become the object, that which is acted upon.
The reality is the voters are the ones with the power and the candidates are the supplicants. Its illusion of control self-comforting crap.
There isn't a world in which Trump could have convinced you to vote for him. Most of the people in this thread feel that way. But we're the special ones with agency, and beliefs. The non-college educated whites, they just had to be persuaded better. They don't really believe in what Trump espouses, it was just Clinton needed to convince them better.
The voters made their decision in those states. They weren't tricked. There wasn't insufficient information. Some chose sanity and rationality. Some chose to not participate in society. Some chose to throw their vote away. And a plurality of those who showed up in enough states willfully chose a hatemonger to be President.
Everything else is smoke
This is exactly the kind of rhetoric that isn't going to help you with the next election.
And when PantsB is the Democratic Candidate in 2020, that will be relevant.
Till then it's just alot of people trying to shut down discussion for some reason. As if saying "Trump voters voted for a bigoted monster" is some sort of goddamn magic spell that must not be uttered, even alone in front of the bathroom mirror with the lights on.
No, it's just that "Trump voters voted for a bigoted monster" isn't some deep insight that will help us win in the future. It is surface-level, knee-jerk reflex thought.
"Why did they vote for Trump?" is better, but still not good enough.
"Why didn't they vote for Hillary?" is getting closer to where we need to be.
It is an important insight actually and you should stop dismissing it.
It tells us, for one, that a ridiculously huge number of voters will vote Republican no matter what. Nothing is disqualifying. It tells you that a big mistake of Clinton's electoral strategy was focusing on showing voters how horrible a monster Trump was. Pussygate, the wall, Mexicans=rapists, these things were all like super well-known. It's just nobody cares. Nobody minds electing a rapist. So don't run on that next time.
These are where we need to be too and continuing to try and dismiss them is silly on your part.
Uh no it doesn't.
They will vote republican but maybe because they just really didn't like Clinton. Maybe they saw Trump as being their brash old kinda racist uncle but he's rich so he must be doing something right, meanwhile this lady over here is straight up black helicopters middle east interfering secret email keeping insulting me with name calling democrat. And the third parties are ridiculous so I guess I vote republican because of course there's those checks and balances I've heard of so he'll just do good republican things and done look at me I'm a great citizen.
Just writing them off as "well they'll always vote that way" ignores the nuances at play here. They aren't thinking "Well I can't vote for this guy because he said these racists things." A lot of people just didn't want to vote for Hillary for a number of reasons, some real and some not. Figuring out how to make a more appealing candidate for a wider variety of voters is important.
Yes, if Clinton had been more convincing to voters she would have won the election.
And if I stand under the shower and turn the knob I get wet.
Note who you give agency to there.
Clinton is the subject, the actor. The voters become the object, that which is acted upon.
The reality is the voters are the ones with the power and the candidates are the supplicants. Its illusion of control self-comforting crap.
There isn't a world in which Trump could have convinced you to vote for him. Most of the people in this thread feel that way. But we're the special ones with agency, and beliefs. The non-college educated whites, they just had to be persuaded better. They don't really believe in what Trump espouses, it was just Clinton needed to convince them better.
The voters made their decision in those states. They weren't tricked. There wasn't insufficient information. Some chose sanity and rationality. Some chose to not participate in society. Some chose to throw their vote away. And a plurality of those who showed up in enough states willfully chose a hatemonger to be President.
Everything else is smoke
Cool I guess we are just going to keep losing then. Because we did everything perfectly.
We nominated a candidate that half of the country (rightly or wrongly) actively hated and you consider that to be perfect?
Yes, if Clinton had been more convincing to voters she would have won the election.
And if I stand under the shower and turn the knob I get wet.
Note who you give agency to there.
Clinton is the subject, the actor. The voters become the object, that which is acted upon.
The reality is the voters are the ones with the power and the candidates are the supplicants. Its illusion of control self-comforting crap.
There isn't a world in which Trump could have convinced you to vote for him. Most of the people in this thread feel that way. But we're the special ones with agency, and beliefs. The non-college educated whites, they just had to be persuaded better. They don't really believe in what Trump espouses, it was just Clinton needed to convince them better.
The voters made their decision in those states. They weren't tricked. There wasn't insufficient information. Some chose sanity and rationality. Some chose to not participate in society. Some chose to throw their vote away. And a plurality of those who showed up in enough states willfully chose a hatemonger to be President.
Everything else is smoke
Cool I guess we are just going to keep losing then. Because we did everything perfectly.
We nominated a candidate that half of the country (rightly or wrongly) actively hated and you consider that to be perfect?
Actually it was more like 25% of the country with slightly more than 25% in favor of them and the rest not caring enough to bother one way or the other.
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CambiataCommander ShepardThe likes of which even GAWD has never seenRegistered Userregular
Whether you call it white fragility or something else, there does not appear to be a good way to discuss the concept of racism or unconscious bias with a white person. I had the only serious fight I've ever had with my dearest sister when I was trying to describe unconscious bias, and I went into that conversation with the complete belief that the racist sentiments she's expressed to me were not as a result of hatred in her heart or any sort of intent and with a strong belief in her natural goodness. It still ended with her in tears. Granted I did gain some ground with her, and I might gain more, but we're two people who love each other and have a good solid relationship. I have no idea how I would do this with anyone I was less close to.
Camb I know this is an emotional topic for you but listen to what you're saying.
There's no good way to talk about racism with a white person? I don't think that, when statements like this are OK for you, that you're going to make a lot of headway with people.
I'm sorry, you're going to have to be more explicit about what's wrong with my wording.
Maybe if I put it this way you'll find it less objectionable: people who are not negatively affected by a phenomenon have a hard time believing it exists. If they also benefit in some way from the phenomenon, they will become defensive and angry when you try to explain it.
This is true of racism, misogyny, rape culture, homophobia, xenophobia, and any other such topics. I gather in your world, spool, it's impossible to surmise which groups benefit from those circumstances, so every conversation where you try to discuss them it's a complete mystery how the person you're speaking to will react if you bring them up.
The bolded is an unnecessary qualifier that is only going to add to the defensiveness and anger, and does your argument a disservice. People who aren't negatively affected by a phenomenon and have a hard time believing it exists are going to have an even harder time swallowing the notion that they benefit from the phenomenon.
But I don't necessarily bring that portion of it in when discussing it with a person who doesn't believe racism exists. My description was for Spool, telling him what groups might have the most difficulty believing in racism and having racism explained to them. It has nothing to do with how I explain the phenomenon to my sister, for example. Unless you're trying to tell me Spool doesn't believe that there are any groups that benefit from unconscious racism, which I'd have to hear from Spool himself before I'll believe it.
Spool is basically a textbook example of white fragility in this thread, ever since the concept came up.
Beyond that though, it truly isn't necessary for the concept of white fragility itself. People who are not knowingly affected by a negative phenomenon, and have a blindness to its very existence, are going to get angry and defensive when you tell them they are a part of the system that perpetuates that phenomenon whether they actually benefit from it or not.
I think whether they benefit or not plays a huge role in how hard they are to talk to about it, actually. I can talk to my sister about sexism because it's something that's negatively affected her. I can even talk to my mom about sexism despite the fact that she is still extremely conservative and would never call herself a feminist. I have to use different wording than "sexism", but I can talk to her about it. I can only now talk to my sister, carefully, about racism having introduced her to the subject, but there's no amount of coded language I could use with my mom to talk to her about it and not have her reject it outright.
"If you divide the whole world into just enemies and friends, you'll end up destroying everything" --Nausicaa of the Valley of Wind
Unfortunately there is only one Obama, and he's leaving the presidency. What he did was going to be difficult to replicate under the best of circumstances. Not to mention the circumstances are different when it's tried by a white woman like Hillary Clinton, who has to be less subtle with messaging for minority voting blocs.
Great but it has nothing to do with the post to which you responded
It did in that what Obama did was not something your average politician would do, otherwise he wouldn't be an exception. Politicians of Obama's pedigree are rare. Without someone liked that trying that approach the chances of that succeeding lower considerably.
I feel like this entire angle is subtly constructed to allow an argument that voting for Obama doesn't prove anything about the racism of a group of people, while simultaneously saying that voting for Trump is sufficient to accuse people of racism regardless of evidence to the contrary including that they also voted for Obama.
That doesn't seem like a legitimate set of positions to hold.
You keep using racism as outright conscious hatred when no one else is. Voting for Obama does not mean you aren't racist. I am racist despite having voted for Obama and Clinton.
The white Obama voters who voted for Trump use it that way. scheck's defs #2 and 3 are each more rarified and academic, and therefore more divorced from the common parlance.
I'm (I thought obviously) talking about people on this forum, with which we are having a conversation.
I reject the academic labels as useful, as do others both within the academy and within the thread and forums.
I am also deeply sceptical of the rigor with which people diagnose these things.
OK, so what term would you use to describe people who are willing to stop-and-frisk all POC and register all Muslims if it means they can get four years of job security? I'm willing to change my terminology but I don't think the connotation of racist is inappropriate in the context of a forum where we gripe about how shitty humanity is.
Humans.
I think a major issue is that the language we use on forums like these leaks out into greater public discourse. Or do you think that Trump voters haven't heard that liberals think they're "racist" just for voting for Trump?
Also, I'm guessing no small number of Trump voters figured his chances of positively influencing their economic outcomes were better than his chances of, say, actually making a Muslim registry happen. Or building a wall, for that matter.
I reject that all of humanity would subscribe to that, even under the probability game. I wouldn't. Am I not human?
One need not accept that all of humanity would subscribe to anything to accept Trump voters as human beings, rather than try to define them as some monolithic Other.
You missed my point entirely.
They're human beings with worries and priorities, just like us. Maybe they don't think Trumps awful policies will happen. Maybe they don't care. Maybe they figure that's somebody else's problem (like hey, maybe NYC voters can worry about stop-and-frisk in NYC, which is a local policy).
Do I need to requote Jon Stewart? Oh, I forgot, we don't like him anymore now that he's not telling us what we want to hear nightly.
Saying that they are human also doesn't help illuminate anything. It's the all lives matter approach, which is to say that sure it's true but obfuscates the point at issue. If we want to diagnose we need terms and shorthand. Humans doesn't cut it.
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Cool I guess we are just going to keep losing then. Because we did everything perfectly.
That wasn't the point of the article, though, the point was that trump isn't so bad because some black people like him and he is no more racist than the average 70 year old white guy.
Which, ok, great. A lot of Iranians and Indians really liked Hitler because he wasn't against them personally. So what?
I reject that all of humanity would subscribe to that, even under the probability game. I wouldn't. Am I not human?
I am willing to give a lot of slack to people that truly are desperate, but that is not what's happening.
I have no doubt that Trump voters have heard us call them racists. That's on us for not being appropriate to the forum in which we are engaging. I don't think its use here is inappropriate or widely misconstrued, but as I've said I'm willing to change terminology since some people disagree, but then the onus is on those who need that clarification to define terms.
We nominated a candidate that half of the country (rightly or wrongly) actively hated and you consider that to be perfect?
The idea that voting Green is about environmentalism does not hold up in my experience. As I said earlier, Green party voters are generally essentially protest voters. They vote 3rd party because fuck the system, because fuck the 2 parties, because I won't vote for warmongers like those democrats or republicans, etc, etc, etc.
The Green Party vote is basically the fuck everything vote for people on the left and tends to rise when people don't like either candidate.
If you care to look back a bit, the parallel to rape culture was chosen as part of an attempt to convince for what I will, for want of a better term, call "my side" that everyone is (at least a little bit) racist and that it's a perfectly valid inference to declare Trump voters as complicit in racism.
I am willing to bet dollars to donuts that few of those for whom this was intended to convince find rape culture to be particularly intellectually compelling as a concept and I will state I do not think it is valid, holds any great explanatory power or is backed by any particular authority. But, I stress, I do not seek to speak for others in this regard. It's not exactly a secret that it isn't well accepted by a non-trivial contingent of the forums and has lead to some of most viscous knock down drag out arguments the forums have seen when it has been deployed.
This isn't the thread for prosecuting the sceptical case but it think it should be clear that such a comparison couldn't be more disasterous if it were an attempt to convince me and likely the others for whom it was ostensibly to convince.
Which all comes back to my central thesis - it was really good as an example to create stark tribal lines and would be very satisfying as an expression of identity to those so aligned.
Switch - SW-7373-3669-3011
Fuck Joe Manchin
This is exactly the kind of rhetoric that isn't going to help you with the next election.
Except no one said that. That's your words that you are shoving in others mouth.
The whole point, rather, is that attempting to deprive voters of agency is ridiculous. Voters chose. You can totally blame them for how they chose. Not if you are a politician though, that generally doesn't work.
Sarcasm
And when PantsB is the Democratic Candidate in 2020, that will be relevant.
Till then it's just alot of people trying to shut down discussion for some reason. As if saying "Trump voters voted for a bigoted monster" is some sort of goddamn magic spell that must not be uttered, even alone in front of the bathroom mirror with the lights on.
What we think about the voters who didn't vote for Hillary is beside the point. It is far easier to change our approach in reaching those voters than it is to change the voters themselves -- and changing our approach is quite difficult enough.
We can wax philosophical all day about who bears the blame for President-Elect Trump. At the end of the day, though, we can really only decide one thing: are we going to keep doing what we've been doing, or try something else? Because we don't get to decide what white voters in the Rust Belt are going to do next time around. We get to choose how we convince them to do something else, and that's it.
No, it's just that "Trump voters voted for a bigoted monster" isn't some deep insight that will help us win in the future. It is surface-level, knee-jerk reflex thought.
"Why did they vote for Trump?" is better, but still not good enough.
"Why didn't they vote for Hillary?" is getting closer to where we need to be.
One need not accept that all of humanity would subscribe to anything to accept Trump voters as human beings, rather than try to define them as some monolithic Other.
You missed my point entirely.
They're human beings with worries and priorities, just like us. Maybe they don't think Trumps awful policies will happen. Maybe they don't care. Maybe they figure that's somebody else's problem (like hey, maybe NYC voters can worry about stop-and-frisk in NYC, which is a local policy).
Do I need to requote Jon Stewart? Oh, I forgot, we don't like him anymore now that he's not telling us what we want to hear nightly.
Actually the point is that we aren't having that discussion with them right now. This is not the thread for talking directly to rust belt white voters or Stein voters. So why do y'all keep bringing this up? All it does is try to shut down other people talking about the results of the election clearly and accurately.
And I kinda do assume that the Democrats are the superior political party to the Republicans or the Greens. Why shouldn't I? Why else would you support the party?
But I don't necessarily bring that portion of it in when discussing it with a person who doesn't believe racism exists. My description was for Spool, telling him what groups might have the most difficulty believing in racism and having racism explained to them. It has nothing to do with how I explain the phenomenon to my sister, for example. Unless you're trying to tell me Spool doesn't believe that there are any groups that benefit from unconscious racism, which I'd have to hear from Spool himself before I'll believe it.
Seems to have worked well enough for one side. Which is where this frustration comes from. There's no conversation on the other side about "How do we get those liberals to see us as people, understand us?" There's no outreach. There's no unifying, win or lose. It's always on us. Why is that?
Switch - SW-7373-3669-3011
Fuck Joe Manchin
My bad
We know Trump is an awful ______. We know that most of us here consider the Democrats superior.
None of that is particularly compelling discourse. There is another thread for lamenting the state of the Union and the American electorate. I'm not trying to shut it down, I'm trying to steer us to a conversation that results in some reflection on what we have the ability to change -- namely, ourselves.
It is an important insight actually and you should stop dismissing it.
It tells us, for one, that a ridiculously huge number of voters will vote Republican no matter what. Nothing is disqualifying. It tells you that a big mistake of Clinton's electoral strategy was focusing on showing voters how horrible a monster Trump was. Pussygate, the wall, Mexicans=rapists, these things were all like super well-known. It's just nobody cares. Nobody minds electing a rapist. So don't run on that next time.
These are where we need to be too and continuing to try and dismiss them is silly on your part.
Because a) we just got trounced b) we haven't discovered an effective tactic that worked for us without repercussion (ala the republican obstruct everything and blame Obama) and c) collectivist solutions are a big part of left/liberal/progressive platforms
Wow, that's super convenient.
You take all the agency away from Clinton, and this way we don't have to lay any blame at her feet, or at the DNC. We can just not learn anything and get ready to Make America Even Greater in 2020, and the important thing is that you come out of this convinced you weren't wrong about anything.
Woooh, that was a close call.
Trump voters voted for someone we (for a given value of 'we', i.e. not me) think is a bigoted monster is a better and more accurate insight.
And Trump didn't say Mexicans were rapists, he said illegal immigrants were rapists and drug dealers.
Spool is basically a textbook example of white fragility in this thread, ever since the concept came up.
Beyond that though, it truly isn't necessary for the concept of white fragility itself. People who are not knowingly affected by a negative phenomenon, and have a blindness to its very existence, are going to get angry and defensive when you tell them they are a part of the system that perpetuates that phenomenon whether they actually benefit from it or not.
lolwhat?
Man, people been crapping on many of the things Jon Stewart says for AGES now. Go back through the old Daily Show threads and you'll find tons of complaints continually about stuff he gets wrong. About how he perpetuates terrible ideas about economics and about how he normalizes Republican politicians and doesn't challenge them on his show all the time for instance. Those two complaints were fairly frequent.
This idea that people only decided Stewart was an idiot sometimes after the election is a ridiculous rewriting of history.
You can't move on rationally until you understand what happened. Its very much the bargaining phase still here. "Candidate X needed to persuade better" says X's positions were the correct ones, the voters were aligned with X but that the least ethically important aspect - the campaign apparatus, staff, or techniques - was the failure point.
There are tons of people to point the finger at. The media played up Clinton's negatives and Sanders attacked them. Clinton's favorable number dropped from 0 to -25 during the democratic primaries and most of that came from the left dropping support. Maybe Clinton would have won if Bernie blah blah blah blah. Maybe if Comey blah blah blah. Its irrelevant (well Comey should still be held accountable for grossly unethical behavior and political use of his law enforcement position but that's a different thing).
The voters decided. That's democracy. And I'm not afraid to say they chose badly. They chose unethically. They chose stupidly. And yes they were a minority and Clinton had an actual plurality. But the citizenry - voters and non-voters alike - chose. And it sucks. But pretending they didn't chose, that the decision wasn't made with eyes wide open by those who chose Trump and yes those who chose their own self-importance or ideological purity over actually making a difference, is just whistling past the graveyard.
The Democratic party has lost nearly every state government. It has lost Congress and the Senate and the White House. That is due to the voters. They have chosen. Blaming it on Clinton ignores that she outperformed the generic Congressional Democrat by a wide margin, wider than Obama ever did, and that in swing states she outperformed essentially every Democratic Senate candidate despite Johnson and Stein voters. Those GOP Senators who opposed Trump were the ones who did the most poorly and those who kowtowed generally were reelected. Clinton wasn't rejected, Trump and Trumpism was embraced.
And that sucks but its the reality.
QEDMF xbl: PantsB G+
Which is interesting, because last I checked the President doesn't actually determine CPD policy.
Just sayin'.
Even appointing multiple SCOTUS justices and getting it declared explicitly constitutional doesn't mean Chicago has to, ya know, do it. It's not a mandate. The elected officials of Chicago and Illinois presumably have some say in this policy.
Except I'm not? You'll note that earlier in the thread I specifically noted that we need to reevaluate what constitutes a disqualifying scandal.
Maybe we are talking past each other a bit here. My point isn't that racism/sexism/etc. can't be part of the conversation. But it needs to be part of the conversation in a way that is productive, rather than a way to excuse our loss. And it needs to tie into the fact that until we can get those people back on board because we are doing things that directly address their needs -- even if it's rural white folk -- fighting the -isms is going to be a losing proposition because nobody listens to the guy who is obstinately refusing to put any of the focus on you with your very real problems.
Actually the accurate insight would be that he is a bigoted monster (easily provable) and they just either don't care or actually agree with him.
One might even suggest that lumping all Mexicans in with illegal immigrants is just a bit racist....
We can "change our approach" sure.
I'm not willing to support a party that isn't willing to fight against racial discrimination. I'm not willing to support one that wants to actively discriminate against Muslims or is fine with torture or is willing to suppress science or fail to fight global warming. I'm not willing to support one that goes backwards on LGBTQ rights or takes away a woman's right to choose.
The thing that is going to change in the next four years is people will remember or first experience what its like to be under unified Republican control of government. That's what happened in 2006 and 2008. And in 2012, those D advantages were halved and now they're gone
QEDMF xbl: PantsB G+
I imagine there is more than you expect, but that Clinton was your candidate. Others pointed out the same thing. You literally picked the only candidate that could have lost to Trump. And while I am sure you think her superior in every way and that everything she did was just chaff, it apparently mattered enough to a number of Independents and Republicans that were turned off by Trump, but still chose him over Clinton.
Also, I suggested you to try and understand the other side, and you retorted with, "well, it's up to them to convince us to understand them." The comparable would have been to ask whether or not there are people on the other side that have tried to understand you. And I do believe there are more of them than you expect (and I'm not just referring to Republicans... that also includes Independents). It is up to both sides, and neither side is ever going to convince everyone, but you need to convince a majority. Digging in your heels and continuing to slander anyone who disagrees with you is unlikely to be very convincing.
I never once said that we need to stop fighting against racial discrimination, and neither did anybody else.
Uh no it doesn't.
They will vote republican but maybe because they just really didn't like Clinton. Maybe they saw Trump as being their brash old kinda racist uncle but he's rich so he must be doing something right, meanwhile this lady over here is straight up black helicopters middle east interfering secret email keeping insulting me with name calling democrat. And the third parties are ridiculous so I guess I vote republican because of course there's those checks and balances I've heard of so he'll just do good republican things and done look at me I'm a great citizen.
Just writing them off as "well they'll always vote that way" ignores the nuances at play here. They aren't thinking "Well I can't vote for this guy because he said these racists things." A lot of people just didn't want to vote for Hillary for a number of reasons, some real and some not. Figuring out how to make a more appealing candidate for a wider variety of voters is important.
He's being sarcastic.
Actually it was more like 25% of the country with slightly more than 25% in favor of them and the rest not caring enough to bother one way or the other.
I think whether they benefit or not plays a huge role in how hard they are to talk to about it, actually. I can talk to my sister about sexism because it's something that's negatively affected her. I can even talk to my mom about sexism despite the fact that she is still extremely conservative and would never call herself a feminist. I have to use different wording than "sexism", but I can talk to her about it. I can only now talk to my sister, carefully, about racism having introduced her to the subject, but there's no amount of coded language I could use with my mom to talk to her about it and not have her reject it outright.
Saying that they are human also doesn't help illuminate anything. It's the all lives matter approach, which is to say that sure it's true but obfuscates the point at issue. If we want to diagnose we need terms and shorthand. Humans doesn't cut it.