I know I said this was going to be my “self-care” weekend, but I could not help myself, and last night while I was stuck in an airport I engaged with some liberals who were very irritated that I dared to point out that voting for Trump meant you were racist. Don’t you know that some of them voted for Obama in the last election, so they can’t be racist? (This is going to be the new “I have a black friend” theme). Don’t you know that if you call white people racists they’ll be alienated and won’t vote for Democrats anymore? (But somehow they care so little about race issues they’ll vote for an openly racist/sexist pig who is endorsed by the KKK and Stormfront). But my favorite response is this one:
@pzmyers It's kind of bad when pretty much everybody is called a racist now. SJWs need to stop attacking free speech, it's helping no one
— Hurricane Sarah (@TriggerStorm) November 11, 2016
Shut up, in the name of Free Speech!
I’ve also gotten a few responses, echoing the sentiments of Obama and Clinton, that we’ve got to give the guy a chance, and gosh, maybe he won’t be as bad as we think. I’ve decided that liberals have become masters of delusional thinking, because no, he’s going to be worse than we can imagine. He is appointing a climate change denialists to head up his transition team for the EPA, he’s going to have a known hate group leader to run his immigration transition team, and another anti-gay hate group leader to run domestic policy. He wants to put Sarah Palin in his cabinet, possibly as secretary of the interior. If you think the election was a shitshow, wait until you see how he governs.
So no apologies. If you voted for Trump, you belong in the basket of deplorables, and there’s no excuse you can offer to get you out. Whining that it hurts your feelings when we mention that the man you voted for is ready to wreck the environment, discriminate against everyone but white people, and turn the whole nation into Brownback’s Kansas is not only the worst excuse ever, but it’s pathetic as well.
By the way, Iris and Caine share similar feelings. You don’t get to claim you were a nice, conscientious, thoughtful person if you voted for Trump. You were just an asshole.
Seconded!
— — — — —
Also, the media have already given Trump a second, a third, and an umteenth chance.
See below:
“The New York Times has published a detailed collection of the 282 people, places, and things that Donald Trump has insulted since June 15, 2015, based on his own tweets and sorted by categories”
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/01/28/upshot/donald-trump-twitter-insults.html
Might as well post this here. I’m afraid this will become our new anthem.
Oh beautiful for well-built walls
For orange waves of hair
For armored bros with swastikas
Across our Christian Plain
Trumplandia Trumplandia
The Donald will grope thee
And crown thy good
With ku klux hoods
From sea to rising sea
PZ:
And either an ignorant ass who couldn’t be bothered to informed about anything, or even worse, someone who isn’t ignorant, but ruled by spite and hate. It never ceases to amaze me just how fucking ignorant people are smack in the middle of farm country. Bees? “Eh, it will be okay.” Oil in water? “Eh, we need the money, shut up.” Fracking destroying land, which no longer is capable of sustaining life? “Eh, we need the money, shut up.” Along with the favourite, “oh, it’s not that bad, it [land, water] will bounce back.
Global warming, climate change? Oh, that’s not real. It’s November, and we have 70 F weather. In nDakota. The water table gets lower every year, because shorter winters, less snow, but there’s no problem, no, not at all.
What a Maroon:
Tiffany Midge has done ‘Ars Poetica,’ by Donald J. Trump.
In other words, the whole bunch are turning into concern trolls…
You know, i’ve never been that politically active outside my job( I work union construction in alberta, not hard to get which industry). A lot of us were pretty excited when the NDP trounced the con’s in the provincial election and the liberals got into the federal gov’t. That may come as a suprise when describing blue collar albertans in the oil and gas sector but we want an alternative. The problem is that the con’s are a shitload better at mobilizing people than we are. Now people are talking about canadian identity tests. I mean, I know the intelligence community shit the bed when it came to surveillance but hey, i’m sure we can trust them to decide who is and isn’t sufficiently canadian. What could possibly go wrong. If there are any canadians here(i’m sure there are a few). We have to get involved. A lot of people are mistaking being five years behind america for not being in danger at all. We have to confront these people wherever we meet them and those of us in alberta need to prepare for a post oil world(priority one for me). I’m not sure exactly how to do the second one in a province so heavily dependent on oil but i’m willing to bet it doesn’t involve voting for the people who want to pretend it’s not a problem.
Thank you PZ. I needed to hear that. I am hanging on to this as I give money to groups the will fight Trump’s actions from the get go. We have closed our eyes so much I fear people don’t remember how to open them. Your anger here is medicine to keep me healthy and awake and ready to resist and support those he hurts.
Or there is this view:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/11/08/a-new-theory-for-why-trump-voters-are-so-angry-that-actually-makes-sense/
Comments anyone? I do not necessarily endorse…
passive racism is the thing. “Racism” in addition to being an action verb, is also an adjective.
Sitting silently in disagreement while a bloviator spews racist dogwhistles is a form of allowance of the behavior. Essentially acceptance of it. Allowing people to hold their own opinions does not mean one must accept those opinions without opposition. While not being actively racist, not objecting to racist activities warrants the adjective “racist”, for passivity.
Free speech applies to both parties. One can say all the awful things they want, the second can refute and oppose all of them.
John Scalzi has a good post here
http://whatever.scalzi.com/2016/11/10/the-cinemax-theory-of-racism/
Petrander @ 8:
I don’t buy it. I live rural. One thing you often hear from people is “oh, I don’t understand that stuff”, so they go with confirmation bias. This is very clear when it comes to something like climate change. The rest of it can simply be explained by good old conservatism, the preserving of the colonial, Christian, white status quo. A lot of people who live rural are older, conservative, and fearful. They don’t approve of women being able to obtain abortions; they still think single women having sex is scandalous, and they don’t think it’s okay for them to pay for their contraception. They understand healthcare, but are terrified of “creeping socialism”, so they are against ACA. They aren’t terribly keen on that feminism stuff, and anything queer they find very unsettling, set their lips in a straight line and shake their heads. Most won’t come out and say anything nasty, but the “that’s unnatural” vibe is very strong. They don’t think it’s okay for queer people to marry, and they are easily scared by propaganda about transgender people using a public lav.
It is true, to an extent, that rural farmers feel isolated and ignored, but that’s not why they voted for Trump. They aren’t so stupid as to not understand that a one percenter doesn’t give a shit about them, but they think he’ll keep the conservative status quo.
Cross posted from the Moments of Political Madness thread.
The future president of U.S. is back on Twitter. He is, of course, lying his ass off immediately. His tweet claims that the anti-Trump protestors in Manhattan are “professional protesters” and that they have been egged on by the media. FFS.
Here’s the entire tweet:
Read more: http://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2016/11/05/discuss-moments-of-political-madness-6/#ixzz4PiYQPnfn
This is how I expect Trump to govern, with self-congratulatory hyperbole, outright lies and non sequiturs.
SC noted that Paul Ryan remains ready to privatize Medicare with the assent of Trump. I know a lot of people who will probably die if Ryan succeeds.
To be fair, not everyone who voted for Trump needs be a racist. A non-racist sexist would find a warm welcome in the trump fold…
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/08/12/a-massive-new-study-debunks-a-widespread-theory-for-donald-trumps-success/
Is an article putting different spin on the cause of the result. The analysis points more to “fear for my kids future” than racism, sexism, -ism, wealth, et al.
Seems many people see the economy as barely maintaining, and not providing growth opportunities for their children. The trope of ‘next generation will be better off than previous’ ( ‘moving up the ladder’ etc) seems to be evaporating. Producing lots of anger and resentment. Even people doing well still feel like they have to struggle to maintain it.
[still considering it]
@13: The Venn diagram of racists and sexists is one circle. Bigotry is funny that way.
———-
I’m also not willing to give a pass to folks who voted 3rd party, or who chose not to vote (and were otherwise eligible and unsuppressed). “Let not any one pacify his conscience by the delusion that he can do no harm if he takes no part, and forms no opinion. Bad men need nothing more to compass their ends, than that good men should look on and do nothing.” (John Stuart Mill)
> If you voted for Trump, you belong in the basket of deplorables
And there it is, political debate it’s finest. I’d let this go, except we had a major candidate for president say the same thing. How’d that work out for her? I know you’re going to shout “popular vote!”, but less than a percent of a difference doesn’t speak volumes to me.
Consider this: would you vote for a candidate who called you a deplorable?
I won’t deny that ignorance, irrationailty, racism, xenophobia and sexism factored into this election, but I’m still firmly of the opinion that most of that could have been overcome if the democrats and the media hadn’t been so smug and condescending, giving a lot of down on their luck people the impression that they don’t give a shit about their problems.
You may think these people are horrible and they may be! But if you want to win elections, you better figure out how to at least placate them, because they’ve just shown they can cost you the election.
So how do we win?
The last few days it feels like this country has a massive case of Stockholm Syndrome.
At the very least, I don’t want to give someone the benefit of the doubt because apparently racism (or sexism, or…) wasn’t enough of a deal-breaker to leave the ballot blank/vote third party/etc*. In which case, I wan evidence to the contrary that this person actively combats racism** or I am going to assume they don’t care enough about others to avoid doing racist shit.
(Honestly, I don’t know what I’d do with someone who supported Trump but volunteered at Planned Parenthood and Black Lives Matter protests. Besides try to figure out what the hell is going on in their head and try to persuade them that the former hindered the latter two.)
* Like, I didn’t consider this the optimal voting strategy for blocking Trump, but it has the minimum standard of ‘not voting for a racist for President when there were less racist candidates on the ballot’.
** This is not ‘I voted for Obama’ or ‘I have a black friend’, or maybe even cutting a check to the NAACP — though that does help — this is actually doing things to help people of color or prevent Trump from making things worse.
@16:
Pandering to the racist assholes does not win you the racist asshole’s votes. Pandering to the racist assholes gives them power, and destroys what trust you have with the people who actually support you.
Republican turnout for this election was basically the same as it was for the last two elections. Democratic turnout was practically halved.
So go ahead and blame the democrats for not compromising enough with an openly islamophobic, racist, sexist campaign. You’re ignoring massive voter suppression and gerrymandering, but hey, at least you can blame the people who are trying to save the country for not trying hard enough.
Trump the Chump will discriminate against plenty of white folk, according to his rhetoric, etc. Women & girls, the LGBTQ community, those with disabilities.
And he loves the poorly educated, so, bearing in mind his mendacity, you can probably add them to the list too.
This has to be the most idiotic response to Trump’s election and the last two decades of Republican actions that I can think of. He’s never moderated or backed down on anything, so there’s no chance in hell that he’s going to do something different than what he’s said in terms of real policies (as opposed to the empty promises he’s made, which he’ll blow off like the dust on his $10,000 suit.) Nor are the Republicans in Congress going to seek compromise and “bipartisanship” in any way, even though they only have power now because of the Electoral College, the extreme gerrymanders they were able to force through back in 2010, and the resulting gridlock that allowed them to create. Ryan is already talking about privatizing Medicare and Trump’s team is filed with Social Security privatizers (and that’s just what we know after only three days.) Trump and the GOP are going to go full steam ahead with the agenda of the plutocrats regardless of what anyone else wants, including the rubes who voted for them (the vast majority of whom do not want either Medicare or Social Security privatized, for instance.)
Markos Moulitsas, the founder of Daily Kos, had the only correct reaction to Trump’s election from anyone claiming to be a progressive: fight everything like the GOP did all through Obama’s presidency. He put it as simply and directly as it can be put: we oppose everything. That’s the only way we keep the country from going down the tubes before the mid-term elections in 2018, it’s the only way we get the country back in 2020, it’s the only way we get enough power to undo the GOP gerrymander, it’s the only way we inspire progressives (especially young progressives) to come out and do what needs to be done to defeat these plutocrats-masquerading-as-populists that have managed to dupe too many people into buying their snake oil. The establishment Democrats tried to be safe this time, tried not to fight back as we should have, and it’s cost us damned near everything. So now is the time to fight like there’s no tomorrow, because if we don’t, there won’t be.
You have a grievance against a party actually trying to help the working person by protecting them predation from large banks and fund? Smug? Nope.
Trump never cared about their problems and conned them into thinking he did.
Now he appears to be giving them the shaft.
A basic rule of cons, if somebody listen only to me, and forget other sources of information, they are conning you. Trump voters fell for a con. We’ll have another recession shortly.
I don’t know if I’m a “liberal” or not, but not only did I *not* vote for Trump (I voted for Clinton…in a deep blue state), but if there had been a chimpanzee running against Trump, I’d’ve voted for the chimp. At least when a chimp throws shit, it’s *real* shit.
I did have the pleasant choice between two US Senate candidates. One a Hispanic woman, the other a Black woman. Both are Democrats.
Some very small tidbits of good news among the utter disaster at the top… Sen. Tammy Duckworth, EX-Sherriff Joe Arpaio, and Gov. Pat McCrory *may* have lost (last I checked he was down by about 11K votes so I expect there’ll be a recount).
dick@21,
Yes, but no one will be discriminated against for being a white person.
Think of it this way: if you are a black woman, or a trans Latin@, you get a two-for-the-price-of-one deal! And plenty of people get even more!!! And you don’t even have to act before midnight tonight–just go out in the street and be who you are, and the deplorables will find you.
I don’t know why so many “liberals” wrote paragraphs upon paragraphs here arguing against Clinton as if there was another choice. The election was only complicated and worthy of long discussions before the nominations were made.
Once the nominees were set, the question collapsed into a simple binary choice. And at that point, if you were still unable to easily vote for Clinton, you’re either extremely ignorant about Trump or an asshole. But since you spent hours writing hundreds of words over the span of several months, you can’t claim ignorance.
You’re assholes. If you chose not to vote when you could have, you’re an asshole. If you voted third party or wrote in, you’re an asshole.
Both Sanders and Warren say they’ll support everything Drumph does to better the common people. BUT everything else he bloviated about will be met with stern opposition. a big “no, no, no, double no” to everything he ran on.
here’s hoping.
Two things: First, now that the Repubs have/will have majorities in the Supreme Court, Representatives, Senate, and White House, remember the list of dreams they have been stroking themselves about for years:
1) Destroy Obamacare
2) Privatize Medicare
3) Eliminate Medicaid
4) Privatize and cut Social Security
5) Open all national parks and protected areas to oil, gas, mining, and other development
6) Eliminate the not-even-adequate Barney Frank bank legislation
7) Eliminate the Consumer Protection Board
8) Spend ONE TRILLION MORE on the F-35
9) Expand privatization of prison system, water systems, and every other public utility
10) Ban abortion across the whole country
11) Enshrine Christianity as the official national religion
They could do EVERY ONE of these things in the first 100 days. They have been given the power. (First, they’ll nuke the Senate’s 40-vote filibuster).
Second, Hillary is just not a good politician. If she really wanted the Presidency, all she had to do was to NOT make those $100,000 private speeches to Goldman et al. She was already rich, she didn’t need the money. Take the long view. Also, after defeating Bernie in the primaries, she could have flat-out lied and said she was adopting his positions (the “public opinion”) while reassuring her backers (in her “private opinion”) that none of the stuff would have been enacted after she own. Instead she publicly sneered at Bernie’s supporters. That’s just dumb. These two actions, and many others, show that she is not really that good of a public politician, despite any of her other good qualities, which is a big reason she lost.
Third, I am pointing you one of the most thoughtful analyses of the reasons we now have President Trump: http://www.cracked.com/blog/6-reasons-trumps-rise-that-no-one-talks-about/
whheydt:
It has to be a difference of 10K or under for a recount. If it goes over 10K, McCrory can’t get a recount.
Saad:
Quoted for fucking truth.
Hairhead:
Fuck you. I am sick to death of every single one of you asshole apologists, still fucking whining. Whining, the most important thing ever, instead of oh, you know, showing up to vote for the one person who had a chance at defeating that xenophobic, homophobic bigot, open racist, a rapist, a sexual predator, a con man, an open fraud, a sociopath, pathological liar, climate change denier and ignorant asspimple.
A xenophobic, homophobic bigot, open racist, a rapist, a sexual predator, a con man, an open fraud, a sociopath, pathological liar, climate change denier and ignorant asspimple. None of that was unknown, the maniac advertised it for effing months on end, but no, as Saad says, spite and the need to whine won the day. Do everyone a favour, and shut the fuck up.
Well I at least now have a ready explanation of why I will not move back to the rural area I grew up in:
I refuse to raise my daughters in a community that predominantly voted for Trump.
“You don’t get to claim you were a nice, conscientious, thoughtful person if you voted for Trump. You were just an asshole.”
Hell yes. I’m with you PZ.
A’int no such thing as a thoughtful-Nazi sympathizer or enabler.
I will give Trump the same level of support that the GOP gave Obama.
My home state of Washington makes it extremely easy so I did cast a vote for Hillary (she really was the only choice), but I was not an eager supporter of hers. If my only option to vote was to stand in line for a long time, I might not have. And some (small) part of it is my disillusionment with the very left. Please don’t get me wrong. I love PZ. I have been reading his posts on an almost daily basis for around 10 years and it has helped me grow as a person. I agree with virtually everything written, but I when I read some of his posts and especially as I read some of the comments I feel (I know, my fee fees are hurt) marginalized when I am told that: as a white person I am racist; as a man I am sexist; and that if I question allowing the self-identified in our children’s showers or have some nuance as to if a business should be forced to serve everyone, I am a bigot. And god forbid if I have moral qualms about a woman’s right to control her body in the final two semesters of pregnancy. Attacking me/us may be cathartic and you may very well be my/our moral superior, but it does not help causes I support like Blacks Live Matter, gay rights or equal pay for equal work. So, you can call me an asshole, but it just makes me feel like I want to take my ball and go home – and truth is I am asshole enough to do it.
A question from someone that respects the USA and find – after a voyage of two weeks in the USA – most of the american people (in an area between Virginia and Pensilvania) very friendly and quite helpful:
Trump is the president now. Right.
But, even with the suport of your Congress (republican majority, if im correct), he cannot change the Constitution, nor rule by decree, isn’t that right?
And, only one more thing: have hope, because i believe nothing is lost, and after the expected dificulties and evil politics of the Trump administration, maybe the next president would be a decent person, capable of being a loyal servant of your people, of all your people, and help make the USA a better place to live.
Be strong all! The majority of the people i know don’t think that all Americans are hateful like Trump.
Thsi election was (only) a mistake, but the mistake can be corrected later.
Best wishes and best of luck to you all!
We’re in this fix because Trump is a very effective con artist (partly). A lot of foolish people were taken in by his con. Many of those people have been living in the Republican disinformation bubble, a con of its own. They’ve stayed there because they never learned how to reason and think, and because they won’t and don’t listen to people on the other side. We’re deluded and misinformed, if not outright malicious liars.
We’re also in this fix because Trump dumped gasoline on the hate-fueled bigots in our society. They got out and voted. He’s their poster boy, and they know he accepts and embraces them.
We’re also here because the 1%ers structured our economic and political system so that the bottom 80%+ have seen no economic gains over the last 30+ years – an entire adult lifetime. Anyone who did better themselves was matched by other people doing worse. A lot of despairing people rolled the dice with Trump. A lot of rural people, but also a few blacks, some hispanics, and lots of women. Economic problems were more important for those last groups than Trump’s very obvious appeals to hate. (Or maybe they heard the appeals to hate people who were not like them, but ignored the calls to hate people like them? ) What we do know is that endless economic stagnation and decline was a characteristic of unusual Trump turnout areas.
This gets to the next to last point: Clinton was more of the same kind of neoliberal/moderate conservative 1%-friendly politics. A lot of people voted for Obama hoping he’d be a change from that – I sure did. He wasn’t. The people he listened to convinced him to give the bankers a wrist slap. He listened to the Larry Summers crowd (Clinton’s people), not the Paul Krugmans. I’m still very fond of him and think he’s one of the best presidents we’ve had, even so. Clinton ran as a continuation of that. She was nearly defeated by Bernie Sanders, who would have been a hopeless candidate in any of the other elections in my lifetime. This was a change election.
Finally, Trump voters are human. Many of them are hate-fueled, but more than a few were not. We’re going to need the latter group to help us get out of this mess. If nothing else, we need to listen to them (not the hate-fueled bigots). Whether it’s true or not, they feel looked down on and despised by the urban elites. And if you think that’s completely false, look up the Alexandra Pelosi/Bill Mahrer show, and Alexandra Pelosi’s film.
First off, there doesn’t seem to be any greater injustice in this world than being called a racist. Being called a racist is apparently worse than being the victim of racism. Go figure.
As for PZ’s claim I’d say it’s fairly accurate if you actually believe Trump is going to make anything but his own bank account great again. But I’m not so sure if that was the main reason for many. I have the impression that many voted for him not because of his stance on anything but simply because he’s not a politician. Every politician for the last few decades has proved that they are incapable of changing anything substantial. The rich just keep on getting richer.
So what are people to do? 4 more years of something that’s guaranteed not to change anything? And then what? Do you really think some perfect candidate will come along all of the sudden? For better or worse (probably worse, but nobody knows anything for sure yet), Trump IS change. He hasn’t even taken up office, and he has already changed everything.
Don’t forget that there is always a silver lining. If he doesn’t deliver people are going to tear him apart. They might tear the country apart while they’re at it but that’s still better than nothing, right?
sez marner @34: “So, you can call me an asshole, but it just makes me feel like I want to take my ball and go home – and truth is I am asshole enough to do it.”
So… you, yourself acknowledge yourself to be an asshole… and yet, being accurately described by a term that you agree applies to you… offends you greatly.
Hm.
Why do you suppose that is, marner?
Perhaps you might benefit from a good, long session or three of introspection.
17 @qwints
So how do we win?
The answer is simple. We study the masters of obstruction — the GOP — and adopt their playbook. We on the left can’t afford to be nice and play by the equivalent of the Queensberry Rules anymore. We need to play dirty. We obstruct at every possible turn; we create a cottage character assassination industry; if necessary we bully, we lie, we cheat, we intimidate. We find a fiery, passionate, take no prisoners candidate who can unite all the splintered, demoralized groups on the left. In other words, we go to war.
And don’t anyone give me any crap about how that will make us just like the other side. Or that you’d rather go down in flames than be like the GOP. What happened on Tuesday is a Fucking Disaster. Make no mistake, this is a turning point in our democracy. If you think that is hyperbole consider this: Stave Bannon may become the White House Chief of Staff! Bannon, a neo-fascist, anti-Semite, may become the power behind the throne. You think things can’t get any worse? Well, they can and they will. Do we have to wait until Trump has his equivalent of the Reichstag fire before we understand what’s truly happened?
Despising the people who voted for Trump is certainly cathartic but not exactly productive.
Race was invented to prop up the aristocracy as a divide and conquer tactic; give poor white people a handful of privileges and turn them against the non-white people who “threaten” those privileges rather than the aristocrats. Trump was incredibly good at executing the white half of that tactic— get the poor white people riled up over a non-white scapegoat to blame for their troubles and they won’t attack the aristocracy that’s actually causing them.
But too many people here are happy to sing the other half of that duet— blaming the poor white people who voted for (what they perceived as) the lesser of two evils, rather than the aristocrats who foisted the false choice on us in the first place.
Most Trump voters aren’t white supremacists dedicated to oppressing minorities any more than most Clinton voters are staunch colonialists dedicated to killing Libyans and Syrians. They’re people in dire straits looking for some hope at getting out, even if it comes at the expense of distant, different people they’ve never met and probably never will. The same holds true for most Clinton voters— that their distant different people are on the other side of the planet and less equipped to protest in American media does not make their position any less morally fraught.
I warned months ago – when the primaries were just getting started – that there were many people who knew they were suffering and didn’t know exactly why but demanded answers. Trump would give them the wrong answers of a fascist— blame a scapegoat less powerful than you. Sanders would give them the right answers— the aristocrats have rigged the system against you. Clinton would give them no answers at all— the economy has recovered, everything is fine. Outside the small minority of die-hard bigots, most rural poor white voters would have preferred right answers over wrong answers, but any answer is better than none.
It’s only two years until the next election, and we’re not going to win it by dismissing and insulting a large swath of the electorate. Two years is enough time for them to learn that Trump’s promises were as empty as Obama’s— it’s up to us to make sure we give them an alternative. In the meantime, we need to make sure that the Democrats don’t let any of Trump’s agenda make it through the Senate alive.
“I’ve also gotten a few responses, echoing the sentiments of Obama and Clinton, that we’ve got to give the guy a chance, and gosh, maybe he won’t be as bad as we think.”
Obama and Clinton have to say that. Supporting the democratic peaceful transfer of power is important for maintaining a stable democracy. Maintaining that democracy is essential for the society we want.
As to the second, it’s going to be way, way worse. Trump is a bully, vindictive, and impulsive. And those are his less harmful qualities. He’s an authoritarian with no respect for the rule of law, and he’ll try to get away with whatever he can. Our system of government is under real threat here, we are faced with a severe test of the system the founders set up. It’s a perfect storm, because our polity has divided into two bitter factions. On top of all that, he’s invited the absolute worst of humanity to stand by his side – Stephen Bannon, his campaign manager, turned Breitbart into an anti-Semitic site. I never thought we’d have to save the world from Nazis again, but our foolish, foolish people have put Nazis into power.
Jake Harban, #40
Nice try.
Not sure when people will understand that racist speech is not free speech.
“We on the left can’t afford to be nice and play by the equivalent of the Queensberry Rules anymore.”
We as Americans and lovers of democracy and freedom can’t afford to play nice. This isn’t about our side losing, it’s that the other side has embraced Nazis. We need to help them look and jump back in horror, sooner rather than later — they will eventually, but it may be too late.
@marner #34 – So you’ve … just admitted… that your feelings of discomfort over having your world view challenged are more important than, say, my right to bodily autonomy and my being treated like a competent, independent human being that doesn’t exist merely to please men? Good to know. I will work to actively avoid you forever now.
All of this hand-wringing is like when Jesse Helms won and said in his victory speech “Well, there is no joy in Mudville tonight. The mighty ultraliberal establishment, and the liberal politicians and editors and commentators and columnists, have struck out again.”
HRC had the entire ultra-liberal establishment behind her including Hollywood. She even had some republican establishment behind her. CNN allowed her to cheat knowing questions in advance. Beyonce and other Rockstars far more famous than Chachi sing-songed for Clinton. She failed. She was not electable. Calling every person who voted for Trump a racist is going a little overboard I would say. Blacks and Hispanics voted for Trump, are they racists too? Come on, now.
It was very amusing to watch …oh, what’s his face…the guy who crowed over and over Hilary’s election was a sure thing –the guy who looks like Fat Bastard from Austin Powers: ah yes, Ed Brayton, that there was no chance at all Trump could get elected, none at all. He has many crow feathers plastered to his face from eating so much crow.
I offer a big bag of Cheetohs to you all as a token of my condolences to your very staggering loss, especially the Supreme Court where for the next several decades conservatism shall be enshrined within the nation.
If JAD were still alive he would say “I Love It SO!” ***
***I was actually one of the last people to ever speak to him in real life. When John A. Davison announced on his blog he did not have long to live and asked for anyone to call him at the number he provided, I gave him a call and chatted briefly. He was disappointed I was not a biologist who could carry on the fight with his theories and ideas (which I thought were absurd but did not tell him so). He was very depressed and not knowing what else to say to a dying man I wished him well on his final journey. I did not want to take up the last few moments of his precious time when he could be spending that time with his family. He was not pleased at all I was not a biologist. It seemed beneath his dignity to speak to me and his words were not rude but they were a little sharp. I had the impression he was someone who had not laughed in 50 years. He was ornery to the last. From his manic posting I figured he had blown a fuse somewhere along the line and attacking evolutionary blogs which rejected his theory was his way of handling stress or getting revenge.
dadsen, #46
More voters wanted Clinton to be president than Trump. That lands her clearly outside of the unelectable zone.
Try again.
marner, you said, ” . . . . or have some nuance as to if a business should be forced to serve everyone, I am a bigot . . .”
Um, if you wish to refuse someone service for any reason other than health, committing a crime, or disrupting your business, yes, you ARE A BIGOT! iT HAS
And god forbid if I have moral qualms about a woman’s right to control her body in the final two semesters of pregnancy.
@ Marner, 34.
I’m sorry, but what ? What the fuck. I’m a white, young male student. I’m quite likely the most priviledged person on the planet. When I do/say racist or sexist shit, it needs to be called out. Because, see, it is very likely I’ve done that. I will do that, from my comfortable position of entitlement. Because the whole fucking culture is built on racism and sexism. There is nothing horrible in admitting this. There is nothing horrible in being critized. I avoid being a horrible asshole as much as I can. And people telling me, when I’ve unthinkingly, or even worse, if I really have had misguided opinions and voiced them, that those things are horrible and hurtful. It you know, gives a person a chance to reflect and change. What is fucking horrible, is crawling back into your ivory tower and sticking fingers up your ears and screaming “Nothing’s wrong, nothings wrong.” Just because someone said something “hurtful”. I’d imagine, being the actual target, of say, racism wouuld be amout a metric fuck-ton worse than being called racist. And for them, there is no ivory tower you can crawl back into and be content that it’s someone elses problem.
Oops, hit the posting button in the middle of my reply; here is the full reply.
marner, you said, ” . . . . or have some nuance as to if a business should be forced to serve everyone, I am a bigot . . .”
Um, if you wish to refuse someone service for any reason other than health, committing a crime, or disrupting your business, yes, you ARE A BIGOT! It has been well-established that the public good is served best when a business OPEN TO THE PUBLIC is actually open to the public. ALL members of the public, including blacks, asians, arabs, gays, Republicans, etc.
marner further said, ” . . . . And god forbid if I have moral qualms about a woman’s right to control her body in the final two semesters of pregnancy. . . ” Ya know what, marner? As female human beings are actual, consenting adults with rights over their own bodies, YOUR MORAL QUALMS ARE ONLY YOUR BUSINESS, NOT HERS!
(If my “moral qualms” were the law of the land, not a single Trump voter would have been allowed vote! )
Personally, I’m keeping track of the people who have tried to feed me the bullshit lines of “Give Trump a chance/Maybe he won’t be so bad/Don’t jump to conclusions!” I don’t want them to get away with being surprised when Trump acts in the way he said he was going to act. Vindictive and petty of me, perhaps, but if I don’t, they’ll act surprised every single time.
As Oprah said (paraphrasing Maya Angelou), “When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time.”
@38 I wrote that poorly. Thank you for pointing it out. While I am only partly an asshole, I am not offended by being called an asshole. I am offended at being thought of as a racist and sexist because of my skin color and gender. I readily acknowledge my privilege, however.
Truth is, if we exclude the asshole faction we are never going to win anything.
@ 45 I support and in fact have voted for a woman’s right to choose, but as the fetus begins to reach viability my strong feelings about the importance of personal autonomy and the protection of something that could be a baby is admittedly hard for me. If that makes me horrible than you really are excluding a large part of the populace. In no way am I offended by being challenged. I am offended that you would go straight to my saying that I believe that you “…exist merely to please men.” I realize that you do not know me but I do not believe that.
Hairhead – First as the follicly challenged, I am jealous. It comes down to nuance. I am open to the argument that if there is another easily accessed bakery, then the one can refuse service. I would however never go to the bakery that did so and would urge everyone to not go there. It may be that social pressure may work better than law. I absolutely support and have voted for people to be able to marry regardless of gender.
All, I have voted in 8 presidential elections and have voted Democrat every time. Admittedly often because the alternative was horrible. My hope here was to express that there is a spectrum of voter who substantively agrees, but is actively being pushed away because they are not pure enough. And getting someone as vile as Trump elected makes me sick.
I in no way want to be that troll, so this will be the last I write in this post.
marner @ 52: Why don’t you read “Black Like Me”. Many blacks who worked in the cities had to go 10 hours without food because NOT ONE restaurant in the city would serve them. They had to bus or walk to “black” restaurants far out of town in order to eat. For decades there was a book published for black travellers which identified which restaurants, hotels, and public services were open to them, as a black person or black family travelling might easily find themselves stranded without food, public toilets, or shelter, so pervasive was the prejudice.
The libertarians always say, “Let businesspeople discriminate freely. Those businesses which don’t discriminate will receive more business, and so succeed, putting the discriminating business out of business.” For over one hundred years, that didn’t work. The social pressures of bigotry absolutely CRUSHED the so-called “law of the market”.
Bottom line. If you are open to the public, you are “open to the public.” “The public” includes EVERYBODY, including people you don’t like or are uncomfortable around.
As for your “potential baby” argument. Since when are the rights of a “potential baby” greater than the rights of an already-existing adult woman? If “potential baby” has more rights than a woman, a woman, perforce, is not a full human being — she has fewer rights than a man, and fewer rights than a “potential baby”. There’s woman, right at the bottom of the pile. Do you feel comfortable telling your spouse, your mother, your sister, and your daughter that they have fewer rights than you, and fewer rights than a “potential baby”
Silver Fox
Well said. We won’t even have to lie to attack Trump or his cronies character.
@marner, No enemies to the left, no friends to the right. The “great” part of returning to the Bush years is that your disagreements with the “very left” won’t matter any more – all we can hope to do is defend the common ground already won from being lost again. People are going to vent, and the left has a long history of circular firing squads you shouldn’t let yourself be bothered by.
I can second everything Caine said about living in a poor, rural area. I live in such an area, and it’s frustrating seeing my relatives actively voting against their own interests and waving those hateful flags. I’ve been literally banished by them for supporting Bernie/Clinton, gay marriage, etc. They’ll probably start to feel their mistakes when they lose their health insurance and labor protections. I have no optimism for the future, it seems this country just can’t take any more steps forward. Citizens are too easily controlled by the oligarchic interests who couldn’t care less about the plight of the average worker.
I would just put out there that trump and his soon to be cabinet is not that different from previous republican administrations, other than being a little bit more open about misogyny and racisim. We had gotten used to a degree of plurality and openness under Obama, and this reversal to not-that-long-ago seems a shock.
https://youtu.be/FUaz2h8Wz5c
marner:
Let me spell it out for you. Assholes: assholery is officially excluded. I will win what I want to win, with or without you. I’m against the asshole things that assholes think/say/do, so it will probably be without. Tough fucking cookies.
No. This is not you being a white dude which is being excluded. This is a stupid, morally indefensible position that some people have. We should reject such positions. And many of us do. It’s your fucking problem that you don’t, not ours.
Maybe you should write two laws, one saying that you should be able to do that, and another saying you should tell everyone that they shouldn’t do that. That would be fucking stupid, but maybe your position just is that stupid.
Too many commenters don’t seem to grasp some basic reasons Clinton lost; they’re repeating her mistakes.
One rule of politics is very basic: Do not insult people whose support you will need. I’m talking about in the nomination. During the nomination, Clinton’s campaign (and she has to take responsibility) routinely insulted Sanders’ supporters and threw a few feces at him too. We were “Bernie bros,” i.e., young white sexists. Nevermind all the older people like me who were excited that we finally had a Democrat from the Democratic wing of the Democratic Party to support, rather the milquetoast corporate flunkies of the past three-plus decades. And all those women who supported Sanders? They were just going where the boys were to find dates. Nevermind the many older women who didn’t need dates. And we threw chairs when we did not get our way. Nevermind that this was a lie, and it came out of a caucus where many people believed the rules of procedure were ignored to bulldoze Sanders’ delegates. Oh, and Sanders was selling unicorns and pixie dust, according to some respected economists, which proved his supporters were naive about economics (not to mention being naive about politics because we opposed a highly electable woman). Nevermind that Sanders was proposing policies that work very well in other developed countries and, such as free college, had existed for a long time in some places in the U.S. Some economists clearly don’t deserve respect.
I could go on, but the point is, Clinton insulted a lot of Sanders enthusiasts. In return, I saw a massive amount of bitterness on pro-Sanders forums, often pointing out ways (real or imagined) that her campaign continued to insult them somehow after she got the nomination. She went dirty and ended up with a lot of mud on her in fighting her own base. Pretending otherwise simply continues the kind of shallowness or self-defeating blindness that has driven the Democratic Establishment into the dust.
Next, if you want to win, you have to give some people a good reason to vote FOR you, not AGAINST the opponent. Yes, pointing out how vile and despicable Trump was was right and necessary. That sometimes can win elections. But why should someone vote for Clinton, when all she promised was to continue the policies that have been so disastrous to the U.S. Trump at least talked against some of our destructive economic policies, such as “free trade” with countries that have slave labor. The Democratic Establishment has been pushing “unfree trade” for a long time while falsely claiming the free market will magically protect our workers. Look, Obama is still pushing the vile TPP, which Clinton once called the “gold standard.” And analysts have pointed out the Democrats took a beating in Congress in a previous election after Obama had tried to push a policy that would have slowly strangled Social Security – well known as the “third rail” of politics. Democrats keep shooting themselves in the feet and then whine about losing races.
Another rule of politics is to beat hard on your opponent’s weakness. I don’t mean dirty politics but rather establishing a clear line between your policies and his. The Democrats have been losing ground in both Congress and at the state level to massively destructive Reptilians for some time (I lived through the vile Bobby Jindal era here in La.). At least the Reptilians have a mantra they routinely recite about how they can grow jobs. It sells despite being garbage. The Democrats rarely point out how really destructive GOP policies. The Democrats are too passive in attacking the GOP while arguing clearly and loudly for policies that would rebuild the middle class at both the state and national level. So while people who voted enthusiastically for Trump were racists, sexists etc., many others unenthusiastically voted for him as a scream of rage against their economic pain. Sanders clearly would have pushed policies that could have helped people. Clinton did not, except mouthing tepid support when she saw how much support he had. For example, Sanders had called for a $15 minimum wage, which was still too low, but much better than the $12 wage she supported. Voters clearly noticed that sort of thing.
Third, saying the people who voted for Trump are racists is true and facile. The GOP has been the KKK party for decades. Most of Trump’s primary opponents would have continued racist policies. Why did he crush them when some (Bush) had massive financial resources and party leaders lined up behind them? Racism is not an explanation when they were all racists. Clinton likewise had massive support – financially, leaders and celebrities lined up behind her, fawning mainstream (Establishment) media support. Why she lose despite all her advantages? If you ignore other possible causes of their vote, then you’ll continue to wonder why you can’t attract them. To put it in other words: It’s the economy, stupid. It’s almost always the economy.
As a corollary to the above items, insulting third party voters is another stupid act. Trump beat Clinton by 400,000 votes in Louisiana. Those of us who voted third party in this state knew that her cause was hopeless so we were free to vote our conscience. If this had been a swing state, I would have considered voting for her despite my strong convictions against her. If third-party voters in swing state had actually cost her the election, you might have a point, but the numbers say that if all of Stein’s supporters had gone to Clinton, she still would have lost. So keep insulting us for no good reason and keep wondering why we don’t listen to you.
Finally, another basic rule of politics is: If you’re going to stab someone in the back, don’t leave your fingerprints on the knife. From early on, the DNC gave off signs that it was heavily weighting the scales for Clinton. The absurd debate schedule was an early clue. As time went on, the massive problems of the primaries pointed to dirty tricks at high levels. Even if the DNC did not cheat, they did little to clear up the growing belief that they had. If half your base thinks you’ve cheated them out of their choice, it is unrealistic to expect them to come home for the general election.
I have no doubt that Clinton would have lost to most of the other mainstream GOP candidates if they had been nominated, for all the reasons cited above. Trump was the one she should have beaten. Why did she lose what should have been a cakewalk? Stop with the facile arguments, take a few steps back and look for why the Democratic Party has been losing so badly this decade.
Only those who wouldn’t support Clinton if she won the primary…which she did. Beyond that point, yawn.
I linked on the Political Madness thread to this piece by Masha Gessen.
It’s also the case that for an authoritarian like Trump, compromise is invariably seen as weakness and he would continue to demand more compromises while pummeling the compromisers and failing to hold up his end. We’ve seen this over the course of the electoral campaign. In Escape from Freedom, Erich Fromm pointed out that “‘appeasement'” – by the German republic, his fellow Rightists, or foreign powers – “was a policy which for a personality like Hitler was bound to arouse hatred, not friendship.” (231) Conciliatory gestures toward Trump will only arouse contempt and lead to further aggression.
@wsierichs, so what? PZ is right that we’ve had a terrible outcome, and it’s only going to get worse. What should people do to staunch the bleeding? What will you do?
Marcoli @ 56:
You could not possibly be more wrong. It might be helpful if you ever bothered to click links which are provided in the OP. These, for example: Oh, all the gods No. Fuck No, and https://www.splcenter.org/hatewatch/2016/11/10/trump-team-takes-shape-and-its-not-pretty
Being blissfully ignorant and all comfy cozy in your privilege is not going to help anyone, and it is already bad out there, very bad, for so many people. Take your fucking blinders off.
Caine, I think we disagree about how bad previous Republican administrations were.
To follow up on my previous comment, people – especially Democratic politicians – shouldn’t be fooled for a second into thinking that Trump is really a “dealmaker.” He sees the world in terms of winners and losers, strong and weak, victors and vanquished – war. He doesn’t want to make deals with his opponents; he wants to destroy them. He’s made no effort to hide this – he’s said it publicly in books and lectures, because he considers it a valid philosophy and code of behavior. Decent people have to realize that he doesn’t think like us.
Hey guys, I have this one particular issue that I feel like I’m personally freaking out about with regards to Trump’s presidency. I should start by saying that I’m among the people who have the least to personally fear from Trump. I’m not a minority, I’m not LGBT, I’m not a woman, I’m from an upper-middle-class suburban family, and I’m living in a relatively inclusive, cosmopolitan area of Southern California. I realize that fearing most about an issue that might affect me personally is selfish, and that people who aren’t like me are going to suffer far, far worse. Even so, the thing that I’m worried about is going to affect people who aren’t like me too, certainly to a far greater degree. That makes it worth talking about as more than just a loss of privilege on my part.
I’m currently enrolled in a public university, and I’m working on earning a degree in biology. I still have a long way to go before I can complete my undergraduate degree, and even longer before I can earn a PhD. What makes me scared for university students right now is the possibility that public and possibly even private universities will be gutted by the Trump administration and students’ education will be impaired. I’m worried that Ben Carson or whichever other mouth-breather gets assigned as the head of the department of education will try to inject science denialism and wacky fringe bullshit into STEM courses, defund university departments that don’t match up to conservative ideology, rewrite other course material to match up with conservative views, or even demolish public universities in their entirety. That’s not even getting into removing scholarships for minorities or forcing universities to abandon their openness to LGBT students.
How much do I and my fellow students actually have to fear? How much power will the Trump administration have over private and public universities? Will they be able to just march in and reshape colleges across the country into pro-GOP propaganda mills? Will they face any sort of meaningful obstruction from what they’re legally allowed to do, or face opposition from state governments or even the university faculty and students themselves?
Any sort of explanation or reassurance of what the league of deplorables can and can’t do to higher education in this country would be very appreciated. I’m afraid for college students in this country, and I’ll admit, I’m scared for myself too.
I will here state that I completely support the resistance to all that trump ran on and stands for.
I however do not support nor do I think it a good idea that we employ lying and cheating in the struggle with those forces of conservative reactionary-ism and denial that forms the basis of conservative political theory. It is the lying and cheating that has gotten us this election result.
It is the results of justice we want it is the equality of all people that is the goal not simply political advantage.
There are no compromise with human rights that will get you human rights.
the only tools we have are the ones we need to use.
Honesty, honor and respect for all people, reason and verifiable evidence. If we want an open peaceful society and an open and peaceful world then we need to live it with all of out abilities and give no quarter to those who resist it.
Take to the street, speak the truth, expose all the fucking secrets that trump keeps from the public eye. play the cards as we get them and let the chips fall were they may. It is past time that the gutless liberal politics step aside.
remember when thinking that there were women and minorities who voted for trump that there were also blacks that owned slaves, they were still slavers weren’t they
uncle frogy
They might have been free blacks that purchased relatives, like parents, who by law, had to be slaves. This was shown to be the case on several episodes of Finding Your Roots on PBS.
What are the odds of Mike Pence becoming President during this term?
(Best as I can tell, Trump has been useful to the GOP, but he’s done his job now)
forsaken @ 55
Nah. Knowing Right wingers like I do (I was one, once upon a time) they’ll just find a way to blame liberals, Democrats, minorities, feminists, gays, immigrants, Jews, Hollywood, atheists, and anyone other than their own ideology.
John Morales,
Trump is old, doesn’t exercise, doesn’t sleep much, and has a pretty bad diet. I can’t imagine he’s in very good health.
There’s also still the possibility of faithless electors–I think it would take ten to throw it to the hands of the House, who would then choose among Trump, Clinton, and whoever gets the third most electoral votes.
As for impeachment, which I think you’re hinting at, that would take something so egregious coming to light that even the gop couldn’t ignore.
So overall I’d give you even odds.
But Pence won’t be much of an improvement (I guess he’s less likely to start a nuclear war).
Qwints @ 65:
Disagree all you like, it just makes you one more fucking fool.
I’m not old enough to remember the first time Nixon was elected, but I imagine people consoled themselves with the thought that he couldn’t be as bad as all that. Turns out he was worse.
And of course Reagan wasn’t as bad as we thought, but only because we avoided (barely) a nuclear war. Everything else was far worse.
But surely W wouldn’t be all that bad, right? Now it’s 16 years later and we’re still wallowing in his shit.
But yeah, despite all evidence to the contrary, Trump can’t really be all that bad, can he?
[barf]
Speaking of ignorance.
@
>”And there it is, political debate it’s finest.”
This…
>”
npsimons
Damn phone…one more time.
Speaking of ignorance.
@npsimons
>”And there it is, political debate it’s finest.”
This…
>”If you voted for Trump, you belong in the basket of deplorables”
…is not a debate. It’s a characterization. Debating about what we call people full of bigotry is not a good thing, they are deplorable and we should not refrain from saying that.
He might do this… by walking back his entire platform and rhetoric, pulling off a mask and revealing that he was actually a completely different person all along. Oh and also by inventing some sort of time manipulation thingo to undo the very real damage his rhetoric has already done.
I know one person who (will admit they) voted Trump. She lives in Michigan, and is a brown person, so It’s Complicated.
She claims to have felt cornered into voting with her hip pocket, as her husband has been out of work or doing menial work for a long time, and she could see no end for their situation.
So, essentially, her calculus seems to be (and I’m paraphrasing): ‘Yes, he’s awful, but a chance is better than the status quo.’
The fact that I can sympathise with her situation doesn’t mean the white (approximately) one-third of her isn’t racist.
I’m a bit divided. I’m from the Netherlands and I see Geert Wilders gaining more voters. The political establishment feels safe that he’ll never rule. but then I look across the pond. I’d hesitate calling his supporters assholes, because it’ll only make them more staunch in their support, I’m afraid. And the DNC tactics didn’t exactly work out for the best.
So, how do we fight the demagogues? Looking at the baddest of them, I’d suggest it’s a matter of being smarter in propaganda. If anything, Trump has won the social media/reality TV battle. The fact that traditional liberal media where also critical to Clinton didn’t help either.
So, how do you market a nuanced opinion that doesn’t really fit in 140 characters, because I think that is the heart of the matter,
I don’t believe that we must use their shameful tactics, lying and other tricks of reality shows and of demagogues, because they (Trump and others) are really, really good at that, and will be extremely dificult to beat them in that game.
Honest people, honest politicians, should not fall in that trap, and playing dirty like the “Others”…
They must present their ideas, clearly, with rational talk, calmly explaining their political programs, treating the people like inteligent persons, and not like some half-witted reality show viewer.
And never, never, underestimate their inteligence nor their pride, but making they understand that some ideas defend by racist and mysoginists (basic and evilly crazy) are quite bad for them and their children, and only a rational, compassive aproach to the government of the country will be fruitful on the long run.
npsimons wrote:
It seems the deplorables get great stock out of claiming Hillary Clinton meant all Trump supporters when she spoke about the “basket of deplorables”.
Been there, done that, laughed and ridiculed by Faux News, etc, for decades. Doesn’t lead to good sound bites.
The gloating dadsen, up there at #46, was last seen here arguing for creationism. That tells you how much credibility his arguments have.
Sign the petition, just because
https://www.change.org/p/electoral-college-electors-electoral-college-make-hillary-clinton-president-on-december-19?recruiter=553555877&utm_source=share_petition&utm_medium=twitter&utm_campaign=share_twitter_responsive
#8, ck the irate lump:
[blockquote]It seems the deplorables get great stock out of claiming Hillary Clinton meant all Trump supporters when she spoke about the “basket of deplorables”.[/blockquote]
Half of them, which is still a decent amount, and a silly thing to do (alienating half of those you wish to convert). And Hillary later realized her error in doing this: http://www.mediaite.com/online/hillary-clinton-privately-acknowledged-she-stepped-in-it-after-deplorables-comment/
Nerd, #69:
[blockuote]They might have been free blacks that purchased relatives, like parents, who by law, had to be slaves. This was shown to be the case on several episodes of Finding Your Roots on PBS.[blockquote]
Nerd, firstly I have to say that praising the idea/reality of “free blacks” (your term, I find it a little offensive, but that may just be me) is to play into the hands of racists. These people may not have to work the fields every day, but they had none f the rights as humans as European Americans of the time.
Secondly, having witnessed the workings of TV shows such as the mentioned, you would have to be naively insane to think that the producers would show ancestors of AA celebrities as slave owners. I have no doubt in fact it was written into contracts. So they came up with this “free slave” idea.
I just read a comment on a more right-friendly forum, and this guy was most focused on war. Or specifically that HRC was a warmonger while Trump was not. And it’s a good point, how long has the US acted as world police? Sticking their nose into “every” conflict, bleeding both money and human blood at a terrifying rate. Could this be part of the explanation, that people simply are fed up with the rest of the world? That this is the beginning of a more isolationist US?
Every thread I pull these days seems to lead towards globalization. Question is whether or not this is simply due to confirmation bias.
I’m afraid #82 is right, even though I would like to agree with Fernando #80. Rational arguments aren’t going to win this one. Stepping over to the dark side and using their scare tactics isn’t the way forward either (as shown by the DNC and the anti-brexit campaign by using scare tactics. Didn’t work). So, apart from challenging apathy (not even 50% voter turnout? Really??) what can we do to keep the demagogues at bay?
Since I like to win I try to find a way to describe these things in terms that are compatible with psychology. Sure, it needs some ethics but it should be done at some point.
Bigotry allows for speed in communication at the expense of accuracy. People become categories instead of individuals and that is traded with a language of fear and other emotions. It’s not unlike military shorthand except that the military has implied information that that is more accurate.
Trump communicated in a specific way. A common pattern is that I can’t get most Trump supporters to show me why they believe what they believe. That suggests language with symbols that do not attach to content and only to other people (religion likely contains similar elememts). That empty symbology in bigoted language may be a point of attack.
>”The answer is simple. We study the masters of obstruction — the GOP — and adopt their playbook. We on the left can’t afford to be nice and play by the equivalent of the Queensberry Rules anymore. We need to play dirty. We obstruct at every possible turn; we create a cottage character assassination industry; if necessary we bully, we lie, we cheat, we intimidate. We find a fiery, passionate, take no prisoners candidate who can unite all the splintered, demoralized groups on the left. In other words, we go to war.”
I agree in large part. I would suggest that because this is a social conflict war metaphors be discarded to a degree. I have see strategic advantages in my choice to be as scrupulosity honest as I can. On a moral level it makes critizing dishonesty much more powerful.
I have already suggested on Facebook that the R obstruction in things like appointments and budget bills amount to social violations that may be emulated in other contexts. Tit-for-tat has positive and negative uses because it represents a general social mirroring that we are capable of. Public criticism of one’s family is rude, but on on a level that can be morally justified. I already begun.
I wasn’t the one demanding they be slaves. That was the State of Virginia.
Tell that to the people who, after Henry Gates explained the legal situation, understood what they were likely seeing. How economically valuable were 50-60 year old slaves, who were the ages expected from the age of their “owner”. Article by Henry Louis Gates Jr., Harvard Univerity.
I never claimed all black that owned slaves did so for family/legal reason, but many did. Others did not.
Pretending that relatives weren’t protected for legal reasons is just ignorance on your part.
Nerd #90.
*Sigh* please read for comprehension.
The point I made was that the modern day AA celebrities would not have allowed this TV show to come to the conclusion that their relatives were bad people. Attorneys would have been involved before the contracts were signed.
Honestly, your pigheaded devotion to ignoring what anyone else says is so frustrating to be honest, and not what one would expect of a “scientist”.
Sigh. Calling nearly half the electorate assholes accomplishes what, exactly?
I’d rather think it makes them angry …. maybe angry enough to vote contrary for spite. And grotesquely poisons future attempts to communicate. Or perhaps you think you can split the country in half and have the “good” half float into some idyllic sunset.
Now look I voted for Hillary, and did my damnedest to convince a fair number of family and friends to vote for her (with *some* but not 100% success). And I’d scared crapless of what the orange one will do to this country.
Now yes those who voted for him were racist and bigoted …. but don’t WE *****KNOW***** that we are – all of us — also racist and bigoted? We simply **try** – knowing that we won’t always be successful to be aware of it, and try to shift our thinking and behaviors to a wider, more inclusive perspective.
In many ways the (imperfect though it is) awareness of our own privilege is in large measure a privilege that the Trump voters are, in large, less able to avail themselves of.
Do you have any idea how culturally homogeneous and parochial life in the small towns dotting the US outside the cities actually are? I grew up there. I know.
Yes things are changing now – I’ll come back to that – and *access* cosmopolitan information is freely available … but “taking it onboard” is something entirely different.
Where I grew up …. in a town of about 10k people there was one black family. No hispanic or oriental I recall. Jewish was a rare bird … who except for putting a menorah in the window in the holidays seemed to go out of their way to act like everyone around them, and even Catholics were viewed as somewhat suspicious. Sliced white bread all the way. And in the next town… and the next. and the next.
Blacks, Islamics … hispanics …. and their problems were not part of anyone’s real experience. The homgeneity meant that I grew up thinking that “prejudice” and “bigotry” were minor things, (though of course from a more mature POV I’m sure the few Jews and Catholics experienced alienation and discrimination much more deeply and painfully than I was aware). In the experience of where we were, nobody was hurt – or deeply disadvantaged by what prejudices “decent” people might have.
Blacks might well have been Martians. Hispanics from Jupiter and other nationalities and religions from another galaxy. Even when there were stories on TV or magazines showing the challenges of blacks or others, it could not “register” . Nothing like it was part of our experience.
Let me see if I can illustrate this …. I grew up thirty miles from Penn State where Joe Paterno was Pope of Pennsylvania. Sandusky happened – and Paterno and the whole of Penn State staff ignored it for years (decades) not because they actively didn’t care about blacks or actively decided that black kids were not “people” … but because in a real sense they couldn’t “see” black kids. Anything that happened to them was completely out of their frame of reference … a fantasy story like the ones in the magazines about doings on Mars.
Of course this is horrific from where I sit now. It really is “not caring about…” but *everything*( about living in these little white-bread towns says “people like us” are real … everything else if a fantasy story. And anything, any talk, any story, even seeing something, that doesn’t fit the “us” narrative very quickly falls off the edge of the world.
But there’s more to it than that. There’s a pride in that isolation …. most of the food we ate was grown on farms around us. In prior generations not far removed, even many of the tools used were locally made (My grandfather’s house was littered with tools made by blacksmiths) Sure, nobody wanted to live the way our great-grandparents did – or even our grandparents … everyone believed they could in a pinch. And for every generation in living memory, life was pretty much continuous, only minor changes one generation to the next …. but more comfortable, easier to make a living and not a lot of “social change” no matter how much the outside world changed. There wasn’t a hint of possible of “wrong” in their world view. Individual families could have shifting fortunes over generations but “the american dream” of improving your lot by your own efforts had enough truth to be believable. Life worked. There was no reason to doubt the worldview.
Now up through the time I left home … that was pretty much the story where I grew up. And I’ll bet in virtually all of “Trump country” as well.
Now lets look what happened about then … factories began, slowly at first, to close. Farming became corporatiized and markets for the farmer’s crops became specialized and the margins of profit smaller.
Slowly over a couple decades … but you’re talking about people and places with a century or more of active (albeit somewhat rose-colored and otherwise idealized) memories. … it became harder and harder to find a path of sure advancement. It became less and less certain that children could match the comfort and prosperity of their parents. It became harder and harder for the current adults to achieve the stability and surety that their parents had.
At the same time a few blacks and “others” started settling in these small towns. At the same time more and more television and other media coverage showed more and more about blacks, other nationalities and trumpeted (pun??) their rising status in society.
We naturally fall into “zero sum” thinking. If we’re doing as well as we think we ought, and others are doing better (without our seeing why) we tend to think they’re getting some slice of the “cake” that used to be ours.
Now look at the privilege thing again. Those of us living or working in urban areas see around us large varieties of people from all circumstances. The advantages of some and the disadvantage of others due to circumstances that have nothing to do with their abilites or willingness to work are literally manifest next door to us. If we talk to our neighbors and co-workers we hear immediately and personally how some are in good circumstances by luck … and others fall to poverty by sheer chance. And if we travel we see outrageous wealth and horrible poverty side by side (In SA I saw children with distended stomachs bathing in a small and grossly polluted stream … while a hundred yards away behind a razor wire topped fence and over-enlabeled with ominous signs began hundreds of acres of rich, irrigated and well fertized corn).
In the city, and having opportunity to know more, we *see* the distinctions of privilege at work around us. Once sensitized to it it is shocking just how pervasive and influential even small ad/dis-advantages of privilege can be in people’s lives.
But in the white-bread towns across america “seeing” privilege and commenting upon it means you are a threat to an increasingly shaky social and economic order. For many people, critiquing – or even refusing to participate – in rituals of “othering” can very really and genuinely endanger your ability to make a living. If you need a job, you don’t make waves at the few employers in the area; if you have a store your margins depend on people willing to come in… And so the privilege of seeing privilege simply isn’t there.
Meanwhile, the opportunities in their world are shrinking … .and as larger employers leave, the blacks and others who’ve moved into the small towns, though often limited to less remunerative opportunities by “genteel” prejudice, are now competing for the remaining jobs …. the lower paying ones they were once limited to are now all that is available to many of the “white-bread” people. Even if those competing have the decency to recognize that it is in no way the fault or choice of the minorities that they sometimes take jobs the long term residents now need, they (correctly) recognize that they are now in competition. So then they hear the (often much exaggerated) advantages to minorities or others by affirmative action or other programs and feel a sting of inequity. Very few have the imagination or depth of awareness to realize the depth of inequity – the disadvantage to people – that such programs are meant to alleviate.
And so there is quiet desperation, a socially ingrained inability to recognize privilege, and at the same time racism and bigotry that they don’t recognise as such because they really don’t directly want to hate anyone … even as they lash out in frustration at those who have had no part in their declining fortunes but are simply there or otherwise pointed to by demagogues who sound like them.
Side note on “privilege”. I came to recognze my own privilege by veering route. Fifteen to twenty years ago, before I knew much about it, I heard more and more discussion of “global warming” and as someone with a rep of knowing a few things about science sometimes got asked about it. So I had to decide “do I believe in this?” Or is it hype. This was before internet, and while I had some science books around nothing that directly addressed GW. So I thought … Pop 6B planet surface 200M mi^2 … about 30/mi^2 ,,,, but only 30% land …. ~ 100/mi^2 and only half habitable … ~ 200/mi^2 …. but as a “po” boy in rural, one of my po indulgences was taking a book or two, walking half an hour to 45 minutes … and then spend the afternoon reading knowing I was a mile or more from any other human being. But at 200 people per sq mile of habitable land that was not physically possible … not for me, not for anyone in “white-bread” small towns…. except that we were in fact incredibly privileged in an almost invisible way …. land long tamed of almost all dangerous animals, and incredibly rich food growth giving excess calories. Despite being relatively poor in one of these towns, I was in fact incredibly rich and privileged on a global scale. When discussion of “privilege started up and the meaning made clear that it’s special opportunites you can’t see, it clicked immediately … I had had no idea that the privilege of spending idle afternoons in splendid isolation answerable to no one was anything special … and had thought it something of a runner-up prize in life’s lottery for the social and play opportunities I didn’t have.
But so it is, the people in these white-bread towns cannot recognize their historical privilege precisely because it is invisible – to them, given their experience. But we won’t get through to them about how they are “privileged” until and unless we can open their eyes to the contrasts that exist. And we can’t do that by belittling them.
— TWZ
— TWZ
The only scandal on “Finding your Roots” involved Ben Affleck. No blacks. What is YOUR problem with the evidence? That is what a scientist says….
On a better note, The Daily Kos reported that the California legislature published an wonderful statement vowing to fight Trumpism in every way possible and to work to protect ALL of their citizens.
My daughter sent me a link about Starbucks stores in Seattle putting up signs that signify the stores as safe zones for any LBGTQ or minority citizen who feels unsafe or a victim of a hate crime. They plan to train their employees in how to handle such situations.
The same daughter (in Colorado) sent me a selfie showing her wearing a large safety pin on her shirt. There is a movement for white allies to wear those pins to signify to LBGTQ and minority folks that this person is an ally who is willing to help.
I’m so proud of that daughter!
I do not know what other people may mean or think is being advocated with honest and open and not adopting the republican tactics of lying and cheating and all the assorted “dirty tricks’ of barley ethical behavior but I am not advocating anything like meek disagreement a few times then quiet acquiescence to “reality”. That is defeatist.
confrontational in your face resistance loud and clear is what is called for. relentless pressure no matter what the immediate reaction. Not this and no further but this is completely unacceptable. There is no need to resort to lies and distortion now any more than there was a need to use lies and distortion in the 1960’s civil rights movement the truth is enough
uncle frogy
Nerd @93: “The only scandal on “Finding your Roots” involved Ben Affleck. No blacks.”
Can you please stop using the word “blacks” in this way? Unless you are trying to pastiche Archie Bunker, it is incredibly thoughtless, rude and…yes, racist.
As for “evidence”: “You keep using this word. I do not think it means…etc” (Inigo Montoya).
Evidence means you shut the fuck with opinion/hearsay, and link to third party evidence from legitimate sources outside of yourself. MIA on your claims, not mine.
miles links wrote:
And the days after the election, it became clear she was right as there was a significant uptick in the number of hate crimes committed across America: https://twitter.com/i/moments/796417517157830656 (Don’t read if you don’t want to hate humanity)
The idea that a quarter (or an eighth given the election turnout) of the population consists of complete and utterly irredeemable assholes isn’t unreasonable. Modern polls asking people if interracial marriage should be legal still come out with 20% saying “No.”
Nerd# 97: “Evidence means you shut the fuck with opinion/hearsay, and link to third party evidence from legitimate sources outside of yourself. MIA on your claims, not mine.”
Let’s just start with your “evidence” not even addressing the point I made. As usual, your hindbrain engaged without asking for input from your cerebral cortex.
Now…”Evidence” does NOT come from amren.com, or any other web magazine. It comes from the peer reviewed literature, such as can be found in places of serious learning such as this: https://www.lib.uchicago.edu/
Please prove your point – whatever it may be – by beginning your research there, or somewhere similar.
that comment about the basket of deplorables and the reaction to it and then HRC trying to act nice and try to placate everyone really was a turning point.
The truth of it was that a sizable portion of trumps supporters are of the ultra-rightest stripe and would not be put off by a fascist state and it is absolutely deplorable that the rest just went along with it. Yes they are a basket of deplorable political imbeciles who have just flushed us down the crapper out of fear, hate and resentment.
That was the time she should have let go with some of her repressed anger and pointed them all out in blunt language just who they are and what they stand for
instead of just looking smug and duplicitous
uncle frogy
Miles, either your link to real third party evidence as you specified that AA’s on Finding Your Roots had in their contract that any mention of their ancestors owning slaves happened wouldn’t be aired, or it didn’t happen except in YOUR MIND.
Link to that to date:
Crickets chirring.
Absolutely right on the money. The right wing thugs who are now in charge are going to trash our safety net, and the planet, and anyone they do not like. This is the end of the American experiment in democracy.
@ bhebing #79:
“…I’d suggest it’s a matter of being smarter in propaganda.”
Bullshit. That’s precisely what got us into the mess we find ourselves.
“So, how do you market a nuanced opinion that doesn’t really fit in 140 characters, because I think that is the heart of the matter”
Market??? You think government is a matter of marketing technique?? That is the heart of the problem: the suggestion that better marketing can beat the opposition’s marketing is ludicrous…unless you like the idea that the country has to go through a national trauma every 4 years on the outcome of a battle of contending marketing strategies.
The education of the public doesn’t require beating it over the head with dumbed-down marketing techniques. Educating the public means equipping them to think for themselves REGARDLESS of whatever bullshit is squirted into their eyes and ears. The public can acquire the truth by being sufficiently well informed and properly educated, and THAT is the heart of the matter. The real problem is that we’ve allowed the determination of government to be dictated by marketing techniques and interests…and you are quite evidently completely oblivious to it.
Nerd, 97 and 101: I am done dealing with an old white dude who uses “blacks” as the collective noun for African Americans. You stick with your 1970s attitudes, Archie Bunker, and I will continue to move onwards and upwards. Fuck. Enjoy Trump, you fucking racist.
I don’t get what Miles’ point is in contending that some hypothetical lawyers were involved in some hypothetical situation where a documentary was going to air that depicted some celebrities ancestors in a bad light.
Even if black people had black “slaves” in a traditional master-slave power differential, black people were, for the majority of slavery as an institution, the most abundant of the demography precisely because of the fact that they were not seen as equal to a white person. So here the travesty isn’t so much that an AA film star didn’t want their name disparaged. It’s that Miles thinks that’s the best point they could make about actual black people who were so marginalized that anyone could own them.
But yeah, just focus on your hypothetical and think that you actually have a point in the defense of a black Trump voter by alluding to something that you haven’t shown is the case.
It’s that Miles thinks that’s the best point they could make about actual black people who were so marginalized that anyone could own them is going to come to the aid of their argument that black people who voted Trump are in an abusive master slave relationship.
Because clearly, no agency. After all, they’re not white and don’t know what’s best for themselves. /s
sez bhebing @79: “…I’d suggest it’s a matter of being smarter in propaganda.”
sez anchor @103: “Bullshit. That’s precisely what got us into the mess we find ourselves.”
The thing is, anchor,propaganda worked. Trump’s campaign, which was built largely of propaganda—evidence-free bullshit—demonstrably did beat Clinton’s campaign, which was built largely of evidence and facts. And while Trump may have received a slightly smaller percentage of the popular vote than Clinton, the fact that both candidate, the fact remains that Trump, like Clinton, received a bit over sixty fucking million popular votes. There’s an awfully damned large percentage of the voting public who looked at the Angry Cheeto’s “America sucks, but I can fix everything! Trust me, it’ll be great!”, and Clinton’s “Here’s the facts about what’s right with America, and what’s wrong,, and how I intend to fix the wrong stuff”… and they voted for the Cheeto.
How, exactly, do you propose to get the Cheeto’s supporters to vote for reality-based policies over “Trust me, it’ll be great!”? These guys won’t even listen to reality-based anything while their ears, and heads, are full of “Trust me, it’ll be great!” These guys really do live in an epistemic bubble that mere facts cannot penetrate. I don’t know how the reality-based segment of the population is going to get thru to them, but we damn well better, and pretty damn soon…
I think we have been led astray from my original point, due to Nerd’s lizard brain reactions to keywords.
Here is the majority of my original thesis: “Nerd, firstly I have to say that praising the idea/reality of “free blacks” (your term, I find it a little offensive, but that may just be me) is to play into the hands of racists. These people may not have to work the fields every day, but they had none f the rights as humans as European Americans of the time.”
Which was in response to Nerd #69,who seemed to be passively wiping parts of slave history away by bringing up something he had seen on a TV show. Hilariously, he later asked me for “evidence”, to which I replied that rather than relying on a webmag (as he had done), one should perhaps consult the peer-reviewed literature available in places such as https://www.lib.uchicago.edu/
This is typical of this commenter, who seems to post from their hindbrain, with no routing through the cerebral cortex.
This thread could not possibly be better evidence of why we lost. We’ve got people attacking allies for saying “black”. We’ve got people attacking allies for saying “Bernie”. And SJWs bear some share of the blame. I called out Pharyngula, Vox, Kos, Salon, HuffPo, DU, etc., for all running SJW clickbait about something offensive Louis Gohmert or Michelle Bachmann or Steve King or today’s Racist-du-Jour said, BUT NEVER ONCE RUNNING A PROFILE OR A FUNDRAISING PIECE FOR THEIR DEMOCRAT OPPONENTS! The SJW blogs seem as if they do not actually want to beat these assholes, but rather receive their pay-per-click income from the Outage Machine. Oh, so-and-so called Liz Warren Liawatha, isn’t that OUTRAGEOUS???? But let’s just keep giving him free press, and never mentioning his opponent, because it makes us money, and it feels so good to whip up our self-righteous high-dander! I did not see Kim Weaver’s name in ONE SINGLE LIBERAL BLOG. Y’all made your money by bashing Steve King nearly every week. But it sure seems you wanted him to win, so you can keep up the SJW outrage every time he says “sub-group”. Rather than fight to get him out of office. The thread above is filled with accusations, but not a single piece of GOTV enthusiasm. Are any of you going to head out and register Latinos working n CAFOs and poultry barns? Or just accuse Bernie Bros of sexism?
Y’all talked about Hillary’s ground game putting it all in the bank, but when push came to shove, you just bickered, rather than canvassed and phonebanked. Amanda Marcotte wrote a ridiculous article yesterday claiming it was all misogyny, that America couldn’t tolerate a woman president. While Joni Ernst and Sarah Palin are icons of the Right. This is exactly the Democrat problem, and Amanda Marcotte and Debbie Wasserman-Schultz and Donna Brazile are the symptoms. “we are post-docs who don’t eat meat and drive a Prius and have been to not just one but TWO gay weddings — how dare you challenge out centrist exclusionary pabulum with talk of unions and minimum wages and outsourcing…..why, we just found something offensive someone you’ve never heard of said, so screw your disappearing pension and shitty public school, we have our Outrage Machine to feed.”
one of the problems I see in the basic democratic party strategy is this idea that they are trying to convince the other guy, the opposition voter, to vote with them the democrats.
They do that by trying not to alienate them by bending over with appeasements. With the result that they are somewhere now in the vicinity of Richard Nixon policy wise and with a very similar credibility with many.
While the republicans have been striving forward with their core beliefs and ignoring any adverse reactions or results
ghee look where that gets us!
with 100% of registered voters voting! no no no that is considerably less than 100% turn out? hmm…….?
uncle frogy
@anbheal
Define ” Outage Machine” in specific terms that include actual examples of outrage that you feel is illegitimate.
You do not say why the people you mention are wrong, you just assert it is so. Explain what your reasoning and logic is so that I can figure out if I should give a fuck.
You seem to be an example of why I am not enthused. You do not appear to be an ally worth associating with. Your answers will allow me to confirm.
@Caine, didn’t think you were a fan of the Bush administration. My opinion is that Trump is an existential threat because he’s a return to the Cheney’s, Ashcroft’s and Yoo’s. Palin’s not going to be a worse Secretarg of the Interior than Bush’s confederate loving She’ll employee.
anbheal wrote:
Don’t attack allies. Gotcha.
Except when they’re allies you personally hate? If you’re going to contradict yourself, you might want to space it out a little bit more. Otherwise, people’ll notice.
Re 108:
Miles seems to be missing Nerd’s point that calling them ‘slavers’ because some blacks happened to own a few other black people, is more racist than calling them ‘free’
Seems miles is focused on arguing with Nerd regardless of the point Nerd is making. Talk about ‘lizard brain’ *sheesh,*
As a non-American (who admittedly wasn’t following USA elections that closely) it wasn’t really that surprising to me that Trump won. Because the same is happening (and has been happening for quite some time) in Europe.
I think people who point out xenophobia and racism as the driving force tend to forget – or maybe they don’t know – that it wasn’t just xenophobia and racism that put a certain German politician to power. It was also anti-elitism. And he did it by clearly identifying the “enemies” to blame: the Jews, the leftists and the international capitalists.
The problem is that most politicians are willing address xenophobia, sexism and racism, but not the anti-elitism. Because first they’d have to admit that they are part of the system that is, at its core, also racist, sexist and xenophobic. (just look at Wall Street – how much of it are white rich men? the vast majority of bank management and executives? white rich men again)
I’m not sure if it is any consolation, but we have elected the equivalent of Trump in my country too. And the previous ruling party still doesn’t get why they have lost either.
spoken by a complete idiot who never bothered to look at the demographics of who voted for Trump in 2016…. and who voted for Romney in 2012.
here’s a hint:
same numbers. same people.
there goes your hypothesis.
“Consider this: would you vote for a candidate who called you a deplorable?”
Consider this: do you imagine being called deplorable is more offensive than voting for a pussy-grabber to occupy the Oval Office?
Ichthyic is correct: that hypothetical is spoken by a complete idiot.
I can’t listen the radio these days. The news comes on, and I’m filled with anger and despair. Populism and demagoguery are returning to mainstream politics.
Fuck this shit. No retreat, no surrender.
Just because you’re in Springfield…
https://youtu.be/jhEvHcuw-f0
@ck, 113, re. anbheal:
It’s just the usual “you [marginal group] need to stop complaining so much and work together with us [majority group with at best a marginal concern for your issues] to beat our common enemy [in this system rigged to force you to vote for the lesser evil every time, freeing us from the need to actually address your concerns in any substantial way once we’re in power] [by shutting up about the issues that concern you — that’s just an Outrage Machine — and supporting my favourite candidate and addressing my pet issues instead]. Stop being so divisive and be better allies [to me]! [PS please run fundraisers for my favourite candidate on your blog instead of addressing your own concerns.]”
It’s convenient because they get to keep engaging in the same party politics bullshit that’s brought the current mess about in the first place, while blaming people actually looking to change the paradigm in some way (be those Bernie Sanders voters or third-party voters or in this case SJWs) for their defeats. It’s not because they’re bad at politics, you see, it’s because you lack political savvy and won’t co-operate.
I mean, we’ve had people here berating those who gritted their teeth and voted for Clinton as the lesser of two evils for not doing so with sufficient enthusiasm.
It’s a standard self-serving silencing tactic dressed up as pragmatic political advice.
Miles, you were refuted by evidence, that some free blacks (legal term at the time) owned slaves that were their relatives, which was necessary as their relatives were considered slaves and unable to legal freed.
Linking to a library proved YOUR assholery, as it wasn’t to a piece of evidence therein.. What a loser ploy.
You never did anything to refute my point.
I win based on evidence.
anbheal@109:
And this quote alone proves that you have no idea what you’re talking about and are only interested in attacking “social justice warriors” rather than doing anything that might get real progressives elected to office. If you’d bothered to pay attention to any of these sites, you’d note that they often included positive material about progressive candidates and put their weight behind fundraising for them.
Just take DailyKos as an example. There were many front page diaries, not to mention hundreds from community members, putting forward excellent profiles of and advocacy for progressive candidates at all levels. The entirety of the DailyKos Elections subsite is dedicated to this very purpose and is featured daily on the front page of the main site. Kossacks also raised hundreds of thousands of dollars specifically through the “Orange to Blue” fund-raising initiative that DailyKos runs in order to back progressive candidates across the nation. And that’s only the most obvious aspects of just one site’s support for progressives.
So take your concern trolling elsewhere. Those of us you disparage are the very ones who’ve been out supporting progressives with our money, our advocacy, and our time in the field. When you do as much, then maybe you can criticize what we do. Until then, go whine to the other idiots who disparage “SJWs”, since they’re the only ones who’ll buy you counter-factual nonsense. We know better.
anbheal:
Still being the bigoted idiot, I see. Where the hell were you when I was advocating for Chase Iron Eyes? His campaign was as grassfuckingroots as it gets – he funded his campaign by selling T-shirts. His donors gave on average $3.80. He was okay with that, because Indians aren’t rolling in money. So where the fuck were you, dipshit? Were you spreading the word? You were helping with that very grassroots campaign? Did you share my post all over the place? Did you share and link back to Indian Country Today? No? Thought not.
Shut the fuck up.
“spoken by a complete idiot who never bothered to look at the demographics of who voted for Trump in 2016…. and who voted for Romney in 2012.
here’s a hint:
same numbers. same people.”
Factually incorrect. There was a shift, and Michael Moore spotted it. He called the election right. It’s been staring us in the face since 2012, too. The people who shifted to Trump were and are desperate. Pew polling spotted them in 2012 and called them the Hard-Pressed Skeptics. Some of them were black, some Hispanic, and they’re some of Trump’s minority voters. Anyone who would fix the devastation that 25+ years of ‘free trade’ caused would win their votes.
The older ones remember the fight against NAFTA, and still blame the Clintons. I do, and I found Hillary’s last-minute conversion entirely unconvincing. I voted for her anyway, because he’s a Nazi-hugger, if not one himself. But I can afford to wait 4 years. The people who couldn’t are living on the edge and are beyond wondering how to make ends meet. They’re living triage, deciding which bills to not pay this month, and putting off their kids’ dentistry in order to feed them. And worrying about the spreading opoid addiction among their children.
It’s really clear, and many comfortable liberals sat around far too long letting the inner cities fester, letting Appalachia fester, and letting the rust belt fester. Those lives matter.
It has been kind of weird to watch the authoritarians adopt this alternative reality view: “Climate change isn’t real. It won’t happen to us.” Neatly matched by the middle-of-the-roaders’ “Trump isn’t real. It won’t happen to us.”
When the shit drops down, it seems like humans prefer their imagined realities rather than whatever’s actually happening.
What I don’t understand is why it even matters to Tr*mp supporters that we don’t call them racist. They just voted for a racist to implement racist policies, what do they think is wrong with being racist?
Well, seems like you must not be a teensy tiny bit upset with people who voted for a fascist candidate. Apparently because they’re prone to prove how totally not brutal violent fascists they are by inflicting a bit of violence. You may make it worse! you say. Because really, this person is a nice totally charming decent human being until you do something wrong.
Sounds like an abusive relationship to me.
It also sounds like the discussions I heard throughout my childhood and youth: just because grandpa was a card-carrying member of the NSDAP and a member of the Waffen SS doesn’t mean he was a fascist or in any way responsible for the crimes that happened, right?
cubist @ #107
I don’t see this situation purely as one of propaganda versus reality. Here’s what one blogger said was Clinton’s storyline: “I will be an historic woman president and I am supremely qualified, competent, and tough. I know what can be done and most left-wing things are impossible, but I’ll do what I can within the constraints of the system.” Or, as one person said, “No, we can’t.” (Trump’s message, as xenophobic, racist, offensive and wrong as it is, said, at least “I can fix this” regardless of whether Trump’s proposed actions actually would fix anything or not. See Jake Harban’s comment at #40 above.) That’s a continuation of the downward counterfactualism the Democrats have engaged for a long time—“Stick with us. Things could be worse” (i.e., Republicans will be worse)—rather than the upward counterfactualism of Sanders and, yes, Trump—“Things could be better.”
And the problem is not just that people would rather hear “Yes, we can” to “No, we can’t.” The problem was also that the person asking the electorate to accept the constraints of the system was seen as embedded in it—perhaps, the quintessence of it, was seen as benefiting enormously from it and seemingly saw very little wrong with it. (And, in fact, her husband had architected it.) That is not, any way you cut it, a winning formulation in a situation where people in the US are sick of the status quo and the élites who are perpetuating it and telling everyone how great it is.
So what do we do now? Well, for newer Democrats (the establishment Democrats are a lost cause), one thing is always go on the offensive. That doesn’t mean with “propaganda”—it means with facts and with progressive policies that have been proven to work (and that are normatively correct, besides), most of which are enormously popular even with people who call themselves “conservative” in this country (and have been for decades). It means abandoning the neoliberal frame that both party establishments have. Nothing says those arguments will win but they’re more likely to win than making arguments for things that haven’t worked. Secondly, you don’t take corporate money and you make it clear that you don’t and won’t take corporate money. If you do that, you are perceived as working in the interests of the people who voted you in, rather than only for donors who are paying the big bucks. Advocating real populist policies—like the New Deal policies of the 1930s—that actually help people and having the latitude to work to enact them (i.e., being free from the constraints of large money donations) work better than just fighting back with “propaganda.” That’s all Bernie Sanders’ playbook—he very nearly beat the Democratic establishment with it and, political geniuses that they are, they didn’t even see it coming. We should be working to make it the progressives’/liberals’/lefts’ playbook.
Calling someone fascist or deplorable can be just.
But is far from being productive.
But: telling them that the politics they suport are like the ones certain DEPLORABLE governments of past History, like Nazi Germany, and the Trump political program they (the voters in Trump) defend, are an FASCIST abomination, quite diferent of the principles behind the foundation of the American Republic; maybe them, instead of reinforce their resolve to suport Trump – because some hot-headed (“possible an islamic-commie!”) called them (“true american patriots and apple-pie lovers!!”) fascists or deplorables”- will stop for a moment and think twice about suporting Trump or other politician with the same ideas.
I hope Trump the Chump doesn’t get sick & incapacitated. Pence the Dense (ATBE) would then take over. With Scalia wannabes appointed to the Supreme Court, the USA could be made a theocracy.
Pence the Dense’s record as Governor is scary. He’s a Christian nutjob extremist.
@P.Z
If we acknowledge that people who vote for Obama or Clinton (or just progressive people in general) aren’t purged of all bigotry and can be racist or sexist in a myriad of ways, why the insistence that people who voted are for Trump are by definition racist ? Are only good Democratic voters capable of having complex, contradictory motivations and beliefs ?
wsierichs@60:
Indeed. It’s what lost Tom Mulcair the PM post in Canada: his campaign was “stop harper” — and he kind of mentioned what *he* wanted to do only as an afterthought. So we got Trudeau instead, who for all his dreaminess and a great start, is now starting to do some rather annoying things (yay pipelines, and bah, who cares about electoral reform anyway).
I felt the same way about Clinton. I went in to the campaign feeling pretty meh about her, but as I got to know her policies better, I was getting pretty excited.
But that’s not what she principally campaigned on: she campaigned on a referendum question: Trump, yay or nay. She narrowly won that question, but narrowly enough that she lost on a technicality.
Trump showed with overwhelming evidence in his rhetoric, that he is a bigot, with several facets to his bigotry. Those who voted for Trump were showing support for a bigoted person when a non-bigoted option was available. Even if they thought they were just supporting his inane claim to “make America great again” as his economic policy.
Glad we agree numerobis.
An additional thought:
This should have been a blowout. The Democrat should have beaten Trump 60-40. He is the most unqualified, loathsome, major-party candidate for president ever. Sarah Palin on steroids. It should not have been close. The fact that is was so close that Trump won the Electoral College tells us just how incredibly bad Clinton and her campaign were.
The point I have been trying to make is that ranting at third-party voters (Stein did not draw enough votes to cost Clinton the election, according to the last numbers I’ve seen) and Democrats who voted for Trump (several percent apparently) does nothing to explain why millions of people who should have voted for Clinton were so unenthusiastic or even turned off that they stayed home or only voted down-ticket.
Until that question is credibly answered, the Democratic Party is at serious risk of more failures in future elections.
Nerd @121: “Linking to a library proved YOUR assholery, as it wasn’t to a piece of evidence therein.”
Haha! Gotcha! How many fucking times have you done exactly this? Who’s the asshole now, asshole?
Jeez, what an imbecile.
HTML lesson
Doing this
<blockquote>paste copied text here</blockquote>
Results in this
<b>bold</b>
bold
<i>italic</i>
italic
Miles, when talking about history, context is very important. To a large degree having intellectual honesty requires you consider the times and not always judge by present day standards.
My argument never was that buying of relatives was the only reason for people of color to buy own slaves. There were obviously the usual reasons for those who had a large amount of land to work.
A distinction was made at that time, between free people of color (black, African-American, negro, pick your choice) and those who were slaves. This was seen in census documents of the time, where a free person of color would have their full names listed, their spouse, and those of their children, same as for free white citizens. Slaves were listed under first name, sex, and age.
Slaves could be freed by owners early in American history. Someone who was born a slave, but later freed, might be able to earn enough money to buy and then manumit their relatives.
This path was taken away in various states in the 19th century. An example from Virginia.
Essentially the law from mid 1830’s in Virginia said that those who where free people of color would remain free, but those already in slavery and those born into slavery past that time would remain slaves. It took a war to change that perversity.
The recourse for free people of color wishing to be reunited with family members, like their parents, after the mid 1830 laws meant that they could buy their relatives, but they couldn’t manumit them. So that is what happened. Some bought their relatives, but treated them like they were freed at home. Rules of the state still had to be obeyed when out in public. They obeyed the law, but relieved their relatives from worst aspects of slavery. Their parents would appear in various documents as slaves, not free citizens.
The case on the genealogy program showed with supporting documents, a free man of color going over to the next county, and buying two slaves that by owner and age (early fifties) who could have been his parents. One did not buy slaves of that age and expect a large amount of work from them. But reuniting the family? Priceless.
So, for not all free people of color (free blacks) was owning slaves was hypocritical or nefarious. It was the only legal way to reunite families.
The article I linked to was by Henry Louis Gates, Jr,, Alphonse Fletcher University Professor and Director of the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research at Harvard University. Very academic. So was the author of the text I bolded, Carter G. Woodson. A bit of his bio:
While I did note that my observation was from a TV show, and I have shown it has a well documented basis, backed up by solid academics. No conspiracy theories or apologetics for slavery. I’ll take the academics to a vague reference to a library.
You are required to either show all cases of free blacks owning slaves resulted in the harsh treatment expect from slavery, or you should show enough intellectual honesty to acknowledge, that given the times and legal requirements, not all free blacks owning slaves was nefarious and dastardly, and there may have been some altruistic reasons for doing so.
Wow, I get knocked out sick for a few days, and here come the usual gang of idiots defending Hillary Clinton by sticking their heads in the sand and ignoring reality.
The reason Clinton supporters want A Single Cause to blame for Clinton’s loss — and have apparently settled on racism for now — is because it prevents them from having to admit that Clinton was a bad choice to begin with. Which she unquestionably was. And if there’s just one cause for her being rejected — preferably a cause which isn’t the fault of Clinton, or of the Democratic Party — why, it means that the Democratic Party doesn’t have to change at all for the next election. Surely if they just sit back and keep collecting money from corporate donors, rubber-stamping the military, and enabling ever-greater violations of civil liberties — as they have been doing for the last 8 years — the electorate will return to them soon!
Clinton knew she was going to run for president again at the next opportunity the very day she lost the primaries to Obama in 2008. Anyone who denies this is deeply in denial. And yet she spent the next 8 years doing things which were obviously, to anyone with a brain, going to make her a hard sell: all those six-figure speeches which had to be kept secret, and which finally ended up leaking anyway and ended up saying “I’m going to be lying to the public to get elected, and what’s going to be really important will be the back-room agreements I come to with people like you”. She refused to work with Black Lives Matter, helped write and then championed the TPP, was a constant cheerleader for war, you name it. Her flip-flop on gay marriage reminded everyone both that she can’t be trusted either to support the rights of minorities when those are under real pressure and that she never leads on issues but has to follow. And, of course, the big war she pushed us into — Obama has said as much, so stop pretending Libya wasn’t her fault — turned out to be a massive disaster; anyone who was actually paying attention knew she had bad judgement as well.
Even though she characterized Bernie Sanders supporters as unrealistic, her supporters ignored the fact that she was seen as untrustworthy, and that she had a solid 25 years of demonization from the right wing which would galvanize the opposition. As it turned out — which anyone with a working brain ought to have been able to foresee — it didn’t even take proof that she had done anything wrong, merely the suggestion, to bring all that back to the surface. A candidate without her baggage would… well, a candidate who did not have fundamentally bad judgement would never have run their own e-mail server for government business in the first place, but one without her baggage would not have been sunk by James Comey. Only someone whose support was extremely tenuous in the first place could lose, according the the NYT, a 50-44 lead practically overnight as a result of something like that.
And then there’s her selection process in the primaries. Object all you like, the primaries were cooked by the DNC. Maybe she would have won anyway, but if so the process of cheating ended up making her perform all the worse when that cheating was revealed, by playing right into her most vulnerable point. Once again: a candidate with good judgement would not have done it in the first place.
And the contempt from her supporters for Bernie supporters, which was, we’re now finding out, orchestrated by her campaign, because they thought it was necessary? Alienating your base has always been a dumb idea, but it was very much a Clinton idea. The “New Democrats”, the DLC members, the “Third Way” supporters, whatever name you choose to call them, the idea was always to spit on the left and chase the right. This was merely one more step in that process. If you think it was stupid, then blame the Clintons and their fellow-travelers for believing it was a wonderful tactic.
Ironically, we Sanders supporters were told variations on “Bernie may be more popular with Independents than Clinton, but he deserved to lose the primary because he wasn’t a Democrat” over and over again. I may be mistaken, but I think I actually saw it repeated again upthread here — I’ve certainly seen it within the last two hours. Well, hey, genuises: registered Democrats are overwhelmingly going to support the Democratic candidate, no matter who it is. (Just as an example, albeit a pertinent one, Sanders supporters mostly, almost overwhelmingly, held their noses and voted for Clinton.) And only a fool (i.e. a Clinton) would expect that Republicans were going to cross over and vote for a Democrat in large enough numbers to make a difference. The only voters worth chasing are the Independents, who Bernie Sanders has always appealed more to than Clinton. In other words, Clinton didn’t just spit on her base, she chased the wrong non-base group. Bad judgement, once again (and not at all surprising).
I’m particularly amused by Nerd of Redhead’s blatant lie here that Trump represents a worse threat to the economic security of the poor than Trump. Before you jump in and scream that Trump is a conman, or whatever words you choose to put around it, I agree with that. Trump is terrible. But although Clinton’s platform may seem nice, what person in their senses believes that Clinton was going to act on it? As mentioned above, her speeches to the banks leaked, and she told them in advance that her “public persona” was going to involve lies to get elected — and that was before the success of Sanders forced her to move to the left! She said in the primary debates that we shouldn’t expect any changes to the status quo, and that she wouldn’t fight any major battles! She said later that she wanted to put Bill in charge of the economy! The man who signed off on the repeal of Glass-Steagall and campaigned on “the end of welfare as we know it”, and was in negotiations with Newt Gingrich to privatize Social Security when the Monica Lewinsky scandal broke and knocked out all his plans! She said in the debates that she didn’t think we needed any more regulation, and chose as her running mate a man who, less than a week before, had been writing to regulatory agencies to try to make them not prosecute the big banks for crimes they had been caught committing! Her credibility on that issue — as on most others, if we’re being really honest about it — is zilch! Saying that voters concerned with economic issues should have voted for Clinton instead of Trump is explicitly saying that voters should not believe transparent lies from Republicans but should believe them from Democrats.
And yes, those economic issues should matter as much as fighting racism and sexism! All issues are intersectional, not just civil rights! What good does it do for, say, gay people to finally get legally married if the banks have crashed the economy so badly that they’re going to lose their homes and maybe starve to death anyway? The plan of the Democratic Party for the last several decades, to use social issues to keep the left on board while they ran as far from economic populism as they could possibly get, was fundamentally a rotten plan, and we should not accept it any longer. Martin Luther King said the same thing, and Black Lives Matter has come to the same conclusion as well: if you’re going to fight for all, you have to fight for one, but it works the other way around, too. No more fucking technocratic condescension!
Clinton was the wrong choice. She will always be the wrong choice. The whole family ought to be considered as politically toxic as plutonium, and for approximately the same amount of time. The people who supported her, and were (and are) blind to her faults, are also the wrong choice. The #1 priority for the next few years, among Democrats, needs to be extirpating the Clintonian Third Way from the party, kicking the Wall Street influence to the curb, and trying to find some people who aren’t basically looking for bribes as a way of life.
Nerd 137: still waiting for links to peer-reviewed sources for whatever it is you’re trying to prove (which seems to have nothing to do with my original point).
PEER-REVIEWED, asshole.
As a professional scientist, I will accept nothing less, and certainly not a reference to something from this same website we are now on, which you provided in a bizarre circular argument.
Cod almighty…
Oh, and by the way:
I, and others like me, have been complaining for 8 years now about how Obama refused to prosecute the Bush administration for their law-breaking, how Obama had claimed that drone bombing was perfectly okay, how his team had defended in court the idea that the president should be able to kill even American citizens that way without trial, how the Obama administration had not only continued Bush’s spying programs but expanded them, how he was building more nukes… and Clinton supporters are precisely the people within the party who were saying that all of that was no problem.
Well, hey, now we have Trump coming into office. He can spy on your conversations to see if you’re his enemy — with precedent from Obama. He can have you killed — with precedent from Obama. He can declare a foreign leader a terrorist and start a war even if Congress votes against it — with precedent from Obama. The fucking losers who make up the Democratic Party establishment have blown it, in the biggest possible way, for all of us. Even if Clinton hadn’t been the worst choice, her faction would deserve to be kicked to the curb on those grounds alone!
wsierichs
Let’s just dream for a moment. Imagine that Murdoch and his poisonous brand of so-called journalism had stayed here in my home town, Adelaide, where he started. Given the absence of Murdoch and his relentless drive to worsen politics and journalism in the whole of the English speaking world, how successful would the GOP have been in demonising the Clintons, Hillary in particular, for the last 30+ years? How well would a get-the-Clintons approach have worked without Fox News in the mix for the last 20 years?
Given this possibility, Hillary would still have attracted plenty of criticism. She is, and has always been, too far left policy-wise for most Americans. But given half a chance, I’d suspect that less concentrated venom and vitriol would have prevented so many people from arguing that she was both too left-wing and too much in the pocket of Wall Street all in the same breath. Lifting or lightening the red curtain of rage that so many people displayed when referring to her would have allowed more people more chance to view her and her policies more dispassionately.
Let’s face it, she won the popular vote anyway. It wouldn’t have taken much reduction in negative pressure for her to have cleared the EC barrier as well.
@nerd
While I think this is true, its not the takeaway lots of people had. Many don’t consume a lot of political news, don’t have the same sources of information you or I may have, and may have reached different conclusions about trump based on different or incomplete information. I know people who are apolitical generally but felt like Clinton would not do anything for them and maybe Trump would. I don’t agree with those conclusions, but there are reasons people would vote Trump beyond race.
Well I wouldn’t agree that voting for Trump would make someone racist. Trump may be a racist, but that doesn’t make all his supporters racist. I doubt that everyone who voted for Trump did it because of his promise to deport all the Mexicans and build a big wall at Mexico’s expense. Trump’s said a lot of other untrue shit that would have attracted voters, like “make America great again” and “more jobs”. I think we need some rules to govern what presidential candidates say during their campaigns and what the various campaign efforts are allowed to print/say/claim. No one ever talks about reasonable policy that can actually be put into law and how it would benefit the nation; these days it’s all about fooling enough of the voters all the time. Sure as Abe said you can’t fool everyone all of the time – but it is an unfortunate fact that you only have to fool enough of ’em.
@130 Remember, Ryan, as the likely Speaker, would be third…
The perfect Trump voter http://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/one-wish-4
Trump supporters aren’t supporters of racism because Trump is personally racist. They are supporters of racism because explicitly racist policies were almost the only coherent policies he had.
at this point worrying if trump supporters are racist is about as useful as a bucket of cold spit.
what matters more is what we want and how to get it. being against something is OK but being for something is stronger.
uncle frogy
@madscientist #143
It does.
I agree that many people voted for Trump because they saw it as a massive middle finger to “the establishment”.
The problem is that these white people, who decided that everything has to burn down, are not the ones who will
be burnt the sooner or the hardest: oppressed minorities will bear the brunt of it.
Now, either these Trump voters don’t realise this, which means they dismiss the pleas of the oppressed, either they do and don’t care enough.
Both are racism.
A more compassionate society would have given more weight to the effect on oppressed groups.
Yes, for many people it was about economical disenfranchisement, and we can’t dismiss that.
Likewise, we should not dismiss the xenophobia (and misogyny!)
At least both viewpoints are necessary to explain the complicated mess.
uncle froggy @147: absolutely. Now is the time for careful consideration of THE position, and of OUR position. Then we can decide on how best to bring the former closer to the latter. Which is to say, how we can work to minimize the damage caused by 4 years of Drumpf, AND prepare a better candidate for 2020. Because it seems we got things completely wrong this year, with a candidate who could not win over those who were unwilling to listen.
sez jeff w @128: “I don’t see this situation purely as one of propaganda versus reality.”
Again: We have sixty fucking million voters who, demonstrably, did choose to pass over a over a candidate whose campaign was largely based on facts and evidence, so that they could vote for a candidate whose campaign consisted largely of fact-free, evidence-free “Trust me! It’ll be great!” These voters did not and could not compare and contrast the factual merits of the two candidates’ respective policies… because one of the two candidates did not fucking have any factual merits to compare and contrast.
You could argue that the Angry Cheeto’s voters selected him because they felt the Cheeto actually gave a damn about the problems that they were facing, and Clinton didn’t. Fine. How many of those voters actually bothered to do any homework, look into the Cheeto’s track record, find out whether the Cheeto actually had a non-trivial likelihood of even wanting to deliver on the promises he was making? I’m going to go out on a limb and say that approximately zero of the he-gives-a-damn-about-my-problems Cheeto voters did that… because if they had, they would have discovered that the Cheeto has been an amoral, parasitic con artist all throughout his adult life. They would have discovered that this man, who promised them he’d bring jobs back to America, has, in fact, spent that last however-many years outsourcing jobs from America to other countries, and is, therefore, one of the people directly responsible for the problem he’s now pretending he wants to solve. So, he-gives-a-damn-about-my-problems Cheeto voters chose the Cheeto on the basis of their having bought into the Cheeto’s propaganda.
Of course, some Trump voters doubtless chose the Cheeto on the basis of being terminally disgusted, and just wanting to see it all burn. So you’re right, jeff w: The situation isn’t purely one of propaganda vs reality. But if you think the propaganda/reality thing doesn’t make up a frighteningly large percentage of the situation… you may want to reconsider that Kool-Aid you’re drinking.
@#141, mostlymarvelous
If that were the case, then Clinton would have lost the primaries to Sanders, because without the influence of Murdoch, left-wing economic policy would not be considered impractical, war would not be seen as normal, and Clinton would have been laughed out of the primaries as a bad joke.
For that matter, complaining that Clinton’s baggage was “unfair” is terribly hypocritical, considering how she was sold to us as “the adult in the room”. Surely you aren’t suggesting that we should ignore the realities on the ground in favor of a fantasy world in which things are better?
A little story about my home town:
I live in what was the poorest county in Illinois, as of the last census. Most of the towns around here depend on levees to protect them, when the Mississippi floods. The levees are maintained and monitored by the Army Corp of Engineers. Or there were until a few years ago, when we were informed that they would no longer be doing either.
But it’s ok! FEMA came to the rescue, offering us the chance to buy flood insurance for the first time in decades. Except… you couldn’t build anything. Not so much as a shed.
There had been a couple of businesses looking to expand into our town. Nothing big; a grocery store, a gas station, maybe a restaurant (none of which we had). But, of course, not being able to build anything meant that couldn’t happen. The businesses went elsewhere, and took the potential jobs with them.
The last straw came when the volunteer fire chief’s house burned down, and he was told he couldn’t rebuild. FEMA was voted out, at which point we were told not to expect federal disaster relief of any kind. And just as an extra fuck you, we were told any future grant applications would be denied.
And where was our state government, with its Democrat controlled legislature, and Democratic Governor (until 2014), during all this? Well, back in the 70’s, the legislature (Democrat controlled then, too) had this wonderful idea. Why not dynamite a bunch of the levees down here, and make a lake? As one legislator from Chicago infamously joked, it’d be a great place to put his yacht.
The people of the dozen-plus towns that would have been wiped out, had the bill passed, fought the measure and won (It was a colossally stupid measure anyway, but the people around here still had to fight like hell against it).
The reason all this matters, however, is that the northern Democrats have never forgiven the people of this area. Even nearly 50 years later, the children of those legislators (nepotism/dynasticism being a fine art and long-standing tradition in Illinois) from that time never miss an opportunity to screw us.
During the last budget battle, funds for our county services were cut to the bone. The sheriff’s department had all but one of their cars repo’d, and couldn’t afford a night shift. The county court house could only afford to be open two days a week, and had only one bailiff. My town’s elementary school was closed, and it was consolidated with another located forty miles to the north. And so on and so forth.
This is kind of thing has been happening all over the country for decades. The coal mines need to be shut down now, as does the fracking industry, but the replacement jobs need to be put in place immediately.
If Clinton and the Dems had proposed a new CCC to build solar plants and the like, with free re-training and preferential hiring for people like out-of-work miners, she could have taken 10% of Trump’s voters, easily. Instead, people in rural areas got some vague promises about green jobs to replace those lost in mining and manufacturing. Mostly, they got the same message as people in the cities.
“Stronger together” is a nice message. It’s even true. But standing in solidarity against bigotry won’t bring back our jobs, our schools, or our communities. “I’m with her” doesn’t mean shit, unless *she* is going to feed our families.
After my little town kicked FEMA out, we actually got a little grocery store. A tiny place, selling only the basics, it was the second store in what we hoped would become a local chain that would serve the all little towns around here that don’t have so much as a convenience store. It was open for about three months.
Right on the New Year, the Mississippi experienced record flooding. A slow flash-flood, is how one local meteorologist put it: quick to rise, quick to recede. Not quick enough, though.
The levee, the one both the feds and the state refused to maintain anymore, broke a few miles to the south of where I live. It wiped the town of Thebes off the map, where the headquarters for the would-be grocery chain was located. Fortunately, they could still get federal aid. Unfortunately, the pitiful relief FEMA offered wasn’t actually enough for any of the town’s businesses to rebuild.
The owners of the store took a buyout, and left the area. Most of the residents did the same; the few who chose to stay won’t get any federal help rebuilding. The grocery store closed, and the handful of jobs it brought were lost. There’s a mile wide gap in the levee now, and the next time we get a real, months’ long flood, the water will come pay a visit to my town, and many other small towns, too.
Before the election, I couldn’t understand all the Trump signs that had gone up around my town. This is usually a fairly blue area. Plus, he’s a fucking monster. Clinton was clearly the better pick in every conceivable way.
Now that I think about it, though, it’s obvious. People here desperate. They’d vote for the devil himself, if he promised to bring back jobs. It doesn’t even matter that it was a lie when Trump said it, because it’s more than the Dems gave us. More than that: people here are FURIOUS.
I want to be clear here: I voted straight ticket Democrat. I will never vote for a Republican, especially after Trump. But I understand the searing hatred for urbanite Dems like Michael Maddigan and Hillary Clinton. I voted Democrat, not because I thought they would do a damn thing to help us, but because I know the Republicans will burn us so much worse.
So to everyone who says: “Don’t blame the Democrats,” I say yes, blame the Democrats. If they had taken a look outside the cities, and offered a little hope to the miserable people they found there, they’d have picked up the few percentage points they needed to win this election. Like most of the pundits and commentators asking “how could this have happened!?!” they didn’t bother.
Now it’s going to bite us all in ass. Because for many of the people who voted for Trump, this election was a suicide bombing. They’re hoping they’ll find paradise on the other side of the bomb blast, but if not, they’ll settle for hurting the people who have hurt them for so long. And like every suicide bomber, the people they actually hurt were never really their enemies. Their real enemies, the propagandists and the owners, won’t feel the pain.* But desperate people are seldom rational.
*Unless Trump nukes the world.
The Vicar: Here, Here.
Vucodlak: Yes, that’s why the Democrats lost. The leadership has been Reptilians Lite for years now and cannot relate to ordinary people. Too corrupt. They don’t understand yet why they lost to the second-worst political candidate in history because they fielded the worst major-party candidate in all of U.S. history.
@wsierichs #153: Nope. Clinton would have been better than Trump. Even if you don’t care about the cultural impact, the unleashing of racism and misogyny, it’s unquestionable that Clinton would have at least had to pay lip service to climate action. And that matters, matters to the whole fucking planet.
With Trump’s election, and the people he appointed, hope has become unreasonable.
Vicar at #138
As usual, I agree with you. I’ll just add this point: Adolph Reed, Jr. (who pegged Barack Obama’s politics as “vacuous-to-repressive neoliberal politics” back in 1996) said (a few years prior to this election):
That certainly does not mean that Reed thinks the issues of multiculturalism and diversity are unimportant—it means is that the parties employ those issues to divert attention away from other issues that affect the overwhelming majority of the population on which the two parties agree. And we’re seeing that here, in the settling on racism as the sole explanation of Hillary Clinton’s defeat. Somehow the neoliberal policy prescriptions of Clinton and the establishment Democrats (in tandem with establishment Republicans)—which have wrecked the economy and hollowed out the middle class over 30 years—played no role?
I just saw a video in which Mark Blyth, professor of international political economy at Brown, said that, in 2015—seven years after they were bailed out with public funds—bonuses on Wall Street—not regular compensation, bonuses—totaled $28.4 billion while total compensation to every person in this country who earns a minimum wage was $14 billion. Hillary Clinton made $22 million in giving speeches, including the well-known ones to Goldman Sachs, following her tenure as Secretary of State—and she certainly was not at the forefront to raise the federal minimum wage to $15. which itself would still be pretty paltry. Yet absolutely no one who failed to vote for her (or, worse, voted for Donald Trump) had any reason other than those having to do with racism, misogyny, etc.? It seems like an exceedingly narrow theory of human behavior to me.
The most revealing comment I’ve seen from the Clinton camp on the subject of the speeches appeared today in Politico :
I’m not sure if she had said something like that in public, she would have been applauded for her candor but at least, perhaps, it would have made her seem more human. (No matter. If she had, I still would have regarded her and her family as, as you say, “politically toxic as plutonium.”)
cubist at #150
Perhaps I didn’t make my comment clear: I’m not talking about what happened. I was responding to what I thought was a policy prescription for what a liberal/progressive/left presidential candidate might do.
All of Trump’s supporters might have brought into his propaganda—whatever he said or showed them. Absolutely none of it might have been true. The propaganda could make up 100% of the situation. None of that means that some other strategy, based on, say, reality, would not work equally well or better than what Trump did. Progressive policies, in fact, work—it’s not like you have to manufacture an alternative reality—propaganda—around them. It’s probably better not to.
And, we can make the assumption, for the sake of argument, that the vast majority of the 59 million people who voted for Trump are so out-of-touch with reality that some fact-based approach would not, could not work. The election came down to 107,330 individual votes in three states, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania. I think it’s plausible to surmise that even .01% (~590,000 people or more than five times as many as needed to have won those states) of those who voted for Trump would be susceptible to a reality-based, fact-based campaign as well as or even better than one based on propaganda.
I think that, had Clinton, every time Trump talked outsourcing, gone on the offensive (as I recommended) and mentioned that Trump had himself outsourced jobs, that would have brought some reality into the situation. It seems pretty obvious but, for whatever reason, Clinton did not do it.
The “purely” part of my comment was a reference to the idea that it’s better to appear to offer a policy on its merits rather than because some industry has been particularly “generous”—it’s not enough to have one’s statements aligned with reality.
So, there’s this guy who says he wants to ban all people of a certain religion whose members are predominantly people of colour.
He says that Mexicans are rapists and he wants to build a wall against them and deport all those who are in the country “illegally”.
He calls black people lazy, retweets literal Nazis and is cheered on by the KKK.
And somebody says “Yes! that’s the guy! He should rule the country!”, but you really mustn’t call them racist based on those things?
In that case I swear there was never ever a single Nazi in Germany.
@#156, Giliell, professional cynic -Ilk-
Hey, you know what? Hillary Clinton wants to start more wars. She has never voted against a war, never campaigned against one. Even back when she was a college student, it seems, she was arguing passionately in favor of Vietnam. Since Obama has admitted that she was responsible for the bombing of Libya in a highly distinct, personalized way, she has a personal death count in the tens of thousands at the very least, and could probably be said to be responsible for many more, what with Iraq and so on.
She wants to start more wars now. She laid out the plans for them in speeches during the campaign. If she were to become president, many more people will die.
Obviously, according to you anyway, every person who voted for her voted for her because she wants to kill people. After all, nobody could possibly be so sickened by Trump that they voted for her despite her belligerence, and nobody could possibly claim that the offsets of having her in office (or preventing Trump from taking office) outweigh the damage she has done or will do, and nobody could possibly claim that, since Trump will probably get people killed too, they believe that she will kill less people. Since I feel strongly about Clinton’s record of causing deaths, it’s totally obvious that the only reason anyone could possibly have voted for her is so that she can cause more deaths.
That was ridiculous, wasn’t it? Although the first two paragraphs are true, the third one is… well, I’m too tired and sick to derive the logical fallacy/fallacies, but it’s just nonsense. And yet it’s pretty much what you are arguing about Trump and his supporters: you feel strongly about the fact that Trump has made appeals to racism, therefore every person who voted for him must necessarily have voted for him because of that racism. It does not follow, and you just sound silly.
@157
not all of them are racists that would be absurd. They voted for an admitted sexual abuser and racist whose main campaign strategy was to insult and demean all those who he did not like and boasted about not paying taxes.
They voted for that guy because they do not care about those things they only care about themselves and their needs and wants. They do not care that happens to those others because they are not like them, let them all rot. but they are not racists no they are not bigots they just voted for one to administer the laws of this country there hands are clean.
If anyone believes that he wont use the military to further his needs maybe they need to enroll in trump uni. to learn how to be rich in this new reality he is going to make when he makes America great again!
uncle frogy
Jeff W.
If this is true, and the parties are indeed basically the same apart from racism, and people picked the racist one, than it seems pretty reasonable to say the victory was in large part due to racism.
I’m not sure whether I’ve shared this here or not, but if not, here goes.
How To Get Through This: Tips From A Lifelong Depressive.
(A hint to the wise here: do NOT write off the mentally ill in this fight. We’ve lived through this already. The anxiety spectrum people know how to cope with the endless inchoate niggles and formless fears that are anxiety disorders – and they know how to keep going despite their fears and worries. They know how to nail down those formless fears, and do something practical about their worries. The depressives know how to keep soldiering on, even though there’s no hope anywhere, and your “get up and go” got up and left three days ago. The folks who live with suicide know how to keep living despite the despair, how to find hope in the depths of tragedy, and how to just last another day when that formless space at the end of life seems so damn attractive. The bipolar folks know how to ride the switchback roller-coaster of emotions, without falling off, throwing up, or letting the emotions ruin your life. The schizophrenics and psychotics know how to ignore the voices telling them irrational things, or how to dialogue with those voices in order to get rational results out of them. We know what it’s like to live in a world gone mad – it’s just this time, everyone else gets to share it with us. And we have SKILLS and EXPERIENCE, which means we’re more likely to either get through it all without really falling apart, or if we do fall apart, at least we have our feathers numbered… for just such an emergency).
The Vicar
REally, going for the “the overbearing woman made Obama do it” narrative? I don’t deny her responsibility and I would have voted for her gritting my teeth, but acting as if all those things were just the doing of Clinton with Obama the commander in chief and president being unable to stop her is ridiculous.
I know you’re a complete asshole anyway, but really, this is pathetic even by your standards. For this to be an analogy to my argument you’d have to demonstrate that Trump indeed had some non-racist, non-imperialistic, non-big capital, non-bellicose alternatives.
People voted and should have voted for Clinton as the lesser evil. I’m pretty sure that some actually voted for her because they agree with her pro war stance. But many people voted for Sanders in the primaries because they believed that Clinton was wrong and Sanders right on these issues. They didn’t vote Clinton because they’re suddenly pro war. They voted Clinton to prevent a fascist from gaining power.
Now the ball’S in your court: Demonstrate how Trump voters looked past Trump’s racism and misogyny, pro war and big capital stances in favour of something else. What are the offsets of having Trump in office?
Question: how many of these “You Democrats are sooooo divisive! If you had been CIVVVIL with the Republicans, you wouldn’t have lost!” have ever gone to any Trump-favoring website to tell them to not be divisive and to be civil with the Democrats? And I don’t mean for this specific election – I mean ever during their lives?
I’d bet the entire fortune of Scrooge McDuck on “no”.
The Vicar seems to making the argument (whether he agrees or not) that most of Trump’s votes were votes ‘against Clinton’ and only rarely ‘for Trump’. Like most of the opposite votes were ‘against Trump’ not necessarily ‘for Clinton’.
To think that giving a {list of awful} person your vote, to oppose the non-awful person, because one disagrees with some of the things ‘the non-awful person’ did, absolves one of all the {list of awful} is misguided.
Is it really so repellent that one does, sometimes, have to vote the lesser of two evils? Will voting for the greater of two evils get one any better? I thinks not. So grit teeth and hold nose. Drinking spoiled milk is still better than drinking gasoline.
Only that this hinges on the argument that there is some area where you can be anti Clinton that doesn’t get you into the basket of deplorables. What is the area where Clinton is so different from Trump that voting for Trump is reasonable?
It’s time to pack up the ultra hatred for all things Clinton, exemplified by the Vicar. With her defeat and age, she won’t be running for president again. Its just irrationally beating a dead horse.
Time to start looking for those who you would like to back in the next election to reverse the liberturdian wet dream that Trump seems to be pushing, and start the necessary work to obtain funding, etc. Something you can be for. But that requires real work on your part. You can’t be bothered to do that. Hate is much easier.
“It’s kind of bad when pretty much everybody is called a racist now.”
-Where was this person during the last eight years when Obama and everyone not Republican were “just like Hitler” ??????
The American makeover of 2016
http://satwcomic.com/makeover-of-2016
The guy with the monocle is daddy England, recently having done his own “screw the immigrants” vote .
Yet more suckiness within the same 7-day period.
Robert Vaughn, star of ‘The Man From U.N.C.L.E.,’ dies at 83 http://www.rawstory.com/2016/11/robert-vaughn-star-of-the-man-from-u-n-c-l-e-dies-at-83/
Hillary Clinton’s Popular Vote Victory Keeps Growing http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/hillary-clinton-popular-vote-victory_us_5827a2c5e4b02d21bbc91bbc
Nearly 2 million votes more than the Donald….
Wait, you’re tellin’ me that maybe it wasn’t actually Clinton failing so much as it is the clusterfuck called the US election system?
Yep, a throwback that was a compromise for the time when the small states distrusted the large states.
Originally senators were appointed by the states, and it stayed that way for 125 years. It took the 17th amendment for the people to directly elect their senators. Now we need to directly elect a president.
Link to wiki on the 17th amendment.
Absolutely right. They did not, and if they did find some of it out, they dismissed it. The people who gave Trump the Presidency switched from Obama-backers to Trump-backers over the last 8 years. They don’t have much time to read up on politics and think about it. This group of people have been desperately trying to make ends meet. They are and have been doing triage on their lives for a long time. Some of them are living without electricity. They don’t have time to watch politics.
They heard Trump’s one clear message other than racism. ‘I will make America great again, by bringing manufacturing back. I will pull us out of NAFTA, I will can the TPP, I will build a wall so that you don’t have to compete with illegal immigrants for lousy jobs, I will make China play fair on trade and reduce competition from Chinese imports, and I hate the cheating banks and their enables.
I care about you and ordinary Americans like you, and you need jobs’
Pure unadulterated economic populism. He was the hope candidate, as many pointed out. Interviews around the country have been showing us this, that people have been voting for him because he would make their miserable, desperate, on-the-edge lives better. That he wasn’t a politician was a big bonus — both sides have made and broken promises of prosperity (for them) for the last 30 years. (Again, these are the Pew Hard-Pressed Skeptics, and are the group that delivered Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania to Trump).
Desperate people are very vulnerable to con games. They do Amway, they buy lottery tickets (the Hope Tax)… They vote for demagogues, for Trumps, for Mussolinis, for Hitlers.
Wow, you people are just utterly delusional. Utterly and completely. In that respect, you are every bit as bad as Trump supporters who think he’s actually going to improve their lives.
You actually have someone upthread, at #152, giving you a direct, exact, perfect example of why people would vote for Trump instead of Clinton without racial motivation. I notice that not one of the usual round of twits (Nerd of Redhead and Giliell, for example) have shown any signs that they even read that one.
Did the people who voted for Trump because they didn’t bother to look closely fall for lies? Of course! Duh! We’ve all been complaining about “low-information voters” for ages. This was not a surprise! Besides, the early Clinton primary wins which basically kept her safe from Sanders all had one thing in common: 70 to 80 percent of voters were saying at exit polls that they had never even heard of Sanders, and voted for Clinton based entirely on name recognition. Those “low-information voters” made up quite a large chunk of the lead Clinton had over Sanders, which we’re supposed to believe legitimized her win of the nomination so that we need to shut up about it.
(It’s also amusing that Sanders supporters wanted to count all the California votes, and Clinton supporters refused to do that, and just said “he lost, get over it.” Gee, looks like that stance is coming back to bite you now, doesn’t it?)
Instead, you’re continuing to try and blame the loss on racism as a single factor, and to try and use that — exactly as I predicted — to avoid admitting that the Democratic Party needs to make any changes. Way to go! Keep that attitude up until 2020, then the Republicans can bring back the filibuster without having to worry, because the Democrats will lose all the races that year and the Senate will have a Republican Supermajority.
As for “we need to drop the hatred of Clinton”, that shows that the twits (once again, Nerd of Redhead, Giliell, etc.) haven’t been paying any attention to what I’ve actually been saying, they just saw “hate Clinton” written a million times in place of whatever I wrote. Let me put it bluntly, in so many words, one more time, in hopes that maybe one or two of you may notice at long last:
The Clintons pushed right-of-center “Third Way” candidates and sycophants into control of the party. These people now fill essentially every role in the DNC, and they will repeat the same mistakes over and over again if you let them.
It is not enough to say “well, Hillary Clinton can’t run again, so she’s gone and we can get back to business as usual”. The Clintons’ DLC movement disbanded a few years back because they took over the entire DNC — there was nothing left for them to do. There is nobody left in the positions of power within the party who is not effectively a Clinton clone when it comes to policy. If you want to win, you need to get away from those policies, and to do that you need to rip out everything Clintonian. If you’re not going to bother, because you’re worried about being called Socialist (as though the Republicans don’t do that anyway!), or because you think someone with a focus on economics can’t also avoid being racist, then you deserve the losses these people are going to lead you to over the next decade.
Kinda cute, Vicar, how you avoid the arguments. It’s also funny how you keep picking on me as an apparent Clintonite when I’m not even Murican to start with. You keep arguing against strawmen of your own making.
You are still acting as if Trump had won the majority of the votes and not actually lost the popular vote and won swing states in large parts due to voter suppression. Of course that doesn’t say anything about Clinton’s politics, which are mostly shitty.
But it’S nice to see how you excuse the Trump voters but basically tell people who are currently getting death threats that they deserve them. I don’t think you can sink any lower but I’m sure you’ll try.
You cannot actually know how funny that sentence is.
Oh for fucks sake. Trump won because of both bigotry and non bigotry related reasons simultaneously. His voters were desperate thanks to the shit economic depression they currently live in, and then someone came along and said “You know that black guy who might be a Muslim you voted for, and that woman he hired? They are the ones to blame. Also Mexicans.” So guess what happened? The entire candidacy took on a racist, misogynistic, xenophobic turn. What a surprise. Pretending that either wasn’t a contributing factor is illogical.
Totally non-racist and non-sexist reasons. Also funny how all black people in the USA seem to be rich. Because I get the feeling that when people talk about “poor people in a shit economic depression” those people are exclusively of one skin colour.
Black women must be the richest people in the USA…
Giliell @176
The Vicar appears to forget that to many non-Americans “Socialist” is a badge of Honor not a slur.
Trump lost the swing states of Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania because working class voters (including some blacks and Hispanics) voted for hope, for rolling back open trade, and for someone who wasn’t part of the Washington establishment that has been screwing them over since Ronald Reagan. That establishment includes Clinton, all the DLC Democrats, Tim Kaine, Joe Biden, and many other less famous people. Not to mention the Bush wing of the Republican party.
Their vote was the surprise this election — Clinton was supposed to win, remember? Voter suppression was looming, but it was largely factored in. Sexism was a factor, but it too was known about and factored in. That Hillary was going to get screwed by the media and painted Red and corrupt by the Republicans was a factor, but it was known about and factored in.
The vote of desperate working class people was there for people to see — it was pointed out by Michael Moore and others — but it was brushed off and ignored by the Clintonites even after Bernie Sanders presented clear evidence of a problem. Bernie supporters were brushed off as wide-eyed progressives and naive young people. But many of us supported him because the Third Way BS didn’t work, and he was change. Some of the Bernie voters switched to Trump — yes, blame them! — because Hillary was establishment and they would not believe an establishment candidate would have helped them much. Honestly, I believe they were right — Hillary would have been four more years of incrememtal, let’s-not-upset-my-wealthy-friends-and-donors change.
Trump fought a class war as much as a race war. And he won.
Yes, they will get change. Unfettered Wall Street to defraud them of their meager savings and IRAs, increasing deficits and lack of investment by government in infrastructure (no money to pay for it after the tax cuts to business and the 1%). Hence to increase in the economy. A recession in a couple of years to add to their woes and stagnant wages.
Be careful of change. It may not go the way you want.
my # 181. That should be “hence no increase”, not to.
Trump was not wrong.
If illegal immigrants don’t depress wages some, then economics as a profession is a total fraud, and so is the idea of market set prices. Businesses lobby for immigration and toleration of illegal immigrants because they don’t want to pay free market prices for their labor. They would go out of business or at least make a lot less profit without desperate illegals looking for work. They say those are jobs that Americans won’t do. And they’re right, no one will at the prices they want to pay. Americans will, if they pay enough.
That Black Guy who might have been a Muslim did not pursue the “malefactors of great wealth” who defrauded and caused the economic collapse in ’08. Not one of them went to jail. The economic ‘recovery’ that came was a recovery concentrated at the top. Ordinary people didn’t see much, till very recently. Maybe Obama couldn’t do much, but the people he put in his cabinet and the people who he listened to were the neoliberals. I still love Obama, but I wish he hadn’t listened to the Clinton branch of the party on economic issues. Especially now.
That woman he hired, Hillary? She and Bill and the entire batch of DLC Democrats triangulated away much of what Democratic voters valued. What was left was not small — civil rights, choice, freedom of religion — but it was yoked with Republican pro-business market-oriented economics. And that economics benefits the wealthy unless it comes with fierce regulation (which they also dismantled).
Yes, they will get change. Unfettered Wall Street…
If Trump is like other fascist authoritarians, there will be huge public works projects. “I’m gonna build a wall.” There will be a trade war. And the working class people who voted for him will have jobs, and their lives will get better. They will love him, at least for a while. And while they do, he will dismantle our democracy — that is how this works. It still won’t work well enough, so we’ll go to war.
We needed something to change. It didn’t come from the Left. Now, it’s coming from the Right, FSM help us all.
This article might be of interest to those arguing about the extent to which racism drove Trump voters:
http://www.salon.com/2016/11/13/yep-race-really-did-trump-economics-a-data-dive-on-his-supporters-reveals-deep-racial-animosity/
Short version – it did.
I want to keep the lurkers updated. Still no response to my #139 from Nerd, the “scientist”. (S)he cannot provide links to the scientific literature (such as are available at places such as https://www.lib.uchicago.edu/) to support their argument.
Until (s)he does so, I will treat them with the contempt they deserve. Pathetic loser asshole.
Why do “lurkers” need an update?
They can read.
Gee, linked to an article by Henry Louis Gates, Jr, an American literary critic, teacher, historian, filmmaker and public intellectual who currently serves as the Alphonse Fletcher University Professor and Director of the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research at Harvard University. Also directs researches and narrates the findings on the PBS show Finding Your Roots. A recognized scholar writing the article I linked to support that supported his position. Showed where the article cited the work of another historian on African American History, Professor Carter G. Woodson. Even showed where the the law situation was the case with a simple Wiki search.
What has Miles done to even attempt to demonstrate with a real citation of his own that the premise advanced based on the work of Professor Gates and Professor Carter is wrong? A link to a library with no specificity. Loser distraction. Are you saying that working refuting the work of Professor Gates will be found there? Or just trying to play dumb?
My link requires you, if you have scientific honesty and integrity to find an link of your own to literature by experts in African-American history to show that there were NO cases of free blacks buying their relatives who had to remain slaves due to the law, for the purposes on just reuniting the family, and getting them out of slavery.
Waiting for YOUR link. I will be waiting a long time….
Something I meant to add to my comment from yesterday, at 152: The sort of people I was talking about are still racists for voting Trump, because they put their (primarily economic) concerns ahead of the very lives of the people Trump directly threatened.
My point was and is that these people weren’t unreachable, like the deplorables for whom the misogyny and racism formed the main reason that they voted Trump. If the Democratic Party doesn’t learn to reach out to these people, this will keep happening. The Republicans are very good at pretending to care about rural areas.
Of course, all this may be moot, as it’s by no means certain that there will be a future election.
These deplorables gave the republicans control of it all. They will go after medicare, medicaid and social security. Without medicare and medicaid my wife will die, like so many others that need it to survive. So I will not be nice to them, I will not empathize with them. I will fight them the whole way.
Painful as it was for me (and it was very painful), I’ve read-read vuclodak @152.
Not a truth I want to confront, but neither is it one I can in good conscience avoid much longer.
@ daulnay
Yup. Bread and Circuses. Temple building. Forums. Keep the plebes distracted while the wars wage and the grain supply continues to decline.
For the lurkers, Nerd@188:
See? Still nothing. Just crickets chirruping.
(S)he refuses to search the peer-reviewed literature,, such as are found here https://www.lib.uchicago.edu/) , and instead (s)he just keeps on repeating the same old internet quotes. As a scientist, that does not work for me. This person Nerd is a fraud, because they keep linking to internet articles like they are proven truth. NO, they are NOT. Please cite me the peer-reviewed literature to back up your claims.
Otherwise you are revealed as a bullshit artist with nothing more than smoke and mirrors, and we can all see the truth about you. FRAUD.
Giliell, like I said both racist and non racist reasons simultaneously. Their poor economic conditions and their concerns for that are not racist issues. But definitely racism was a factor. Both worked off each other, its what I am trying to say. Pointing out which one attributed to his win the most is almost pointless bickering.
@miles links, how about instead of ignoring the evidence she presented as if her claim was some extraordinary claim warranting such high skepticism, you actually address it? Because from this angle you are the one who looks like your full of shit as well as a fanatic with a personal vendetta.
#193
Nerd pointed to a source, you have dismissed the source without any reasoning beyond ‘it’s just a tv show,’ which is mere disparagement rather than a reasoned rebuttal. Perhaps you have forgotten that tv shows can contain real research? And you have yet to provide anything other than ‘present a source from this library because I say so’ and a bunch of insults.
Nerd #171
Looks like there is one minority in US right now, that profits from legislative protection against being willy-nilly screwed ower by majority.
The sad thing is, this minority does not recognize it as such, they think they are majority (they won the wote!) and they want to remove all protections for all minorities but themselves.
miles links @193
Nerd of Redhead’s claim was that there were black people who bought black slaves NOT because the formers wanted slaves, but often because the formers wanted to take the latters (who often were relatives of the formers) out of the fatigues of slavery, but they couldn’t simply give them the “free” status them due to the laws at the time, so they settled for “I buy them from other slavers, then I let them live as if they were free despite them being legally still slaves”.
YOUR claim is that there weren’t any black people who did that, and that black people bought slaves only to use them as slaves, NOT as a way to “free” them from the fatigues of slavery when they legally couldn’t be free.
Nerd brought the informed opinion of an historian who specifically studied the matter in question, and who supports their position.
You brought the equivalent of http://www.google.com and told Nerd to do your job in your place. If NErd doesn’t do a good enough job (read: refuse to do your job for you, because that’s not how “burden of evidence” works) of finding evidence to support your position, it’s YOUR fault. YOU abdicated the responsibility of finding evidence, YOU gave it to Nerd, YOU take the responsibility for whatever evidence Nerd finds (zero, because again, not their job).
Also, you keep droning on about “science”. Methinks that you’re trying to pull off a “social science (including history) is not REAL science”.
Problem is, this is a topic of history. Meaning: you’d think that you’re making everything your opponent can say on the matter invalid because “It’s not REAL science”.
Hit “post” too soon. Last line should’ve been erased.
Problem is, this is a topic of history. Meaning: you’d think that you’re making everything your opponent can say on the matter invalid because “It’s not REAL science”.Steve Bannon, misogynist, anti-semitic alt-right kook, becomes a key advisor to Trump. http://www.rawstory.com/2016/11/4-reasons-to-be-disgusted-and-alarmed-that-trump-made-breitbarts-steve-bannons-a-key-adviser/
…but what the media is talking about is how Trump looked into the camera and said “stop it”.
I would argue that acts speak louder than words, but the media hacks are just as useless as during the first years of Dubya.
Guess What? Trump Lied About Locking Out Lobbyists http://www.patheos.com/blogs/dispatches/2016/11/12/guess-what-trump-lied-about-locking-out-lobbyists/
He’s now reportedly considering Goldman Sachs’ Jamie Dimon, the ultimate Wall Street insider, as treasury secretary.
Trump is filling his transition team with some of the very sort of people who he has complained have too much clout in Washington: corporate consultants and lobbyists.
Jeffrey Eisenach, a consultant who has worked for years on behalf of Verizon and other telecommunications clients, is the head of the team that is helping to pick staff members at the Federal Communications Commission.
Michael Catanzaro, a lobbyist whose clients include Devon Energy and Encana Oil and Gas, holds the “energy independence” portfolio.
Michael Torrey, a lobbyist who runs a firm that has earned millions of dollars helping food industry players such as the American Beverage Association and the dairy giant Dean Foods, is helping set up the new team at the Department of Agriculture.
Trump is basically ”draining the swamp” by pumping the mess into the White House.
Neoliberalism: the deep story that lies beneath Donald Trump’s triumph https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/nov/14/neoliberalsim-donald-trump-george-monbiot
From Hitler to Hayek….fascism has become more subtle.
Cool, there are no black or Latin@ working class people.
It’s the same as it was after Brexit: The white middle class pushes the fault to the white working class which gets then excused as desperate people who were grabbing straws. I’m sick and tired about the excuses made for poor white people’s racism.
The data in the article joel grant linked to is pretty damning. First of all it shows that there’s not a big difference between the percentages of whites with and without a college degree in when it comes to support Trump:
And of course the economic argument fails when you look at how people of colour voted. 97% of black women voted for Clinton. One of the poorest demographics almost voted unisono for Clinton. The first to be fire, the last to be hired and they threw their lot in with the big money candidate because they know that they cannot ignore misogynoir.
Only white people have the privilege to ignore the racism. Which means that in the best case they thought “Fuck the blacks, Trump is going to be good for me”.
Ulgaa
My deep sympathies.
jefrir @ #158
Yes, that’s true—except this year’s campaigns were markedly different for both parties. That’s why I added “(a few years prior to this election).” What happened this year was you had challenges against the prevailing neoliberalism on both the right (Donald Trump) and the left (Bernie Sanders)—Trump and Sanders were both anti-establishment candidates. That’s why the establishments on both sides were so eager to snuff these guys out.
In the end, because the Democratic establishment’s candidate prevailed in the primary, it was a contest between the status quo neoliberalism/pro-multiculturalism&diversity (Hillary Clinton), on the one hand, and anti-neoliberalism/anti-multiculturalism&diversity (in a particularly virulent form) (Donald Trump), on the other. In a contest like that, it’s difficult to assess what any particular vote means. If you’re voting for either candidate, are you voting for what he or she stands for or against what the other candidate stands for? And for or against which part or both parts?
My point with Professor Reed’s comment is that, even though people voted in taking into account that new factor, a lot of the frame of the conversation here seems to proceed as if the issues around multiculturalism/diversity were still the only ones that separated the two candidates—the issue as to the economic ideology remains as submerged as before. That actually continues to serve the party establishments of both parties—they don’t want there to be a debate on, or even awareness of, something about which they both agree—and, more so, the Democratic Party establishment—they don’t people to think that Clinton might have lost on ideological grounds. Better for people to think the loss involved only other factors (the racism. disclosures by the FBI, etc.—which, of course, played a role, too).
Pretty obvious now the narrative drumbeat is going to be “racism”.
What can you do about it? Can you talk people out of racism while calling them racist? It’s a ploy to make sure nothing can be done to significantly change things politically. Nothing that won’t polarize and subdivide the electorate into even smaller, more manageable groups.
And most of all it diverts attention from the real cause, the rape of the middle class and the conscious deconstruction of our social and economic systems towards a neo-feudalism.
— TWZ
Gods, you people disgust me.
The worst thing ever is calling racist people racist, why have you got to be so divisive, stop all that racism talk, won’t you, it’s your fault they’Re trying to lynch people!
@vucodlak #152 – That is *exactly* what I’m talking about. And yet people here are still bickering over minutiae and insulting each other (on the same side!).
You know what, Giliell? You’re right. You and others here filling these forums with hate disgust me. Never would I thought I’d abandon a liberal message board due it being filled with so much hate, but then I never thought Trump would make president either.
I’m out. Peace.
npsimons
Go troll the Stromfront with your message of peace and love and understanding. But you’re not going to do that, right? None of you fucking assholes are going to them and talk about how they must understand people.
npsimons
Tone trolls like you never, ever, show that what they claim. They are also very hypocritical, in that they yell at us, but not at those who are really racist, as Giliell #207 says.
Ignoring racism doesn’t make it go away, just hides it under a veneer of “politeness”. Racism must be confronted in its many forms until it goes away, which means those who are racist, or want the racist mentions to go way (they are de facto supporting racism), must confront, acknowledge, and do the introspection to stop being racist. No problem can be solved until it is acknowledged by those who need to learn, like yourself.
Also, let’s talk about hate. Let’S talk about “Lynching lists” for black students. Swastikas sprayed on buildings, dorm rooms, churches. Latin@ students being told they’re all getting deported . Women getting sexually assaulted and then told that the guy’s allowed to do that because they’re a white guy. Gay pride flags burned. Anti-semites being given positions of power. Trump talking about rounding up three million people (an unfathomable number) claiming they’re all rapists and criminals and drug dealers (fuck due process, right?) and deporting them.
But holding people who voted for that shit, who condoned that shit responsible is hate?
@ Miles #193
Thank you SO much for the shout-outs to lurkers like me. I really appreciate it, because I was just going to let your garbage pass and keep lurking. But since you were soooo insistent on getting lurkers’ attention, I just had to respond.
You want the peer-reviewed journal articles? Fine. Here you are:
Nerd’s link at American Renaissance was just an extract from a longer article at The Root (http://www.theroot.com/articles/history/2013/03/black_slave_owners_did_they_exist/) in which HL Gates linked to the sources he used for his article summarizing the historical research on the topic. Surprise, surprise, they were published in peer-reviewed journals!
The ones most relevant to Nerd’s claim that many free black owners of slaves owned their own family members to free them from the worst burdens of slavery were:
“Free Negro Owners of Slaves in the United States in 1830” by Carter G. Woodson; The Journal of Negro History Vol. 9, No. 1 (Jan., 1924), pp. 41-85. (http://www.jstor.org/stable/2713436?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents)
“”The Known World” of Free Black Slaveholders: A Research Note on the Scholarship of Carter G. Woodson” by Thomas J. Pressly; The Journal of African American History
Vol. 91, No. 1, The African American Experience in the Western States (Winter, 2006), pp. 81-87 (http://www.jstor.org/stable/20064049?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents)
And, “Free Black Owners of Slaves: A Reappraisal of the Woodson Thesis” by R. Halliburton, Jr.; The South Carolina Historical Magazine Vol. 76, No. 3 (Jul., 1975), pp. 129-142 (http://www.jstor.org/stable/27567319?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents)
So there are your so frequently demanded peer-reviewed journal articles proving Nerd’s point. Do you still want to dispute that many black owners of slaves owned their relatives in order to “free” them from their white owners as a second-best measure since they could not free them outright? It’s really not a controversial position. It’s the scholarly consensus in the field.
Now, as to what you’ve repeatedly claimed to be your main point, where is YOUR evidence?
You claimed at #86:
The last sentence of that is clearly refuted by the peer-reviewed journal articles you requested and I provided. Free slaves owning their enslaved relatives to free them as much as the law allowed is the scholarly consensus, not an idea created by “Finding Your Roots.”
Which leaves your so far unsupported assertion that the TV show would have been contractually prohibited from showing that african-american celebrities ancestors were slave holders.
Care to provide any actual evidence to support that assertion? Something beyond you “having no doubt”? Any examples of similar contracts? Any interviews with involved parties that mention similar clauses? Any examples of disputes that suggest such an issue? Please note that I’m not even demanding, as you did, peer-reviewed journal articles. Just anything to support the notion that there were any such contractual clauses.
All I have been able to find on that account are the many articles about the Ben Afflick controversy, where it is pretty clear that Afflick did not have any such contractual clause (otherwise he would not have had to ask Gates to not include it), and that PBS found it to be a serious breach of their ethical and scholastic standards that Gates agreed to not include it. Which, obviously, would argue against your claim.
So, basically the onus now is upon you to either put up or shut up. Either cite something peer-reviewed to refute the peer-reviewed journal articles supporting Nerd’s claim, or cite anything the hell at all to support your so far unevidenced claim. Or just shut the hell up.
I know which one I am hoping for.
BTW Nerd, having gone this far down the rabbit hole already, I’d be interested to know which black celebrities you were referring to, so I can see what the historical evidence shows in their specific cases. Just out of intellectual curiosity and a desire to complete my little investigation.
*cracks knuckles*
Miles, this is what YOU should have done. It’s called research. Nowadays it can be done via Google and Google Scholar, although some results may be behind paywalls. For example:
In Search of Our Roots
How 19 Extraordinary African Americans Reclaimed Their Past
Henry Louise Gates Jr.,
Crown Publisher, NY, NY 2009
Only selected pages are shown for copyright reasons. He discusses his research into the past, and it includes people on his TV show. My guess is that the incident I mentioned is buried somewhere in the non-preview text.
An article about free black people and slavery in Virginia
Emancipators, Protectors, and Anomalies: Free Black Slaveowners in Virginia.
Philip J. Schwartz, associate professor of history Virginia Commonwealth University
The Virginia Magazine of History and Biography
Vol 95, No. 3 (1987) pp. 317-338
Title sounds good, but only the first page is previewed.
Some evidence found in this article
Colored Freemen as Slave Owners in Virginia
Samil Goldsmyth, James Radford, Peter Hawkins, and John Russell
The Journal of Negro History
Vol 1, No. 3 (1916) pp. 233-242
John Russell was Professor of Political Science, Whitman College, Walla Walla, WA
Excerpts:
“During the last quarter of the eighteenth century, slave-owners in Virginia possessed unrestricted powers to bestow freedom upon their slaves. Under such circumstances free blacks became instrumental in procuring freedom for many of their less fortunate kinsmen. They frequently advanced for a slave friend the price at which his white master held him for sale, and having liberated him, trusted him to refund the price of his freedom. A free member of a colored family would purchase whenever able his slave relatives.”
A couple of examples were given, including the purchase of a father-in-law freed with payment of the 5 shilling recording fee.
Needless to say, the white slave-owners were not amused.
“A law which required and slave manumitted after May 1, 1806 to leave the State within the space of twelve months was passed in 1806, and remained in force until the war rendered it obsolete. Forfeiture of freedom was the penalty for refusal to accept banishment. From this act dates the beginning of this benevolent type of slavery. Free Negros continued to purchase their relatives but held them as slaves, refusing to decree their banishment by executing a deed or will of manumission.”
Exactly what I claimed. Your turn.
Crossposted from Discuss: Moments of Political Madness:
There’s a lot of media and commenter noise about how Trump’s voters were “those left behind by globalization”, or “anti-establishment”. Ed Brayton, on Dispatches from the Culture Wars said:
I responded:
Nonsense: Trump won majorities among men, whites, those over 40, and those making over $50,000 a year. Clinton won majorities among women, all other racial groups, those under 40, and those making less than $50,000 a year (and of course among voters as a whole). Do Trump’s supporters look like an anti-establishment coalition? Most of his voters more likely voted for him because they believed he would protect their privileges. Some will have voted for him because they believe – or at least, hope – that he will bring back decently-paid working-class jobs; and at the least, didn’t find his bigotry sufficient reason not to vote for him. Those are the ones who are going to be most swiftly disappointed, but the majority of his voters are likely to be right, at least in the short term: he, and the Republicans, will protect the interests of privileged groups.
That by no means implies that the Democrats don’t need to craft a program that will appeal more to those at the bottom of the economic heap, or “left behind” by globalization. But overwhelmingly, that means 2016 non-voters. It’s not going to be easy: contrary to many claims, Sanders didn’t bring in a lot of new voters to the primaries – whether he could have done so in the general, we don’t know. And it shouldn’t be attempted under the delusion that most of Trump’s voters supported him despite the bigotry: at best, they didn’t care enough about its targets to stop them voting for him; for many, it was not a bug, but a feature. Understanding how deep and widespread the social pathologies Trump and his European counterparts exploit are, is absolutely necessary in fighting them.
Adding, in relation to this thread: Yes, Trump attracted some of the “desperate working class people” daulnay@180 talks about. But that was not where his support was concentrated, significant as it was in states such as Pennsylvania and Michigan.
Trump fought a “class war” alright: and most of his supporters know damn fine which side he’s fighting on.
birgirjohansson@201,
I think George Monbiot is wrong about Trump and neoliberalism. Certainly, his rhetoric is anti-neoliberal (i.e., anti-free-trade), although up to now his practice (outsourcing jobs to Mexico and China) has not been. Historically, the right can switch between “free-market” and nativist positions according to political convenience and economic conditions (the common thread being the maintenance of inequality and privilege) – and the Brexit vote, Trump’s campaign, and the rise of right-populist and outright fascist parties in Europe indicate that such a switch is well under way, as a result of the financial crash and the anemic and fragile recovery from it. IOW, I think campaigning against neoliberalism is probably now missing the point; we’re back to fighting fascism. Maybe the neoliberals will win the tussle for Trump’s ear, and he’ll go back to supporting NAFTA, TPP, TTIP… but I very much doubt it.
danielhenschel #211
Guess I’ll have to scan my collection of FYR for the show. IIRC it was in season three.
I found this about the ancestors of John Legend (scroll down):
Danielhesnschel, another bit from Google,
Ben Jealous
@joelgrant
This is not news. Racism has been driving Republican voters since the days of Nixon, Trump merely brought it more into the open. Racism also drove a lot of the voters who opposed Obama, but he still won. It’s also unsurprising that a lot of white Republicans who are worried about jobs have bought the line that it’s competition from minorities — the Republicans have been pushing this idea for a long, long time. Obama still won.
A good chunk of the Republican party has been racist since Goldwater and especially Nixon invited them in. LBJ knew the Democrats would lose the racist Southern vote and the South when he signed the Civil Rights Bill. There is no news in that article, it’s exactly what I expected. Democrats have won 4 times since Reagan, and won the popular vote twice on top of that, including twice running a black man for President.
If you’re going to claim that race drove more people to vote for Trump, you’re going to have to show a growth in racism and voters who switched Dem to Rep because of it or who voted now when they didn’t before. Racists are Republicans, and it’s not news. Racists are also likely to blame minorities for taking their jobs, also not news.
“IOW, I think campaigning against neoliberalism is probably now missing the point; we’re back to fighting fascism. ”
True. Whining about neoliberalism is pointless. Neoliberalism is dead, even if it was mainly responsible for this clusterfuck.
@ Nerd, #214 and 215
Thanks Nerd. My Google-fu was weak last night. In my defense, it was 2AM my time when I was researching. I even found the same Buzzfeed article you did, but the page was slow loading, and it was just Buzzfeed, so I skipped it.
For Miles’ benefit, I will anticipate his objection that “Buzzfeed isn’t a peer-reviewed journal article” and give him links to the Encyclopedia of Virginia article on Peter G Morgan, which lists among it’s primary sources at the bottom the peer-reviewed journals Virginia Magazine of History and Biography and Journal of Negro History, and, going one better than peer-reviewed journal articles, I’ll link to the original court documents on the Peyton Polly case (http://dbs.ohiohistory.org/africanam/html/mss/vfm3627.html). Primary source documentation kind of trumps peer-reviewed journals, amiright?
So Miles, there are two very well established and documented examples of african-american celebrities who were featured on Finding Your Roots and who were found to have descended from fee blacks who owned their relatives as “slaves,” documented by both peer-reviewed journals (as you so insistently demanded), and by original fucking primary sources.
Which pretty completely proves Nerd right, and demolishes your assertion that “this “free slave” idea” as you put it was made up for the show in order to avoid showing black celebrities’ ancestors as slave-holders.
As I see it, you have only two choices here. One is that you could demonstrate that you have intellectual integrity by admitting that you were entirely 100% wrong and Nerd was 100% right, and apologize to African Americans for denying an important part of their history and to Nerd for insulting Nerd’s character and scholasticism. (Yeah, right, sure. I’ll believe that when I see you post it.)
Or you slink away without ever admitting you were wrong, or keep blustering on arguing a thoroughly disproven point, either of which would conclusively demonstrate that you are a complete hypocrite who never gave a damn about peer-reviewed articles or any other facts, except to use them as a club against Nerd and african americans.
I’m waiting…
About that article linked by joelgrant in #185, I’m having some trouble with how some of the statistics are handled. It compares voters’ views on white jobs and free trade, plotting them against their mean preference for Trump, but it doesn’t account for the number of people in each bin. If on one of those two issues more people hold a moderate opinion than on the other, then the outliers on the first one will have a smaller effect on how people actually voted. You can’t directly compare the two graphs, unless they both have the same number of people in each bin (unless you weigh the means in each bin by the number of people). Does anyone here have easy access to the original data?
Ooops, I forgot to paste in the link to the Encyclopedia of Virginia article on Peter G. Morgan. Here it is: http://www.encyclopediavirginia.org/Morgan_Peter_G_1817-1890#start_entry
And just for good measure, as an apology for forgetting the link the first time around, here are links to the articles from peer-reviewed journals that the encyclopedia article cites:
Hume, Richard L. “The Membership of the Virginia Constitutional Convention of 1867–1868: A Study of the Beginnings of Congressional Reconstruction in the Upper South.” Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 86 (October 1978): 461–484, esp. 483.
(http://www.jstor.org/stable/4248257)
Russell, James S. Letter to Journal of Negro History 8 (July 1923): 341–344.
(http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/44343)
Lowe, Richard G. “Virginia’s Reconstruction Convention: General Schofield Rates the Delegates.” Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 80 (July 1972): 341–360, esp. 350.
(http://www.jstor.org/stable/4247735?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents)
The FYR episode that mentions Peter G. Morgan is one in the second season (initially S2E4) with Ben Affleck, Khandi Alexander, and Ben Jealous. Due to the censoring of Affleck’s ancestors owning slaves, which got the series in trouble, it doesn’t appear in the collective season 2 for download from the Apple Store. I was able to find a low res copy on Youtube for download a few months ago.
Nerd @212
*cracks knuckles, wrists, elbows and shoulders*
Bwahaha! “My guess” My fucking guess! You science real good, Nerd!
You are killing me! Hahahahaha!!!!!!!!!!!! Oh my Cod!!!!!! “Title sounds good”. I am fucking crying with laughter here!!!!! TITLE SOUNDS GOOD!!!!!!!!!!
Hahahahahahaha!!!!!!!!!!!!
TITLE fucking SOUNDS GOOD!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Giliell @ 205 …
I never denied that there is racism … or that in large Trump voters are more likely hold such views and a greater willingness to be tolerant of overt racism.
What you didn’t do is answer the question. What and how are you going to do about it? You’re talking about almost half the voters in the US.
I am NOT suggesting that overt and blunt racism should not be confronted. I am suggesting that a more nuanced discussion and perhaps less confrontational language is needed to address the many who recognize that overt and blatant racism is wrong … but who are unwilling to acknowledge and recognise the caustic nature of what we might call petite racism.
And by the way, my wife is latin – with a heavy accent to her not very good English. I’m terrified for her now that white supremacists and jingoist feel empowered. (Yes she’s legal, a naturalized citizen, but I don’t think some drunken punks will care). I damned well *do* care about racism/jingoism and the rest. I can’t be with her 24/7. That’s rather more immediate and personal than trolling some white supremacist web site. So take your nose in the clouds superiority and shove it.
— TWZ
danielhenschel:
My point originally was not that free slaves did not exist, it was simply that given my experience of TV affairs, I said there was no way that the AA celebrities on this show would have been allowed/allowed themselves to go on TV with an ancestral backstory where there was slave ownership.
Unfortunately for you and I, Nerd’s lizard brain was unable to detect the subtle difference between this and “there were never free slave owners of slaves”.
C’est la vie, when dealing with lizards such as Nerd.
pitiful
Well would you look at that, miles ignoring evidence and declaring himself the victor somehow. Just whats our problem with Nerd anyways? She/he hurt your feelings or something?
“Title sounds good.”
Update to all lurkers! Miles still hasn’t given any evidence for his claims, still won’t acknowledge the evidence Nerd (and I) have provided, and has revealed himself as a totally ignorant hypocritical fuckhead.
@Miles #224,
You are such a fucking bullshitter.
If you weren’t arguing that they didn’t exist, WHY THE FUCK did you say at #86
That’s a clear claim that 1) the idea is bullshit, and 2) that it was created for the show.
Furthermore, If you didn’t dispute Nerd’s claim, then WHAT THE FUCK were you demanding peer-reviewed journal articles from Nerd for?
A sane, reasonable, and intellectually honest person doesn’t go around screaming for MOAR BETTER EVIDENCE!! for something they accept is true. Are you actually admitting that you demanded peer-reviewed evidence FIVE FUCKING TIMES for something you don’t actually dispute?
As I said before, this is clear proof that you never gave a fuck about evidence or the facts, you were just using the demand to harass Nerd. And you owe Nerd an apology.
Yes, I noted that. But you still have two big fucking problems. One, “AA celebrities” ACTUALLY DID “go on TV with an ancestral backstory where there was slave ownership.”
Nerd has provided references to actual examples FROM THE SHOW where they did exactly that; and I backed that up by providing the actual historical documents and your precious peer-reviewed journal article, to show that the claims made in the show (that the slaves were their wives and children) were very well documented history, not something they “came up with” for the show because of your imaginary contractual clause.
And two, you gave NO FUCKING EVIDENCE for your claim, and still haven’t. No references or citations to such contractual guarantees, no examples of celebs who pulled out or refused to allow their segments to air, or ANY FUCKING THING. Your being “very sure” because of your “experience of TV affairs” IS NOT FUCKING EVIDENCE.
WHERE IS YOUR EVIDENCE?
You are such a lying, bullshitting, hypocritical, fuckhead!
“Title sounds good.”
@ Miles #229
I thought you weren’t disputing that free blacks owned slaves who were relatives in order to free them from slavery? SO, why the fuck should she bother reading a 21-page article to find relevant quotes for you? You don’t dispute it, and you don’t care about evidence, anyway. You’re just a lying hypocritical troll harassing Nerd for no good reason. Fuckwit.
PZ, I think it’s time for the ban hammer on this asshole.
danielhenschel@230
Really? Fuck me, how sad. You inserted yourself into a discussion between two other people, and when one of those people doesn’t roll over and offer their belly to you, you whine for them to be excluded. Christ on a crisp, this is pathetic. I come here for lively debate, not for my spirited co-commenters to behave in this way. Really, just awful, sad, pathetic. You should be ashamed of yourself for that comment.
@ colonelzen #223
I think you meant petty, there, but regardless…
Colonelzen, that’s the same thing accomodationists like to say about atheists, that angry diatribes and confrontational tactics don’t work, don’t change people’s minds, and that we should have more balanced, civilized, nuanced discussions.
But, the problem with that is that it doesn’t always work. Those calm, quiet conversations can be, and usually are, safely ignored. And angry, confrontational language can shake up people’s complacent attitudes and force them to listen.
Remember PZ’s series of “Why I Am an Atheist” posts, where he posted readers’ stories of how they came to become atheists? Many of them were from people who had ignored atheist arguments for years, until they came across fire-brand atheists like PZ that they couldn’t just ignore.
Have you ever read Greta Christina’s article “Atheists and Anger”? (http://gretachristina.typepad.com/greta_christinas_weblog/2007/10/atheists-and-an.html)
I’m going to quote a fairly long segment of it:
It’s not just true about atheism, I’ve read LOTS of comments here from people who have had their eyes opened to issues of sexism and racism specifically because commenters here got in their faces about it, yelled at them, and didn’t let them off the hook in the name of calm, nuanced discussion. Some people just don’t hear the calm quiet voices, and NEED to hear other people’s anger.
Hell, none of this is new. It’s just the argument about MLK’s vs. Malcolm X’s tactics all over again. MLK’s calm rationality wouldn’t have gotten anywhere without Malcolm X’s anger.
(And for that matter, MLK wasn’t as calm and polite as people want to remember him as. Ever read Letters form a Birmingham jail? Or the first 2/3rds of the “I have a dream” speech? That’s some passionate, angry dialogue right there.)
But that’s the great thing about de-centralized movements without any authoritarian thought-leaders. We can do BOTH.
So go ahead and have your calm, non-confrontational discussions, if you think that’s what will work. Share articles and videos that you think are quiet, civil, and nuanced enough, that you think will sway people’s opinions.
But stop telling people who are righteously angry not to have angry, impassioned dialogues. Not to get in people’s faces, and yell until they fucking listen. Because that works, too, and sometimes that’s what it takes.
@ Miles #231
I inserted myself? Oh, that’s rich. For one thing, you want a private conversation between two people? Don’t have it on an open comment thread.
For another:
#186
#193
Fuckwit, you BEGGED for lurkers to pay attention to you, now you got it and can’t handle it.
As for the ban hammer, that’s what happens around here when someone abuses the platform with repetitive, harassing, evidence-free comments.
Where is your evidence for your claims? ANY of them? Why did you repeatedly harass Nerd for evidence of a claim you now say you weren’t disputing?
Apologize to Nerd, or GTFO.
colonoelzen
Now, given that I’m not in the US, lots of this is moot, but I can tell you what I would do and what I’m doing in my home country:
Organise and fight. PZ just posted about some coffee shop owner who had to backpaddle quickly after he met resistance. I think Sanders is right: rebuild the Democrats not as the president voting club it has become but as an organisation that does work on the ground. And if you simply cannot stand the Democratic Party, which I can understand, organise in different grassroots organisations and thrive for cooperation. That doesn’t mean forgetting the differences but it means having a solid coalition against Trumps’ hatred.
It is kinda funny how we’re always supposed to extend grace to the actual racists but them people start to squabble about small stuff when building coalitions. This applies to all. I think that black churches will once again play a big role. I think that it’s important to take muslim organisations on board. And for this to work religious institutions need to acknowledge that women’s rights and LGBTQ rights are important to many and liberal organisations need to acknowledge that religious freedom is very important to them.
I am all listening to how this is working. Because seriously, this sounds like a unicorn: extremely beautiful and easy to picture yet unseen in the wild. Anybody remember Ian Cromwell’s plea to call out racist behaviour instead of calling people racist? And yeah, I know from communication science that you should never criticise the person but always the behaviour but honestly, the only times I’ve seen this approach working is with people who have already done lots of heavy lifting and are willing and able to examine their own implicit biases.
What usually happens is that you say “excuse me, but what you just said was racist” and people go all “you’re calling me a racist 11!!!!”
Also, how much do we have to suck up? How many pampering and sweet talking do we have to do? I’ve asked this before: what is the actual level at which I’m allowed to say something? Because to say nothing is to let people believe that what they’re saying is OK and that you’re on their side.
Nuuuuaaaaaaaaannnnnnnnnce… Fine, they’re not completely racist, maybe just 3/5. That better? Nuuuuaaaaaaannnnnnnnnnnnnnssssssssssssssssssssss…
miles links
Did you ever comment here under another nym?
rq
I see what you did there.
Giliell
I’m too nuanced for you. ;)
In my post-racial dystopia, white liberal zombies wander the world looking for nuance to feed on (“Nuuuuuuuaaaaaaannnnnnnccsssssssssss…” in a deep, breathy gargle). Don’t give it to them!
You know what happens when you talk to racists in a non confrontational way? They get angry anyways. Because mere disagreement is confrontational to them.
Compared to your vacuum responses? You have no links except to the U of Chicago Library. I link to Northwesterns science library at times.
Gee, name calling instead of evidence to back your claims…Tsk, Tsk.
Anybody who can do a google search of “free people of color” (the term used in the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries) is simply incompetent. Link to Wiki article.
At the time of the Civil war, about 10% of the black population were free people of color. Some had been free from the seventeenth century. Some fought in the Revolutionary War (and their descendants can be members of the SAR and DAR), and some fought in the Civil War, on both sides.
There is nothing wrong with learning some history. There is something wrong you won’t listen and learn. As you have so aptly demonstrated.
You have shown nothing to show I am wrong. Hence, there is nothing to learn from your spewings, other than hatred for me. Your problem, not mine.
Just a word to the lurkers. I was a academic years ago, and had the inter-library loans available, and large subscription services through the institutional library, and the libraries at the largest state universities. But that was almost 30 years ago. I am now retired, so I am at the mercy of Google, Google Scholar, and the copyright laws that limit preview pages.
Trying to refute Miles isn’t worth paying the exorbitant fee to obtain full articles.
236 chigau (ever eliptical):
No. You?
Nerd 241:
And the difference is? Really, come on: you chastised me for linking to a school’s online library, which I did as a mock of what you have done. Now, you admit to doing it, but somehow you are different, and better than me. Hmm…
Lurkers: consider whether experience of academia which ended almost 30 years ago is perhaps the reason why this idjit thinks that “title sounds good” is an adequate fisking of a research paper. Lol.
Nerd 242:
Why do “lurkers” need an update?
They can read.
[meta]
miles links, your little vendetta against Nerd is no less futile than it is tedious, though it is revealing.
LOL, I present evidence to back my statement. You present no evidence to refute it. I linked to evidence that the library you say you want the evidence from may the JOURNALS and BOOKs by academics I cited, and that means I am far ahead based on YOUR talking points.
Now, Please point too the Journal links YOU have PROVIDED that show me wrong, that free people of color didn’t exist, and if they did, they didn’t buy slaves for reasons that might be beneficial considering the time and place.
That evidence doesn’t exist, and you know it. Time to stop your complaint. It doesn’t exist except in your mind.
Now, what evidence do YOU require me to present, so the lurkers can see if it is even logical to expect.
Miles, if your next post(s) do not contain a description of the exact evidence you require, or links to evidence refuting my claim, I will just consider you troll and not try to educate you any further. In your mind, you may think you have won in such a case, but I know better.
You haven’t presented any cogent argument with third party evidence to date.
There is no way to convince me I am wrong without you defining what you with high specificity the evidence you require, or using third party evidence to show my claim of free blacks (people of color) could have owned slaves for beneficial reasons is wrong.
*salutes lurkers*
Nerd, nice to see you using the term “people of color”, alongside “blacks”. Welcome to 2016 (or, indeed, 1980).
“Title sounds good.”
John Morales 246:
What does it reveal? Is there an internet diagnosis heading my way? Also, please close your meta links, otherwise it makes the whole downstream thread meta, which could become confusing. ;-)
No internet diagnosing needed to accuse you of being an idiot with a vendetta. Seriously, I don’t speak for other lurkers but this one in particular thinks you have made an ass out of yourself. You have shown that you are intellectually dishonest as well as intellectually deficient, and also wishes the ban-hammer upon you. You’ve earned it imo.
The title does sound good…but you don’t. Not in this thread anyways.
logical cat 51: being told off by someone misrepresenting themselves as a lurker? Not bothered in the slightest, come back when you can be honest.
So I cant be a lurker now? Lurkers are not allowed to respond apparently. Only good lurker is a quiet one.
253 logical cat:
FFS, spare me the weeping soliloquy. OK, so how do we define “lurker”? Because I have seen your name here a lot, so let’s set a grammar rule if we need it. “Posts per month”, or “total posts”? What shall we say?
I rarely posted until recently. I’m not a regular. I mostly lurk. Ppl dont know me here like they know others such as Nerd, John Morales, Giliell, ect. Even if I was not a lurker, you would still be full of shit. This is my last post aimed at you since you clearly are a waste of time.
Spare us all your dishonesty, pls.
@ Miles
Let’s recap:
Uncle Froggy said at #68:
To which Nerd replied at #69:
At which point you inserted yourself into the conversation (to use your phrase) at #86 to criticize Nerd for using the (IMO uncontroversial) phrase “free blacks” and for “praising” the “idea/reality” of free blacks (which she wasn’t doing, just making a valid historical point about the facts of black slave ownership) and then claimed:
You are clearly claiming there that Nerd’s claim at #69 was something the TV show came up with to avoid showing black celebrities in a bad light. A claim for which you didn’t offer ANY EVIDENCE AT ALL. Just your own unsupported certainty.
Nerd @90 provided you with a link to an article by a well-respected scholar in African-American history, who also happened to be the producer of the show Nerd referred to support her claim:
You replied to that at #91 by just repeating your own assertion again, and again gave NO EVIDENCE AT ALL for it:
Nerd addressed your claim directly at #93, saying:
You replied at #96, but (other than again criticizing Nerd for using the uncontroversial term “blacks”) your only response (other than your first to the evidence Nerd gave was:
Nerd pointed out your total lack of evidence for your claim at #97:
At #99 you did two things. First you claimed that Nerd’s article didn’t address your point
But it did, because part of your claim was that the idea of free blacks owning slaves for beneficial purposes was something they “came up with” for the show, and Nerd was showing that that part of your claim is completely false.
Second, you disparaged her evidence, claiming that
which was nothing more than a dodge on your part. Nerd’s article was written by a recognized expert in African-American history, and was based directly on peer-reviewed journal articles. It’s a summary of the scholarly consensus in the field, and if you had read it, it references all of it’s original sources, many of which were peer-reviewed historical journals..
What you did NOT do, once again, is provide ANY EVIDENCE AT ALL for your claim.
At #101 Nerd asked you again for your own evidence for your still completely unsupported claim:
To which, instead of replying with ANY EVIDENCE AT ALL, you played the “flounce” card at #104 and claimed to be “done dealing with” Nerd, along with accusing Nerd of being a racist for using “blacks.” And accusing Nerd of being an old white man. Which I’m not sure is accurate, but whatever.
Despite supposedly being “done with” the discussion, after Throwaway commented on your argument, you jumped back in at #108
Which is another attempted dodge, and a very dishonest one. You clarified at #91 and at #224 what your main point was, and didn’t even mention free blacks’ lack of real civil rights, just repeated your claim about black celebrities not allowing slave owning ancestors to be shown, for which you still at this point haven’t provided ANY EVIDENCE AT ALL. Besides, Nerd never disputed that even free blacks were treated as sub-human, and that point was also made in the article she provided and you rejected. Hell, it’s not even “the majority of [your] thesis” as you claim, it’s at best half.
The next couple of posts were just Nerd responding to your link to a fucking library, and you claiming “Gotcha, how do you like it” (I’m paraphrasing of course), which I assume refers to some prior disagreement between you two.
The next substantive point was made by Nerd, at #137, quoting wikipedia and defining the qualifications of the author of the article she provided before, and of Woodson, one of the scholars that article cited, in order to show that her article was indeed valid evidence.
You ignored that, and just kept repeating your demand for peer-reviewed journal articles at #139, #186, and #193, adding in for some reason shout-outs to lurkers.
Nerd again defended the validity of her evidence and pointed out your total lack of ANY EVIDENCE AT ALL for your claims at #188. Which you ignored, just as you ignored Logical cat at #194, Tizio at #197, who both agreed that Nerd had been providing valid evidence.
Which is where I “inserted myself” (to use your phrase again) at #210, where I provided exactly what you had so repeatedly demanded; peer-review journal articles supporting Nerd’s claim. In fact, they were the peer-reviewed journal articles that were cited in the article Nerd provided, that you dismissed as not being evidence.
I also directly addressed what you claimed at #91 was your main point:
And I challenged you to support your claim:
To which you replied at #224, by simply repeating your claim a third time, still without giving ANY EVIDENCE AT ALL to support it, and completely ignoring that I DID address it directly:
Meanwhile, Nerd provided links to more articles and books supporting her point at #212, a couple of which were behind paywalls. You ignore that except to make fun of Nerd for not spending the money for research that you would ignore anyway.
Also, Nerd provided references at #214 and #215 to two black celebrities featured on Finding Your Roots, who were shown on the show to have had free black slave holding ancestors, a direct disproof of your claim that they would never allow that to be shown.
I followed up on that at #218 with an encyclopedia article, peer-reviewed journal articles, and original court documents, showing that the slaves owned by the black celebrities on the show were their wives and children, which is direct disproof of your claim that that ideas was something the show “came up with.”
In all this time, you have given NO EVIDENCE AT ALL to support your claim, you have dodged or dismissed evidence against your claim, and have insulted Nerd at every turn.
You are just a troll. You have no point, you are just pursuing a grudge against Nerd and harassing Nerd for no apparent reason.
I stand by my suggestion for the ban hammer to fall.
danielhenschel, a very good comment, but please be aware: Nerd is a bloke.
(The Redhead is his wife)
Danielhenschel reminds me. The Ben Affleck scandal .
initial report NYT article.
Show returning with more fact checking.
I plead guilty to be being an old, fat, bald man. Time for bed as the Redhead will wake me in about three hours for needed care.
OK, good to know that wasn’t another of Miles’ slams. I though it was a call back to him comparing you to Archie Bunker before.
danielhenschel 256:
I must apologize. In the midst of Nerd’s noise, I completely failed to properly read and appreciate the quotes you mention at 214 and 215. I completely retract my original comment in the light of this evidence, which directly refutes what I thought of the matter. Sorry Nerd, and as I said somewhere else: I dislike your persona here intensely, but I have been moved to tears in the past by your posts about you and the Redhead’s lives following her stroke. Very very best wishes for a loving couple.