Omnibus Politics Thread: Campaign 2016 EditionFollow

I'm assuming you're aware of the rioting, so here's one of many links to the whole "got beat for being white, and thus assumed to have voted for Trump" video.

You seriously didn't hear about this?




And I suppose you have a link to a video clearly showing this sort of thing happening? Complete with bystanders laughing about it while it's happening? Or are you just going off rumor, suspicion, and assumptions in a sort of "cart before the horse" manner? What I do find interesting is that there are at least a couple stories out there of claims of people being assaulted by Trump supporters after the election, but amazingly enough, no video or evidence of the actual attacks exist. In one case, the woman latter recanted and admitted she made it up.

The narrative tends to go in one direction, but reality goes in the other.

Reported by whom? Which ones were incidents of violence? How many were obvious liberal narratives representing what they assume Trump supporters believe (like the whole "Make America Hate Again" graffiti)? Cause I've seen a ton of those, repeated ad-nauseum on social media by people who apparently don't realize how unlikely an actual Trump supporter would show their support by spraying an anti-Trump fear mongering message on a wall, while a whole bunch of anti-Trump people would in protest of his victory.

That's the echo chamber I'm talking about btw. I'm no fan of Trump, but some of this stuff has just gotten ridiculous.


Oh. And is there context for those numbers? What's the normal rate during a week in the US? How much is this about focus on this (ie: looking harder for it, and reporting it more in order to fit a narrative about Trump and Trump supporters)? Again, I'm seeing a lot of hype and fear, but not a whole lot of actual events to back it up. Meanwhile, actual incidents of violence and hate are going largely unreported (or at least under reported), in the other direction.

I'll ask again: How many riots happened when Obama was elected? Any? That should tell you right there which "side" is more emotionally driven.

Wrong. You'll notice that the ballots have the name of the president/vice-president on them and not simply the names of electors that you're trusting to pick a president you like. The mechanics of which include an electoral college delegation but the intent of the ballot is not to simply pick electors. Otherwise the president's name wouldn't need to appear at all and there would be no such thing as faithless electors. Hell, we wouldn't even have people running for president; just campaign to be a great elector and let those presidential hopefuls direct their attention on the delegation itself rather than citizen voters.

No, the Sec of Interior is nominated by the president and confirmed by the Senate via vote. But the Senate doesn't vote FOR a Sec. of Interior in an election sense. There's no ballot where the Senate gets to pick between people or a process to be considered beyond being the one guy the president is asking for confirmation on. It's a completely different process and has nothing to do with our electoral system.

Which, again, wasn't always that way but it was eventually understood that keeping the process from the hands of the people was wrong. So the whole "But we need special people to decide the president!" doesn't really have a lot of credibility. The Framers felt we did because they didn't trust voters but perhaps it's well past time we leave that broken thinking behind.

Your argument that the EC is somehow standard operating procedure in our system, however, is a joke. It's an anomaly left over from mistrust in the ability of the people to rule themselves.

Edited, Nov 29th 2016 9:59am by Jophiel

Yay, I got one right!

I'm sure he'll offer them a discount, 10% off room service purchases or something. He strikes me as a nice guy like that.

And by "people", you mean the Portland police? Isn't that what a riot is? isn't it funny just how often a "peaceful protest" by members of the Left just happens to have a few bad apples who proceed to do such isolated things as toss rocks and bottle at police, light cars on fire, smash storefronts, etc? At what point do we place at least a small amount of blame on the "peaceful protesters" who continue to go out peacefully protesting, night after night, despite the fact that every time they do it, their large numbers more or less act as camouflage for those who want to destroy things?




Ah. So just a small number of actual isolated racists were afraid of an Obama presidency, while a really large number of... what? not at all racist folks are absolutely terrified of Trump? Because? Maybe the difference here is that no one defends or supports the actions of white racists, and thus their actions, when they occur, actually are small and isolated, while it seems like a very large number of people on the left support the actions of extremists on their side.

Which is maybe the problem? Perception vs reality and all of that.



I don't know if I agree though. The political climate was different back then. I've posted many times over the year how their seemed to be a sea change in how the Left acted after the 2000 election. Up to that point, the Democrats had controlled congress for 40 years straight (all 40 in the House, and 37 of those 40 years from 1955 to 1995 in the Senate). They had retained the White House up to 2000, so they were still empowered. But when they lost in 2000, it was like they went into panic mode or something. Suddenly, tons of money started flowing to what I can only describe as very radical and very emotional media outlets, designed to engaged in a constant emotion driven rhetoric campaign attacking everything and anything associated with the political Right.

I was as that time (IMO of course) that the Democrats more or less abandoned their decades long positive progressive message and turned to just outright name calling the GOP. Since then, our political divide has grown, and our politics have gotten uglier and uglier. I honestly don't think Trump has anything at all to do with it (although he certainly maybe doesn't help with some of his own rhetoric). If the most moderate and calm conservative in the world had been elected, I'm quite confident that we'd still be seeing angry protesting and riots by liberals, who, having been subjected to nearly 20 years of fear mongering about all the horrible hings the GOP would do if in power, have actually believed that and are scared witless about what will happen next.

Let's not forget that most of those rioting and protesting are relative young. They've lived most of their teen/adult lives with Obama as president, with most of their understanding of the Bush years filtered though the same liberal fear mongering messages. They literally don't know that a GOP in power isn't really the end of the world, but they think it is. They aren't aware that things were actually pretty good during Bush's term in office (and objectively much better in many areas). They've been subjected to a message that has massively over focused on issues of race, gender, orientation, and a smattering of fears about wars and foreign policy and nation building, but don't really have the life experience and context to see the bigger picture.


I remember the fears being raised about Bush when he won. It was all about how abortion would be outlawed, and sex education would disappear, and kids would be forced to pray in school, and learn creationism as science. Amazingly, none of those terrible fearful things actually happened, despite the angry left constantly drum beating the fear. And guess what? I suspect that what those kids rioting today are fearful off aren't going to happen either. They've just been wound up by fearful messaging and are reacting exactly as you'd expect.



So pretty similar to what the violent extremists are doing in response to Trump's election. Well. Except without the rioting, and the "peaceful protesting" that is facilitating such things. I'm reasonably certain that no random bystanders to any of those crimes just stood there laughing about it though, right? I mean, shouldn't we maybe also judge a "side" by how the supposedly non-violent non-hateful members of that side act as well? Because there will always be haters and extremists on all sides of any issue. The real question is how the rest of us react to it.



That's not the "side" though. That may be some disturbed individuals. The "side" is judged by how they act as a group. And frankly, the Left "side" is behaving horribly.



Can't speak to Trump threatening the First Amendment (been drinking, remember?), but Obama absolutely did try to get a number of restrictions placed on gun ownership. He failed because he lost control of congress. Of course, how much of that was just pandering to the anti-gun folks, then waiting until he couldn't get anything passed to make attempts, then blaming the GOP for preventing it? No clue. Honestly though, while I'm sure that sort of thing is what got the most media coverage (cause angry gun toting white folks from the fly-over states always sells well on TV), most of the actual talk among conservatives with regard to Obama's agenda revolved around his spending agenda and foreign policy. And in those cases, most of the fears of the Right did come to pass. He did go on a spending spreed and put us further into debt. His "recovery" did result in terrible GDP growth for 8 years running. His fearful approach to foreign policy did embolden a ton of tin-pot factions of bad guys around the world resulting in violence, strife, and general global chaos.

Those were the things conservatives were really fearful of with regard to Obama. Not "OMG! A black President" or "OMG! He's coming for our guns!". That was the media narrative of the conservative reaction to Obama. I'm sure you can see why they might want that to be the perceived opposition position. Straw man indeed.

Edited, Nov 29th 2016 4:31pm by gbaji

Which is all a great response to the idea of faithless (or faithful as he puts it) electors. It does not, in any way, change the fact that each state has a specific number of electors assigned to them, that does not change based on how much one candidate won the popular vote in that state.



Total straw man though. No one's (well, at least not me) is arguing that we need to return to the good old days when we voted for or appointed electors and trusted them to just kinda hash things out and pick a President because we thought they'd do a better job than the public at large. And even those who are currently arguing for the electors to vote differently than how they were pledged prior to the election are not arguing this based on the idea that they are all a bunch of political geniuses who would make better choices than the public. You are literally arguing against something no one is coming remotely close to talking about here.

The issue of popular vote versus EC vote has nothing at all to do with what you just wrote. It has everything to do with the fact that each state's population is represented by a specific number of electors. Period. And that has not changed. No changes in how electors are selected changes that fact. I suppose one might argue that if all states changed to proportional elector delegations, it might change things. But then again maybe not. Again though, that's not what you have been yammering on about.

Nothing you have posted supports an argument to eliminate the EC entirely and replace it with a direct popular vote. That's clearly what you are arguing *for*, but the arguments you actually use are entirely about how the EC membership is made up. Which seems like a bizarre tack to take. Why not make an argument about why popular vote would be better? Stop trying to pretend that the historical changes in the EC itself somehow support the idea that we should scrap it entirely. Because that just doesn't wash. We've changed the way the electors are chosen over time. That's it. We have never not had Presidents elected by electors instead of direct popular vote. If you really think we should make such a radical change, you kinda need to actually make a rational objective argument for doing that.

Can you do that?

At what point do you place at least a small amount of shame and complicity on the conservatives for continuing to ignore or handwave away the virulent bigots and racists in your own party?

If your answer is "the party as a whole can't stop that behaviour" then, that's your answer. If you think the party as a whole can stop that behaviour then ya'll "conservatives" have a lot of work to do.

Edited, Nov 29th 2016 7:44pm by Bijou

We have mentioned that it fails to do this multiple times. having 51% (~26% net) of support in half the country is better than having 48% support in the whole country. There is no requirement to appeal to different geographic demographics.

That might have something to do with the fact that when the negative action comes from someone identified as "on the right", the response from everyone else "on the right" is a massive condemnation of that action. When the negative action comes from someone identified as "on the left", the response from large portions of everyone else "on the left" is to excuse it, ignore it, or even verbally attack those who bring it up. Like, say, pretending that a riot wasn't really a riot. Or excusing it as "peaceful protests". Or suggesting that you can't really blame people for being upset, so we should just accept it for some reason (you know, cause violence in the pursuit of a liberal agenda is totally justified I guess). Sometimes, others "on the left" actively support the negative action. Like, you know, bystanders laughing while a white man is dragged from his car and beaten.

I'm reasonably certain that no one's reaction to any of the events lolgaxe posted was to laugh and say "Well, they voted for Obama, so I guess it's ok". I sometimes get the distinct impression, even from liberals that I consider pretty darn sane, that when violent stuff like that happens to conservatives, there's this kind of smug thought in their heads that those people probably deserved it for the heinous crime of voting GOP in the first place. Chickens coming back to roost, right?



Again. There were no mass protests from people "on the right" angry about Obama winning an election. So if we just the whole group, the left has behaved badly in that regard, right?

You're doing this bizarre thing where you're excusing the behavior of a large number of people, which has been broadly supported and accepted by an even larger number of people, by trying to claim some kind of parity with individual actions by a very small number of people, which has been broadly condemned by the whole group. Those are not remotely equivalent. It's not fair to judge an entire "side" by the actions of a handful of people. It's quite fair to judge a "side" by the actions of a large number of their members, and even more so by the excuses and downplaying of those actions by the leaders of that "side".


When I see liberal pundits on TV responding to the topic of those riots by ignoring the fact that people are actually destroying things and hurting people and choosing to just talk about the protests and how people have a right to protest, yeah, I'm going to lump them in on the "contributing to the problem" side of the equation. When your stock response to such things is to ignore, excuse, and downplay, you are not helping. Yet, I see that constantly from the mouthpieces of the left. Meanwhile, it's hard to find a single instance of an actual riot engaged in by people "on the right" at all. So you have to go to individual acts of hate instead and make some kind of equivalence. But that's BS, not only because there is no equivalence there, but because there are similar acts of hate by people "on the left". Both "sides" have their haters. But one "side" has rioters as well. And it's the latter group that I'm talking about. Since it indicates a broad acceptance of that kind of behavior among members of the political Left.

So yeah, I call that the Left behaving horribly.

Sure. A popular vote would give equal weight to every citizens' vote, give value to votes in partisan-leaning states where previously they had none and inspire others to participate in the process because now their votes matter.

I mean, it's a really simple argument to make. The counter-argument for why it's proper to disenfranchise millions of voters is considerably tougher, especially without relying on tradition and "But the Founders wanted it".

No, but the presence of empirical evidence does help us ensure that something actually did happen, versus just being claimed to have happened. We've seen a number of cases of "crying wolf" against alleged racist behavior, that were later discovered to be complete fabrications (Duke Lacross team anyone?). It's not like it's not outside the realm of possibility for people to invent claims of this sort of thing purely to gin up the racial narrative. Or have you already forgotten the whole bit about DNC operatives paying people to engage in violent rioting at Trump campaign events?

The left engages in social false flag operations constantly. So yeah, I'm kinda going to want some kind of actual evidence.



Like the ones you aren't providing here?



And? Feel free to enter "black liberation/power organization" if you want to as well. As I said, both "sides" have their haters. You're choosing to ignore one while obsessing over the other. I acknowledge that both exist, but I'm not talking about that. I'm talking about the actions of a much larger group of liberals who presumably aren't in the "haters" group, but are engaging in childish and harmful behavior anyway. That much more represents the "mainstream" of the two "sides", and IMO is a much greater reflection of which "side" is more violent and emotional.