Decision 2016

[Nukatha]

So... where was this Trump tape a year ago? He could have been stoppes by his back in the primary, but someone just let it happen. At any rate, I think we'll see Republicans jumping ship to Gary Johnson in the next week or so, and he'll be in the 3rd debate.

[Dad_Scaper]

I think the chances of him being in the third debate are near zero. But, Nukatha, I'll say the same thing to you I've said to others who like their third parties: Don't just show up every four years and complain that your man (or woman) doesn't have a seat at the table. You get a seat at the table when you have a political machine at your back. "If you build it, they will come."

[wriggz]

Originally Posted by Dad_Scaper

I think the chances of him being in the third debate are near zero. But, Nukatha, I'll say the same thing to you I've said to others who like their third parties: Don't just show up every four years and complain that your man (or woman) doesn't have a seat at the table. You get a seat at the table when you have a political machine at your back. "If you build it, they will come."

This is an amazing point. Maintaining multiple parties is a huge undertaking. it takes election reform and healthy discourse. putting a candidate in each riding at state and national level is a huge undertaking. That said it is hugely worth iylt and leaDS to healthy democracis.

[Dad_Scaper]

Update from the front:

Recently, the headlines involving Trump had to do with women he's known and his treatment of them. The *other* thing he's been up to this past week is dipping a ladle into the well of anti-Semitism. He said Clinton “doesn’t care for you unless you’re Wall Street or Hollywood,” and he combined that with this: “Hillary Clinton meets in secret with international banks to plot the destruction of US sovereignty in order to enrich these global financial powers, her special interest friends, and her donors.” LINK

He's talking about the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. He's bringing with him onto the podium one of the building blocks of centuries of pogroms and other atrocities against the Jewish people. Suddenly it all makes sense: the fascination with Clinton making private speeches to financiers, as if Trump and countless other celebrities haven't done the same. It's important that it's *Clinton* because it connects her to the *Jews*, for all the people who can hear the frequency of that particular dog whistle.

I know the OP suggested we don't call names, but I'll say this: Donald Trump is the goddamned devil. He and Bannon and their other alt-right cronies.

Anyone still talking about Trump and Clinton as if they were similar is just not paying enough attention. He is a bad, bad man, surrounded with bad, bad men.

[vegietarian18]

Maybe I am naive but I don't really see the comparison. I guess if you start with anti-Semitic assumptions they could be interpreted that way. But the leaked emails have some pretty bad stuff about collaboration between the media and the Clinton campaign. I don't think writing off criticism of that as "anti-Semitic" is very positive, for those of us who want to stop Trump temporarily, but fix those issues in the future.

[Dad_Scaper]

Vegie. . . These are code words. They don't come together lightly.

There are lots of things that should be fixed. But this component of his campaign is not a distraction. It is the real deal.

Though while we're on the subject of collaboration between one of the campaigns and the media, how about this. When you think corruption in the family foundation, you think Clinton. When you think corruption with the media, you think Clinton. When you think vulnerable to the influences of foreign powers, you think Clinton. And yet, time after time, scrape the goo off the surface of the half-remembered truth, and Trump has it bad. His foundation is corrupt; he is the one paying a guy who works at CNN and travels incognito on his plane; he is the one with shadowy ties to foreign powers.

Anyway. Don't tell me that references to secret international banks, in connection with "Hollywood," is not a reference to Jewish power, in the context of the worst kind of anti-Semitism. It's chum in the water. He already has a long history of recycling white supremacist nonsense, and his campaign manager is this guy.

He's always been the darling of the white supremacists in this campaign. We are well, well, well past the point where he would get the benefit of the doubt, and I would be troubled by this imagery from anybody. Anybody. But from him? He of all people, familiar with the tropes, knows what it means.

It shouldn't be a surprise, anyway. He's already said awful things about a bunch of other groups. Why shouldn't he go after the Jews, too?

[vegietarian18]

If you read the leaked emails, you can see emails between Clinton staffers literally talking about political articles that will be posted on sites the next day. I'm sure Trump and the main Republicans do the same thing, with Breitbart and Fox and similar sites. The point is the forgiveness to that kind of behavior, trying to attach it to Trump's racist tendencies. I don't think that attachment is correct or necessary or positive.

Maybe his word choice is selected to cater to his racist supporters . Maybe the whole argument is. But bad people can make good points to do bad things. I don't think we should be forgiving of politicians seeking to control media stories, since it makes it harder for all of us to understand where the truth really is.

[Dad_Scaper]

I am so done with Wikileaks. It is an anti-Clinton puppet of Russia, as far as I can tell. But if you want to point me to a couple of emails I'll look at them.

I've known when stories were going to be printed soon. Because reporters talked to me about them, as part of preparing the story, and told me what they were working on. If you want to show me something that's troubling you, though, I'll be glad to look at it.

There are bad people in the world, and there are knowable truths. Any day now, you can abandon your effort to cling to an unknowable center position, that every day goes further into unreasonableness and further into the ditch while the candidate goes further into unreasonableness and further into the ditch.

There is no reason to treat them as similar in any meaningful way. They aren't similar in any meaningful way. I mean, I *thought* when all those emails got out there, that somebody would find something that might resemble a bombshell. So far, it sounds to me like a whole lot of "well, that sounds like a reasonable way to run a campaign."

But like I said, if you found something you want me to look at, post a link.

edit: And yes, it is naive of you to refuse to see the anti-Semitism clearly present in that language, but you're young, and I suspect your education didn't cover the history of anti-Semitism from either side. Trump, of course, would have had the training from his dad the white supremacist, and from associating with others as an adult.

Edit 2: Media Matters addressing CNN's election coverage and the ridiculous way it's striving for "balance," instead of accuracy: https://mediamatters.org/blog/2016/1...problem/213824

edit 3: More on the subject: https://mediamatters.org/blog/2016/1...x-jones/213842

[dok]

References to Hollywood have become stock in trade as a slam on liberal elites. Now, you can absolutely trace it back to anti-semitism if you look back to how that became a standard line, but at this point it's used "innocently" by plenty on the right.

But "a global power structure" of secret international bankers? Come the %&*# on. This is just straight antisemitism, and if you don't know that, you either don't know the history of what antisemitism looks like or you are willfully blind to it when you encounter it. It's not a shock to me that this language comes out now, now that he's given his campaign's direction completely over to Steve Bannon. There's a 0% chance that any campaign professional (e.g. Kellyanne Conway) would have approved that speech.

[srmalloy]

Originally Posted by Dad_Scaper

I think the chances of him being in the third debate are near zero. But, Nukatha, I'll say the same thing to you I've said to others who like their third parties: Don't just show up every four years and complain that your man (or woman) doesn't have a seat at the table. You get a seat at the table when you have a political machine at your back. "If you build it, they will come."

The political landscape reminds me of the exchange from So Long, and Thanks for all the Fish:

“It comes from a very ancient democracy, you see..."
"You mean, it comes from a world of lizards?"
"No," said Ford, who by this time was a little more rational and coherent than he had been, having finally had the coffee forced down him, "nothing so simple. Nothing anything like so straightforward. On its world, the people are people. The leaders are lizards. The people hate the lizards and the lizards rule the people."
"Odd," said Arthur, "I thought you said it was a democracy."
"I did," said Ford. "It is."
"So," said Arthur, hoping he wasn't sounding ridiculously obtuse, "why don't people get rid of the lizards?"
"It honestly doesn't occur to them," said Ford. "They've all got the vote, so they all pretty much assume that the government they've voted in more or less approximates to the government they want."
"You mean they actually vote for the lizards?"
"Oh yes," said Ford with a shrug, "of course."
"But," said Arthur, going for the big one again, "why?"
"Because if they didn't vote for a lizard," said Ford, "the wrong lizard might get in. Got any gin?"
"What?"
"I said," said Ford, with an increasing air of urgency creeping into his voice, "have you got any gin?"
"I'll look. Tell me about the lizards."
Ford shrugged again.
"Some people say that the lizards are the best thing that ever happenned to them," he said. "They're completely wrong of course, completely and utterly wrong, but someone's got to say it."
"But that's terrible," said Arthur.
"Listen, bud," said Ford, "if I had one Altairian dollar for every time I heard one bit of the Universe look at another bit of the Universe and say 'That's terrible' I wouldn't be sitting here like a lemon looking for a gin.”

Ever since the election of 1796, where the first American political parties coalesced -- the federalists and the anti-federalists -- the electoral system in the US has worked to force people into two parties.


In a proportional-representation system, where parties win seats in the legislature based on the percentage of the vote they receive, it encourages the development of multiple parties, because even a small share of the vote can allow a party to build a niche in the legislature and expand.


In contrast, the first-past-the-post -- aka 'winner take all' -- system that is almost exclusively used in the US (only Maine and Nebraska allot electors proportionally in Presidential elections), the majority vote-getter in any given race wins the seat (or all the electors). Because of this, weaker parties are pressured to form an alliance, banding together to become big enough to be able to win elections. Similarly, voters learn not to vote for candidates outside the two major parties (the "wasted vote" principle). These effects cause the vast majority of voters to gravitate to one of the two major parties, no matter how tenuous the alignment of that party's principles are to their own.


This also works to create conglomerate parties that are held together only by the knowledge that if they break apart from each other, they'll become 'minor parties' and get marginalized (note that Bernie Sanders decided to run as a Democrat despite being an independent in order to have a chance of winning, tying himself to a party whose goals he didn't really agree with to hook into its voting bloc). So we see groups like the Tea Party that have divided the Republican Party, holding significantly divergent positions while remaining part of the party as a whole. Like them, groups within the two major parties that hold divergent policy views will remain within their party as a faction that, depending on its size, needs to be catered to by the party organization in order to present a unified front against the other party.


Holding third parties to a standard of being able to compete on an equal footing with the major parties before they're accorded the same consideration as the major parties is inherently biased against them. How do you expect a third party to grow to be competitive with the major parties if they can't be competitive unless they're as big as the major parties?

[Dad_Scaper]

I think of myself as a practical guy. We are where we are. Moaning about the absence of competitive third parties is uninteresting to me. You want to talk about how to get there from here? Fine, that's a conversation. But not one that helps where we are right now, and what we'll do between now and Nov. 8.

Regardless, we have a qualified candidate from one of the two major parties. She is not perfect, but she is leaps and bounds more qualified than anyone running against her, compared to Trump, Johnson, and Stein. The longer this campaign goes on and the more exhausting it gets, the more impressed I am with her grace under pressure.

I won't point at this election and say "this is why we need third parties." One of the two major parties produced a fine candidate.

I will, however, point at it and say this is why the Republican Party needs to examine itself, and why I think that its leadership is without moral authority. They must be held accountable for endorsing him, and for refusing to say that he would be terrible for the country, even when that is plainly true. That's a damn shame, and I wonder if they remember a time when they had integrity, and put their country before their party. If all of these conservative media outlets can say that Clinton is a better candidate, it is inexcusable to me that the conservative representatives of the same communities cannot be so honest with us.

[Aldin]

Show of hands... who wants to see me say pro-Trump stuff here just so we can watch DS's head explode?

~Aldin, registered voter