unnamednewbie13
Moderator
+2,053|6742|PNW

I've been incorrect or sometimes misguided/misinformed on a lot of political stuff in the past. I can admit that. A hardcore Trump supporter will not admit that of themselves.

If they ask me something about my line of political thinking, I'll do my best to answer. Or admit that I'm not informed enough on a particular topic and will get back to them later.

If I ask them something about their line of political thinking and they don't have a straight answer or are feeling cornered, they will change topics. "Dems do it to," "Hillary called me deplorable," "obama aoc bubba pelosi sanders," "well what if a Democrat was caught breaking the law?" Huh, well then they should be held accountable too!
Shahter
Zee Ruskie
+295|6745|Moscow, Russia
So, it's been quite a while since the election was technically over - now is there a way for Trump to still turn this around? I wouldn't say so, but with orange man it's never been straightforward.

Last edited by Shahter (2020-11-26 06:31:05)

if you open your mind too much your brain will fall out.
uziq
Member
+492|3422
there is no way for trump to turn it around. the transition has already begun. his legal challenges amounted to an old, infirm rudy guiliani shouting into a deep well.

stop rubbing your hands together at the thought of instability in the US, putin poodle boy.
Shahter
Zee Ruskie
+295|6745|Moscow, Russia
I mistyped, snd already edited it. But you are just too quick with another of your putin-related insults. Well done.
if you open your mind too much your brain will fall out.
uziq
Member
+492|3422
i know it must disappoint you to see a democratic election working well. the most secure election ever, apparently. isn't it annoying when the institutions of a democracy actually deliver a good result?
Shahter
Zee Ruskie
+295|6745|Moscow, Russia
We already discussed this. There can be no democracy under capitalism. Period. Voters in US validated another choice that's been made for them by their 1%. That that particular turd sandwich you, personally, happen to like more than giant douche that had been put up for election by an opposite faction within their ruling class means exactly nothing.
if you open your mind too much your brain will fall out.
Larssen
Member
+99|1858
Uhm Europe has many vibrant and healthy democracies.
uziq
Member
+492|3422
'we already discussed this. i am going to parrot a line from a book from 1886 and not apply any analysis whatsoever'.
Larssen
Member
+99|1858
The only way trump can overturn this is either by making the electoral college vote for him or by delaying/sabotaging/overturning the confirmation in the senate.

Both options do not seem realistic.
Shahter
Zee Ruskie
+295|6745|Moscow, Russia
Edit: damn, you are quick.
@Larssen re democracy in Europe:
No they don't.

Last edited by Shahter (2020-11-26 06:59:15)

if you open your mind too much your brain will fall out.
Larssen
Member
+99|1858
There's several countries that have multi party democracies and strict rules on campaigning and funding / donation transparency. Most of scandinavia, the netherlands, germany, even greece - how are these 'not real' democracies? There's no hidden class of rich people preselecting candidates Shahter. I know that's the norm in the dystopian bizarre oligarchy-dictatorship mix you live, not here.

As for your fondness of Marx let's for a moment also consider that Russia was the last country on the planet Marx envisioned for a communist revolution. It absolutely wasn't post industrialist, it was still largely agrarian and pre industrial even. Ya'll been doing it wrong since 1917

Last edited by Larssen (2020-11-26 08:34:24)

uziq
Member
+492|3422
shahter's galaxy-brained idea is that because the rich control the media and all the resources, they of course swing elections their way. whilst it's true that they undeniably have a large influence on proceedings and can project their influence further and more insidiously than 'honest' candidates, it's still absolutely not the case that they can 'buy' elections. the electoral process is not prima facie a sham.
Larssen
Member
+99|1858
But they also don't? We have hundreds of independent media all over the continent, from extreme left to extreme right...
uziq
Member
+492|3422
yes, i know, but shahter is regurgitating media theory textbooks from the 1990s, as if nobody in the west has ever heard of chomsky's 'manufacturing consent'.
Larssen
Member
+99|1858
You're filling in his blanks, I don't think he was thinking about the interaction between capitalism-media-politics at all.
uziq
Member
+492|3422
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v42/n22 … hy-go-high

Yet no American president has so flagrantly pandered to white grievance as Donald Trump, even as he has praised himself for doing more for Black Americans than anyone ‘except maybe Abraham Lincoln’. The significance of this ugly achievement should not be underestimated. Trump understood that euphemisms are no longer necessary when it comes to attacking and humiliating people of colour – or making common cause with white nationalists, whose company would have scandalised earlier Republican leaders, whatever their convergences of views. In the last four years, Trump has fed his supporters a steady diet of racism and aggression. A small selection from this extensive menu would include his Birtherist questioning of Obama’s citizenship; his attack on the family of a Muslim-American soldier killed in action; his praise of those ‘very fine people’ among the Neo-Nazis who marched in Charlottesville; the Muslim travel ban; the fulminations against ‘shit-hole countries’; the gulag archipelago that his adviser Stephen Miller created for undocumented immigrants, in which children were separated from their parents and some women forced to undergo invasive vaginal examinations that reportedly resulted in sterilisation; and, not least, the violent dispersal of a Black Lives Matter protest outside the White House.

Not all of Trump’s supporters have enjoyed this theatre of cruelty. But most were indifferent, and saw no reason not to support him a second time. (An estimated 93 per cent of Republicans voted for him.) They were not dissuaded by his brazen misogyny, his envious embrace of foreign strongmen, his corruption and double-dealing or his continual lies. Even when those lies became literally lethal, Trump’s followers were not dissuaded by his conspiratorial claims that Covid-19 was a hoax contrived by Democrats, scientists or doctors to shut down his wonderful economy and deprive him of victory at the polls (or ‘Poles’, as he tweeted on election night). They were not dissuaded by the revelation, in Bob Woodward’s Rage, published in September, that Trump had recognised the airborne lethality of Covid-19 as early as 7 February. They were not dissuaded when he became infected with the virus and briefly acknowledged its gravity. On the contrary, they continued to go to his rallies, where not wearing a mask was a badge of pride. Epidemiologists have estimated that these gatherings caused 30,000 infections and 700 deaths. If this were the Middle East, the behaviour of Trump’s most ardent supporters might have been described by the mainstream media as an expression of fatalism, fundamentalism or a desire for martyrdom. But they believed that the closure of the economy posed a greater threat to them than Covid-19 – even when it began to ravage red states, whose residents, taking their cue from the president, either denied its reality or took comfort in the fact that it had so far mainly killed people in the infernal blue states of New York and California. They did not protest when Trump openly spoke of refusing to accept the election results, or assailed the postal service, or accused the Biden campaign of cheating. There was no possibility that ‘their’ America – and they left little doubt whose America it was – could vote against Trump; any victory for Biden could only be an illegitimate takeover, a triumph for ‘socialism’, for Black Lives Matter and antifa rioters, foetus killers and other enemies of the nuclear family. Trump, as one of his evangelical supporters told the New York Times, is ‘our bodyguard’.

In The Paranoid Style in American Politics, Richard Hofstadter wrote that the right-wing extremists who rallied behind Barry Goldwater’s 1964 race for president were

concerned more to express resentments and punish ‘traitors’, to justify a set of values and assert grandiose, militant visions, than to solve actual problems of state ... Their true victory lay not in winning the election but in capturing the party – in itself no mean achievement – which gave them an unprecedented platform from which to propagandise for a sound view of the world.

Trump, however, succeeded not only in capturing the Republican Party, but in proving that open resentment, raging against foreigners, denouncing ‘treason’ and essentially avoiding governance could be, for nearly half the population, an acceptable, even admirable, style of presidential leadership. Through his thunderous, nihilistic fury, he established an almost erotic connection with his base, which, unmoved by reason, often heedless of its own economic interests, found emotional compensation in his tributes to the ‘uneducated’ and his insults against members of Eastern seaboard ‘elites’.
more in the link.
unnamednewbie13
Moderator
+2,053|6742|PNW

This lays a good outline for why it's so dismaying to get continually sucked into political argumentation with Trump supporters. Almost low-key harassment on the job. The Indifference seems to often be a veneer for their Blatant Support for Everything.

e: That combined with the inevitable segue into covid conspiracy talk directly from qanon, from people who have asked me what qanon was. Just give me an aspirin.
uziq
Member
+492|3422
yes, pretty good précis of some major issues.

In The Frozen Republic (1996), Daniel Lazare argued that the sacralisation of the constitution stands in the way of a genuinely popular democracy. ‘In their infinite wisdom,’ Lazare writes,

the Founders created a deliberately unresponsive system in order to narrow the governmental options and force us to seek alternative routes. Politics were dangerous; therefore, politics had to be limited and constrained. But America cannot expect to survive much longer with a government that is inefficient and none too democratic by design. It is impossible to forge ahead in the late 20th century using governmental machinery dating from the late 18th. Urban conditions can only worsen, race relations can only grow more alienated and embittered. Politics will grow more irrational and self-defeating, while the price of the good life ... can only continue its upward climb beyond the reach of all but the most affluent. Rush Limbaugh, Howard Stern and other demagogues of the airwaves will continue to make out like bandits, while the millions of people who listen to them will only grow angrier and more depressed.

Lazare’s predictions today seem understated. The ‘demagogues of the airwaves’ on Fox News, notably Tucker Carlson, not only fan the resentments of their audiences, they now help steer the Republican Party and influenced the policy-making of the Trump administration. Politics has become so constrained that both Democrats and Republicans dream of achieving through the courts what they can’t achieve through political channels. The Republicans under Trump have exploited this route more effectively than any previous administration. But, whichever side is benefiting from it, this is a defective system.

The weaknesses of American democracy, which the Trump presidency has so powerfully exposed, can’t be entirely blamed on the constitution or on political procedure. They are rooted in the defeat of Reconstruction after the Civil War and the enduring power of white supremacy. In recent years, they have been amplified by deindustrialisation, the collapse of organised labour and the rise of social media. The Democratic Party bears a share of the responsibility for this. Since the Clinton administration, it has prioritised free trade and globalisation over jobs and economic equality, becoming a party of college-educated middle-class professionals, and largely turning its back on working-class voters.

[...]

Although Trump failed to deliver on his promise to revive American industry, he gave his followers the illusion of power, something they felt they’d been denied under Obama. He spoke powerfully to red America’s understanding of what it calls ‘freedom’. This freedom is as old as the republic, as old as our other great freedom narrative: the emancipation of Black Americans in their struggles against slavery, Jim Crow, and, more recently, mass incarceration. It originated as a fantasy of untrammelled individual liberty, made possible by the enslavement of Africans and the genocide of Native Americans. Today it means not having to take responsibility for other people or for the environment. Anti-taxation, deregulation, gun-ownership, ICE raids, Blue Lives Matter and environmental despoliation are its contemporary manifestations. The adherents of this ‘freedom’ don’t seek to build the country but to be left alone – even if it means dying of opioid addiction, or Covid-19. (This was what Mike Pence meant when, in response to a question about virus controls during his debate with Harris, he said that Trump trusts American families to ‘make choices in the best interest of their health’.) They are sovereigntists who don’t care about the opinion of the world beyond America’s borders. They don’t see why they should ‘go high’, as Michelle Obama advised. Going high is what happens when you ascend to heaven. On earth, you do what it takes to win – and in politics it takes a bully.
Dilbert_X
The X stands for
+1,810|6076|eXtreme to the maX
Yes, white people bad.

How is unconstrained African democracy doing today?

https://www.abc.net.au/cm/rimage/12909220-16x9-xlarge.jpg?v=2
Русский военный корабль, иди на хуй!
uziq
Member
+492|3422
what are you even on about?

in any other context you rage and rail against the influence of evangelicals but then, here, you celebrate the bloc of power that has amassed behind trump in a 'culture war'.

i'm sure it all makes sense in dilbert land.
Dilbert_X
The X stands for
+1,810|6076|eXtreme to the maX
Given the choice between a conservative white democracy or a radical black democracy I know which I would prefer.

Maybe the drafters of the constitution weren't so stupid.
Русский военный корабль, иди на хуй!
uziq
Member
+492|3422
a 'radical black democracy'? lmao.
SuperJail Warden
Gone Forever
+634|3690
I wouldn't be so pessimistic about America regarding our political polarization. The R voters elected a dummy president based of identity politics just like they did with Bush in 2000. Eventually they lost power and the democrats are back in charge.
https://i.imgur.com/xsoGn9X.jpg
DesertFox-
The very model of a modern major general
+794|6655|United States of America
The QAnon, electron fraud, and Covid denier conspiracy theorists all make me worry about the future. It's like an even stupider Millerite cult that remains steadfast in the face of their "sure-thing" theories falling flat. The biggest hope for the election fraudsters has been this Sydney Powell's "Kraken" lawsuit that is a rehash of everything previous but with bonus typos galore. People are barely speaking the same language anymore, let alone living in the same realities. I expect a certain amount will eventually realize that they've been conned, but nowhere near the majority. They'll stay and marinate in their worldview via Parler, Newsmax, or OAN and discard previous sources like FOX when it no longer is pushing the narrative they expect.

If it's so hard to convince a lot of Republicans that Joe fucking Biden would actually be better for them than a disinterested, silver-spoon goddamn billionaire, I don't know what chance there is to break them out of that worldview and actually make some progress.
unnamednewbie13
Moderator
+2,053|6742|PNW

Dilbert_X wrote:

Yes, white people bad.

How is unconstrained African democracy doing today?

How did you get "white people bad" out of all that?

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