US Elections - There is 'Ahead in the Polls' behind you

[The Anti-Targ]

A Trump win would almost certainly mean Republicans at least retaining their level of control over Congress, if not increasing it. That means Republicans running the whole show. And after reading about Trump's climate change policy, which basically amounts to a climate change denier's wet dream, I think this is far more of a concern than supreme court appointments. If he gets in, and he has a Republican then he will have pretty free reign to implement those policies. By and large supreme court appointments only matter to the USA. The USA's climate change policies affect the entire world.

I think this throws out the lesser of two evils argument and counter argument. The differences between Hilary and Donald on this extremely important matter are stark, and clear. Donald will be bad for climate change policy, Hillary will be good for climate change policy. (or vice-a-versa if you're a denier). She won't be less bad, she won't be not as bad.

[Shryke]

On 8/21/2016 at 1:45 AM, The Fallen said:

This is an article about how, surprisingly, both candidates are against free trade. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/aug/20/trump-clinton-free-trade-policies-tpp

This comment resonates the most with me:

Clinton is totally pandering. Sanders especially wiped up more of this sentiment on the left then usual so she's gotta pander a little harder then Obama did. It's a long running sentiment in the US voting public among various demographics.

[Jo498]

I disagree that a two-party system is necessarily better in getting rid of "bad ideas", disregarding the naiveté about what actually constitutes "bad ideas" (racism, even slavery "worked well" in practice for centuries, were they therefore "pretty good ideas" at some time and place?),  apparently viewed in analogy to falsification of scientific theories (this is also a fairly naive view of science as has been shown in the last 60 years since Popper but it does have some merit without a doubt, among other things not being quite as naive as some of the ideas that were the foil for Popper's in the 1930s ;)).

Obvious counterexample: What if the two parties AGREE wrt a lot of "bad ideas"? E.g. that the natural world can be used as a dumpster with infinite capacity because that's the easiest way for economists to model... A two-party-system all but guarantees that different ideas don't get a platform for an extended period of time, unless they are already powerful enough to infiltrate one of those powerful and entrenched parties. Because everything focusses on parties and only they have access to real political power, movements like tea party, occupy etc. will usually flicker only for a short time.

[ummester]

9 hours ago, MerenthaClone said:

Your blithe "what have you got to lose?" says a lot.  Because for most people, there is a lot to lose, and the people who say that the most are the ones who can usually weather a crisis well. 

It's all relative though isn't it? Other than life, time and healthy offspring - what of real value does any human truly have? Social standing? Wealth?

From the news on the US I see, the standard of living has gone down immensely for the majority over the last 20 years. Between the unemployed and underemployed, those who lost houses, businesses and retirement savings following the 2008 crash - what does the average American really have to lose now? What golden road of opportunity can any still see in front of them?

[aceluby]

2 hours ago, ummester said:

It's all relative though isn't it? Other than life, time and healthy offspring - what of real value does any human truly have? Social standing? Wealth?

From the news on the US I see, the standard of living has gone down immensely for the majority over the last 20 years. Between the unemployed and underemployed, those who lost houses, businesses and retirement savings following the 2008 crash - what does the average American really have to lose now? What golden road of opportunity can any still see in front of them?

Losing their home.  Starving.  Their children starving.

To think people can't have it worse just because 'the standard of living has gone down immensely' it extremely naive, and could be dangerous.

"Hey, that's house needs a lot of work.  I know you can still live in it, it provides everything you need from a house; but it needs new carpets, new paint, new hardwood, some bathroom work, and the kitchen should really be remodeled.  Here, how about we just blow up that house for you and then we can start over.  Don't know how that's gonna work?  It's ok, neither do I, but it's got to be better.  What have you got to lose?"

[ummester]

22 minutes ago, aceluby said:

Starving.  Their children starving.

There are plenty of Wall St bankers to eat if things get that bad

Seriously, at what point do you realise it's not going to get any better, it's probably going to get worse and if you want to leave a better world for your offspring it's time to rock the boat? How far does apathy stretch?

[BloodRider]

5 minutes ago, ummester said:

There are plenty of Wall St bankers to eat if things get that bad

Seriously, at what point do you realise it's not going to get any better, it's probably going to get worse and if you want to leave a better world for your offspring it's time to rock the boat? How far does apathy stretch?

Electing Trump is not rocking the boat.  It is setting the boat on fire, with the logic that, when it is all over that even though you yourself will be much worse off, at least you can swim, and some fuckers that you really dislike will drown in the whole ordeal.

[Ormond]

6 minutes ago, ummester said:

There are plenty of Wall St bankers to eat if things get that bad

Seriously, at what point do you realise it's not going to get any better, it's probably going to get worse and if you want to leave a better world for your offspring it's time to rock the boat? How far does apathy stretch?

Things are not at all as bad in the USA as your analysis. I believe it is quite untrue that the standard of living has gone down "immensely" for the majority. I think the actual facts are that the majority's standard of living has remained stagnant while the top 20% have seen a large increase, so that income inequality has increased. I think this is a big problem. But it is not the same thing as the majority having their standard of living going down "immensely". 

[sologdin]

real wage stagnation in the OECD, surely, since 2008, with reasonable increases in real wages in developing states, by contrast.  the race to the bottom had accordingly concluded, and there's apparently no where to go but up.  

real wages have not increased much in the united states for 40 years, compared to fairly impressive increases in labor productivity.  taken to the logical extreme, all production in the US will be carried out by robots and for export, as human laborers therein shall lack incomes to purchase any of the crap the robots make.

[TerraPrime]

The "this shit is so hopelessly bad so let's burn it to the ground" crowd never has any meaningful way to guarantee that what comes out of the ashes is going to be significantly better so that the pain is worth it.

That claim also carries a different amount of convincing power coming from one segment of society than if it were to come from another. In other words, someone who grew up in the neglected urban centers like inner city Detroit saying this will at least make me stop to consider and sympathize, versus someone who grew up in a typical middle class suburbia.

 

Political stability is a commodity not valued as much by those who have it, it seems.

[Mr. Chatywin et al.]

Trump kind of just admitted that his companies collectively have around $650 million in debt:

http://www.politico.com/story/2016/08/how-much-debt-does-trump-have-227265

[sologdin]

the rightwing populist wants to live in the agambenian state of exception, apparently, a roman iustitium, a caesura of the law wherein all manner of violence shall be authorized in order to preserve a fictive right-populist fauxtopia.

[A Horse Named Stranger]

15 hours ago, sologdin said:

postmodern bourgeois liberalism, rather.  

I am not sure, but isn't that pretty much a describtion for the forum, in which middle class people are talking about the woes of the world with a good class of bourbon in hand. (Yes, it's a Georg Lukacs allusion for the philosophy nerds).

[TerraPrime]

34 minutes ago, Notone said:

I am not sure, but isn't that pretty much a describtion for the forum, in which middle class people are talking about the woes of the world with a good class of bourbon in hand. (Yes, it's a Georg Lukacs allusion for the philosophy nerds).

It's probably fair to assume that most participants here are middle class of one sort or another. But not all. Some are in the higher economic brackets and some are in the lower ones.

[sologdin]

40 minutes ago, TerraPrime said:

It's probably fair to assume that most participants here are middle class of one sort or another. But not all. Some are in the higher economic brackets and some are in the lower ones.

lotsa lumpenized antisocial nihilists here, which is a late capitalist transclass phenomenon whereby the particular class consciousness constantly conjoined in theory to a given socioeconomic class in the marxist sense no longer obtains as a matter of praxis, dropping thereby traumatically individuated class subjects into atomized durkheimian anomie, normally through the routine processes of semiurgical overload, enlightened false consciousness, lyotardian distrust for metanarratives, and nomadization in the deleuzean sense.

[A Horse Named Stranger]

Durkheim?

Really? Oh, Comrade! Didn't you have your Habermas at hand?

[White Walker Texas Ranger]

I'd argue atomized durkheimian anomie a neccesary result of Marxism in practice. You can't meaningfully identify with a class that comprises 80% of humanity, or in a true Marxist utopia, more like 99.9%.

Also @HappyEnt, I think the real benefit of Democracy is in preventing civil wars and succession crises by allowing for peaceful resolution of disagreements and grievances, rather than in finding the best answer, eliminating the worst answer, or any permutation thereof.

[sologdin]

22 minutes ago, Notone said:

Durkheim?

Really? Oh, Comrade! Didn't you have your Habermas at hand?

ha nice! isn't the habermasian anomic simply durkheim played more or less straight? 

7 minutes ago, White Walker Texas Ranger said:

I'd argue atomized durkheimian anomie a neccesary result of Marxism in practice. You can't meaningfully identify with a class that comprises 80% of humanity, or in a true MArxist utopia, more like 99.9%.

au contrare! we certainly can make the identification, based on relation to means of production (marx), relation to employment patterns (durkheim), relation to consumption (weber), and so on.  likely most of the US is proletarian (the 80% is a reasonable floor there), reserving 'middle class' in this analysis for the bourgeois, 'course.  do we locate atomized durkheimian anomie as arising out of the large proletarian group therein?  perhaps that explains the appeal of trump, a candidate for lumpenzied antisocial nihilists, were there ever one?

[Shryke]

3 hours ago, Ormond said:

Things are not at all as bad in the USA as your analysis. I believe it is quite untrue that the standard of living has gone down "immensely" for the majority. I think the actual facts are that the majority's standard of living has remained stagnant while the top 20% have seen a large increase, so that income inequality has increased. I think this is a big problem. But it is not the same thing as the majority having their standard of living going down "immensely". 

As I've pointed out before, views about how good things are going and going to be actually follow racial lines to a good degree. White people think stuff is going to hell alot more then non-whites. The sense that things are going to hell is imo not really about the economy much at all.

[Shryke]

51 minutes ago, White Walker Texas Ranger said:

I'd argue atomized durkheimian anomie a neccesary result of Marxism in practice. You can't meaningfully identify with a class that comprises 80% of humanity, or in a true Marxist utopia, more like 99.9%.

Also @HappyEnt, I think the real benefit of Democracy is in preventing civil wars and succession crises by allowing for peaceful resolution of disagreements and grievances, rather than in finding the best answer, eliminating the worst answer, or any permutation thereof.

Aye. Democracy has little to do with good governance. It's about legitimate governance.