US elections 2016 - "Go ahead, throw your vote away"

[IheartIheartTesla]

Don't blame me, I voted for Kodos

[Ser Scot A Ellison]

Kang! Kang! He's our man if he can't do it no one can!!

[Kalbear]

Much like the cancer treatment I just want things to be done with this election. Just give a finish, please. 

[White Walker Texas Ranger]

5 minutes ago, Kalbear said:

Much like the cancer treatment I just want things to be done with this election. Just give a finish, please. 

Is that why you weren't active?

I hope you or whoever is in treatment has a full and speedy recovery

[Kalbear]

 

Just now, White Walker Texas Ranger said:

Is that why you weren't active?

I hope you or whoever is in treatment has a full and speedy recovery

I've been pretty active. I've stopped posting and participating in certain things but that was before my son got cancer and for entirely different reasons. 

And yeah, the election season and cancer both have pretty similar feelings right now. Both involve a 60-40 outcome, both involve very little I can do save do the right things and wait, and both just go on months and months with occasionally surprising, horrible things happening to spice things up. 

[DanteGabriel]

Okay, so this lady has become the Internet's new scratching post because she said some amazingly ignorant and awful and racist things:

Quote

Donald Trump’s campaign chair in a prominent Ohio county has claimed there was “no racism” during the 1960s and said black people who have not succeeded over the past half-century only have themselves to blame.

Kathy Miller, who is white and chair of the Republican nominee’s campaign in Mahoning County, made the remarks during a taped interview with the Guardian’sAnywhere but Washington series of election videos.

If you’re black and you haven’t been successful in the last 50 years, it’s your own fault. You’ve had every opportunity, it was given to you,” she said.

“You’ve had the same schools everybody else went to. You had benefits to go to college that white kids didn’t have. You had all the advantages and didn’t take advantage of it. It’s not our fault, certainly.”

Miller also called the Black Lives Matter movement “a stupid waste of time” and said lower voter turnout among African Americans could be related to “the way they’re raised”.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/sep/22/trump-ohio-campaign-chair-no-racism-before-obama

Within hours of the story's publication, she was dutifully denounced by Trump campaign officials and replaced in the campaign and as an elector by a black talk radio host who'd been publicly opposed to Trump six months ago. She also apologized for her "inappropriate" comments and clarified that she wasn't speaking bigotry on behalf of her bigot candidate's race-baiting campaign, but never acknowledged that her comments were wrong.

I'm not posting about this dumb person merely to pile on, as I'm sure there's a tidal wave of well-deserved vitriol crashing down on her already, but what do we do with people like this? I agree intellectually that we can't just withdraw to separate camps that represent 40% of the country, but my emotional self just wants to bury and mercilessly ridicule people like this. With this kind of willful and vicious ignorance, which I am sure is not at all rare, how do you engage? This is not some inexperienced and sheltered kid. This is a middle-aged aged woman in a sizeable city and a significant black population. I doubt patient outreach or respectful discussion or a trip to a trust-building camp with Ta Nehisi Coates is going to change her. So how does on interact with such a person, if we're not just going to write her off as a lost cause?

[White Walker Texas Ranger]

3 minutes ago, DanteGabriel said:

Okay, so this lady has become the Internet's new scratching post because she said some amazingly ignorant and awful and racist things:

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/sep/22/trump-ohio-campaign-chair-no-racism-before-obama

Within hours of the story's publication, she was dutifully denounced by Trump campaign officials and replaced in the campaign and as an elector by a black talk radio host who'd been publicly opposed to Trump six months ago. She also apologized for her "inappropriate" comments and clarified that she wasn't speaking bigotry on behalf of her bigot candidate's race-baiting campaign, but never acknowledged that her comments were wrong.

I'm not posting about this dumb person merely to pile on, as I'm sure there's a tidal wave of well-deserved vitriol crashing down on her already, but what do we do with people like this? I agree intellectually that we can't just withdraw to separate camps that represent 40% of the country, but my emotional self just wants to bury and mercilessly ridicule people like this. With this kind of willful and vicious ignorance, which I am sure is not at all rare, how do you engage? This is not some inexperienced and sheltered kid. This is a middle-aged aged woman in a sizeable city and a significant black population. I doubt patient outreach or respectful discussion or a trip to a trust-building camp with Ta Nehisi Coates is going to change her. So how does on interact with such a person, if we're not just going to write her off as a lost cause?

My take is that it seems like the Trump Campaign's learned to cut these people off and disavow them.

It's scary, they're almost like professionals now.

[DanteGabriel]

4 minutes ago, White Walker Texas Ranger said:

My take is that it seems like the Trump Campaign's learned to cut these people off and disavow them.

It's scary, they're almost like professionals now.

Don't give them too much credit -- her comments contradicted Trump's comments about how shitty things are for black people, as part of his latest black outreach effort.

But I'm sure local or state officials knew what a fuckup those comments were and got on her case before it even got to the Breitbarters at the national HQ.

[Jaxom 1974]

So the campaign denounced it.  Did the Donald?  If he'd been asked about it. 

[Ser Scot A Ellison]

19 minutes ago, DanteGabriel said:

Okay, so this lady has become the Internet's new scratching post because she said some amazingly ignorant and awful and racist things:

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/sep/22/trump-ohio-campaign-chair-no-racism-before-obama

Within hours of the story's publication, she was dutifully denounced by Trump campaign officials and replaced in the campaign and as an elector by a black talk radio host who'd been publicly opposed to Trump six months ago. She also apologized for her "inappropriate" comments and clarified that she wasn't speaking bigotry on behalf of her bigot candidate's race-baiting campaign, but never acknowledged that her comments were wrong.

I'm not posting about this dumb person merely to pile on, as I'm sure there's a tidal wave of well-deserved vitriol crashing down on her already, but what do we do with people like this? I agree intellectually that we can't just withdraw to separate camps that represent 40% of the country, but my emotional self just wants to bury and mercilessly ridicule people like this. With this kind of willful and vicious ignorance, which I am sure is not at all rare, how do you engage? This is not some inexperienced and sheltered kid. This is a middle-aged aged woman in a sizeable city and a significant black population. I doubt patient outreach or respectful discussion or a trip to a trust-building camp with Ta Nehisi Coates is going to change her. So how does on interact with such a person, if we're not just going to write her off as a lost cause?

I don't know.  But 140,000,000 people is a lot of bigotry.  Regardless of how awful the bigotry is that an awful lot of people to worry about.  Some people if engaged harshly are likely to respond in kind.  But in fairness harsh and ridculing treatment is the only way to get through to some people.  However, it's a dice roll as to whether or not such treatment will work or if it will push them deeper into their noxious ideology. 

I have no simply answer to this rather glaring problem.

[zelticgar]

I'm voting for Trump just so i can obtain negative attention  .  Seriously though, so excited for the debate. I have no idea whats going to happen but I suspect it is going to be really interesting.  In a train wreck kind of way. 

 

[Disturber of Peace]

I don't think the Giant Douche can keep up the promise of fucking 140M people to death.

[Shryke]

A couple of things on Clinton vs the Media for this election.

Firstly, this Gallup poll which has some pretty straightforward explanations of why Clinton has been having issues:

http://www.gallup.com/poll/195596/email-dominates-americans-heard-clinton.aspx

Most simply:

Quote

Americans' reports of what they have read, seen or heard about Hillary Clinton over the past two months are dominated by references to her handling of emails while she was secretary of state.

By contrast, Americans' reports of what they have read, seen or heard about Donald Trump over this same period have been more varied and related to his campaign activities and statements.

ie - The media has been doing nothing but hammering the email story for months now and completely ignoring both her actual policies and more or less Trump in general, for whom there has been zero focus. They also just hear more about Clinton. And of course, what they hear about is her emails.

 

To go with that, like a nice second course, a good write-up by a professor at Harvard as part of their Shorenstein Center that studies media:

http://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-patterson-clinton-press-negative-coverage-20160921-snap-story.html

Quote

 

My analysis of media coverage in the four weeks surrounding both parties’ national conventions found that her use of a private email server while secretary of State and other alleged scandal references accounted for 11% of Clinton’s news coverage in the top five television networks and six major newspapers, including the Los Angeles Times. Excluding neutral reports, 91% of the email-related news reports were negative in tone. Then, there were the references to her character and personal life, which accounted for 4% of the coverage; that was 92% negative.

While Trump declared open warfare on the mainstream media — and of late they have cautiously responded in kind — it has been Clinton who has suffered substantially more negative news coverage throughout nearly the whole campaign.

 

Quote

 

How about her foreign, defense, social or economic policies? Don’t bother looking. Not a single one of Clinton’s policy proposals accounted for even 1% of her convention-period coverage; collectively, her policy stands accounted for a mere 4% of it. But she might be thankful for that: News reports about her stances were 71% negative to 29% positive in tone. Trump was quoted more often about her policies than she was. Trump’s claim that Clinton “created ISIS,” for example, got more news attention than her announcement of how she would handle Islamic State.

I also looked at the year before the 2016 primaries began, and even then Clinton had a 2-to-1 ratio of bad press to good press. There was only one month in the whole of 2015 where the tone of her coverage on balance was not in the red — and even then it barely touched positive territory.

During the primaries, her coverage was again in negative territory and again less positive than Trump’s. After the conventions got underway and Trump got embroiled in a testy exchange with the parents of a slain Muslim U.S. soldier, the tone of his coverage nosedived and her coverage looked rosy by comparison. But even then it was not glowing. Her convention-period news coverage was 56% negative to 44% positive.

Clinton’s emails and the accompanying narrative — “she can’t be trusted” — have been a defining feature of coverage from the campaign’s start. Only occasionally have reporters taken the narrative a step further. 

 

And it goes on. But this should already be obvious if you been paying attention.

[Castel]

15 minutes ago, Shryke said:

A couple of things on Clinton vs the Media for this election.

Firstly, this Gallup poll which has some pretty straightforward explanations of why Clinton has been having issues:

http://www.gallup.com/poll/195596/email-dominates-americans-heard-clinton.aspx

Most simply:

ie - The media has been doing nothing but hammering the email story for months now and completely ignoring both her actual policies and more or less Trump in general, for whom there has been zero focus. They also just hear more about Clinton. And of course, what they hear about is her emails.

 

To go with that, like a nice second course, a good write-up by a professor at Harvard as part of their Shorenstein Center that studies media:

http://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-patterson-clinton-press-negative-coverage-20160921-snap-story.html

And it goes on. But this should already be obvious if you been paying attention.

This is why you get into the  circle-of-madness where Bernie people demand policies that favor them and claim that she never ever talks about policy (and then reject policy but that's on the backend). Bonus points if they were the ones complaining about "low information voters" going for Hillary in the primary.

 

1 hour ago, DanteGabriel said:

I'm not posting about this dumb person merely to pile on, as I'm sure there's a tidal wave of well-deserved vitriol crashing down on her already, but what do we do with people like this? I agree intellectually that we can't just withdraw to separate camps that represent 40% of the country, but my emotional self just wants to bury and mercilessly ridicule people like this. With this kind of willful and vicious ignorance, which I am sure is not at all rare, how do you engage? This is not some inexperienced and sheltered kid. This is a middle-aged aged woman in a sizeable city and a significant black population. I doubt patient outreach or respectful discussion or a trip to a trust-building camp with Ta Nehisi Coates is going to change her. So how does on interact with such a person, if we're not just going to write her off as a lost cause?

 

This is why I have no sympathy for the handwringing from progressives and concern trolling from alt-righters and other disaffected groups about how progressives somehow made Trump's supporters his by being too smug...these people and this mentality have always been around. It's just vanity to believe that they belonged to you until you fumbled some ball.

There really is no answer. for them. It's one thing if it's one person but they have an entire party that weaponizes any discomfort to blame people (like Obama) for being "divisive" and tied up in their identity so...what can you do?

[Mr. Chatywin et al.]

1 hour ago, DanteGabriel said:

Okay, so this lady has become the Internet's new scratching post because she said some amazingly ignorant and awful and racist things:

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/sep/22/trump-ohio-campaign-chair-no-racism-before-obama

Within hours of the story's publication, she was dutifully denounced by Trump campaign officials and replaced in the campaign and as an elector by a black talk radio host who'd been publicly opposed to Trump six months ago. She also apologized for her "inappropriate" comments and clarified that she wasn't speaking bigotry on behalf of her bigot candidate's race-baiting campaign, but never acknowledged that her comments were wrong.

I'm not posting about this dumb person merely to pile on, as I'm sure there's a tidal wave of well-deserved vitriol crashing down on her already, but what do we do with people like this? I agree intellectually that we can't just withdraw to separate camps that represent 40% of the country, but my emotional self just wants to bury and mercilessly ridicule people like this. With this kind of willful and vicious ignorance, which I am sure is not at all rare, how do you engage? This is not some inexperienced and sheltered kid. This is a middle-aged aged woman in a sizeable city and a significant black population. I doubt patient outreach or respectful discussion or a trip to a trust-building camp with Ta Nehisi Coates is going to change her. So how does on interact with such a person, if we're not just going to write her off as a lost cause?

Yikes. My guess is a lot of people believe this crap and now they feel like they can openly say it because that has become "telling it like it is." The Trump Effect may have several negative connotations for a long time to come, even if he loses badly. 

[Swordfish]

1 hour ago, Castel said:

This is why you get into the  circle-of-madness where Bernie people demand policies that favor them and claim that she never ever talks about policy (and then reject policy but that's on the backend). Bonus points if they were the ones complaining about "low information voters" going for Hillary in the primary.

 

 

This is why I have no sympathy for the handwringing from progressives and concern trolling from alt-righters and other disaffected groups about how progressives somehow made Trump's supporters his by being too smug...these people and this mentality have always been around. It's just vanity to believe that they belonged to you until you fumbled some ball.

There really is no answer. for them. It's one thing if it's one person but they have an entire party that weaponizes any discomfort to blame people (like Obama) for being "divisive" and tied up in their identity so...what can you do?

You're mistake here is caricaturing all of his supporters as being exactly like this dumbass woman.

They aren't. 

 

 

[DanteGabriel]

24 minutes ago, Swordfish said:

You're mistake here is caricaturing all of his supporters as being exactly like this dumbass woman.

They aren't. 

 

 

How many of them are this dumb? Seems like a lot. Or at least they have those dumb opinions but are smart enough not to trip over a camera crew looking for juicy examples of American morons. There's a shocking percentage of white people who think black people aren't systematically discriminated against, that there's no racial police violence problem, that white people are persecuted, etc.

[Castel]

21 minutes ago, Swordfish said:

You're mistake here is caricaturing all of his supporters as being exactly like this dumbass woman.

They aren't. 

 

 

I don't see how my post requires every Trump supporter to be a...deplorable to make the point? 

 

[Ormond]

3 hours ago, DanteGabriel said:

Okay, so this lady has become the Internet's new scratching post because she said some amazingly ignorant and awful and racist things:

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/sep/22/trump-ohio-campaign-chair-no-racism-before-obama

Within hours of the story's publication, she was dutifully denounced by Trump campaign officials and replaced in the campaign and as an elector by a black talk radio host who'd been publicly opposed to Trump six months ago. She also apologized for her "inappropriate" comments and clarified that she wasn't speaking bigotry on behalf of her bigot candidate's race-baiting campaign, but never acknowledged that her comments were wrong.

I'm not posting about this dumb person merely to pile on, as I'm sure there's a tidal wave of well-deserved vitriol crashing down on her already, but what do we do with people like this? I agree intellectually that we can't just withdraw to separate camps that represent 40% of the country, but my emotional self just wants to bury and mercilessly ridicule people like this. With this kind of willful and vicious ignorance, which I am sure is not at all rare, how do you engage? This is not some inexperienced and sheltered kid. This is a middle-aged aged woman in a sizeable city and a significant black population. I doubt patient outreach or respectful discussion or a trip to a trust-building camp with Ta Nehisi Coates is going to change her. So how does on interact with such a person, if we're not just going to write her off as a lost cause?

I think your questions in the last paragraph really go beyond the election and if you want to start a long discussion about them they should go into a separate thread. So this will be my only comment in this thread. 

However, I think the research on overcoming prejudice shows that something like a "trust-building camp with Ta Nehisi Coates" actually would help these individuals. It's just that you can't force them to go to one. 

Also, the fact that she lives in a city with a large Black population does NOT necessarily mean that she interacts with Black persons on an equal level in a mutually supportive environment regularly, and that's the sort of interaction it takes to change these attitudes. 

[Kalbear]

Why you shouldn't vote third party: Because the third party people are fucking idiots.