U.S. Elections: The Narcissist and the Nineteenth Amendment

[Castel]

1 hour ago, butterbumps! said:

Yea, that's the party line so to speak-- that Trump is better for their interests.  Even though it's 100% objectively false.   Do these people actually believe Trump will make things better for them?    Some might (or some might want to believe), but I don't think these people are generally that genuinely stupid not to realize he's an incompetent and it won't be better for them.   There's something else going on with this.   When you listen to what they're actually saying, it's a lot closer to "let's burn it all down," and kind of like punishing the "elites" and establishment, or even settling the score to get those "cutting the line" back into places.  This is why facts don't matter!  They don't care.

And you're missing my point about entitlement.   I'm specifically addressing the pervasive issue of feeling entitled to the status quo despite a changing world.   The Cracked writer seems to presuppose an acceptability to this particular feeling of "entitlement to the way things used to be" as a device to conjure sympathy.

Are the two mutually exclusive? It seems to me that there is some precedent for this. 

Some people really do seem to believe that the problems in the US system have to do with  politicians and, putting in someone who isn't will solve them or, at the very least, somehow break the hold on the "System". I don't even know that it's just a purely conservative intuition at this point,given how some people on the Left have treated alternatives to Clinton

Take this ad. It seems to show the exact mentality. Politicians (well, other people's) are weak and corrupt. I'm coming to break the system and therefore force it to work. The base has been getting fed this for a while

It may seem as if there's nothing constructive to it, but that may be because, to a lot of people, putting down systemic problems to dispositional factors and especially believing that Trump will solve the problem, just seems a bit...optimistic.

I have heard people who do want to burn it down (while simultaneously believing it's "send a message" or some such thing) but a lot of people really may have talked themselves into believing that things will be fixed if you get out a career politician.

 

[Ariadne23]

10 minutes ago, butterbumps! said:

And it seems like some Trump supporters really are in a bad place economically.  But not most, it seems.  The people described in that Cracked piece are, but it seems they aren't the majority of Trumpkins.

And I guess, one more time, because I think this is still getting lost-- I'm specifically annoyed by the Cracked article's eliding over this segment of Trump's supporters' faulty worldviews (even the non- ist ones), sense of entitlement, portrayal as agency-less victims, and offensively weak "because Walter White" conclusion that forces a view of Trump supporters as too stupid to know he's not really going to help anyone. 

(1) I did not realize that most Trump supporters are not personally suffering economically. I looked it up, and get it now, so thanks for that. But they do seem to be from communities that are suffering economically.

(2) I read the Cracked article again, and the author's main point seems to be:

Quote

See, rural jobs used to be based aroundone big local business -- a factory, a coal mine, etc. When it dies, the town dies...Cities can make up for the loss of manufacturing jobs with service jobs -- small towns cannot. That model doesn't work below a certain population density.

He goes on to say these people cannot relocate to urban areas because the staggering increased cost of living is an enormous barrier.

These seem like fair points? What should these people be doing? What would an individual exercise of agency look like, for them?

[Jace, Extat]

33 minutes ago, Ariadne23 said:

 

He goes on to say these people cannot relocate to urban areas because the staggering increased cost of living is an enormous barrier.

These seem like fair points? What should these people be doing? What would an individual exercise of agency look like, for them?

Support candidates who advocate federal intervention against abusive housing costs and economic policies that aim towards increasing demand for goods, rather than magic beans handed out by the rich when they no longer have to pay on their income.

[butterbumps!]

39 minutes ago, Ariadne23 said:

He goes on to say these people cannot relocate to urban areas because the staggering increased cost of living is an enormous barrier.

These seem like fair points? What should these people be doing? What would an individual exercise of agency look like, for them?

I thought that was a false dichotomy the author set up.   The most obvious solution might be simply that instead of working in your neighborhood or town, you need to start commuting to a large town or city (if there is one in reasonable commute distance.  If not, a move toward a suburb or ex-urb might be useful).   Your transportation cost and time will rise, but it doesn't necessarily require increased cost of living or even a move.   I think the article made far too much of this strict "rural/ urban" divide.   There's a lot of space between "urban" and "rural" in the country, and finding opportunity doesn't require moving within city limits.  It may require a move to more densely populated areas, admittedly, but I didn't find the author's representation of the divide tremendously accurate.

Another issue might be to embrace/ accept change.  If it's becoming likely that factory work will become more limited, taking steps to move toward something else-- especially for the next generation-- might have helped avert some of this.  I don't mean blaming workers for getting laid off or anything like that, especially those blindsided in the early stages of it.   But when it became evident 10, 15, maybe even 20 years ago that a lot of these jobs weren't going to be around, that fact should have been recognized, and the next generation of workers could have been encouraged to do something else instead of expected to follow at the local plant-- to get out in front of it, instead of having to react to it-- with limited options-- on the back end.   

[Shryke]

1 hour ago, DunderMifflin said:

If there are truly people thay are "left behind" by a society. Shouldn't that be addressed? 

I don't know enough to say whether or not Trump supporters truly are or not left behind by a changing society.

But if there is a segment of population that lags behind then it probably deserves some sort of sympathy or acknowledgement, otherwise it just seems eerily similar to "pull yourself up by the bootstraps"

Not really no. Because the way in which they are being "left behind by a changing society" is that white people are now not so numerous that they can impose a policy based in white nationalism onto the entire US. Society is no longer conforming to their views of how it should be because it's becoming more pluralistic. That's how they are being left behind.

 

Like, to go a bit more general here and address the whole thread, y'all keep yabbering on about this cracked article and the standard media narrative it presents while missing what Mormont so adroitly pointed out a few pages ago already: that narrative is wrong.

The entire point of that Vox article linked a few pages before it, and many analyses like it done before during this election if you wanna go look, is that the narrative about who supports Trump is wrong. This whole idea that it's people left behind by a changing economy is bullshit. It's about race. "Economic anxiety" is about race, not economics.

Just ... stop it. Stop accepting, explicitly or implicitly, the framing of this as being about people displaced by free trade or some bullshit. The data on how political support breaks down does not, from anything shown so far, back up this idea.

[Ariadne23]

26 minutes ago, butterbumps! said:

I thought that was a false dichotomy the author set up.   The most obvious solution might be simply that instead of working in your neighborhood or town, you need to start commuting to a large town or city (if there is one in reasonable commute distance.  If not, a move toward a suburb or ex-urb might be useful).   Your transportation cost and time will rise, but it doesn't necessarily require increased cost of living or even a move.   I think the article made far too much of this strict "rural/ urban" divide.   There's a lot of space between "urban" and "rural" in the country, and finding opportunity doesn't require moving within city limits.  It may require a move to more densely populated areas, admittedly, but I didn't find the author's representation of the divide tremendously accurate.

Yeah, as I was thinking about this more, tax incentives for allowing remote employees seems like a good idea. Not for manufacturing, but for first line desk tech support and other customer service jobs.

The availability of internet access in rural areas is a big hurdle there, however. I'd be in favor of a federal program to address that.

On commuting, I'm not sure that is really an option. In urban areas I've lived in before, you'd half to get more than an hour out to see any appreciable difference, and those prices would still carry enormous sticker shock to people used to rural cost of living, who, also, you know, can't exactly flip their houses in a month. I'd like to see solutions that don't ask people to throw out everything they've accomplished and start completely over at age 40 or 50 for empathetic and self-interested reasons.

[OldGimletEye]

11 hours ago, Commodore said:

Vox and Mother Jones don't know the first thing about Trump voters

This is a better read from someone who grew up in that environment.

http://www.cracked.com/blog/6-reasons-trumps-rise-that-no-one-talks-about/

 

Oh dear god.

I think I sprained my wrist from doing a face palm. Somebody call a doctor.

No, let me tell what the so called fucking “liberal elite” did.

So, like back in 2008, when the shit hit the fan, the “liberal elite” looked at what was happening and said, “oh fuck we’re headed for liquidity trap. This gonna be some real bad shit.”

And it wasn’t like liberals sat around and said, “this is going to bad for the kids in the inner city.” It was more like, “this going to be bad for everyone, both the kids in the inner city and the boys and girls in small town America.”

Conservatives, oops I mean “true conservatives”, can sit there and talk about “structural reform” (which mainly just means: tax cuts for the rich) all they want, but the fact of the matter is that said structural reform is easier to do when labor markets are tight. And as soon as the financial crises hit, it was clear that labor markets weren’t going to be tight, as there was going to be very large drop in aggregate demand. And loose labor markets are bad for both the kids in the inner city and bad for the kids in small town America.

It’s clear that the author of this article has no real clue to what he is talking about. It’s clear he has no clue about the intellectual battles that have been fought in economics over the last 8 years or so. The fact he is so clueless probably makes him a good candidate for being a “true conservative”. He probably believed in Unskewed Polls like about 90% of the Republican Party.

We had seen something like the Great Recession before. Fortunately, we have a bit of a play book here. It was called The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money.

And we had another little book that, back in the day, conservatives even took seriously. That little book was called a A Monetary History of the United States, written by guy called Milton Friedman, who conservatives used to like, before the Austrians, Gold Bugs, Randinista’s and other assorted critters came crawling out of the nether regions of the world.

Now there was this pretty little model called a New Keynesian model. And it was the model used by most of the academic community including notorious leftist like Ben Beranke.And it had all these pretty little bells and whistles like micro-foundations, rational expectations, “deep parameters’ and such cause some guy named Robert Lucas said if your model don’t have these things, it ain’t legit. Despite having all the “bells and whistles” demanded by the Robert Lucas’ of the world, the New Keynesian model essential message wasn’t far off from Keynes and Friedman’s essential messages. It was use monetary policy aggressively to fight shortfalls in aggregate demand. And when it looks like interest are going to hit the the zero lower bound use fiscal policy.

When the financial crises hit, liberals wanted to do both. When it looked like nominal interest rates were going down the shitter, liberals particularly harped about the use of fiscal policy. But liberals, and not so liberalish people, had a huge fight ahead of them with people that had wanted to re-fight the 1930s.

Just as soon as there was talk of doing aggressive fiscal stimulus, “true conservatives” came out of the woodwork to oppose it. People like Amity Shlaes wrote books like “The Forgotten Man” which claimed that FDR prolonged the Great Depression. Schlaes book was largely a piece of crap.

The Robert Lucas’, Jon Cochrane’s, and Lee Ohanian’s denied the effectiveness of fiscal stimulus. But all these guys were essentially working in the Real Business Cycle model. But the claims of the Real Business Cycle model have always been highly suspect. For one, it claims that the business cycle is not mainly determined by shortfalls in demand or monetary problems, a proposition that seems overwhelmingly empirically false. And leaving the RBC’s empirical issues aside, the RBC model relied on a very strong theoretical assumption which is Walrasian market clearing. There is no particular good reason to believe that Walrasian market clearing holds in the real world, particular in monetary economies where little barter trade happens. Price stickiness is a thing. It empirically holds in the real world. Now price stickiness may the reason why Walrasian market clearing doesn’t hold in the real world or maybe price stickiness is just a symptom of the fact Walrasian market clearing doesn’t hold, but whatever the reason there was a lot of reason to doubt the story told by RBC models.

The fiscal stimulus deniers told stories about “expansionary austerity” and the “confidence fairy” largely based on one little paper by Alberto Alesina. It turned out though Alesina’s paper was highly flawed and it was bullshit. Unfortunately, those with an agenda to shrink the size of the state grabbed hold Alesina’s paper and used it to justify “expansionary austerity”. The expansionary austerity story was particularly well sold in the UK, causing the UK to have a slower recovery than it did during the Great Depression.

Back to the US. Soon after Obama became president conservatives and Republicans started bitching about the deficit. But the deficit wasn’t our immediate problem. Returning the US back to full employment was the immediate problem. And besides, if fiscal multipliers were over 1, and there were plenty of good reason to think that they were, austerity was likely to be self defeating anyway. And the fact is that the United States had plenty of fiscal capacity.

Since 2008, the amount of ignorance and stupidity from Republicans and conservatives has been mind boggling. Around 2009, John Bonehead claimed that the stimulus had “crowded out private investment”, even though short term nominal interest rates were going right down the crapper.

And then you had people like Newt Gingrich running around saying, “Obama should have done it like Ronney did it” because, you know, Republicans and conservatives just really have no fucking clue about what really happened in the early 1980s. And just refuse to see reality.

But, the amount of stupidity, wasn’t just limited to the political class of the Republican Party. People who should have known better made some extremely ignorant comments about fiscal stimulus. Jon Cochrane, who is a professor of finance at U of Chicago, claimed that every dollar spent by the government is a dollar taken away from the private sector. Well, that isn’t true and even sophmore economic students know that.

Cochrane, along with other conservatives, then started warning about rampant inflation, which never fucking materialized. The reason Cochrane made that prediction was because the model he was working in sucked. Another guy that warned of “rampant inflation being around the corner” was David Malpass, a Trump economic adviser. As far as I know, Malpass has never admitted that he was wrong back in 2010. And he still continues to spew idiocy.

I think it’s quite telling that few academic economist have endorsed Trump. Even the usual suspects that normally endorse Republican Candidates, like John Taylor and Greg Mankiw seemingly haven’t endorsed Trump. In fact, Mankiw faced palmed over a paper written by Trump advisor Peter Navarro because it was so bad.

Now, in a perverse way, Trump’s plans might actually work, in the short term. But, not for the reasons that Republicans like to give. Trump’s tax cuts would likely boost aggregate demand. In other words, Trump’s tax cuts would work for demand side reasons and not supply side reasons.

If Trump were able to push through his tax cuts, perhaps it would generate the aggregate demand needed and push the economy out of the doldrums, helping the boys and girls in small town America as well as the inner cities in America. But then we would have to hear Republican’s and conservatives claim:

“Golly, its a supply side miracle!!!!!!!”

And that bullshit meme would be repeated by conservatives and Republicans for the next 40 years. And, you know, giving Republicans the appearance of that kind of intellectual victory has to bring bile at the back of one’s throat, since the Republican Party has been pushing austerity bullshit for 8 years.

Also, there is the fact that Trump’s tax cut plans were be a very inefficient sort of stimulus. Because the main beneficiaries of those tax cuts would be the ultra wealthy whose marginal propensity to consume is lower than those who are not so rich.

Also, in the long run, Trump’s tax cut plans would likely create very huge deficits that would be cynically used by conservatives to end the American welfare state. I’m quite certain Mr. “I feel like I’m living in an Ayrn Rand Novel!” would do that. And many of the people in small town America do rely on and benefit from the American Welfare state. Many of them rely upon Roosevelt Security and Johnson Care. And liberals will be god damned before they let somebody like Trump destroy it.

Also, Trump’s tax cut plans would likely make inequality worse than what it already is. That wouldn’t be good for the boys and gals in small town America and it wouldn’t good for the kids and people in the inner city. Also, there are strong reasons to believe that the wealth inequality has been a severe drag on economic recovery. If consumption spending were higher, interest rates would be higher, making monetary more effective in stabilizing aggregate demand.

I don’t see Trump proposing anything to specifically address the issues of the middle class and the poor other than the good old Republican Party standby, “If ya cut taxes for the super wealthy, everyone will prosper!!”. Now, why oh why, would anyone believe this bullshit? George Bush cut taxes for the wealthy, yet no supply side miracle materialized. The only people that buy into this con game are the same people that believed in Unskewed Polls. It’s just another data point that the Republican Party is a fucking intellectual dumpster fire.

Hillary Clinton is proposing policies that could potentially help out people in the inner cities and in small town America.

Now, on free trade, liberals are quite aware that some people have been hurt by free trade. For those liberals, like me, who tend to support free trade, the game plan is essentially: “Make the pie grow bigger and then redistribute the pie.”, whereas the Trumpster’s plan is more along the lines of “make the pie grow smaller, but don’t redistribute”. (even though in reality Trump’s proposed tariffs would be a redistribution of income. But hey, I guess it’s important for some Americans to feel all libertariannnnnish about themselves even though it has no frickin basis in reality.)

Also, a lot of conservatives do support free trade. The difference between free trade conservatives and free trade liberals is that free trade liberals are willing to acknowledge the redistribution of wealth caused by free trade as being a potential problem and also liberals are willing to recognize that labor markets may not adjust as quickly or efficiently as conservatives would like to think. The only thing that most conservatives would offer up for problems created by free trade would be: selected readings from Ayn Rand.

Also, a lot of the jobs that have been lost in these rural communities has been due to technological change and not free trade. So free trade isn’t the only culprit here. With regard to these technological changes, the Trump’s plan or the conservative plan is what exactly? Cut taxes for the wealthy? A better plan would be to invest money in these people so they can find other occupations because lots of these jobs are not coming back.

Also, one other thing: The goal of full employment is back in the Democratic Party platform, after being taken out around 1992 or so. It should have never been taken out, even if done to appease “true conservatives”. And full employment doesn’t just benefit the kids in the inner city. It benefits the kids in small town America.

For this author to suggest that liberals do not care about the plight of small town America is bullshit.

Now, I’ve probably spent way too much time on the economics on this thing. Because, in reality, it seems that there is quite of bit of evidence that the real motivation among many Trump supporters is white supremacy and nationalism, and economic matters aren’t really a concern with many of them. In fact, white supremacy has probably been the most important variable in our economic policy disputes over the last 8 years, and probably longer. One day, economic historians will probably write about the Great Recession. Of course they will probably point to many factors like foreign capital inflows, wealth inequality, bad risk management practices, etc. etc, but no story about the Great Recession will be complete without telling the story of white nationalism.

 

[DunderMifflin]

10 minutes ago, Shryke said:

Not really no. Because the way in which they are being "left behind by a changing society" is that white people are now not so numerous that they can impose a policy based in white nationalism onto the entire US. Society is no longer conforming to their views of how it should be because it's becoming more pluralistic. That's how they are being left behind.

 

Like, to go a bit more general here and address the whole thread, y'all keep yabbering on about this cracked article and the standard media narrative it presents while missing what Mormont so adroitly pointed out a few pages ago already: that narrative is wrong.

The entire point of that Vox article linked a few pages before it, and many analyses like it done before during this election if you wanna go look, is that the narrative about who supports Trump is wrong. This whole idea that it's people left behind by a changing economy is bullshit. It's about race. "Economic anxiety" is about race, not economics.

Just ... stop it. Stop accepting, explicitly or implicitly, the framing of this as being about people displaced by free trade or some bullshit. The data on how political support breaks down does not, from anything shown so far, back up this idea.

Sadly there are still probably people in the universe who don't accept things as right and wrong simply because you or mormont proclaim them to be. Ridiculous sure, but people still are burdened with their pesky thoughts that aren't going to always align with you. Hence, the "yabbering"

[Shryke]

3 hours ago, OnionAhaiReborn said:

You're right about foreign policy. Anything that doesn't directly involve American lives (like our ongoing proxy war in Yemen) receives basically no mainstream debate. My hunch is that we'd see a little more attention paid, at least in liberal media outlets, if we had a Republican President again. But too many liberals- like this writer- give Democrats a free pass. 

Based on what? It ain't like GWB got much pushback on his foreign policy in the media (Iraq War cough). The types who complain about American foreign policy from both a humanitarian and an isolationist standpoint have been complaining about Obama and things like his Drone policy or the Libyan intervention this whole time, just like they did during the previous administration. They haven't gone away. There's plenty of people out there who talk about Clinton being too interventionist.

But the truth is more that this aspect of American foreign policy is just accepted by many. You just won't see some people complaining about it because they don't have a problem with it.

 James Arryn been trying to beat this drum for awhile now but the whole problem with this argument is that it assumes that aspect of american foreign policy isn't already known and accepted.

[Ariadne23]

OGE - I think the idea is that rural working to middle class white people are vulnerable to blaming the loss of a way of life that actually occurred for economic reasons on immigration and cultural changes (i.e., xenophobia and racism) when the alternative explanation  offered by the "liberal elite" comes packaged as 30 paragraphs of Keynsian economic theory.

ETA: I should add that what I just said is, of course, on its face, more elitist than anything you said, but life is full of these little ironies.

[Shryke]

7 minutes ago, DunderMifflin said:

Sadly there are still probably people in the universe who don't accept things as right and wrong simply because you or mormont proclaim them to be. Ridiculous sure, but people still are burdened with their pesky thoughts that aren't going to always align with you. Hence, the "yabbering"

Actually it's not cause I proclaim them to be, it's because that's what the data actually shows.

What you are really burdened with here is an ability to adjust your viewpoint to actual evidence because the anecdotal fairy tale you already believed is easier to go with.

Stop yabbering, start supporting your viewpoint with actual evidence.

[Fez]

Hugh Hewitt just made a Davos is to Stannis as Pence is to Trump analogy on Meet the Press. Gross. 

Also, if we're going off the show, this means that apparently Hewitt thinks Trump is going to burn Ivanka alive to improve his election chances.

[DunderMifflin]

1 minute ago, Shryke said:

Actually it's not cause I proclaim them to be, it's because that's what the data actually shows.

What you are really burdened with here is an ability to adjust your viewpoint to actual evidence because the anecdotal fairy tale you already believed is easier to go with.

Stop yabbering, start supporting your viewpoint with actual evidence.

No need for such hostility sir. 

 

[OldGimletEye]

3 minutes ago, Ariadne23 said:

OGE - I think the idea is that rural working to middle class white people are vulnerable to blaming the loss of a way of life that actually occurred for economic reasons on immigration and cultural changes (i.e., xenophobia and racism) when the alternative explanation  offered by the "liberal elite" comes packaged as 30 paragraphs of Keynsian economic theory.

I'm not sure what you mean here. 

But, anyway, I think the idea that liberals are ignoring the plight of small town Americans is nonsense. It's nonsense mainly because 1) white nationalism is what is at work here, and 2) because even if white nationalism wasn't in play here, the fact is that it isn't true the liberals weren't worried about the plight of small town Americans, economically speaking. The intellectual battles liberals have fought was for their benefit as it was anyone else's. For the author to suggest otherwise is bullshit. And I wanted to be detailed why it was bullshit.

It seems to me that that the author is woefully ignorant about the nature and history of these disputes.

[Shryke]

5 minutes ago, Ariadne23 said:

OGE - I think the idea is that rural working to middle class white people are vulnerable to blaming the loss of a way of life that actually occurred for economic reasons on immigration and cultural changes (i.e., xenophobia and racism) when the alternative explanation  offered by the "liberal elite" comes packaged as 30 paragraphs of Keynsian economic theory.

ETA: I should add that what I just said is, of course, on its face, more elitist than anything you said, but life is full of these little ironies.

But Trump's support is not primarily rural working to middle class white people. Like, the problem with this whole framing of "economic troubles -> blame it on the Other -> support Trump" is that the data we have does not support it. Economic difficulty does not correlate with Trump support as you would expect were the proposed causal chain true.

[Shryke]

4 minutes ago, DunderMifflin said:

No need for such hostility sir. 

Please dude. You keep trying to ignore that what I (and Mormont) pointed out about that article and the whole framing of this issue that it forwards is that it's wrong because the data shows it is, and not as you keep trying to pretend, because I said it is.

[butterbumps!]

25 minutes ago, Ariadne23 said:

Yeah, as I was thinking about this more, tax incentives for allowing remote employees seems like a good idea. Not for manufacturing, but for first line desk tech support and other customer service jobs.

The availability of internet access in rural areas is a big hurdle there, however. I'd be in favor of a federal program to address that.

On commuting, I'm not sure that is really an option. In urban areas I've lived in before, you'd half to get more than an hour out to see any appreciable difference, and those prices would still carry enormous sticker shock to people used to rural cost of living, who, also, you know, can't exactly flip their houses in a month. I'd like to see solutions that don't ask people to throw out everything they've accomplished and start completely over at age 40 or 50 for empathetic and self-interested reasons.

Well, I think additionally to advocating for remote tax credits, the government offers credits, counseling and retraining programs, especially for those hit by certain affected industries.   I'm not sure how effective those are, but the idea seems good.

Additionally, I think there are a lot of industries that don't necessarily require expensive degrees or tons of training that people can go into.   Apparently industrial welding pays like $100k (according to the WSJ), and is in high demand because of the fracking business, requiring some retraining.   Nursing is another industry that's in very high demand, and while that requires some more training than some can afford, it is very lucrative, and probably can't be replaced by robots any time soon.  I really  think keeping oneself aware of which industries are growing and making sure you, or at least your kids move toward one of those, is a good way to "exercise your agency" in this.   

The commuting may not work for everyone, but I do think the writer's portrayal of how America is apparently entirely comprised of patches of inner city Chicago between fruited plains inaccurate, and the idea that you have to live in city limits to find a real job these days to be disingenuous.   There are large towns and full blown suburbs that are home to sustaining industries, where the costs of living are not outrageously high.   The difficulty of selling your house profitably to relocate is a good point, and wouldn't work for everyone.   But in responding to the article-- that seemed to imply all the jobs are in cities, and in order to work in one you must live in one, paying astronomical prices-- the fact that people can commute is the obvious answer.

[OldGimletEye]

1 minute ago, Shryke said:

But Trump's support is not primarily rural working to middle class white people. Like, the problem with this whole framing of "economic troubles -> blame it on the Other -> support Trump" is that the data we have does not support it. Economic difficulty does not correlate with Trump support as you would expect were the proposed causal chain true.

Part of the Trump and Republican Party pitch is about economic competency. And for some reason, they are seen as being more competent on these matters. But, the fact is that are incompetent. This is a point I want to drive home.

Of course, I know, white nationalism is the key driver here. But, when conservatives want to run around saying, "vote Trump cause economic awesomeness" I think it's important to point out why that claim is nonsense.

[DunderMifflin]

1 minute ago, Shryke said:

Please dude. You keep trying to ignore that what I (and Mormont) pointed out about that article and the whole framing of this issue that it forwards is that it's wrong because the data shows it is, and not as you keep trying to pretend, because I said it is.

And you keep saying that it's racism because data, case closed. Like you are the world's best data decipherer that can't possibly be wrong.

Its fine if we disagree, no need to be hostile about it.

[Shryke]

Just now, DunderMifflin said:

And you keep saying that it's racism because data, case closed. Like you are the world's best data decipherer that can't possibly be wrong.

Its fine if we disagree, no need to be hostile about it.

If I'm wrong, point out how. Show me data or analysis that says otherwise.

Cause so far you haven't and that means it's not "we disagree". That's "teach the controversy" bullshit. It's you pretending like not having a counter-argument denotes a stalemate and "who knows what's correct?".

ie - it's bullshit