US Politics: Hindsight on 2020

[Altherion]

24 minutes ago, Swordfish said:

A silver lining of this election is the growing acknowledgement from my friends on the left that forcing someone to register in order to exercise a right is a terrible, ineffective idea with high potential for abuse, and that these kinds of registries should be rigorously opposed.

I'm pretty heartened to see this evolution of opinion, and sincerely hope that these attitudes carry forward into the future.

Don't bet money on it -- or at least not on it expanding to all rights.

[The Fallen]

This quote function is not working with my phone.

@MMaithanet

I couldn't add the comment that he didn't link to any sources, hence why I wanted to ask here.

In all fairness to Killer Snark, I can sympathize with Europeans wanting to keep their countries white. When we think of Ireland, for instance, or Norway, we think of them as white countries. So I can see Europeans wanting to keep that heritage alive. The issue I have is that no European country is in danger of becoming minority-majority anytime soon. 

Also, Europeans have historically been the ones who have gone to other continents and wreaked havoc.

[Week]

33 minutes ago, Swordfish said:

A silver lining of this election is the growing acknowledgement from my friends on the left that forcing someone to register in order to exercise a right is a terrible, ineffective idea with high potential for abuse, and that these kinds of registries should be rigorously opposed.

I'm pretty heartened to see this evolution of opinion, and sincerely hope that these attitudes carry forward into the future.

Is this why the Right is so vigorous in its opposition to voting registration (and the actual act of voting)? Or do we just apply the logic to guns?

[Maithanet]

10 minutes ago, The Fallen said:

This quote function is not working with my phone.

@MMaithanet

I couldn't add the comment that he didn't link to any sources, hence why I wanted to ask here.

Well, the statement that he is making (poor whites supported Clinton over Trump) seems unlikely, based on the education/race breakdown I cited earlier.  But if you come across anything backing up his statement, I would be interested to see it.

[Ice Queen]

1 hour ago, The Killer Snark said:

I am not a white supremacist. I am a cultural preservationist. I believe that the majority of any constitutionally established country in the world deserves to remain a majority, no matter what colour they happen to be. This is the opposite of racism. You would never believe how many people there are among the Left who I have come across on social media alone, never mind in Germany's Green Party or in the Cultural Marxist halls of Swedish government, who openly celebrate the fact that white people are doomed to be a global minority, even in their own countries, well within the next twenty or thirty years.

What BS. Worldwide, whites (or, to be more accurate, Caucasoids) have always been a minority. I'd go look for the exact numbers but I don't want to come across any Aryan Nation sites. You do understand, though, that the term "white" encompasses more than just those in Europe, the US, Canada, NZ and Australia, right? The Middle East is mostly Caucasoid as well, as is northern India and north Africa. Hispanics can be either white or non-white. 

By far the largest group is Asian. China alone comprises more than 20% of the world's population. 

White people immigrate to white-minority countries just as often as non-whites immigrate to white countries. Just remember, the people you're trying to preserve "our" culture from--Middle Easterners--ARE ALSO WHITE. 

Just sayin'.

 

[Altherion]

One of the interesting aspects of the Trump campaign's relationship with the media is that they seem to be giving... unconventional outlets quite a bit of attention. For example, here's a Steve Bannon interview in something called The Hollywood Reporter. It's propaganda, of course, but quite entertaining:

Quote

"I’m not a white nationalist, I’m a nationalist. I’m an economic nationalist,” Bannon tells THR media columnist Michael Wolff

...

In this dark day for Democrats, Bannon has become the blackest hole.

“Darkness is good,” says Bannon, who amid the suits surrounding him at Trump Tower, looks like a graduate student in his T-shirt, open button-down and tatty blue blazer — albeit a 62-year-old graduate student. “Dick Cheney. Darth Vader. Satan. That’s power. It only helps us when they—“ I believe by “they” he means liberals and the media, already promoting calls for his ouster “—get it wrong. When they’re blind to who we are and what we’re doing.”

...

What he seems to have carried from a boyhood in a blue-collar, union and Democratic family in Norfolk, Va., and through his tour of the American establishment, is an unreconstructed sense of class awareness, or bitterness — or betrayal. The Democratic Party betrayed its working-man roots, just as Hillary Clinton betrayed the long-time Clinton connection — Bill Clinton’s connection — to the working man. “The Clinton strength,” he says, “was to play to people without a college education. High school people. That’s how you win elections.” And, likewise, the Republican party would come to betray its working-man constituency forged under Reagan. In sum, the working man was betrayed by the establishment, or what he dismisses as the “donor class.”

...

“Like [Andrew] Jackson’s populism, we’re going to build an entirely new political movement,” he says. “It’s everything related to jobs. The conservatives are going to go crazy. I’m the guy pushing a trillion-dollar infrastructure plan. With negative interest rates throughout the world, it’s the greatest opportunity to rebuild everything. Ship yards, iron works, get them all jacked up. We’re just going to throw it up against the wall and see if it sticks. It will be as exciting as the 1930s, greater than the Reagan revolution — conservatives, plus populists, in an economic nationalist movement.”

 

[felice]

2 hours ago, Kalbear said:

Also, this left-leaning treatise on black-on-black crime (which always sounds like some porn subgenre to me) is probably a good place to start for looking for the  "Left" talking about it. As most things that conservatives pundits tend to talk about crappily the issue is really complex and has a lot of different factors.

Not that complex - it's poverty. Poverty causes crime, irrespective of what colour your skin is. Sure, there are lots of other contributing factors, but that's the big one. And of course the descendants of people brought to America as slaves are going to be disproportionately poor.

[Swordfish]

58 minutes ago, Altherion said:

Don't bet money on it -- or at least not on it expanding to all rights.

It is an admittedly optimistic hope.  but what can I say, in this regard, I am perhaps a sweet, sweet summer child.

 

51 minutes ago, Week said:

Is this why the Right is so vigorous in its opposition to voting registration (and the actual act of voting)? Or do we just apply the logic to guns?

I don't know.  Perhaps you should ask them and report back to the class on your findings?

[Swordfish]

12 minutes ago, felice said:

Not that complex - it's poverty. Poverty causes crime, irrespective of what colour your skin is. Sure, there are lots of other contributing factors, but that's the big one. And of course the descendants of people brought to America as slaves are going to be disproportionately poor.

And addiction.  Not that that can be effectively separated from poverty.

 

[Week]

3 minutes ago, Swordfish said:

I don't know.  Perhaps you should ask them and report back to the class on your findings?

That seems like an appropriate response when you have nothing to offer. 

[Swordfish]

1 minute ago, Week said:

That seems like an appropriate response when you have nothing to offer. 

My apologies. It seems appropriate to me to not pretend to know the answers to questions being posed to me, if i fact I do not know the answers.

I realize that is contrary to the positions of some other people, and I respect their decisions in this regard.

At any rate, I still do not know the answer to your query.  Perhaps google could help?

[Kalbear]

21 minutes ago, felice said:

Not that complex - it's poverty. Poverty causes crime, irrespective of what colour your skin is. Sure, there are lots of other contributing factors, but that's the big one. And of course the descendants of people brought to America as slaves are going to be disproportionately poor.

Again, it's not that simple. Poverty is absolutely a factor, but it isn't the sole factor, and there have been numerous studies indicating that poverty by itself (or even extreme poverty) does not fully explain the differences. And it further definitely doesn't explain the differences in actual arrests and jail time, which are absurdly biased against minorities irrespective of economic status. This, IMO, is one of the things that infuriated the AA community about Sanders - that even if you fix poverty, you aren't fixing 2 million people in jail and more in various stages of holding.

[Maltaran]

2 hours ago, Altherion said:

Given his qualifications, I think that he will most likely be confirmed by the Senate.

His main qualification in that respect being he's a Republican

[Kalbear]

Here's a great, powerful, and deeply depressing take on what you need to do post election - write to yourself, about yourself, and keep that somewhere so that in a year's time you can confront yourself with the ideals that you had. 

Quote

 

You can look to the president-elect himself for a vision of what is to come. He has told you his plans all along, though most chose to downplay or deny them. You can even look back to before his candidacy, when in February 2014, he went on Fox News to defend Russia. Why a reality TV host was on Fox News defending Russia is its own story, but Listen to what Trump said already back in 2014.here is what he said about his desired outcome for the United States:

“You know what solves it? When the economy crashes, when the country goes to total hell and everything is a disaster. Then you’ll have a [chuckles], you know, you’ll have riots to go back to where we used to be when we were great.”

 

 

[Altherion]

5 minutes ago, Maltaran said:

His main qualification in that respect being he's a Republican

It wasn't enough when he was being nominated to judicial position by Reagan -- a Republican Senate rejected him.

[White Walker Texas Ranger]

So in case anyone's forgotten about Trump University, apparently Trump just settled for $25 million. I was hoping it would actually go to trial.

Also:

 

[Wrl6199]

1 minute ago, Altherion said:

It wasn't enough when he was being nominated to judicial position by Reagan -- a Republican Senate rejected him.

Who are you guys talking about?

[mormont]

2 hours ago, The Fallen said:

In all fairness to Killer Snark, I can sympathize with Europeans wanting to keep their countries white. When we think of Ireland, for instance, or Norway, we think of them as white countries. So I can see Europeans wanting to keep that heritage alive. The issue I have is that no European country is in danger of becoming minority-majority anytime soon.

For the record, as a Scot, I'd rather go for a drink or live next to any of the many minority ethnic Scots I've met in my life than the Snark here. Most have contributed more to my country than he has or will. People are people, and I'm sure there must be idiots in every community, but I don't define my country by its prevailing skin colour.

4 hours ago, Bold Barry Whitebeard said:

You seem to be missing the point that telling poor white people how privileged they are while demanding benefits for minorities that exclude them is precisely what is driving them towards white identity.

No, unfortunately for you I understand that point very well: that point being, as I have noted, an attempt to excuse racism by blaming it on the only people struggling against it.

4 hours ago, Altherion said:

This was a political campaign. There is nothing unethical about appealing to specific groups, stoking their resentment, etc. etc. Yes, you can find a few instances where it went horribly wrong, but for every one of those I can find dozens where this was business as usual. Trump's only innovation was that he blatantly flouted political correctness and appealed to a group that had been abandoned by the establishment of both parties. There's nothing unethical about that... unlike, for example, getting debate questions in advance.

Comparing irresponsible appeals to racism to getting a debate question in advance. Nice. Did anybody get attacked because of the latter? Remind me. Anyone living in fear? Any pro-Clinton activists roaming around graffitiing Sanders voters' homes with 'we know all the debate questions!'? No? Oh. 

As for the rest, it sure is strange that both parties abandoned these voters and for some reason nobody ever thought about doing this perfectly ethical thing of appealing to racism to win them over. Perhaps... I don't want to get carried away here, but maybe they thought about doing it and then realised it was unethical, so they didn't? It's possible.

[Wrl6199]

2 minutes ago, mormont said:

For the record, as a Scot, I'd rather go for a drink or live next to any of the many minority ethnic Scots I've met in my life than the Snark here. Most have contributed more to my country than he has or will. People are people, and I'm sure there must be idiots in every community, but I don't define my country by its prevailing skin colour.

No, unfortunately for you I understand that point very well: that point being, as I have noted, an attempt to excuse racism by blaming it on the only people struggling against it.

Comparing irresponsible appeals to racism to getting a debate question in advance. Nice. Did anybody get attacked because of the latter? Remind me. Anyone living in fear? Any pro-Clinton activists roaming around graffitiing Sanders voters' homes with 'we know all the debate questions!'? No? Oh. 

As for the rest, it sure is strange that both parties abandoned these voters and for some reason nobody ever thought about doing this perfectly ethical thing of appealing to racism to win them over. Perhaps... I don't want to get carried away here, but maybe they thought about doing it and then realised it was unethical, so they didn't? It's possible.

God i agree with you. I have met lots of people where i live who talk about how the poor white peoples voices are being oppressed. Its like Jesus.

[Ser Scot A Ellison]

Is Keith Ellison a 9/11 truther?