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US Politics : And the Finer Art of Grumbling


GAROVORKIN

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Just now, GAROVORKIN said:

Is it ? as a I just asked Kabear , if you had his financial resources and connections  do you think you get yourself elected to that Job?

Yes. Trump being a racist, exploiting deep divisions within the US, having backing from a foreign power and running against a historically terrible candidate who was under investigation by the FBI has zero relevance on Trump's ability to understand market forces. Zero.

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45 minutes ago, GAROVORKIN said:

He's a businessman , he knows all about market corrections. So what can he really say?

Well, he could admit that as a businessman, anything he's touched or even gone near, has faded, withered and gone belly up.

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33 minutes ago, Kalbear said:

It's not exactly bad for the opposition in my mind; it's bad for my personal take on the US. 2 out of every 5 people in the US appear to actively approve of Trump. 

My suspicion is that they're still happy about him passing taxes. 

I dunno.  My relatives -- who voted for him -- don't seem to think they're getting a tax break.  They are all grumbling about the enormous amount of taxes they have to pay.

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1 hour ago, GAROVORKIN said:

If  you had access to his level of financial and political resources , do you think you could have could you have gotten yourself elected to that job?  

If you had access to a functioning brain would you be a goddamn redtard? It's really a Chicken or the Dolphin situation right here.

1 hour ago, Zorral said:

I dunno.  My relatives -- who voted for him -- don't seem to think they're getting a tax break.  They are all grumbling about the enormous amount of taxes they have to pay.

Jace filed her taxes, I got FUCKED! Like, I actually made more money this year and my returns are down... :(

 

ETA: I'm not a tax genius, and I guess some of my income this year is different. So that could be the reason, but reason's got nothin' to do with it.

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Last stock market post, at least until tomorrow!

Today was the first day on the job for the new Fed chairman, Jerome Powell. Apparently the markets have a history of welcoming the new Fed chair with a down market.

Jerome Powell. Remember that name. No one else has talked about him, what do you folks know about him, what do you expect?

A lot of the market action ($1.5 Trillion in value wiped out) is blamed on the uptick in interest rates, and another increase is expected in July. I've seen a few analysts say he's being tested, and he has to be careful the markets don't wag the dog.

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24 minutes ago, Mexal said:

Yes. Trump being a racist, exploiting deep divisions within the US, having backing from a foreign power and running against a historically terrible candidate who was under investigation by the FBI has zero relevance on Trump's ability to understand market forces. Zero.

Historically terrible? She is literally the second most popular person to ever run for president (measured in total votes received) how is being in the top two historically terrible?

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2 minutes ago, lokisnow said:

Historically terrible? She is literally the second most popular person to ever run for president (measured in total votes received) how is being in the top two historically terrible?

Population increases over time. In 2020, more people will vote than voted in 2016 and so on. At the end of the day, she lost to Donald Trump, a man riddled in controversy and scandals. She was the wrong candidate for the moment. Maybe historically terrible is a bit much but I don't think there were a lot of other candidates who would have lost to Trump.

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4 minutes ago, Mexal said:

Population increases over time. In 2020, more people will vote than voted in 2016 and so on. At the end of the day, she lost to Donald Trump, a man riddled in controversy and scandals. She was the wrong candidate for the moment. Maybe historically terrible is a bit much but I don't think there were a lot of other candidates who would have lost to Trump.

Some think Bernie Sanders might have fared better . 

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2 minutes ago, TsarGrey said:

Who was the most popular?

@Rippounet thanks for answer and article last thread.

Obama got more raw votes in 2008 (69.5 million) and 2012 (65.9 mil) than Clinton did in 2016 (65.8 mil). 

Speaking broadly, Clinton getting 48.2% of the electorate is a pretty bad performance for a Democratic candidate.  Worse than Obama (twice), Kerry, Gore or Clinton (1996).  The last time a Democrat did that poorly, you have to go all the way back to Clinton 1992, and that is with Perot winning 19% of the vote. 

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And expanding on that point, Trump's performance in 2016 wasn't anything special either.  He got 46.1% of the vote, which is less than Romney (47.1%) or either of Bush's elections.  He beat out McCain though, although the Republican brand was FAR worse in 2008 than it was in 2016.

The poor favorability ratings of the two candidates definitely contributed to 2016 having a higher portion of third party votes (5.7%) than any election since Perot ran in 1996.  One worry I have is that while Trump is very bad at making himself popular, he is good at making other people unpopular.  There's very little chance that Trump's coalition will expand significantly between now and 2020, it just isn't his style.  So his political survival will depend on dragging down whoever the Democrats nominate and fracturing the Democratic coalition so that people who are unhappy with Trump either stay home or vote third party. 

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Wise and powerful board! Board of mercy and judgement! I cast myself upon thine consideration! 

I'm new to the whole Politics thing, but isn't there a chance that a lot of deeply blue or red states get shaken up in the House? 

So Democrats do the Gerrymandering thing too, just not as sick and twisted like R's do it. I have lived in swing states and in fortress states. There is something to being in a swing state. In 2012 everybody had an opinion in Colorado, even in the depraved confines of Colorado Springs (a bastion of Redness) there was constant talk. 

When in a place like Indiana, California, Texas or Tennessee there is a malaise about politics. Most people don't think of down ballet, it's why midterms are dreadful rather than merely awful in terms of turnout. And even midterms are driven by backlash against the President. 

Now the streets have been talking. And I got my ear in the gutter for you. 

Everybody's got an opinion now. And the 2 in 5 ratio of Trump to Human stands up to my experiences. 

Is it possible that turnout increases so much over the next few years that the House finally starts to come back to Democrats? 

The R problem of shrinking demographics is weirdly two sided. They should dominate the Senate because of basic arithmetic, but that isn't an effective strategy for them because their base is dying. 

Hence how far they've gone to the right in pursuit of clinging to the house over the last 10 years.

If -and it's a big if- voter turnout explodes over the next 5 years, I think the parties realign dramatically. 

R's become about actual family values and personal freedoms in pursuit of the hispanic vote/religious/business.  

D's become about efficiency and order (co-opting law enforcement) and debt correction. 

I have a few wildcards that are open to either party (towards the end of the 2020's these will be up for grabs) 

Gays/weirdos 

Black vote could take a big step towards the reformed Republican party

Single parents

Unmarried 

Unions 

 

Now I know I'm basically listing demographics that R's could maybe have a shot at if they actually tried. But that's what they have to do. And eventually they will be forced to start picking groups of undesirables to include in their House of Friendship rebrand.

I actually think Bill Kristol could be the guy in that SNL commercial from a few years back.

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Southern Poverty Law Center attributes more than 100 killed or injured by the alt-Reich since 2014

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On December 7, 2017, a 21-year-old white male posing as a student entered Aztec High School in rural New Mexico and began firing a handgun, killing two students before taking his own life.

At the time, the news of the shooting went largely ignored, but the online activity of the alleged killer, William Edward Atchison, bore all the hallmarks of the “alt-right”—the now infamous subculture and political movement consisting of vicious trolls, racist activists, and bitter misogynists.

But Atchison wasn’t the first to fit the profile of alt-right killer—that morbid milestone belongs to Elliot Rodger, the 22-year-old who in 2014 killed six in Isla Vista, California, after uploading a sprawling manifesto filled with hatred of young women and interracial couples (Atchison went by “Elliot Rodger” in one of his many online personas and lauded the “supreme gentleman,” a title Rodger gave himself and has since become a meme on the alt-right).

Including Rodger’s murderous rampage there have been at least 13 alt-right related fatal episodes, leaving 43 dead. And more than 60 injured in these incidents (see list). Nine of the 12 incidents counted here occurred in 2017 alone, making last year the most violent year for the movement.

Like Atchison and Rodger, these perpetrators were all male and, with the exception of three men, all under the age of 30 at the time they are alleged to have killed. The average age of the alt-right killers is 26. The youngest was 17. One, Alexandre Bissonnette, is Canadian, but the rest are American. While some certainly displayed signs of mental illness, all share a history of consuming and/or participating in the type of far-right ecosystem that defines the alt-right.

The “alternative right” was coined in part by white nationalist leader Richard Bertrand Spencer in 2008, but the movement as it’s known today can largely be traced back to 2012 and 2013 when two major events occurred: the killing of the black teenager Trayvon Martin and the so-called Gamergate controversy where female game developers and journalists were systematically threatened with rape and death. Both were formative moments for a young generation of far-right activists raised on the internet and who found community on chaotic forums like 4chan and Reddit where the classic tenets of white nationalism — most notably the belief that white identity is under attack by multiculturalism and political correctness — flourish under dizzying layers of toxic irony.

Significantly, Gamergate also launched the career of Milo Yiannopolous who later used his perch at Breitbart News to whitewash the movement and push it further into the mainstream (former senior adviser to President Donald Trump and Breitbart executive editor Stephen Bannon infamously called the site “the platform for the alt-right.”).

Today, the audience available to alt-right propaganda remains “phenomenally larger” than that available to ISIS-type recruiters, according to MoonshotCVE, a London-based group that counters online radicalization. This accessibility makes it easy for gradual indoctrination, particularly on social media platforms where tech companies long ignored the warning signs that their platforms were contributing to the radicalization of far-right extremists. That so much violence has taken on the shades of a specific subculture like the alt-right so quickly shows just how critical these wide-open platforms have been to the growth of the movement.

But the dark engine of the movement is reactionary white male resentment. Alt-right propaganda is designed to nourish the precise grievances recited by the disillusioned and indignant young men that dominate its ranks. It provides a coherent—but malicious—worldview. For a recruit, the alt-right helps explain why they don’t have the jobs or the sexual partners or the overall societal and cultural respect that they believe (and are told) to be rightfully theirs. This appeal is resonating at a moment in the United States when economic inequality is worsening and a majority-minority United States is forecasted for 2044—developments exploited by racist propagandists. As a writer on Spencer’s AltRight.com wrote this past December:

And all of modern society seems to offer literally nothing to young White men. It’s as if society doesn’t want them to tune in, show up and have a stake in the future of that institution.

As a result, new institutions step up to pick up the slack.

PUA [Pick Up Artists] meet-ups help them learn the skills to get girls. In the place of a gentleman’s club, or underground boxing ring, or boy scouts-type activity, the Alt-Right has stepped up to give camaraderie and a sense of purpose. The internet gives them their entertainment and a place to intellectually grow.

As all the old institutions die, new ones rise to meet the demand and fill the vacuum. Till the perks come back, young White men are going to keep tuning out of society, cast adrift by previous generations that just don’t give a damn.

The lucky ones will wash up on our shores. The unlucky ones…well.

The violence that left one dead at the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, last summer should not be understood as the high-water mark for the movement as some analysts have argued. The alt-right worldview, this rebranding of old hatreds, will remain compelling to disaffected white males and those who claim to speak for them for the foreseeable future. Worse, as this study suggests, punctuated violence will continue. For the same vision of society that the alt-right promulgates—its externalization of blame that lands on a host of enemies seen to be in the ascendancy—also aligns with the indicators of mass violence.

Meanwhile, the alt-right is redoubling its efforts at youth recruitment, intensifying its rhetoric and calling for radical, individual action.

It sure is a good thing terrorism only matters if it's done by a Muslim. Otherwise these issues, and the next generation or two coming of age right now and being raised with this crap as part of their normal surroundings, might be cause for concern.

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3 minutes ago, GAROVORKIN said:

Even had he gotten in , he would faced a Republican dominated Senate and Congress .  In circumstance he wouldn't have been able to get his agenda through.

I know. It's why I never voted for him. I thought his plans were completely unrealistic.

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1 hour ago, GAROVORKIN said:

If  you had access to his level of financial and political resources , do you think you could have could you have gotten yourself elected to that job?  

If I had his financial resources I would have Russian mobsters getting a firmer grip on my balls. 

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