This is entirely normal - the young like things to change, the old do not. This voting pattern well predates the internet.
> I believe that in general, younger people have become better at filtering out bullshit because they've had access to much more information
I disagree. It's about the same as it always has been. Yellow journalism exists now, just as it existed in the 19th century, and people still fall for it now.
If the internet stopped people from falling for bullshit, "post-truth" would not have been 'word of the year' for 2016.
Makes no sense given the context. Clinton was absolutely not the change candidate in this election.
Old people predominantly voted for a shakeup, a radical change in the way American govt operates.
I'm not sure if you noticed, but both houses went Republican, and the Republicans who have been controlling congress for the past 6 years have been stonewalling and blocking everything. The people who were voted in? They actually aren't up for change.
edit: The Republicans in particular are not going to change the current system, and Trump, even if he wanted to, can't do it without a 2/3rds majority for the constitutional change. The Republicans don't want to change the current system, because it's their force multiplier - they are overrepresented because they've been able to more successfully bend the current system via gerrymandering and similar. They also will have serious trouble fiddling with the constitution, because in order to get where they are, they've made a lot of shouty people very religiose about the original document - changing their 'holy bible of politics' will be a very difficult sell.
Trump will change the rhetoric coming out of the oval office, sure, but he's not going to substantially change how government functions.
There are actually two ways to pass a constitutional amendment. 2/3 of both Federal legislative houses is one, but they can also do it with 2/3 of all state legislatures.
Republicans do very well in the state legislatures, they're only about five states short of the latter threshold.
2018 is likely to be a bad year for Democrats, there's a huge number of seats to defend and only a handful of Republican seats that must be defended, with only like 2-3 competitive seats. A very real possibility is that this turns into the usual midterm bloodbath and they pick up a few more seats/legislatures and start pushing constitutional amendments on wedge/social issues to lock in their wins.
People's adherence to this as a "religious document" is oversold - the document includes a method to change itself, and this is "playing by the rules". But frankly they wouldn't even think twice before rationalizing, when presented with the opportunity to lock in their wins for multiple decades.
You're right about it being in their best interest not to mess with the election system right now. The multi-level (state/federal) and district-by-district/state-by-state nature of the system favors them heavily compared to the popular vote. Republicans have near total dominance of all levels of government, with what amounts to a popular loss. One thing they may change is to have more blue states start splitting their electoral votes, like Nebraska and Maine do. States get to determine how their electoral votes are allocated, and Republicans control many of the "blue" states' governments (eg Michigan, Wisconsin, etc). Republicans can essentially make those states not count for Democrats electorally, since they will go half-and-half for both Republicans and Democrats (+/- a few seats).
the person you're replying to didn't make such a strong claim.
"If the internet stopped people from falling for bullshit, "post-truth" would not have been 'word of the year' for 2016."
which is making a general claim. Whereas now you're implying that you weren't making a general claim about "stopped".
If you 'stop' corruption, it doesn't mean you 100% eliminate corruption. A journalist can 'stop people in the street' to talk to them, but that doesn't mean that they stand still rather that walk-and-talk. If a parent is able to 'stop' a kid sleeping badly, it doesn't mean their kid never again sleeps badly, just that the incidence is considerably reduced. Even a traffic 'stop' sign doesn't completely stop people all the time. 'Stop', when applied to human behaviour, is not the fucking same as corking a bloody wine bottle.
Let me put it another way: in your subsequent replies you are implying that what your original claim meant was "If the internet stopped even just a few people from falling for bullshit, "post-truth" would not have been 'word of the year' for 2016." which is clearly not what you meant (and, BTW, would clearly be a false statement) - hence the equivocation.
Maybe, but if so it's not like a phase of the moon, which changes on its own. This phase will only pass if we do something to make that happen.
... this long run is a misleading guide to current affairs. In the long run we are all dead. Economists [and everyone else] set themselves too easy, too useless a task, if in tempestuous seasons they can only tell us, that when the storm is long past, the ocean is flat again.
Er... yes, I basically deeply disagree with all of your points :-)
I didn't vote for Trump, so it's not like I was supporting him, but damn Hillary voters were so ignorant of her history. They were so mad that Trump didn't want to welcome more Syrian refugees. How many of them knew Hillary literally created the Syrian refugee crisis in a failed attempt at a coup? Not a single one I talked to.
There is no evidence that Clinton backed or supported a coup in Syria. The US did support elements of a popular uprising in Syria during the Arab spring, and then provided and continues to provide military support to Anti-Assad factions after Assad viciously cracked down on the uprising. A coup d'etat is a very different beast.
The refugee crisis is a result of Assad and Anti-Assad factions acting to change the demographics of Syria via ethnic cleansing. It is unclear, but seems unlikely to me, that the refugee crisis would be lower if the Anti-Assad factions had gotten less support from the US. The refugee crisis would have just happened over a shorter period of time. To avoid increased US involvement Assad regulated his behavior somewhat (see Chemical Weapons controversy). It seems likely to me that the US by providing limited support to Anti-Assad factions acted to limit/control military support given by gulf nations to the more extreme Anti-Assad elements. Such support would likely have made the more radical elements of the civil war much more powerful and likely increased the flow of refugees.
US involvement in the Syrian Civil War did in certain circumstances limit the refugee crisis and has allowed refugees to return home. For example the US/YPG defense of Sinjar Mountain in N. Iraq allowed refugees to escape genocide, then with the recapture of Sinjar, allowed refugees to return home. Another example would be halting of the Islamic State's campaign in N. Syria, which if continued would have generated hundreds of thousands of refugees. Not only was the Islamic State's advance halted, but it has been rolled back significantly with large numbers of refugees returning home. This would not have been possible without US support to the factions (YPG/SDF) fighting the Islamic State.
We can debate the exact nature of US responsibility for the refugee crisis, but (1). any direct responsibility for foreign policy at this level is with the President not the Secretary of State, (2). there was no coup d'etat attempted or otherwise in Syria.
http://www.latimes.com/world/middleeast/la-fg-cia-pentagon-i...
>Srian militias armed by different parts of the U.S. war machine have begun to fight each other on the plains between the besieged city of Aleppo and the Turkish border, highlighting how little control U.S. intelligence officers and military planners have over the groups they have financed and trained in the bitter five-year-old civil war.
2. As another poster noted, ISIS started in Iraq not Syria.
3. The Syrian factions which the US supported are opposed to ISIS and fought several early battles against them. Some US allies in the region sent aid to ISIS, but the US worked to limit and stop that aid.
4. The Pentagon is not backing Assad and still provides aid to anti-Assad groups.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CIA_activities_in_Syria#Parami...
Wikileaks has reported that the US government has been covertly funding the Syrian opposition since 2006.[40]
2. Yes, ISIS started in Iraq, by not primarily by Iraqis. As I said, the Syrians who had been trained, armed, and radicalized by the CIA fled to Iraq when the coup failed and started ISIS.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/jun/03/us-isi... A year into the Syrian rebellion, the US and its allies weren’t only supporting and arming an opposition they knew to be dominated by extreme sectarian groups; they were prepared to countenance the creation of some sort of “Islamic state” – despite the “grave danger” to Iraq’s unity – as a Sunni buffer to weaken Syria.
3. See #2 above, we clearly funded and armed what became ISIS.
4. You're right on this one. The reports of the two parties backed by the CIA and Pentagon fighting each other had me mixed up. That doesn't change the rest of the stuff above for which I've provided citations.
2. What happened in Syria is a civil war not a Coup d'etat.
>"the Syrians who had been trained, armed, and radicalized by the CIA fled to Iraq when the coup failed and started ISIS."
The civil war was going well for the rebels all throughout the rise of ISIS, so I'm curious when you thought this was happening? All sources agree that ISIS was formed in Iraq and then infiltrated into Syria.
"the US and its allies weren’t only supporting and arming an opposition they knew to be dominated by extreme sectarian groups - they were prepared to countenance the creation of some sort of “Islamic state”"
Lets parse that carefully as it is deceptively written:
* "the US and its allies" that is, the US had one policy and its allies had another, but the author chooses to group them together to blame the US for activities undertaken by US allies which the US actively opposed and ran counter to US interests.
* "supporting and arming an opposition they knew to be dominated by extreme sectarian groups" while true the US was going out of its way to arm the less extreme elements (unlike some US allies).
* "they were prepared to countenance the creation of some sort of “Islamic state”", that is, a DIA intelligence assessment considered the possibility that the Sunni population of Iraq might break away from Iraq. They didn't support this possibility, just said it could happen (and it did). This state need not be "The Islamic State", but author choose the name "Islamic State" to make it sound like the US supported the Islamic State.
The author of that piece is being willfully misleading. Note that it was published in the Opinion section of the guardian. Even with all that the author supports my claim that ISIS started in Iraq.
I think you will find the opposite is true. You have completely out-of-touch elitists who think everything is great, and then you have people who voted for Trump who are extremely aware of the reality of the situation.
The people who voted for Trump had to actually seek out the truth because they realised that would they were being fed by the mainstream media and social media didn't match their reality.
The people who voted for Hillary just continued to be fed information. The end result is the Trump voters became extremely knowledgeable about all of the various issues, and Hillary voters look like products of brainwashing.
For example, Hillary voters would see the cnn article about how citibank predicted the sharemarket would drop 3% if Trump was elected and just take it at face value. Trump supporters know that citibank has strong ties to the democrats to the point that they selected the Obama team and can see that CNN is merely a propaganda arm of the clinton foundation.
Hillary was under investigation from the FBI at the time that article was written and their logic for suggesting the 3% decrease was supposedly that at some point Trump wasn't the favourite and so it would be an unexpected result. So being an unexpected result will cause a 3% drop, but not your president being under investigation by the FBI.
That is just one example of literally hundreds of examples. Hillary voters never bothered to seek the truth.
Internet culture is still very young. At least in the US based on the election last week, the majority of people 18-25 voted progressive in most states. These are people who have never known the world without internet access.
I guess that the people who voted the other way are folks who have transitioned into internet-required lifestyles later in life and had their young adult lifestyles set in the 80's and early 90s and earlier. This makes them less digital natives and more like immigrants (ironically).
Again, none of these are universally true of course and this is all just personal opinion.
I believe that in general, younger people have become better at filtering out bullshit because they've had access to much more information than older folks did growing up.
I was born in 1980 and while I'm technically outside the millennial cutoff, I still identify with that group more than any other. While we didn't have a computer in the house until the early 90's, I was always exposed to computers and the internet from a super early age. Most of my viewing habits are gaming and making on YouTube, some streaming, etc. Still haven't really gotten the value from Snapchat personally, but I think that's more of a function of not having much need to use it.
Overall I am hopeful things are getting better as boomers age out and die off and the younger folks are coming into their own.