Sorry but they don't get off that easy when almost half of them voted Trump into office.
> Americans, especially outside overcrowded urban areas, are courteous, helpful, hospitable people that are very tolerant of other people and ideas.
I've found quite the opposite, out in the boonies you're more likely to get harassed when you're not the "right" color or religion. I've had some really nice, helpful people turn nasty as soon as I mentioned my atheism, for example.
8 years of Obama gave increased spying, kept the insane TSA, blocked people born in Iran from entering the country (independent of what nationality they currently have). Gave the ESTA Visa Waiver program, where you have to pay for getting exactly no rights what-so-ever. And as final insult, you are allowed to list the social media you use.
The American voter, individually and in aggregate, has lost much say in American bureaucracy. I don't blame Trump alone in this. Bush thought Homeland Security was a good idea. But Trump thinks the problem with American government is that he hasn't been running it. We'll see that that is a foolish take on things soon. Obama made the same mistake and had the same revelation eventually, hence all the executive orders and phone calls in his later presidency instead of laws and reforms and such.
I can't comment about your personal experiences in small town America other than to say that my experience is very different and that referring to areas epithetically (1) undermines your point. America is a very broad and diverse place, though, so there are idiots and bigots in places. But I would just like to point out that kind and welcoming people are easy to find. They don't make headlines. And good impressions don't last as long as bad ones, I guess.
(1) Boonies or boondocks implies a judgemental attitude that people are backwards or unsophisticated. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boondocks
That is not a valid argument by any possible mean. Everybody has the right to vote whatever they want of course, but saying what you said is like saying "people eat meat to piss off vegans more than because they like it". And regardless, the driving motive of something doesn't change the end result of such something.
People need to take responsibility for their actions. They voted for Trump and their is the fault of the current state of things. Period. The reasons behind why they did it don't matter and, frankly, it's also nobody's business.
Now try convincing someone. That is what I tried to do throughout the entire election, but the propaganda machine is treated as fact by many here.
These people get hung up on the idea that we can never leave the two party system, meaning no third party candidate will ever get elected.
Here in Utah, we did manage to give McMullin 20% of the vote, but that was still marginally less than Hillary (after salt lake county) or Trump.
Or... it's nothing like that?
I mean, I get the impression that some portion of people did vote for Trump to piss people off, but that's not what the parent was talking about. Saying that they "voted against Clinton more than they voted for Trump" means they cast a vote to avoid what they saw as the worse outcome.
Let me ask you a loaded question though: Are you white?
I am, and have had only good experiences both in NYC, LA, SF as well as a bunch of small towns.
If you are not white, or dress differently, or are transgender, I can guarantee you which of a small town or a big city would be more embracing. (On aggregate, there are of course outliers on both sides)
You cannot claim that people who didn't vote don't support Trump (or vice versa, don't support Hillary). There simply isn't any data to support this.
> Also keep in mind that most "Trump voters" voted against Clinton more than they voted for Trump.
Citation needed.
You simply fell prey to a focused disinformation campaign that actively tried to prevent intelligent voters from voting and that worked, probably well enough to influence the outcome of the election. That's a hard pill to swallow and you'll probably tell me and yourself that of course that's not what happened, but it wasn't an accident you felt that way. The Russians are very, very good at disinformation and always have been.
You're smart enough to accumulate huge karma here on HN so I'm sure you're smart enough to figure out how voting works. Hopefully you'll manage to fight the confirmation bias you'll likely look for to justify your past actions and be able to make your future actions matter. A great many people wish they had your vote. Please make it count.
Also, it really reads as just a not-very-thinly-veiled accusation that people who do not vote for the candidate that you want to win are stupid and/or naive. I don't think there's anything wrong with saying that, necessarily, but you might as well just say it. I disagree with both the rhetoric and the conclusion entirely, but your opinion is what it is.
Personally, I think this kind of thinking leads to the negative outcomes that pervade our political system. Even if third parties have no chance of winning, the idea that they might not be able to bank on the votes of people scared of the "wrong lizard" might force them to moderate their political stands.
And just like in every previous election, no one "listened" to the voters who voted for the spoiler candidates. No one said "if HRC or DT had just done x they would have gotten more of the Green Party or Libertarian voters." People who vote for spoiler candidates self select themselves into a group where they guarantee the winning and losing major parties don't care at all what they think. Voting for a spoiler candidate means the major candidates don't have to care what you think, and they don't, so you end up with even less influence than if you had voted for one or the other of the potential winners.
My third party vote in CA arguably has a bigger effect than a major party vote in CA, for the presidency in the general election.
By population, that's substantially less true - nothing I do in the ballot box is going to make a dent in a 60-40 split in CA, and quite a few will have to think just like me before it does. If you're in one of those parts, vote accordingly.
I assume, like me, OP was there. We tried to talk sense into voters, but this was the biggest concern for most of them. Here in the US, we have been stuck in a two party system for decades simply because of this (flawed) logic.
Most Americans won't change their behavior to effect a greater change unless they are sure that greater change will be happen because of their relatively insignificant effort. This is why we struggle so much with climate change, the two party system, monopolies, etc.
Irrelevant. What is relevant is that you can't claim that people that didn't vote at all aactually voted for Trump, which is necessary to support the upthread claim that nearly half of Americans voted for Trump. Less than 1/5 of Americans, and less than 1/3 of registered voters, voted for Trump.
Nowhere near half of Americans voted Trump into office. (Now, if you want to criticize a very large share of eligible voters for abstaining, that's valid, but abstaining isn't the same as voting for Trump.)
That is 19% of the total population. Reliable sources inform me that this may in fact be significantly less than half of all Americans.
The notion of the nutcase fringe in politics has been around for a while -- there's about 20% of the vote you've got to be very aware of. Where other voters are insufficiently motivated, or actively discouraged by various means (voter suppression efforts, media, uninspiring candidates), the fringe can win.
That said, there's a range of types throughout the country, and a worrying fraction are worrying. Or worse.
Yes, but it's a different decision than voting for candidate X. Facts matter in criticism.
Of course, even if you mean "Americans eligible to vote" or the slightly smaller number of "Americans registered to vote", the claim still isn't even approximately true.
I'm not sure exactly how we're getting away with having this ESTA thing at all for countries that are supposedly part of the Visa Waiver program, without them retaliating in kind. I only hope that we'll come to our senses and stop before they do so. But given that ESTA has now existed for 10 years and both parties seem to support it, I have low hopes of it going away.
The best rendition of the text on the I-94W form is undoubtedly Frank Zappa and the Ensemble Modern's: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qPPDrXHjJx8
Not to rehash the past, but I thought we had gotten it clear by now: voting for the guy does not indicate support. Americans vote for the candidate they fear and despise the least.
If you voted for Trump, you supported Trump. It's OK to change your mind, but people need to own and take responsibility for what they do at the ballot box.
That's exactly the flawed logic that is keeping us in this two party system. If we just vote for the candidate we support, neither Trump not Hillary would stand a chance.
The trouble with convincing people to actually do that is that most Americans feel the need to be on the winning side. "My vote is worthless unless it's for someone who can actually win."
Do you care to elaborate on this? That's incongruent with voting records.
I will say that America is very diverse. Various states and postal codes have wildly different attitudes about things and very few Americans want to change or homogenize that.
I understand that people from the countryside can be seen as kinder towards people they like but my impression is that hatred and prejudice is much more prevalent there... So care to elaborate if my impression is wrong?
That's not my experience at all. I dealt with more overt racism in NYC than any tiny red state town, and I've spent plenty of time in both. There are racist people everywhere, but even in rural areas, they tend to be ignorant and antisocial so they are not really in any position to oppress anyone.
People tend to mistake talking heads on TV for actual people. People also tend to mistake voting patterns for personal quality of character. There's a caricature on TV (a bigoted one IMO) that small towns are full of shirtless racist rednecks that throw beer cans at all minorities that wander in town. That's because it's a useful trope and an easy way to advance a narrative. Every all town church I'm aware of sends missionaries overseas to build schools, wells, etc. That doesn't mesh with the "we hate foreigners" narrative. I had dinner in a tiny red state town last week. The most popular place in town is run by Mexican immigrants. And it's thriving. Life is more complicated than most media lets on.
Even if we narrowed everything down to political views, the traditional red state view is that diversity in government (federalism) provides better prosperity, diversity, justice, freedom, and so on. Most red state types are fine leaving Colorado with its marijuana and Nevada with its brothels. They value the ability to self determine more than they value the ability to control other people.
Though this is a hard conversation to have meaningfully since different people mean different things by racism. The context here is a Northern European visiting the U.S. I think it would be a bit of a stretch to say they'll have a hard time in the rural south. I'd say (accented) rural Southerners would have a harder time in NYC than Scandanavian visitors would have in Mobile.
It's also a super weird comparison. Southern intolerance is subtextually about animus towards African Americans and Latinos. Nobody is arguing that a Scandinavian would have any trouble in Mobile.
Further: Mobile is a weird choice for a comparison as well, since it's comparatively urban and well-educated. Mobile is more diverse than many parts of Chicago. When we talk about Southern racism, we're generally not talking about the urban south.
Finally, and I want to make this point gingerly, but if we want to drag US political parties into this discussion, the Republican party is almost mathematically determined to be more racist than the Democratic party, which is a coalition of labor, minorities, and liberal whites. It's also just empirically true that the Republican party harbors more overt racists, but we don't have to dive into a lot of value judgements about conservatism and nationalism to conclude that; we can just observe that the Democrats have African American and Latino voters as one of the foundations of their constituency.
The assumption you build this on is that those groups are not more racist than the groups in the Republican party. The only way you could even make that kind of jump is if you subscribe to the definition of racism where you can't be racist if you are systematically oppressed in some regard. Is that the case?
If not, then you will definitely need some data showing that blue collar workers, minorities, etc have lower rates of racism.
The vast majority of racism I hear (assuming the definition based on race discrimination) comes from uneducated people, regardless of political affiliation.
Living in the bay area, I've encountered more anti-black racism from Chinese people than any white people. Should I take that to presume whichever party has more asians is automatically racist against black people?
Just because a party has more people of a specific skin color than another says nothing about racist behavior. Anything else would imply that the Bernie Sanders crowd is the most racist group of them all (skews very heavily white).
That's all I'm saying. I am not psychoanalyzing Republicans in general. Most Republicans probably aren't racist. That's not my point.
I'm really not interested in what you think Chinese Americans think, sorry.
Of course it can be bigoted. Those minorities do not make up a majority of the party and as long as they feel the goals of the party overall help them more than Republicans they will put up with whatever racist crap that comes from Democrats (e.g. "tell em you're a Muslim" Pelosi).
It's all about tradeoffs, a party that offers racist policies in your favor and/or the refusal to enforce laws that affect many of your people is better than a party with no favors offered, even if the former is filled with bigoted morons.
>I'm really not interested in what you think Chinese Americans think
And I never offered you what I thought they think, so go attack some other strawman to attempt to gain some moral high ground.
People in rural areas seem to think of "city people" as brash, always in a hurry, always on their cell phones, etc. whereas they themselves are courteous, friendly, would give you the shirt off their back, etc. I grew up in a small town in the south and heard this sort of thing a lot, but it's bullshit. It's just one parochial stereotype among many.
Looking at maps like these:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:2016_Nationwide_US_presid...
http://www.270towin.com/2016-house-election/
is always useful to remind yourself that there are still plenty of 'red' pockets in deeply 'blue' states and vice versa. In 2016 presidential election I believe there where only two states where all counties went Republican and two states where all went Democratic.
True. But you can not organise conferences in the USA. You can tell your employers that holding meetings in the USA is bad. etc.
(For the record: I never had any problems whatsoever both using ESTA and a visa. However, the process feels significantly more hostile and unwelcoming compared to other countries.)
Almost all Americans think this sort of thing is nonsense. But the average American has little standing to hold the American bureaucracy accountable for its nonsense.
Americans, especially outside overcrowded urban areas, are courteous, helpful, hospitable people that are very tolerant of other people and ideas.