It's been a constant stream of catastrophizing from them for the last four years. It was like this during the Bush years as well, though they do seem to have perfected it.

The things that the mainstream media have not reported enough is his corruption and incompetency. Instead, they constantly chase after his remarks. I will give you an example. The way USPS is undermined is nothing but sabotage. Trump and his officials claimed that they run USPS like business. The mainstream media simply reported it along this frame. However, no reasonable business would run like what they did to USPS. Besides, the moment they claimed that they would revert the changes, the mainstream simply reported what they said. No, they didn't revert their changes. By reading mainstream media news casually, we wouldn't know that USPS was sabotaged. Many people think that Trump administration simply tried to run USPS like business but they decided not to due to opposition. The reality is that USPS was sabotaged and the damage is done.

Then, all of a sudden Trump administration said that they would suspend/revert the changes. The mainstream media all rushed to report the statements, even though they were lies. There were no reporting of similar scale once the lies were uncovered. This is also the reason why Bill Barr was able to destroy Mueller's investigation - by first lying that there was no wrongdoings to gain enormous coverage and then escape scrutiny when truth was uncovered due to subdue coverage. As I also said, the mainstream media knew that Trump administration lies consistently. They should really ignore what they said and simply report what they do and don't do.

In summary, the mainstream media are really poor in conveying the big picture because Trump administration successfully hacks them and because they are unable to adapt to this adversary.

The post office was not sabotaged. They're foundering because mail volume has dropped to half its peak and they haven't been able to downsize their operations fast enough to keep making money.

The media and the Democrats spent the last year chasing this wild conspiracy theory about the USPS throwing the election for Trump. It never ever made any sense and, indeed, there's no evidence that mail in ballots were tampered with on any large scale.

I've looked at a few definitions, and I don't see how it's an accurate description of what's happening here.

For example: “Catastrophizing is a cognitive distortion that prompts people to jump to the worst possible conclusion, usually with very limited information or objective reason to despair. When a situation is upsetting, but not necessarily catastrophic, they still feel like they are in the midst of a crisis.” (https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/basics/catastrophizing)

We have experienced “great damage or suffering” (i.e., catastrophes), not merely upsetting situations. The media hasn't been catastrophizing; they've been reporting about catastrophes.

He publicly condoned shooting unarmed protesters, and let his DOJ kidnap people in unmarked vans.

He left the Paris climate accords.

These are catastrophic.

Edit: forgot to say numerous people close to him and his campaign have gone to jail. Steve Bannon, Michael Cohen, Paul Manafort, Roger Stone...etc.

Source? Sounds like conspiratorial nonsense.

glen greenwald: http://archive.is/58vqu

matt taibbi: https://archive.li/acKAO

> The idea that this is simply a continuation of an Obama-era practice is "preposterous," said Denise Gilman, director of the Immigration Clinic at the University of Texas Law School. "There were occasionally instances where you would find a separated family — maybe like one every six months to a year — and that was usually because there had been some actual individualized concern that there was a trafficking situation or that the parent wasn’t actually the parent."

> Once custody concerns were resolved, "there was pretty immediately reunification," Gilman told NBC News. "There were not 2,000 kids in two months — it’s not the same universe," she added.

That's not to say that the Obama administration didn't do some other cruel things to migrant families in an effort to deter them. Some of which got smacked back down by the courts, too. But separating families as a matter of policy was not one of those policies.

This single action by Trump imperils all of humanity.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intermediate-Range_Nuclear_For...

https://foreignpolicy.com/2019/08/02/what-does-the-demise-of...

They also stopped Ebola from spreading, which is at least an order of magnitude worse than COVID.

That team operated internationally with the cooperation of local governments. When it was disbanded, many people warned the administration that it was leaving a huge public health gap, and that the decision would result in unchecked pandemics.

We’re lucky to have ended up with a COVID pandemic, and not something much worse.

The death rate is 50%, which is 100x higher than COVID’s 0.5% (which has been lowered to 0.125% with improved hospital care).

In the absence of a coordinated pandemic response, I count that as “worse”.

Pure unmitigated ignorance.

I do not believe that Biden is capable of enacting any policy that will lead to the (simple) social behaviors that can stop the disease in its tracks. He can do some policy on the edges.

But if we do stop the virus, it won't be because of Biden, it will be because of the actions of a huge number of people, across the political spectrum, and a grand unification of people. We will need to build a massive virus stopping machine, and such projects are never the result of one person, anymore than the space shuttle being attributable to a single person.

I think it's possible, but I do not think it's likely.

Nancy Pelosi was walking around Chinatown in SF after it was well known that there was an outbreak going on overseas.

The NYC department of health advised that it was perfectly safe to attend Chinese New Year celebrations shortly after.

When POTUS stopped international travel earlier than the media decided it was a legitimate issue, his political opponents called him a racist. Then you'll argue, "but but the nyc outbreaks trace to Europe!!" And I'll argue back that China has industrial factories in Italy, and ask you how the virus got to Italy/Europe in the first place. And you still won't get it. It's like the left just constant ignores common sense and hides behind reddit-teir "you got a source for that" nerdery.

All of this happened less than a year ago. It is well within living memory.

Literally nothing you said here has any relevance to effective policy for stopping Covid19. Nothing. Somehow, in our modern society, you have been able to consume a very large diet of information, and have been misinformed about its basic suitability as information.

There's only one way to stop this thing: by paying attention to evidence and our best understanding, and to put aside our silly political games that have not bearing on reality. Or worse, political games that think they are the reality.

I hope that as part of the healing process, science starts having a seat at the table in these discussions.

You're seriously going to claim that the US wouldn't have had a better response to a pandemic had they actually had a pandemic response team?

You really think that would've all played out the same? I assume you didn't vote for Trump, and your opinion is based in facts and logic, and not a misguided attempt at defending his laughably embarrassing attempts at downplaying a pandemic ravaging our nation.

PS: Where's that vaccine he promised? Or were you one of the ones that thought the virus was just going to "magically disappear" after the election?

Withholding aid to Puerto Rico. Calling for the governor of Michigan to be locked up for implementing covid restrictions then refusing to condemn the folks that attempted to kidnap her.

Charlottesville. Sending in Federal Police to kidnap folks in Portland. Refusing to impose sanctions on Russia that had bipartisan support. Refusing to condemn Russia for assassinating citizens of other nations with chemical weapons. Jamaal kashoggi. Saluting North Korean soldiers. Outright telling governor's he was withholding Federal aid unless they did him favors. Etc, etc, etc. "left-leaning media" has absolutely nothing to do with his train wreck of a presidency.

I don't think he managed to go a single month over the last 4 years without violating the Constitution.

That’s what fascism is, you realise?

This really cuts to the heart of it; what does it take to get someone to change their views, when the facts don’t work?

Even if you disagree with a democratic agenda, how can you in good conscience continue to support someone who is blatantly acting like a fascist dictator right now?

I personally find it easy to distinguish Trump, who I consider an waste of air, and the GOP, who has an agenda I can appreciate.

Why is that so difficult to do?

The fact that the left has been absolutely out of their minds with hatred for the man for the last four years makes it very, very difficult for people to easily trust that they are not engaging in impropriety during the election. Their motto for removing him is essentially "At any cost" at this point.

I'm not sure why you're framing his actions or words along the lines of "fascist dictator". This is simply a continuation of the vitriolic rhetoric I've been trying to combat for years now. It's crazed, and I do not understand why you - someone who can write clearly enough that you must be intelligent - cannot see it. It's rhetoric like that that is driving so many people to distrust you.

Trump will challenge the election results in court and succeed or fail. It's as simple as that. Personally, I hope it's a failure because I don't want there to have been any impropriety. If that's the case, Trump is done. There is no fascism. There is no dictator. Please stop catastrophizing.

Now, he’s refusing to accept the results of the election.

He has appointed self-proclaimed facists and neo-Nazis to his inner circle.

His apparently illegal secret police force illegally detained protestors over the objections of the state governments that had legal jurisdiction over the protests.

He said he rushed the appointment of an additional judge to the supreme court so he would have enough votes to overturn the election results.

People claim he wants to be a “fascist dictator” because these are just recent examples of his four year concerted effort to dismantle our democracy.

He did all of these things in the open. There’s no “catastophizing” here. These are all, well-documented, uncontested facts. Most are documented by multiple videos of him, and members of his administration speaking about them. There are dozens of other examples of this behavior, also all well-documented.

Fortunately, it looks like he failed, and will soon be a former president.

This is the problem - Trump is a moron and everything he believe is suspect.

He believes he had the largest inaugural crowds ever, even after PHOTOGRAPHIC evidence proves otherwise. He believes his administration accomplished more in the first 100 days than any other one in US History. He believes COVID is a conspiracy, fading away, we've rounded the corner, doctors and hospitals are faking numbers to make money, the fake media only talks about it to hurt him and it will stop after the election. Etc.

>I'm not sure why you're framing his actions or words along the lines of "fascist dictator".

He has called for jailing or imprisonment of his political enemies, suggested the election system is rife with fraud, order troops to suppress free speech, had federal agents snatch people off the streets, tried to get other countries to smear his opponents before they got aid from the US, etc. The GOP ran a political convention when HALF of the the speakers were his relatives and advanced no agenda. If he were the President of some banana republic, we would say that is expected in a failing state led by a fascist dictator. I mean the convention alone is bordering on the type of stuff North Korea would stage.

It's not “as simple as that.”

He's made baseless claims about the security of mail-based voting, suggested that shifts in tallies are the results of illegal votes — instead of a predictable effect of preventing counties from tallying ballots until election day, and clearly and unequivocally claimed that he has won the election and that any other outcome must be a result of fraud.

Working to create the appearance of fraud and then pointing to the situation as evidence is problematic, even if it is not ultimately successful.

He's saying things like that he would win if it weren't for all of the illegal votes being counted. That "bad things" are happening in Pennsylvania as his lead was closing. He said, months ago, that he didn't think votes should be counted after election day, which is absolutely absurd.

He's literally trying to sow doubt about the election process and trying to make people think that Biden closing and overcoming a vote gap is suspicious, when it was totally expected.

I don't throw the term around lightly, but I don't know what else to call a blatant undermining of democracy like that other than fascism. Maybe we can discuss whether or not fascism is all that bad, but I find no way you can argue in good faith that what he's saying about the election is "ho-hum. Nothing to see here."

I hear you, and I know what you mean.

...but, I don’t think you can reasonably claim that now, even if, perhaps, you could previously.

I’m not trying to convince anyone; I’m just saying, for me, looking at what is happening right now, I cannot argue that the behaviour Trump is displaying is a) inappropriate for the potus, and b) scarily like what you would expect from a “fascist dictator”.

I can’t disagree with you more strongly than this: regardless of what has happened in the past, what is happening right now is NOT a continuation of the last four years of leftist media agenda.

The reason the two types of balloting had such a difference in party-support is that the President in the Republican party had been telling his supporters not to use mail-in balloting because it would be rife with fraud. People took him at his word on that side of the political divide, so there's a resulting bias in the likely candidate supported by the mail-in ballots.

Sources:

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.foxnews.com/politics/pennsy...

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.forbes.com/sites/alisondurk...

https://www.npr.org/2020/11/04/931136905/we-ll-be-working-24...

Funny how Trump isn't complaining about the exact same thing happening when it winds up helping him.

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.cbsnews.com/amp/news/fact-c...

This is not what is happening, and if anything, in Pennsylvania in particular, the Republican legislature is responsible for this situation. PA is one of only a few states that does not allow processing mailed ballots until election day (i.e. they can't even open the envelopes). The Democratic governor asked to change the law to allow counting of ballots before election day, precisely so you wouldn't get into this situation, and the Republican legislature refused.

Now he throws as many lawsuits as he can about the voting process with zero evidence. His suits are being thrown out because they are frivolous and lack credibility.

Doubt with regards to the voting process is being sown by a single person and we shouldn't doubt our institutions just because someone is screaming loudly with no evidence.

Admittedly, I'm still trying to track down some more info on the rumored last minute software update in Georgia I believe it was and some more info on some rather interesting age demographics.

I don't doubt that if there was an election to pique voter mobilization, it'd be this one. I just know I'd sleep more soundly knowing some of the numerical strangeness rumored to be going on was looked into wholeheartedly.

Also because of the hyper-distributed nature of American elections, that's a much better way to understand how they work in one's town than to look at national news about what's happening in Miami-Dade County. If you're not a citizen of Florida (much less a resident of Miami-Dade), you might as well ask how elections are run in Germany; it'll apply about as much to how they run in your town.

For me, Trump trying to use the Justice Dept to investigate his enemies and thwart investigations of his friends is so beyond the pale, way beyond what any president, Republican or Democrat, has ever done that I am shocked people can think this was not a big deal. I mean, that extreme abuse of power is banana republic, end of Rome-type shit.

Put it another way: I firmly believe if a time traveler from, say, 2010 just showed up to see Trump's autocratic desires that they'd be horrified; we've just gotten used to Trump's extreme abuses. Heck, it's become something of a new favorite pastime of mine to look at Trump's own tweet storms circa 2012 and see how 2012 Trump would be condemning 2020 Trump in the harshest possible terms.

Listen to his responses again. I don't know how you can interpret it any other way.

September 2020: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oR8oIitE6mI

October 2016: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cP0G4vJ5OMw

Edit: Found a September 2016 one where he does say he will support the transfer of power - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XRJ8TLCZdnI

(Before downvoting/flagging, please recognize that this answer is not exclusive of other explanations such as "Trump really does have dictatorial ambitions". I take no position on such non-falsifiable claims.)

This is very similar to George W Bush's "fool me twice... I won't get fooled again" gaffe. Had he completed the quote properly he could never have escaped the clips of saying "shame on me" taken out of context (remember this is before the days of deepfakes; now it would matter much less). This was predictably spun as "Dubya is stupid!" but frankly to recognize mid-quip the minefield he was about to step in is a feat beyond the average person. Of course the difference is (again) that unlike Bush, Trump really leaves open the possibility that he really is incompetent as opposed to the 5-dimensional chess that anyone supporting him really hopes he's playing.

Maybe hes smart enough not to answer the question - the problem is that it should never have needed to be asked.

Then why wasn't Biden asked the same question? Or anyone else? If this was just a gaffe factory then surely it would be a staple of the presidential interview genre, no?

But it's not. Only Trump got asked that. Ever, as far as I know. And the reason isn't because we were looking for a gaffe but because there was (AND REMAINS!) significant doubt as to whether he would support a peaceful transition of power.

I mean, the current circumstances right now disprove the theory you just proposed. Read his twitter feed, for goodness sake.

That doesn't even make sense! Biden isn't the sitting POTUS. The question "will you support a peaceful transition of power" only makes sense when asked of a sitting POTUS, not an incoming POTUS. Biden doesn't currently have any power which he's required to transmit to Trump!

I know TDS can be a powerful effect, but surely you're not asking me to believe (or to take seriously) that there's someone else other than Trump who currently holds the position of POTUS.

Would you care to revisit your priors as to whether or not it was appropriate to ask Trump about his support for a peaceful transfer of power?

https://foreignpolicy.com/2020/09/24/trump-transition-us-ele...

He literally called them the "enemies of the state". He routinely calls for the prosecution of his political enemies, and has apparently directed his own Department of Justice to that effect.

I mean, sure, it's true that he may not "be" a fascist authoritarian. But he sure acts like one. Is it wrong to report that?

If this is not sufficient evidence that Trump is a proto-fascist authoritarian, what more would be needed, in your mind, to meet that bar? Or, perhaps putting it another way, can you explain to me how all of this stuff is cool and normal and not a clear pattern of proto-fascist authoritarianism?

I did my best here to source examples from multiple media outlets in order to try to mitigate against the paradox that your main complaint is that the media is distorting the truth. Once someone decides that, not just one source, but the entire media apparatus is lying, it’s incredibly difficult to source information in a way which is acceptable—which is why a free press is so important, and why it’s particularly dangerous that Trump and his party have been spending so much energy on undermining it.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KQJzt48wXbA

[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/all-the-presidents-d...

[2] https://www.nytimes.com/article/trump-pardons-commutations.h...

[3] https://nypost.com/2020/11/05/trump-to-speak-from-white-hous...

[4] https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/international/worl...

[5] https://www.cbsnews.com/news/lesley-stahl-donald-trump-said-...

[6] https://cpj.org/reports/2020/04/trump-media-attacks-credibil...

[7] https://www.thewrap.com/trump-attacks-fox-election-day/

[8] https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/trump-attacks-fox-ne...

[9] https://www.npr.org/2020/03/09/813577462/how-trump-has-fille...

[10] https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/trump-mobilizes-mili...

[11] https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politic...

[12] https://www.globalgovernmentforum.com/trump-extend-hire-fire...

[13] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xZ2AvqLSjSs

That is, by definition, fascist and authoritarian.

My main problem is that the same treatment is not applied to the democrats. This means that in order to find similar stories from the other side, one needs to start (1) reading extremist-leaning news. These also contain many half-truths and outright lies, so on top of that one has to (2) try to verify themselves the veracity of those claims. Most people don't have the time to do that (obviously), so they stop at the first step.

aside from the bizarre alternative-universe psychodrama that corporate media has been airing for the past years, trump in reality was basically just unremarkable and incompetent.

His tweets clearly show the mindset of someone who wants to use levers of power which are massively beyond his constitutional powers (shut down the media, overthrow elections, imprison critics). But he had neither the energy or the political skill to accomplish any of that. What he did have was the ability to convince millions of people that the US government should be turned over to a TV reality clown.

So I'll add because I'm more or less with you: I'm sincerely confused how we can spend years alleging Russian interference and now that on a really close election, with contention over the way the ballots were counted, it's being called by the media without presenting doubt despite polling being pretty off? The inconsistency is concerning, in my opinion. What am I not understanding?

If I'd introduced a new system in at work (my understanding is the mass mail-in ballots are new at this scale, but please correct me if I'm wrong) and was testing it and it gave a weird result, I'd at least double check it.

So I’d say that’s what you’re not understanding, though I’m puzzled as to how you could have missed it if you spent any time looking into it at all, since every reputable source has reported the rebuttals right alongside the allegations.

There is no question in this election. The margins are not close. They are not surprising. They were not even terribly unexpected. The only party alleging any of those things is the party that has repeatedly eschewed facts for 4 years and longer. The one that has repeatedly pushed useless investigations that they themselves conclude are baseless. And in fact it’s not even the whole party, it’s mostly the parts of the party working directly for the loser.

Does that help clarify your confusion?

Who do you consider to be reputable sources? I will include them in my reading.

I'm also interested in why it was necessary to refer to the president as a "loser." I thought your point stood without it and all that did was clue me in on the possibility of bias in the rest of the response. Staunch supporters would likely discard your reasoning entirely because of it.

Reputability-wise I focused on the American press in general (Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, NYT, etc). My main through-line during the week was following the 538 live blog, which did a good job of linking out to a variety of sources as several of the cases unfolded during the week. A decent summary is the one at https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/election-2020-trump-campaign... . You'll find the legal challenges so far are largely about technicalities rather than actual allegations of voter fraud, despite claims otherwise, and that the ones that have been heard have mostly either been dismissed or they have resulted in minor adjustments to procedures, at times to the frustration of the presiding judge (finding in-person recounting of the proceedings requires digging deeper than the above article).

Not featuring in the legal proceedings are other allegations, such as those that certain people who were supposedly deceased had submitted votes. These have mostly turned out to be clerical errors, many of which were already fixed but hadn't necessarily propagated to the systems that the allegers were looking at. As a bonus, here's a 538 feature from 2016, when the groundwork for this kind of argument was once again being laid just in case now-president Trump lost: https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/voter-fraud-is-very-rar... .

They also hoped that he would come to the table and legitimize Russia as a fellow superpower and usher in a new era of diplomatic relations. The fact that Trump utterly failed to do that probably chilled Russia's interest in the 2020 election though.

Read more here: https://www.bbc.com/news/election-us-2020-53702872

I'm not claiming this is the case but providing an example of how subjective and spinnable any set of facts can be made.

I believe that an exchange of views is possible in a way that will be illuminating to both "sides", but it just isn't possible in a forum like this.

"They literally manufactured a Russia collusion story" is an assertion presented as fact. It obviously has a very deep argument behind it that has convinced the author. But given the context of the discussion, it's impossible for the author to explain why he thinks that is true, in a way for a counterpart to verify and explore.

Similarly, those on the other side who believe the Russia collusion isn't a "manufactured story" also have very deep arguments that can't be included here.

It's the same with "orchestrating a hijacking of the Democratic primary". It's an assertion that comes across as completely ridiculous to people who don't believe it, based off of counter arguments that are also very deep having to do with the intricacies of how the primaries work.

And so then of course the conclusion is that Trump is bad but the media is worse, based off of those previous two assertions being true. And the discussion goes absolutely nowhere.

I am literally highly interested in the thinking behind why the Russia collusion story is manufactured, and how the Democratic primary is hijacked. Yes because I believe those conclusions are false, but I want to respectfully explore where in the argument I think it falls down. But to do it would take a long exchange, probably with time in between to research, that just isn't supported by forums like this.

Edit: Specifically https://krebsonsecurity.com/2017/08/twitter-bots-use-likes-r...

And the Republicans did the same thing with Obama, which is why he is so reviled among the right. The pendulum swings harder at each cycle, and how people still cannot see how thoroughly they're being manipulated by their party of choice continues to astound me. I get the tribalism, and I get the basic cognitive gears at play, but it takes only a modicum of self awareness and attempted empathy to understand the other side enough to open up the door to doubt, and only the tiniest degree of curiosity to find more nuanced understanding of issues at play. I do see this in some places, but I see ignorant partisan propaganda far more, and the pendulum swings ever harder.

The devil is the one we make, seemingly blind to the ingredients we carelessly continue to throw into the cauldron that will continue to produce them, even as one group rejoices that the latest one has been defeated.

Yeah no ... at this point if you honestly still believe that, we have to agree to disagree, and I'm glad that more people in America disagree with you than agree with you.

The United States has structural issues, many of them features and not bugs, that make a coordinated effort to suppress a contagious virus basically impossible. Biden never made the case for what he would have done different; he didn't really have to.

That's the thing about a crisis. When your opponent is in charge during a crisis, you can always say he was incompetent, and no one can prove that you're wrong.

It certainly can't say what Biden would have called a "reasonable response" at the time, whether he would have followed through on it, etc. We actually know what Biden was saying to do in the early days of the pandemic, and Trump's earliest actions were roundly criticized by Democrats.

My theory is that if Trump had come out hard for lockdown early on, Republicans would be pro-lockdown and Democrats would be anti-lockdown. I view the partisan divide on COVID handling as...well, purely partisan.

The early CDC tests, during the period we might have been able to maintain contact tracing, were faulty. A different president wouldn't have changed that.

Republicans didn't embrace masks, but it's unlikely a Democrat president would've done a better job convincing them.

In my opinion Trump's worst fault here is that he lacks the temperament for one of the most important things we needed: fireside chats. Trump is a pretty good hype man, cheering on good times, but abysmal at the somber tough message delivery we needed.

Which implies your summary of the point is based off of one of the several misreadings out there.

https://youtu.be/vMm5HfxNXY4

I think it's important to keep in mind that Trump winning the primaries in 2016 was essentially a repudiation of the entire Republican incumbency by a good portion of their base.

Because basically all those arguments remain true - yet Trump didn't win. These aren't argument for why Trump would win. They were arguments for why Trump has some purchase. The reason Trump won was the elites go so sloppy they let him win, they let their garbage boogieman alternative become the choice because they were addicted to having that kind of creep as their opposition.

And Michael Moore's argument in particular is crap among these. Homeless factory workers aren't Trump's base, family construction companies are his base - I see them regularly. The well-off but not college educated.

The group dynamics of bullying are pretty straightforward. There will always be bullies at the top who want to cement their status by showing their power as a bully. To get a significant group of people to go along with the bullying, however, (think everyone laughing along when the bully makes fun of someone) that group needs to be really unsure of their place in the social hierarchy. They know bullying is wrong but at that point are somewhat terrified of ending up on the wrong side of the bullying. That's why you see so much bullying in middle school, where kids are usually just starting to find their place in the social hierarchy.

I think in the US (and many Western democracies) there is currently so much unease about economics, about finding a good, and more importantly, stable job, that the situation is ripe for a bully to come along and take advantage of people's general worries about their place in the world to think "better for me to be a bully myself than to be the person that ends up on the bottom of the totem pole". Think of the crowd laughing along when Trump mocked a reporter with cerebral palsy.

When you couple this with large, structural racial changes in the US, it's not hard to see how Trump was able to take advantage.

Hopefully Trump can accept the results sooner rather than later. His instinct to fight at all costs is not serving him well in this situation. Fortunately, it’s futile. As someone said in one of the debates, it’s not up to him whether he gets to stay, it’s up to us.

I hope the the next 4 years are more unified than the last 4.

It's not helping anything to pretend this is true. For example, consider the spectrum of reactions you witness among your peers, not to mention on social media, the next time there's a high profile killing of an unarmed person of color by police officers. I don't think woo, it's great that we all want the same things is the feeling you're going to get.

Under Trump, it has become clear that they (edit: Republicans) want something fundamentally different: to do better than other groups of people. They care more about hurting those they disagree with than making things better for anyone.

Not all conservatives fit your described profile.

It’s curious how many conclusions people draw from a binary choice on a ballot.

Yes, there will always be a few people at the extremes of any movement. It is very different when they control the movement.

They may have seen it as the "least-bad" option rather than actively wanting what Trump was offering, but honestly that distinction doesn't matter if they are willing to support that level of harm. You don't get to vote for Trump and claim you aren't in that group. If you enabled him, you own his policy.

Aka schools? Honestly, what do you do with people making $40k / year who think they’re going to be affected by tax on earnings over $400k, going to pay tax on the sale of their primary residence, and going to be affected by the estate tax?

There are a lot of people that can’t seem to figure out they aren’t rich and are never going to be.

[1] https://www.citizen-times.com/story/news/local/2020/11/04/cr...

That sort of division seems to have cost one party the White House and the other a lot of seats in Congress.

(The premises are false enough that it feels less like a "peers" opinion and more like a "social media rando who needs attention" opinion, but I guess that distinction illustrates the original point.)

https://mappingpoliceviolence.org/nationaltrends

https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2018/crime-in-the-u.s.-...

Unless a Biden administration can begin to heal and make whole America's large working class, the angst will continue to grow and eventually boil over.

https://twitter.com/existentialfish/status/13237520320004505...

A recent example with when they called AZ by blindly listening to AP when anybody that knows basic math could see a large chunk of votes still remaining. When you prove you can’t be trusted you lose your audience.

I started doing this a couple years ago, when I was called up, and asked to take a survey. The young woman on the other end was very polite, and the questions at first seemed reasonable. The further I went into the survey, the more nakedly leading its questions became, clearly meant to support Republican talking points. I told her I was done, hung up,and since then I've only given false answers to political survey calls.

If my representative wants my opinion, they can host a town hall, or reach out to me directly. I'll send an email or call their office if there's an issue I care about.

If our politicians know nothing, and receive bad data, then they'll either cross their fingers and be more straight about their convictions, or be badly disappointed whenever they try to pander.

I don't think you understand half the country.

Every time you gloss over this, you give a pass to it and to those who knew about it and supported him anyway.

If you are against one party, you will vote for the other. The feeling of being against something is generally much stronger than the feeling of support.

This is not just a Trump issue but a bipartisan one, as I wager most of the 75 million that voted for Biden, simply voted against Trump and the GOP as well.

With the addition of more parties to the German political spectrum, building coalitions has been harder in recent years, forcing essentially the two most central mainstream parties, CDU/CSU and SPD, to build a "great coalition". The problem of this is that people not happy with the results necessarily have to vote more extreme, and we did see a lot of protest votes, swinging from the very-left Die Linke to the ultra-right Afd, for example.

Observing the political process in the US, it seems that the primaries leave the final candidates always somewhat worse for wear, maybe more so on the Democrat side than on the Republican side (Infighting seems to be a worldwide phenomenon more prevalent on the left). By necessity, most winning candidates must then do a dance from the more extreme positions they expressed to win the primaries to the center. This is almost by construction, as the voters in the primaries will almost always be more extreme than the voters in the presidential election, even if reduced to those which would consider to vote for the party in the first place.

That's the popular myth, based largely on a combination of conflation of parliamentary and multiparty systems (the two have no essential connection) and the fact that parliamentary systems tend to use different language around a government/administration than presidential systems do.

Measured by either cabinet or head of government turnover rates, multiparty parliamentary systems among established democracies are more stable than the US.

> which was one of the reasons for the downfall of the Weimacher Republik and the rise of the NSDAP.

Two party systems have at least as much problem (really, more) forming moderate-to-opposing extreme coalitions against extremists from one side, which is how extremists of the Right have progressively hijacked a major party in the US, with nothing like the level of externally-imposed stress that produced the NSDAP in Germany. [0] At least in a multiparty system, forming a coalition across tribal identity boundaries formed by party labels is expected.

[0] see, https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2020/10/31/the-repu...

Second: There will always be people not happy with the government. Maybe because they really got handed the short stick, or because they just tend to pick the short stick. That is true even if they are better off than before, just if other people are more better off, people will not be happy. These people want to vote for an opposition. Who should they vote for? They can only go to an extreme party.

> Who should they vote for? They can only go to an extreme party.

That is what extremists want you to believe. But the belief that both big parties are corrupt exists in the USA as well, and it helped Trump. The fact of the matter is, if you are unhappy with what a grand coalition does, you can still vote for the party that you agree more with to have it gain more power next time around. Only if you believe that cooperation and compromise themself are bad things, you have to vote extreme.

I'm no longer convinced that this is a good argument, given that a two-party system just gave rise to the Trump party over the past four years - and it was 'rejected' by a mere ~60,000 votes in a country of 350 million.

The basis of a two-party system is actually single-member electorates. Because each seat can only have one representative and the economics of campaigning and organising make it hard for a third party to make appreciable inroads.

Australia's Parliament demonstrates the differences: the House of Representatives is composed of single-member electorates and is dominated by the two major political organisations (and this is for the good, as the government is formed in the House and a two-party system almost guarantees that a government can be formed and sustained easily after each election). The Senate, by contrast, is composed of multi-member electorates, one for each state, elected on a proportional basis. While the major parties typically have the largest share between them, the nature of a proportional multi-member electorate is that it creates more room for minor parties to obtain one or two seats.

[1] https://stlapproves.org/

We also have a parliamentary system, where these parties can make coalitions and essentially pool votes, which softens (but doesn't eliminate) the need for strategic voting.

Rarely outside of BC does lib-ndp vote split work in the con favour and often works the other way for the lib in Quebec with the bloc.

The ndp and lib seem like they are progressive and the idea that one should vote for the other to block the cons misses the differences. And your vote is worth a few dollars so vote for what you want... because funding matters.

POTUS, on the other hand, is personally entrusted with substantial levels of power.

The constituent countries each have a nationalist bloc that will often be successful in local government but not really at the UK level unless whoever is running the UK as a whole is antagonistic to the nationalist position. This results in silliness like Wrexham (which is technically over the border into Wales but nobody there speaks the Welsh language) being required to have Welsh-speaking bureaucrats and signs in Welsh even though the most likely language you'd hear there besides English is... Polish. Why do this? A few million quid on symbolic gestures defuses Welsh nationalism, cheap at twice the price.

But those nationalists won't work together and have almost nothing to say about the UK's larger politics. The closest is probably either the Scottish Nationals objecting to the consequences of Brexit (since Scotland didn't vote for it, and it destroys at least one of the claimed benefits of voting against independence for Scotland in its previous referrendum) or the DUP (a Northern Irish party which opposes Irish independence and is closely affiliated with the Conservative Party) offering a Confidence & Supply deal to keep the Tories in power.

Beyond that, there's the Liberal Democrats, but they aren't very big, and the only time Brits gave enough Lib Dem MPs the nod, they were obliged to throw their lot in with the Tories†, who aren't stupid and used this to ensure most of the blame for the resulting Tory policies landed on Lib Dem MPs who promptly lost in droves. They are nowhere close to being a "viable party" in the sense of able to govern, though they do have majorities in some local governments.

And then what, one Green MP? I mean, she's competent, her policies make sense, all credit to her, but on her own she is not a "viable party" in that sense. Her constituents (Brighton) are going to vote for her because they trend hippier than most of the UK (also gayer, but I don't think the Green Party is especially pro-LGBTQ), because she's good at her job and incumbents are always harder to defeat but that doesn't result in a Green UK government, just one MP.

So no, really there are two viable parties, the Conservative and Unionist Party (Conservatives, "Tories") or the Labour Party. I think they're both a bit screwed because they both subscribe to beliefs about the importance of Work and I believe we're at the end of the era in which the capability of humans to do Work is necessary or perhaps even relevant to prosperity.

† The existence of numerous smaller groups some of which I did not mention means that the Liberal Democrats could not have formed a working coalition with Labour, because that coalition would lack the votes to beat a "No Confidence" motion from Tories and other rival parties, forcing fresh elections. With the Conservatives they had more than enough, so the only alternative to a Tory coalition was fresh elections. In hindsight that would have been the correct choice perhaps, but wisdom at the time was that the one thing voters hated more than the other party was elections, so never force fresh elections unless you're confident you can win them.

That might be true in some cases (at least if “arbitrary” includes accidents of biography and consequent trust), but I suspect there are more supporters of both parties who actually identify with the explicit platform goals or projected values than there are people who are only against the other party.

I will go further here: the idea that there is a mass of people out there waiting to support a third party that would somehow better represent Americans is entirely without merit. How can you tell? Simple. Watch primaries. Any spoiler effect should be weak there. You can feel free to cast your ballot for whoever you like most without worrying that the candidate from the party you like the least will win without you supporting your second least.

But in spite of that freedom... we still see third party primary participation that’s multiple orders of magnitude down from primary participation focused on the big two.

I think the most straightforward explanation for this is that a vanishing fraction of Americans are ever likely to support more than two parties.

No, it just assumes (which is true) that people care about different aspects of the party platform. All over the developed world, people on both sides of the aisle want to reduce immigration. Left-leaning parties in Denmark and New Zealand (the beloved Jacinda Ardern) campaigned and won on platforms calling for reduced immigration. Mainstream center-left politicians like Macron have shifted to calling for increased integration.

In the U.S., that left has radicalized that debate. Democrats have dismissed all such concerns are racist. The moderate candidate Democrats ran didn't push back on any of that or acknowledge there was a legitimate debate to be had over immigration levels. And nearly everyone who ran in the Democratic primary embraced far-left positions such as decriminalizing illegal immigration and universal healthcare for undocumented immigrants--positions only 1-2 EU countries have embraced. (Due to a lack of any pushback on those positions from Biden, it was easier to get those primary positions to stick to him.) Biden wouldn't even take the completely mainstream Democratic position of condemning illegal immigration and calling for secure borders, which Obama embraced.

At that point, what do you do? A party isn't a single person or policy position; its an entire ideology (and the Democratic Party has become increasingly ideological).

I think the big problem with the system as it stands is that people rightfully understand that if they vote for a third party candidate, that candidate is a) guaranteed to lose, b) guaranteed to be unable to enact any change in government without having a literal majority in the senate, and c) guaranteed to steal votes from a candidate who you may not love but is the lesser of two evils (plenty of libertarians do not agree with Biden much at all, but would rather have him than Trump/vice versa, and then vote down the party lines to avoid disaster).

Third party votes are often cast as a waste of a vote - and I don't blame people for thinking that way, because the system encourages it.

A huge number of Americans are socially conservative and economically liberal and there is currently no party that really supports that point of view.

https://www.storybench.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/polcom...

I don't think that's true at all:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Assembly_(Switzerland)

40, 38, 38, 31, 20, 16, 10, 5, 1, 1

The 4th largest party with 31 seats was the largest one in the previous parliament.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parliament_of_Finland

I don't think that's necessarily because of the two party system. I think it's more a result of a period of extreme partisanship/polarization reflected through a two party system.

As recently as a few decades ago, you still had significant numbers of conservative Democrats and liberal Republicans in office, and I feel that helped a lot with bipartisanship. Maybe it was a mistake to get rid of stuff like congressional earmarks, which maybe took pressure off officeholders to be so ideologically strident and combative.

America has had a two-party system for 200 years. Has it been this polarized for most of those 200 years?

And then we come to the huge divide that starts more recently during the Bush administration and the demand for LGBTQ equal rights (brewing strongly since the ‘70s) and more recently a revisiting of policing and criminal justice which brings us to today. There are periods where the divide seems to ebb and flow. Probably 10-20 year spans, and then a recognition by the greater community that things remain unfair for various groups.

It’s hard to say, but let’s say more than 50% of American history is a divide of some sort on various issues. Is it due to two parties? Or do the parties coalesce around the issues that are brewing at the most extreme boiling points? Or worse, do the two parties use various issues as wedges to create divide where one might not otherwise exist? (All of this is from my own memory and study, so I’m sure there are major things I’ve glossed over or missed not being an expert in the area)

It's more than that. He hurts them. He is their kryptonite. A shiv in their side. Blocking the other side from enacting their agenda is one thing, and any republican can do that. he causes liberal tears, and they love it. It's like voting for poison ivy instead of sidewalks made of ice. They dont like him, they like the pain he causes others. And by extension that makes him admirable, despite not actually giving two anythings about him as a person.

Hacker News political discussions are worthless because we are not allowed to explore the possibility that people sometimes act in bad faith.

Ask your self, how against the democratic platform do you need to be in order to justify affirming this guy?

Spoil your ballot.

But when people are effectively given a binary choice, they will simply side with whomever aligns against the direction they don't like. It's not cool, but if we claim that all those choosing that direction are endorsing Trump, we're saying that there's no democratic choice whatsoever for those that recognize his failures.

In my opinion, there is something wrong with the two-party system much more so than there is something wrong with "republicans".

And the simple reality is that until it is addressed, we will have a non-zero chance of another Trump or Trump-like candidate in the future. Worse, we will have a candidate, who is much, much smarter, who saw all the new avenues and the ways things could be done..

Instead, we have this weird sports event with confused crowd cheering equivalent of 'my team won'. It is fucking depressing. I may be bitter, because I genuinely hate sports too.

https://www.wral.com/fact-check-did-biden-support-wars-in-ir...

the other guy supported at least some of those wars publicly also. But since he parachuted into politics, who knows how he felt about these things until it was convenient to have an opinion favorable to his base.

But my point is, I very much doubt this is representative of 100% of the Republican electorate. I think its probably something like way less than 1%.

Trump's implicit support of them elevated and amplified them and made them much bigger than they really are.

It takes a special sort of doublethink to not acknowledge which views he states that no other politician is willing to say.

Some people just want the trains to run on time. I understand that. However sometimes there are more important issues. In those instances it is hard to see people ignore those issues in favor of the train schedule.

Maybe or maybe not, but 100% of the people that voted for Trump were, by definition, willing to tolerate his white supremacy ... otherwise they wouldn't have voted for him.

People who voted for Trump believed that what Biden represented was worse than what Trump was represented. Personally, I think they were terribly wrong.

  “Senator Byrd reflects the transformative power of this
  nation,” read a statement by NAACP president Ben Jealous.
  “Senator Byrd went from being an active member of the KKK
  to a being a stalwart supporter of the Civil Rights Act,
  the Voting Rights Act and many other pieces of seminal
  legislation that advanced the civil rights and liberties of
  our country.”

I feel this unique cherry picking of obviously terrible stances by President Trump is used to undermine so many trump supporters who chose to vote for him for a myriad of reasons.

Its discouraging to see

There is a massive list of horrible things this president has done. Many acts of fraud through out his entire life. An open child rape court case. Through all of this they have supported him. It’s not one cherry picked example. Trump supporters have nothing to hold up anymore. If you are one, look yourself in the mirror and say “I have been a terrible human being and American citizen, but I will work to be better”.

Trump supporters don’t deserve sympathy or respect. Trump supporting republicans need to earn that.

1. https://www.brookings.edu/research/2020-exit-polls-show-a-sc...

The white liberal is way different, they see themselves basically as a superior person, the summit of human ethical achievement. They interject themselves into minority problems to show how much "they care" but 99% the acts are only to "virtue-signal", when push come to shove they will quickly align with any policy that makes their life easier, no matter the impact on the world.

More insidiously, the supposed tolerance and open-mindeness are very quickly thrown out of the window once a minority sub-group fail to align to their worldview. See for example the vitriolic insults received by Cubans/Venezuelans in Florida just because they "dared" to vote for Trump.

If I were to live in America, I think I would happier and more accepted among the "racist rednecks" in Idaho or Alabama that among the NY/SF liberal crowd.

America, the land of opportunity, is an incredible place for all cultures, and the best of its kind in the world. If you're looking for utopia, you won't find it anywhere, but this is nowhere near the hell you claim it to be. I would advise you experience what racism really is like when it's the entire nation and government like in the Middle East or even countries like Japan. Maybe that perspective would help.

Stop trying argue with strawmen. No one is saying that America is more racist than the middle east. It is in fact possible to be less racist than Saudi Arabia and still have racist elements.

The context of this discussion is about comparative racism between different segments of the American population. It has nothing to do with America's international position on the racism scale.

Since you don’t live in America, you have absolutely no idea what you’re talking about and you should stop talking like you do.

>Your comment reinforce my point instead of refuting it.

I live in one of the reddest states in the nation and come from a family full of those Alabama rednecks you talk about, and I voted Republican in every election before 2016. If you think I represent the liberal elite, you're dead wrong.

Good luck trying to get along with the rednecks you're talking about. Most of them don't want you here, and if they had their preferred immigration policy you wouldn't be allowed in. Many of the family members I talked about wouldn't even allow you to marry a person outside your race, and they'd prefer if schools were still segregated. Though they'd never say that to an outsider's face. And the majority of them outright support requiring Muslims to register with the government so they can be tracked.

This has nothing to do with the South btw, it's more of an urban rural divide.

Ironically, living in America usually means you have no idea about the level of violence, racism and suffering around the world, and lack much of the perspective of immigrants who sacrifice so much to move here.

Believe me if you lived in a small town with them you’d change your mind about which type of racism you prefer pretty quickly.

> Ironically, living in America usually means you have no idea about the level of violence, racism and suffering around the world, and lack much of the perspective of immigrants who sacrifice so much to move here.

It’s interesting you bring that up because if you come from a “shit hole” country, you wouldn’t even be allowed to be here if those voters had their way.

The issue with immigration has been stopping illegal entry and ensuring the rest are valuable contributors to society. Nobody is stopped because of their national origin, nor has that ever been proposed. The USA still continues its green card lottery system which gives out many free slots every year. Very few countries come anywhere close to matching the immigration strength or desire of the USA.

Neither is some asshole liberal you ran into once. Nor is the caricature of "Liberal elites" you read about in the National Review.

>nor would you rather live in another country where that's the national norm.

Who said I'd rather live in another country. You seem to be having the argument you'd like to be having rather than actually participating in a conversation.

>The issue with immigration policy has been stopping illegal entry and ensuring the rest are valuable contributors to society.

I'm sorry but if you aren't considered part of the in group, White Trump supporters won't admit this to you, but as a group they are terrified by the demographic changes in the country. Fear that their culture is being erased is the primary impetus behind their call for decreased immigration. Law and order, and calling for a points base immigration system is simply more palatable than outright calling for only letting in Whites.

>Nobody is stopped because of their national origin, nor has that ever been proposed.

Trump has instituted Travel bans multiple times. During his campaign he called for "a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States until our country's representatives can figure out what is going on." He also reportedly said "Haiti? Why do we want people from Haiti here? Why do we want these people from all these shithole countries here? We should have more people from places like Norway.”

His advisors and and multiple national Republican politicians have said they are afraid that White birth rates are lower than immigrant birth rates.

>The USA still continues its green card lottery system which gives out many free slots every year. Very few countries come anywhere close to matching the immigration strength or desire of the USA.

Again this isn't from lack of trying. Trump isn't a dictator, there are limits to what he could accomplish in 4 years.

If you make claims like that, people on the internet who have experience with actual racists will call you on your shit. They will attack you because you are acting like a complete ass. And then you will sit around smugly using those attacks to build on your confirmation bias.

Ever wonder why you keep attracting liberal assholes? If you meet an asshole in the morning, you met an asshole. If you meet assholes all day long, you’re the asshole.

The fact you say that without even a hint of self-awareness is amusing. You seem to have unresolved anger issues by the way you approach the discussion with people who disagree with you. All in all you seem a very unpleasant fellow so I wouldn't propagandize too much your supposed liberal values. Nobody will believe them.

You really sound a lot like your imagined liberal bogeymen with your patronizing concern my friend.

2. Group A systematically robbed and cheated Group B for centuries. Now that Group B has some political power and legal protections, Group A wants to pretend that "they can't see color."

Despite the fact that Group B has 1/10th the household wealth of Group A, are more likely to be arrested for committing the same crimes, receive harsher sentences for the same convictions, are much less likely to receive callbacks for job interviews, less likely to be hired for jobs they are equally qualified for, less likely to be approved for mortgages, less likely to be rented to, their dialect is considered linguistically inferior to Group A's, they are less likely to be picked up by a cab, and their children are even disciplined more harshly in fricking kindergarten.

Can you not understand how Group B isn't thrilled with the status quo with Group A's insistence that "they can't see color."

>something that you're accusing the "rednecks" of attempting to do.

1. They don't need to change laws to take race into account, because the system already does that for them.

2. Every single Trump supporting "redneck" I know supported the Muslim ban. And nearly every single Trump supporting "redneck" I know supported requiring Muslims to register with the government for tracking. According to survey's about 10% of them don't approve of mixed race marriages. And I guarantee from personal experience that the real number is much higher than that.

The only reason they don't get to enact the laws they want to, and the only reason they are afraid to publicly espouse their racist beliefs is because of the hard work of those left leaning Americans you despise.

Those left leaning American's you hate so much are the only reason most non white immigrants are even allowed to be in this country in the first place. The majority of my family doesn't even support birthright citizenship and would remove any non white citizens who's parents haven't been in this country more than a few generations if they could.

2) What is this nonsense about group A and B? Are we responsible for our ancestors? Are you prepared to say everyone in group B is responsible for any and all harm they collectively do? The answer is no, you would elect to treat people as individuals instead, so it seems it's you that treat the different groups differently by assigning collectively responsibility to only one of them.

3) "can't see color" is absolutely the correct way forward. We've spent decades proving that what you look like has nothing to do with your talents, motivations, interests, passions and character. We will never progress forward if you continue to discriminate and treat people by the very characteristic you claim is being used to discriminate.

4) The system is nothing but laws. Anything else would be up to how a specific individual deals with those laws, which is a problem with that person and not the system.

5) Anecdotes are useless. The travel ban is not what you claim it was, but perhaps you should look at how members of that religion handle racism first. You won't find any multiculturalism there, that's for sure. As a foreign-born naturalized US citizen, I don't support birthright citizenship either. It's unique to only the US and Canada, not the norm, and repealing it would solve many problems.

6) I don't hate left-leaning American's. This is your projection, clouded by your bias and judgement. I only hate policies that enact the very discrimination they aim to solve, created by people who are ignorant in the problems they aim to fix while ignoring all consequences of those solutions and further blocking any potential discussion or feedback.

7) No, the modern left is not responsible for any of that. America is a melting pot and has been for centuries. This is not some new development, it existed for generations before you and there are no serious attempts to stop it. Again you keep using anecdotes to say a few people are representative of the whole. Is there a country without criminals? Does that mean we all commit crime? Clearly not, so why don't we look at what actually is the reality instead.

All of those issues and more combine to create a reinforcing feedback loop that creates a permanent lower class within our society, that erodes trust in institutions, increases crime and, directly impacts our economic development.

What specifically do you propose we do to end that feedback loop?

2. This isn't about blame. It's about ameliorating an issue that harms all of us. And it's only indirectly about our ancestors. There are people alive today who were directly harmed by the laws that were put in place by the municipalities, states, and the country they live in today. People who were never compensated for that harm.

3. Pretending that you "don't see color" is an absurd response. Of course you do. Everyone does and everyone has implicit biases. The key is to recognize those biases, and sometimes to consciously correct for them.

4. > The system is nothing but laws.

That is naïve to the point of absurdity. I'm sure if you think about it you can come up with a few counter examples.

5. If anecdotes are useless, why do you keep brining them up?

> The travel ban is not what you claim it was, but perhaps you should look at how members of that religion handle racism first.

The travel ban that Trump called for during the campaign that won him votes was much more expansive than what was actually enacted. He also suggested that we should register all Muslims.

A survey in 2016 said that 40% of Americans called for a registry of Muslims, the results were heavily correlated with party affiliation. I'm going to give you 1 guess on which party favored registering Muslims.

>but perhaps you should look at how members of that religion handle racism first. You won't find any multiculturalism there, that's for sure.

What happened to treating people as individuals not as part of a group?

6. >It's unique to only the US and Canada, not the norm, and repealing it would solve many problems.

I thought the US was an amazing unique melting pot? There are many conservative and liberal argument for how the melting pot is helped by birthright citizenship.

https://www.cato.org/publications/commentary/birthright-citi...

7. You really need to read a bit more history if you think this is true. Look up the 1965 immigration act.

> America is a melting pot and has been for centuries.

The Chinese exclusion act, and country based immigration quotas favoring European countries were the norm through most of that time.

>there are no serious attempts to stop it.

Here's a conversation between Steven Bannon and Stephen Miller (Trump's current lead advisor on immigration) --------------------------------- “Isn’t the beating heart of this problem, the real beating heart of it, of what we gotta get sorted here, not illegal immigration?” Bannon asked Miller. “As horrific as that is, and it’s horrific, don’t we have a problem? We’ve looked the other way on this legal immigration that’s kinda overwhelmed the country?”

Bannon goes on to decry the “oligarchs” of Silicon Valley and Washington and call the number of immigrants in the United States “scary.”

Miller’s response is affirmation: “The history of America is that an immigration-on period is followed by an immigration-off period,” he said. -----------------------------------

Bannon and Miller are both obsessed with preserving "western"(European) culture. If you aren't from a European country, you very likely would not have been allowed here had Steven Miller been in power when you immigrated.

There was an article a few days ago that claimed Trump’s increase in minority support was because the minorities were racist too.

I mean, that’s just lazy thinking.

Trump getting 12% of the black vote in 2020 is up from the 8% he did in in 2016. That sounds like going from really low to not as but still really low.

I don’t think Democrats would be taking so much about race and gender if Trump wasn’t dog whistling so much.

The activist wing was defeated in the primary, and wasn't an option they were presented with. Many blacks are not supportive of the centrist wing and it's devotion to the interests of corporate capital and it near-total-absence of a working-class message, which, when it's the only thing around, makes right-wing economic populism, which does center around working class economic messaging (even if those of us on the progressive side might see it as both an ineffective platform if genuinely pursued, and much of it also a dishonest mirage being dangled as a manipulation strategy), if not exactly attractive—especially when visibly associated with virulent, violent racism—possibly seem the lesser near-term evil.

Edit: according to https://www.vox.com/2020/11/7/21551364/white-trump-voters-20...

Trump gained 4 points each for the black male and female vote, that would put him somewhere around 16, though I’m not sure what that article’s basis was. Still, those are starting from really low numbers to begin with, a lot of it could just be noise.

Nothing changes the issues with Trump. People looked at Trump as a candidate and decided to vote for him regardless of all those things about him, and for that they chose to privatize themselves over the nation and their fellow countrymen.

Incorrect from their point of view. They saw him as a lesser threat to stability through his policy decisions. I know, because I asked. Further, it is hard to argue with the results when you had Democrat cities getting burnt to the ground and there being no effort put into curtailing it which philosophy of leadership would genuinely lead to a safer polis.

In fact, many of them voted that way, because they thought it was better for the country.

Demonization and dehumanization of the other side gets you either nowhere, or in an increasingly bad place. I strongly advise against it.

Large cities usually lean Democratic. This is like saying "cities run by male mayors." It's the statistical reality, but not necessarily related.

Not to say that Trump was the man for the job on any of this, just that you shouldn’t wave away people’s prioritizing of a strong economy as greed driven.

If your entire statement breaks down at the existence of the first non-white Trump supporter than your position isn't as accurate or valid as you think.

Yet you clearly made a statement of all of his voters as choosing one thing over another. Perhaps you should revise that then, according to your new statement.

Reasons people might support Trump in spite of his many many shortcomings:

Trump has generated a middle east peace deal with UAE, Saudi etc. recognizing Israel which helps pave the way for stability in the region.

We have not entering any new proxy wars during his reign.

Trump banned lobbyists from the white house (although this one turned out to be a net negative because then the much of the white house staff members became defacto lobbyists--for instance Michael Cohen was paid around 10 million from various fortune 500 companies to help bring their interests to the president)

His stance on not murdering babies (which is how many prolife members see abortion, your mileage may vary--I am pro choice myself).

Trump has appointed many "true conservative" judges, so if you consider judicial appointments extremely important and are conservative you might support him for that reason.

What about the fact that Richard Spencer, who started and led the Jews will not replace us rally and was the leader of the white nationalist movement at Charlottesville is now a CNN contributor and endorsed Biden. And the fact the president did condemn them, repeatedly.

Trump passed the most comprehensive criminal justice reform bills of the last 20 years.

2020 Trump has the best percentage of vote share among republican presidential candidates from Hispanics, Jews, and African Americans of the past 50 years so maybe he isn't quite as racist as he seems.

You could believe that school choice is the most important civil rights issue of our time.

You think that the government has not right to be mandating lockdowns, school closures, etc. And have seen many instances of overreach from democrats.

Very low trust in the media and other "ruling" elites whom Trump seems to be constantly embattled.

There are of course lots of reasons to support Biden.

As VP he oversaw a very successfully timeframe of American history, with economic growth, political and social stability.

Trump has a tendency to say many things which are dog whistles/outright racist.

Trump speaks about women in derogatory ways.

Instead of bailing out local governments and schools during the coronavirus, Trump was pumping money into large corporations.

Biden takes climate change seriously. We are likely to see a green new deal.

Biden is likely to increase social safety nets during a time which is likely filled with economic uncertainty.

Biden isn't doing saber rattling with China threatening a second cold war.

Biden/Obama created a peace deal with Iran with the potential to bring stability to the region.

Its hard to judge policy, but Biden's character is much much more appealing than Trump's.

Biden is likely to bring a sense of dignity back to the office.

Biden is not a divisive figure and can help heal the country.

Biden is likely to bring police reform.

Trumps response to the coronavirus has been terrible. He basically left it up to the states instead of showing leadership. Moreover he was constantly spouting whatever nonsense it was that he was spouting.

Biden is likely to try and do something about the growing inequality in the country.

Biden has shown he can lead competently.

It's hard because conservatives and liberals tend to not only have differing personality traits, they tend to have underlying philosophies, priorities and thought patterns (personal anecdote not science). But we have to find ways to love each other despite our differences. Much love, I hope Biden does great things for the country and the next four years are prosperous, full of love and happy.

Sabre rattling with China. I'm no expert but have spent 15 years doing business in China.

A very firm position is the only one they respect (although they will claim otherwise). If you offer them concessions they will take them and at the same time respect you less. In many western countries concessions are met with good favour. This is rarely the case in China in my experience.

No, Trump had virtually nothing to do with that...

Anyone with even a passing familiarity of the Gulf region knows that the UAE and Israel have not been at war. On the contrary, the countries have had diplomatic relations under the table for quite some time now. The UAE even hosted an unofficial Israeli embassy at IRENA in Abu Dhabi.

The reason why full diplomatic relations took so long is that the UAE government had to gradually prepare the populace for the announcement. Everything else was in place way before Trump became president.

So why was it announced that way? My guess: Trump claimed that he brokered this “deal” to earn brownie points with Americans, and the Emiratis/Israelis got to earn points with Trump. Win-win.

I could not go to bed with a clear mind knowing that I voted for a lying disgusting piece of trash, even if that meant that I was voting for the one whose policies I "agreed with the most".

I guess I _get_ it if you view politics as sports. Sports fans (in the EU) will support their club to death. The president of a football club can be corrupt and they will still probably back them so that they can back the club.

In both cases, these are twisted, unhealthy stances.

I really cannot fathom how so many Americans can vote for this piece of trash human being. I don't think all these people are bigots, racists or idiots; I simply cannot understand how someone can be comfortable with having a piece of shit as the face of the country.

I used to love America and the idea of going to it. I used to think it was lead by hardworking (albeit maybe _too_ hardworking) people. I used to think that maybe healthcare wasn't "that" important because it was _AMERICA_. I can't think like that anymore because a very significant part of the country chooses to be portrayed by an _objectively and openly racist, sexist bigot_.

Heck, I think I'm right leaning on most stuff in life, but I could never ever carry a straight face knowing I contributed to this disaster.

I would rather vote blank (I'm a strong believer in doing just that), against the system, than vote "for" a pig so as to not "vote" for the opposition (a typical argument used by trump "non-supporters who vote for him"). At least the opposition wouldn't put America to shame in such a magnitude. In my country America is now used as an example of what not to be, what not to do. We tolerate its undeniable leadership in the world; we no longer worship it or look at it as somewhat of a better society. It used to be the other way around. What happened, America?

I don't fully understand it myself, but as it's been explained to me by trump supporters is: "don't listen to what he says, look at all the good policy, look at how hard he is on China, look at how many jobs there were pre covid, etc etc". Whether or not you see his policy as good, some people do, and they are willing to overlook his madness because they think he is achieving good things. (actions speak louder than words, etc) Some of his supports do bring up his appointing of tons of federal judges, and this what I would probably consider the most valid reason for voting for him (if one is aligned to a more conservative viewpoint), as his judges are more likely to enforce (or not) the laws that align with "traditional" republican political ideals, and that's the what matters to the voters.

Or also because they've always voted R, and Biden= socialism (which is worse than satan worship according to some people's moral codes..), or Biden= Let our cites get burnt down by rioters. This goes back to the, it's easier to vote against someone than for someone. And now that I put this all in words, this second justification is probably what I heard the most during trumps 4 years, some peoples defense of trump always came down to, "but hillary would be way worse". Some level of cognitive dissonance definitely plays into it.

Also having some subset of the population support a populist, pathologically lying sociopath is not necessarily a new or uniquely American problem. It's just that the problems seem to be amplified when they are American, cuz everyone is watching.

The question is whether it is an outlier or the norm. I’m old enough to remember when racism and anti-semitism was common, then not (at least vocally).

America is a diverse culture. Why Euros are confused about it, they haven’t studied history. How would a country like the US would turn out as when Puritans, Calvinists, Scots-Irish and whatever other rejects from Europe were sent or fled from their homelands?

We got the best and we got the worst.

Someone like Trump but instead being a bring person, could have won the elections I think, and then, via internet surveillance, find the opposition and fabricate charges and put in prison? Combined with maybe forcing FB to show only ads pro one party?

Politicians are liars by definition. It is part of the job description. More people abstained than voted for either candidate.

You had two choices of which both were horrid. Which bad choice do you pick and if they are both that bad is the distinction significant?

Contrary to popular belief, the AP doesn't decide who is elected president. Shocking, I know.

American politicians lie through their teeth as a matter of fact. No one gets or delivers anything they campaign on. This is by design. However, I'm still in your camp as well. I can't understand it at all. He didn't get off the first week of his campaign before I was dead refusing to vote for him.

However, I couldn't vote for his opponents either, which is where I think a lot of people get caught out, and where I think we have a real weakness in our system. That someone like him even got to that point is a testament that apparently anyone can do it. Just be a bull headed, pathologically lying charlatan and find a way to insert yourself in the nations political apparatus when the time is right.

How can you be discouraged by acknowledging the full spectrum of what this president has encouraged? What are you willing to sweep under the rug to white wash clearly bad behavior?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bd0cMmBvqWc (4:10 is him denouncing Proud Boys, for example)

https://streamable.com/sr9o2s

He takes both sides of lots of issues. You could make a page-a-day calendar out of quotes where he has taken opposite sides on an issue.

It's a strategic decision, and it's very effective. The white nationalists can look at what he says and say "ah, he wants us to stand by. Sure, later he'll disavow us, but I got the message. wink wink." And then the people who oppose white nationalism can say "see, he disavowed it, so that clarifies everything - nothing he said before meant what it sounded like."

For what it's worth, here's how the proud boys interpreted the comment: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/29/us/trump-proud-boys-biden...

I'll note that my comment did not directly link proud boys to "white supremacy". Instead, I (and the comment I replied to) used "right-wing extremists". I think that's an accurate description that does not require an assumption that "Western = white".

For anyone curious about their beliefs:

https://proudboysusa.com/tenets/

Minimal Government

Maximum Freedom

Anti-Political Correctness

Anti-Drug War

Closed Borders

Anti-Racial Guilt

Anti-Racism

Pro-Free Speech (1st Amendment)

Pro-Gun Rights (2nd Amendment)

Glorifying the Entrepreneur

Venerating the Housewife

Reinstating a Spirit of Western Chauvinism

>https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2018/12/08/fbi-says-pr...

>https://www.opb.org/news/article/portland-fbi-proud-boys-cla...

“In that briefing there was a slide that talked about the Proud Boys,” Cannon said.

The slide was intended to characterize the potential for violence from individual members of the Proud Boys, according to Cannon, and not to address the group as a whole.

“There have been instances where self-identified Proud Boys have been violent,” he said. “We do not intend and we do not designate groups, especially broad national groups, as extremists.”

generally speaking i tend to assume that feds have and always have keep a close watch on pretty much any sizeable right-leaning organization, most especially ones that are frequently involved in street violence with other organizations. maybe this is the legacy of ruby ridge and timothy mcveigh, maybe it just looks good on a quarterly review. but even aside from that you can find plenty of accounts over the years from BLM and occupy activists about being surveilled. how many of these are credible? it is hard to say. we do know that there has been a large injection of funds for the purpose of increased surveillance following months of blm related riots

>https://theintercept.com/2020/09/13/police-surveillance- technology-operation-legend/

personally i believe the fbi that went after the black panthers and mlk is not materially different from the fbi of today and should be treated with heavy skepticism no matter what your political leanings.

this becomes a problem as well, proud boys have been involved in violence... against other groups who were also actively seeking to enforce street violence. is this the result of a concerted campaign or does a group founded around crudity and bravado attract absolute knuckledragging choads who are likely to get into fistfights?

It's quite possible to be a jew and an anti-semite, a woman and a misogynist, and a non-white white supremacist. It's easy, actually - just define an out-group that, for some contrived bullshit reason or other, doesn't include you.

You can see Donald Trump denouncing Proud Boys here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bd0cMmBvqWc&feature=youtu.be...

The whole premise of the question (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qIHhB1ZMV_o) was his criticism of Biden for not specifically calling out antifa and other left-wing extremist groups, and whether he'd be willing to "condemn white supremacists and militia groups" and "say that they need to stand down and not add to the violence".

Mistake or not, he didn't condemn the proud boys during the debate. If it was his intent to do so, when it became clear that large portions of the country misunderstood his remarks — including the proud boys themselves — he should have clearly communicated his intended message, instead of dodging questions about his remarks for 2 days. (See, e.g., https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefings-statements/remarks-pres...)

Painting it as some siren call for white supremacist supporters to rise up and take the nation by force is just as disingenuous and hypocritical as Trump himself.

1. Say that he didn't know who the Proud Boys are. Even the most generous interpretation of this doesn't look good. He was asked to denounce them during the debate and either (a) attempted to do so (fumbling the response) without knowing who they were or (b) it was an intentional dodge — and either way, he didn't follow up with his staff to learn more.

2. Say that they need to "stand down" and "let law enforcement do their work", but not condemn them (i.e., still fall short of the ask during the debate, when given a chance to correct the fumbled response).

3. Dodge an explicit question about whether he misspoke when he said "stand by" (again, failing to fully correct the fumbled response).

4. Continue to shift away from criticism of right-wing groups to left-wing groups.

https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefings-statements/remarks-pres...

> Painting it as some siren call for white supremacist supporters to rise up and take the nation by force is just as disingenuous and hypocritical as Trump himself.

When right-wing groups interpret it as a siren call and he fails to unequivocally correct that interpretation, it's not disingenuous to be concerned.

He's the type of person that screams until he's blue in the face that water isn't wet, simply because someone not on Team Trump said that it is. That doesn't mean he's some secret conspiratorial white supremacist talking in code. It just means he's a juvenile idiot.

I'm not saying that the second is somehow better than the first. It's not. They're both equally despicable and I have zero respect for Trump being the former. But it's equally reprehensible to have a crowd on the sidelines chomping at the bit to exaggerate, fabricate or concoct stories, simply because they don't like someone.

It's "he's not our guy, so the end justifies the means", and it's an incredibly disturbing trend that goes beyond Trump.

> ...

> But it's equally reprehensible to have a crowd on the sidelines chomping at the bit to exaggerate, fabricate or concoct stories, simply because they don't like someone.

I'm confused. Where in this comment chain does what you describe seem to be happening? The closest I can find is the great-great-great-great grandparent, which states “The guy had armies of white supremacist supporters and advisers. He told right-wing extremists to “stand by” on national TV.”

From my perspective, the key here is that right-wing extremists interpreted his words as code — and he refused to correct that interpretation. From the point of view of the extremists, it was intentional, and that's enough to embolden them.

Even though it was likely the result of a mistake and stubbornness, it was damaging to the country and the impacts are worth acknowledging.

At this risk of taking a bit of a tangent: it's not as if this is the only time his carelessness with his words and stubbornness to correct the way they were interpreted caused problems. In those cases too, we need to acknowledge both the cause and the effect. Accidentally causing damage and intentionally causing damage are distinct problems, but they're both problems — especially when you're the leader of a country.

There was torrential, indignant outcry on my Twitter feed that Trump was literally sending the message to armed white supremacist militias to standby and that they would be called upon to take arms shortly.

But even that GP comment is a good example. "He told right-wing extremists to stand by" - is a partial truth at best. Either way, it's misleading. Why did GP choose the words "stand by" and omit the words "stand back"? Because s/he wanted to paint Trump as a racist, and the latter didn't fit the narrative. It's intellectually dishonest.

> At this risk of taking a bit of a tangent: it's not as if this is the only time his carelessness with his words and stubbornness to correct the way they were interpreted caused problems. In those cases too, we need to acknowledge both the cause and the effect. Accidentally causing damage and intentionally causing damage are distinct problems, but they're both problems — especially when you're the leader of a country.

In this respect, I agree completely. I'm not saying that puerile stubborness is somehow any better than militant white supremacy. If his speaking carelessly causes issues, it is certainly his responsibility to undeniably, unconditionally refute it.

My gripe is with the continual exaggeration, misrepresentation and outright misinformation from the anti-Trump brigade. Any facts which don't fit the narrative are conveniently discarded. It's not limited to Trump, either. Countless people described the Kenosha shooter as firing indiscriminately and unprovoked into a crowd, which is a patently absurd distortion of reality. Or the complete fiction that Nick Sandmann (the kid in the MAGA hat) approached the Native American guy and start making racist taunts.

Many Anti-Trumpers are hypocritically engaging in exactly the same dishonest behaviour as Trump/Trumpists. Frankly, I don't believe anything I read any more, and that's an absolute travesty.

Is the argument that Trump is racist or right wing? They aren’t the same.

You can argue Proud Boys are right wing if viewing it in relation to Antifa for instance, but they aren’t racists. They are pretty diverse as a group, they just may not hold your values.

KKK and Neo Nazis are not right wing, but they are very racist. Both organizations are historically tied into the democrat party.

It’s the constant conflating of the two that has twisted up people into pretzels and turned this argument into pure trash honestly.

Trump is not going to align with your political values if you are left, but it doesn’t make him a racist.

The right courted the racists. The racists might not be inherently right wing, but the modern right actively seeks their support and will do what the racists want in exchange for tax cuts and forcing women to keep parasites

I see three points in the "grandparent" comment:

1. “The guy had armies of white supremacist supporters and advisers.”

2. “He told right-wing extremists to “stand by” on national TV.”

3. “Every time you gloss over this, you give a pass to it and to those who knew about it and supported him anyway.”

I would consider these the arguments being discussed in this comment tree, not "Trump is racist" or "Trump is ... right wing".

> You can argue Proud Boys are right wing if viewing it in relation to Antifa for instance, but they aren’t racists. They are pretty diverse as a group, they just may not hold your values.

I don't think that even the proud boys would dispute a label of "right wing".

I don't really know how to respond to the claim that they aren't racists. Gavin McInnes is on the record with NBC in 2017 as saying "I’m not a fan of Islam. I think it’s fair to call me Islamophobic." and Islamophobia is anti-Muslim racism.

More recently, Enrique Tarrio has said they're not racist, but they've just gotten more careful with how they express their racism; they use dog whistles and veiled references.

If you look through archives of their early 2019-era merch store, you'll see things like multiple versions of the "Honkler" incarnation of Pepe the Frog — commonly used as a neo-nazi dog whistle, a picture of a black silhouette with the caption "Don't monkey this up, America!" — a reference to the racial slur that Ron DeSantis experienced backlash for using in late 2018, references to lynching, references to QAnon, and a joke about Muhammad being a Pedophile. (You'll also find a pile of sexist and transphobic content.)

> KKK and Neo Nazis are not right wing, but they are very racist.

From the wikipedia page on Neo-Nazism: "Neo-Nazism is considered a particular form of far-right politics and right-wing extremism." (citing: https://www.verfassungsschutz.de/en/fields-of-work/right-win...)

You can't pretend there isn't systemic racism, and that Trump isn't racist, when he is doing things like that.

There is no other way to interpret that action.

In what world is that not an overt endorsement of Joe Arpaio's Racism?

I lean more conservative and had my own issues with Trump and his presidency, but I looked at his policy, words, and his actions. I still voted for him because I felt he aligned with the policies I wanted to move towards.

Falling into such a blatant lie about his racism though exposes any person that keeps repeating it as intellectually weak, easily manipulated, and wholly dishonest.

Frankly, I’m disappointed to see it repeated and upvoted on Hacker News. I come here to see intellectual comments and discussion, not low brow Twitter and Reddit garbage.

Personally I listened to when he said "stand back, stand by".

It's just more inane rambling

good people on both sides? STIll saying the Central Park Five are guilty - originally paying to advocate the death penalty? Being the #1 pusher of Obama birther-ism? and so so so much more here is just one list of the worse: https://www.vox.com/2016/7/25/12270880/donald-trump-racist-r...

You mean like actively refusing and convincing ~half the country NOT to wear masks? Even though the worst case scenario is.. you are wearing the mask and it doesn't help?

Trump himself said he thinks wearing a mask looks weak. And that's why he didn't want to do it.

So, instead of being a LEADER and leading by example- wearing a mask. He made it into a political issue because he thinks people looks weak doing it. And has no doubt cost peoples lives by CONVINCING others not to wear masks. To this day (in his recent rallies) it's the same damn thing.

I mean, I can go on and on about the CHARACTER of Trump, but let's leave it at one.

You sound like someone who is like "eh I like his policies so he can act however the hell he wants and that's OK".

THAT is what you and I can never agree on.

Bannon is a goblin but I preemptively concede that there's not much evidence of his problems being racialized. But Miller you can't say that about.

Miller has published neo-Nazi propaganda in the recent past. I think he’s the one who says Hitler’s chief of propaganda is his primary role model, but I might have him confused with someone else in Trump’s inner circle.

This opinion that Trump is a white supremacist, is just that... an opinion. Very few of his supporters saw him as a white supremacist. Trump disavowed white supremacy many times. This is divisive language is something I’m glad to see Biden avoiding, so far.

Source? (Preferably in the form of a video, since there is a lot of misinformation about this, and he explicitly espoused white supremacy on live TV during the first presidential debate of 2020.)

The fact that the whole racist and white supremacist trope gets pushed around this much means that the media has been very effective at lying to entire populace. Think about what else they may have lied about.

There is one exception: A press release he clearly did not write condemns white supremacy.

Again, during the debates (after all the examples cited in that article), he again refused to condemn white supremacy, even when Fox’s Chris Wallace handed the opportunity as a soft ball, and even when Biden reduced it to a simple yes/no answer for him by naming a group to condemn.

All he had to say is “I condemn the Proud Boys” (or any other group he could name).

In the most visible public forum available to him, he chose not to do so, which is the same as condoning them all.

Honestly I expect more from HN than to fall into Kafkaesque arguments about these things but perhaps the problem lies within my own expectations.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bd0cMmBvqWc (4:10 is him denouncing Proud Boys, for example)

https://streamable.com/sr9o2s

It’s one thing to give someone the benefit of the doubt and be wrong. It is another to explicitly condone their behavior after the fact.

(Also, I’ve never heard of the incident you’re talking about. Searching for the quote leads to some blogs, but no reputable sources. Are you sure the event happened?)

and sources here but OP didn't post sources for "armies of white supremacist supporters and advisers" which is normally against HN guidelines but I guess those are ignored also. [1][2]

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Black_Panther_Party_voter_...

[2]: https://www.adl.org/blog/king-samir-shabazz-bomb-white-churc...

2) Make a divisive statement accusing the other side of creating division

3) Throw racism and identity politics into the mix, that always helps

4) Repeat as necessary

"Trump Is Losing Ground With White Voters But Gaining Among Black And Hispanic Americans" https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/trump-is-losing-ground-...

The increase in the support levels among Latinx is definitely more substantial, and likely has to do with the fact that the right wing has been ginning up fear around “socialism” to a group historically seriously injured by it. (Bearing in mind of course that the definition of socialism which has caused harm in Latin America is the state owning the means of production, and there is absolutely unequivocally zero support for that among Democrats — who range from center-right to at most a flavor of social democrat).

A fundamental tenet of ownership is having control of it and the proceeds from it. It's not just the name on the masthead.

1. taxation takes the proceeds from the property - the higher the taxes, the more socialist.

2. Rent control.

3. California specifies the gender makeup of boards of directors.

4. Single payer health care.

There are lots more, these are just examples. You can argue that the benefits of such abrogation makes it worthwhile, but they are socialism. The more of them, the more socialist.

> Far from failed, folks there enjoy a general higher standard of living than Americans.

The US then shouldn't be such a popular destination for immigrants looking for opportunity.

1. taxation takes the proceeds from the property - the higher the taxes, the more socialist.

Not a socialist issue, for instance Donald trump raised taxes by capping the SLPT deductions, and imo has nothing to do with the state owning the means of production.

2. Rent control.

Not a federal or Democratic Party policy issue, just a stupid approach to control cost of living. The real answer is just supply and demand, and to permit building. This isn’t partisan it’s bad policy and has nothing to do with the means of production.

3. California specifies the gender makeup of boards of directors.

That has nothing to do with the means of production and isn’t a federal issue.

4. Single payer health care.

Not a left vs right issue IMO any more than a socialized fire department or police department are socialist. This is evident in the fact both democrats and republicans love Medicare which is literal socialized medicine for folks over 65.

My personal opinion is that medical care does not fall under “means of production” and should instead fall under basic infrastructure which supports and facilitates the private ownership of the means of production.

> The US then shouldn't be such a popular destination for immigrants looking for opportunity.

This doesn’t prove or disprove anything. People often come to the US hoping they will do better than average. I suggested on average folks are better off elsewhere and your statement doesn’t prove or disprove that. Worse, immigration was basically wholesale suspended.

Trump doesn't define what socialism is or is not. Taxes are a taking of the proceeds of an enterprise, the more taken the more the owner is defacto the government.

> Not a federal or Democratic Party policy issue

It's local and state Democratic policy, and it certainly is socialistic.

> That has nothing to do with the means of production

Of course it is. It applies to business and how they are run.

> Not a left vs right issue

Of course it is. It comes from the left.

> This doesn’t prove or disprove anything.

Requiring them to all be wrong should perhaps give pause.

Anyway, you're clearly focused on federal socialism. So I'll bring up Biden's plan to spend $2 trillion on all kinds of centrally planned economic initiatives, such as electric car chargers all over the place. The government has tried central planning of energy production and distribution before, back in the 70's. The DOE decided, for each and every gas station in America, how much gas it was allowed to sell. It was a disaster - gas lines and shortages everywhere. This all ended overnight with Reagan's first Executive Order.

And I mean literally overnight the gas lines disappeared and never returned. I remember it well, it was wonderful not to have to plan for an hour wait for gas. The DOE proved simply incapable of putting gas where people needed it.

Do you believe Biden's central economic planners will put the charging stations in the optimal place? I don't. But I suppose we'll see. In any case, it's still $2 trillion worth of socialism.

> This is evident in the fact both democrats and republicans love Medicare which is literal socialized medicine for folks over 65.

Of course Medicare is socialism. You are pushing the idea that Republican actions define socialism. I disagree - socialism is an economic system, and is not defined by who implements it.

For example, a carbon tax is a market based solution.

First off, the government needs revenue to function. It has to tax something to get it. Taxing pollution "internalizes the externalities" and serves two goals - providing revenue for the government, and discouraging pollution.

Isn't that better than discouraging productive behavior?

In a socialist society there is no concept of individual property and therefore no concept of taxation. The concept of taxation is unique to a capitalist society. Beyond that, I'd say that what the taxes are used for defines whether it leans socialist or not.

Further, I disagree, taking the proceeds does not exert control or ownership until the level is substantially higher than it is now. Either way, a business' income apportionment doesn't matter as much these days thanks to the rise of equity.

> [Rent Control] It's local and state Democratic policy, and it certainly is socialistic.

Rent control is interesting, as I firmly disagree with it -- for being bad policy. I can see how this policy diminishes the value of personal property, though I could get behind it if it worked. The most effective approach I've seen that strengthens private property rights while also providing for the average citizen is the Singapore HDB model. [1] 78% of Singaporeans live in HDB government housing, and the rest have zero government imposition whatsoever.

> [California Gender Law] Of course it is. It applies to business and how they are run.

This is a state issue, as you pointed out. I will say though, that I tend to subdivide regulations into "for the greater good" type redistributive regulation (which I think you could make a claim is socialist leaning in a mixed economy), and "capturing externalities" regulation. The free market has shown a total inability to capture externalities, and as such, certain classes of regulation are required for a property functioning market economy. IMO doing so actually net strengthens property rights.

> [Single Payer] "It comes from the left"

I mean, agree to disagree on this one. I see it as the same degree of socialist as a DMV, police station or fire station. A necessity for a functioning free-market economy, and not a business. I believe having a socialized healthcare system strengthens private property ownership, private enterprise and the free market on the whole.

> Do you believe Biden's central economic planners will put the charging stations in the optimal place? I don't.

I don't believe Biden will have "central economic planners" -- the Democrat's will do the same thing government always does in the US. Find a private company, and have them do it.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_housing_in_Singapore

Yeah, which is why I regularly propose taxes on pollution to "internalize the externalities".

Free market capitalism requires a functioning government, at the least to provide protection of our rights and enforcement of contracts. This requires police, a court system, and a military to defend it all.

Single payer health care is not a necessity for a functioning free market economy, any more than the government must run collective farms.

> Find a private company, and have them do it.

Government contracting is not free market, and suffers from most of the ills of the government doing it directly.

> I don't believe Biden will have "central economic planners"

Of course Biden will. You can't oversee $2 trillion in spending otherwise.

See this is where we disagree. I believe healthcare is necessary for a an functioning capitalist system to exist. I do not describe the existing setup as functional.

Who are these voters racist against?

The premise makes even less sense if you're calling out divisive rhetoric.

This cuts both ways as you point out. People vote for all sorts of reasons, and people are willing to overlook racism because they have higher priority issues. Just because the president is a racist doesn’t necessarily make you racist for voting for him. It just means you have things you consider more important.

Having African American voters doesn’t make you somehow not a racist, and voting for a racist doesn’t necessarily make you one. That’s how far the American political system has fallen.

Mere indifference has become controversial.

That kind of ignorance is nothing compared to literally forcing migrant women to have hysterectomies along the southern border. That’s a different kind of racism. [1]

[1] https://www.npr.org/2020/09/16/913398383/whistleblower-alleg...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bd0cMmBvqWc&feature=youtu.be...

https://streamable.com/sr9o2s

Even Kamala Harris called him a racist. She did her best to run away from that after it was no longer convenient of course.

See: Biden's statements on "a racial jungle," segregation, busing, and how he didn't want his children going to desegregated schools.

See: Biden's support of the crime bill that specifically targeted and locked up a million black people.

See: Biden's past friendships and associations with 'former' KKK memembers like Robert Byrd (someone he considered a good friend and mentor). Byrd was one of the most vile pieces of scum elected to the US Government in the past century. How's that for associating with white supremacists?

See: Biden's racist statements about Obama prior to the 2008 election.

"Listening to Senator Byrd I felt with full force all the essential contradictions of me in this new place, with its marble busts, its arcane traditions, its memories and its ghosts. I pondered the fact that, according to his own autobiography, Senator Byrd had received his first taste of leadership in his early twenties, as a member of the Raleigh County Ku Klux Klan, an association that he had long disavowed, an error he attributed—no doubt correctly—to the time and place in which he'd been raised, but which continued to surface as an issue throughout his career. I thought about how he had joined other giants of the Senate, like J. William Fulbright of Arkansas and Richard Russell of Georgia, in Southern resistance to civil rights legislation. I wondered if this would matter to the liberals who now lionized Senator Byrd for his principled opposition to the Iraq War resolution—the MoveOn.org crowd, the heirs of the political counterculture the senator had spent much of his career disdaining.

I wondered if it should matter. Senator Byrd's life—like most of ours—has been the struggle of warring impulses, a twining of darkness and light. And in that sense I realized that he really was a proper emblem for the Senate, whose rules and design reflect the grand compromise of America's founding: the bargain between Northern states and Southern states, the Senate's role as a guardian against the passions of the moment, a defender of minority rights and state sovereignty, but also a tool to protect the wealthy from the rabble, and assure slaveholders of noninterference with their peculiar institution. Stamped into the very fiber of the Senate, within its genetic code, was the same contest between power and principle that characterized America as a whole, a lasting expression of that great debate among a few brilliant, flawed men that had concluded with the creation of a form of government unique in its genius—yet blind to the whip and the chain."

All is forgiven by the establishment if you’re a good boy and toe the line.

That's why being a politician takes some skill.

The only skill required is managing to pull the cover over the eyes of your constituents while you take money from invested interests.

Hillary Clinton herself has said so, something along the lines of "you must fight like your life depends on it for your values." The left was doing it, now the right is doing it.

https://www.nbcnews.com/think/opinion/trump-vote-rising-amon...

Did the former German soldiers of Jewish heritage gaslit this journalist too? Or am I being gaslit by the journalist? So many layers!

[1] https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1996-12-24-mn-12209-...

https://www.theyeshivaworld.com/news/headlines-breaking-stor...

H1-B Visa, by law, is only for those jobs where there are no Americans to fill the role, eg. theoretical physicist PhD with masters in data science.

But firms and hospitals use this to get foreigners at cheaper wages to supplant Americans from their jobs from programmers to doctors (MDs).

Biden, Schumer, Harris, all wish to make the job market and wages worse for American STEM workers/doctors (MDs).

During the 2016 primaries, when Disney CEO Bob Iger replaced about 200 American STEM workers with H1-B Visa abuse replacements, it was Trump and Sanders who complained vociferously about the illegal use of H1-B, which the Obama DOJ did nothing about, perhaps because Clinton received a $100,000 donation from the same Bob Iger for the Hilary Victory Fund.

Trump recently fired the CEO of the federal TVA for attempting to replace 200 American STEM workers H1-B Visa abuse foreigners and then made an exec order to prohibit any federal agency from doing so.

Biden, Schumer want to increase the number of H1-B Visas (Schumer wants to triple them). VP (and former Sen Harris) was Democratic sponsor of senate bill S.386 which seeks to double the number of Indians who get green cards.

The moves of Trump helps Americans. The moves of Biden, Schumer, Harris harms Americans.

Those are the facts, irrefutable, as have been presented above. So, ask yourself, do I want an American President that give in to donors like Bob Iger and brings more foreigners into the country or do I want someone like Trump, who cannot be bribed and does what is best for Americans and not foreigners.

You should check all the red counties that voted for Trump and education level plus medium income. Compare that to the blue counties.

Ok, I'm about as far from a Trump supporter as one can get, but think about how this comment sounds to people on the other side. You just outright dismissed a fairly big topic that this person views as important.

So, to what benefit do you or anybody have to point out the education level of any voter?

Is that something that you perceive as bad or negative? Please explain why that is the case.

With Trump out in January, I hope more people are critical and skeptical of the various institutions in our country that wield the actual power. For a more in depth analysis, would highly recommend Glenn Greenwald's take: https://greenwald.substack.com/p/no-matter-the-liberal-metri...

We don't talk to others anymore. We tweet, we Facebook, we Instagram, we believe what we read on screens and we've made companies feeding us what we want to hear rich.

There is a game being played, you've just missed the players.

I think this is a tired, lazy argument. First, while the polls were skewed they actually weren't that wrong, and many of the differences are magnified by the fact that the electoral college forces us to chop up one large poll (the national results) into lots of small ones (the states) where statistically you're likely to see more variance no matter what. And as for the skew, the generally accepted explanation that it's easier to poll urban, more highly educated people than rural, lower educated people makes much more sense than there being some coordinated conspiracy.

There is no "generally accepted explanation" for the polling skew, let alone one as obvious as "it's easier to poll highly educated, urban voters than lesser educated rural voter". Believing pollsters are dumb enough to not consider this when conducting polls is lazy thinking.

Major poll-based forecasts (which not only aggregate polls but incorporate modelling of non-sampling error in polls, which only report sampling error in the margin of error) were not “dead wrong” (naively looking at polls as predictions might be dead wrong, but the fact that polls don't work that way is why poll-based forecasts like 538 exist.) The low end of the 80% confidence interval (the 95% CI is what is usually used to state a “margin of error” when a CI isn't explicitly identified and would be much wider) for the 538 forecast for Biden’s vote share was ~50.9%. His actual vote share at current count is ~50.7%.

Results a hair outside the 80% CI doesn't indicate that a forecast is “dead wrong”.

EDIT: While I think 538 has made some progress in simplifying it's reporting to help deal with this, aside from deliberate misinformation (which is a substantial factor in the “criticism”), I think the main problem remains that people really, really don't grasp uncertainty even when it's shoved in their face, and are prone to criticize something for not being a precise oracle even when it's expected error range is prominently presented.

But Biden did win an overwhelming popular vote.

Division is a perception created by keyboard warriors and news that needs something to report on and the rest of us find crazy people entertaining. If you turn the news off and step away from social media the artificial insanity goes away.

I do understand some major metros have witnessed massive protests this year with large scale property destruction. From the outside looking in it looks like communities with a lack of diversity and severe economic stratification. I say that because I live in a major metro that experienced none of that insanity and this major city is either or about to be the most diverse major US city and is very healthy economically.

A small collection of keyboard warriors see division because they want to. Without something to ground their baseless opinions they becomes just as absurd as they appear outside their echo chamber.

Coincidentally my same opinion is also well upvoted in a different thread. That doesn’t make it more of anything.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25018920

Good for you. But some of us have friends who will literally die if the ACA is repealed, so, yes, I have cut people out out of my life for supporting the Republicans.