Curb Your Authoritarianism? The 2016 Conventional Wisdom Thread (Elections, Part 6)

Are you talking about Stein or the dude complaining about her, because honestly I can see the argument either way.

I don't think she's a bigot I think she's just ignorant

Mostly Stein for thinking she could just cover her tracks.

Someone should have Megyn Kelly walk over and explain those poll results to Newt.

like she probably read one (1) counterintuitive counterpunch article on the topic of brexit and based her opinion on it w/out getting more information. in general she does not seem v curious or particularly bright or educated to me. cf her homeopathy views + vaccination agnosticism.

Imagine if Hillary had tried to pull that...

she is the head of the establishment

lol

http://i2.wp.com/www.forwardprogressives.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/JillStein.jpg

this is pretty lol

In similar 'the internets, how do they work' and 'wow, if Hillary tried to pull the shit pulled by people who oppose Hillary' news: Newly-Hired Trump Aide Deletes Tweets About "Sleazy Donald" for Some Reason.

"And if he's within five points he'll just beat her. I mean, look what happened with Brexit," Gingrich said. "What happens is the elites, the establishment all pile on. The average citizen will not tell pollsters the truth. You get much better results for Trump for example in a computerized online poll than a telephone poll because people don't want to tell the pollster something they think is not socially acceptable."

Even Trump's supporters recognize that voting for him is socially unacceptable.

this is pretty lol

an instant classic imo

http://i.imgur.com/1Sz35Nz.jpg

we are coming to you live from a pile of recyclables alongside the mighty monongahela river

@USChamber
Under Trump's trade plans, we would see higher prices, fewer jobs, and a weaker economy

sad!

I'm really hoping for some producer or engineer at a news station to set up Trump to say something stupid on the air, Lonesome Rhodes-style.

lol he's so bad at this
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/livewire/trump-fundraising-british-members-parliament

i'm not about to start giving a shit what the US chamber of commerce thinks

a now familiar story: someone speaks ill of trump, his place of employment gets swarmed by MRA anime nazis

https://newrepublic.com/article/134534/told-truth-donald-trump-rally-trolls-threatened-life

re trump hitting up MPs

why the fuck is he doing this? does he think they have extra 'leave' campaign money sitting around they just want to give to some loud american asshole to do what with exactly?

is that even legal?

legality was my first thought too - isn't it still against the law for foreign government officials to contribute cash to US political campaigns? or did CU gut that too I can't remember

http://www.fec.gov/ans/answers_general.shtml#Can_nonUS_citizens_contribute

not legal.

Like, I wish I could chalk this up to him being a crook (or at least an attempted crook) but, as always, all signs seem to point only to him being incompetent as fuck.

I genuinely think anyone who inherited what he did and had the same perpetual lack of self-reflection could fall ass backwards into the same success that he's had.

this is one of the 92 tweets donald trump has liked?

https://twitter.com/billinwaco/status/698034361837355008

lol

http://www.cracked.com/blog/trump-having-twitter-conversations-with-fake-accounts/

this'll win those voters over!

https://www.yahoo.com/news/michael-cohen-hillary-tweet-trump-000000005.html

They should investigate her for that ASAP.

maybe get a congressional panel set up or something

Don't know if anyone's posted this yet, but I thought this piece by Chris Arnade makes some interesting points:

Why Trump voters are not "complete idiots" - parts 1 and 2

https://medium.com/@Chris_arnade/trump-politics-and-option-pricing-or-why-trump-voters-are-not-idiots-1e364a4ed940#.35t0dyozp
https://medium.com/@Chris_arnade/why-trump-voters-are-not-complete-idiots-part-two-what-should-hillary-do-7cfcbd7aa19e#.vv9r51uis

Really great and a much more articulate take on what I've been saying for a while - lots of people just want to see things get shaken up. Can't doubt that Trump will do that.

I'm going to go out on a limb and say those posts seem kind of patronizing, and reiterate a lot of conventional wisdom (concluding that clinton should highlight the risks of a trump presidency), with well-shot photographs interspersed.

this story about trump's emails going to MPs is my favorite bizarre campaign story right now - josh at talking points memo has since heard from MPs in australia and iceland who also got multiple trump campaign emails bashing crooked hillary and asking for money. what the hell - what kind of list did he buy??

suspect it's the tip of the iceberg of bad campaign practices ranging from unprofessional to actually illegal.. like they never thought they'd get this far so i just wonder how many corners they cut along the way

trump giving a speech literally in front of a pile of garbage today was pretty good too

you know the party's desperate when it resorts to camouflage

today I was reminded of "please clap" and realized that this has definitely been the greatest election cycle of my life so far

It's fun and games until someone gets an eye poked out.

yeah, but we'll always have Trump giving a speech in front of a pile of literal garbage

I don't know if anything will ever top Palin being interviewed while a turkey is killed in the background.

If I hadn't read those links that o.nate shared in the wrong order, I wouldn't have read them at all. The setup is that there are only two kinds of people in the world and Trump voters are one them. Gross.

I guess I can see some of the reasoning behind supporting a candidate like Trump but then you realise that candidate actually is Trump and that's just unforgivable.

xp it's cool, all you have to do is wait 24 hours and you'll get to read something even dumber! And here it is!

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/i-hate-donald-trump-but-he-might-get-my-vote/2016/06/28/ddeee5f8-398d-11e6-9ccd-d6005beac8b3_story.html

xxpost It's an oversimplification but in a larger sense it isn't inaccurate, at least inasmuch as there's a broad array of people with differing belief systems but who ultimately agree on the importance of maintaining a civil society with some sort of order and there are those who won't be content until the external world matches the morass of illogical chaos that exists inside their minds.

I think I got like fifteen words into that WaPo op ed before I vomited all over my keyboard. Almost worse than the stereotypical Trump voter is the dickhole who tries to sound smart about supporting Trump and betrays his fourth grade-level understanding of how the world works.

You don't have to be a complete idiot to support Trump, but you'd have to be a complete idiot to support Trump with no serious reservations. And if you have serious reservations, why would you support him? You'd have to be an idiot. It'd be like Brexit redux. "What? Yeah, I voted for him, but I didn't think it would count! Don't we get another vote? As a low income blue collar worker of Mexican descent and a recent convert to Islam, I had no idea he would try to deport me and my family!" As a member of the 1% I had no idea his election would destroy our economy, or that we would bomb Iran thinking they were hosting Isis, if I knew all that I never would have voted for him!"

Many Trump supporters are, I'm sure, undereducated and underinformed and straight-up misinformed by various 'news' outlets. But if you pay the slightest attention to politics or have the slightest understanding of history or foreign policy or economics (and I mean the slightest) and you still support Trump, I feel completely comfortable calling you an idiot.

Or a nihilist. There's probably some overlap there.

And please don’t try to stereotype us. We’re not uneducated, uninformed, unemployed or low-income zealots. We’re affluent, well-educated, gainfully employed and successfully retired.

I found this part particularly galling, since the pervasive reverse stereotype is that Democratic voters do so because they are unemployed and want free stuff.

So the op-Ed writer rejects stereotyping except for that which they do themselves and find worthwhile or self-congratulatory?

If I hadn't read those links that o.nate shared in the wrong order, I wouldn't have read them at all. The setup is that there are only two kinds of people in the world and Trump voters are one them. Gross.

eh, not really. the idea is that there are people who want things to change and people who want things to stay the same. the people who want change aren't necessarily Trump voters but they may be making a calculated gambit, knowing that positive or negative, Trump is the most likely to bring real change into their lives. so it's Hillary's job to convince that segment that any change Trump brings about is almost certainly not going to benefit them.

I'm sure we would get some serious change by just picking any random American citizen to be our new president but I fail to see how that would be a responsible decision. I could get me some change by jamming my fist into a running garbage disposal, as well.

well, that seems like a nonsense argument. there is no "i like things fine just the way they are" vote in this election. the past eight years have been a time of some pretty massive changes. the only choice is what sort of change you want, so the "calculated gambit" trump voters are making is that the sort of change trump represents will be more favorable to them than the current sort of change. except it's not a calculated gambit, because they're ignoring all of the actual data involved in the gambit.