What i see is….a lot of Trump voters wont admit that the Trump camp has a big racist-faction. They dont want to see it, or simply wont admit to it.

But I also think its hard for the clinton voters to see that theres big factions in the Trump camp that are NOT part of the big racist faction. There’s plenty of voters who just think of him as an ‘outsider’ and a ross perot type, etc.

I agree with a lot of your assessment, but I think you’re leaving out another perspective: Leftists, who detest both parties, won’t vote for either candidate, but see Trump as a racist demagogue, and a large portion of his voters following him because of that.

By no means all of them. But a significant portion. We know it’s significant, because study after study, asking them to describe their own views, shows us this. Hell, 20% of his supporters in South Carolina said Lincoln never should have freed the slaves, and a much higher percentage said the South should have won — which is defacto support for slavery. More than 65% of his supporters, regardless of state, think Obama isn’t eligible to be the president, being born elsewhere. Trump himself led the racist birther (papers please!) charge for six years until just yesterday, when he scammed the media into helping him do an infomercial for his campaign and his new hotel, because he said he’d say something big about birtherism.

So, again, no one is saying it’s all of his supporters. But it is a significant chunk. More importantly, to me, Trump himself built his campaign on the twin pillars of birtherism and hatred and fear of brown people supposedly coming to take our jobs from us. If he had not done so, he never would have won the Republican nomination. What else is he offering, but a shot in the arm for white nationalists?

• This reply was modified 8 years, 2 months ago by Billy_T.

If it were about economic anxiety, they’d support Sanders or Stein, not Trump. Trump offers the vast majority of Americans nothing. Nada. Zilch. But he will give himself a massive tax break worth tens of millions of dollars a year, and his heirs, and corporate America, and all billionaires. He’s pushing standard issue voodoo economics which has never helped a single Americans outside the richest 1%.

It IS all about race and white supremacy.

And then, of course, there is this bombshell, which should end his campaign, but won’t. Primarily because the media are more focused on Clinton’s being sick and her basket of deplorables comment, and their bosses don’t want them investigating capitalists anyway.

How the Trump Organization’s Foreign Business Ties Could Upend U.S. National Security By Kurt Eichenwald On 9/14/16 at 5:30 AM

Ear-piecegate is just like picklegate. A big fat nothingburger.

Alt-right paranoids who really need to start questioning why they keep falling for this nonsense.

Another quick comment.

Trump came out with a new policy to radically increase military spending, and to ramp up the size and strength of the military — well beyond what the Pentagon itself is calling for. So much for the concept that he’ll be less hawkish than Clinton.

And, of course, he wants to do this while slashing revenues to the Treasury, with his massive tax cuts for the rich. Reagan Redux.

We have two horrible choices, in my view (if we go by who is going to win). But Trump really is much worse.

I’m still voting for Stein.

• This reply was modified 8 years, 2 months ago by Billy_T.

NewMexicoRam wrote:

Just so everyone knows where I am coming from: I believe these 2 candidates are the worst ones I have ever seen in the years since I have been able to follow elections (1968).
Either way, there are major flaws and America will pay for it.
My major issue is the Supreme Court. I know which way Hillary will go and I don’t like it. The Supreme Court will be able to make up its own laws for the next 20-30 years as a self-appointed royalty.
The Donald is behind in both polling and the electoral vote. As he would say, “Not good, not good.”
But Wikileaks isn’t done yet. I believe there could be something very major in these next release of documents that may tie Hillary directly to a criminal act. She did learn well from her days as a Democratic lawyer during the Nixon investigations and covered her butt well, however, we will soon see how well.
I may be wrong, wouldn’t be the first time, but something is up and Wikileaks could bring a major turnabout in this election.

Ironically, if you really want the Court to stick to precedent and a close reading of the Constitution, you’d want a Dem to pick the judges. I know this goes against conventional wisdom on the right, but it’s true. When you drill down into Court decisions, read the dissent, read through the justifications for the majority, you’ll find a pretty obvious pattern: Republican appointed judges, almost without exception in recent times, are radical reinterpreters of the Constitution, who aggressively seek activist change.

From voting rights issues, to corporate power and personhood, to campaign finance, to affirmative action, to guns, to RFRA and back again, the so-called “conservative” judges have been the aggressive activists, and the so-called “liberal” judges have, time and time again, decided upon precedent and fairly narrow readings of the Constitutions. It’s really the “conservatives” who “make up their own laws,” as they did with Hobby Lobby, Citizens United, Voting Rights, Heller and so on.

In Hobby Lobby, for instance, they didn’t use the Constitution at all to make their case — knowing that it doesn’t support their position. Instead, they tried to rewrite RFRA and radically expand its purview.

Sometimes people confuse desired outcomes with a “correct” reading of the Constitution. It doesn’t always work that way.

A thot-experiment — If Trump had won, would those angry-white-males
still like him two years into his term, when their
lives stayed the same or got worse ?

Anyway, with President-Hillary as President it gives them
something to live for — smoldering hate.
(and i will be right there with them 🙂

w
v

They’d turn on him soon enough, if they were presented with another messiah. And that’s all Trump is. A temporary messiah. Perhaps the best used-car salesman as messiah in American political history. But temporary all the same. So, if he does win the presidency, and the inevitable happens — he gets nothing done — yes, they’ll turn on him. But not until much later in the day, as was the case with Bush. Bush was beloved by righties very nearly to the end, and anyone who spoke against him was considered a traitor and anti-American and bashed mercilessly.

Now? Because of the Trump effect as new messiah and chief Goebbels Big-Lie artist, we see the Republican faithful saying they were against the Iraq invasion all along, against “free trade,” “globalization” and all the bedrock Republican third rails. Trump even has them changing their minds on Putin:

Will Jordan @williamjordann

PUTIN Net-Favorability (YouGov/Economist Poll) among…

Democrats
July 2014: -54
Aug 2016: -54

Republicans
July 2014: -66
Aug 2016: -27
8:57 AM – 9 Sep 2016

748 748 Retweets
574

Trump has proven something most here already knew: Politics is nothing but sales. The folks with the best sales team win.

nittany ram wrote:

Billy_T wrote:

Recently watched a so so movie, In the Heart of the Sea, and it spurred a lot of thoughts. From wiki:

In the Heart of the Sea is a 2015 historical drama film based on Nathaniel Philbrick’s 2000 non-fiction book of the same name, about the sinking of the American whaling ship Essex in 1820, an event that inspired the novel Moby-Dick. An international co-production between the United States and Spain, it was directed and produced by Ron Howard and written by Charles Leavitt; the film stars Chris Hemsworth, Benjamin Walker, Cillian Murphy, Tom Holland, Ben Whishaw, and Brendan Gleeson . . . [3]

Anyway, it was one of those “duh” things for me. They hunted the whales almost to extinction for oil. We used to slaughter these beautiful, incredibly intelligent animals for oil.

(Now we slaughter our fellow humans for it. But that’s another story, one not taken up by Melville — but hinted at toward the very end of the film.)

It’s a good thing we humans also make art, or we’d forget about the beauty that was once on this earth, or all too rare, because of what we do when we’re not making art.

I read the book “Heart of the Sea” and really liked it. I don’t know anything about the movie but the book wasn’t a dramatic effort. It was simply a description of the events that occurred based on the accounts of the survivors and what was known about that time period.

This part of the linked paper bothered me…

“Slijper (1962) reported succorant behavior when a humpback whale supported an injured humpback for 40 min before being harpooned by whalers.”

It bothered me mostly because of what happened…a whale was harpooned while trying to help another previously injured whale (probably also harpooned). I picture a grieving, frightened animal, frantically trying to help a pod member (probably a sibling, parent, etc) only to receive a horrible and painful death for its efforts.

But what also is unsettling is the detached, clinical way in which it is written. Of course, it’s a scientific paper. To word it any other way would be inappropriate, but still…reading that after looking at pictures of a dolphin and whale playing was a little unsettling.

That is pretty awful. I’ve read that whales are quite likely smarter than we are. So we can’t make the excuse that we were just killing “dumb” animals without any feelings. They may surpass us in those areas.

Thanks for the picture, Nittany. It’s beautiful to see and think about.

Recently watched a so so movie, In the Heart of the Sea, and it spurred a lot of thoughts. From wiki:

In the Heart of the Sea is a 2015 historical drama film based on Nathaniel Philbrick’s 2000 non-fiction book of the same name, about the sinking of the American whaling ship Essex in 1820, an event that inspired the novel Moby-Dick. An international co-production between the United States and Spain, it was directed and produced by Ron Howard and written by Charles Leavitt; the film stars Chris Hemsworth, Benjamin Walker, Cillian Murphy, Tom Holland, Ben Whishaw, and Brendan Gleeson . . . [3]

Anyway, it was one of those “duh” things for me. They hunted the whales almost to extinction for oil. We used to slaughter these beautiful, incredibly intelligent animals for oil.

(Now we slaughter our fellow humans for it. But that’s another story, one not taken up by Melville — but hinted at toward the very end of the film.)

It’s a good thing we humans also make art, or we’d forget about the beauty that was once on this earth, or all too rare, because of what we do when we’re not making art.

Would be pretty cool if the Green Party were the “far right” for us.

:>)

But, pushing things a bit further, rather than having a bunch of leftist parties — which would be ginormously better than our current situation — why not zero parties?

No political parties allowed. Because they are, of course, concentrated organizations, with their own hierarchies, and concentrated organizations tend to represent their own interests, rather than the broader public’s. At least over time. Concentrated power tends to make gaining more power the goal.

Instead, let’s go back to basics, and “organize” as communities, with everyone automatically granted full and equal membership in their particular (fully democratic) community, federated with every other community. The economy would be fully democratized, and cooperative, not competitive. The communities themselves would be co-ops.

We’d have regions, not states. And regions would consist of all the co-ops in their area, and the regions would cooperate with each other too . . . and the communities and the regions would form the nation, under a new Constitution and a new economic mode. No permanent power centers, anywhere. The flattest possible pyramids, with “leadership” being temporary, rotational, at the local, regional and national levels. Lotteries. Not elections.

No parties needed. All political power rests in each of us, as individuals, with equal voices and equal shares in our commonly held economy and democratic union. Our organizing principles are the earth, democracy, equality, social justice for all.

Zooey wrote:

http://www.dailystormer.com/a-normies-guide-to-the-alt-right/

Zooey, that gets a red light from my browser’s WOT app. Says “not safe.”

WV,

That one about the 13 trillion. Not sure if he goes into more detail about the repercussions of a bailout from the bottom up. But, it’s pretty obvious that it would do amazing things beyond his initial listing. People with paid for houses and no debt have all kinds of “disposable income” they never had before, and they’d likely spend it. If they’re from the “working class,” they’d likely spend all of it here, in this economy, which rich folks don’t.

If the goal is to improve a capitalist economy, there is really no better way than to get money into the hands of the poor on up to the middle. They’ll spend 100% of that here, now, whereas the richer one gets, the lower that percentage goes . . . . In effect, the richer one is, the more one takes money OUT of a capitalist economy.

So, beyond the ethical and moral dimensions of a bottom up bailout . . . . and the obscenely unethical and immoral dimensions of bailing out the rich . . . . it’s just smart economics under a capitalist system. Radically increase disposable income for the people who will spend 100% of that income here, now.

Of course, the billionaires will never let this happen, but they should. They’d make money too. A ton.