Trump + Putin + Helsinki Press Conference = More Hysteria

[_Kishkumen]

I’m not going to defend Hillary’s decision to continue to revisit the election in this divisive way. But, as a point of accuracy, she did not actually say that all Trump voters matched her denigrating description. Clinton is pretty insufferable, and she should not have said those things, but it’s not as if she described all Trump voters as being exactly the same.

[_Some Schmo]

Absolutely breath-taking!

I almost can't believe what I read here some times.

OMG! Ceeboo has the vapors again! Quick, the smelling salts.

Whiny little bitch.

[_Some Schmo]

I've asked a number of people why they dislike Clinton so much but they never can give any real detail or back up with good evidence of any really horrible. It appears to be people thinking what their tribe tells them to.

Completely agree. I'm no fan of Hillary Clinton, but I've run the same exercise as you with people who claim that she's basically Pantsuit Satan, but who cannot even begin to tell me what their actual problem is with her. They simply end up repeating weak Fox talking points about non-existent scandals or babbling, "Emails!!1!1" without having any competent explanation about what any of that means to them.

I didn't want to be dismissive of any of these folks' opinions during that election, but at some point, I just felt like they left me no choice given their willing surrender of intellect to stupid partisan rhetoric.

by the way, this is absolutely true. The problem with many Drumpf supporters is that they can't articulate their way out of a wet paper bag.

And when you get some distance from the whole thing, it's becomes obvious their nebulous concern over her emails was complete BS, given the breaches in national security we see the man-baby in office commit daily.

[_Water Dog]

Trump is incompetent, eh? What a convincing argument!

[_Kishkumen]

Trump is incompetent, eh? What a convincing argument!

What, you think he is competent?

The problem with you is that his obvious incompetence is not enough to turn you off! You seem to like it!

[_Chap]

Trump is incompetent, eh? What a convincing argument!

What, you think he is competent?

The problem with you is that his obvious incompetence is not enough to turn you off! You seem to like it!

That's homophily for ya!

(As the good professor will understand, of course, I am not saying that WD likes gays.)

[_Ceeboo]

I’m not going to defend Hillary’s decision to continue to revisit the election in this divisive way. But, as a point of accuracy, she did not actually say that all Trump voters matched her denigrating description.

Right, she said "half" of the Trump supporters are racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic and deplorable.

but it’s not as if she described all Trump voters as being exactly the same.

Yep, only 30 plus million Americans. That's not so bad.

[_Ceeboo]

OMG! Ceeboo has the vapors again! Quick, the smelling salts.

Whiny little bitch.

An infant posing as an adult male.

[_honorentheos]

[Okay, there were approximately 60 million American citizens that voted for Trump. Of those 60 million people, how many of them do you think are seen as a "racist" or a "nazi" or a "sexist" or a "homophobe" by countless people who hold differing political views?

Ceeboo, there are a few ways to interpret what you are describing.

You can think that all folks who didn't vote for Trump characterize those that did in the way that you've stated it above.

Or, it can be acknowledged that those same non-Trump-voters don't see Trump voters as racists per se, but as folks who may be willing to put an apparent racist (in their opinion) in office. To these folks, there's a disconnect between hearing folks say, "I'm not a racist!" while those same folks then pull the lever for a man who makes it a central chord of his message that (as example) most immigrants are criminals and rapists, because they're not Americans.

A flip side to this is that there really isn't a two-sided coin to be flipped here, deciding when a person is 'a racist' or not. There is really more of a spectrum of attitudes and actions from one ideological end to the other. Everyone, regardless of which of the two candidates they voted for, can - and will at some point - hold an arguably racist attitude or commit a racist action of some type. No side owns that position exclusively. But there are some legitimate concerns with how certain elements within the social landscape align on Trump's side and why they do, and how Trump won't stand up against those folks and their public actions. This is a codependency that serves a very narrow and dangerous agenda.

Hey Canpakes,

While I agree with this, I do think that it drills deeper on both sides.

For example, you'll recall this thread where EA shared an article in the Atlantic by Ta-Nehisi Coates: http://www.mormondiscussions.com/phpBB3 ... &view=next

The discussion that followed was specifically about this issue, how much the willingness to turn a blind eye to Trump's racist rhetoric played into the election, and how the label "racist" is used by those on the left side of the political spectrum as a conversation ending insult. But I don't think that makes sense to those who hold conservative values any more than the right's attacks on Clinton supporters claiming that Bill Clinton's infidelities showed liberals are cool with adultery and worse.

We have to be cautious in looking at the worst characteristics of our political foes and wondering how it is that they could possibly be supported despite that while failing to recognize we all are overlooking something because we believe the greater good will ultimately be served by the one candidate compared to the other and it isn't as simple as overlooking racism, infidelity, or whathaveyou. I think the follow-up to Coates' article, also published in the Atlantic, said it best:

https://www.theatlantic.com/notes/2017/ ... New Testament/539976/

When you construct an entire teleology on one cause—even a cause as powerful and abiding as white racism—you face the temptation to leave out anything that complicates the thesis. So Coates minimizes sexism—Trump’s disgusting language and the visceral hatred of many of his supporters for Hillary Clinton—as background noise. He downplays xenophobia, even though foreigners were far more often the objects of Trump’s divisive rhetoric and policy proposals than black Americans. (Of all his insults, the only one Trump felt obliged to withdraw was his original foray into birtherism.) Coates doesn’t try to explain why, at one point in the campaign, a plurality of Republicans supported Ben Carson over the other nine candidates, all white. He omits the weird statistic that slightly more black and Latino voters and slightly fewer whites went for Trump than for Mitt Romney. He doesn’t even mention the estimated 8.5 million Americans who voted for President Obama and then for Trump—even though they made the difference. No need to track the descending nihilism of the Republican Party. The urban–rural divide is a sham.

That 46 percent of voters, overwhelmingly white, chose Trump—that some chose him because of bigotry and some while overlooking it—that more than a third of the country still supports him: all this is hideous enough. But we live in a time of total vindication, when complication and concession are considered weaknesses, and counter examples are proof of false consciousness. This spirit has taken over Coates’s writing. In this essay and other recent work, he’s turned away from the self-examining quality of his earlier writing to a literary style that’s oracular. He has become the most influential writer in America today; this latest Atlantic essay is already being taught in college courses. He has never written more powerfully, and the sentences sweep you along because they don’t yield for a second to anything.

But the style of no-compromise sacrifices things that are too important for readers to surrender without a second thought. It flattens out history into a single fixed truth, so that an event in 2016 is the same as an event in 1805, the most recent election erases the one before, the Obama years turn into an illusion. It brushes aside policy proposals as distractions, and politics itself as an immoral bargain. It weakens the liberal value of individual thought, and therefore individual responsibility, by subordinating thoughts and individuals to structures and groups. It begins with the essential point that race is an idea, and ends up just about making race an essence.

Now, personally, I think the charge of supporting an authoritarian strongman that is undermining democracy is more difficult to excuse and no number of Supreme Court justices or tax cuts should have excused overlooking that. But that isn't the direction the conversation has gone.

[Guest]

Let me see if I can pick one person out of the crowd and drill down a bit. Okay there is a tall Mexican fellow in a silk yellow shirt doing the hustle, do you see him?. He voted for Trump because he is a small business owner with three kids and (in his opinion - right or wrong) Trump would create a path for him to be able to afford health insurance for the three people he loves most on planet earth. Something he can't afford now.

So he exercises his constitution right to vote and he votes for Trump.

Part of the disconnect that you perceive is that there are a lot of folks trying to figure out the ‘for right or wrong’ part of this scenario.

Our hypothetical voter above had a choice between a candidate who has been involved with the health care and insurance debate and has worked on proposals and possible solutions, flawed or otherwise. The other candidate stood with the folks who stomped their feet and loudly proclaimed how they were going to tear down the recent changes to the system so that they could go back to the previous system, which they also claim is as, if not more so, dysfunctional, while simultaneously representing a party that has had virtually no history of addressing problems within that system.

So how did our hypothetical voter above arrive at his decision? This is the question that makes other non-Trump voters (NTVs, for brevity here on out) scratch their heads with wonder.

And this question comes up again and again. Vote for Hillary, when her immoral husband got a blow job from an intern? OK, then, let’s vote for the guy who has had three marriages, several affairs, and pays off porn stars for sex. Or, vote for Hillary, with all of those accusations of corruption and Whitewater baggage? OK, then, let’s vote for the businessman with a proven track record of bankrupting his businesses, stiffing less powerful business partners, and who dabbles in casinos and hotel development in some shady places like Russia and has received millions in loans from corrupt banks abroad.

In other words, the reasons given for rejecting Clinton also rule out Trump, but to an even greater extent. So what are the actual underlying reasons that are driving some voters to pick one over the other? Why are they seemingly acting counter to their own principles or concerns?

My point is that people vote for a variety of reasons ...

It’s my own opinion that a lot of the dysfunction in the system today is the result at not really looking at and dissecting those reasons, which would follow from failing to honestly identify them.