Trump Trainwreck - Ongoing diary of betrayal and evil

[pbrower2a]

(12-19-2016, 09:10 PM)Warren Dew Wrote:

(12-19-2016, 04:48 PM)taramarie Wrote:

(12-19-2016, 04:40 PM)Warren Dew Wrote:

(12-19-2016, 04:09 PM)taramarie Wrote:

(12-19-2016, 04:04 PM)Classic-Xer Wrote: I'm not biased. I've seen protests by  both sides many times.

Which brings me to what i stated above...do you think pointing fingers is productive? Do you think likewise lefties pointing fingers causes right wingers to self reflect?

You'd prefer to let the violence pass unremarked?  Don't you think that risks encouraging violence?

Your analysis of me is incorrect. My issue is with stating one side or the other is more violent than the other. It encourages more division, more "they are worse than me" mentality. It is how it is phrased which causes one side or the other to feel attacked. When that happens, no one listens. It is the strategy that is the problem. It is how it is taken, absorbed and the ultimate response that is the problem.

When one side uses violence and the other doesn't, as is largely the case here, you either have to overlook the violence, you have to lie about who is using it, or you have to drop the false equivalency and point out which side is doing it.

So if you're not advocating overlooking it, and you're discouraging pointing out who is doing it, sounds like you want people to lie about who is using it?  I don't think that's a healthy approach.

Someone who uses violence on the side of liberal causes (like Earth First extremists who put spikes into trees so that lumberjacks get crippled if their saws  hit the spikes) I disown them. If someone draws an image of Donald Trump with a rope around his neck, I disown that person.

Imagine that we had won, and we had Hillary Clinton as President with a Democratic majority in the Senate. I would be talking sympathetically to Republicans whose politicians lost. I would tell them that we may need some of their votes in 2018 and 2020 and want to earn them. If you lost the election, then you are going to be using the same roads, your kids will be attending the same schools, you will want wise regulation of workplace safety and the environment, and you will have the same needs for law enforcement and national defense. America is as much your world as ours. The essence of democratic (notice the small letter) politics is service. The essence of undemocratic politics is a combination of graft for winners and punishment for losers.

Warren, you  may not be a troll, but I have seen plenty of them -- and they gladly talk about 'kicking your ass' and other nasty metaphors and expect us liberals to buy into a veritable personality cult around Donald Trump, and we are permanently repudiated as liberals. If we lost then such reflects our inadequacy as people, or so think those trolls. Those are hard people to like.

Presidential winners in the elections from 2000 to 2016 have gotten anywhere from 45.96% of the popular vote  (Trump in 2016) to 52.86% of the vote (Obama in 2008). Presidential losers since 2000 have gotten anywhere from 45.60% of the popular vote (McCain 2008)  to 48.38% of the vote (Gore in 2000). Neither liberalism not conservatism has been repudiated in any of those elections. I'm not going to compare the very different three0way races involving Bill Clinton, but It is ironic that Mike Dukakis got trounced while getting only 45.65% of the popular vote in 1988. that Donald Trump's result in 2016 is almost as poor as that of John McCain in 2008. But in our system, winning the right votes matters more than winning more votes. and that's the way things have been for over 200 years. We really have a travesty, but we are stuck with it. We may have voted for a horrible leader, but we are stuck with it much as Venezuelans were stuck with Hugo Chavez and Zimbabweans were stuck with Robert Mugabe.

So he will be President Donald Trump -- even if for the next four years I might prefer to be, for example, a citizen of the UK (among other sovereign states). Even if I must snicker at what we have, and cry when he exposes an extremism that will get increasingly unpopular with time. Even as I protest extremism, bad public policy, and offensive behavior. It is worse than being a fan of the St. Louis Cardinals and having to admit that the Chicago Cubs are the World's Champions of baseball. I expect to participate in protests and demonstrations and I can imagine myself doing civil disobedience.

Donald Trump and the Republican party do not have a mandate to operate a single-party system in which Democrats can be permanently neglected. "We won and you're done!" is for the likes of Hugo Chavez, Robert Mugabe.... and Fidel Castro. I can see through the personality of Donald Trump, and all I can think of is that people are attracted to con men and spouse beaters either out of some lust for punishment or because the con artists and spouse-abusers have to put on the charm to get victims.

48% of the American electorate voted against him in 2016. An even shift of even 1% of the popular vote (which is how it usually works in near 50-50 elections) means that Donald Trump loses in 2020. Democrats probably get the Senate back in 2020, and America gets to undo whatever it perceives as the damage. But I expect that over time more people are going to say "How could I have ever voted for that?" than say "I didn't vote for him, but I am glad that he was elected -- so I will vote for him in 2020".

Yes, I see him as a sociopath and a demagogue -- which is also how I see Fidel Castro. I also see him having reduced the issues to language suitable for appealing to unruly elementary kids, also a very bad sign. I do not communicate that way. Reality is far too complex for that. I expect the worst from Donald Trump, and we will be lucky just to avoid getting into a Yugoslav-style split-up. By 2021 I will be ready to exchange my US passport for either a passport of the "Republic of Michigan" or the Dominion of Canada without having moved.

When we are through with this nightmare, I expect that we will make major changes in the educational system  and shore up the political system so that Americans are too sophisticated to vote for a sociopath and our political system closes the seams in the Constitution. We might even go to a parliamentary system and decide to go to proportional representation instead of relying upon those in power in a state legislature to select the electorate for the politicians of their choosing.

The happiest ending for a Crisis is that we end up better for it all without paying too high a price. God help us should we have to pay the price for our follies as did the Germans and Japanese (let alone their innocent victims) did in the last Crisis.