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[Makonero]

They'd rather blame the people that voted for Trump instead of admitting their candidate was shit and blaming her.

close, but no

it's that they can't admit that THEY were wrong about her

 

[Dash_Riprock]

The shit people will defend in Clintons name is astounding.
She lost against fucking Trump and people won't say she was crap.

As I said in another thread, far too many bruised egos for PoliGAF to ever admit they fucked up by supporting her.

Not that I think Sanders was much better, but he didn't win the nom so all we can ever do is speculate...

 

[Massive Duck. C.M.]

They'd rather blame the people that voted for Trump instead of admitting their candidate was shit and blaming her.

If I shot you in the dick because one guy was really enthusiastic about it and another guy warned against it but was low energy, would you blame me or the guy who warned against it

 

[Douglas Quaid]

Corporate Dems will keep losing, and you will too PoliGaf. Progressives owe you nothing. Good job alienating them FOREVER during the primaries too Shillbots.

 

[Steel]

I suppose I agree, I had initially though you meant when you said nitty gritty that you were really saying in general it didn't matter at all what the policy was

In all honesty it takes about two seconds to really look at Trump's policy in detail to know it's stupid. But yeah they phrasing of it between the two is different, because of the campaign style.

I mean if you go by the reports and anecdotes, Hillary seemed to loathe campaigning in general and it seemed she wanted to move quickly through that stuff to the election itself. Meanwhile, Trump is basically still campaigning even though the election has long since passed.

That kind of weird bravado and self-confidence for some reason resonated with folks who didn't look any further to see if there was substance behind it deserving of that confidence. He basically operates like a celebrity, someone who is sure of everything they do and only apologizes when backed into a corner and forced to. Hillary's response should have been to poke holes in all his "great" ideas or to have some sort of counter to that strength of Trump's. Not to sigh, shake your head and go "that's not how this works". She wanted to treat him like a politician and destroy him and his chances at the Presidency like he was one, like he was Howard Dean yelling during the Democratic caucuses, but Trump never operated on that kind of level.

Yeah I can agree with this. And, to be honest, I thought the same thing. I can understand the logic behind her choice to focus on attacking him; his entire playbook went against the grain of political history. She was trying to grind down his voting base to run up the score and fill the Senate and House, but, in hindsight, that was an incredibly poor decision.

Yeah, she should have run a more conventional campaign against him and treated him like an adult, even if he wasn't. I mean, it's still hard to think about how someone like Trump won. If Romney had been involved in even one of Trump's political mistakes the pubs would've lost the house and the Senate. Or at least you'd think so, but given how things turned out, perhaps that's putting too much faith in humanity.

We're talking about the policy positions that people would have been exposed to the most- The news headliners, the national broadcast ads, those types. Not the website stuff, the ABC talkshow news, the debate snipets.

Hillary ran a very negative ad campiagn, Trump ran a negative ad campaign but with simple to understand (and get behind for the struggling middle class) policies.

That's not what I'm talking about in that line of posts though:

It's harder to pin down what effect her policy positions had on the outcome because the vast, vast majority of the voting base doesn't get anywhere close to looking at the details of candidates plans. I'd go so far as to say it's the least important aspect.

Follow the line of posts and you'll find that I don't really disagree with you.

 

[Dash_Riprock]

Corporate Dems will keep losing, and you will too PoliGaf. Progressives owe you nothing. Good job alienating them FOREVER during the primaries too Shillbots.

PoliGAF doesn't represent anything but a fraction of smug condescending Dems. Neither do the (mostly now banned) obnoxious Bernie Bros that were here duking it out with them. Numbers suggest that by and large many Bernie voters bit the bullet and voted for Hillary

Just not enough, and not where it mattered.

 

[Vigilant Walrus]

It also seems like going down the "personal responsibility" road when it comes to mass politics is probably not the best thing for liberals to do, considering how easy it is to turn that around (don't we usually frown on that type of thinking when it comes to any other systemic issue?). A few people here and there not voting, sure, maybe "personal responsibility" applies. Consistently low turnout, millions of non-voters, and the election of Donald Trump? That's a systemic issue.

I've been going through Carlins Common Sense podcast throughout the election period, and it's been interesting hearing his take on it. He said something similar to what you're saying. He mentioned that a highly regarded Political science scholar had done studies back in 1984 about the last time that the US have had a great president who was able to exercise influence, get legislation done and mold his agenda into effects, and at the time- In the mid 1980s, it was concluded that there hadn't been a arguable good president in more than 40 years- Since Truman. The same scholar incidentally also noted that FDR and Eisenhower where the two other "best" presidents of the 20th century.

The American people have been angry with the two-party status quo for a long time. And it keeps getting worse because the two-party structure is not feasible.

Had Hillary won, you'd still have looked at 4-8 years of obstructionism to the same continued effect of being able to move the country forward with two hands tied to your back. Obama only got a fraction of his agenda through compared to what he wanted to.


At the end of the day, voters do not care whose fault it is. They blame the Commander-in-Chief. They are frustrated about their country falling into ruin over political ideology being put before the needs of the country. It damages it. It breaks it from within. Frustration, anger, apathy and resentment builds up over the decades. The housing market, college intuition, stagnant wages, a crippling middle class, outragous funds going to defense, defunding and de-centralization of infrastructure based programs, cutpacks to goverment agencies like the IRS.
It all amounts to disasterious quality of life, and instability. More people fall through the social net and never recover, more homeless people, more people down on their luck, and many many people with full time jobs that cannot find a decent place to live or a decent wage.


What happens is that privileged majority whites are so outraged that they cannot think about others when they perceive to have lost so much. They expected the same wealth as their parents and grandparents who've engaged in a lot of prosperity and possibilities. That has died with them, and not only will they die faster, be more sick, they will also have less money and less opportunity, more competition, more working hours and less safety needs.
More than half of Americans live paycheck-to-paycheck. Things are getting so bad for so many people that they can only respond with anger when the Democratic Party wants to focus so much on minority issues. Privileged people scream "what about me?" < All the minorities start fighting each other over the table scraps, purity tests and oppression olympics. fuck other minorities who want to use other minorities as a mule, fuck white feminists, fuck the fake allies who are bigots, fuck the gay people who are trans phobic, fuck the islamapshobes who worry about national security, fuck any anti Semite who criticizes protecting israel.
There is so much division, blaming and "give me and my people something, or go fuck yourself". It's unsustainable and a sign of that there is no unity. There is nobody that all left people on the left can rally behind.

Hillary was part of an old guard and had been in politics for a long time. She represented Obama and the old Democratic party. For the new liberal college breed coming out of the last 15 years, her "most progressive platform ever" could go fuck itself when that platform still contained being apolagetic towards bibbi, selling weapons to wahhabi extremists, acting obtuse on polarizing positions like weed and fracking.
And most of all; People just didn't buy her "she has evolved or changed".

You saw the same thing recently with Bill Maher. "these people are too old to changed", "they are predisposed", "they are bigots". The hypocricy is just on where you want the draw the line in the sand. People can apologize for their past mistakes, but that doesn't mean you're forgiven or get off.

Hillary also ends up being the symptom of weak democratic bipartisan election that has helped things to get so bad since post Truman era. She believes in the old outdated Henry Kissinger style foreign policy of arming rebels, undermining regimes.


And she was someone who spoke political. I think a lot of people felt her way of speaking was patronizing because many people enjoyed Trumps honesty. He said what what he thought. With Hillary you got a pie-in-the-sky-answer. Never yes or no. Never something about taking a stance. "do you support the legislasation of weed, Hillary?"

To which she answers that more research should be done before they can say anything conclusive. That sort of response is quitesential a classic political move of not wanting to take a stance on a subject that can push voters away. It's a sound strategy, but not in this election. Nobody wanted to hear from a politician. Sanders also didn't sound like a politician, but like a popularrii who could have stood on a crate and raised a mob against sentators in rome 2000 years ago about sharing farmland and letting centurions getting their just land for serving.


Hillary is the dejection of peoples faith in politics. More than 90 million people who were registered to vote decided "nah". "they can both go fuck themselves". This sort of apathy is incredible dangerous. And it's been created by a deadlock between the tent pole parties for many many many years. I worry what will happen if it keeps continuing.

I worry that people will not find a outlet for the continued and increasing anger and inability to exercise effective legislation. This is on top of everything else that poses incredible dangers for us. We're in a post antibiotic period with a lot of ice melting that is prehistoric to human. We're close to what could be a disaterous epidemic that our immune systems would not be able to fight. We're on the breaking point of a new cultural revolution not seen since the industrial revolution and that will yield many millions of people unemployed over a short amount of years.

It is incredible dangerous right now. Then you have regular climate change, increasing ambitions from Russia and polarization that makes the US unable to function as a whole.


I don't blame Hillary for this. Send any establishment candidate and you'd have the same. Obama was a massive disappointment to a lot of people who had expected him to fix everything. Getting a nobel peace prize at the beginning of his tenure. Most voters don't care whose fault it is for his inability to keep good on his promises. the presidency is fetichisme to the highest degree- It's the commanders-in-chief fault, and only a strong man can fix it and weed out the swamp crooks. the frustration with Obamas broken promises passed on to Hillary.

And this is on top of both the right and the left being angry with her and with Bill. Bill who himself went a more conservative road, after the liberal Democrats of the 70s and 80s failed to win elections. The Clinton name is entrenched with corporatists. Which becomes a toxic slur following a financial crisis where no justice is served and where nobody gets punished. Millions of people are still angry with no sense of justice being done. No Lehman or Sach Brothers top aides have served prison times. And that just makes the government seem like villains in a lot of voters eyes. It's dangerous to ignore peoples sense of justice.

 

[UFO]

PoliGAF doesn't represent anything but a fraction of smug condescending Dems. Neither do the (mostly now banned) obnoxious Bernie Bros that were here duking it out with them. Numbers suggest that by and large many Bernie voters bit the bullet and voted for Hillary

Just not enough, and not where it mattered.

There were condescending Dems everywhere, like the SNL skits were they basically saying it was a foregone conclusion that she would win. And this:

 

[Dash_Riprock]

There were condescending Dems everywhere, like the SNL skits were they basically saying it was a foregone conclusion that she would win. And this:

I wonder how much those shirts will be worth in a few decades. Kinda like those "Dewey Defeats Truman" newspapers.

 

[jack_package_200]

Corporate Dems will keep losing, and you will too PoliGaf. Progressives owe you nothing. Good job alienating them FOREVER during the primaries too Shillbots.

I was wondering when the word shill was going to get thrown in.

 

[rashbeep]

post

Good post

 

[pretty done]

If I shot you in the dick because one guy was really enthusiastic about it and another guy warned against it but was low energy, would you blame me or the guy who warned against it

Sick analogy lol

 

[UFO]

post

Great post brother. You hit it on the head with the sentiment people feel.

 

[Douglas Quaid]

I was wondering when the word shill was going to get thrown in.

Still not sure if this forum is saturated with advertising PR people or simply "tech/gaming/corporate media/fast food enthusiasts"

 

[ExVicis]

Yeah I can agree with this. And, to be honest, I thought the same thing. I can understand the logic behind her choice to focus on attacking him; his entire playbook went against the grain of political history. She was trying to grind down his voting base to run up the score and fill the Senate and House, but, in hindsight, that was an incredibly poor decision.

Yeah, she should have run a more conventional campaign against him and treated him like an adult, even if he wasn't. I mean, it's still hard to think about how someone like Trump won. If Romney had been involved in even one of Trump's political mistakes the pubs would've lost the house and the Senate. Or at least you'd think so, but given how things turned out, perhaps that's putting too much faith in humanity.

There is a lot of stuff this election that got turned on it's head and it's really an egg on everyone's face now because of the assumptions that everything would be the same or that people would have the logic to vote against a crude, racist asshole.


I think another big problem, is that there was a real "The Emperor's New Clothes" kind of scenario going on here where it was hard to criticize Hillary when she made the wrong moves. Lot of people in that earlier linked thread got called for their opinions "Concern Trolls". People were too afraid of Trump winning that it seemed a lot of us were too unwilling to see if there was something we were doing wrong on our part.

 

[Massive Duck. C.M.]

Sick analogy lol

It just cracks me up that while people will admit voting Trump was a stupid fucking decision and use the general ignorance of the voting public to defend it they still get upset when Trump voters are called out

Maybe not being complacent with fundamentally uninformed people taking part in decisions that affect most of humanity in some way because there's not enough razzle dazzle going on is something to consider, I dunno

 

[Zen_Arcade]

If I shot you in the dick because one guy was really enthusiastic about it and another guy warned against it but was low energy, would you blame me or the guy who warned against it

That's not really a good comparison. In that situation you're Trump, not the people voting for Trump. Of course I would blame you.

A more realistic comparison is that you and someone else are having a debate that ends in the fate of my dick with a group of people voting on what happens to it. Then the person who wants to shoot my dick makes outlandish arguments about why I shouldn't have a dick, and the person who wants to save my dick spends all of their time talking about how the person who wants to shoot off my dick is an asshole, and barely even touches on the subject of why my fucking dick shouldn't get shot off.

In which case, they're both assholes. The guy who shot off my dick is obviously MORE of an asshole, but the person who can't even convince people that genital mutilation is wrong because they spent more of their time attacking their opponent and very little time talking about why I should keep my dick would still be a pretty big inept asshole too.

The problem with people like you Duck, is that you can't admit that there are varying degrees of being an asshole, or ineptitude, or any other negative character trait. Trump and his shitty supporters existing doesn't mean that Clinton did her job well, and them being worse people than Hillary doesn't mean that she didn't fuck up too. The blame for this very much deserves to be spread around.

 

[jack_package_200]

Still not sure if this forum is saturated with advertising PR people or simply "tech/gaming/corporate media/fast food enthusiasts"

You should PM a mod and voice your concern that NeoGAF has been infiltrated by paid neoliberal corporate shills.

Spoiler

Don't actually do that.

 

[Douglas Quaid]

You should PM a mod and voice your concern that NeoGAF has been infiltrated by paid neoliberal corporate shills.

Spoiler

Don't actually do that.

Oh there's no need for that, sheltered middle-class nerds gonna do what they do. Btw did you hear Wendy's is bringing back the Baconator?

 

[ExVicis]

(Insert Great Post Here)

This is an amazing post that deserves more praise than I can give it. Especially this part

There is so much division, blaming and "give me and my people something, or go fuck yourself". It's unsustainable and a sign of that there is no unity. There is nobody that all left people on the left can rally behind.

This and a lot of other parts I really agree here with and would like to discuss. I'm just afraid if I keep going here it'll go off topic.

I will say though I did have an observation prior to November that win or lose the Democrats were going to have to re-structure themselves very soon. Getting Hillary elected would only be a band-aid on a party that was trying to maintain the way it's been since the 90s when it's base is people who have moved past that.

Oh there's no need for that, sheltered middle-class nerds gonna do what they do. Btw did you hear Wendy's is bringing back the Baconator?

As someone who only occasionally eats Wendy's I wasn't aware it ever left.

 

[BinaryPork2737]

.

This more or less sums up most of my feelings on this election and aftermath of it, especially on the lack of a unifier for the left and an increased presence of infighting in minority communities. The latter has been really noticeable in my local LGBT+ community, to the point where I've been avoiding local gatherings due to the increased hatred towards bisexual, transgender, and non-white individuals.

 

[water_wendi]

Just got home a little while ago and lo and behold Jimmy Dore put up a video discussing this study.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CI-OpbHz1-4

 

[Rentahamster]

Just got home a little while ago and lo and behold Jimmy Dore put up a video discussing this study.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CI-OpbHz1-4

Kyle has a decent one too.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QJXT147SiUw

 

[i_am_ben]

They'd rather blame the people that voted for Trump instead of admitting their candidate was shit and blaming her.

You can do both!

Everyone should be held accountable for their actions. This includes Trump supporters and Hillary Clinton.

 

[water_wendi]

Kyle has a decent one too.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QJXT147SiUw

Thanks. Yea another great video about this study.

 

[lastflowers]

Yeah I can agree with this. And, to be honest, I thought the same thing. I can understand the logic behind her choice to focus on attacking him; his entire playbook went against the grain of political history. She was trying to grind down his voting base to run up the score and fill the Senate and House, but, in hindsight, that was an incredibly poor decision.

I always thought this strategy was a stupid one, and made numerous post on it throughout last year. Most beautifully outlined by Carl Beijer:


(http://www.carlbeijer.com/2016/09/shunning-is-mostly-performative-and_25.html)

Growing up in an Anabaptist community, I occasionally found myself in the middle of debates over the politics of shunning. For those who are unfamiliar, shunning is an old practice shaming and exclusion based on a few lines written by the Apostle Paul:
I wrote to you in my letter not to associate with sexually immoral people - not at all meaning the people of this world who are immoral, or the greedy and swindlers, or idolaters. In that case you would have to leave this world. But now I am writing to you that you must not associate with anyone who claims to be a brother or sister but is sexually immoral or greedy, an idolater or slanderer, a drunkard or swindler. Do not even eat with such people. (I Corinthians 5:9-11)
In practice, this could have some pretty dramatic consequences. While the basic rules of shunning are fairly narrow - don't eat with the person, don't do business with them, don't accept anything from them, etcetera - and sporadically observed, the ostracization that it legitimizes could effectively shut the target out of social life and turn them into a pariah. Justifying all of this, of course, was an elaborate apparatus of theology that few outside of the Amish church would find compelling.

In addition to theological justifications, however, the community also developed various pragmatic rationales that the modern liberal-left will find familiar. "By shunning [the offender] in all social relations," Hostetler writes, "the community gives him a status that minimizes the threat to other members of the community." The Dordrecht Confession of Faith, a central text of the Radical Reformation, advocates shunning so that the offender "may be made ashamed, be affected in his ways." In other words, shunning was supposed to have two practical consequences: 1) to engineer wokeness in the community, and 2) to shame the offender into rehabilitating.

Criticism

Both of these rationales emerge time and time again in modern liberal-left advocacy for shaming and ostracization as tools of social engineering and personal discipline. And yet strangely enough, anyone at all familiar with the standard left critiques of shunning should have rejected both long ago.

To take the second point first, there is little reason to believe that shunning actually has any kind of rehabilitative effect on its target, and considerable reason to believe that it can actually amplify the problem. Delaney notes that "the effects on the shunned person can be devastating...[and] akin to psychological torture." Tanaka notes research on shunning that
indicates a severe distortion of the self image, for example, 'I am a type of person that everyone hates'...This long-term effect suggests a huge impact on one's identity...[it] has a strong impingement on emotional development, which as Kahn points out is the essence of cumulative trauma. 
Tanaka goes on to add that as a defense mechanism, the target of shunning may "develop a victim's identity...[that] may fix and solidify further their negative identity." This should be an all-to-familiar experience for anyone who has tried to shame an offender, only to watch them double-down and embrace the attack. The point here is not to argue that shunning is simply mean - it's to point out that it's often directly counterproductive in terms of its supposed goal. Instead of rehabilitating the offender, it can just as easily harden the offender and give him a powerful psychological / emotional stake in continuing his behavior.

 

[O Canada Our Home and Native Land]

I hate Hillary and, imo, blame her for the current political meltdown, but do we really need to go over the election again when Obamacare is under siege, new developments everyday revealing Trump's ties to Russia, and a dysfunctionally clueless Democratic Party not ready for 2018.

 

[Nuu]

Lol what a shit candidate. Everything about her campaign is such a disaster.

I hate Hillary and, imo, blame her for the current political meltdown, but do we really need to go over the election again when Obamacare is under siege, new developments everyday revealing Trump's ties to Russia, and a dysfunctionally clueless Democratic Party not ready for 2018.

Bullshit. Learn from your mistakes or you are bound to repeat them.

 

[jWILL253]

That's not really a good comparison. In that situation you're Trump, not the people voting for Trump. Of course I would blame you.

A more realistic comparison is that you and someone else are having a debate that ends in the fate of my dick with a group of people voting on what happens to it. Then the person who wants to shoot my dick makes outlandish arguments about why I shouldn't have a dick, and the person who wants to save my dick spends all of their time talking about how the person who wants to shoot off my dick is an asshole, and barely even touches on the subject of why my fucking dick shouldn't get shot off.

In which case, they're both assholes. The guy who shot off my dick is obviously MORE of an asshole, but the person who can't even convince people that genital mutilation is wrong because they spent more of their time attacking their opponent and very little time talking about why I should keep my dick would still be a pretty big inept asshole too.

The problem with people like you Duck, is that you can't admit that there are varying degrees of being an asshole, or ineptitude, or any other negative character trait. Trump and his shitty supporters existing doesn't mean that Clinton did her job well, and them being worse people than Hillary doesn't mean that she didn't fuck up too. The blame for this very much deserves to be spread around.

This analogy didn't work as well as you might have thought it would.

 

[ExVicis]

I hate Hillary and, imo, blame her for the current political meltdown, but do we really need to go over the election again when Obamacare is under siege, new developments everyday revealing Trump's ties to Russia, and a dysfunctionally clueless Democratic Party not ready for 2018.

We should go over all those things though and I think this article and some discussion about the topic is fine as a discussion. If not now to go over and discuss the mistakes we've found we made then when?

This analogy didn't work as well as you might have thought it would.

I kind of agree.

To make it a more apt analogy is if instead it was a debate between two people about the ownership of a gun pointing at a dick. Of the people who decided who would win ownership some people were aware of the gun pointing at the dick and some were not and further from there.

But apt is a relative word, this analogy in general isn't very good and I sat here trying for a long time thinking if I could make this fit the situation better before I realized "I'm thinking way too fucking much about a gun shooting off someone's dick" so I decided that was enough of that.

All in all I think the point is don't expect everyone to think exactly like you do and go "Well he said sexist shit! Of course I'm going to vote for this other person!" because unfortunately not everyone thinks that. Why? Well if you want to know that I think that means you have to understand those kinds of people and I know that's an unpopular opinion around here sometimes...

 

[Aselith]

There were condescending Dems everywhere, like the SNL skits were they basically saying it was a foregone conclusion that she would win. And this:

She was from the good timeline

 

[kirblar]

Bullshit. Learn from your mistakes or you are bound to repeat them.

No Dem candidate is going to hire Robbie Mook or run a campaign like this.

The bigger systemic fixes to avoid this situation is simple (but hard to implement): Don't let people run twice.

 

[encephalon]

How to Job to Donald Trump: The Campaign

Hillary Faction will continue to blame everyone except Hillary though.

But emails
But Benghazi
But Comey
But Russia
But WikiLeaks

What about BUT THE CAMPAIGN WAS TERRIBLE AND NO ONE LIKED THE CANDIDATE

Failing to recognize the contribution of elements outside of how Hillary ran her campaign is just as bad as ignoring the role her campaign and faults as a candidate played in electing trump.

 

[jack_package_200]

Failing to recognize the contribution of elements outside of how Hillary ran her campaign is just as bad as ignoring the role her campaign and faults as a candidate played in electing trump.

This.

All of that bad shit + bad campaign is what made her lose.

 

[water_wendi]

Failing to recognize the contribution of elements outside of how Hillary ran her campaign is just as bad as ignoring the role her campaign and faults as a candidate played in electing trump.

If the campaign problems were something out of their control i could see the outside influence stuff as being just as bad. What we are talking about here is incompetence that they were warned about.

 

[GaimeGuy]

"Bring back the jobs" isn't a policy. It's a goal.

 

[PatThePassive]

She was from the good timeline

Damn you Mandela effect!

 

[Kinyou]

Was there ever a candidate with more skeletons in their closet than Trump? It was foolish to only focus on that, but it's easy to see why the people running the campaign probably thought they struck gold.

 

[encephalon]

If the campaign problems were something out of their control i could see the outside influence stuff as being just as bad. What we are talking about here is incompetence that they were warned about.

It's both. As we've read in this thread, Hillary spent a lot of time impugning Trump's character. Maybe a more policy focused, positive ad campaign would have been better. But Hillary's negative ad campaign was probably rendered less effective than it otherwise could have been by outside developments - Hillary's own character was in question. The Benghazi investigation was reopened. If you read a lot of articles and were very familiar with developments at the time, you might have realized that it was probably nothing - just the same emails showing up on someone else's computer, which is what it turned out to be. But for most people, the reopening of the investigation reinforced the idea that she was untrustworthy and maybe even "crooked." If Trump was slimy and immoral then so was Hillary.

This, of course, in turn lends to the idea that focusing so much on Trump's character was a strategic miss by the Hillary campaign. However, going forward, we should also be aware that the Republicans have been rewarded for making something out of nothing and it is now a proven successful strategy. Expect more Benghazi in the future.

 

[BlueTsunami]

"Bring back the jobs" isn't a policy. It's a goal.

Step 1: Bring back the jobs
Step 2: Jobs brought back

 

[water_wendi]

It's both

im not saying other factors werent at play but i outright reject that incompetency from within and outside influences are merely equal in how bad they are and in which has the more important lesson to take away.

 

[El_Tiguere]

I've been going through Carlins Common Sense podcast throughout the election period, and it's been interesting hearing his take on it. He said something similar to what you're saying. He mentioned that a highly regarded Political science scholar had done studies back in 1984 about the last time that the US have had a great president who was able to exercise influence, get legislation done and mold his agenda into effects, and at the time- In the mid 1980s, it was concluded that there hadn't been a arguable good president in more than 40 years- Since Truman. The same scholar incidentally also noted that FDR and Eisenhower where the two other "best" presidents of the 20th century.

The American people have been angry with the two-party status quo for a long time. And it keeps getting worse because the two-party structure is not feasible.

Had Hillary won, you'd still have looked at 4-8 years of obstructionism to the same continued effect of being able to move the country forward with two hands tied to your back. Obama only got a fraction of his agenda through compared to what he wanted to.


At the end of the day, voters do not care whose fault it is. They blame the Commander-in-Chief. They are frustrated about their country falling into ruin over political ideology being put before the needs of the country. It damages it. It breaks it from within. Frustration, anger, apathy and resentment builds up over the decades. The housing market, college intuition, stagnant wages, a crippling middle class, outragous funds going to defense, defunding and de-centralization of infrastructure based programs, cutpacks to goverment agencies like the IRS.
It all amounts to disasterious quality of life, and instability. More people fall through the social net and never recover, more homeless people, more people down on their luck, and many many people with full time jobs that cannot find a decent place to live or a decent wage.


What happens is that privileged majority whites are so outraged that they cannot think about others when they perceive to have lost so much. They expected the same wealth as their parents and grandparents who've engaged in a lot of prosperity and possibilities. That has died with them, and not only will they die faster, be more sick, they will also have less money and less opportunity, more competition, more working hours and less safety needs.
More than half of Americans live paycheck-to-paycheck. Things are getting so bad for so many people that they can only respond with anger when the Democratic Party wants to focus so much on minority issues. Privileged people scream "what about me?" < All the minorities start fighting each other over the table scraps, purity tests and oppression olympics. fuck other minorities who want to use other minorities as a mule, fuck white feminists, fuck the fake allies who are bigots, fuck the gay people who are trans phobic, fuck the islamapshobes who worry about national security, fuck any anti Semite who criticizes protecting israel.
There is so much division, blaming and "give me and my people something, or go fuck yourself". It's unsustainable and a sign of that there is no unity. There is nobody that all left people on the left can rally behind.

Hillary was part of an old guard and had been in politics for a long time. She represented Obama and the old Democratic party. For the new liberal college breed coming out of the last 15 years, her "most progressive platform ever" could go fuck itself when that platform still contained being apolagetic towards bibbi, selling weapons to wahhabi extremists, acting obtuse on polarizing positions like weed and fracking.
And most of all; People just didn't buy her "she has evolved or changed".

You saw the same thing recently with Bill Maher. "these people are too old to changed", "they are predisposed", "they are bigots". The hypocricy is just on where you want the draw the line in the sand. People can apologize for their past mistakes, but that doesn't mean you're forgiven or get off.

Hillary also ends up being the symptom of weak democratic bipartisan election that has helped things to get so bad since post Truman era. She believes in the old outdated Henry Kissinger style foreign policy of arming rebels, undermining regimes.


And she was someone who spoke political. I think a lot of people felt her way of speaking was patronizing because many people enjoyed Trumps honesty. He said what what he thought. With Hillary you got a pie-in-the-sky-answer. Never yes or no. Never something about taking a stance. "do you support the legislasation of weed, Hillary?"

To which she answers that more research should be done before they can say anything conclusive. That sort of response is quitesential a classic political move of not wanting to take a stance on a subject that can push voters away. It's a sound strategy, but not in this election. Nobody wanted to hear from a politician. Sanders also didn't sound like a politician, but like a popularrii who could have stood on a crate and raised a mob against sentators in rome 2000 years ago about sharing farmland and letting centurions getting their just land for serving.


Hillary is the dejection of peoples faith in politics. More than 90 million people who were registered to vote decided "nah". "they can both go fuck themselves". This sort of apathy is incredible dangerous. And it's been created by a deadlock between the tent pole parties for many many many years. I worry what will happen if it keeps continuing.

I worry that people will not find a outlet for the continued and increasing anger and inability to exercise effective legislation. This is on top of everything else that poses incredible dangers for us. We're in a post antibiotic period with a lot of ice melting that is prehistoric to human. We're close to what could be a disaterous epidemic that our immune systems would not be able to fight. We're on the breaking point of a new cultural revolution not seen since the industrial revolution and that will yield many millions of people unemployed over a short amount of years.

It is incredible dangerous right now. Then you have regular climate change, increasing ambitions from Russia and polarization that makes the US unable to function as a whole.


I don't blame Hillary for this. Send any establishment candidate and you'd have the same. Obama was a massive disappointment to a lot of people who had expected him to fix everything. Getting a nobel peace prize at the beginning of his tenure. Most voters don't care whose fault it is for his inability to keep good on his promises. the presidency is fetichisme to the highest degree- It's the commanders-in-chief fault, and only a strong man can fix it and weed out the swamp crooks. the frustration with Obamas broken promises passed on to Hillary.

And this is on top of both the right and the left being angry with her and with Bill. Bill who himself went a more conservative road, after the liberal Democrats of the 70s and 80s failed to win elections. The Clinton name is entrenched with corporatists. Which becomes a toxic slur following a financial crisis where no justice is served and where nobody gets punished. Millions of people are still angry with no sense of justice being done. No Lehman or Sach Brothers top aides have served prison times. And that just makes the government seem like villains in a lot of voters eyes. It's dangerous to ignore peoples sense of justice.

One of the best posts explaining 2016 I've seen on GAF. No matter her strategy or where she did or did not run ads, 2016 was an indictment on government corruption. Democrats huddled in wealthy liberal metros did not sense that the economic recovery had been mediocre for most of the country, and that the lower classes were blaming the old corrupt order in DC. The Clinton baggage since the 1970s (aside from Bill being a sexual predator) was always about double-dealings and corruption. The server and email issue stuck because it CONFIRMED double-dealings and corruption.

Every Democrat going forward will be judged by whether they stand with the lower classes who are on the brink, or will they coddle corporate donors for their own personal gain how they have been doing for ages. We have the silver lining that Trump is still grotesquely incompetent, but mobilization will only happen when we can rally behind progressives that intend to drain our own swamp on the left.

 

[Mega]

Pride comes before the fall....

What's weird is that we case studies of Presidents winning and it's based on a strong narrative:

http://www.quantifiedcommunications.com/blog/storytelling-in-politics

https://vimeo.com/155823636

Hope and Change

Make America Great Again

I'm With Her seems to feed into the desires of an egomaniac and didn't really convey what are you're going to do for me.

I'm With Her was terrible and meant nothing to anyone other than telling unconvinced people they were to follow along with this unconvincing politician.

Her campaign logo was weird disjointed trash too. It looks remarkably like a hospital street sign. There were even fake ones put up around LA that looked real.

 

[Kickz]

"I'm with her" was so, so awful.

And so was Yaaaaaaas Queen bs

 

[Autoignition]

I'm genuinely surprised at this study. I live in Vegas, and I saw positive Hillary ads constantly. Always her with children, and always with her "women's rights are human rights, and human rights are women's rights" speech. There were also commercials promoting her economic message. Sure, I saw the negative ones too, but I never noticed a huge disparity between them in terms of frequency.

I imagine it was hard for her to run ads that attacked Trump's policies, though, considering the fact that he didn't really have many. He had a bunch of half-baked, malformed ideas. Not much to go on there.

Shame the rest of the country didn't get the Dem treatment that Nevada got. I worked on the campaign for her out here, and we ran it like a well-oiled machine. Went for Hillary and also got Cortez-Masto in the Senate and Kihuen in the House.

Saw an interesting piece about the real difference between Republicans and Democrats in terms of elections and party composition, too. Thought you guys might be interested.

Republicans have shared values- traditional social values, distrust and dislike of government, “tough” foreign policy, being pro-business. More than that though, those shared values translate into shared policies.

...

Democrats on the other hand are a coalition. Democrats do have values, just like the GOP- support of the working class, diversity, Civil Rights, protecting the environment, global diplomacy, and a strong, functioning government- but not necessarily shared ideas of how those things translate into policy.

 

[Dash_Riprock]

And so was Yaaaaaaas Queen bs

Whats that even a thing outside of GAF???

 

[BlueTsunami]

GAF OT killing Yasss queen still makes me angry

 

[TheLostBigBoss]

There were condescending Dems everywhere, like the SNL skits were they basically saying it was a foregone conclusion that she would win. And this:

Yes like Trump supports didn't think it was a forgone conclusion he would win.

Spoiler alert, hardcore supports of each side think their side will win.

 

[Billy_Pilgrim]

They'd rather blame the people that voted for Trump instead of admitting their candidate was shit and blaming her.

The thing is, Hillary's campaign marketed to the Neogaf demographic, which is as far removed from a presidential winning vote as can be thought of.

Even now, in thread after thread you have the same people on neogaf disparaging working class people who voted for their own interests over diversity, inclusiveness and progressiveness and those on the left still can't work out why that is, when it's obvious. Hillary Clinton did not stand for any of that. She was a status quo, globalist, neo-liberal. She stood for nothing and had nothing of interest to say. She was the candidate purely because of her connection to a previous president. They even set aside some horrendous things she proposed and enacted during her husband's presidency. The fact that she was a woman was enough for too many people, when she wasn't the right woman.

Sanders wasn't the man to win the presidency, but his platform was the right one. It was a British style centre left proposition, closer to FDR than Clinton. People on here spent so much time forcing Hillary Clinton down everyone's throats for a number of irrelevant reasons, totally forgetting that the ultimate demographic in America is working class white people.

Hillary Clinton had decades of baggage, most of it undeserved, but it still existed. Why they allowed themselves to be corralled into thinking that running her against a Trump that would say and do anything to get elected was a good idea was anyone's guess.

She and her campaign were lazy and misjudged the mood of the nation, the number one prerequisite for running the country. Time after time I see people perform olympic level mental gymnastics to defend the shite situation they and her prepared for, purely because they refused to accept that white working class people in America had the ruling hand. It was complacency on her behalf and vindictiveness on the behalf of the people supporting her on here.

Now we're left with the farcical situation that people still defend someone who lost to someone who quite patently won an election in collusion with Russian interests in America. And then they blame the voters! The very people they hope to resolve it next time. Shameful.

 

[jack_package_200]

GAF OT killing Yasss queen still makes me angry

It was really only a thing with the gay community.

According to some of you, Yas Queen is the worst thing ever ever and it ruined your entire neogaf experience.