Election 2016

[Dr_Noface]

How can non-US citizens help halt the ascent of Trump to God-Emperor?

[Prak]

[The Great Fence Builder Speaks]
Advocating for anyone's (even Trumps) death is forbidden.
[/The Great Fence Builder Speaks]

[Username17]

Trump quotes are better if you read them in the voice of Mojo Jojo from Power Puff Girls than in the original Cheetoh Jesus.

Don’t worry about that baby – I love babies. I love babies. I hear that baby crying, I like it. What a baby, what a beautiful baby. Don’t worry, don’t worry. The mom’s running around, like, don’t worry about it, you know? It’s young and beautiful and healthy and that’s what we want. Actually, I was only kidding – you can get the baby out of here. That’s all right, don’t worry. I think she really believed me that I love having a baby crying while I’m speaking. That’s OK. People don’t understand. That’s OK.

-Username17

[sendaz]

Trump quotes are better if you read them in the voice of Mojo Jojo from Power Puff Girls than in the original Cheetoh Jesus.

-Username17

Dammit, now when I listen to Hillary I keep having her voice switch between Blossom and Buttercup.

[Josh_Kablack]

I was going to suggest campaign contributions, but apparently those are also illegal under US law, unless made by a citizen or permanent resident.

Maybe look into "non-election related" SuperPACs and similar loopholes.

[phlapjackage]

I say this half-jokingly, but you could keep reminding your American friends/family about Trump. Keep talking about him, keep slyly bringing him up in conversation. Don't let them forget that he is actually seriously for reals not too far from being President.

I am fucking mortified now when any non-US-ian asks me about Trump. It's really helping to ensure that I get out and vote, if only to shut them up so I can stop being so damn embarrassed.

[Dogbert]

If Hillary wins, the country (and the world) will continue its slow, gradual downward spiral to hell.

If Trump wins, he'll drag the country for some Thelma&Louise cliff jumping.

The Pirate Bay's founder has gone on record for saying that the best thing for everyone would be if Trump wins, because (paraphrasing) at this rate nothing short of a trip through the worst-case scenario will remove the wool from people's eyes, then perhaps we'd finally be arsed to do some real change.

As much as the possibility frightens me (after all, the ones with more to lose will be the middle class), I think he has a point.

[Ice9]

That relies on one very optimistic assumption - that after everything is burned down, the sane and not-horrible people will be the ones deciding how to rebuild it. I see little evidence of this. And that it will even be possible to come back from, which is more likely but not certain.

[Koumei]

Also, about the only way you're going to see significant change is through either the actual collapse of the USA, or through violent revolution.

For the first one, you're assuming it would be limited to the USA itself, that every other country will have "Business as normal, except without America imposing its will on everyone and backing large corporations against other countries" as opposed to ripple effects and currency crashes everywhere - and I remind you several European countries basically went bankrupt and descended into Hell just from a couple of US banks not having any money, never mind the government collapsing and the country devolving into cannibalism. So that's a daft assumption.

For the second one, you're assuming the people who will grab their machine guns and revolt and somehow defeat the combined forces of the military and the other militarypolice to change the system will be generally sensible people who want to promote good ideas and sane policies and reduce the kind of situations where people run about with machine guns. Protip: in America it's always crazy religious right-wing people who have their violent uprising fantasies and plans. And even they have limited themselves to small-scale stuff. So there's at least one stupid assumption there.

[Mechalich]

Indeed.

It is important to keep in mind the following: the most likely form of 'total chaos' to be unleashed by a Trump presidency is a military coup. Seriously, a suitably disastrous foreign policy move - like repudiating NATO in the face of outright Russian aggression in the Baltics - combined with mass unrest at home - easily possible in the face of scooping up thousands of half-trained right wing militiamen to serve as temporary ICE enforcement in order to conduct mass deportations - could lead to a coup. And once you have a coup, democratic legitimacy is lost for at least a generation if not forever.

And by the way, even the most benign coup scenario - which is that the military forces an impeachment vote and Mice Pence or Paul Ryan becomes President - still leaves a horrifically right wing person in the Oval Office with a mandate to enforce draconian 'law and order' policies.

The 'Trump failure brings about massive liberal victory in 2020' only works for a very narrow zone of potential failure. Essentially Trump has to cause a crisis bad enough to trigger a massive democratic wave election, but not so badly that measurable progress can't be made against that problem prior to 2022 (when you hit the mid-terms). This is basically the exact scenario we had in 2008, and while Obama was able to get a lot of liberal stuff passed in the brief window where there was a Senate supermajority, they still lost out in 2010 and progress stalled.

By contrast a Clinton presidency ensures all of Obama's major gains: the Affordable Care Act, the Paris Climate Agreement, the repeal of the very worst parts of the Bush Tax Cuts, legal gay marriage, the Iranian nuclear deal, and more all remain in place (high on the list of potential Trump disasters is a nuclear exchange between Iran and Israel). A Clinton presidency also insures a 5-4 liberal majority on the Supreme Court, which if social justice issues mean anything to a person is of effectively infinite value.

It also has incredible pro-democracy value, since voting rights will increase massively under a liberal supreme court, which is a necessary prerequisite that, combined with ongoing demographic change, has the potential unlock the republican stranglehold on the House of Representatives following the 2020 redistricting. If that happens then the democrats will gain an advantage in the House elections similar to the one the currently enjoy in Presidential elections - a move that will drag the entire country significantly leftward in short order because it will crush the outsize pull of the ultra-right-wing groups currently exercising control through primaries of GOP safe seats.

[Longes]

The Trump-Putin thing is more extensive than I'd have expected

And it's just gotten worse, as Trump as now called upon the Russians to publicize any emails they might have hacked from Hillary's email server. This is borderline treason, and exposes Trump to the possibility of criminal changes at least as serious as anything Hillary ever theoretically faced regarding her emails.

I thought, after months of this, that nothing Trump could do would shock me anymore. I was wrong.

US Election 2016: the Putin Games.
If someone has a WSJ account, there's a linked to the paywalled source article in there.

[Koumei]

Do you have anything more reliable than the Daily Fucking Mail? Like, I dunno, some guy in a pub?

[Longes]

Do you have anything more reliable than the Daily Fucking Mail? Like, I dunno, some guy in a pub?

Well, you can read the paywalled Wall Street Journal article that is linked in there. Or you can have a kneejerk reaction and scream like a madman.

[Username17]

If Hillary wins, the country (and the world) will continue its slow, gradual downward spiral to hell.

If Trump wins, he'll drag the country for some Thelma&Louise cliff jumping.

This is bullshit. It is dangerous bullshit. The world is in fact getting better on every axis you care to measure except global warming.

And even air pollution is not as bad as we thought it was going to be a few decades back. That is to say that the total CO2 produced has of course increased, and even the rate of CO2 production has increased, but the acceleration of CO2 production is negative. The CO2 production over the last few years has been almost flat, and if things continue as they are then we can expect carbon production to start being lower year to year, and eventually even get to a sustainable level.

Obviously, carbon emissions won't come under control fast enough to stop us from getting hit by heavy weather events - we've already had heavy weather events. But the idea that we'd get this shit under control any faster by electing the guy who claims climate change is a fraud perpetuated by the Chinese to undermine our economy over the woman who pledges to make good on Obama's Paris accord promises is completely insane.

And on every other metric, and I do mean every single one, things are better now than they've ever been. Yes, wages have been stagnant since the Reagan administration. But by "stagnant" we mean that real wages are only 10% higher than they were at the beginning of Reaganomics. Given the increases in productivity, the share that Labor gets should be much higher than that, but winning by less than you should is still winning. Yes, Healthcare costs have gone up, but by less than we thought they were going to (Thanks Obama!) and it's not like we haven't gotten something for the extra money - life expectancy went up by 5 years in the three decades from 1980 to 2010.

By any possible metric the plight of homosexuals is much improved. During the first Clinton administration we were having an actual argument over whether the government should stop investigating suspected homosexuals for the purposes of firing them if they were found to be gay. For fuck's sake, now we're arguing whether it's OK for private companies to fire people for being gay at all. And in a lot of states, we've already reached the conclusion that it is not.

And let's not forget how great it is that people are complaining about black people getting killed by police. Arrest Related Deaths is not a new reality, it's just that fifty years ago or even ten years ago we lacked the public consensus that it was a problem. Young black people have been being gunned down in the street for literally hundreds of years and only now has the arc of justice progressed to the point where the zeitgeist holds that it is something that should be changed.

Socially, economically, technologically, and any other way you care to slice it, things are fucking awesome. And there are numerous ways that they can be better still that are obviously worth pursuing.

The way you make the world better is by working to make the world better. Because fucking obviously. And nihilistic bullshit about how everything is going to go to shit no matter what you do is just a shitty cop out.

-Username17

[Prak]

Now Busters are crowing about Hillary's "ties" to Daesh

*Sigh*
Goddamnit.

[Username17]

Now Busters are crowing about Hillary's "ties" to Daesh

*Sigh*
Goddamnit.

So the accusation is that Hillary Clinton has the support of the largest construction materials firm on the planet. That construction firm also owns facilities in the Middle East. And the company might have paid out extortion money to criminal gangs that threatened to blow up their facilities and kill their workers if they didn't. Do I have that right?

What exactly is the part of the accusation that I'm supposed to give a shit about? Is it the part where Hillary knows a guy who knows a guy who got shaken down by criminals? Is it the part where people in areas with little access to the rule of law actually hand over their wallets when robbers threaten them? Seriously, I don't get it. Even if the bizarre tawdry rant is 100% true, I don't actually understand why I'm supposed to be mad at the construction firm, let alone why I should be mad at some politician that country supported on the other side of the planet.

-Username17

[fbmf]

That relies on one very optimistic assumption - that after everything is burned down, the sane and not-horrible people will be the ones deciding how to rebuild it. I see little evidence of this. And that it will even be possible to come back from, which is more likely but not certain.

This. To a disturbing degree.

Game On,
fbmf

[Prak]

Now Busters are crowing about Hillary's "ties" to Daesh

*Sigh*
Goddamnit.

So the accusation is that Hillary Clinton has the support of the largest construction materials firm on the planet. That construction firm also owns facilities in the Middle East. And the company might have paid out extortion money to criminal gangs that threatened to blow up their facilities and kill their workers if they didn't. Do I have that right?

What exactly is the part of the accusation that I'm supposed to give a shit about? Is it the part where Hillary knows a guy who knows a guy who got shaken down by criminals? Is it the part where people in areas with little access to the rule of law actually hand over their wallets when robbers threaten them? Seriously, I don't get it. Even if the bizarre tawdry rant is 100% true, I don't actually understand why I'm supposed to be mad at the construction firm, let alone why I should be mad at some politician that country supported on the other side of the planet.

-Username17

Yeah, Busters are starting to make me regret ever being a vocal supporter of Bernie...

[The Great Fence Builder Speaks]
Advocating for anyone's (even Trumps) death is forbidden.
[/The Great Fence Builder Speaks]

Fair. I didn't see it as advocating, but I get it. Note made.

[MGuy]

No matter what stupid shit gets brought up I won't regret my support of Bernie but the frequency of the bullshit from people I know had caused me to start speaking up for Hillary.

[Prak]

I don't regret supporting Bernie. Bernie's a good guy I wish had been nominated.

But I'm starting to regret being so vocal about it.

...I might bookmark Bernie's speech from the DNC just so I can reply to every Buster post with it...

[PhoneLobster]

I don't think that Trump will burn everything to the ground. I think Trump is, probably, the greater evil... but not by a particularly gigantic degree.

Except the big problem with Trump is... that's only a MAYBE. MAYBE he is only somewhat greater evil. I think it's genuinely likely he might, say, decide to have a ground war in Iran... and that it's also at least somewhat likely Hillary might too. But even though I think it's decidedly unlikely it's at least possible that Trump might decide to NUKE Iran, and I'm pretty sure that's just plain not even a remote possibility with Hillary.

Voting for Trump because you want the USA to literally explode itself is stupid on a number of levels, but it is also stupid because he probably won't actually do that, but it's still stupid because he just maybe on the off chance might.

[Prak]

Apparently he had to ask advisors, repeatedly, why he can't just use the nukes.

[Longes]

Apparently he had to ask advisors, repeatedly, why he can't just use the nukes.

Eeeeh... This is basically unsourced and was mentioned months after the event, so the legitimacy is extremely questionable.

[Prak]

Oh, everything I've seen made it seem like it happened, like, yesterday.

[Prak]

Ok, I'm watching anti-Hillary propaganda as a show of an open mind.

Can someone give me an unbiased view on the people the Clintons fired when Bill took office, and then accused of criminal wrongdoing as an excuse, and the IRS threat shit?