Election 2016

[MGuy]

Did you know that calling a black woman an "ape" is controversial? I didn't. I thought it was uncontroversially terrible and racist and fucking awful, but according to NBC, ABC, CNN ect., it's merely "controversial."

Didn't you know? Comparing blacks to various kinds of simian is totally in and 'not racist' right now.

[Prak]

Fuck you and your anti statistics bullshit DSM. That's not how polling works. It's not perfectly accurate but it's still fucking meaningful data you fucking moron.

It's meaningful data, but it's not predictive data. General election polls that far out are more meaningful as feedback on candidate performance.

[DSMatticus]

Anyway, moving on, does everyone remember that mini-scandal about an FBI agent offering to declare that an email did not contain classified information in exchange for some favors? The existence of that scandal immediately made me doubt all of the FBI's findings. See, the FBI made it sound like their process was to turn over emails that might contain classified information to the relevant agencies and let those agencies make the final determination - the FBI's judgment about what was and wasn't classified did not factor in. The fact that there was an FBI agent in a position to make that offer means that was all bullshit and FBI agents were making calls about what information was and was not classified all along - the same FBI agents who would later go to the press to leak either misleading or outright false anti-Clinton propaganda to the media.

I don't remember that at all. Can you remind me of that please, preferably with a link?

So, an anonymous source within the FBI agent leaked a story to the media about a quid pro quo between the DOJ and the FBI. You can read about that here. It's important to note that this anonymous source was not directly involved in the quid pro quo and was providing a secondhand account.

Eventually the FBI agent who has actually responsible for making the quid pro quo offer stepped forward to say "that was me, I'm on the one who made the offer, and once I realized what it was about it I killed it." The broader story is that the FBI and the State Department were disputing whether or not a specific one of Hillary's email was classified (because different agencies each handle their own classification and there's no centralized oversight to the process), and someone at the State Department was looking to find sympathetic ears among the senior FBI officials. Not really that noteworthy, and you can read about that here.

But anyway, reading between the lines the fact that this is a dispute that happened at all means that the FBI had the authority to decide which emails contained classified information - which makes their blatant partisan slant incredibly pertinent to the overall credibility of their findings. These are the people who deliberately threw the election to Trump, and yet we're supposed to have trusted them to impartially decide which emails contained classified info? Fuck no. Deceitful asshats are deceitful asshats, and I have no doubt that they erred on the side of "fuck Clinton."

My original understanding was that the FBI 'outsourced' the classification of the emails to the agencies they thought 'owned' the information, meaning that ultimately the decision was out of their hands. That still lends itself to problems of overclassification, because our government tends to classify everything, but it at least removes any potential FBI bias. But now we know that that probably was not the procedure, and that the FBI was biased, and so as far as any reasonable person is concerned the whole investigation is completely suspect.

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@DrPraetor, just shut up. There isn't a single grain of evidence to a single thing you claimed, because spoiler: it didn't happen. Nobody cares about your power to imagine a world of rainbows and sunshine for Sanders. The fact is that candidates who are projected to win the general by double-digit leads during their primaries can and do end up losing in landslides because the "expectations" people have about the general election that far out correspond to reality about as well as tea leaves and astrology. The polls do not really start to converge towards the real results of the race until late August/early September, i.e. a little bit after the party's conventions.

But more generally regarding the whole "moderate Democrats can't win the leftwing of the party" bullshit, Obama's approval ratings and Clinton's underperformance are both coming from the same demographic groups. Clinton is, irrefutably if marginally, to the left of Obama. There is simply no way to square those two facts into a coherent worldview about the failure of moderate Democrats to appeal to the Democratic party's leftwing. If moderate Democrats couldn't appeal to Sanders-types, then Obama would have lower approval ratings. If Sanders-types had given Clinton the level of support they are currently giving Obama, then Clinton would have won the election.

Again, the only coherent explanation for the 2016 election is that the media and the FBI rigged it for Trump by shouting emails, emails, emails over and over, just like they are currently normalizing Bannon as 'controversial' instead of calling him what he is; a blatantly racist white supremacist. Both sides bullshit has broken the system. Thankfully even the broken system looks like it'll be capable of spitting out sanity in at least half of all presidential races, though who knows if that will remain true as Jim Crow completes his return.

[Parthenon]

Thanks for the info.

[Maxus]

So it appears the backbiting and jockeying under Trump has begun, as his lackeys fight to be the most loyal.

A few days ago, I told someone that the big sign if things are gonna be bad, is if there's a lot of competing for favor because they'll only do things through patronage. Welp. I was right.

And then there was this.



I move we name the next politics thread "The DTs".

[Schleiermacher]

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/201 ... ity-leader

For those of us who aren't up on our who's who, what kind of guy is Schumer and what does this portend for Democratic strategy going forward?

To me it looks like they're moving left, appointing Sanders to the budget committee and such (if only to angle for his supporters), but my Washingtonology is really rather rudimentary.

[Kaelik]

Meanwhile, Lindsey Graham, the only principled Republican in existence.

[infected slut princess]

Schumer is the worst Democrat to lead opposition to Trump!

He is a pro-Wall Street, pro-torture, and pro-corporatism. Also, he supported the NYPD's Muslim surveillance program (which Trump likes a lot) and he loves the PATRIOT Act.

Schumer voted for Bush's Iraq War II and he voted against Obama's Iran nuclear deal (which was very flawed but relatively speaking an improvement).

[Blicero]

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/201 ... ity-leader

For those of us who aren't up on our who's who, what kind of guy is Schumer and what does this portend for Democratic strategy going forward?

To me it looks like they're moving left, appointing Sanders to the budget committee and such (if only to angle for his supporters), but my Washingtonology is really rather rudimentary.

The Intercept is not a fan of him:
https://theintercept.com/2016/11/14/chu ... ible-time/

That may or may not count for much in your book.

[DSMatticus]

So, just let me say that Chuck Schumer is kind of a shithead. On social issues, he is vaguely and unemphatically leftish. On economic issues, he frequently finds excuses to rail against regulation and higher taxes - specifically when they would affect the financial sector. I'm not a fan, just like I'm not a fan of Tim Kaine, and the Democratic Party's determination to court these people despite their complete and total lack of influence is pathetic and self-destructive and... well... fucking corrupt, either through overt financial self-interest or simply some kind of affinity bias. The fact is that "give the wealthy more money" doesn't have a home on either side of the aisle because 99.99% of voters think it's fucking stupid. Giving people like that a platform is a thing you do because you're an asshole who believes in terrible things and/or are wildly disconnected from the average American, not because it wins elections.

That said, that article is fucking stupid. Three bullet points in and we have a link to the National Review (HAHAHA) and someone bitching about the bailouts. Let me make this clear for the spoiled brats of today who have spent their entire adulthoods living under a functioning economy and think history's darkest moments are things that happen to other people; we tried letting the banks fail. That fantastic idea would later be called the Great Depression. Worldwide GDP fell by 15% and U.S. unemployment peaked in the high 20's. And to make matters even more bizarre, TARP has made a profit on the money it loaned to banks. Not only did we successfully dodge a repeat of quite possibly the worst economic crisis of all time, we made money doing it. Jon Schwarz is a whiny know-nothing twat.

[infected slut princess]

DSMatticus is a Wall Street shill and the bankers appreciate his support. No wonder he faps to his portfolio of nude Hillary Clinton drawings on a nightly basis. And since Wall Street is the epitome of white patriarchy, we can question DMSATticus's commitment to liberalism.

His comparison to the Great Depression is laughably stupid. Banks failing wasn't the CAUSE of the Great Depression, it was a consequence of earlier stupid policies that precipitated the whole mess. Go learn some economic history you dumb fucker.

Also, TARP didn't make any money for the government. Go learn some accounting and finance you retarded retard. You probably don't even know how to use a financial calculator LOL.

[virgil]

http://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow/watc ... _fb_maddow

[Kaelik]

If Posted on TGD, Query: Did ISP say it?

If No: Probably wrong.

If Yes: Definitely wrong.

[infected slut princess]

I see that Kaelik the Super Virgin is still bitter about being exposed as a virgin.

Interestingly, Kaelik's system indicates that his posts are "probably wrong" and if I say 1+1=2 that is "definitely wrong"!

Pretty weird!

Let's try this again:
I say "Trump sucks."

If Posted on TGD, Query: Did ISP say it?

If No: Probably wrong.

If Yes: Definitely wrong.

So "Trump sucks" is a proposition that is "definitely wrong" to Kaelik. So Kaelik is a closet Trump supporter! What an idiot.

P.S. Kaelik I am happy to help you lose your virginity. Send me a PM. I know this swell fellow who will do anything you want for only $10, and he will wear your choice of donkey mask or bird mask.

[deaddmwalking]

I can't believe you're still trying to use 'virgin' as an insult. You appear incredibly puerile.

[Kaelik]

I can't believe you're still trying to use 'virgin' as an insult. You appear incredibly puerile.

You'll have to forgive him, he's a bit of an idiot. He read a post where I called him mean names, and told him he was wrong in response to one of his insults, and he thought "Man, I really must have gotten under Kaelik's skin with that one, or he wouldn't have said mean things about me!" and decided to follow up with the one insult he thought worked really well forever after any time he wants to try to get under my skin.

I leave it as an exercise of the reader to find the irony.

[Hiram McDaniels]

http://jezebel.com/trump-surrogate-cite ... 1789074483

So that happened.

I'm legit in the middle of an existential crisis right now. I'm not really sure how the democratic party prevails going forward, unless they go the way of the whigs and are replaced by an actual Progressive party.

2018 and 2020 don't look very promising to me. People are cooing about the district lines getting redrawn, but that seems meaningless unless we actually get DEMS into local and state houses, which hithertofore the DNC hasn't seemed to give wet shit about.

Also, the left just plain does not have the arsenal of dirty tricks that the right does. They consistently get the minority of votes but hold most seats of power.

We can't even touch their propaganda machine. Even if the progressive wing manages to take over the party, how are they going to sell their platform to a public that has become impervious to facts and for whom the word "deomocrat" is synonymous with "traitor". I mean first we need someone who can rebrand socialism into something more palatable to the general public the way Frank Lutz turned robber barons into "job creators".

Other people are more optimistic about the future, but I don't really see a way out of the mire now.

[Mechalich]

2018 and 2020 don't look very promising to me. People are cooing about the district lines getting redrawn, but that seems meaningless unless we actually get DEMS into local and state houses, which hithertofore the DNC hasn't seemed to give wet shit about.

Well, there's going to be a new DNC Chair shortly. Current candidates range from 'Pretty Darned Liberal' Howard Dean to 'Muslim Progressive' Keith Ellison (who's the current front-runner with the big names behind him) to 'Firebreathing Liberal Activist' Ilyse Hogue. So democratic opposition to Republicans across the country is going to get significantly stronger and with any luck considerably better organized.

We can't even touch their propaganda machine. Even if the progressive wing manages to take over the party, how are they going to sell their platform to a public that has become impervious to facts and for whom the word "deomocrat" is synonymous with "traitor". I mean first we need someone who can rebrand socialism into something more palatable to the general public the way Frank Lutz turned robber barons into "job creators".

While this is true, the ultimate reality is that in order for their to be democratic victory this is not actually necessary. The key factor is that Republican policies do not work, full stop. As a result, they actually have greater leverage in the opposition role because they don't have to do anything - every time they try to do anything they screw up. Trump's liable to make this worse by adding on a thick layer of incompetence, cronyism, and nepotism.

This means that a Katrina-esque colossal failure of governance is almost certain at some point during the next four years. And just as happened with Katrina it will suck massively, and people will suffer, and the support for Republicans will take a bath.

2016 had a huge number of people vote for Trump despite not liking him and not actually caring about policies, simply because they wanted 'change' (this is why there are articles that talked about structural Republican advantage in this election). These people are generally comfortably situated financially and mostly white (though a lot of Trump's shockingly large Hispanic support and likely most of his Asian and Black support qualifies as well) and generally not very interested in politics. In 2020, faced with the country still apparently getting worse and one or two examples of Republican incompetence/nefariousness on the books, they are quite persuadable towards the challenger.

Propaganda and voter suppression hide many sins, but low information voters determine their vote by considering how they feel the country is doing and then either supporting or blaming the president. So if you screw up the country you eventually lose.

The really tragic thing is two fold. First, in screwing up the country the Republicans will cause millions of people to go through considerable suffering. Second, terrible Republican policies will almost certainly do long term damage to the country and in some cases to the entire world (climate change most obviously).

Beyond that, because Trump is Trump, there's a small but distinctly non-zero chance he manages to do something, most likely in the foreign policy arena (because Paul Ryan will have control of the domestic policy agenda for the most part) that destroys America as a functioning democracy permanently.

[DSMatticus]

The Great Recession also did not start with a banking collapse. It started with a fall in the valuation of mortgage-backed securities, leading to concerns about the solvency of banks, what with banks having invested heavily into mortgage-backed securities. When the government intervened to prop up those banks, those concerns became moot, the bank runs did not happen, and the global economy stumbled but continued functioning.

Just like the Great Depression also did not start with a banking collapse. It started with a fall in the valuation of stocks, leading to concerns about the solvency of banks, what with banks having invested heavily into stocks. When banks started failing, those concerns were validated, the bank runs started, and the global economy tumbled downhill for the better part of a generation.

It's almost like bank runs are not things that happen because LOLWHYNOT, and are instead a painful yet preventable consequence of some other kind of economic shock. Sort of like how bleeding to death is not a thing that happens because LOLWHYNOT, and instead a painful yet preventable consequence of some other kind of injury. Clearly if you have been in a car accident and are gushing blood from a chest wound, at no point should the doctor recommend a blood transfusion. How the hell is a blood tranfusion supposed to undo a car accident? That's absurd. Doctors are so stupid.

[maglag]

When banks started failing, those concerns were validated, the bank runs started, and the global economy tumbled downhill for the better part of a generation.

Except for, you know, Russia.
And China.
And France (dropped a bit but never went negative).
And a crapload of other countries.

But neither of those spoke english as their primary language, so of course their economies don't count for your "world" view.

Like when the Sovient Union collapsed and most of eastern's Europe's economy then went truly downhill, but english speakers didn't give a single fuck because they were all dirty communists, fuck them all, right?

Meanwhile back at my birth country neither the economy or the people have recovered from the artificial recession triggered by the USA's mass bank bailouts last decade. Thanks!

[erik]

What the fuck are you going on about maglag?

And "artificial recession"? As opposed to those pure ones found in nature? Bizarre that you blame the bailouts and not the collapse for the recession. Do you even fucking words?

These are rhetorical and not actually a request for you to convert more raw stupidity to print.

[angelfromanotherpin]

In not actually news, economies which have had a quarter of their workforce destroyed in some sort of Great War are resistant to the unemployment effects of a Depression, so they go down the shitter less.

[DSMatticus]

First off, it is embarrassing that you don't know what global means. Worldwide GDP fell by 15% during the Great Depression and it fell by much fucking less than that during the Great Recession. I don't care if you want to cherrypick countries you know absolutely nothing about, because hey guess what? You can find 'em on a globe, dipshit. They are already included in any global tallies, because that is what words mean. Yes, thanks to Germany today countries like Greece have it Great Depression bad, but guess what? During the Great Depression, more places had it Great Depression bad! If you don't actually want to talk about the scale of these respective crises, what the fuck do you think your verbal diarrhea is worth? Nothing. It's worth nothing. But because, as usual, I know more about this shit than you do I will run you through your own stupid fucking examples and tell you how stupidly uninteresting they are:

Sovet Union: It's important to remember that when the USSR was formed the region was an unindustrialized rural wartorn shithole. It had neither the industry to produce a significant quantity of exports, not the infrastructure to cheaply transport those exports to potential trading partners, and it is bouncing back from a massive civil war. That is not to say they had zero economic contact with the outside world, but it is to say that even by 1920's standards they were incredibly economically isolated and, unsurprisingly, economically isolated countries do not feel global shocks as badly. They are also generally poorer, because specialization is magic. Take grain, for example; some parts of the world are just objectively better for growing grain in, and if the world grows most of its grain in those regions and exports it everywhere else, then the world will have more grain for less labor and be slightly wealthier as a result. But that's something of a digression; a country which has yet to mass produce the tractor has more pressing concerns than the costs and benefits of fully integrating into the global economy. Speaking of tractors, industrialization, and urbanization, that shit is free growth. The fact is that the transition from hoes to tractors is such a massive increase in productivity that it can and should overwhelm any and all other economic trends. You can starve millions of Ukrainians to death and despite all the labor you're erasing with your horrible ethnic genocide your GDP will still go up because industrialization is one hell of a drug. But industrialization isn't an infinite process; eventually you catch up and then you have to learn how to run an ordinary economy. There are no real lessons to be learned from the USSR's "success."

China: Second verse almost the same as the first. China begins the 1920's with a strong isolationist political movement which helped buffer them against the damage of the Great Depression. They, like the USSR, are also in a period of rapid industrialization. But unfortunately for China, their industrialization started a little earlier and is a little lower on Steam by the time the Great Depression hits. Also, Japan invaded Manchuria, which sucked, and was also probably a large enough hit to mask any effect of the Great Depression. If there's a lesson here, I would say it's don't let Japan invade your industrial heartland.

France: Hahahaha nope. This is just blatantly counterfactual. Where in the sweet fuck did you even read that? Seriously, I'm curious. I am not even remotely aware of a single fringe academic movement which argues that the Great Depression didn't hit France like it hit everyone else. I suspect you simply have no idea how to interpret economic data in order to measure downtowns and this is some variety of homegrown stupid. Yes, the Great Depression hit France. Yes, it was really, really bad. No, it didn't really show up in unemployment data, because the last war had left a severe shortage of French workers - but it did show up in GDP and industrial production, and it hit France roughly in line with the way it hit other European countries.

Meanwhile back at my birth country neither the economy or the people have recovered from the artificial recession triggered by the USA's mass bank bailouts last decade. Thanks!

Erik kind of beat me to it, but just let me say that artificial recession is the stupidest term I have ever heard. What part of an economy is natural, exactly? I've never had a gopher try to rent my lawn by paying me in scraps of paper with the faces of famous gophers printed on them. But honestly there is more pressing stupid to discuss, because the recession is formally recognized having started a year before the bailouts; Q4 2007 vs Q4 2008.

I do not understand your economic views. They are incomprehensible gibberish. You're like an idiot trying to read a map upside down, except in this case the map is the very fabric of spacetime itself. In maglag land causality runs in reverse and I find it baffling and frightening. How do you function? The bailouts did not cause a recession. The recession started a year before as the result of an economic shock (the sudden devaluation of mortgage-backed securities), and the reason it was as painful as it was ended up being largely due to structural problems with our economy (cough wealth inequality cpugh) that have been brewing for decades. We are all too fucking poor to create enough demand to employ one another, and it was inevitable that some shock would come along that tipped us into global catastrophe. And it is inevitable that another shock will come along and do the same thing, repeat ad infinitum until we finally pull our heads out of our ass and restore the wealth of the common consumer.

But all of that aside, I don't know where you're from and I also don't care. Name a country and I will tell you exactly what's happened to it from now the run-up to the Great Recession until now.

[Kaelik]

http://www.cnn.com/2016/11/13/politics/ ... d-lawsuit/

https://www.bostonglobe.com/news/politi ... story.html

Trading those barbs. You know, when one person says "These organizations are objectively celebrating, and people are living in fear." and then the campaign manager for the president elect says "We are going to arrest the shit out of you for saying true things." That's some fucking Barb trading.

[Username17]

Leaving aside the stupidity of talking up Russia and China in the interwar period as regions to be emulated, France is so incredibly not a country that escaped the Great Depression that it is frequently used as an example of bad monetary policy because their Great Depression was so bad. England famous backed away from the Gold Standard, while France doubled down on it. And that is frequently cited as a primary reason that France's performance was so utterly awful compared to that of the British next door.

By any metric, be it median incomes, GDP per capita, total GDP or whatever you want, France did very poorly in the Great Depression. It is a Goofus nation that people use as an example when they want to show that some policy or another is bad. Scholars don't debate whether France had it rough, they debate why. You get provacative academic questions like "Did France Cause the Great Depression?" and you do not get serious academics asking how to best emulate France's weathering of the Great Depression storm. Because France being a poor role model is fucking self evident and the only question is what the mistakes were and how big an impact they had.

Using France as an example of successfully avoiding the Great Depression is straight up big lie territory. They didn't avoid the Great Depression, so they could not have been successful at doing so. The only thing you could possibly do is cherry pick dates and claim that because France wasn't hit by the Great Depression in 1929 that it was somehow immune. But they factually were hit, and harder than in Britain - just a year later because it was the fucking 30s and global events took longer to play out back then.


At least it isn't Hooverian.

-Username17