The Liberals Thread

[Luther Blissett]

Lena Dunham is a moderate conservative.

That is not how she is perceived by the folks that voted in Trump (either actively or indirectly by not voting at all).

I understand that, but they don't have the same perspective as the leftists who despise her.

[slomo]

As I said above, Trump's base is creating the new reality now.

Again, no joy here in stating the facts...

[PufPuf93]

Lena Dunham is a moderate conservative.

Who the hell is that? I did some googling but could not fathom why she is anyone to be reckoned with. Maybe it's my fault for not paying attention to the bullshit leading up to the "election". I'm sorry to be at a loss here.

Dunham is the creator and star of the TV series "Girls".

I watched some as the first two seasons are "free" on Amazon Prime.

Evidently the show is popular and influential.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1723816/

[Luther Blissett]

Lena Dunham is a moderate conservative.

Who the hell is that? I did some googling but could not fathom why she is anyone to be reckoned with. Maybe it's my fault for not paying attention to the bullshit leading up to the "election". I'm sorry to be at a loss here.

Dunham is the creator and star of the TV series "Girls".

I watched some as the first two seasons are "free" on Amazon Prime.

Evidently the show is popular and influential.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1723816/

She also comes from insane wealth and is completely out of touch with poor people, the working class, and people of color.

[slomo]

Lena Dunham is a moderate conservative.

Who the hell is that? I did some googling but could not fathom why she is anyone to be reckoned with. Maybe it's my fault for not paying attention to the bullshit leading up to the "election". I'm sorry to be at a loss here.

Dunham is the creator and star of the TV series "Girls".

I watched some as the first two seasons are "free" on Amazon Prime.

Evidently the show is popular and influential.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1723816/

She also comes from insane wealth and is completely out of touch with poor people, the working class, and people of color.

You have essentially just described HRC's base.

[Luther Blissett]

Lena Dunham is a moderate conservative.

Who the hell is that? I did some googling but could not fathom why she is anyone to be reckoned with. Maybe it's my fault for not paying attention to the bullshit leading up to the "election". I'm sorry to be at a loss here.

Dunham is the creator and star of the TV series "Girls".

I watched some as the first two seasons are "free" on Amazon Prime.

Evidently the show is popular and influential.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1723816/

She also comes from insane wealth and is completely out of touch with poor people, the working class, and people of color.

You have essentially just described HRC's base.

Exactly. She's a perfect moderate conservative neoliberal icon.

[bks]

I included words with the numbers in the first post above. Try reading those. Otherwise, you're just trolling so that the actual post gets lost in your bullshit and my counter-bullshit.

So here it is again, since people tend to read the last couple of things posted.

Candidates in the last three presidential elections, ranked in order of vote totals:

1. Obama 2008: 69.4 million
2. Obama 2012: 65.9 million
3. Romney 2012: 60.9 million
4. McCain 2008: 59.9 million
5. Clinton 2016: 59.8 million
6. Trump 2016: 59.6 million


Gentlepeople. This is RI, so just in case you want to argue those numbers are fabricated by machines: Fine. Then you have nothing to say on what or who Trump may or may not have "won."


You want to ignore those numbers? Fine. Then at least know that whatever you say is pulled straight out of your ass, and you know shit about what who Trump may or may not have "won." You're just participating on the lowest level of the spin and counter-spin machinery.


Trump didn't win shit in votes. I don't only mean that he got FEWER votes than Clinton, which is true. I mean that he did not gain any votes on prior Republicans. He did not win more of your precious white identity-politics voters than before. What happened is, millions of people who voted for Obama did not bother to vote at all for Clinton. This is not Trump's win. It is Clinton's loss.


Candidates in the last three presidential elections, ranked in order of vote totals:

1. Obama 2008: 69.4 million
2. Obama 2012: 65.9 million
3. Romney 2012: 60.9 million
4. McCain 2008: 59.9 million
5. Clinton 2016: 59.8 million
6. Trump 2016: 59.6 million


Cumulatively, about 10 million voters appear to have abandoned the Democrats since 2008. Republican vote totals have also declined but remain more stable, and still lower than the Democrats'. Only a small part of this can be blamed on vote suppression measures. The reality: More people are staying home than before, and more of them used to be Democrats.

It is not true that working class voters in the Midwest or elsewhere shifted toward Trump. That is a pernicious myth. It is being crafted right this moment and has two functions: For liberals, it shifts the blame for the DNC's self-made disaster on to "populist" sentiment. For Trump supporters, it legitimates the billionaire con artist's image as a man of the people.

What did Clinton have to offer to the working class voters of the Midwest, who are now falsely blamed for Trump? More of the same shit. More of them therefore stayed away from the ballot box.

Trump won these battleground states without getting more votes in any of them than Romney did when he lost the same states in 2012.

In any case, out of the last six "major party" presidential candidates, Trump 2016 ranks sixth out of six. Dead last. He won because we do not have a democratic system in the United States. Rather, some long-dead rich guys from 1787 are still playing a joke on us.

(You can check state numbers for 2012 at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_St ... tion,_2012 and compare these to 2016 numbers.)


Remember the U.S. electorate has grown in the last eight years, so I'm adding the following info for reference and framing, since of course we do not have the exact same people alive or eligible to vote in the three elections:

Voting age population (over 18), 2008: 227 million.*
Voting age population, 2016: about 255 million.*
Number of people in U.S. who turned 18 since 2008: about 31-34 million.
Who died: something under 20 million.
Naturalized citizens since 2008: about 5.6 million.
* - Resident aliens make up about 6% or 7% at any given time and cannot vote.

There's a lot of votes still uncounted, Jack.

[NeonLX]

Lena Dunham is a moderate conservative.

Who the hell is that? I did some googling but could not fathom why she is anyone to be reckoned with. Maybe it's my fault for not paying attention to the bullshit leading up to the "election". I'm sorry to be at a loss here.

Dunham is the creator and star of the TV series "Girls".

I watched some as the first two seasons are "free" on Amazon Prime.

Evidently the show is popular and influential.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1723816/

She also comes from insane wealth and is completely out of touch with poor people, the working class, and people of color.

You have essentially just described HRC's base.

Exactly. She's a perfect moderate conservative neoliberal icon.

Got it. Another limousine-liberal.

Thanks for the clues to pop culture. I live in a bubble, manufactured from a lack of cable teevee and even an internet connection at home. I read a lot--mainly sci-fi (Philip K Dick!). People at work talk about shit on teevee and I have no point of reference. I'm well on my way to old fogey-dom.

Edited to put the italics where they were supposed to be.

[guruilla]

No idea which of the countless threads to post this at, but since I am simpatico with Mac, I'll pick this one.

'Trump was the placeholder joke name... and that's still true': The Simpsons predicted Donald would become US President 16 years ago

Some thoughts I put together yesterday, relation to this:

This is the first time I have ever felt even remotely involved in an election, & the first time I have felt shocked by the outcome. In the months leading up to this, I believed Trump’s role was to scare people into voting for Hillary so it wouldn’t be too obvious when they shuttled her into power. (The elections are always rigged & always have been; the people who create the system do not have to play by the rules of the system they create; they would be fools to do so.) But then, in the last couple of weeks, I began to suspect that Trump was actually the man who’d been chosen for the job. Then, at the final hour, when things started to come out about Clinton-pedophilia, etc., as well as the links via Podesta to what may be a grand UFO disclosure scam (something Hillary promised some while back), I was pretty sure it was going to be Hillary after all.

Congruent with this, I went from secretly, though only mildly, hoping Trump would win, simply because it would piss off all the people who were pissing me off (mostly in my Faceborg feed) by endorsing Hillary. As it got closer to the day, I realized that, if Trump won, these people would become even more obnoxious, since their fears would be confirmed and they would feel as though they hadn’t been strident or hysterical enough. (They might also blame people like me for Trump.) Add to that the fact that they would never get to see Hillary dash all of their illusions with her presidency and continue believing in her as their savior, albeit failed.

It seems like we have all been duped, including those of us who were sure the Hillary-heads were being duped into thinking Trump could win. (They were, but not in the way we thought.) When I heard that Trump won while I was waiting for my morning bowel movement today, the first word I said was “Crap.” I’d had a sense of what to expect if Hillary won (the big UFO rapture hoax), but now Trump has, what? Probably the same only with a different cast and crew, as if Michael Winner got to direct it rather than Katheryn Bigelow.

Meanwhile, I am interested to discover any evidence that Trump was being groomed for this, and how far back. My bet is that, like Reagan, he was singled out for this role a long time ago (maybe even as a child, if I know how these things work), and that part of the “sting” was making it seem like he came out of nowhere, that he didn’t have any real chance of winning, and that he was useful mostly as a colorful foil for the neoliberal clique.

Now he’s in. Now we get to see what, if any, difference it makes to US policies, policies which were already going to be changing radically and exponentially in these high-crisis times (which means it will be hard to tell). It’s worth keeping in mind that politicians rarely ever make good on the promises they use to secure people’s votes, and that it’s quite likely Trump will “disappoint” his haters, as much as his supporters. And also, never to forget, please, that he jetsetted to the same “mystery island” of unspeakable pleasures as Bill, Hillary, and Barack, and that they will doubtless all continue to party on together there, as the end times roll.

[guruilla]

@slomo: happy to see you took yourself out of RI quarantine: you are my favorite psychopath.

Having skimmed the thread (& as someone raised in an ultra-liberal environment with lots of stories to tell, as most people here know), one thing I'd suggest is that the word "racism" is essentially meaningless at this point in history, and that, when a word becomes meaningless and yet is still being used, it becomes counter-productive, even damaging. There are a whole slew of words which I feel essentially the same way about, and most or all of them pertain to or stem from the "neoliberal" set, since, whatever Trump's victory suggests, this is the dominant ideological narrative right now.

It's a certain kind of viewpoint, generally, that relies on words like "racist" and "racism" to argue its points, and the people who use those words (at this thread, for example) generally do so for a specific reason. Guess what? It's the same reason people have used the word "nigger": to stigmatize a whole group of people.

Personally, and this is probably something I knew as a child, I've started to see how all these -isms and -phobias are just red herrings, because there's one thing happening here and it trumps (no pun intended) all its variations: scapegoating. When "liberals" fight "racism," they condemn large numbers of people, without ever meeting them or talking to them, not for the color of their skin but for their beliefs. In the process, the anti-racists exalt themselves and their views to a higher moral plateau (rightly or wrongly), by doing the same with whatever minority (or "minority") they are defending (the liberals' pet-cause; for my grandfather it was blacks, gays, and murderous mobsters doing jail time; almost certainly pedophiles too). This creates privileged "minority" classes (I put "minority" in quotes because the definition isn't always based on numbers), and, as everyone knows, these "minorities" get special treatment ~ for having been discriminated against previously.

As I see it, if: a) a person is not permitted to express their opinions or feelings about someone or a group of people (or even national policy that relates to certain people, such as immigration laws) without being stigmatized; and b) that same (latter) someone or group of people is not merely protected from "prejudice" but is also receiving special treatment (being idealized, essentially) and is being presented as in some way beyond reproach (since any reproach is seen as discrimination) . . . What happens?

Trump happens.

Those associated ~ rightly or wrongly ~ with the original perceived persecution drives (misogyny, racism, homophobia, etc) then become the persecuted "minority" (the underclass); and so naturally their anger, frustration, & hostility increases, as well as their numbers.

I've avoided using concrete examples because of course this area of discussion is filled with land mines designed to go off at first contact, to provoke archetypal/emotional responses and not rational ones. But also because, in a way it doesn't matter, since it is all scapegoating, all the identical social principal that's being applied to achieve the ends of an actual privileged minority class. What can be said about this group is very little. But they may not even be racist, homophobic, or misogynist at all, because they may be something far beyond such limited and limiting terms (terms they would have coined deliberately to befog the rest of us); they may view themselves as superior to all humankind, as we think of the term, regardless of type or orientation.

[dada]

As I said above, Trump's base is creating the new reality now.

Again, no joy here in stating the facts...

This attitude is ridiculous. I mean, I'm sorry you feel that way. But you're projecting your authoritarian fantasy onto the rest of the world. It doesn't apply to some of us.

---

Well, there's racism and sexism, and there's structural racism and sexism. Can we agree on that?

When I say I stand against racism and sexism, I'm not saying I'm against some group of strangers. It's a very real thing I encounter. I fight with misogynists online, I scold people in real life when I encounter casual racist negative stereotypes that cross the line from joke to hate. There's a difference, you know. Spend some time in the real world with real people, you learn to distinguish between the two..

Racism is part of some people's upbringing, and is part of their social circles. Racism and sexism is something I deal with even among friends. They aren't white supremacist confederate flag waving racists, or beating their wives. Not around me, anyway.

I don't get people on the internet sometimes. Really need a reality check.

edited to add: Never heard of Dunham, either.

I'm always amazed how these totally insignificant things are discussed for pages. And meanwhile there's intelligent discussion, and creative thinking happening here. I guess there's just a difference between what people want to do with their short time on planet earth.

[dada]

As I see it, if: a) a person is not permitted to express their opinions or feelings about someone or a group of people (or even national policy that relates to certain people, such as immigration laws) without being stigmatized; and b) that same (latter) someone or group of people is not merely protected from "prejudice" but is also receiving special treatment (being idealized, essentially) and is being presented as in some way beyond reproach (since any reproach is seen as discrimination) . . . What happens?

Trump happens.

Those associated ~ rightly or wrongly ~ with the original perceived persecution drives (misogyny, racism, homophobia, etc) then become the persecuted "minority" (the underclass); and so naturally their anger, frustration, & hostility increases, as well as their numbers.

You're making a case, (albeit very eloquently:) ) that it's the persecuted white person that decided the election. We're discussing this on other threads, as well. I don't think it's that simple. I said on one of those threads that 'the working class, on both the left and the right, rejected the system in their own way.' That's what the numbers look like.

What we've really got here, though, is different ways of looking at things. I see a lot of 'what went wrong' thinking going on. I had a flash where I realized, something went right. I thought I'd focus on that, see where it takes me.

edited to add: I should add that I doubt my opinions match anyone else's. I'm not speaking for anyone, or any demographic. ahm a critical machine.

Go ahead, look around, engage with others on the internet, you'll see. Then bring those opinions back to me, so I can eat them. Chew them up and spit them out:)

It's fun, I recommend you all should try it.

[Luther Blissett]

I am flabbergasted. Would you like some concrete examples of racism guruilla? What on earth are you talking about?

[JackRiddler]

Response to guruilla here.
viewtopic.php?f=8&t=40146&p=618522#p618522

[82_28]

I'll tell you what, as far as racism, I knew of no one that ever sought it out. It came to them. Why, I do not know. But it happens. My best friend who was murdered around a decade ago (time flies) I call his family on all the key dates just to let them know well you know, I'm thinking about you cats. But his mom went off on "those people". It pained me but I said you do realize (said friend) was killed by one of our own. A white kid.

I didn't even know what the fuck I was doing as a kid but I have encountered ridicule because I always got along with everyone. You won't fucking believe it, but I have made zero fucking enemies growing up. I fucking find it astounding. But this is what I envision liberalism as.

Speaking for myself, I am not a "push over". Believe me I can say fuck you but I choose not to. I know I am preaching to the choir about these here parts, but being a liberal helped me along the way. Did it get me anywhere? I would say no. Anyway, yeah. I be a liberal.

I only bring this up because I am currently shepherding RIGHT AT THIS MOMENT a custody battle and it was on my mind. Sorry.

I am actually an anarchist that believes in non violence. Anyhoo. . .