Congratulations, Stupid.

[stefano]

Yeah, we know. You've already given us you and your Green devils vision of the future.
Which honestly is worst than Trumps. Knowing his future is fucked--but making it happen out of spite.

Ah, thanksralphery.

I disagree with this. If I'd been American I'd have voted Green as well. Firstly, Clinton's future was in no way unfucked. Secondly, and I think this is more important, it's precisely because of years and years of lesser-evilism that this was the choice you got saddled with. At some point you're going to have to start voting for people you actually support, else in 20 years' time you're going to go into an election and having to choose between Bashar Al-Assad and Abubakr Al-Baghdadi. While not quite as bad, Trump is going to bring serious pain to a lot of people, and so would Clinton have (though they would have been further away and had worse teeth than Trumpo's victims).

Think I saw this here? Not sure:



And Jack's argument about the electoral vote doesn't really hold water. I mean, yes - that's a saner way to pick a president, but the fact that Clinton won the popular vote doesn't at all mean she'd have won a first-past-the-post race had one been run. The campaign would have been very different. More like hers, in fact, heavy on TV ads and events in cities, with less of the travelling amid provincial folk, the bombastic events that probably won it for Trump.

[JackRiddler]

Anyway, electoral college. This is not a democracy. This is not a legitimate result.

The biggest rigging (among many riggings) was in the candidacies predetermined above all by the centralized corporate media. They set up the contestants before any votes were cast, they provided the Reality TV format, they determined the political "agenda" (mostly of total bullshit), and they did so even in the age of "social media," which is actually still a minority pursuit, and mostly consists in talking about and exchanging the shit rolling down from the top of the media hill.

Contest that. Spin me some tales about dispossessed workers in six Michigan counties who voted for Trump, and why they should count and everyone else doesn't (no matter who they voted for).

.

[tapitsbo]

so why keep the "usa" format at all?

to say nothing of the two mainstream parties

surely it's all an illegitimate dinosaur?

[stefano]

"social media," which mostly consists in talking about and exchanging the shit rolling down from the top of the media hill.

Good point well made. Also, increasingly, the middle of the media hill - hot takes by people in their late 20s cranking out three bits a day, with no advice or proper editing... That's journalism these days.

Anyway, electoral college. This is not a democracy. This is not a legitimate result.

Are only democracies legitimate? And only the purest of them? I wouldn't say that. This college business is not as democratic as first-past-the-post, but it is, undoubtedly, legitimate. Everyone knows the rules, and everyone, at least as far as I can tell, goes on and on about the Constitution and what a transcendentally marvellous package of rules it is. How's a win on those terms not legitimate?

Contest that. Spin me some tales about dispossessed workers in six Michigan counties who voted for Trump, and why they should count and everyone else doesn't (no matter who they voted for).

Everyone else's vote did count, but not as much as those of the dispossessed workers in a few spots. Those counted as much as those of the latte liberals and rich reactionaries and Johnson voters and Stein voters in the same districts, or any other category you want to use. Again, I agree that a universal suffrage would be better, but you don't have that and won't get it, seeing what a constitutional amendment requires.

[norton ash]

Don't know if anyone's posted this one yet from The Baffler... it covers the whole blame-game pretty f'in well.

Round-up of Recriminations
After Trump's win, there are more culprits than we can shake a finger at


COREY PEIN November 10, 2016

As I watched the results sink in, that evening, to an incredulous and weirdly sedate panel on Fox News, as panic spread across my Twitter timeline, I put aside my fast-growing personal shit list in order to compile a list of recriminatory theories shared by others. I have listed those theories below in order from least plausible to most plausible. Of course my rankings are entirely subjective. Why not? The sham rationality of “data journalism” belongs to the toxic trash heap that was 2016.

http://thebaffler.com/blog/round-up-recriminations-pein

[JackRiddler]

And Jack's argument about the electoral vote doesn't really hold water. I mean, yes - that's a saner way to pick a president,

Sure as hell, though if you cite me in context you know I'd rather not be picking a "president" at all, that's not an appropriate executive office for a country of 330 million population (or anything over 20 million, I would think).

but the fact that Clinton won the popular vote doesn't at all mean she'd have won a first-past-the-post race had one been run. The campaign would have been very different. More like hers, in fact, heavy on TV ads and events in cities, with less of the travelling amid provincial folk, the bombastic events that probably won it for Trump.

You mean, didn't win for Trump the "it" we are talking about, which is total vote. But anyway, what do you think the turn-out would have been like in New York and California, if everyone knew their vote made a difference? (New York turnout, under 7 million out of 11.5 million). And remember: California probably has as many "provincial folk" as a whole bunch of the states we think of as "provincial" (where majorities are in conurbations anyway) combined. The post-election "analyses" show very little consideration of cumulative numbers and a lot of spinning around cherry-picked facts. The EC system obviously contributes to that.

.

[brekin]

Yeah, we know. You've already given us you and your Green devils vision of the future.
Which honestly is worst than Trumps. Knowing his future is fucked--but making it happen out of spite.

Ah, thanksralphery.

I disagree with this. If I'd been American I'd have voted Green as well. Firstly, Clinton's future was in no way unfucked. Secondly, and I think this is more important, it's precisely because of years and years of lesser-evilism that this was the choice you got saddled with. At some point you're going to have to start voting for people you actually support, else in 20 years' time you're going to go into an election and having to choose between Bashar Al-Assad and Abubakr Al-Baghdadi. While not quite as bad, Trump is going to bring serious pain to a lot of people, and so would Clinton have (though they would have been further away and had worse teeth than Trumpo's victims).

Wow. Thanks for not being an American and not being able to vote in our election.
And thanks for explaining how we got to where we are today.
I'm mean who knew we had been going through lesser-evilism all this time?
RI is such a happy, shiny place that insulates one from the darker narratives.
(Always a bonus when there is a Simpsons reference. That way you can be right, hip and smarmy at the same time!)

Look, a Green candidate is never going to be president. Ever.
I know that sounds pessimistic but the fact is there are not enough people who identify as Green, or ever will.
(But if they only knew how things work, if they got educated, blah blah, Not going to happen. If it worked that way no one would smoke or get the clap.)

Why don't people understand that some of the most dangerous people in the world, are the ones who are for wonderful things, and believe in them, but don't have the pragmatic brains to even pull even one of the off?
A vote for a green candidate is a vote for Abraham Lincoln at this point. It is useless.
In fact, it is worse than useless as we see in key battleground states it got a fascist in the White House.
Its like some simple logic puzzle some people can't solve.*

I'm probably 90%-100% on board and in alignment with Green policies and endeavors.
(Guys, I voted for Nader the first time. Thefirst time.)
But I'm probably 90%-100% not on board with their organizing, strategy or faith in changing the political machinery or even understanding how things get done.
The only way a Green president could ever happen is if they were a political chameleon who got elected under a completely different agenda and then using War or War like conditions pushed through Green policies in the name of national security.
Voting for a Green means you are either so stupid you don't understand basic math. Or so self righteous you won't allow yourself to understand basic math.

That people think things under Clinton would be just as bad, or getting there, don't understand the climate of someone like Trump campaigning creates, let alone being president.
You really think kids being bullied and afraid of what the president will do to their parents, or his kids supporters doing now, is just an extension of where we would be in Clinton's second term as president? Do you think any of the hard won gains in any sector would be up for discussion?

P.S. By the way, looking for a roommate by any chance?

*Simple Logic Election Puzzle

Three levers administer electric shocks.
One lever stuns you, but you live.
Two levers administer shocks that kill you.
The lever that stuns you says "This lever will shock you and things will remain roughly the same."
One lever that kills you says "This lever will kill you but also make America Great Again."
The other lever that kills you says "Free Healthcare for everyone, free college education for everyone, a living wage for everyone, No artic drilling, free Beer on Fridays, etc"

Which one do you pull?

Ethan Coen's "Congratulations, Stupid"esque letter:
(Yes, I know, "CIA" Cohen on "CIA" NYT, but he's right)

2016 Election Thank You Notes
Loose Ends
By ETHAN COEN NOV. 11, 2016

Such a surprise! So many people to thank!

1. Jill Stein voters: You helped elect a man who pledges that he will, in his first hundred days, cancel contributions to United Nations programs to fight climate change. If your vote for Ms. Stein did not end up advancing your green agenda, it did allow you to feel morally superior to all the compromising schmoes who voted for Hillary Clinton. And your feelings about your vote are more important than the consequences of your vote. So — thank you!

2. Gary Johnson voters: Thank you, for similar reasons. You, too, may now reward yourselves with feelings of warm self-approval, and your libertarian agenda will now be advanced (or not) by someone who admires the governance of Vladimir Putin. And to Mr. Johnson himself: Not only can no one blame you for this outcome — we’re all free agents, man! — but you can stop looking for Aleppo.

3. James Comey: Your publicity coup may have affected the outcome of the election. Or it may not have. But it will certainly breed speculation that it did. Such discussion will in some way serve the reputation of the F.B.I. Or not. You had to bravely contravene bureau protocols to make your contribution, so to you we owe a special thanks!

4. Anthony Weiner: You also found a surprising way to contribute! Thank you, sir — your act never gets old!

5. Jimmy Fallon: How did you manage to shine a nonthreatening light on someone who alarms so many women, frightens so many undocumented families and slurs so many minorities? Can’t have been easy! Thanks! Maybe now you could have the Grand Wizard on your show: He leans his head to you, you slip his hood off and ruffle his hair. Could be a cute bit!

6. All our media friends. Thank you for preserving reportorial balance. You balanced Donald Trump’s proposal that the military execute the innocent families of terrorists, against Hillary’s emails. You balanced pot-stirring racist lies about President Obama’s birth, against Hillary’s emails. You balanced a religious test at our borders, torture by our military, jokes about assassination, unfounded claims of a rigged election, boasts about groping and paradoxical threats to sue anyone who confirmed the boasts, against Hillary’s emails. You balanced endorsement of nuclear proliferation, against Hillary’s emails. You balanced tirelessly, indefatigably; you balanced, you balanced, and then you balanced some more. And for that — we thank you. And thank you all for following Les Moonves’s principled lead when he said Donald Trump “may not be good for America, but he’s damn good for CBS.”

7. The Electoral College. Thank you, for being you.

I cannot thank: Hillary Clinton. She is not a morally perfect person — her fault! She was not the perfect candidate — her fault! Misogyny may have magnified her failings so as to show them balancing the outsized failings of her opponent — and that might not be her fault. But she fought to the very limits of her ability to deny us Tuesday night’s surprise, so I do not thank her. Pooh on you, Hillary Clinton!

I do thank, lastly:

8. The American electorate. Because in the end, we all did it together. We did it! We really did it!

Ethan Coen is a filmmaker whose movies include “No Country for Old Men,” “True Grit” and “The Big Lebowski.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/13/opini ... .html?_r=1

[JackRiddler]

Those counted as much as those of the latte liberals and rich reactionaries and Johnson voters and Stein voters in the same districts

I expect better from you than this cheap "anti-liberal" spin. All these categories combined don't add up to 1/10 of the actual anti-Trump majority of the voters. Black, Latino, people making under $50,000, workers in cities, the precarious, the majority of the voters who count as "dispossessed" but may be enjoying the benefits of the evil Obamacare that Trump wants to overturn -- all of these groups voted in the majority (sometimes overwhelmingly) for Clinton. Union workers too, obviously. Whatever the shifts may have been. And the young, overwhelmingly. And even among the white folk, a 10+% gap in the women's vote (single women overwhelmingly for Clinton). And I submit most of them weren't patsies for the neoliberal ideology or Clinton lies, but lesser-evil voters with a better idea of their actual economic interests than the lionized (and largely fictionalized) dispossessed white workers of the rust belt. It's so damn easy for privileged liberal-haters (among whom I usually count) to pick three celebrities or Internet venues and use these to characterize the anti-Trump majority as some kind of collectively "out of touch" caricature. No matter where they are, everyone knows Trump voters - they are a huge group, after all.

PS- On the other hand, brekin, Ethan Coen is a great illustration of blind neoliberal stupidity. Metaphors are not arguments. Pop-psychology is not an empirical science.

.

[stefano]

Don't know if anyone's posted this one yet from The Baffler... it covers the whole blame-game pretty f'in well.

Thanks! That's some good stuff.

Barack Obama

Republicans are predictably crediting Trump’s victory to the failures of the Current Occupant. Yes, he inherited an historic mess. Yes, he endured an intransigent, racist opposition. But he also reneged on key campaign promises and, in highly Clintonesque fashion, tried to pass off his minor, occasionally retrograde reforms as major accomplishments, at a time when Americans were getting desperate. It’s fair to say the man was out of touch and that his “ask the Harvard guys” approach to governing was naïve at best. Unforgivably, he perfected and enshrined the most horrifically dystopian innovations of George W. Bush’s tenure—secret drone strikes on civilians including U.S. citizens, total domestic surveillance—just in time for a bona-fide wannabe dictator to take over the White House on a platform of jailing his political opponents. Yes, by all means, blame Obama.

Hillary Clinton

Nothing good will come of her defeat, except perhaps the end of the Clinton dynastic stranglehold on Democratic Party politics and, by extension, the seizure of all liberal, left, and activist politics in the U.S. by the family’s scrupulously cultivated base of corporate donors. But that silver lining was bound to emerge eventually. Hell, it might’ve happened in two years when the next mid-terms rolled around. And there’s no guarantee that the liberal and leftist groups will make good use of the narrow opportunity they have been given. Indeed, the whole umbrella of “progressive” causes the Democratic Party claims to represent has emerged weaker than ever from this election. And Hillary Clinton bears a large part of the responsibility for that. It was her campaign, after all. She’d been preparing for this moment for decades, but when it finally came, she choked, and retreated to the only place she seemed to feel comfortable—talking small groups of rich people out of their money. It was Clinton who ran with no message, other than the profoundly tone-deaf “America is already great.” “Dangerous Donald,” indeed. She doesn’t deserve to go to jail for no reason, as the new president-elect would have it, but she and her highly fanatical careerist-asshole acolytes sure as hell don’t need to lead the country’s only opposition party for . . . One. More. Day.

edit - from another bit by Corey Pein that merits a read:

The key to understanding this election cycle—and its energetic locus, Trump—is to accept that we are not dealing with an ordinary man, bound by the rules of decorum and the presupposition of coherence. I have another idea. I propose that Donald Trump is the personification of a Norse god named Loki.

Think about it. Everyone keeps asking, how does he do it? How does he get away with the outbursts of expletive and blasphemy, with cruel mockery of disabled people and torture survivors, with the rambling incestuous fantasies? What I am saying is that Trump doesn’t need to play by the rules because he is the fabled shape-shifting trickster wearing the orange skin of a man and the hair of a wily red fox. That is how he gets away with it.

Bear with me. I know this may seem implausible. It is not very often that a thousand-year-old deity manifests in a foreign country in order to wreak havoc on an electoral contest, slaying taboos and causing spasms of cathartic rapture among his worshippers while sowing trepidation throughout the remainder of human civilization. Yet there is historical precedent for this line of thought.

[OP ED]

It's always pleasant to be lectured by millionaires who make their living glorifying violence about social responsibility.

[brekin]

JackRiddler wrote:

PS- On the other hand, brekin, Ethan Coen is a great illustration of blind neoliberal stupidity. Metaphors are not arguments. Pop-psychology is not an empirical science.

I don't know if it is necessarily blind or stupidity. I'm assuming he has more access and insight in to how "things really work", (even if he's not a reader of RI, ha ha) His milieu is probably much more revealing and would reinforce his ideology. He makes CIA vanity films with George Clooney and Tom Hanks. If he thinks this was a major fuck up, that makes you think, doesn't it?

The threads move so fast these days.

It's always pleasant to be lectured by millionaires who make their living glorifying violence about social responsibility.

Maybe you should have listened to somebody, hey, Mr. Green?

green
[green]

adjective, greener, greenest.
1.of the color of growing foliage, between yellow and blue in the spectrum:
green leaves.
2.covered with herbage or foliage; verdant:
green fields.
3.characterized by the presence of verdure.
4.made of green vegetables, as lettuce, spinach, endive, or chicory:
a green salad.
5.not fully developed or perfected in growth or condition; unripe; not properly aged:
This peach is still green.
6.unseasoned; not dried or cured:
green lumber.
7.immature in age or judgment; untrained; inexperienced:
a green worker.

http://www.dictionary.com/browse/green

[stefano]

You mean, didn't win for Trump the "it" we are talking about, which is total vote. But anyway, what do you think the turn-out would have been like in New York and California, if everyone knew their vote made a difference? (New York turnout, under 7 million out of 11.5 million). And remember: California probably has as many "provincial folk" as a whole bunch of the states we think of as "provincial" (where majorities are in conurbations anyway) combined. The post-election "analyses" show very little consideration of cumulative numbers and a lot of spinning around cherry-picked facts. The EC system obviously contributes to that.

Well I don't know what it would have been - no one does. It's a counterfactual that we can only speculate about, you can't take the popular vote in elections under these rules and just assume that the score would have been the same in a direct-suffrage vote. What's true of California is true also of Texas, right - maybe turnout there would be higher in a direct vote, too.

I expect better from you than this cheap "anti-liberal" spin.

Those are the same kind of labels as "dispossessed worker," or at least labels of the same level of approximation. I meant: the rules entail as consequence that each vote in one of six Michigan counties, or whatever, does count more than a vote in a major coastal city. The rival contesting teams knew this, as did any voter who cared enough to find out. Those are the rules, and under those rules Clinton actually ran a remarkably weak campaign, avoiding the cheesy and cliché'd county fairs and so on in preference to more rigidly scripted and controlled events on the East Coast. Not one even in Wisconsin, I think, based on something I think I read here. That certainly made a difference.

[stefano]

Look, a Green candidate is never going to be president. Ever.
I know that sounds pessimistic but the fact is there are not enough people who identify as Green, or ever will.

Ever? Ever ever?

I disagree. Just based on the fact that there have been a (small!) number of two-party configurations in the US over the years. Another one will come along at some point, although maybe some crisis more serious than any we've seen since the current dichotomy began will be required for that. Given the total obliteration of the Democrats last week, perhaps the next one will be Green (or something else, left of the current Democrats) and Republicans?

[brekin]

Look, a Green candidate is never going to be president. Ever.
I know that sounds pessimistic but the fact is there are not enough people who identify as Green, or ever will.

Ever? Ever ever?
I disagree. Just based on the fact that there have been a (small!) number of two-party configurations in the US over the years. Another one will come along at some point, although maybe some crisis more serious than any we've seen since the current dichotomy began will be required for that. Given the total obliteration of the Democrats last week, perhaps the next one will be Green (or something else, left of the current Democrats) and Republicans?

Your disagreement has been noted,
As how you would have voted,
Now shit in one hand,
And hope in the other,
And tell me again, my friend,
Which fills up faster.

[norton ash]

Facebook thread or 'Stupid' thread? I'll go with congratulations on the stupidest election evar.

48 Hours in Facebook’s Unreality
Mark Zuckerberg thinks it’s a ‘crazy idea’ that fake news on Facebook helped put Trump in the White House. He should take a gander at the most shared stories of the last two days.

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2 ... ality.html